Dr. Nehemia Gordon - Bible Scholar at NehemiasWall.com

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #192 - Early Mormonism on Trial, Nehemia welcomes back Dan Vogel to discuss the uncovering of Joseph Smith’s court hearing documents, his background digging for treasure using seer stones, and the influence of folk magic on early Mormonism.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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VERSES MENTIONED
Helaman 13:31 (Book of Mormon)
Mormon 1:18 (Book of Mormon)

BOOKS MENTIONED
Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet
by Dan Vogel

Charisma under Pressure: Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1831–1839
by Dan Vogel

Early Mormonism and the Magic World View
by D. Michael Quinn

The Magus (1801)
by Francis Barrett

Book of Jubilees

Book of Zohar

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes
Hebrew Voices #164 – A Karaite Jew on Mormonism: Part 1
Support Team Study – A Karaite Jew on Mormonism: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #183 – Early Mormonism Revealed: Part 1
Support Team Study – Early Mormonism Revealed: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #190, Mormon Chains of Authority: Part 1
Support Team Study: Mormon Chains of Authority: Part 2

OTHER LINKS
Dan Vogel’s YT channel
FAIR Mormon Apologetic Site
The Joseph Smith Papers

The post Hebrew Voices #192 – Early Mormonism on Trial appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

Watch the Sneak Peek of this episode of Support Team Study - The Cairo Genizah: Part 4, Nehemia concludes his discussion with Dr. Ben Outhwaite of Cambridge with a look at the sketchy methods of a 19th century Karaite scholar, the autographs of famous medieval Jews in the Cairo Genizah, and the problem of archaeological artifacts that show up on the antiquities market.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

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 | TuneIn
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The post Support Team Study SNEAK PEEK! The Cairo Genizah: Part 4 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #191 - The Cairo Genizah: Part 3, Nehemia continues to discuss with the head of the Cambridge Genizah Research Unit how fragments from 1,000 years ago now scattered in libraries throughout the globe are reunited using technology and scholarly elbow grease. They also talk about the coming AI revolution that will change the face of Hebrew scholarship.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

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Subscribe to "Nehemia Gordon" on your favorite podcast app!
Apple Podcasts | 
Amazon Music
 | TuneIn
Pocket Casts | Podcast Addict | CastBox | iHeartRadio | Podchaser
 | Pandora

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes
Support Team Study – How Medieval Jewish Children Read Hebrew
Hebrew Voices #156 – Bibles Written by Medieval Jewish Kids
Hebrew Voices #141 – When were the Hebrew Vowels Written Down
Support Team Study – 3 Hebrew Vowel Systems
Support Team Study – The Vowels of the Aleppo Codex
Hebrew Voices #153 – Sighting the New Moon in the Middle Ages
Hebrew Voices #154 – Reaping the Benefits of the Medieval Aviv Calendar: Part 1
Support Team Study – Reaping the Benefits of the Medieval Aviv Calendar: Part 2
Support Team Study – The Masorah as an Error Correcting Code
Hebrew Voices #174 – How We Got Our Hebrew Bible
Support Team Study – Bible Vowels of Ancient Israel
Hebrew Voices #144 – The Scribe of the Leningrad Codex
Hebrew Voices #183 – Early Mormonism Revealed: Part 1
Support Team Study – Early Mormonism Revealed: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #164 – A Karaite Jew on Mormonism: Part 1
Support Team Study – A Karaite Jew on Mormonism: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #161 – The Moses Scroll
Support Team Study – The Shapira Scrolls
Hebrew Voices #98 – Toilets in Ancient Israel
Hebrew Voices #26 – Easter Miracle of the Holy Fire
Support Team Study – Hebrew Bible Manuscript Gold Rush
Hebrew Voices #189 – The Cairo Genizah: Part 1
Support Team Study – The Cairo Genizah: Part 2

OTHER LINKS
Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit | Cambridge University Library
Jewish Quarterly Review
Full archive of JQR: The Jewish Quarterly Review on JSTOR
The Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society (Digitized Cairo Geniza)
Bar-Ilan Responsa Project - vast Jewish sources
Ktiv | Digitized Hebrew manuscripts (nli.org.il)
A Jewish Business Woman of the Eleventh Century on JSTOR

The post Hebrew Voices #191 – The Cairo Genizah: Part 3 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In Hebrew Voices #48, Jewish Freedom in America, Nehemia Gordon and Tel Aviv University Professor Michael Kochin, explain how Jonas Phillips, an 18th century Jewish merchant gave us freedom of religion, how George Washington set us free from the tyranny of religious "toleration", and how the Regressive Left is ushering in a new era of religious persecution. They also discuss how President Trump's "Muslim Ban" fits with the American Constitution, and the history of US immigration law.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Benjamin Netanyahu: Le ma’an Zion lo ekhesheh, u’l’ma’an Yerushalayim lo eshkot. (For Zion’s sake I will not be silent, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest. Isaiah 62:1)

Nehemia: Shalom, this is Nehemia Gordon with Hebrew Voices, and I am coming to you this week with Professor Michael Kochin of Tel Aviv University, the Department of Political Science. He did his undergrad at Harvard University and his PhD at the University of Chicago, and today, we’re going to be speaking about the cornerstone of American Jewish history. Shalom, Professor Kochin.

Professor Kochin: Hi, Nehemia.

Nehemia: We’ll be talking today about this letter written by a Jew named Jonas Phillips, who wrote to the Constitutional Convention as they were formulating the Constitution of the United States. So what was the issue here, Michael? Why is it that he wrote this letter? And then I’ll read a little bit of the letter.

Professor Kochin: So what bothers Jonas Phillips is something they have in Pennsylvania and the other states, except New York. They have religious tests for office that prohibit Jews from taking office under the state government.

Nehemia: Now, they don’t actually say Jews can’t participate in government, but the way they word it makes it impossible for a Jew to participate, right?

Professor Kochin: To take office you have to swear an oath that you believe in the Old and New Testament, which Phillips explains in his letter as something no Jew could swear.

Nehemia: Okay, and he’s in Pennsylvania, and the Convention is in Philadelphia, is that correct?

Professor Kochin: Yeah. He’s a Jew from Philadelphia. He’s a member of Mikva Israel, which is today, the oldest continually operating Jewish congregation in the United States.

Nehemia: Wow. And by the way, Mikva Israel, Mikveh Israel, people might think that’s the immersion bath of Israel, but the word “mikva” also means “gathering”. So it’s the gathering of the Israelites, is kind of what the name of the synagogue means.

Before we read the letter, I want to read from Article 6 Clause 3, or Section 3, of the US Constitution. And it says as follows: “The Senators and representatives aforementioned and the members of the several legislatures and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation.” And this is this the key part. “Anybody who holds public office shall be bound by oath or affirmation to support this Constitution, but no religious tests shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

And this Clause 3 of Article 6 of the US Constitution is a response to the letter written by Jonas Phillips in 1787. This whole idea that we have religious freedom, and in order to hold public office we cannot be forced through a religious test, is a response to this letter by Jonas Phillips.

Professor Kochin: It’s certainly a response to the kind of concern that he had. And he was an important guy, and it’s quite possible that he had other social opportunities and so forth, to express his views to the members of the Convention.

Nehemia: There was an article written by this Jewish scholar in 1879, who actually claims that Article 6 Section 3 of the US Constitution was a direct response to Phillips’ letter. Let me read this. This is written on August 22, 1879. It says, “In connection with this circumstance, I wish to remark that it was due to Jonas Phillips that the article on religious liberty, as contained in the New York Constitution of 1777, was made a part of the Constitution of the United States in 1789 by Congress.”

In other words, this idea of religious freedom already existed in the New York Constitution of 1777, and they copied that clause. And he says here in 1879 that it was a response to the letter. And like you say, whether it was a response specifically to the letter or that kind of concern, I guess you could never know that.

So let’s read this letter. It’s pretty amazing. He starts out, and he writes it on September 7, 1787. And the really cool thing is, I went online and I was able to find the original letter. It’s really hard to read. It’s really faded. I had to put it though Photoshop to enhance the ink. But you could actually read it! You can make out some of what it says. So here’s what he wrote in the letter of 1787.

He says, “I, the subscriber…” meaning the writer, and this is again, Jonas Phillips writing. “I, the subscriber, being one of the people called Jews of the city of Philadelphia, a people scattered and dispersed among all nations, do behold with concern that among the laws in the Constitution of Pennsylvania, there is a clause, Section 10, which says…” and then he quotes Section 10 of the Pennsylvania Constitution. And basically, what it’s talking about is that to hold public office you have to make the following declaration. And he quotes the declaration.

The declaration is, “I do believe in one God, the Creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked, and I do acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration.” This is what people had to declare in order to hold any public office in Pennsylvania, according to their constitution.

And so Jonas Phillips, after quoting this, he writes, “To swear and believe that the New Testament was given by divine inspiration is absolutely against the religious principle of a Jew, and it is against his conscience to take any such oath. By the above law, a Jew is deprived of holding any public office or place of government, which is contradictory to the Bill of Rights.” And it’s interesting, he then quotes the Bill of Rights of the Pennsylvania Constitution, which says that, “All men have a natural and inalienable right to worship Almighty God, according to the dictates of their own conscience and understanding.”

And then it says, “They cannot be deprived or abridged of any civil rights as a citizen on account of his religious sentiments or peculiar mode of religious worship.” In other words, there’s a contradiction in the Pennsylvania Constitution, which on the one hand says you can’t be deprived of civil rights as a citizen based on your religion and on the other hand, it says you have to declare you believe the New Testament was given by divine inspiration, which Jews cannot do, based on the Jewish faith.

And I love this. I was very moved by this part. Let me read you this, and we’ll post a link to the transcript of the letter and to the original letter itself on the website, on nehemiaswall.com. He says, “It is well-known among all citizens of the 13 United States that the Jews have been true and faithful whigs…” and I had to look up what whigs were. Whigs was a term that referred originally to people who believed in the rights of the Parliament in England, opposing the Tories, but in the Revolutionary war, apparently whigs were those who supported the Revolution.

Professor Kochin: Against Parliament. [laughing]

Nehemia: Against Parliament, right. Okay. Ironically, right. “The Jews have been true and faithful whigs, and during the late contest with England…” [laughing] meaning the Revolutionary War, “they have been the foremost in aiding and assisting the States with their lives and fortunes. They have supported the cause, have bravely fought and bled for liberty, which they cannot enjoy.” Meaning, you have formulated in 12 of the 13 states a religious test preventing Jews from holding public office. We fought for this liberty. We bled for it. We put our money behind it, our lives and our fortunes, and now we can’t enjoy it. We can’t enjoy the fruits of freedom.

And I thought that was interesting, he writes here, “Their lives and fortunes.” And so I looked up this man, Jonas Phillips, and I found out that in 1770 he signed a covenant with other merchants, saying they would no longer import goods from England. I guess it was sort of an embargo or a boycott against English goods, because of the unfair taxes that were being imposed by the English. And here was this Jew in Philadelphia who was a merchant, and he says, “Okay, we’re not going to import anything more from England.” And that must have cost him dearly.

So when he says, “We’ve put our lives and fortunes behind the revolution,” he’s not talking just in general about Jews, he means personally, as well. He fought for this freedom. And there’s this great letter that’s been discovered. He sent a letter to a Jewish merchant in Amsterdam, and it’s really interesting, because he writes the letter in Judeo-German, or maybe a dialect of Yiddish. And he writes in the letter, he said, “I’d be able to express myself much better if I didn’t have to write in Yiddish.” [laughing]

And in the letter, he’s bragging about how the United States now has freedom, and he actually appends a copy of the Declaration of Independence to this letter. And we have the letter today, because it was intercepted by the British, by the English, during the American Revolution, and it’s now in the English archives in England. And in the letter, he’s saying, “Now America has done what Holland had done much earlier,” which is interesting, because as far as I know, Holland was the only country in Europe that had freedom of religion, is that right?

Professor Kochin: They had partial freedom of religion in England. They had legalized the Jewish community and the residency of Jews back in the 17th century. That was legalized by Cromwell. They didn’t have complete religious freedom for Catholics.

Nehemia: Okay. Well, so basically, he’s bragging about the American Revolution and including a copy of the American Declaration of Independence in English. But he writes his letter in apparently very bad Yiddish or Judeo-German. And this letter has survived, it’s incredible. He’s bragging about how the US, how the colonies have 100,000 soldiers, which I’m not sure if that was true, but he’s certainly very proud of his new country, the newly-formed country, or forming country.

All right, so talk to me about this letter.

Professor Kochin: So there’s no real question about religious freedom, certainly not in Pennsylvania. But he’s upset about religious tests, where it’s possible to hold office without swearing a religious oath that Jews can’t swear.

Nehemia: In other words, no one was going to come and shut down a synagogue or arrest you for practicing Judaism, but if you wanted to hold a government office you had to be a Christian. And that was the whole point of the revolution. What triggered it was, “Hey, taxation without representation.” And he’s saying, “Where’s my representation, if I’m not allowed to hold a public office?”

Professor Kochin: Representation means voting. So in Pennsylvania, Jews could vote. I’m not sure they could vote in all the states, and I don’t think they could. But in Pennsylvania, they could vote. They just couldn’t be elected. And that’s what upsets him.

Nehemia: Which, if we fought for this freedom and we put our fortunes behind it, and our lives, then we should be able to hold public office. I want to go back to one really interesting issue, in the Pennsylvania Constitution, Section 10. They’re declaring they believe the New Testament was given by divine inspiration. And then, after the declaration it says, “And no further or other religious tests shall ever hereafter be required of any civil officer or magistrate in this state.” In other words, once you declare you believe in the New Testament, we’re not going to impose any other additional religious test in Pennsylvania, which is very interesting. In other words, they were allowing for Catholics and other Christian minorities to be part of the government, but not Jews.

