The Lailashi Codex כֶּתֶר לַיְלָאשִׁי

An almost complete Masoretic Pentateuch from Lailashi in Lechkhumi, western Georgia: Tiberian vocalisation, Masora Magna, micrographic decoration. It is held in the Georgian National Museum. The village of Lailashi treated the manuscript as its own sanctuary, and a local custom grew around it—both Jews and Christians came to it.

The dating is genuinely unsettled, and this should be said plainly, because popular descriptions confidently call the codex tenth- or eleventh-century. Giorgi Tsereteli asserted the tenth century in 1969, but that dating never underwent palaeographic or codicological examination. The first real study is Thea Gomelauri's of 2023 (Taylor Institution Library, Oxford, 210 pages, with a contribution by Joseph Ginsberg, who located the missing leaves at the National Library of Israel): it corrects Tsereteli on "timeline, history, page count and other important characteristics," and the codex's origin remains undetermined. It is telling, too, that the manuscript was absent from Israel Yeivin's authoritative list of Masoretic Bibles. The current "eleventh century" in popular summaries is not a result but a placeholder.

Why this matters for the whole Georgian chapter. Georgian Jewry is usually described through a number—"two thousand six hundred years"—rather than through objects. Yet the objects are few and of unequal weight: the Mtskheta inscriptions of the fourth and fifth centuries, in Hebrew script and in Jewish-Palestinian Aramaic, are a firm foundation; the Lailashi codex is the largest manuscript, but with an open date; and the Urbnisi and Armazi inscriptions, constantly adduced as proof of antiquity, have nothing to do with Jews—they are Iberian royal Aramaic. The honest picture is made of those three lines.