Book Excerpt: The Shapira Affair
The late 1880’s in Jerusalem was an age of discovery. On the one hand, textual critics, anthropologists, geologists, and philosophers combined to pour scorn and derision on Scriptural traditions; on the other, archaeology was never so popular or well-supported financially as when it set out “to prove the Bible right.”
Well-endowed archaeological missions flocked to the Holy Land, and in their wake came an ever increasing tourist traffic. The railroad and the steamship brought Palestine within the compass of the European grand tour. Wide-eyed and credulous, heaven-sent manna to every imaginative rogue, they flowed into Jerusalem. It was the age of Romance, and the mysterious East opened wide its arms to its most succulent prey.
The old city of Jerusalem was, as it is still, an extraordinary mixture of ancient and modern, East and West. Its narrow, stepped streets and alleyways climb and twist bewilderingly through more than three thousand years of history. In a little house on Christian Street was a shop which belonged to the hero of our story.
Moses Wilhelm Shapira was born about 1830 in Kiev, of Slavonic Jewish parentage, and became converted to Anglican Christianity in Jerusalem. He married a naive, prudish German Lutheran deaconess, who bore him two daughters.
His business career was as many-sided as the remainder of his character. To the passing tourist world of the Holy City, he was the dapper, almost dandyish little shopkeeper who welcomed visitors into his glittering emporium of tourist baubles, the mother-of-pearl necklaces, the olivewood camels and crucifixes, and the dried and pressed “Flowers from the Holy Land.”
The speciality of his shop was the inscription to order of Hebrew verses on the olivewood covers of Bibles and prayer books imported from abroad. But to those clients he deemed especially rich or, if feminine, attractive, he would open the way to the heart of his business and his life. In a room at the back of the shop he kept his most valuable wares, rare books and manuscripts culled from all over the world. Before wondering and appreciative eyes he would unroll parchment scrolls like precious bales of silk, translating the Hebrew for the uninitiated and romanticizing about the histories of the documents and the lands from which they came. His main customers for these treasures, acquired mostly from penurious Jewish communities in the Yemen, were European museums and libraries. He was especially proud of the title he displayed above the shop door—“Correspondent to the British Museum.”
The back of Shapira’s shop looked out onto one of Jerusalem’s ancient pools. Local tradition ascribed it to King Hezekiah, or even more fancifully, to the time of King David and his seductress, Bathsheba. It was here, they said, that Uriah the Hittite’s beautiful wife attended to her daily toilet in full view of the king’s chamber in the Citadel, a little to the southwest.
To Shapira’s youngest and fairest visitors he recounted the romantic tale of David’s unholy alliance and pointed out the watchtower where the king’s passion daily grew until he could no longer resist the temptation to add his faithful subject’s “one ewe lamb” to the royal harem.
The Shapira family’s house was typical of the larger Turkish dwellings of Jerusalem. A large walled courtyard was hung with rings and chains. An arched doorway led into the domestic quarters. In a smaller court, a stone-flagged well held pride of place, and over it drooped a pomegranate tree. A tall, graceful water jug stood in one corner by a roped bucket. Three doorways broke the glare of a whitewashed wall. One led into the kitchen, the other to the granary, and the third gave onto a steep flight of steps. On occasion Shapira would climb the stairs and be lost to his family for hours. This would be when his caravans brought home strange potteries and manuscripts, to be carried aloft and studied or repaired in his undisturbed sanctum.
To the small, gossipy world that had its social center around the Anglican Church, the Jewish convert must have presented a bizarre figure. Dressed in his dark frock-coat, soft, broadbrimmed hat, pearly-gray gloves, with trousers a shade too tight for elegance, Shapira regularly led his family proudly to church. Shapira tried to outdo his neighbors in conformity: he was more English than his English friends, more orthodox in his Anglicanism. But beneath that black frock coat beat a wild, romantic heart which no middle-class respectability could forever confine.
At the end of the working day the little bookseller would return to the bosom of his family in the Saracen House. He would appear heavy and morose, and while his wife and daughter played dice games, he would doff his western garb and put on the loose, flowing robes of the desert. He would recline barefoot on a divan, smoking a narghileh, or hubble-bubble, and dreaming of the desert and the fame and fortune it would one day bring him. At length his wife would go over to the couch and take his head on her lap, running her soft, white hands through his hair and murmuring, “My little husband. My little husband … ” but he hardly heard her. He merely drew more strongly on his narghileh and then expelled the smoke with a profound sigh, watching the petals dance on the water.
On some mornings horses’ hoofs would clatter in the courtyard and Shapira would ride proudly out through the gate on a white Arab mare. His flowing robes billowed out behind him, his head was covered with a silken headdress bound with golden cords. He would be gone many days. At length he would return.
The whole house would become a caravansary. Men and beasts jostled one another. Bundles lay heaped all over the yard, and from them rose the scent of roses of Jericho, balm of Gilead, and the bitter apples of the Dead Sea. Other packages were neatly stacked in a corner. Over them a Bedouin warrior stood silent sentinel, his lance at the ready. No one was ever allowed to approach the bundles save when Shapira was present. Then Selim, the general factotum, would take his knife and split them open. Grains of wheat spilled onto the ground. But this was not the treasure they concealed. He plunged his hand further in and brought out statuettes, little pagan figurines in terra cotta that would make his daughter’s pious nurse gasp and cross herself.
