Shapira Scroll

Clermont-Ganneau, Revue politique et littéraire, 29 September 1883

Shapira Strips, 1883, Scientific American.

Two contemporary assessments of the scroll

Shapira's description of the discovery of the scroll is contained within a handwritten letter from Shapira to Professor Hermann Strack of Berlin on 9 May 1883:[1]

I am going to surprise you with a notice and a short description of a curious manuscript written in old Hebrew or Phoenician letters upon small strips of embalmed leather and seems [sic] to be a short unorthodoxical [sic] book of the last speech of Moses in the plain of Moab ... In July 1878 I met several Bedouins in the house of the well-known Sheque Mahmud el Arakat, we came of course to speak of old inscriptions. One Bedouin asserted that the antique brings blessedness to the place where it lays. And begins to tell a history to about [sic] the following effect. Several years ago some Arabs had occasion to flee from their enemies & hid themselves in caves high up in a rock facing the Moujib (the neues Arnon [sic]) they discovered there several bundles of very old rugs. Thinking they may [sic] contain gold they peeled away a good deal of Cotton or Linen & found only some black charms & threw them away; but one of them took them up & and [sic] since having the charms in his tent, he became a wealthy man having sheeps [sic] etc.

Shapira sought to sell the scroll to the British Museum for a million pounds, and allowed the Museum to exhibit two of the 15 strips.[2] The exhibition was attended by thousands. Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau, whom Shapira had previously denied access to the scroll, was among the attendees and, after close examination of the two strips on display, declared them to be forgeries.[3] Soon afterward British biblical scholar Christian David Ginsburg came to the same conclusion. Later, Clermont-Ganneau suggested that the leather of the Deuteronomy scroll might have been cut from the margin of a genuine Yemenite scroll that Shapira had previously sold to the Museum.[3]

1883 Punch cartoon of Shapira and Ginsburg

Shapira fled London in despair, his name ruined and all of his hopes crushed. Six months later, on 9 March 1884, he shot himself at the Hotel Willemsbrug in Rotterdam.[5]

The British Museum put up the scroll for auction at Sotheby's in 1885 and it was purchased by Bernard Quaritch, a bookseller. Two years later, Quaritch listed the scroll for sale for £25. The scroll was thought to have been purchased by Sir Charles Nicholson, and destroyed in a fire in Nicholson's study in England in 1899.[3][6] In 2011 Australian researcher Matthew Hamilton identified its purchaser as Dr. Philip Brookes Mason;[7] the identification was publicized in a 2014 documentary by Yoram Sabo, Shapira and I,[8] and a 2016 book by Professor Chanan Tigay, The Lost Book of Moses.[9][7][10]

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, in approximately the same area Shapira claimed his scroll was discovered, cast some doubt on the initial charges of forgery.[11][12]

Despite the assessment of contemporary scholars—including not just Clermont-Ganneau and Ginsburg, but also German ones from Halle, Leipzig and Berlin—which rested on doubts about the antiquity of the leather or purported flaws in the Hebrew, and even leaving aside the fact that the peculiar "eleventh commandment" showed Christian leanings which could be connected to Shapira's own conversion, there have always been researchers claiming to have reasons to believe that the Shapira scroll might be a genuine ancient artifact after all.[13]

Professor Menahem Mansoor, chairman of the Department of Hebrew and Semitic Studies at the University of Wisconsin, announced in 1956 that the scroll may have been authentic.[14] In a book published in 1958 Mansoor concluded that “neither the internal nor the external evidence... supports the idea of a forgery... there is justification... for a re-examination of the case”.[15] Mansoor’s conclusion was supported by Jacob L. Teicher and attacked by Moshe H. Goshen-Gottstein and by Oskar K. Rabinowicz.[16]

• British Library Add. MS. 41294, “Papers Relative to M. W. Shapira’s Forged MS. of Deuteronomy (A.D. 1883–1884).”