Dershowitz to Head Qimron’s Legal Team

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Elisha Qimron, the Israeli Dead Sea Scroll scholar who is suing the Biblical Archaeology Society (BAS) for a quarter of a million dollars, has hired Alan Dershowitz, one of this country’s most famous and most feared lawyers, to fight his case in the United States. Time magazine has called Dershowitz “the top lawyer of last resort in the country.” The Harvard professor’s successful defense of Klaus von Bulow, accused of murdering his wife, was made into the popular movie Reversal of Fortune. Less successful was Dershowitz’s defense of heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson, accused of rape, and hotel magnate Leona Helmsley, accused of tax evasion. Dershowitz is also author of the bestseller Chutzpah and writes a regular column for Penthouse magazine.

At stake in the Dead Sea Scroll litigation is open access to one of the most important Dead Sea Scrolls, known as MMT,¹ which officially remains unpublished 40 years after it was discovered. The precedent-setting litigation is also likely to affect open scholarly access not only to reconstructed Dead Sea Scrolls, but to other reconstructed ancient texts as well.

Qimron’s case was filed in the Jerusalem District Court last January, where he obtained a temporary injunction against BAS’s sale of its two-volume set of pictures of unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls so long as the publisher’s foreword contained the reconstructed Hebrew text of MMT as published—without Qimron’s authorization—in a Polish journal named The Qumran Chronicle. Qimron claims that BAS’s publication of the 120-line text of MMT violates his copyright. Qimron obtained the injunction, which applies throughout the world, without notifying BAS of his application to the Israeli court or even of the existence of the case; when he obtained the injunction, he promptly faxed BAS a copy of it.

MMT was originally assigned for publication to John Strugnell, formerly professor of Christian origins at Harvard Divinity School and formerly chief editor of the official scroll publication team. Strugnell was deposed following publication of an interview he gave to an Israeli journalist in which he called Judaism “a horrible religion” that was “originally racist” and in which he described himself as an “anti-Judaist.” Strugnell enlisted Qimron’s assistance because of the latter’s expertise in Jewish religious law and Hebrew philology. How much of the reconstruction of MMT was accomplished by Strugnell and other scholars before Strugnell enlisted Qimron’s assistance in 1980 remains an issue in the case.

BAS is represented in this country on a pro bono publico basis by the well-known Washington, D.C. law firm of Arnold & Porter. The firm has a long tradition of pro bono publico representation going back to the McCarthy days, when it represented such well-known luminaries as Owen Lattimore, the State Department official accused by Sen. Joseph McCarthy of 065being a Communist. On BAS’s behalf, Arnold & Porter filed a suit in September, in federal court in Philadelphia (where Qimron this year is a research scholar at the Annenberg Research Institute), seeking a declaration that BAS has not violated Qimron’s copyright.

Qimron responded by retaining Dershowitz. According to the Legal Times, a newspaper following the case, Qimron’s legal team also includes Jerome Shestack of the Philadelphia firm of Wolf, Block, Schorr and Solis-Cohen and copyright authority Robert Gorman of the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

BAS’s legal team is headed by Daniel Rezneck, a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice William Brennan and a former Justice Department prosecutor. In a recent article in Washingtonian magazine on the 50 best lawyers in Washington, Rezneck was ranked eighth. BAS’s legal team also includes noted intellectual property lawyer Cary Sherman.

The next battle of the Dead Sea Scrolls is shaping up as a legal one. However, the world of academic scholarship, as well as the legal world, will be watching the case closely.