And the wording earlier in the passage allows a person to make an oath or affirmation. And I thought that was really interesting, because this whole idea of making an affirmation versus an oath, it goes back to the Quakers. And the Quakers were obviously a Christian denomination. In their faith, it was forbidden to make an oath, and they based it on the Gospel of Matthew 5:33-37. By the way, I’ve talked about some of this in my book, The Hebrew Yeshua Versus the Greek Jesus. Verse 34, this is Jesus speaking, and he says, “I say to you, swear not at all, but let your communication be yea-yea, nay-nay.” In other words, you can say yes or no, but don’t swear. “For whatsoever is more than these, commeth of evil.” And most Christians read that in context and say, “Well, he’s not saying you can’t make an oath.” They kind of ignore what he says, to be honest with you.

But they took it literally, the Quakers, based on what it actually says in the Greek and English texts, and said, “Okay, we’re not allowed to make an oath. We’re not allowed to swear.” So the Pennsylvania Constitution and the US Constitution allows someone to affirm, and specifically guarantees the right to affirm, and this was for the Quakers. There was no other Christian group that I know of, or no major group, at least, that had this issue. But this is basically a Quaker provision allowing people to affirm.

And it’s quite interesting, because I recently did jury duty here in Texas, and they made us recite this statement, and we’re allowed to swear or affirm. So even now in the 21st century, this carries over. And I learned about this years ago. My father, of blessed memory, who was a rabbi, but also a lawyer, once had to testify in court, and they asked him to swear and he said, “Your Honor, it’s against my beliefs to swear. I can affirm.” And the judge thought he was trying to pull a fast one. And my father had to pull out a US Constitution and say, “Hey, it’s my constitutional right to affirm and not swear.”

And so I asked my father, “Where’s that from?” My father wasn’t reading the Gospel of Matthew. He was actually getting it from Ecclesiastes chapter 5, of all places, and it says in verses 3 and 4, “When you make a vow to God, do not delay to fulfil it, for He has no pleasure in fools. What you vow, fulfil. It is better not to vow at all than to vow and not fulfill.” And my father took this to mean, “I should never make a vow. If I have the opportunity, I should affirm.”

And by the way, in the Israeli army today, when you make your declaration, you can say, “Ani nishba” or “Ani matzhir,” “I swear” or “I affirm.” So to this day, there are many Jews who interpret it the same way as my father, similar to the Quakers, [laughing] although they’re basing it on something else, not to make an oath, but to make an affirmation. Now, the affirmation has no difference in the eyes of the law, and I don’t think before God. But it doesn’t mean you’re allowed to lie. You’d better keep your word, whether you’re affirming or making an oath.

But I think it’s interesting that the Constitution of Pennsylvania had – I’m going to put it this way – it had a Quaker clause, but it didn’t have a Jew clause. It was an anti-Jew clause, I mean, in a sense. Anti-Jew, and, I guess, anti-atheist clause. And so the US Constitution then comes and corrects that. That’s pretty cool.

So you know, this term “religious test” is something we hear about a lot today in the news in relation to President Trump’s so-called Muslim Ban, that is an executive order that he issued and it was shut down by the courts. I mean, were the courts right? Meaning, if you’re not allowed to have a religious test, does that apply to President Trump’s so-called Muslim Ban or travel ban?

Professor Kochin: Well, until these court rulings, there was no law that said that these issues applied to people outside the US. So the courts have really done something pretty radical and said that foreigners can also get certain rights or privileges from the US Government without regard for their religion, and they have some kind of constitutional right to that. Which if it’s the law, it’s only the law in the last few months, because up until then there was no such law.

Nehemia: Does this concept of a religious test apply to immigration, or is it only for holding public office?

Professor Kochin: So the US has a long history of offering haven to people who are fleeing religious persecution, and there are laws that empower the President to let those people in. So it’s a little hard to examine some of these claims of religious persecution if you can’t find out what religion they are. I mean, there are other ways in which religion comes into immigration, but quantitatively speaking, that’s the most important.

Nehemia: So actually what you’re saying is that there’s a law – and you had sent me a link to this, and we’ll post it on the website on nehemiaswall.com – but in the US law, not only are they allowed to look at religion as a consideration for accepting refugees, they’re required to, aren’t they?

Professor Kochin: If someone is claiming religious persecution, yes.

Nehemia: Right, and I actually read the executive order, the original one that President Trump put out. And the only thing it said about religion is that religious minorities would be allowed to get preferential status, and presumably, the context there was the Yazidis, who were being murdered en masse and turned into sex slaves by the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, or they were particularly in Iraq. And really, I think future generations are going to judge the American leftist establishment for the hundreds of thousands of Christians – I mean, I’d be shocked if the number isn’t hundreds of thousands – who needlessly died because of this quashing President Trump’s executive order. I mean, it really is criminal what they’ve done. They’ve shut the door on hundreds of thousands of people who are being murdered, for no other reason than that they’re Christians and other minorities, as well.

So to invoke the religious tests of holding public office and in a sense it’s a reverse religious test. “Hey, we’re not going to keep you out, based on your religion. We’ll let you in, based on your religion, if that religion’s persecuted from where you’re coming from.” Am I right about that?

Professor Kochin: Yes. That’s what it means in this context.

Nehemia: Right. You know, I’ve been doing some genealogy research recently, and I found my great-grandfather’s application for US citizenship. It’s called a Petition for Naturalization, and he’s actually the man I was named after, Rabbi Nehemia Yaakov Robinson, or “Reubenson”, they wrote it back then. And this is from 1928. So here he signs in this declaration, he says, “I am not a polygamist, nor a believer in the practice of polygamy.”

Now, whether you agree with polygamy or not, that’s not the topic here. But the US Government had a ruling that you may not immigrate to the United States and become a citizen if you’re either a polygamist or even if you believe in polygamy. I mean, if that’s not a religious test… I mean, obviously this was formulated against the early Mormons, who later disavowed polygamy, but originally considered it to be a righteous thing. And so this in 1928 is still in the petition for naturalization, the application for US citizenship.

So to say that the US never has had a religious test is just not true, meaning this isn’t just, “Okay, we’ll let you in if you’re persecuted for your beliefs.” This is, “We won’t let you in if you have certain religious beliefs.” And I’d like your thoughts on this. But given the reality of the world today, how immigrants to the United States, and even people who are coming to visit, how there is not some kind of at least declaration that says, “I am not a violent Jihadi, nor a believer in violent Jihad.” I don’t see how that is not part of the immigration process. That’s just criminal. It’s criminal to the people who are already here.

Professor Kochin: If one didn’t want to actually ban Muslims from coming into the United States, then one would have to work on the wording a little bit, because the Muslim scholars like to talk about “defensive versus offensive jihad”, and so-forth. If Muslims are attacked for their religion, then to defend themselves and their religion is also considered jihad.

Nehemia: I said violent jihad, and the reason I said violent jihad is some Muslims will tell you – and I think they’re sincere – some Muslims will tell you, “Jihad is the inner struggle against Shaitan,” which is Satan, “to keep Allah’s commandments,” or whatever. You know what? That’s some doctrine I’ve no interest in whatsoever. We’re not talking about the inner struggle of jihad. We’re talking about violent jihad. It’s a term that they use. It’s one of the five pillars of Islam, is jihad. If they take that jihad to be violent jihad, I don’t want them in my country. Let them go to their countries.

And the ones who don’t believe in violent jihad, okay. Hey, I’m not even talking about those people.

Professor Kochin: No, the question is whether you should expect Muslims to be Quakers, and not be allowed to use force to stand up for themselves when they’re attacked by people who don’t like Muslims. There are places in the world where Muslims are persecuted, in Burma, for example. There was just this attack in London. Now, there’s a violence by Muslims and there’s some violence against Muslims. So it’s very tricky to figure out how to write these things down.

Nehemia: And I’m not in favor of that. That’s horrible, violence against Muslims, violence by Muslims, and against each other. I’m not saying there should be violence against Muslims. What I’m saying is that I think it should be a basic question. And you’re right, so now you’re getting into religious nuance, and you have to work on the exact wording.

But anyway, one of the things I know you’ve spoken about in the past is this issue of tolerance. And I’ve found this to be a very fascinating topic. Tolerance is held up today as the highest and most noble value, that we should tolerate people. But actually, it’s a really disgusting, horrible thing. [laughing] Can you tell us about why tolerance is such an evil thing?

Professor Kochin: Well, tolerance means that there’s something bad, or at least unpleasant or distasteful about what somebody’s doing, or something you don’t like about it. I happen to like reggae music. If somebody doesn’t like reggae music, then I don’t just tolerate that difference. I’m happy for them to listen to whatever kind of music they like, and they should just let me listen to whatever kind of music I like. That’s not tolerance.

Nehemia: So tolerance is confused with acceptance?

Professor Kochin: Yeah, to recognize that people are different and that not every kind of difference is something that, even if we have some feeling about it, maybe that’s a feeling we shouldn’t indulge, even so far as to say, “Well, you know, if find that the food he eats smells really bad, but I guess I have to tolerate it.”

Nehemia: By the way, I lived in China for a year, and they have a delicacy in China called chodofu which translates as “stinky tofu”, and it’s the smelliest thing you can even imagine. There are actually laws that you’re not allowed to make it in certain places, because it smells so bad. [laughing] So I hear what you’re saying, but there is an ancient Jewish adage, “Al tam vereakh ein lehitvakeakh,” “One may not argue concerning smell and taste.” And the point there is that those are inherently subjective.

Now, I don’t believe religion is subjective, I believe there is a true faith that the Creator of the Universe taught to mankind. But I also believe that in this day of exile, that it’s really not my place, as long as somebody’s not harming somebody else, I don’t need to get involved in what his beliefs are.

So here’s why I think the idea of tolerance is really evil – because when I hear that term, what I think of is the Roman debate concerning the Jews. We’re talking like in the 4th and 5th century. So the Romans had basically made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, and then they have this decision, “Hey, we have the political power to either kill all the Jews or force them to convert,” or at least offer them conversion or death, or exile them. And they came to the conclusion that they would tolerate the Jews.

And what does “toleration” mean in that concept? It means, “We really can’t stand the Jews, but we’ll allow them to exist.” And that became the policy – Jews were tolerated. And there were places Jews weren’t tolerated. Like for example, they were banned from England, I think in the 12th century. And as you said, they were brought back by Cromwell in the 17th century. But in most places, Jews were tolerated. And what that meant is, Jews had to pay extra taxes, there were humiliating laws that they had to live under, they had to wear literally, funny hats. I mean, it sounds so immature and ridiculous, but literally, they made Jews wear funny-looking hats to humiliate them. And in Muslim countries, they had the “jizya”, the Jew tax. The Jews were under a special tax, as were Christians.

So tolerance is actually a way of saying, “I can’t stand someone. I hate them, but I’m going to allow them to exist, and in order to allow them to exist, I’m going to probably treat them in a bad way.” And one of the things that you’ve shared is that the US is a new page in history. It wasn’t that the Jews were tolerated, the Jews were actually accepted. And there’s a famous letter that George Washington sent to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, from 18th August, 1790, and how that is a new page, it’s no longer tolerance, it’s acceptance as full citizens. Tell us about that letter.

Professor Kochin: When Washington becomes president, he goes on a tour of the United States. But in his first tour, he doesn’t go to Rhode Island, because Rhode Island was the last state to ratify the Constitution, and they weren’t actually part of the United States when Washington became president.

Nehemia: And you had told me before that Rhode Island was considered like a foreign country, basically?

Professor Kochin: Right. So Rhode Island was sort of dragging its feet on ratifying until the United States made clear that they were going to treat Rhode Island as a foreign country, especially for tariff purposes, and at that point, the Rhode Islanders gave up and ratified the Constitution.

Nehemia: Oh, wow. [laughing]

Professor Kochin: But until then, he didn’t go. He only visited the states that were in, and he didn’t visit Rhode Island, which was out. So then, after Rhode Island ratified, he went to Rhode Island and he met with all kinds of groups and went to all kinds of places in Rhode Island, and one of the places he went to was to the synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island. So this is a thank-you note for the reception that he received from them while he was there in Rhode Island.

And he says in this letter, this is the passage that I think is really most amazing. “The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy, a policy worthy of imitation. All possess liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as it if was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoy the exercise of their inherent, natural rights. For happily, the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they, who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions, their effectual support.”

Nehemia: Tell us what that means, in plain English. [laughing]

Professor Kochin: In plain English, well, I think it’s actually pretty plain English for 1790. But what he’s saying is that Jews are citizens. It’s the first time in the history of the world that a gentile ruler addressed Jews as citizens.

Nehemia: And I think this is the key passage for me. “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoy the exercise of their inherent, natural rights.” In other words, it’s not that, “Hey, we Christians, we’re tolerating you Jews and allowing you to live in our country. You are citizens, and as long as you pay your taxes and are loyal to the government, and support the government, you’re full citizens just like everybody else, equal before the law.” And that really is the power of the American enterprise, which is really special in world history. It’s not that, “Yeah, Jews are allowed to be in the country too.” No, Jews were citizens and had the same rights as anybody else. I mean, what a powerful thing.

You do a teaching on this, and you call it the Cornerstone of American Jewish History. Explain that a little bit.

Professor Kochin: Well, the documents from pretty early on in the history of the United States sort of set the tone for both the attitudes of the United States towards Jews and the attitude of Jews towards the United States. As you said, Jews are citizens, just like any other group of citizens, and the expectations from them are precisely the expectations from any other citizens – that they should pay their taxes and obey the laws and support the government.

Nehemia: And I want you to reiterate that. I just want to emphasis that. So you’re telling me, in all of world history, there had never been a gentile ruler that comes to mind that turned to the Jews just like any other citizens? Or at least, that we have an address from.

Professor Kochin: So there’s a little technicality, which is “citizens” means people who live in a republic, who are full members and who have full political rights of the republic.

Nehemia: Okay, so for example, in China there were Jews, and the Jews had the same status, probably, as the peasants, which basically meant they had no rights. [laughing]

Professor Kochin: No, there were Jewish Mandarins. The Jews were the same as everybody else, because the government really wasn’t all that interested in any religion that didn’t interfere with government. But China was an empire, it was a monarchy, people’s rights depended on what their official status was. But the whole concept of citizenship wasn’t one that was at all relevant.