“My God! More Moabite idols.”
These pieces of pottery formed a large part of Shapira’s more recondite stock in trade. To Shapira’s daughter they were but play-things, little dolls to whom she gave pet names and arrayed before her in “school games.” Occasionally her mother caught her at this pastime and was shocked to see her daughter caressing the full-breasted and large-hipped tokens of pagan fertility cults.
The next day the caravan would have gone. Silence descended once more upon the little courtyard, but the dusty smell of the desert still pervaded the house. The “King of the Desert” had become again the respectable shopkeeper of Jerusalem, his too-ready smile gleaming a welcome to the tourists of Christian Street.
In 1868, some years before the main event of our story, a German pastor attached to the British Missionary Society had been making an expedition on the east side of the Dead Sea, in ancient Moab. One day while poking around the ruins of the biblical city of Dibon, modern Dhiban, he had noticed a black basalt stele lying half hidden in the dust. He scraped it clear and found that it measured some three and a half feet tall and two feet wide, and was inscribed with rows of ancient Semitic writing. The script was similar to that appearing on old Phoenician funerary inscriptions and was of a kind known to have been used by the ancient Hebrews before the Exile to Babylon.
About the same time, the existence of the stele came to the notice of a young French diplomat and amateur archaeologist named Charles Clermont-Ganneau. An English traveler and archaeologist, Captain Charles Warren, also learned of the stele’s discovery, and both Clermont-Ganneau and Warren set about trying to have copies made of the text. With the help of local Arabs they succeeded, but their obvious interest in the stone so aroused the suspicion and cupidity of the villagers that the locals began to believe that the black stone must hold some other attraction than the writing carved on its face. They thereupon proceeded to break the stele open by alternately heating and cooling its surface.
Happily most of the pieces were subsequently recovered and the copy already obtained enabled the archaeologists to restore the stele to almost its original form. It proved to be a commemorative account by the King of Moab of his revolt against the Israelites in the ninth century B.C., otherwise recorded only in 2 Kings 3:4ff. As is usual with such inscriptions there is a certain amount of overstatement in the results of the engagement:
“Omri, King of Israel, oppressed Moab many days, for Chemosh [a Moabite god] was angry with his land. And his son succeeded him and he also said, “I will oppress Moab.” In my days he spoke thus, but I have triumphed over him and over his house, while Israel hath perished forever … ”
There is also here some chronological discrepancy with the biblical account which puts the revolt after the death of Ahab, Omri’s son. Nevertheless this truly remarkable find known as the Moabite Stone or the Mesha Stele received a great ovation in the western world, where the rationalistic tendencies of modern thought were casting doubt on the historicity of so much of the Bible narrative. However late the critics might prove the sources of the Old Testament to be, here at last was a quite independent confirmation of the essential truth of the Scriptural account.
The little shopkeeper of Jerusalem dreamed of such discoveries. After all, if Clermont-Ganneau, a Westerner, a non-Semite, and an amateur could make such a world-shaking find in the country of ancient Moab, how much more fitting that Moses Shapira, by birth a Jew and versed in the languages of the ancient Semitic world from his youth, should discover something equally important that would rank him among the foremost scholars of his time.
But Shapira’s eagerness and gullibility led him into trouble. Overtrustful of his Arab friends and, despite his Jewish upbringing, insufficiently versed in Semitic linguistics, he had allowed himself to be made the unwitting tool of forgers.
In all good faith he had sold to the German Government in 1873 pottery vessels inscribed with Moabitish characters, similar to those found on the famous stele. He firmly believed that they were the fruits of excavations he was sponsoring in the Dhiban area. In actual fact they were being manufactured locally and planted for his men to find and carry back triumphantly to Jerusalem.
Years later, Shapira protested that he could not reasonably be blamed for the forgeries. In spite of his own freely expressed doubts as to their genuineness, a number of eminent scholars and travelers had urged him to buy as many of the potteries as he could obtain. A German pastor named Weser, for one, had copied some of the inscriptions on the jars and confirmed their antiquity by telegram to the German Government. Shapira was pressed to obtain more at almost any price and to ensure that they fell into no other hands.
In all this, expostulated the Jerusalem shopkeeper, he acted as no more than the buying agent for the Germans, while all along retaining his honest doubts about the authenticity of the potteries. The money was freely paid, he says, and he was urged to search the places from which they were supposed to have come and find more for his German paymasters.
This he did at considerable cost, but before he could realize his outlay, the French diplomat-archaeologist Clermont-Ganneau had pronounced them forgeries. Clermont-Ganneau spoke scathingly of the “poor bookseller of Bathsheba’s Pool who believes himself an industrious scholar.” Thereafter, Clermont-Ganneau was Shapira’s bitterest enemy and was later to play a key role in the condemnation of the manuscript on which Shapira placed his hopes of rehabilitation in the learned world.
