(It didn’t help that one scholar who took up the cause also claimed that Christianity’s roots were connected with hallucinogenic mushrooms.)ĭershowitz’s own obsession with the Shapira manuscript began as something of a lark. But their arguments gained little traction. Since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a few scholars have tried to reopen the Shapira case, arguing that his Deuteronomy fragments were another Dead Sea Scroll, dating, like those from Qumran, to around the first century B.C.E. is a forgery unless Monsieur Ganneau did it!”
“Although I am not yet convinced that the M.s. “I do not think that I will be able to survive this shame,” he wrote. But in a letter to Ginsburg, Shapira professed his innocence, and pointed the finger at his old nemesis. Sharp-Eye-Ra,” with forger’s ink still dripping from his finger. Still, for some, his Jewish origins rendered him suspicious.Īfter the British Museum issued its damning verdict on the Deuteronomy fragments, the satirical magazine Punch ran a cartoon showing the museum’s expert, Christian David Ginsburg, apprehending a stereotypically hooknosed “Mr. By the time he announced the Deuteronomy fragments, he had sold some 250 apparently genuine ones to the British Museum. In 1873, after Shapira sold a large collection of newly “discovered” Moabite pottery to the German government, Clermont-Ganneau publicly denounced them - correctly - as “false from beginning to end.”īy 1883, Shapira had re-established himself as a respected dealer of antique Hebrew manuscripts. The showdown with Clermont-Ganneau was not the first time the two men had tangled. In her 1914 autobiographical novel, “The Little Daughter of Jerusalem,” his daughter Maria recalled how Shapira would return from artifact-hunting trips proclaiming himself “King of the Desert.” Soon, he started selling antiquities out of his back room, and cultivating grandiose ambitions. In 1861, he opened a souvenir shop on Christian Street in the Old City, offering palm fronds and kitschy souvenirs to tourists. Scholars who previewed his findings at a closed-door seminar at Harvard in 2019 are divided, a taste of fierce debates likely to come. That would make it the oldest known biblical manuscript by far, and an unprecedented window into the origins and evolution of the Bible and biblical religion.ĭershowitz’s research, closely guarded until now, has yet to get broad scrutiny. The text, which he has reconstructed from 19th-century transcriptions and drawings, is not a reworking of Deuteronomy, he argues, but a precursor to it, dating to the period of the First Temple, before the Babylonian Exile. In a just-published scholarly article and companion book, Idan Dershowitz, a 38-year-old Israeli-American scholar at the University of Potsdam in Germany, marshals a range of archival, linguistic and literary evidence to argue that the manuscript was an authentic ancient artifact.īut Dershowitz makes an even more dramatic claim. But now, a young scholar is staking his own credibility by asking, what if this notorious fake was real?
Since then, the Shapira affair has haunted the edges of respectable biblical scholarship, as a rollicking caper wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a cautionary tale.
But the next morning, he went to the press and denounced them as forgeries. While the museum’s expert evaluated it, two fragments were put on display, attracting throngs of visitors, including Prime Minister William Gladstone.Ĭharles Simon Clermont-Ganneau, a swashbuckling French archaeologist and longtime nemesis of Shapira’s, had been granted a few minutes with several of the fragments, after promising to hold his judgment until the museum issued its report. The discovery drew newspaper headlines around the world, and Shapira offered the treasure to the British Museum for a million pounds. Blackened with a pitchlike substance, their paleo-Hebrew script nearly illegible, they contained what Shapira claimed was the “original” Book of Deuteronomy, perhaps even Moses’ own copy. In 1883, a Jerusalem antiquities dealer named Moses Wilhelm Shapira announced the discovery of a remarkable artifact: 15 manuscript fragments, supposedly discovered in a cave near the Dead Sea.
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