But in the republics of Europe, places like Venice and so forth, the citizens all had to be Christians, and pretty much everywhere, Christians of a certain sort – in Venice, they had to be Catholic, in Hamburg, they had to Protestant.

Nehemia: So if a Jew was born in Venice and his great-great-great-great grandfather was born in Venice, but because he was a Jew, he wasn’t a citizen of the republic, is what you’re telling me?

Professor Kochin: No. Shakespeare lays this out pretty clearly in Merchant of Venice. Shylock is a Jew from Venice, but the merchant, the Venetians, the citizens, they’re all Christian.

Nehemia: So literally, I could show up in Venice as a Catholic, get citizenship and I have more rights and standing before the law than a Jew who’s lived there for 1,000 years, since the time of the Roman Empire.

Professor Kochin: Yeah.

Nehemia: And that made sense to people in Europe. And so here is a departure from that, that because you are a citizen of the republic, it doesn’t matter what religion you are. And I love this progression. So we have the letter of 1787, saying, “Hey, wait a minute. We fought for freedom. Why are we not allowed to hold public office?” And then we have Article 6 of Clause 3 of the Constitution, that basically says, “No religious test.” And then we have this letter in 1790 that says, “Hey, you’re citizens. And it’s not that we’re tolerating you and we’re allowing you to exist, gritting our teeth saying, ‘We’ll allow those Jews the indulgence of one class of people against another, or for another,’ but that you are citizens just like anybody else.” That’s pretty cool. That’s something really special about the United States.

Professor Kochin: Right.

Nehemia: And as you said, this is something that is an example for mankind, and I think it’s been imitated now in probably other countries. But like, for example, in the United Kingdom, in England, it’s still officially a Christian country, isn’t it? I mean, by law. [laughing]

Professor Kochin: By law, it’s a Christian country, and the Queen has to protect the Christian faith, and I think it’s still true, probably, the heir to the throne can’t be married to a Catholic. And in Sweden and Norway, the king – there’s an official religion. The king has to be a Lutheran. So it’s not completely gone now, even in democratic countries.

Nehemia: Right. So not everybody so quickly accepted this.

Professor Kochin: No. So the thing’s a little complicated, because the ‘no religious test’ clause only applies to the Federal Government. It doesn’t apply to the state governments. Twelve of the 13 state governments had religious tests, all of them except New York, and they continued to have them for many years.

Nehemia: For example, Texas, where I currently am, Article 1 Section 4 of the Texas Constitution says, “Religious tests – no religious tests shall ever be required as office or public trust in this State, nor shall anyone be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledges the existence of a Supreme Being.” In other words, according to the Texas Constitution, if you’re an atheist, you can’t hold public office. [laughing] A Jew, a Christian, I don’t know, maybe a Buddhist and a Hindu could, but not an atheist. And that’s today, that’s still in there.

Professor Kochin: Right. So the US Constitution, they added after the Civil War, the Civil Rights Amendments, 13, 14, and 15, and those were interpreted in 1961 by the Supreme Court to prohibit the states from applying religious tests, and in the case of Texas, preventing atheists from holding office. But certainly, the original Constitution was never interpreted that way, and the states continued to apply their own religious tests until they got rid of them.

Nehemia: So Texas didn’t get rid of it. So is this something that’s enforced today? I mean, I know it’s not.

Professor Kochin: It’s not, no. The 1961 Supreme Court case would prohibit the State of Texas from actually excluding atheists from office. There was recently a thing with Bernie Sanders, where Trump appointed some guy, and Sanders started interrogating the guy about what his beliefs are regarding salvation, and who he thinks is going to hell. And so a lot of people pointed out this is exactly what the US Constitution was intended to prohibit. You can’t ask somebody if they’re a Christian. You can’t ask somebody not to be a Christian, in order to hold office under the United States.

Nehemia: And this was in a Senate confirmation hearing?

Professor Kochin: Yes.

Nehemia: So the atheist man of Jewish descent, Bernie Sanders, was imposing a religious test? [laughing]

Professor Kochin: He was trying, yes. He was trying.

Nehemia: Unbelievable. I didn’t know that. That’s really shocking. And by the way, you had another thing that you had quoted, that one of the ways of dealing with Jews by the anti-Semites was to say, “Well, they’re not human beings.” Can you talk about that?

Professor Kochin: So, when I gave this talk at Claremont McKenna College a few years ago, I found this book by this kind of dubious English guy. But the book is called, The Jews; Are They Human? And it was a book attacking anti-Semitism, published in 1939, as I recall.

Nehemia: It was attacking anti-Semitism? Okay.

Professor Kochin: Attacking anti-Semitism, in other words, making fun of the notion that Jews aren’t really human or can’t be treated as human beings, or that somehow things would be better, in some helpful way, if the gentiles get rid of the Jews, which he thought was just utter nonsense. But in the lecture, I brought it up because of the following problem, which is, you read this letter by Washington, and it’s really inspiring. And every time I read it, I choke up and I cry.

But then, you have to remember that Washington doesn’t actually care whether there are any Jews in America or not. If all of them would convert to Christianity, he’d be completely indifferent. There’s a story about the American sailors who were being held as slaves in Algiers by the jihadi pirates of Algiers, and the Bey of Algiers says at one point to the American who’s sent to negotiate…

Nehemia: That’s the ruler, the bey is the Turkish ruler, right?

Professor Kochin: He’s the ruler, yeah. So he says to him, “Look, the US is very slow to pay. They’re not well organized. They don’t have money. They’re not paying the ransom. They agreed on the ransom, and they haven’t paid.” And the Bey is kind of impatient with this, right? And he says at one point to the American representative, “Look, if you don’t pay, these guys are all going to convert to Islam, because if they’re Muslim slaves, then they’re going to be treated better than if they’re Christian slaves.” And the American representative says he doesn’t care, they can all go convert to Islam. That has nothing to do with him. That’s not the issue. The US doesn’t care.

So it’s not that the US wants there to be Jews, or doesn’t want there to be Jews, or wants there to be Christians, or doesn’t want there to be Christians, or wants there to be Muslims, or doesn’t want there to be Muslims. It’s really indifferent, and people have to make their own choices, and they have to live their own lives, which in America, has given a lot of Jews and a lot of Christians the opportunity to throw away the faith that they were brought up in, and to live without religion, or to live under a different religion.

You know, as Washington says, as long as they pay their taxes, obey the Government, and give it all lawful support, the government really is completely indifferent to them. Now, if you’re a Jew, you’re not indifferent to the survival of Judaism. If you’re a Christian, you’re not indifferent to the survival of Christianity. And so this letter, which is really impressive, it’s a world historical document…

Nehemia: And you’re talking about the George Washington letter to the synagogue in Rhode Island?

Professor Kochin: The Washington letter, yeah, or the provision of the Constitution, which is eloquent in its own way. These things, from the point of view of traditional religious life, there’s a lot that’s really scary here.

Nehemia: Scary?

Professor Kochin: Yeah.

Nehemia: In other words, can I put it differently? That Jews thrive in persecution? [laughing]

Professor Kochin: It does seem that that was the point of the author of that book, whose name has suddenly escaped my mind. Unless you kill all the Jews, persecuting the Jews is probably not going to be the way to convince them to stop being Jewish.

Nehemia: So you’re saying… Jews obviously don’t survive being murdered, but a certain mild level of persecution actually causes traditional Jewish communities to thrive, is what you’re saying.

Professor Kochin: That seems to be the lesson of history.

Nehemia: That sounds like a whole other topic we need to explore. [laughing]

Professor Kochin: Yes. But freedom gives people tremendous opportunities, and that kind of freedom was generally rejected by traditional societies, both Jewish and gentile. And they had their reasons, so it’s worth remembering that.

Nehemia: So traditional Jewish and Christian societies didn’t want the freedom, is what you’re saying?

Professor Kochin: No, they didn’t give the freedom to their own members. They didn’t give it to other people.

Nehemia: In other words, if you were a Christian heretic in the 1400s, you were burned at the stake. So there was persecution of Jews and there were laws against them having certain professions, and to humiliate them, but the gentile Christians weren’t free citizens under the law, either. [laughing]

Professor Kochin: They were, but freedom didn’t mean religious freedom.

Nehemia: Okay, it wasn’t freedom in the sense that we consider it today, in the United States or in the Western… Maybe it was more like North Korean freedom?

Professor Kochin: I wouldn’t go that far, but you know, if your neighbor worships idols, God’s going to look at that. The Book of Deuteronomy has something to say about that.

Nehemia: Yeah, but we don’t implement that today. I don’t want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but people make the argument, “Well, wait a minute. So Muslim jihadis, they’re no different than the Jews and the Christians, because in the Old Testament, the Tanakh, it talks about waging religious wars and all kinds of things like this.” Yeah, but nobody actually implements that today. That’s deferred to the time of the King Messiah, who will work those things out. At least, that’s my perspective.

In today’s world, I want the government staying out of my personal business and my religion and my faith, and I’m going to stay out of other people’s personal religions and faith and things, as well. Theoretically, the people who say this are right in a sense that you could create an ISIS-like state under the Torah, but nobody today in Judaism is even thinking in those terms, I don’t think. Maybe they’re fantasizing about that, some people, in the ultra-Orthodox world, but nobody is seriously going to do that, whereas it actually exists today in the Islamic world. It’s not a hypothetical thing. And I think that’s a fundamental difference.

Professor Kochin: If your conception of religion makes religious freedom fundamental, then it’s a fundamental difference. And you and I are Americans, and this is the kind of understanding of religion that we were brought up with.

Nehemia: Yeah. Well, it reminds me of the Essenes, who when Josephus describes them, he describes them as these extreme pacifists. And one of the first seven scrolls that was discovered was called “Milkhemet Benei Ohr veBenei Khoshekh,” “The War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness,” in which they described their battle formations, and the weapons, and they’re going to write on their different spears and swords. Wait a minute, what’s going on here? Well, that’s an eschatological war. That’s not something anyone is attempting to carry out today.

And that, from my perspective, is the fundamental difference between the way Jews understand the Torah today, and it doesn’t matter what denomination you’re part of, even the most extreme ultra-Orthodox Jew is not in any active way, attempting to set up the death penalty for… I don’t know, for adulterers, right? No one’s thinking in those terms, whereas in Saudi Arabia, that’s actually a weekly event. You go and you see people’s hands get cut off, and things like that. People are executed for things that, certainly the way I look at it, I don’t need to know about what you’re doing. I don’t want to know about it. It’s got nothing to do with me. The government should stay out of my personal business, and it should stay out of yours. That’s how I look at it. And God will sort those things out, and I view see that as a fundamental difference.

Look, we’re putting this episode out for July 4th, although people will be listening to it for years to come. And just my personal feeling is that the United States really has created this wonderful thing in world history. It became a haven for the Jews. Millions of Jews were not killed in the Holocaust because they found refuge in the United States, I think because of this letter by Jonas Phillips, and things like that, that the people responded to and said, “Okay, you know what? These people were on our side. They’re no different than us. They might believe differently, they might have a different synagogue, or a different church, but they’re citizens, and if we believe what we say, that all men are created equal…” And okay, there were some issues that had to be worked out with slavery, obviously.

But the beginning of that was to say, “Everyone is a citizen before the law, every human being.”

Professor Kochin: Yes. There’s a basic message about religious freedom here, that’s really important. I think in some ways, the sort of Bernie Sanders attitude, or what’s come out of the gay marriage legalization in the US, now the question is whether traditional religious belief, biblical belief, Christian belief, Orthodox Jewish beliefs, are going to be tolerated, and to what extent. Those are really the political questions.

So whereas Washington could say, “It’s some time since people have ceased to speak of toleration,” now the whole question regarding religion, the religion of the majority, biblical religion, is a question of toleration. What’s the room for people who believe in the Bible? Are they going to be able to educate their children to bring up their children the way they think they ought to be brought up, in terms of the biblical imperatives? And will the government, will the powers that be in society, tolerate that, or to what extent will they repress that?” That’s really the politics of religion today in America. Those are the main issues.

You have a case like this farmer, I think in Wisconsin, and they said that because he won’t allow gay weddings on his farm – he has a farm which he rents out for weddings, he won’t let them out for gay weddings – so they’re not going to let him sell his produce in the city farmers’ market, because he’s a bad person. So now there’s a religious test for occupation. Do you subscribe to the currently fashionable beliefs, and if you don’t, then the government feels free to deprive you of a livelihood. So that’s where we are in terms of the politics of these things right now in the United States, and it’s kind of dispiriting when you compare it to what Washington said in 1790.

Nehemia: Wow, that’s a really interesting analogy. In other words, what Jonas Phillips writes in his letter is basically… Theoretically I could say the words, “I declare the divinity of the New Testament,” but that would be against my religious faith. It excludes me based on my conscience. And what you’re saying here today is, the man who says, “I don’t want to have a gay wedding,” which is viewed certainly from a Christian perspective and a Jewish perspective as a religious ceremony, any wedding, “I don’t want that kind of religious ceremony on my property.” So he’s now deprived of his livelihood. And you know, when they say, “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” my understanding is that the pursuit of happiness is a capitalist statement – meaning, originally, I think it was the pursuit of property, right?

Professor Kochin: Wealth; Locke says, “Life, liberty and pursuit of wealth.”

Nehemia: Oh, “Life, liberty and pursuit of wealth,” okay. So they’re now being deprived of their ability to pursue wealth because of their religious conscience. And I just heard this case the other day, that there was this neo-Nazi who changed his son’s name to Adolf Hitler, and went to get a cake, and they refused to make the cake. If you were of certain persuasions, the government would have gotten behind him, and instead, what happened is, his kids were taken away, because they said he’s a bad influence on his kids.

