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Mogilany 1989, Papers on the Dead Sea Scrolls Offered in Memory of Jean Carmignac
Zdzislaw Jan Kapera
Part I (Krakow: Enigma Press, 1993) 244 pp., $28.00 cloth, $18.00 paper; Part II (Krakow: Enigma Press, 1991) 294 pp., $28.00 cloth, $18.00 paper
These are the papers delivered at the Dead Sea Scroll conference in Mogilany, Poland, in 1989, one of a number of recent Dead Sea Scrolls conferences that reflect the phenomenal progress of the field in the past few years. Part II was published two years ago. Part I has just appeared.
In truth, many of us who attended the first Mogilany conference in 1987 did so out of curiosity. Imagine, a Dead Sea Scrolls conference in a Polish village just south of Krakow! It was an opportunity to see a country few of us had seen, “the valley of the shadow of death” that before the Holocaust had been the crown of East 079European Jewry. When we arrived, we found that this conference was not only an opportunity to exchange ideas with familiar colleagues but, perhaps more important, to meet scholars from what was then the Eastern Bloc. The first exchange of Qumran information through this channel can, in retrospect, be seen as a minuscule crack in the Iron Curtain around the Communist world—the fall of which we never believed would come so quickly.
Z. J. Kapera is a dedicated organizer and, together with Mrs. Kapera, a very gracious host. A bibliographer and historian of the field, Kapera became, through the conferences he organized and the publications he edited, a “player” in the Dead Sea Scrolls drama. He is best known for publishing an “anonymously received” edition and translation of 4QMMT. When this turned out to be the work of Elisha Qimron and John Strugnell, the Israel Antiquities Authority demanded that he take it off the market, and he complied.
Volume 1, after Kapera’s introduction, opens with a resolution by a group of scholars demanding access to the Qumran material and protesting the slow pace of its publication. Then follow two volumes of papers, dealing to a large extent with the conference’s main themes: the Teacher of Righteousness and the relationship of the scrolls to the New Testament. At both conferences there was extended discussion of the Jerusalem thesis of Norman Golb. In addition, F. García Martínez, Philip Davies, Robert Eisenman, Barbara Thiering and the present writer presented their respective views on Qumran “origins,” and lively debates ensued among us.
Unfortunately, these conferences convinced us that our East European colleagues lagged far behind in Qumran research. We knew in advance that they needed books and journals, but in Mogilany we realized that they need to learn how to think independently, and that only interaction with Westerners would help bring that about. In these volumes, therefore, one finds the work both of well-known Qumran scholars and of struggling East Europeans, whom we must continue to aid and encourage. Kapera deserves much credit for opening Eastern Europe to Qumran studies and for fostering dialogues, both academic and personal, among scholars. In this sense the volumes are an appropriate memorial to Abbé Jean Carmignac, editor of the Revue de Qumran, who maintained cordial relations with scholars of different national and religious backgrounds over many years.
Mogilany 1989, Papers on the Dead Sea Scrolls Offered in Memory of Jean Carmignac
