I’ve spent the last couple of years on and off trying to find a set of photographs of Karaite manuscripts that my advisor was involved in shooting in Cairo in the mid-seventies on behalf of a Bay Area collector, Seymour Fromer. Fromer’s papers are now mostly in the Bancroft Library at UC-Berkeley. There’s a lot of record of his travels to Egypt and to India to document Jewish books and collect Judaica for his museum in Berkeley, the Judah Magnes Collection. I wasn’t able to find the manuscript photos. (The one above isn’t from that set.) They may still be in one set of personal papers that hasn’t been processed for scholarly access yet (Ze’ev Brinner’s papers), but it appears that even in the mid-seventies they didn’t make it to the JNUL, which helped to fund the expedition to Cairo.