Now, he might be a bad influence on his kids – he’s a neo-Nazi, I agree. But they’re not my kids, they’re his kids. [laughing]

Professor Kochin: Right. So you know, you have to draw these lines. But until 2015, people tried to draw these lines in such a way that everybody was treated equally, and that people were free to relive their religious lives as far as possible if they didn’t do any physical harm to anybody else, and that’s no longer the way people look at things in the United States. It’s no longer the way the law or the government looks at things. And so I’ve found that dispiriting.

Nehemia: Wow. Well, to paraphrase what a Lutheran Pastor in World War II said, “First, they came for the communists.” And I’ve got to say, first they came for the Evangelical Christians, and then they came for the neo-Nazi. We know it always ends with the Jews. I’m no fan of the neo-Nazis, you know? [laughing] But I know where this ends. This doesn’t end well for us. This is a lot to think about, but this really is a beautiful letter written by Jonas Phillips, and what I see as the response in a way, of the Constitution and then ultimately, by George Washington. It’s a beautiful gift to mankind.

So thank you very much. Shalom, and happy Fourth of July, Independence Day, to everyone. Shalom.

Professor Kochin: Shalom.

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Original Pennsylvania Constitution, Section 10

Letter from Jonas Phillips a Jew, dated Sept. 7. 1787 to the President & Members of the Convention
To His Excellency the president and the Honourable Members of the Convention assembled
Present
Sires
With leave and submission I address myself To those in whome there is wisdom understanding and knowledge. they are the honourable personages appointed and Made overseers of a part of the terrestrial globe of the Earth, Namely the 13 united states of america in Convention Assembled, the Lord preserve them amen —
I the subscriber being one of the people called Jews of the City of Philadelphia, a people scattered and despersed among all nations do behold with Concern that among the laws in the Constitution of Pennsylvania their is a Clause Sect. 10 to viz — I do believe in one God the Creature and governour of the universe the Rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked — and I do acknowledge the scriptures of the old and New testement to be given by a devine inspiration — to swear and believe that the new testement was given by devine inspiration is absolutly against the Religious principle of a Jew. and is against his Conscience to take any such oath — By the above law a Jew is deprived of holding any publick office or place of Government which is a Contridectory to the bill of Right Sect 2. viz
That all men have a natural and unalienable Right To worship almighty God according to the dectates of their own Conscience and understanding, and that no man aught or of Right can be Compelled to attend any Relegious Worship or Erect or support any place of worship or Maintain any minister contrary to or against his own free will and Consent nor Can any man who acknowledges [79] the being of a God be Justly deprived or abridged of any Civil Right as a Citizen on account of his Religious sentiments or peculiar mode of Religious Worship, and that no authority Can or aught to be vested in or assumed by any power what ever that shall in any Case interfere or in any manner Controul the Right of Conscience in the free Exercise of Religious Worship —
It is well known among all the Citizens of the 13 united States that the Jews have been true and faithful whigs, and during the late Contest with England they have been foremost in aiding and assisting the States with their lifes and fortunes, they have supported the Cause, have bravely faught and bleed for liberty which they Can not Enjoy —
Therefore if the honourable Convention shall in ther Wisdom think fit and alter the said oath and leave out the words to viz — and I do acknoweledge the scripture of the new testement to be given by devine inspiration then the Israeletes will think them self happy to live under a goverment where all Relegious societys are on an Eaquel footing — I solecet this favour for my self my Childreen and posterity and for the benefit of all the Isrealetes through the 13 united States of america
My prayers is unto the Lord. May the people of this States Rise up as a great and young lion, May they prevail against their Enemies, May the degrees of honour of his Excellencey the president of the Convention George Washington, be Extollet and Raise up. May Every one speak of his glorious Exploits. May God prolong his days among us in this land of Liberty — May he lead the armies against his Enemys as he has done hereuntofore — May God Extend peace unto the united States — May they get up to the highest Prosperetys — May God Extend peace to them and their seed after them so long as the Sun and moon Endureth — and may the almighty God of our father Abraham Isaac and Jacob endue this Noble Assembly with wisdom Judgement and unamity in their Councells, and may they have the Satisfaction to see that their present toil and labour for the wellfair of the united States may be approved of, Through all the world and perticular by the united States of america is the ardent prayer of Sires
Your Most devoted obed Servant
Jonas Phillips
Philadelphia 24th Ellul 5547 or Sept 7th 1787

Photo of the Original Jonas Phillips Letter to the Constitutional Convention

Reference to 1879 Study Crediting Phillips with Article VI Section 3 of the Constitution
"...it was due to Jonas Phillips that the article on religious liberty... was made a part of the Constitution of the United States in 1789 by Congress."

Jonas Phillips's Participation in the American Revolution

Jonas Phillips Yiddish Letter to a Dutch Jew

George Washington's Letter to the Jews

The United States was born "in the Name of the Great Jehovah"! During the early days of the Revolutionary War in 1775, the American Patriot Ethan Allen surrounded Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York and called on the British garrison to surrender. "By what authority?" the British commander demanded. Ethan Allen famously replied: "In the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!" Fort Ticonderoga fell to American forces without a single shot fired! Happy American Independence Day!

The post Hebrew Voices #48 – Jewish Freedom in America appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

Watch the Sneak Peek of this episode of Support Team Study, Mormon Chains of Authority: Part 2, Nehemia continues his discussion with Dan Vogel about an early conspiracy theory to explain how an uneducated farm boy wrote the Book of Mormon and how a hunger for charismatic experiences drove the formation of the early Mormon church..

I look forward to reading your comments!

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The post Support Team Study SNEAK PEEK! Mormon Chains of Authority: Part 2 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #190, Mormon Chains of Authority: Part 1, Dr. Nehemia Gordon welcomes back Dan Vogel to discuss a modern-day American prophet’s claim of divine authority, Mormon beliefs about Jesus' arrival to America, and the redefinition of angels.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: How does he think he can get away with it? That’s an even better question!

Dan: Oh, yeah, really.

Nehemia: I’m back with Dan Vogel, the greatest living historian of early Mormon history, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating there, at least that’s my view on it.

So, alright, I want to read this. I want to show the people chapter 4 of the Book of Commandments from 1833, which I didn’t realize wasn’t published until you just explained that. But now you can see it online, what was printed… I guess it was salvaged from the destruction in Missouri. And this raises an interesting question that we’ll get to in a minute. So, it’s chapter 4, I’m going to share my screen here. It says, “A Revelation given to Joseph Smith and Martin,” I guess Martin Harris.

Dan: Yes.

Nehemia: Oh, yeah, it says it in parentheses here. On the right here is their transcription, on the left is, I guess, a photo of it. “…in Harmony, Pennsylvania, March 29th, when Martin desired of the Lord to know whether Joseph had in his possession the record of the Nephites.” So, tell us, what is the background here?

Dan: So, Martin Harris had been fired from being a scribe.

Nehemia: Oh, after he lost the 116 pages.

Dan: Right, in 1828. And he comes back… Well, there was a trial, actually, somebody was trying to sue… Martin Harris’ wife had something to do with this trial, and at this trial somebody got on the witness stand and said, “Joseph Smith told me there was nothing but sand in that box. There’s nothing but sand.”

Nehemia: Okay.

Dan: “It’s all a fraud.”

Nehemia: The plates don’t exist, they’re claiming, on the stand.

Dan: And Martin Harris is hearing this. So, he goes down to Harmony, Pennsylvania and says, “I need to have a greater witness.” Issac Hale tells this part of the story. “I need to have a greater witness,” and Joseph Smith told him, “Well, I’ll take the plates out into the woods, and you follow my footprints in the snow, and you will eventually see the plates out there.” And he does it, and nothing happens. He doesn’t see anything and he doesn’t get his greater witness. But Joseph Smith dictates a revelation to… probably Martin Harris is the scribe for this revelation, telling him that he wouldn’t get a greater witness.

Nehemia: He would or would not?

Dan: Basically until he had faith.

Nehemia: Ah. So, it’s Martin’s fault that he doesn’t have enough faith.

Dan: Right.

Nehemia: Okay, fair enough.

Dan: This is trying to tell Martin Harris basically that… you’ll read it, that Joseph Smith is not to pretend to any other gift that he would grant him.

Nehemia: That’s the mind-blowing part here I want to get to. Alright, so let’s read it. And by the way, and just because I don’t know, is this part the introduction?

Dan: Yeah.

Nehemia: Is that considered part of the revelation?

Dan: No, no. Even though it has a “1” next to it.

Nehemia: Okay, so the italics… So, “Behold, I say unto you, that my servant Martin has desired a witness from my hand, that my servant Joseph has got the things of which he has testified and borne record that he has received of me.” Let’s keep reading, “And now, behold, this shall you say unto him.” So, the voice here is God speaking to Joseph, right?

Dan: Yeah.

Nehemia: Meaning, the way it’s presented. “I the Lord am God, and I have given these things unto my servant Joseph, and I have commanded him that he should stand as a witness of these things. Nevertheless, I have caused him that he should enter into a covenant with me, that he should not show them except I command him,” meaning, don’t show them the plates?

Dan: Don’t show anybody.

Nehemia: Okay. “Unless I, God, command him to do so. And he has no power over them except I grant it unto him; and he has a gift to translate the book, and I have commanded him that he shall pretend to no other gift, for I will grant him no other gift.” Wow, okay. So, his job is to translate the plates, not to show the plates. And here’s an interesting thing…

Dan: Evidently, he didn’t get a commandment to show them to Martin Harris, that’s why he didn’t see them.

Nehemia: Let’s assume for argument’s sake that the plates are real, because later on he has these mummies, and what they do with the mummies is they charge people to see them, right?

Dan: Yeah. In 1835, in Kirtland, Ohio.

Nehemia: And the mummies are real.

Dan: They’re real.

Nehemia: He could have said, “Hey, I’ve got these gold plates, pay me two shillings and you’ll get to see the plates, these things that were written by ancient Israelites in America.” But God is telling him “No, he has no other gift other than to translate. He’s not allowed to show the plates unless I give him authority to do so.”

Dan: Yeah. He hasn’t even started dictating the part that remains of the Book of Mormon. He hasn’t even started that. He won’t start that until the next month…

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Dan: When Oliver Cowdery arrives. But right now, he hasn’t done anything. His only goal is to translate the Book of Mormon.

Nehemia: Okay.

Dan: And nothing else! Nothing about founding a church, nothing about anything. And that same revelation goes on to say that through the Book, God will cause a reformation to appear among the churches, among the believers.

Nehemia: So, he might have thought originally that he’s not going to start a new church, but that he’ll change the existing churches to get them right or something.

Dan: Yes.

Nehemia: Okay.

Dan: Through the book. The book will solve anti-doctrines, resolve doctrinal disputes, it will solve all of those debates about whether you should baptize infants or not.

Nehemia: But doesn’t that kind of go against what you’re saying, that his aspiration was to found the theological empire? Meaning, at some point that might have been the case, but at this point…

Dan: That’s later.

Nehemia: Okay, so at this point he’s not thinking of a theological empire, he wants to fix the Presbyterians and the Catholics and whoever.

Dan: Yeah, he hasn’t worked out everything in advance. He knows the end and the beginning of the story, that begins with the Israelites coming to America and it ends with the Indians destroying this supposed white Jewish race and burying their bodies in these mounds that exist in Joseph Smith’s neighborhood, and all over America, basically, too. It’s the Moundbuilder Myth.

Nehemia: And you wrote a book about the Moundbuilder Myth…

Dan: Yeah.

Nehemia: …which is an incredible subject, but we probably won’t get to it today.

Dan: No. So, he knows the end and he knows the beginning. He doesn’t even know Jesus is going to come and visit these people. There’s several clues along the dictation, when you go according to the order of dictation, he doesn’t even know that Jesus is going to come and visit these Nephites after his resurrection. That’s not even seen. But he knows a lot about what he wants to do. He knows the historical structure of these people. He’s just going to tell the story that these people that come from Israel are bringing true beliefs with them, which includes a version of Christianity even though they’re Jewish. And they lived the law of Moses, but they looked forward to Jesus coming, and they all know about what’s going to happen with Jesus because they’re prophets.

So, it’s going to be a story of a family that comes to America that has religious disputes, and finally the patriarch, the prophet patriarch, is trying to teach the truth and some rebel against it. And this is the story of what happens when some rebellion…

Nehemia: This is Lehi you’re talking about?

Dan: Lehi and Nephi.

Nehemia: Well, so Nephi, essentially, we said, if I understand you correctly, in some respects represents Joseph in that he’s the son of the patriarch.

Dan: Yeah, and Lehi represents his father.

Nehemia: Right, wow.

Dan: A kind of a dual aspect of the father, actually.

Nehemia: What do you mean by the dual aspect?

Dan: The good and the bad.

Nehemia: Okay.

Dan: But Lehi is the good version of his father.

Nehemia: Okay. I want to now go back to the Book of Commandments, 1833. So, this again is Joseph Smith papers, and again, this is a publication of the LDS Church. This isn’t some critical organization; this is the LDS church’s publication. And it says here, Revelation, March 1829 D&C5. So, D&C5 means Doctrine and Covenants 5, meaning that’s what it’s called today.

Dan: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay, so let’s go to D&C5.

Dan: Well, D&C5 doesn’t always… the numbers in the 1835 doctrine… oh yeah, it is the current edition.

Nehemia: So, in other words, although this is chapter 4, it’s equivalent to D&C5.

Dan: Yeah.

Nehemia: Now this is churchofjesuschrist.org, which I understand is the LDS church, and it’s D&C5, and it’s the same thing as we just read, except it says, “And you have a gift to translate the plates.” Let’s go back to the other one… is that what it says? I guess it’s not word for word.

Dan: No, well…

Nehemia: We’re coming to the difference, but I want to see the parts that are similar. So, it says, “I have given you a gift to translate the plates, and this is the first gift that I bestowed upon you.”

Dan: Yeah, the first gift.

Nehemia: “This is the first gift that I have bestowed upon you.”

Dan: Yeah.

Nehemia: “And I have commanded that you should pretend to no other gift,” and that is verbatim, right?

Dan: Yes.

Nehemia: Let’s find it here.

Dan: It’s right there, right above the 3, right there.