The account Shapira gave of the circumstances leading to his acquisition of the Deuteronomy manuscript was improbable enough to be true, but it did nothing to enhance the document’s chances of acceptance by the authorities. He said that some years before, he had chanced to visit the house of an old friend, a sheik of a local semi-Bedouin tribe near Jerusalem. One of the Arabs present loudly declaimed against local people selling antiquities to foreigners. He was against the practice not for any patriotic reasons but simply because he believed such relics brought good fortune to those possessing them.
To illustrate his point, the man cited the instance of some Arabs who, a few years previously, had been fleeing from the Turkish authorities and had sought refuge in some caves in the gorge of the Wadi Mujib on the east side of the Dead Sea. They had found there some bundles of old rags and, thinking they might contain gold, had torn off the wrappings to discover beneath only the blackened skins of ancient scrolls. In disgust they had thrown them away, but one of the Arabs later on had second thoughts and retrieved the bundles and kept them in his tent. To the chagrin of his comrades his action was well rewarded, for his flocks prospered and he became a rich man.
Shapira pricked up his ears at this story of hidden manuscripts for he knew the area well. It lay near Dhiban where the famous Moabite Stone had been discovered.
Shapira asked the sheik to persuade the man to support his strange tale by bringing along a small piece of these parchment documents from the cave. The worthy sheik replied that he knew a man with less regard for national rights and the preservation of antiquities, one who would indeed willingly sell his mother-in-law for a few piastres.
A secret meeting was arranged at a place on the road between the so-called Fountain of the Apostles and Bethany. Shapira remarks in some notes he made for the British Museum authorities that he thought the fellow’s reticence was due to his being wanted for theft or murder.
At the first meeting the man handed over one small piece inscribed with ancient Hebrew letters, and Shapira gave him a few coins with the promise of more if he produced the rest of the hoard. They had four fruitful meetings altogether over the following five weeks, and on the last occasion the man said that this completed the collection.
Shapira knew the man only as Salem, and thought it best not to inquire too deeply into his family name, and background. He never saw him again, and soon after the sheik who had arranged their meeting died, making impossible further investigation into the manuscript’s immediate antecedents.
The documents consisted of fifteen strips of parchment, measuring on an average three and a half inches by seven inches, with a few smaller fragments. Most of the pieces were very dark and the writing hardly distinguishable. Shapira thought that this blackness came from their being coated with some preservative agent, perhaps asphalt, since the Dead Sea was famed from ancient times as a rich source of this substance. Furthermore, some of the skins were much decayed, partly through the depredations of worms and partly from chemicals in the cave dust.
The state of the skins made reading difficult, and Shapira describes in a letter how, to see the letters at all, he had to dampen the parchment slightly, when the writing would become momentarily visible. However, when the skin became too damp the writing soon lost its luster and he could see nothing more until the parchment dried and he could repeat the process. Later he used spirit instead of water and thereby speeded up the process. He noticed that rubbing and these repeated applications of moisture in no way affected the ink itself, “a thing,” he says, “not usual in oriental manuscripts.”
Shapira saw with growing excitement that the writing was in the character of the Moabite Stone, a type of writing which it was generally thought at the time had died out soon after the Jewish captivity in Babylon, in the sixth century B.C. This script derived from ancient Phoenician, and is the forerunner of Greek and our own writing.
Shapira therefore jumped to the conclusion that the manuscripts must be dated to the pre-Exilic period, perhaps as old as the ninth-century Moabite Stone or even older. When, after some four weeks of painstaking study, he discovered that the text was a hitherto unknown variant form of the biblical book of Deuteronomy, his excitement knew no bounds.
The oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Old Testament at that time went back no further than the ninth or tenth centuries A.D., and it is on these texts that our modern translations are largely based. Could it be that these ancient strips of parchment witnessed to a form of the Mosaic Law of some two thousand years earlier than anything previously seen?
Shapira now felt it was time to seek an authoritative opinion on the manuscripts. He had contacts in the scholarly world in Germany, but his choice of confidants could hardly have been more unfortunate. Dr. Konstantine Schlottmann, Professor of Old Testament at the University of Halle, to whom he now sent a transcription of the new Deuteronomy text had, it is true, supported Shapira’s Moabite potteries from the beginning. Indeed, he was still vehemently arguing for their authenticity long after the rest of his colleagues had acknowledged their error. In consequence, his scholarly reputation had suffered, and he was hardly ready yet to listen to the Jerusalem shopkeeper’s story of another fabulous discovery from ancient Moab.
Schlottmann sent back only a fierce rebuke that Shapira should have dared to call this document a “biblical” manuscript when its text so blatantly disagreed with Holy Writ. Shapira sadly acknowledged that this was so and at first piously resolved to have no more to do with such blasphemy. He put the offending manuscripts in the safety vaults of a Jerusalem bank and tried to forget them for a while. For some years thereafter, Shapira tells us, he pursued his normal course of business, at his Jerusalem shop. He also continued to make his expeditions to Arabia in search of Bible manuscripts to sell to western institutions. He was not able, however, to dismiss the strange cave documents completely from his mind. He began to notice that even in the comparatively modern Bible scrolls with which he mainly dealt there were slight differences to be found from the standard text.
