The Lost Book of Moses: The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Bible

265 Pages·2016·1.4 MB·English

by  Chanan Tigay

DEDICATION
FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER
CONTENTS

1. DEDICATION
2.
3. DRAMATIS PERSONAE
4. PROLOGUE
5.1 FROM PHILADELPHIA TO JERUSALEM
6.2 A BIBLE AND A SPADE
7.3 LONDON
8.4 AN EPIC BATTLE
9.5 ROTTERDAM
10.6 SCULPTING A CIVILIZATION
11.7 PARIS
12.8 GERMANY
13.9 THE ANTIQUARIAN AND THE MURDERER
14.1 0 TERRA INCOGNITA
15.1 1 SYDNEY
16.1 2 LONDON CALLING
17.1 3 FROM PARIS WITH DOUBTS
18.1 4 PLAYING DEFENSE
19.1 5 IN LIGHT OF RECENT DISCOVERIES
20.1 6 BURTON-ON-TRENT
21.1 7 MR. SHARP-EYE-RA
22.1 8 SAN FRANCISCO
23. AUTHOR’S NOTE
24. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
25. NOTES
26. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
27. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
28. PRAISE
29. CREDITS
30. COPYRIGHT
31. ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
NINETEENTH CENTURY
Moses Wilhelm Shapira: A Jerusalem manuscript and antiquities dealer
Mahmoud al Arakat: The sheikh in whose home Shapira first heard of the
Deuteronomy scrolls
Salim al Kari: Shapira’s factotum
Walter Besant: An English author and leader of the Palestine Exploration Fund
Edward Bond: The chief librarian of the British Museum
Yaqoub Caravacca: Hired by Ganneau to secure a squeeze of the Moabite
Stone
Sabah Cawar: A Jerusalem teacher dispatched to Moab to negotiate for the
Moabite Stone
Charles Clermont-Ganneau: A French archaeologist and Shapira’s nemesis
Claude Conder: An officer of the British military and one of the first people to
whom Shapira agreed to show his scrolls on arriving in London
Charles Tyrwhitt Drake: A Palestine Exploration Fund explorer
Fendi el Faiz: Sheikh of the Beni Sachr Bedouin and a Moabite Stone suitor
Christian David Ginsburg: The leading English Bible scholar charged with
authenticating the Shapira scrolls for the British Museum
Jemil: One of three horsemen who attempted to make a squeeze copy of the
Moabite Stone for Ganneau
Frederick Augustus Klein: Discoverer of the Moabite Stone
Philip Brookes Mason: An English physician and naturalist
Charles Nicholson: The English-Australian nobleman thought to have
purchased the Shapira scrolls
Edward Henry Palmer: A Palestine Exploration Fund explorer and Cambridge
Arabic professor
J. Heinrich Petermann: The Prussian consul in Jerusalem, 1868–1869
Bernard Quaritch: The London book dealer who bought Shapira’s scrolls at a
Sotheby’s auction
Konstantin Schlottmann: The German scholar to whom Shapira first showed
his scrolls
Myriam Harry (Maria Shapira): Shapira’s daughter and a famous French
author
Rosette Shapira: Shapira’s wife
William Simpson: A sketch artist for the Illustrated London News
Hermann Strack: A German Orientalist and Shapira correspondent
Baron Thankmar von Münchhausen: Germany’s imperial consul in
Jerusalem, 1874–1881
Charles Warren: A British military man and Palestine Exploration Fund
explorer
Charles Wilson: Led the British Royal Engineers in the Ordnance Survey of
Jerusalem
Zattam: Klein’s guide in Moab when he discovered the Moabite Stone
TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES
Mahmoud Alassi: Manager of preservation and restoration for the Louvre’s
Department of Near Eastern Antiquities
Anneke Barends: A Dutch history enthusiast
Paul Beringer: An Australian pastor
Elisabeth Fontan: The former chief curator for the Louvre’s Department of
Near Eastern Antiquities
Moshe Goshen-Gottstein: A Semitic philologist at the Hebrew University
Matthew Hamilton: An Australian Shapira researcher
Menahem Mansoor: The University of Wisconsin Semitics scholar who
reopened the Shapira case
Oscar K. Rabinowicz: A journalist and educator unconvinced by Shapira’s
scrolls
Michael Ruprecht: The director of the archives at the Martin-Luther-University
of Halle Wittenberg
Yoram Sabo: An Israeli documentary filmmaker
Annette Schwarz Scheuls: A living German relative of Shapira
Solomon Zeitlin: A professor of rabbinic literature at Dropsie College in
Philadelphia who spoke out against the Dead Sea Scrolls.
ORGANIZATIONS
PEF: Palestine Exploration Fund
DMG: Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society)
BNHAS: Burton-on-Trent Natural History and Archaeological Society
PROLOGUE:
A FAMOUS CORPSE
THE NETHERLANDS
Sunday, March 9, 1884, began as a slow news day at police headquarters in
Rotterdam. At ten thirty, Catharina Johanna van Vliet arrived in a huff after her
brother-in-law spent the morning calling her names. At one o’clock, two
patrolmen attempted to detain a drunken German. With six o’clock came a break
in the Case of Some Stolen Sausages: Officers A. van der Muelen and L. J. A.
Hoogland had collared a suspect on the Westplein. The arrest came too late to
save the sausages, but the constables’ work was considered so exemplary that
each was slated for a bonus.
It was right around this time that the station received a concerned dispatch
from a seedy hotel called the Willemsbrug. Two days earlier, one of its guests
had entered his room and locked the door—and hadn’t been heard from since.
Adjunct Inspector G. Putman Cramer was sent to investigate. Arriving at No. 6
Boompjes Street, situated on a block of brick buildings that housed a bank, a life
insurer, and a zinc merchant, Cramer approached the room in question and broke
through the door.
He entered to a grisly scene. Slumped on the bed was the bloodied corpse of a
middle-aged man, a bullet hole notched in his head. Beside the bed lay the man’s
suitcase. It was stuffed with manuscripts—some new, some ancient—written in
English and Hebrew, among other languages. Nearby was a stack of business
cards. Cramer slipped one from the pile and took down its inscription:
M. W. Shapira, Book Seller and Antiquarian
Agent of the British Museum
Jerusalem
That evening’s police register logs the death, noting the name of the deceased