Nehemia: Okay, “that he,” that’s interesting, here it’s in third person, and here it’s in second person, “that you should pretend to no other gift.” And it says, “that he should pretend to no other gift,” “until my purpose is fulfilled in this,” meaning translating the plates, “for I will grant unto you no other gift until it is finished.” So, once it’s finished, then I’m going to give you another gift, which is to establish the church maybe, and do other things. But here it’s, “that he shall pretend no other gift for I will grant him no other gift.” “Full stop”, as the British say, “period” in American English. And then it’s “other things”.

So, what happened between 1833 and 1835 when we got “until it is finished”?

Dan: Well, as he dictated the Book of Mormon it became more and more religious as time went on. It became more and more concerned with actual worship and the church and authority and organization. And when Jesus comes, he sets up 12 apostles, and those 12 apostles administer the church and… until there’s an apostasy among the Nephites, and there’s no more apostles left, and they go into this apostasy, and they actually dwindle and…

So, they were united when Jesus came, and had all things in common and everything was a golden era for 200 years. And then they started apostatizing and changing…

Nehemia: Just to be clear; when Jesus came to America everything was this golden era for 200 years according to the Book of Mormon, is what you’re saying?

Dan: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay.

Dan: But they apostatized eventually, and the church became corrupted and lost authority and lost the spirit. It didn’t have the gifts. No more gifts, no more speaking in tongues, no more healings, no more revelations, no more prophesy, and then they became ripe for destruction. This is all a metaphor for what the Book of Mormon is trying to warn Jacksonian America to be aware of. And they became ripe for destruction, and they split into tribes… they splintered into tribes, they were not united anymore. And then they started warring, and the righteous part became even more wicked than the wicked part, because they have sinned against the light.

Nehemia: Okay.

Dan: They have sinned against the light and become more wicked than even the Lamanites, who are only wrong because of the false traditions of their fathers.

Nehemia: Whereas the Nephites should know better.

Dan: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay.

Dan: So, God allows the Lamanites to destroy the Nephites totally in a war of extermination, and that’s how it basically ends. And Moroni becomes almost the lone survivor, although the only Nephites that survive are the ones that apostatize over to become Lamanites. And the truth is gone, and Moroni writes the last parts of it and then buries the gold plates in the hill in New York near Joseph Smith’s farm. And then later, 1,400 years later or whatever, appears to Joseph Smith in his room.

Nehemia: This is incredible stuff, Dan! Alright, I want to just finish up this issue of the Doctrine and Covenants. So going back to the Book of Commandments, 1833, and then the modern Doctrine and Covenants, maybe it was changed in 1835. Whenever it was, did Joseph Smith, when they published the Doctrine and Covenants, did he have those revelations in his hand and he said, “I want to change this. I want to add the words until it is finished,” or is he trying to reconstruct it in his memory after this catastrophe that happened in Missouri and the press is destroyed? Maybe he doesn’t remember, or maybe he thinks nobody else knows, and he’s adding until it is finished to say, “Hey, I’m not just a translator, I’m actually the founder of a church.” How does that happen in a two-year period? It’s such a big difference! How does he think he can get away with it? That’s an even better question.

Dan: Yeah, really! Well, there’s several strings of the story here.

Nehemia: Okay.

Dan: But the thing that changes the whole story of the restoration, the apostasy and restoration, is when they’re trying to… Joseph Smith and Olver Cowdery, they were trying to keep the Missouri church from apostatizing because they’re questioning a lot of Joseph Smith’s revelations and his leadership. And they’re not so sure about certain innovations like the high priesthood. They’re not so sure about that. And him becoming the president of the high priesthood, “No, we’re not so sure about that.”

So, they kind of saw it as themselves in Missouri. The Missouri church had its own presidency, as a little autonomous to the Kirtland church over here. And then Joseph Smith started trying to control this one more. They are charismatic themselves, and David Whitmer is the president, actually, of that Missouri church.

Nehemia: Oh! Okay.

Dan: Bishop Partridge is over here questioning Joseph Smith, and there’s a lot going on over a period of years. And then finally, out of nowhere almost, Oliver Cowdery and Joseph Smith get together to write the history of the church and publish it in letters written to the Missouri church. And the first thing they announce is, “By the way, we were ordained by John the Baptist shortly before our baptisms while we were translating the Book of Mormon. We just never mentioned it.”

Nehemia: Wow! So, “I’m not just a translator now,” I, Joseph Smith. “I’m only the translator until it is finished, and now I’ve got this other authority.”

Dan: Directly from someone who has indisputable authority.

Nehemia: And David Whitmer is thinking, I presume…

Dan: “I’ve never heard of that before.”

Nehemia: Well number one, he’s thinking, “I never heard that.” And he’s also thinking, “I saw the angel. I saw the plates. Why is Joseph Smith so special?”

Dan: Before this, you mean?

Nehemia: Well, even at that point he’s probably thinking this right?

Dan: No, this puts a whole different concept of authority in place.

Nehemia: But does David Whitmer accept that?

Dan: We’re not just being commanded by revelation and obeying commandments, that’s the authority. We now have established a chain that can’t be broken.

Nehemia: Okay, I see.

Dan: You can’t splinter off over here in Missouri and be legitimate.

Nehemia: You’re not defying Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery, you’re defying John the Baptist.

Dan: Right.

Nehemia: Okay.

Dan: There’s a chain of authority from John the Baptist, the authority to baptize. He physically ordained us because he was resurrected, right?

Nehemia: Was he? I mean, that’s part of the doctrine here, right?

Dan: Yeah. In the New Testament, he was beheaded before Jesus, and so when Jesus was resurrected, all the bodies of the saints arose and went into…

Nehemia: Oh, okay, so that’s the idea, that he’s been alive since the time of Jesus’ resurrection.

Dan: Yeah, so he could ordain…

Nehemia: Okay. Is that the claim about Moroni? That he was resurrected during the resurrection? Is that why they changed the name?

Dan: That’s a whole other story.

Nehemia: Right. Because originally it didn’t say Moroni was the one that appeared to him in the room.

Dan: Yeah, it was Nephi. It’s always been Moroni, the earliest is Moroni.

Nehemia: Oh, it is? Okay.

Dan: In his official history it was changed to Nephi. Some people claimed it was just a mistake, it was just an error. And I say, well what if it wasn’t? What if it was on purpose?

Nehemia: Okay.

Dan: What if he wanted Nephi to have a body? Because Nephi is 600 years before Jesus, and it would make more sense. It wouldn’t be necromancy, delving into familiar spirits.

Nehemia: Oh, because Nephi was resurrected when Jesus died.

Dan: Yeah.

Nehemia: But Moroni can’t be resurrected because it was 400 years after Jesus.

Dan: But the funny thing is that in 1838, he’s dictating his official history and he accidentally, or on purpose, says Nephi instead of Moroni. At the same time, he’s publishing answers to questions in the newspaper called The Elder’s Journal, in 1838 in Missouri, right around the same month, April, May, June, July of 1838. He answers a question about, where are the plates? Where did you get the plates? Where are the plates? He says, “Moroni, who was resurrected, gave them to me and took them back.”

Nehemia: Alright.

Dan: So, it must have been a special resurrection, in other words. So, he’s telling them that he’s concerned about a body belonging to that angel.

Nehemia: I see.

Dan: It’s not a spirit, it’s not a familiar…

Nehemia: Because like we said before, angels in Jewish and Christian culture had been this idea of a specially created being and not somebody who used to live and who now came back as an angel.

Dan: He’s actually redefining the term angel from what everybody else thinks an angel is. He’s redefining it to be mortals.

Nehemia: There’s definitely, in Jewish culture… I want to be careful about this. There’s all kinds of stories of rabbis having appearances of angels. Are there stories of the spirit of a dead rabbi coming to a living rabbi? I want to say there are, but somebody should verify that.

Dan: That would be a familiar spirit.

Nehemia: Well, you’re saying from an Old Testament perspective. I’m talking about medieval Jewish superstition.

Dan: Oh. I don’t know.

Nehemia: And medieval Jewish Kabbalistic beliefs. So, off the top of my head… we need to investigate that further. There’s definitely the idea of a dybbuk, which is the disembodied spirit of a dead person, but that’s usually an evil spirit of a sort.

Dan: Yeah.

Nehemia: We’ll have to look more into that. So, I want to go onto the next thing, and we’re going to take a break before we do that.

Dan: Okay.

Nehemia: I’ve got to go to the bathroom again. But the last thing before that, if you still have the energy to go on…

Dan: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, the last thing before we take that break. I want to wrap up this issue of the Book of Commandments from 1833, chapter 4 verses D&C5.

Dan: No, D&C5 was published in September of 1835.

Nehemia: So, it’s two years later.

Dan: They were highly edited revelations. The edits that you read were done at that time.

Nehemia: They were done at that time?

Dan: Yes. Joseph Smith did them. So, along with introducing this angel story, angel ordination story, he’s actually worked in some of these early revelations, mentions of that visit.

Nehemia: Okay. I’m going to go back to this question, and I’m thinking as somebody in the 21st century. I have a web page open here and another web page open here, and I look at them side by side. Is he thinking no one’s ever going to check? And I’m talking about where he adds the words, “there’s no other purpose until it is finished”.

Dan: At the time they published it in 1835 there was a review committee, Joseph being on it and Oliver Cowdery being on it. This review committee, the statement they made was that the only published versions of these early revelations they had were in the newspaper. The Morning Star published some of them, and people would be able to compare. Nobody else could compare because they were all in manuscript versions. And they blamed it on the typesetter.

Nehemia: Okay, so they had an explanation.

Dan: A carelessness of the scribe; the scribes could make mistakes in hearing. So, they gave an excuse that wasn’t really transparent.

Nehemia: So, if you’re a devout Mormon, you can hear everything we just said about how he added the words “until it is finished” and say, “Okay Nehemia, don’t lie to us, don’t deceive us. That’s because of the typesetter, and you should have known that that was Joseph Smith’s explanation at the time.” Okay, that would be the apologist answer, right? I guess.

Dan: It was the explanation at the time.

Nehemia: At the time even, okay.

Dan: Most Mormons that know about this, that know that that doesn’t really cover it all, would say that Joseph Smith under inspiration updated the revelations.

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Dan: That they were given line by line, precept upon precept, sort of like what I was telling you, that the Bishops were added later than the 1830 foundational articles and covenants, and that they had to come back and add to that. They would just say, “He had authority by God to update it.”

Nehemia: Just like he did with the Old Testament and New Testament, where he goes through, and he corrects the… but in that context…

Dan: It’s a little different.

Nehemia: …is he claiming he’s restoring the original truth about it?

Dan: He did. He claimed that. In one sermon he gave in Nauvoo, he quoted one of his changes, like, “God doesn’t repent… it repented God that He had created man.” Well, God doesn’t repent, so he corrected that to, “It repented Noah that God had created man.”

Nehemia: I see.

Dan: But at the same time, he delivered this sermon and gave one of his revisions, which were never published. He said that he believes the Bible as it fell from the lips of the authors. And so, by implication, he’s restoring it to the way it fell from their lips as it was originally written. Nowadays, if you ask more apologetic types, they try to say, “No, he didn’t claim to be restoring the text to its original reading,” as if it had been lost, because you can prove that that’s not true.

Nehemia: How can you prove that that’s not true?

Dan: It’s just not… it won’t work.

Nehemia: Wait, how can you prove it’s not true?

Dan: The revisions that he gives are too extensive.

Nehemia: Okay. Well, maybe whole chapters were lost, I don’t know, like the Book of Moses.

Dan: But there are some parts that people who know Hebrew…

Nehemia: Well, there it raises the question… in other words, if you wanted to be an apologist and maintain that he’s restoring the original words that came off the prophets’ lips, I guess you could say what has survived in the Masoretic text isn’t what Moses wrote, or Jeremiah wrote, or Isaiah wrote. That it’s not just the translation that’s wrong of the King James Version, it’s that there’s entire sections. That’s, I assume, what they would say. That’s what I would say if I was a devout Mormon.

Dan: Yes.

Nehemia: That there were things that were corrupted… that’s what Muslims say, that there are things that were corrupted in the Jewish… and in the case of Muslims they’ll say the Christian Bibles, and Mohammed is essentially telling you what Allah really said. And the Jewish version is corrupt, the Christian version is corrupt, and Mohammed came to restore what was really revealed by Allah. That’s what Muslims say.

And I guess you could say that… like, let’s say, what they call the Book of Moses, or you have these whole sections about Enoch, maybe those were in the original Torah written by Moses 3,500 years ago and the Jews lost it until Joseph Smith came along and restored it. I don’t think that’s what happened, but I guess you could make that argument.

Dan: The Book of Mormon claims that this great and abominable church of the devil has corrupted the text and taken out of the text the plain and precious parts.

Nehemia: Okay, there you go! So, he restored them.

Dan: So, a textualist would say the Bible has been corrupted by glosses more than losses.

Nehemia: Okay.

Dan: The Bible suffers from additions, like accidental things, marginal things being incorporated in the text and things like that. And the Dead Sea Scrolls, more or less, show that the Isaiah text has been pretty stable.

Nehemia: Yeah. But then Jeremiah is fundamentally… not fundamentally different; there’s big issues with Jeremiah. But that’s a different issue.

Dan: Well, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th Isaiah, that kind of thing, those things come up as problems with the Book of Mormon, actually.

Nehemia: Right, but that’s on the level of textual…

Dan: That’s an addition, textual additions.

Nehemia: Right, that has to do with chronology, that’s a separate… Let’s not get into that.

So, the last thing on this subject. There’s this apology channel on Tik Tok that I follow. I find it fascinating, and he addresses this whole issue… and it’s also on YouTube, he addresses this whole issue, and this guy…

Dan: I think I know who you’re talking about.

Nehemia: It’s called Saints Unscripted.

Dan: Oh no, that’s a different name.

Nehemia: And I wouldn’t even say he’s really hard core like The Joseph Smith Foundation.

Dan: No, he’s not.