Then, one day, there happened to come into his hands a copy of an Introduction to the Old Testament written by a German scholar of some renown. To the Jerusalem shopkeeper’s astonishment he learned there for the first time of the progress that had been made among textual critics of the western world in probing into the background of the Old Testament writings. It seemed that in Europe learned and presumably pious scholars were no longer content with accepting traditional interpretations regarding the authorship and date of the biblical books but were ruthlessly subjecting the text to critical examination, trying to place the sacred writings into their true historical environment.
The first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, had been commonly ascribed to Moses. It was now freely admitted that a narrative which includes an account of the prophet’s death could hardly have been written by him, and must have come from a later hand. Indeed, the stories were but a weaving together of at least three different strands of tradition, and it was claimed these could be clearly distinguished.
One of the criteria for separating these sources was the name by which God was known. One tended to call him Yahweh (the true pronunciation having been long ago lost since the word was considered too sacred by the Jews to be uttered). Duplicate narratives of the same event used other divine names, like El or Elohim.
Shapira remembered that in his manuscript of Deuteronomy one of the differences between the new and the standard texts was that the former almost entirely avoided the tribal name Yahweh, substituting the title Elohim. Could it be, he wondered, that his document represented one of the “Elohistic” sources of the Pentateuch posited by the advanced critics? He rushed round to the bank and withdrew the strips from the vaults and began to study the texts with renewed confidence.
In some notes written later we can see how he tabulated the arguments against and in favor of the authenticity of the manuscript, for example:
1. Only Elohim is found for the divine name; but perhaps it came from a school which knew only that name, even when Yahweh was known by more orthodox Jews.
2. That a certain word used in the new text is more Aramaic than Hebrew; yes, but other derivatives from the same root are found in the Bible.
3. The strips were folded, not rolled like a scroll or mummy covering (thinking of an Egyptian-type burial as the manuscript’s original source); yes, but it was more than 20 years ago that the strips were found, and perhaps the folding was done much later by the Arabs.
4. The ink looks very black and new, and some pieces do not seem at all old; of course, but if one piece is genuine, the whole is genuine. The first owners seem to have oiled it freely to preserve the skin, and the spirit I used myself to read the writing has blackened it.
That spring the Shapiras were visited by a German professor and his wife. The scholar pored eagerly over Shapira’s new manuscripts and was as convinced of their authenticity as Shapira. When he left he took away with him a few fragments to submit to other orientalists. He offered to try and sell all that Shapira possessed to a museum in Germany and if sufficient funds were not immediately available to bring the matter to the personal notice of the Emperor. The professor’s wife began to think seriously of Shapira’s elder daughter, Elizabeth, as a fitting match for her own son. Mrs. Shapira sadly confessed that they could give Elizabeth no dowry worthy of such a marriage. The fond mother assured her that if the Deuteronomy manuscripts were proved authentic there would be dowry enough …
Soon in Shapira’s mind the dreams of riches and honor became accomplished fact. He engaged another assistant for his shop and was now rarely seen there himself. He bought his younger daughter a pony and engaged a groom to lead his mounted charge through the crowded streets to school and back again.
“Is it not so, Papa,” his younger daughter would say, “that when you have sold the Deuteronomy you will buy all Palestine?”
By May 1883 Shapira had completed his re-examination of the Deuteronomy fragments. He was now more than ever sure of their genuineness and was prepared once more to brave the onslaughts of his German critics. His thoughts turned toward taking the strips to Europe and displaying them himself before the scholars. In this he found much encouragement from the favorable attitude evinced by a certain Professor Schroeder, the German consul in Beirut. He saw the pieces in Shapira’s house in Jerusalem and pronounced himself completely satisfied that they were genuine, wanting even to buy them for his own collection.
The following month Shapira departed for Europe and, arriving in Berlin, placed the strips before a committee of experts called together by Professor Richard Lepsius, Keeper of the Royal Library. This high-powered body of scholars included such famous names as August Dillmann, professor of Hebrew, and the distinguished orientalists Professor Eduard Sachau, Professor Adolf Ermann, and Dr. Moritz Steinschneider. They met at the house of their convener on July 10, 1883, and in one hour and a half had decided that the manuscripts were a “clever and impudent forgery.”
It will be recalled that the Germans had already burned their fingers over the Moabite potteries affair with which Shapira had been only too closely connected. How far this matter influenced their decision over the Deuteronomy strips we can only guess, but the one idiomatic phrase they found in the new texts that they afterward cited as decisive, “Thou shalt not kill the person of thy brother,” seems now puzzlingly innocuous. However it was apparently so conclusive to the pundits that they brushed aside as quite unnecessary the suggestion that they might call upon the services of a chemist to pronounce on the antiquity of the skins themselves.
While the scholars deliberated, Shapira cooled his heels in an adjoining room, and even when they had made their decision, he was apparently not informed of its nature. He was led to believe that the matter was still under consideration, a not unreasonable assumption since he was well aware that the blackened state of many of the strips would necessitate many hours of eye-straining study for the text to be thoroughly examined.
