The tone for Chanan Tigay’s
book is set by the cover: a colorized photograph of Jaffa Gate (Bab al-Khalil)
of Jerusalem’s Old City in the late 19th century. Looking back at the camera, while
the other figures in front of the gate go about their business, is Moses
Shapira, the Jerusalem antiquities dealer and Tigay’s main character. Except
there is one problem: Shapira did not appear in the original picture. Our cover
photo is a fake.
Inside the covers we find
the lengthy tale of the “world’s oldest Bible” in Tigay’s subtitle – not a
complete Bible, but merely the purported original version of the book of
Deuteronomy, with which Shapira showed up in London in summer 1883. Shapira
asked the British Museum for a million pounds to acquire his Deuteronomy
strips; instead, they were declared a forgery, with Shapira leaving the country
in disgrace and committing suicide six months later. The manuscript itself was
lost within a few years of the incident, but has been the subject of recurring
interest since. This notorious incident has been retold many times, in both scholarly
and popular versions, but journalist Tigay combines the tools of investigative
reporting with some recent scholarship in this account of his attempt to find
the strips and determine whether they were authentic.
Tigay’s version is a popular
version, and it can be difficult to review a popular book as a scholar. The
criteria to judge by and even the goals of popular books vs scholarship can be
quite different. But this book, however broad an audience it’s reaching for, is
still a contribution to our knowledge of the past – and it is this contribution
in which I’m most interested. So let’s consider each aspect separately.
As a popular book: The Lost Book of Moses makes for fairly
quick reading. It is engaging, other than a tendency to provide unnecessary or
unwanted details. (These include several odd passages focusing on his and others’
undergarments or bodies.) In the end, though, the book is simply anti-climactic:
(spoiler) Tigay doesn’t find the manuscript
he spent four years looking for, and on top of this he concludes that it’s a
forgery anyway.
As a work of scholarship: It
is well-researched – both in terms of extensive investigative reporting and
library research. Tigay uses most of the known (and some previously unknown)
sources that are relevant to the strips. I’m glad that I read this book: I
learned several things about Shapira and the Deuteronomy strips, even as
someone who has researched and written on them before.
There are many minor errors,
most of which do not affect the main conclusions or the course of the narrative.
But there is one major exception to this: a cluster of errors around the
influential Orientalist scholar Charles Clermont-Ganneau.
Clermont-Ganneau makes two
climactic appearances in Shapira’s life, and for each one Tigay has badly
botched the sequence of events: Clermont-Ganneau’s announcement of Shapira’s
Moabite pottery (the infamous “Moabitica”) as a forgery in 1873-74, and his
announcement of the Shapira strips as a forgery a decade later. In both cases
the effect is to make Ganneau appear to have rushed ideas into print, without
care or “scooping” other scholars, or even “poison[ing] the well” (p. 250). In
both cases Tigay cites and even quotes from the documents that provide the
correct timeline and prove Ganneau mostly innocent of the charges.
Tigay also presents a series
of cases in which he charges that Ganneau stole ideas or discoveries from
others. It is true that Ganneau emphasized his role in the recovery of the
Moabite Stone and neglected to mention F.A. Klein, the missionary who was the
first Westerner to see it, in his publications on the stele. But in general the
evidence for theft in these cases is flimsy or even nonexistent.
One claim deserves special
attention: that Ganneau stole credit for the discovery of the first Gezer
boundary inscription from Charles Tyrwhitt Drake, a scholar with the Palestine Exploration
Fund’s Survey of Western Palestine. This is a remarkable claim, since that
discovery (and its connection with the identification of Tell Jezar as Gezer)
is one of the most important and famous of Ganneau’s achievements and is
universally credited to him. Tigay’s sole source here is John Moscrop’s Measuring Jerusalem, which itself has a
large number of errors (as noted in Rachel
Hallote’s review in Religious Studies
Review, 2004.) Moscrop in turn relies on a letter of Claude Conder, but the
actual text of that letter – contra Moscrop
and Tigay – makes clear that this claim of theft is merely a false rumor spread
by Ganneau’s enemies in Jerusalem, and Conder declared it baseless.