Nehemia: I think he’s more liberal in his approach. So, he has a video where he talks about why LDS have multiple temples. And he says some people say, “Hey, you guys can’t have more than one temple. Deuteronomy 12, there’s one temple.” And the explanation he offers is, “No, that was made up by Josiah during the Josianic Reformation. That Moses didn’t write that,” that’s his explanation. “That was added by the priest in the Temple, Hilkiah, or somebody in the court of Josiah,” a Josian, whatever. He doesn’t get to that.

Dan: The Deuteronomist.

Nehemia: Right, the Deuteronomist. But he’s essentially saying, “Deuteronomy 12 is just made up. That’s not from God. We know what’s from God.” I’m paraphrasing what he said, and I might be getting it wrong, but what I understood he said is, “What came from God is what we know from Joseph Smith and our prophets in the LDS church. And what you see in Deuteronomy 12, that’s somebody who wanted power and wanted to concentrate,” which is what secular scholars say, “someone who wanted to concentrate the power of the Jerusalem Temple. He proclaimed there’s only allowed to be one temple.”

Dan: Yeah, there is that in the Documentary Hypothesis.

Nehemia: Absolutely, that’s the explanation of Deuteronomists.

Dan: There is a competition of where the holy mount is… which priest is going to win. I understand the guy’s argument.

Nehemia: So, then I wrote to him on the video. I said, “Well, I looked at the Joseph Smith papers. We have what, at least according to the Joseph Smith papers, is Joseph Smith’s copy. And in Deuteronomy 14, Joseph Smith says something to the effect of, in the note, ‘everything up until Deuteronomy 14 is correct.’ So, if Deuteronomy 12 was made up by Josiah or somebody in his court in the Temple, wouldn’t Joseph Smith have pointed that out to us?” So, I don’t understand how a modern apologist could ignore… If Joseph Smith is restoring the true scripture as it came from the mouth of the prophets, then why would you ignore that he says that Deuteronomy 12 is correct? I don’t know.

Dan: I don’t know. The multiple temple thing: Joseph Smith has to solve that problem since he wants to build the new Jerusalem temple himself.

Nehemia: Okay.

Dan: So, the question is, by what authority are you going to run this temple? And by what authority did the Ephramites, Menasseh or Ephraim, it’s supposed to be both of them there…

Nehemia: Okay.

Dan: Because the tribe of Joseph is the wrong tribe for the priesthood to run the Temple.

Nehemia: Right.

Dan: And he solved that by introducing the Melchizedek priesthood.

Nehemia: Wow.

Dan: And Jews struggle with this question too! By what authority did Abraham offer sacrifice?

Nehemia: Right.

Dan: And the Patriarchs? And usually, it ends up going to Psalms 110.

Nehemia: Right. I’m impressed that you know that! That’s very interesting. That is one of the Jewish explanations, to say that God took the priesthood from Melchizedek and handed it off to Abraham, and then eventually it gets to the hands of Aaron. That’s interesting.

Dan: So, you’re talking about how it gets to Moses. But that’s an Aaronic priesthood temple for animal sacrifice and all that kind of stuff, and we’re talking about Melchizedek priesthood temples.

Nehemia: Well, I’m saying on the Jewish side. The other explanation, which I think is probably the more common Jewish explanation, is to say that it’s really Leviticus 17, not just Deuteronomy 12. Both of those passages together limit where you’re allowed to bring sacrifices. Well, before that was revealed… There is this idea of progressive revelation, and then Deuteronomy 12:32 says, “Don’t add and don’t subtract from anything I have commanded you today.” So, up until that time, God could bring in new revelations, just from that point forward you weren’t allowed to change things.

So, there is an idea of progressive revelation. So, Noah bringing a sacrifice, most Jews would say, isn’t a problem because at that time it hadn’t been limited to the Aaronic priesthood.

Dan: They had a Temple, but they also had the Tabernacle, and the Tabernacle moved around.

Nehemia: Right, for sure. So, there it gets complicated, the Tabernacle… Anyway, it’s beyond the scope of the discussion today. And then there’s the whole debate with the Samaritans on where the true chosen place is, but that’s a whole separate discussion. Because they would say the chosen place is Mount Gerizim, not Jerusalem. And I as a Jew would say they’re wrong, but that’s beyond the scope of scholarship, I suppose, for here.

Alright, I want to continue, and you had brought up before the issue of the theory of how Joseph Smith could have written the Book of Mormon.

Dan: Yeah.

Nehemia: And there was an explanation at the time that nobody today believes as far as I know, and I want to take a break and then come back and have you explain that.

You have been listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!

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VERSES MENTIONED
Isaiah 28:10-13
Deuteronomy 12; Leviticus 17
Psalm 110

BOOKS MENTIONED
Indian Origins and the Book of Mormon
by Dan Vogel

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes
Hebrew Voices #164 – A Karaite Jew on Mormonism: Part 1
Support Team Study – A Karaite Jew on Mormonism: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #183 – Early Mormonism Revealed: Part 1
Support Team Study – Early Mormonism Revealed: Part 2

OTHER LINKS
Dan Vogel’s YT channel
FAIR Mormon Apologetic Site
The Joseph Smith Papers

The post Hebrew Voices #190 – Mormon Chains of Authority: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

Watch the Sneak Peek of this episode of Support Team Study - The Cairo Genizah: Part 2, where Nehemia continues discussing the Cairo Genizah with Cambridge scholar Ben Outhwaite including the discovery of a lost 2nd Temple period book in a medieval synagogue, the first Dead Sea Scroll published over 50 years before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, and the influence of Arabic culture on medieval Jewish scholarship.

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The post Support Team Study SNEAK PEEK! The Cairo Genizah: Part 2 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #189 - The Cairo Genizah: Part 1, Nehemia sits down with the head of the Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge to learn about the most important cache of surviving Hebrew manuscripts after the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Genizah was a chamber in the Cairo synagogue where Jews placed old scrolls, books, and letters for 1,000 years. Learn the story of how this treasure trove was discovered and brought to England.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Dr. Ben Outhwaite: That’s why the Genizah is so important. Because, in addition to preserving some of the best copies and earliest copies of important Jewish texts, the main Jewish religious texts, and lost works and so on, it also preserves an amazing archive of everyday life, of a kind that’s not preserved in other archives.

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Nehemia: Shalom. This is Nehemia Gordon. Welcome to Hebrew Voices! I’m here today with Dr. Ben Outhwaite, who is the head of the Genizah Research Unit at the University of Cambridge. He got his PhD here at the University of Cambridge. Thank you for joining the program.

Ben: Thanks very much for having me.

Nehemia: So, let’s start with a really basic question. Let’s assume my audience knows nothing. What is the Genizah? And why is there a Genizah research unit? And why is it here at Cambridge?

Ben: Okay. Yeah. All good questions, actually. So, what is a genizah? A genizah is a… the usual words we use are like sacred storeroom. As you know, in Judaism there is a practice of “genizah-ing”, of putting away texts that are holy. That once you’ve finished with something that has God’s name in it, you shouldn’t leave it lying around… one, just because that’s not respectful, but two, you don’t want to leave things that are potentially holy to be misused, like old Torah scrolls, Bibles, prayer books, all that kind of stuff.

So, in Judaism, and you can see this in the Mishnah already, they developed a practice whereby you have to put these things away where they can be securely stored and won’t be misused, and they are treated respectfully. And the comparison is with a dead body. So, when someone has died, you don’t leave the body lying around. You bury it with due ceremony. And it’s the same with texts, that you practice a kind of holy hygiene and that you lock them away. Now, in England, and I think it possibly is still the practice, they will bury books with people. So, when they bury someone…

Nehemia: You mean the Jews will?

Ben: Yes. Jews will, yes.

Nehemia: Non-Jews don’t do that in England, do they?

Ben: No.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: They will put books in sometimes, into the graves as well, old books that they no longer have a need for, but which are hanging around in a synagogue to be disposed of according to the laws of genizah. And so, what the genizah is, and the Cairo Geniza is in particular, is the contents of the storeroom, the genizah storeroom of the what’s now known and has been since maybe, I don’t know, 16, maybe, probably later, 17th or 18th century, the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo. Their storeroom, which was by all accounts quite enormous, a two-story storeroom, although accounts differ, filled up with the detritus of the medieval Jewish community over a period of nearly a thousand years as they followed this practice of “ganeezering” their old texts.

Nehemia: You say “ganeezering”. So, for the audience that doesn’t know any Hebrew, what is this word “ganaz”, “lignoz”, what does that mean?

Ben: So, the word geniza is a noun taken from a root which is originally Persian. You find it in the book of Esther.

Nehemia: Oh, really? Okay.

Ben: So, there’s lots of Persian in Esther, because it’s the story of, you know…

Nehemia: Okay. Ginzei hamelekh.

Ben: Yeah. And in that case, it means the treasury of the king.

Nehemia: Oh, wow. Okay.

Ben: And so, the word does mean to store away, like treasure. And it comes to be used in post-biblical Hebrew specifically for hiding away texts in two meanings, because you can find it used in two meanings. One is to hide away texts that you can no longer use because they are too old, too damaged, or perhaps the rite that is practiced in them is no longer the current one that you practice. But, since they are holy texts, you ganeezer them away, you put them in a genizah.

The other use of it is texts which are inherently holy because they’ve got the name of God in, but which are not to be used. And at certain times this has included things like the Book of Ben Sira or other texts that are regarded as not suitable for contemporary consumption, and so you should hide those away. But you can’t destroy them, you can’t burn them, you can’t rip them up, you can’t cast them to the four winds, as you can in some other religious… So, Islam, for instance, when they finished with a text, it’s acceptable, like even a Quran, to rip it up, to put it in running water.

Nehemia: Really?

Ben: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Really!

Ben: Yeah, yeah. You have to dispose of it that way.

Nehemia: You’re telling me Muslims, when there’s a Quran manuscript… maybe not even a manuscript, is no longer in use, they rip it up?

Ben: It’s technically possible. It is technically allowed to do that. Now, obviously, if a non-Muslim does that, that’s a different matter.

Nehemia: Okay!

Ben: Because the intention is that you are stopping it from being misused. And we can kind of see that in the Genizah already because we have pages of the Quran, for instance, in the Genizah, which were perhaps used by Jews for magical purposes.

Nehemia: What does that mean? Tell me what that means.

Ben: Well, on the grounds that your own religion is sacred, but other people’s religions are sort of… they are your source of magic. So, the Toledot Yeshu, the story of Jesus. So, Jesus performs miracles and so on, so that…

Nehemia: This is the Jewish version…

Ben: The Jewish version of the story of Jesus. So, this is the polemic against Jesus written and circulated amongst medieval Jews. So, they don’t deny that Jesus performs miracles in it, but they say that he stole the ability to do it by stealing the magic or stealing the holy powers of the Temple from the rabbis, and that’s how he does it. So, basically, he’s taken Jewish religious power and turned it into magic. And so, the same idea is, if you were to leave… so in Judaism, if you were to leave pages of the Bible around, people might cut them up and use them as amulets, lucky amulets, and you can kind of see that because there was that guy who had a piece of the Aleppo Codex in America, wasn’t he?

Nehemia: He was a Syrian Jew who became a taxi driver in New York, and he had walked by the synagogue in Aleppo the day that the Aleppo Codex was supposedly destroyed and burned. And he saw two pieces on the ground, and he picked them up and he kept them in his wallet for decades. And when he died, his daughter turned them over to the… to Israel.

Ben: That’s right. So, that was a kind of lucky charm, you know?

Nehemia: But they would do that with the Quran, you’re saying? Jews would do that?

Ben: Well, we do have Quranic passages copied into Hebrew script.

Nehemia: Really?

Ben: In the context of a book that also contains kind of charms for good luck in travel, for protection in travel and so on. So the suggestion is that the Quran here is being used specifically for kind of magical good luck purposes.

Nehemia: Hmm. Okay. All right, so we had three questions. One is what’s a genizah, what’s the Cairo Geniza? And how did it end up here at Cambridge?

Ben: So, a genizah is a storeroom where you put used or worn-out texts that you can’t leave lying around because, one, would be disrespectful to God’s name that’s in them, but also, they might be profaned by other people misusing them.

Nehemia: Talk for a minute about misusing them. So, you gave the example of… well, you said they rip it up in Islam in order to avoid the misuse. So, using it as an amulet is one type of misuse. What’s something else?

Ben: Well, even quite simple things, such as accidentally writing an obscene text over the top of it. Or it is quite… I think it’s an established fact that some old Roman papyri are used subsequently as toilet paper.

Nehemia: Really?

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: That’s so interesting. I didn’t know that.

Ben: Yeah. You want to be careful when handling old manuscripts.

Nehemia: That’s interesting.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: That reminds me of the scholar who… or the archaeologist who discovered the toilet at Qumran. And he told me he walked around, he measured 2,000 cubits, and then he walked around the 2,000-cubit perimeter and just smelled until he found it. And after nearly 2,000 years it still stank. So, that’s interesting. And then when they did tests on the feces there, they found that it was endemic to have diarrhea, like… So, we used to think they were so clean because they went to a mikvah, they immersed in water every day. But if you’re using the same water for six months and you immerse every morning, that’s not going to be clean water. And so, people were dying in their 30’s because they constantly had diarrhea out in the desert, probably from the mikvahs. So, you’re saying you could be handling old manuscripts? I didn’t know this. And you could be touching feces…

Ben: Yeah, because they have done some tests on some Roman stuff from certain areas that has that…

Nehemia: Really? Oh, Roman stuff. So, I’ve smelled some Torah scrolls that had two distinct smells. One was the smell of death, and that ties into what a genizah is, and what you just said, that they bury it with a body. So, if they’re burying it in a cave, at some point maybe somebody went and pillaged that cave, but the death smell is still there. And the other is a very strong smell of perfume, which may also tie in, because that’s a practice in some Eastern Jewish communities, to throw a bottle of perfume into the grave so that the dead person… and I asked people, “Why do you do that?” And they say, “We don’t want our beloved father to have to smell the death.” Well, he’s dead, right? But maybe on some metaphorical level to… they don’t want it to stink.