Shapira, now with undiminished confidence, turned his steps toward London. His letters home became more and more buoyant. He reported that his interviews with the German scholars had been most encouraging, all declaring for the authenticity of the Deuteronomy strips. The Berlin Museum, he said, had even reached the point of discussing price, and he might have accepted there and then had not his German professorial friend urged him to try for greater rewards elsewhere: Let Mr. Shapira do nothing in undue haste. Let him try Paris or London, and in particular the British Museum, where he had already many friends. England after all was famous as a country of passionate amateurs in all matters affecting Hebrew scholarship.
Shapira could not complain of any lack of attention toward his manuscripts on arrival in London. All the newspapers carried stories of his wonderful discovery.
Shapira’s first official contact was with the Secretary of the Palestine Exploration Fund, Walter Besant.
Shapira’s first meeting with Besant was on Friday, July 20, 1883, when he told him of the Deuteronomy manuscript. Three days later there was another meeting at the offices of the Fund at Adam Street, the Adelphi, in London, and Shapira explained in detail how he had come by the manuscript and deciphered portions of the text. On the following day, at another meeting Shapira consented to show his precious strips to the executive meeting of the Fund. This Besant covened for noon two days later, Thursday, July 26, 1883.
Besant in his memoirs implies that Shapira was throughout these meetings acting with somewhat suspicious reticence, and had to be persuaded to show his manuscript to anyone in authority. This hardly fits with his mission of bringing the discovery to the eyes of the British experts as soon as possible, with the object, of course, of selling the manuscript at the highest price obtainable. The meeting for the twenty-sixth, according to Besant, was intended to be limited at Shapira’s request to two persons. The secretary suggested the names of Dr. Christian Ginsburg and Captain Claude R. Conder, R.E.
Christian David Ginsburg, himself a Jew converted to Christianity, was an acknowledged expert on the text of the Old Testament and its traditions. He had also published a major study of the Moabite Stone and seemed therefore particularly fitted to pronounce a judgment on the new discoveries.
Conder was a doyen of British archaeology. As an officer of the Palestine Exploration Fund, he had carried out a wide survey of the Holy Land on its behalf. He was the author of many books and articles on the subject of biblical geography and topography and had in preparation at that very time a volume on ancient Heth and Moab.
“Shapira unfolded his manuscript,” Besant’s memoirs continue “amid such excitement as is very seldom exhibited by scholars. The excitement lasted about three hours … ”
Shapira then withdrew from the assembly, and after a little further discussion the learned company separated. As they went out, records Besant, one of them, a professor of Hebrew, exclaimed with conviction, “This is one of the few things which could not be a forgery and a fraud!”
The British Museum now entered officially on the scene as a party interested in purchasing the documents, and it was on Ginsburg that they placed the responsibility for deciding on the authenticity of the manuscripts. For three weeks he worked steadily, deciphering the scripts and making comparison with the standard texts of the Bible. These translations were published in The Times of August 10, 17, and 22, 1883 and repeated in other journals throughout the country. During all this time he gave no hint that anything was amiss, and Shapira’s hopes rose higher still.
The climax of popular acclaim was reached when the Prime Minister himself, Mr. Gladstone, took time off from a busy schedule to visit the British Museum on August 13 and view the one or two pieces on display. He spoke long and earnestly with Mr. Shapira, and it is a lively comment on the breadth of knowledge expected from politicians of the nineteenth century that Gladstone was able to express astonishment at the close similarity of the scripts of the Moabite inscription and the Shapira Deuteronomy.
According to one eyewitness of the events, rumors were publicly current that the money to buy the Shapira manuscript had already been earmarked by the government. The treasurer of the British Museum was watched carefully whenever he made his customary journeys to the Treasury on museum business, and when one day he was seen emerging covertly from the government offices on his way back to the museum, the story grew that he had made a special visit to arrange the payment of some hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money to complete the transaction.
Suddenly in London the fever heat of interest and excitement was chilled by a new development. From across the Channel the shadow of Shapira’s hated enemy, Clermont-Ganneau, fell over the scene. The French Government had entrusted him with a special mission to examine the Deuteronomy manuscripts, presumably with a view to outbidding the British authorities in the event the documents were genuine.
Clermont-Ganneau arrived on Wednesday, August 15, and immediately made contact with an officer of the British Museum, a certain Dr. Birch, who took him along to see Dr. Ginsburg. Even before he arrived the Frenchman confessed that he had already serious doubts as to the authenticity of the Deuteronomy scroll and that he made the trip only to confirm his suspicions.
He found Ginsburg and Shapira in the manuscript department studying the fragments. He obtained only a glance at two or three of the fragments on the table before them but was given reason to hope for a more prolonged examination two days later. He noticed, however, that Ginsburg showed some hesitation and seemed uncertain whether this detailed study would in fact be possible. It was agreed that he should have a decisive answer on Friday.
Clermont-Ganneau suspected that Ginsburg was afraid that he might steal some of his thunder and make a prior publication of part of the text. The Frenchman hastened to reassure him that he wished only to concern himself with the external and material state of the fragments and that he would examine them only in Ginsburg’s presence. He would refrain from examining the text and from publishing anything on the contents of the scroll.