but offering no indication that authorities knew they had a world-famous corpse
on their hands—that months earlier this brilliant man had been a household
name, meeting with England’s prime minister and its intellectual elite, making
daily appearances in European gossip columns, staying in fancy hotels as he
prepared to become exceedingly rich. “The guest in question . . . appears to be
named M. W. Shapira,” the duty officer reported. “After having been viewed by
Dr. C. H. Eshuijs he was taken to the morgue.”
Just beneath this, the night’s final entry: “There is nothing to report about
garbage.”
It took three days, but the press eventually figured out who the dead man was.
A short item in the March 12 edition of the Leidsch Dagblad noted that “this is
probably the person who became disreputable last year in England for his
falsified manuscripts.”
Not quite the epitaph M. W. Shapira had been hoping for.
EIGHT MONTHS EARLIER, when he arrived at the London doorstep of Sir Walter
Besant, longtime secretary of the Palestine Exploration Fund, Moses Wilhelm
Shapira—archaeological treasure hunter, antiquities maven, inveterate social
climber, and, by that point, a man painfully down on his luck—believed that the
contents of the stylish carpetbag he carried would help repair a once-solid
reputation that had nearly been destroyed by scandal.
At home in Jerusalem, Shapira’s wife and daughters awaited news of his
mission. If all went according to plan, they would soon rank among the Holy
City’s wealthiest inhabitants, assuming a place in its social hierarchy that the
fifty-four-year-old Shapira had been clawing for ever since he bolted Eastern
Europe three decades earlier in search of his absent father and his fortune.
That July morning, Shapira—a little bit Indiana Jones, a little Jay Gatsby—
had appeared at Besant’s claiming to have in his possession an ancient
manuscript that would “simply make students of the Bible and Hebrew scholars
reconsider their ways.” It was a bold claim, redolent of a magician’s patter, and
while Shapira’s performance intrigued Besant, he also found the whole thing a
little annoying. The Brit was entirely familiar with the bearded, bespectacled
foreigner standing before him now: the previous year, Shapira had played a
small, unsuccessful part in an attempt to rescue one of the Palestine Exploration
Fund’s orientalist explorers when the man, Edward Henry Palmer, was
kidnapped by Bedouin brigands during a reconnaissance mission in Egypt. The
fund had paid Shapira eight pounds and change for his efforts; Palmer had not
fared so well. Soon after his capture the Bedouin had slaughtered him, tossing
his body off a cliff to be feasted on by birds.
Besant also knew Shapira as one of the British Museum’s most important
purveyors of centuries-old Hebrew manuscripts. Over the prior six years,
Shapira had collected a vast stockpile of these valuable books and scrolls from
communities throughout the Middle East; some of them dated back as far as
seven hundred years. The museum had paid handsomely to add these
manuscripts to its own collection, as had other such institutions around Europe—
a fact that imbued Shapira’s stagy pronouncement with the aura of authenticity.
Archaeology in the late nineteenth century was a popular pastime among
Western elites, and, as Shapira approached Besant, the field was still emerging
from the domain of gentlemanly adventure into one governed by tenets of
science. The British were engaged in a drawn-out rivalry with Germany and
France, not only for colonial dominance but for international prestige.
Archaeological prowess—manifested by the display of looted relics in the gilded
galleries of their national museums—offered an express passage to glory.
After its discovery by French soldiers near the mouth of the Nile, England had
managed to secure what became known as the Rosetta Stone for the British
Museum, opening the way for scholars to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.
When an Anglican missionary found the Moabite Stone—its inscription offering
the first confirmation of a biblical story outside the Bible itself—the French
snatched it up, depositing the 2,700-year-old basalt monument in the Louvre for
all the world to ogle. The Germans, however, had yet to acquire relics of such
magnitude for their Royal Museum. Indeed, efforts to keep pace with their
European adversaries had recently ended in humiliation.
That debacle began in 1872, when Shapira—himself an occasional Anglican
missionary—came into possession of nearly two thousand ancient clay vessels
and statuettes allegedly discovered in the biblical region of Moab, just east of the
Dead Sea. Many of these items were engraved in an ancient script similar to the
one found on the Moabite Stone, which told the story of King Mesha’s blood-
soaked rebellion against the Israelites. Others coarsely depicted nude women
with genitalia that appeared to have been fashioned by the swing of a battle-ax.
Eager for a big win after losing Mesha’s stele to Paris, the Prussians had gone all
in, purchasing Shapira’s collection for twenty thousand thaler. Much as his sale
of Hebrew manuscripts would boost the reputation of the British Museum,
Shapira’s pottery had buoyed Prussia. But when the artifacts were dismissed as
clumsy forgeries, the fallout came as a great embarrassment to the Germans.
Shapira had been laboring ever since to repair his reputation. Despite recent
success as an agent to the Brits, he remained unable to entirely shake the taint of
disgrace.
“The man was a good actor,” Besant recalled some years later. “He was a man
of handsome presence, tall, with fair hair and blue eyes; not the least like the
ordinary Polish Jew, and with an air of modest honesty which carried one away.”
Besant’s reference to the religion of Shapira’s birth raises questions about the