Ben: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: So, I wondered if those Torah scrolls… Of course, it could have been that there was a genizah and a rat crawled in and died, and that’s why it smells of death. I don’t know, but I like my version better. It’s a good story.

Ben: And you can see this as well. So, in geniza one, right, so we have Qurans, now we have Quranic pages that are proper…

Nehemia: Intact?

Ben: Intact, and from a Muslim… almost certainly from a Muslim provenance, the written Arabic script, finely written… Why they end up in genizah we can’t be entirely sure… how they’ve ended up in a storeroom associated with Jewish objects. But the genizah has become contaminated over time with other things which we can get into.

Nehemia: Aren’t there love letters and things in the Genizah?

Ben: Yeah. There’s everything.

Nehemia: Right, so it’s not just things with God’s name.

Ben: No. So, we probably have to make a distinction between a genizah in theory and the practice that is proposed for it by the rabbis. And it’s not mentioned that often, but you can see, for instance, in the Mishnah… Mishnah Shabbat talks about… we often quote this bit from Mishnah Shabbat, where it says what you can do on Shabbat and what you should do, and it says, “kol kitvei kodesh matsilim otam mipnei hadleika”.

Nehemia: Translate that for the audience.

Ben: “All holy writings should be saved from fire.” So, it should be saved from destruction.

Nehemia: So, the background of that is that there’s two prohibitions in Rabbinical literature about Shabbat. One is you can’t start a fire, and the other is you can’t put out a fire. So, if you’re saving a holy book from the fire… if it was a secular book, that would be a violation of Shabbat. But a holy book, okay, you can save from fire.

Ben: And it’s kind of up there with the idea of saving lives on holy days, when you’re not supposed to do any work, but you’re allowed to jump in and save someone from a pit. And it’s the same… and so, they almost equate the idea of holy books, which they don’t define. So, they say kitvei kodesh, “holy writings.” They don’t actually say whether that’s because it’s got the Tetragrammaton in it, the shem hashem, or whether it’s a book because… there are books of the Bible without the shem hashem in it…

Nehemia: Like Esther, for example.

Ben: Like Esther. And probably at different times and by different communities the idea of kitvei kodesh has been taken in different ways. But anyway, it kind of equates that with saving human life. And so, the idea is that you should drop everything, and you should save holy writings. It does say, “bekhol lashon”, so whichever language they’re written in.

Nehemia: Really?

Ben: And, it says, “bein she’korim ba’hem uvein she’einam korim ba’hem”.

Nehemia: Mmm.

Ben: So, whether you read them or not. So, the implication there is whether they’re holy to you or not. So, maybe they are a different branch of Judaism, or maybe even if they’re holy to Muslims or Christians, it’s still the Abrahamic God.

Nehemia: Okay. So, we have to unpack that, because another way of understanding whether you read them or not might be what exactly what we’re talking about; it’s so old you don’t read out of it anymore. So, whether it’s still in use or not still in use, that’s one possibility. And you’re saying the other possibility is, well, maybe it’s not your sacred text or your branch of Judaism. Let’s say something written by the Dead Sea Scroll community, the rabbis, we have the example of Ben Sira, which we’ll get to, I think. Well, it’s unclear whether they read from that or not. I guess they probably did. Okay. So… all right, interesting. So, you save them from the fire, and so how does that connect to a genizah?

Ben: And then it says, “and then you should subject them to the laws of genizah”. And…

Nehemia: Oh! Okay. Because they’ve been damaged by fire.

Ben: Yeah. And so, you should then put them away. And so that’s genizah in theory, but the Cairo Genizah in practice… so this chamber that was in the Ben Ezra Synagogue… and although we call it the Ben Ezra Synagogue, in the Middle Ages it had a completely different name. So, nowadays it is known as the Ben Ezra Synagogue, and it’s a tourist site in the oldest part of the city of Cairo…

Nehemia: So, people can go visit it today?

Ben: Yes. And in fact, it’s kind of on the… because for start, the Fortress of Babylon, the heart of Old Cairo, it’s actually the city…

Nehemia: You said the Fortress of Babylon?

Ben: The Fortress of Babylon. That’s sort of a walled city.

Nehemia: That’s called the Fortress of Babylon?

Ben: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: I didn’t know that. But Babylon’s in Iraq, so why is it called the Fortress of Babylon?

Ben: The Persians are supposed to have… people who came from the East are supposed to have founded it.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: It’s a Roman city… So, the synagogue is in the heart of what’s known as al-Fustat. Al-Fustat was the first Islamic capital of Egypt. So, when the Muslims captured Egypt, they camped at Fustat, and they built their first sort of big city there, and that grew to be the capital. In the 10th century, when the Fatimids came… the Fatimid Empire expanded from North Africa, so, a Muslim empire, they conquered Egypt, which they had long wanted to do. And in the 960’s they conquered Egypt and they decided to found a new city celebrating that, and they founded Cairo, a little bit north of the old city. Now, as Cairo has expanded… of course, now it’s a huge megacity, it’s completely encompassed Fustat. But Fustat used to be a separate city.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And it used to be the most important administrative center in Egypt and was long after Cairo was founded. Cairo is where the caliph and then the sultan lived, and the army, and the Islamic administration and the emirs and the highest echelons of Islamic society lived. Whereas all the people associated with the previous regime, and with the administration of it under the previous Islamic regimes, lived in Fustat, and they were Christians and Jews for the most part. So, it’s a very Christian city.

Nehemia: Hmm.

Ben: There was a synagogue in al-Fustat, which nowadays is known as Ben Ezra, but in the Middle Ages was one of two Jewish synagogues within the walls of the old city of Fustat. The city of Fustat was there before the Muslims conquered it. It was a Roman town for a long time; it was a port city, because it sat right on the Nile, and you can see that there’s two big round towers at the entrance to Fustat that are now churches, or ones a church, and one’s a ruin. And the railway runs right in front of the old city of Fustat. Now, the railway actually follows the course of the Nile. So, the Nile used to run right in front of it, but because the Nile silts up and moves over time…

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: It’s actually moved away from Fustat. So, you don’t get the feeling that this was a maritime city, but it was really because it sat right on the Nile as a port. And between those two round towers was a canal that went to the Red Sea.

Nehemia: So, currently… and I’ve never been to that part of Egypt, so currently the Nile doesn’t run through…

Ben: No, it’s moved to the west.

Nehemia: Oh, that’s so interesting.

Ben: Yeah. It’s still within… you can probably stand in a tower and see it, but there is now a railway that follows the exact route that the Nile ran.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And there used to be a canal that ran through the middle of the city. So, it was a port city canal that connected the Nile with the Red Sea. So, a very important town in Egypt. And the Jews had two synagogues. The Jewish community of Fustat had two synagogues within those walls. So, as part of the oldest part, the synagogue of the Shami’im, so of the Syrians, the Palestinians, however you want to translate…

Nehemia: Levantines.

Ben: Al-Shams, the Levantines, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Al-Shams is Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories and Jordan today, right?

Ben: Yes. When the Muslims took that part of the world, that was their administrative division; they created al-Sham. And it doesn’t fit with the modern geography of Syria and Palestine, so we say Syria-Palestine or something like that. But it was also known as the synagogue of the Jerusalemites. So, in Arabic this would be like Kanisa, which means synagogue in Arabic like Knesset. Kanisat ha’shami’in, or kanisat ha’yerushalmi’in. And then the other synagogue, which was built, it appears, right next to a Christian church, of which there are many in Fustat, known as the Hanging Church, was the synagogue of the Iraki’in, of the Iraqi Jews, so, the Babylonian Jews.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: Now, that synagogue, by all accounts, was originally a church that was purchased from the Christian community in the 9th century.

Nehemia: Really?

Ben: Because the Iraqi Jews arrived later. The Palestinian Jews were already there; they were the largest congregation in Fustat, but many Iraqi Jews left the Abbasid Empire. They settled in North Africa, they followed in the footsteps of the Fatimids, and eventually they came to be the majority in Egypt, but not originally.

So, the oldest synagogue in Fustat, and perhaps one of the oldest synagogues in Egypt, is the Kanisat ha’shami’in, what became the Ben Ezra Synagogue. So, when we talk about the Cairo Genizah, we mean the storeroom of that synagogue in the oldest part of the capital city of Egypt. And unlike the normal principles of genizah, when this was opened up by Solomon Schechter… and perhaps I’ll say a bit more about how that happened, what he discovered, to his great surprise, was that it did not contain Torah scrolls, Siddurim, prayer books, copies of the Mishnah and Talmud, the holy sort of…

Nehemia: It didn’t only contain that.

Ben: No, it didn’t only contain that. It had those, but it also contained personal letters, philosophical writings, poetry in huge abundance, not just liturgical poetry, so religious poetry, but also secular poetry and bad poetry.

Nehemia: [Laughter]

Ben: You know, poetry about wine and love for boys. And the kind of thing that was in was in vogue.

Nehemia: Did you say love for boys?

Ben: That was. Yeah. I mean, so, love expressed in poetry could be towards romantic ideals of women or the idea that you find in Spanish Hebrew poetry, which as well comes from Arabic poetry, is the boy as an object of worship.

Nehemia: And this is men writing about…?

Ben: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay, I learned something new.

Ben: It’s a kind of ideal love.

Nehemia: Okay, I’m just gonna ask, does that mean homosexual love?

Ben: Yeah. But it…

Nehemia: Or is it some kind of ideal of… I love my dog, right?

Ben: Yeah. It does, but it’s a kind of idealized love, you know, it’s a kind of pure love that… and whether or not it actually reflects practice is debatable.

Nehemia: Okay, wow.

Ben: Yeah, there’s a lot of poems about it.

Nehemia: So, that’s in the Genizah, even though that’s obviously… nobody even then would have considered that sacred. And is it there because it’s written in Hebrew letters and they just threw everything in there?

Ben: So, this is the big question, because when Schechter emptied out the storeroom, he said it was a battlefield of books, and he had these strange combinations of… you would have a pious, rationalistic text arguing against superstition and magic, and stuck to it was an amulet, which…

Nehemia: [Laughter] Well that’s why you needed the text against superstition, because there are amulets.

Ben: Yeah… sought angels’ power to protect you against bad luck or whatever it was. And we don’t know why this happened, but there are a number of things that are worth bearing in mind, and you have to adopt the medieval mindset. Because what we’re talking about is text that… so, this synagogue was active from the 10th century, maybe earlier, we don’t really know. The building itself dates from about 1040, but it was built on an earlier building that was destroyed by the Caliph al-Hakim, and they immediately rebuilt it when he died.

Nehemia: And did they take the contents? I guess this is the big question.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: Did they take the contents of the Genizah from the earlier synagogue into the 1040 synagogue?

Ben: We assume so.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: We assume so, because we have a lot of material that predates the 11th century. So, this synagogue was active from probably at least the 10th century all the way through to the 19th century, when Solomon Schechter, a scholar from Cambridge, arrived and emptied it out. And over the course of time, maybe originally, their intention was, “We’ll put Torah scrolls in here and we’ll put holy books associated specifically with this synagogue.” But over time, we got holy books from other congregations. There is material from the Iraqi congregation. There is material from the Karaite congregation. We have these strange survivals of Dead Sea sect works in there. But also, all of this, what we would regard as purely secular literature. And, in sort of the medieval mindset, of course, it’s very difficult to distinguish secular from religious because practically everything you write in the Middle Ages invokes God in some degree. So, if you write a letter to someone, whether it’s in Arabic or Hebrew or Aramaic, near the beginning you will say, “In the name of God.”

Nehemia: Mmm, okay.

Ben: Or you will say, “God bless you.” Whatever. We have letters where Sir Solomon Ben Judah, the head of the Jews in Jerusalem, falls out with an archrival who attempts to usurp his position as head of the Jews, and he describes him in one letter. He describes him as “the suspect”. He doesn’t want to name him because he so hates him. But he says, “God, kill him.”

Nehemia: Wow.

Ben: Yeah. “Yamito ha’el”. Yeah.

Nehemia: Wow. That’s literally a curse.

Ben: Yes.

Nehemia: But because he mentions God there… so that actually makes sense why that would show up there. But the love poetry, or… so, there’s a whole other genre which is like administrative texts of merchants and things like that, so there’s all these merchants’ letters. Like, there are entire archives of merchants. How did those end up in there? Why did they end up in there?

Ben: Well, again, even a bare bones kind of economic document, something that represents a financial transaction, will often invoke God. So, we have what are proto checks, we have these orders of payment that say… and we have them written by various different people, but we have a large number by one particular trader called Abu Zikri Cohen. So, he had an Arabic name. He’s a Jew living in an Arabic speaking land. So, he adopts an Arabic name, but his name is Judah.

So, Abu Zikri Cohen… and he writes these checks that are very similar to modern checks. They say, “pay to the bearer”. “May the banker”, and it names the banker, Abulkhair, “pay to the bearer the sum of two dinars” or whatever. And then it will also, on the note, write the number “2” as a numeral, so, like a modern-day check, like yesterday’s check. You write out the numbers in words and in numbers as a kind of security feature. It’s the same on these. But, at the top of it, it will have often a Bet, which is short for either… No, sorry. It often has a Bet, or sometimes you have a “be’emet” or something. So, it will have some kind of invocation of God. So, it will be “be’ezrat ha’el” or some kind of implying that God is guaranteeing this transaction.

Nehemia: Okay. Kind of like an American coin saying, “In God we trust”.

Ben: Yeah. Exactly, exactly.

Nehemia: In God we trust, but pay cash.

Ben: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. No. Well, no…

Nehemia: It’s a bit ironic, right?

Ben: This is paper money, and what they’re paying is… basically it’s a promise to pay because of the difficulties of moving large amounts of gold and silver across borders, which was tricky. I mean, it’s tricky as a Jewish merchant carrying around large amounts of money when there were bandits everywhere. But also, it was a bit tricky for Jews rather than Muslims to move large amounts of money around under Muslim rule.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: But also, the distances involved. They were trading with India. You didn’t want to send vast amounts of cash.