For one who was supposed to be making a thoroughgoing appraisal of the manuscript on behalf of the French Government this might be thought to be an extraordinary self-limitation. However, on Friday when he went again to the British Museum, he was not even allowed this fleeting examination; Mr. Bond informed him that to his great regret he was unable to submit the fragments to him. Their owner, Mr. Shapira, had expressly refused his consent.
As Clermont-Ganneau later dramatically recounted the story in long article to The Times published in its issue of August 21, he almost despaired of achieving his object. He did not, however, he adds, lose courage, and set to work with the meager means of information at his disposal. He had very briefly looked at the two or three pieces on which Ginsburg had been working during his first visit. Furthermore, two fragments had been displayed for public viewing in a glass case in the manuscript department of the British Museum. Unhappily, this case was very ill lit and difficult of access because of the continual press of eager sightseers thronging the room. For two days, the distinguished Frenchman jostled with the common crowd around the showcase, peering at the blackened skins as the visitors surged back and forth past the table.
His patience was rewarded. He had the satisfaction, he records, of obtaining an unhoped-for result. From the external evidence alone he was able to deduce without any doubt that the strips were the work of a modern forger. Lest anyone imagine that this conclusion derived from mere personal prejudice against his old antagonist, Clermont-Ganneau could show from even his cursory examination how the forger went to work. He had taken a comparatively modern, perhaps two or three hundred years old, synagogue scroll of the Law of Moses and cut off the lower margin normally left blank. This gave him the widest surface on which to inscribe his fraudulent text. It should be noted that Mr. Shapira was well acquainted with such scrolls, for he had been buying and selling them to libraries and museums for years.
The forger had then attempted to induce the appearance of greater antiquity in the skin by the use of chemical agents. On this blackened leather he proceeded to write his Deuteronomy text with such variants as his fancy dictated, with a patience and learning worthy of better employment. The form of the letters he copied from the Moabite Stone.
What to the Frenchman clinched the matter was the strips had been impressed at intervals with a dry-point ruling, originally the marginal limits of the writing on the Law scroll. Unfortunately for him, the unobservant forger had not noticed these faint marks, visible though they apparently were to the fleeting viewer. He had written his message with no respect for such limits, carrying his text in places even across the marginal lines. The right and left edges of his columns of script had been determined simply by creases in the leather formed when the strips of skin were folded.
Further proofs for the true source of the forger’s material was shown by the fact that the upper edge of the Deuteronomy strips was quite straight and smooth as if cut by a knife, while the lower edge was fringed and ragged as one would expect from a well-used synagogue scroll.
Again, such a scroll consists of several skins sewn together at the edges to make a continuous strip of writing material. Clermont-Ganneau had noticed that at least one of the Deuteronomy strips was composed of two similarly sewn pieces. It would be, interesting, he suggested, to make a close examination of the thread used in such a seam.
Other points that might engage the attention of investigators more fortunate than he in obtaining access to the strips included examining closely the upper edge of the strips to see if they could detect traces of the tails of square Hebrew characters, remnants of the original text. They might also study the backs of the strips to see if they did not differ materially in appearance from the face. Possibly this singularly inept forger had left them in the original condition of the synagogue scrolls from which the strips had been cut. It should also be possible by measuring the breadth of the strips to deduce the original size of the synagogue scroll that supplied the forger with his raw material.
Clermont-Ganneau, in conclusion, generously offered to follow the technique used by the forger and produce a fitting companion to the Shapira Deuteronomy, say, an equally “ancient” scroll of Leviticus which, he said with heavy Gallic humor, “would have the slight advantage over it of not costing quite a million sterling.”
The day following the publication of Clermont-Ganneau’s letter to The Times, Ginsburg made his report. Five days later, it was published in The Times.
His conclusion was the same as Clermont-Ganneau’s, and the external evidence he adduced differed hardly at all from that of the Frenchman. For Ginsburg also, the source of the skins was the lower margins of synagogue scrolls, and looking among the files in the British Museum he was able to find manuscripts which had been sold by Shapira in the past exhibiting just the same width of uninscribed lower margin as was represented in the Deuteronomy strips. Indeed, one such manuscript actually had a fragment cut from the bottom and fastened to the beginning of Genesis, and this scroll was bought from Mr. Shapira in 1877, only a year before Shapira was supposed to have heard first of the discovery.
Ginsburg was however, able to enlarge upon Clermont-Ganneau’s reasons for rejection, since he had had the advantage of a close study of the text itself. This led him to the conclusion that the forgery was the work of four or five different persons.
The writing itself was simply a copy of the scribal character of the Moabite Stone. The author had been at pains to use the same method of word separation and had even derived his vocabulary and topography from the ninth-century B.C. inscription.
The Times probed motives of those concerned in the attempted deception. “An ordinary forger,” The Times said, “would have been content with the common Biblical text. The forger of the Shapira strips has been far more ambitious in his aims. He has sought to supply one of the archaic originals from which the common Bible text was constructed, and to furnish material which would fall in with the theory of its late unauthoritative character. If only it had succeeded how rich and famous a man would Mr. Shapira have become!”