These cases then set up a
final charge, that Ganneau stole his proof for revealing the Shapira strips as
a forgery from Christian Ginsburg. Here, the only evidence, besides the
similarities of Ganneau’s and Ginsburg’s points – which Ganneau put into print
before Ginsburg – is the recollection of Ginsburg’s son thirty years later. Looking
at each of these charges on their own, there is little to no supporting
evidence; so Tigay must present them together in order to suggest a pattern of
bad behavior (to poison the well?).
Ironically, for someone
employed in the French consulate, Ganneau was a remarkably undiplomatic person.
He was apparently a difficult man to get along with. He emphasized his own role
in discoveries and scholarship repeatedly, deemphasizing or ignoring the roles
of others. He made many enemies. But Ganneau also had friends among scholars.
And almost everyone respected him immensely for his abilities and his work. The
PEF tried for two years to hire him before they were successful, and even after
he resigned his commission they still promoted him publicly and published new
articles of his for decades.
So, why does Tigay
consistently make these errors?
Accounts of the Shapira affair
typically present it as a contest between Shapira and Ginsburg (see Fred
Reiner’s excellent contribution), or Shapira and Clermont-Ganneau, with the
latter as Shapira’s long-term nemesis (from the Moabite pottery days). Tigay
adopts this frame, but then does something astonishing: he makes the forger
Shapira his hero.
Shapira is not presented in
a wholly positive light – we see his sometime neglect of his family; his
apparent affair – but Clermont-Ganneau’s presentation is almost completely
negative, except for brief references to his skill and knowledge as a scholar.
This presentation of Ganneau includes the most ungenerous readings, and even
misreadings, of his work and the circumstances surrounding it. To be clear: I
do not imagine that this treatment of Ganneau is intentional. Presumably, through
his search for his strips Tigay has come (understandably) to identify with
Shapira, and therefore casts Ganneau as the main villain – and this naturally
but unfortunately leads to things like the use of unreliable sources without
due diligence and sloppy analysis that consistently cuts against Ganneau.
Meanwhile, Shapira, in
Tigay’s account, is “brilliant,” a “genius,” a “virtuoso forger,” and compared
to Mozart. But there is little concrete evidence to support these praises
beyond the much more subdued assessments in a trade school evaluation (p. 42).
In fact, I think it is pretty clear Shapira was not a virtuoso forger.
Certainly he was good enough to make money off some of them (the Moabitica, the
Philadelphia scrolls). But I am aware of seven Shapira forgeries or groups of
forgeries that have been identified: all were detected during his lifetime; they
were all revealed during his lifetime too (except the Philadelphia scrolls that
were first declared forgeries by
Isaac Hollister Hall, not Cyrus Adler as Tigay has it, two months after
Shapira’s death). Most of those who were qualified to judge his material were
easily able to detect them as forgeries – if Adler is to be believed, an
undergraduate did in one case. This is especially true with the Shapira strips:
every single scholar who considered them (Ginsburg, Clermont-Ganneau, Conder,
Sayce, Neubauer, Guthe, etc.) concluded that they were forged. The one possible
exception is the German scholar of Semitics Paul Schröder – but here we only
have Shapira’s word; Schröder later denied that he ever claimed them to be
authentic. Compare Shapira’s record to actual
virtuoso forgers whose work goes undetected for decades and fools multiple
scholars.
Here we hit on the real
problems with the book: romanticizing a forger and his frauds, with all of the
ethical problems that result from this; and sensationalizing the study of the
past, treating it as a whodunit to be solved (when instead scholars typically
look at their work as trying to improve understandings of a never fully
recoverable past). This involves the need to provide a sufficiently engaging
plot, with a strong enough central conflict. Taking 300 pages to pretend that
there is a real question about the authenticity of the strips when the
overwhelming scholarly consensus has always been that they are obvious
forgeries. Insisting that we need to find the strips, or conduct a multi-year
search for them, to find out what kind of a person Shapira truly was, when we
already knew that he built a career on making and selling forgeries and
stealing manuscripts from Jewish communities in Yemen (pp. 195-197).
But this type of
sensationalism is typical of public presentations of scholarship and the study
of the past. Is this inevitable? Or can we do better?
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