The collection of Hebrew manuscripts contains numerous outstanding and precious individual pieces. The collection, which today comprises around 500 volumes, was built up with great expertise and prudence. The development of the collection is mainly due to Moritz Steinschneider (1816-1907), who not only built up the collection of Hebrew manuscripts in the last decades of the 19th century, but also catalogued it. He listed 259 volumes in his catalogue.

One of the first manuscripts in the holdings of the Electoral Library was the four-volume so-called Rösel-Bibel, which came to the library as a gift from a woman of this name in 1692.

Worth mentioning is the collection of Hebrew codices and Arabic manuscripts in Hebrew script, acquired by Moses Wilhelm Shapira in 1873 and 1877.

In 1880, the library acquired 15 Hebrew manuscripts from Erfurt, including a two-volume giant Bible from 1343 (Erfurt Bible), four Torah scrolls, a Tosefta manuscript, a Machsor, two Rashi manuscripts, other very old Bible codices and a composite manuscript with Aesop's fables.

For several years, these Erfurt manuscripts have been intensively researched, cf. the overview from the DFG research project of the FU Berlin.

Catalogues of the Hebrew manuscripts of the State Library.