The writer goes on in a semi-jocular vein to suggest that Mr. Shapira could best spend his time now in tracing the person who had succeeded in duping him.
Shapira’s agony is reflected in a letter still in the files of the British Museum. Written in an agitated hand, it is dated August 23, 1883:
Dear Dr. Ginsburg!
You have made a fool of me by publishing & exhibiting things that you believe them to be false. I do not think that I will be able to survive this shame, although I am yet not convince that the ms is a forgery …
I will leave London in a day or two for Berlin.
Yours truly,
M. W. SHAPIRA
The Times reported: “(Shapira) is so disappointed with the results of his bargain that he threatens to commit suicide. This we venture to think, he will not do. He has survived the Moabite pottery fraud, and he will probably survive this one … ”
Thereafter Shapira embarked on purposeless and half-demented wanderings around Europe, writing letters home he never posted, abandoning portions of his luggage in each place he stayed.
In March 1884, he finally arrived at a small hotel in Rotterdam called the Bloemenclaal, “Valley of Flowers.” On March 9, 1884, he put a pistol to his head and ended his agony of mind forever.
The notorious affair of the little Jewish-Christian dealer from Jerusalem and his “oldest Bible manuscript in the world” was over.
The foregoing is reprinted from John M. Allegro’s The Shapira Affair. The remainder of Allegro’s book is devoted to building a case for the possibility that the manuscripts might be authentic. Allegro believes that the Deuteronomy fragments may have been produced not in the ninth century B.C., as Shapira contends, but in the years shortly before the beginning of the Christian era by a Jewish sectarian group akin to the people of Qumran who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. Indeed, it was the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls that raised the possibility that the Shapira documents may have been genuine.
Unfortunately, the Shapira fragments themselves have completely disappeared, having been seen last in London in 1887, shortly after they had been offered at auction by the still famous firm of Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge, today Sotheby Parke Bernet.
In 1963–64 Allegro himself briefly explored the east coast of the Dead Sea, the area from which the Shapira fragments were said to have come. He found in the upper Mujib or Arnon Valley climatic and geological conditions similar to those on the west coast at Qumran where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. There he found a naturally dry climate coupled with the presence of impermeable limestone caves (limestone is itself a drying agent), leading him to the conclusion that a truly early Biblical text could have survived 19 centuries in that location. Both 19th and 20th century critics had argued that conditions on the east coast of the Dead Sea are not equivalent to those at Qumran.
As to the authorship of the manuscripts, Allegro has been convinced by evidence from Masada and Qumran that entire religious communities fled the mainstream of life in Judea during the first and second centuries before and after the birth of Jesus. Allegro agrees with a suggestion Shapira himself made that the fragments may have been part of the religious possessions of such a community of that period. From Masada and from the works of the Jewish historian Josephus, Allegro finds evidence to support the theory that such groups were not unique at the time and could have existed on the east coast of the Dead Sea as well as on the west.
Although the documents themselves were written in paleo-Hebrew, differed markedly from one another in color, and were obviously cut from the margins of torah scrolls, Allegro finds these facts compatible with his hypothesis that the manuscripts were authored by a sectarian religious community in retreat. He argues that an understandable shortage of writing material would occur under those circumstances, and that the use of the antique paleo-Hebrew script is reflected in finds from the Qumran library.
As to the content of the manuscripts, Allegro cites two precedents, one from the Qumran library and one from Egypt, for a much abbreviated Biblical text interspersed with passages from other parts of the Pentateuch.
Privately, it is difficult to find a scholar who believes that the Shapira manuscripts were genuine. Professor Frank M. Cross of Harvard University, one of the world’s leading experts on manuscripts from this area and period, has already expressed his view in BAR that the Shapira fragments are forgeries (see “Phoenicians in Brazil?” BAR 05:01). According to Cross, the Shapira fragments are just another example of the many forgeries created in the wake of such monumental discoveries as the Moabite Stone and the Temple Stele. The same rash of forgeries spread, says Cross, after the Dead Sea Scrolls were found: numerous ones surfaced on the Jerusalem antiquities’ market.
In the course of his work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Cross examined documents in the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem which Shapira had originally sold. Cross found evidence that they had been doctored.
The exception to the general silence with which the scholarly literature greeted Allegro’s book was the Jewish Quarterly Review, published by Dropsie College in Philadelphia. JQR published an article entitled “The Shapira Scroll: A Nineteenth Century Forgery” which is a broadside attack on Allegro’s conjectures by Oskar K. Rabinowicz.
Rabinowicz argues that the best scholars of the day concluded that Shapira’s fragments were forgeries, not only on external grounds, like the marginal nature of the strips and the holes for sewing them together, but also on internal linguistic evidence. These scholars, says Rabinowicz, found in the fragments Hebrew spellings which were influenced by Eastern-European dialectical pronunciation. They also found spelling and vocabulary dependent on the Masoretic text which dates only to the 10th century A.D. Such prominent scholars as Franz Delitzsch and Hermann Guthe, in addition to the British Museum’s Christian Ginsburg, independently concluded that the fragments were forgeries.
Rabinowicz also quotes from a report by a respected Orientalist named Abraham S. Yahuda who recounts a chance meeting with a Christian Arab who claimed to be the actual forger of the Shapira fragments. For some reason, this account by Yahuda escaped Allegro’s attention. Yahuda wrote:
“On one of my visits to Palestine, in 1902, a Christian Arab by the name of Salim, introduced himself to me as a dragoman, i.e. a guide to European tourists. He said that when he heard that I was interested in Palestinian archaeology he felt a desire to place himself at my service, because he could obtain for me most unusual antiques, and reveal to me important finds not yet seen by anyone before …
“Several weeks passed. Salim began to visit me again, and became more and more friendly with me. He brought me old coins, old Greek gold jewels, Phoenician glasses and other objects which I bought from him. … One day he said to me that he was growing old and tired of a world of falsehood and wickedness in which an honest man cannot earn his bread without making forgeries. ‘I swear,’ he continued, ‘by Allah, the Messiah and all the saints, that I feel much happier with the little money I made out of the coins and the few other things I sold to you, than with all the money I got for the Moabite antiques—and it was a lot—in spite of all the endeavors of that rogue of Shapira to rob me as much as he could.’ Then he began to tell me the ‘secrets’ of his past: how he helped Shapira in the preparation of the leather strips which had been cut away from old Torah-scrolls and then inscribed with portions of Deuteronomy; and how he taught Shapira to soak these strips in an oil lotion to make them appear much older.
“With a surprising frankness he told me on another occasion how he together with some friends prepared all the tools and forms for the Moabite forgeries which had been sold to the Berlin Museum and to many tourists. Walking one day with me through a street, leading to the Nablus-Gate, he pointed to one of the cellars of the then well-known oil press khan-el-zeit in which he had installed a large oven to burn the forged clay antiques. He even showed me the figures he had drawn for the use of the potters and some of the ‘inscriptions’ which he had composed for the antiques. On this occasion he revealed to me that his surname, al-Qari, which means “the reader,” was given him by the Bedouins, because he could read all sorts of inscriptions ‘in every language of the world.’
“When I asked him how the forgers could expect to find clients for such clumsy and stupid contrivances, he said that the very eagerness of European scholars and tourists to get antiques encouraged him and many dealers to engage in this nefarious work. He himself succeeded after continuous exercises in compiling texts in ancient alphabets, looking like those of the Diban-stone, the Siloam inscription, or other Phoenician inscriptions and of Samaritan books. He also used Nabatean and Himyarite letters to make the forgeries more interesting. In some cases, he said, he was given a text in Hebrew letters to copy in a mixed script of letters taken from different alphabets. He gave me a note-book with primitive drawings and all kinds of ancient alphabets as well as copies of various inscriptions, some of which he used for his forgeries.
“He then said that there were places in Transjordania where he used to hide antiques in caves or in ruins and then take there antique dealers of European tourists and sell them his ‘finds’ at high prices.
“He continued: ‘Some Moabite and Hebrew antiques are still buried in such places. One day they will be discovered and again controversies will rise among European savants about them. Those poor fellows (masakin) will not know that it was Salim who caused them all this headache.’ He sighed and said: ‘May Allah forgive Salim for his sins’ … ’”
As noted above, Sotheby’s sold the Deuteronomy fragments at auction in 1885 after Shapira’s death. The auction catalogue described “The Shapira Manuscripts” as “Deuteronomy in Hebrews 7 numbered and 8 unnumbered fragments, written on leather.” Alongside the entry is a name, that of the purchaser, one Bernard Quaritch, a bookdealer, and the amount he paid for his bargain “£10. 5s.”
Quaritch later exhibited the strips in an “Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition” in 1887, and subsequently listed them for sale in his own catalogue, placing their value at one million pounds!
Now, new information concerning the fate of the scrolls comes to us from Australia. In the preface to his catalogue of rare manuscripts held by the University of Sydney Library, A.D. Crown writes:b
“Sir Charles Nicholson, a former Vice Chancellor of the University of Sydney, bestowed upon it various benefactions. Sir Charles began to study Hebrew late in his life. In the University archives are a number of notebooks showing his first attempts with the unaccustomed script and indicating his steady progress to the stage where he was able to proffer his own solutions to problems arising in the Hebrew text of the Book of Deuteronomy.
“Sir Charles had tried to buy the renowned ‘Shapira scroll’ … He failed to obtain the scroll at the Sotheby’s auction but did manage to acquire three others from the Shapira collection. … If one may judge from a letter sent by Sir Charles to Sir Walter Scott, Vice-Chancellor of the University in 1898, he managed eventually to acquire the celebrated scroll from the antiquarian bookseller, Quaritch [who bought it at Sotheby’s auction]. The fate of the Shapira scroll is a mystery which has exercised the minds of many scholars. It is probable that it was destroyed in the fire which burned Sir Charles’ study at his Totteridge home in 1899.”
Thus, in all probability, Shapira’s Deuteronomy fragments no longer exist.