Nehemia: So, you’re saying a merchant could take this promissory note or sort of check and bring it to India? And…

Ben: Yeah, there would be some Jewish banker there who would get… who would be able to…

Nehemia: Oh, that’s amazing.

Ben: Yeah. And these notes could then be traded.

Nehemia: And you mean literally India.

Ben: Yeah, yeah, literally. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the west coast of India. Jews settled there and had factories producing bronze and sending it back to Egypt. There was a whole Indian Ocean trade route in the 13th century. Most of our information comes out of the Genizah. But anyway, so getting ahead of myself a bit. So, you can’t write something without “In the name of God”. So, even a shopping list. So, we have a shopping list written by Judge Elijah, a judge from…

Nehemia: Wait, we literally have a shopping list?

Ben: Oh, we have loads of them. Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: That’s amazing!

Ben: So, we have a shopping list written by Judge Elijah, who was active in the 13th century in Egypt, and it says, at the top it says, “expenditure for”, and it’s in Arabic, in Hebrew script, because most Jews wrote their Arabic in Hebrew script. And it says, “expenditure for the festival of Shavuot”.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Ben: “If I live that long with the help of God.” And so, it’s in Arabic. So, the expenditure is nafaka or whatever, but at the end it’s “be’ezrat Shaddai”. So, “with the help of the Almighty”.

Nehemia: In Hebrew, not in Judeo-Arabic.

Ben: In Hebrew. It’s Hebrew words in a Judeo-Arabic sentence.

Nehemia: Okay, I see. So, it’s kind of like if you have a Hebrew word in Yiddish; is it Hebrew or is it Yiddish?

Ben: Yeah, exactly.

Nehemia: Okay, I see what you’re saying.

Ben: Yeah, yeah. And you can argue whether this is code switching or whether this is this…

Nehemia: So, how would you say, is that “be’ezrat”, “with the help of”, in Arabic? “Basa’ad” or something?

Ben: So… Yeah, something like that, I guess. And they would say “Allah”. They did say inshallah or something in Arabic. It would be quite common.

Nehemia: So, that’s a whole other maybe can of worms. But do they refer to God as Allah in this Judeo-Arabic? The Jews, refer to God as Allah?

Ben: When Maimonides, the greatest thinker of the Middle Ages, writes about God, he will often, in one of his philosophical contexts, he will call him Allah. When a teacher sends a note home for a schoolboy who’s being bullied at school, it’s in Judeo-Arabic, Arabic in Hebrew characters but it’s between two Jews, and he says, “God bless you” at the top of it, and that’s “Allah”.

Nehemia: And that’s an actual example of a letter sent home to a…

Ben: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Oh, that’s really cool!

Ben: And so, it’s not only…

Nehemia: There were even bullies in the Middle Ages. I guess we knew that, but wow.

Ben: Oh, yeah, I know. It’s a fantastic little note. It’s just a little note that, that says, “Your son” basically, “the child has been getting on very well, in his reading,” or is it “writing”? I can’t remember. Anyway… and, unfortunately, another boy in the class conspired with the other kids to break his writing board. Because they don’t have tables. You sit on the floor.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And you have a board on your knees, and you use that to write on.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Ben: And so, the other kids broke his writing board just to teach him not to shine in class, I guess.

Nehemia: Wow, man.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: Things haven’t changed!

Ben: I know.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: But that gets preserved in the Genizah, and that’s a little piece of really ephemeral writing, because that’s of interest to no one other than the boy and his guardian, right?

Nehemia: Well, today it’s got to be interesting to historians of what life was like in the Middle Ages.

Ben: Exactly. That’s why the Genizah is so important, because in addition to preserving some of the best copies and earliest copies of important Jewish texts, the main Jewish religious texts and lost works and so on, it also preserves an amazing archive of everyday life, of a kind that’s not preserved in other archives. Because nobody intended… these were not deliberately put for posterity, they just felt they couldn’t throw them away. Well, they had the name of God in them. They’re written in Hebrew characters, so even most of their Arabic writing is done in Hebrew characters, because Jews went to school to learn Hebrew. They didn’t learn Arabic at school; they spoke it at home. So, when they came to write as adults, even the greatest scholar of the Middle Ages, Moses Maimonides, the greatest Jewish scholar of the Middle Ages, writes his Arabic in Hebrew characters. So, it’s written in lashon hakodesh, it’s written in the holy language. So maybe if God has chosen to transmit the Bible to the Jews in the holy language, maybe I shouldn’t throw this piece of paper away that’s written in that sacred language…

Nehemia: I mean, technically it’s not the holy language, it’s the holy script. But…

Ben: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: I guess they were like… When I was a kid and we would study the Talmud, they would talk about reading the Hebrew. Well, now I know that most of what I was reading was Aramaic, but we didn’t make that subtle distinction because it was in Hebrew letters.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, that’s a similar sort of thing, what you’re saying.

Ben: Yeah. And so, they do refer to Judeo-Arabic, Arabic in Hebrew characters, they do refer to it as Arabic, but sometimes they have to be very clear and distinguish… do you mean Arabic in Arabic characters? So, he says, ktiva, to mean “the writing”, because sometimes we have one or two letters where they say things like, “I need to write to so and so, do you know, does he read Arabic?” And what he means is, does he read Arabic script? Because everyone can read Judeo-Arabic, because they can all read Hebrew and they can all speak Arabic.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: But not everyone can read Arabic script in the Jewish community.

Nehemia: Wow, that’s very cool.

Ben: That’s a skill by the kind of… your parents had to pay a bit extra to get you Arabic tuition for that, intending that you’ll go and work in the Islamic government or something. Anyway, so they keep it because it’s got the name of God on it. They keep it because it’s in Hebrew script. Maybe they keep it just because they don’t like to throw away anything written down, because the Jews are a highly literate society, far more literate than their neighbors, the Christians.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Ben: And so, perhaps that’s why they put things in… rather than let these things be wasted, they put them in the Genizah. But also, there is possibly just a sense of… what the Genizah is is lots and lots of different archives. So, at some point, like the great merchant Abu Zikri, say, he dies, and people clear out his house. And as a merchant he would also be a scholar, because he would have been educated to some degree. So, he would have copies of books of the Bible. He will have poetry to recite. He will have prayer books. He will have Mishnahs and Talmuds to study, and do they really want to sort through all that stuff, from his shopping lists and his personal letters and the doggerel he wrote about love or whatever? No, they may just take it all and deposit that in the synagogue. Or maybe it was the beadle of the synagogue whose job it was to sort it out. And maybe the beadle wasn’t the most educated member of the Jewish community, which is possibly quite likely, who knows? But anyway, for whatever reason, they put it all in the Genizah.

Nehemia: Mmm. Wow. So, all right. How many documents are in the Genizah, approximately?

Ben: So, in the Cambridge Collection that we have, we have 197,000 from what’s known as the Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection, which is this collection brought back in 1897 by Solomon Schechter.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: Other people went to the same chamber before Schechter went. Some people went and took away large pieces. The community associated with that synagogue in Egypt were also taking stuff out and selling it, and that found its way to different libraries and museums.

Nehemia: You mean like in the late 1800’s they’re taking it out and selling it?

Ben: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And that’s one of the reasons why Solomon Schechter went there. He found out about the Genizah because Cambridge was being offered manuscripts for sale from Jerusalem by a dealer in Jerusalem called Solomon Wertheimer. And he was offering various fragments of medieval manuscripts; pages of Bibles, bits of Mishnah, ketubot, marriage deeds, that kind of thing. And Schechter wasn’t that interested in it. But then, he met these… well, the story is long and involved, but he met two Scottish women who had travelled to the Middle East to go to Saint Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai. They were great adventurers and explorers, and they went to old monasteries around the Mediterranean to recover texts of the Bible. They were Christians, very, very devout Christian Presbyterians, and their intention…

Nehemia: This is Lewis and Gibson?

Ben: Lewis and Gibson, exactly. Two immensely rich widows from Scotland, Irvine in Scotland. Raised Presbyterian, but they lived in Cambridge by just this bizarre combination of coincidences, all of the stars aligned and the whole Genizah story. They lived in Cambridge because one of them had married a Cambridge academic. Both of their husbands… they married late in life in their 40’s or something, and both their husbands were kind of weak Victorian men who died of Victorian illnesses running for trains.

Nehemia: What do you mean, running for trains?

Ben: He ran for a train and died on the train after sitting down.

Nehemia: Wow.

Ben: Yeah, it was too much strain on his Victorian heart.

Nehemia: Okay. Oh my gosh.

Ben: Yeah. And the other one died in bed after asking for flannel underwear.

Nehemia: What?

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: He died… wait, what?

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: I’m confused. Because he was cold? Or…

Ben: I don’t know, I don’t know, but his last words were apparently, “Please buy me some flannel underwear.”

Nehemia: Wow, okay. Maybe he was going into shock, and he was really cold or something. All right.

Ben: So, anyway, these two Scottish women who had married… one was a preacher, and the other was a librarian, their husbands, and so, they were associated with the university. But being women in Cambridge in the 1890’s, you couldn’t be employed by the university. They were very scholarly. They knew all sorts of languages, from Greek to Arabic, and they travelled. They were doing what was in vogue at the time, which was to go to monasteries and find old manuscripts, with a view of improving our knowledge of the original text of the Bible.

Nehemia: That’s how Codex Sinaiticus was found.

Ben: Exactly. They were following in the footsteps of people like Tischendorf…

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: … who had really kind of revolutionized the approach, that you have printed editions that we’ve been relying on for centuries. But how reliable are these? We should go and find the best, earliest reliable texts, the critical editions of the Bible is what we want to create. And so, they were doing that off their own back because they were immensely rich through some accident of fate. They had inherited a lot of money from a Canadian who had built railroads.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: Like, a Scot had gone out and founded railroads in Canada…

Nehemia: It’s like a theme in their lives, railroads, right? They’re killing husbands, giving them wealth.

Ben: Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. After their husbands died, they decided to travel to get over the grief, because they’d always been great travelers, and they went to Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, and they discovered what was then the earliest Aramaic copy of the New Testament.

Nehemia: Okay. Is that the… what is that called? That’s the old Syriac, I think, or something like that.

Ben: Yeah, I’m a little… that’s not my area. So… and how they got there, because obviously Tischendorf had been to Saint Catherine’s before, and he had left behind… well, they don’t like him in Saint Catherine’s because he took Codex Sinaiticus away and they never got it back. The two women, when they went, had a very different experience. Because one, they were kind of unthreatening because they were women; two, they spoke Greek, whereas Tischendorf had very bad Greek.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: They spoke Greek. They were able to communicate with the monk librarian in Greek.

Nehemia: Oh, wow.

Ben: Because scholars in those days didn’t speak the languages. They knew the written language, right? Not the sort of modern vulgar dialect that they speak. But they could speak Greek. And that’s how they’d managed to inveigle their way into all sorts of monasteries around the Mediterranean and made friends with the librarians.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Ben: And in this case, the librarian, I think Galaction, his name was, showed… he opened up like the special, “This is where we keep the good stuff.”

Nehemia: Oh, okay!

Ben: That he hadn’t shown Tischendorf, and in it they found this Aramaic copy. Now, importantly as well, the other thing they did is, they photographed items in situ. They didn’t take them away. They were pioneers of academic photography of manuscripts, something that you…

Nehemia: …dabble in. Yeah, okay.

Ben: And so, they came back with a whole Cambridge expedition to photograph the manuscripts.

Nehemia: Oh, wow. At Saint Catherine’s…

Ben: At Saint Catherine’s.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: On the spot.

Nehemia: So, their goal wasn’t even the Cairo Genizah or Cairo.

Ben: No.

Nehemia: Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai!

Ben: And the Genizah was just a byproduct. Because whenever they passed through Suez or Cairo or any of those places, and they took a tour to Palestine. They used to go to the book dealers in the market and look at what they had, and they bought things, and in that way, they bought some manuscripts that had been only just stolen from Saint Catherine’s, and they were able to return them to the monastery.

Nehemia: Okay. Wow.

Ben: But also, they bought a whole bunch of Hebrew stuff. Now, they could read Hebrew. They brought it back to Cambridge, like scattered, individual leaves of Bibles and that kind of stuff. And they brought it back to Cambridge in 1896, and they were in their house; they built a massive baronial mansion in the middle of Cambridge, because they were so rich.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Ben: And they were in their baronial mansion looking at these, and they realized they couldn’t understand what all of the pieces were. They could recognize some things, like Bibles and so on, because they knew the Bible. They could read Biblical Hebrew, but they couldn’t recognize other works. So, they called in Solomon Schechter. Now, Schechter was then teaching Rabbinics in Cambridge University. He was a Jew teaching in an Anglican organization Rabbinics to people intended mainly… I mean, up until then, Cambridge had been a factory for producing Anglican priests. It was modernizing a bit, but essentially the university was still kind of like an echo of the monasteries. That’s… his job was…

Nehemia: So, Solomon Schechter was a professor here at Cambridge, but he was teaching clergymen, Christian clergymen?

Ben: Yeah. Well, essentially, yes. People who were learning Hebrew were essentially learning it to enter…

Nehemia: Okay. And, and I’ll just make a little note here for American Jews. Every American Jew I’ve ever spoken to about Solomon Schechter, they’re like, “oh, I know the school.” Because there’s a chain of schools in the United States called Solomon Schechter.

Ben: Yeah, yeah. He is, I mean, he’s immensely famous in American Jewish circles, and utterly unknown in English circles.

Nehemia: Really?

Ben: And yet his career began here. He was essentially placed in Cambridge University to improve Jewish learning in England. The Montefiore family in England had originally tried to bring over Jewish scholars, the finest Jewish scholars of Europe, to England to improve the intellectual standing of the Jews of England. They thought they needed one or two kind of “tent pole scholars”, like to bring up the whole…

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: They brought Solomon Schiller-Szinessy in, a Hungarian rabbi, and they put him in Cambridge to teach Hebrew. Up until then, Hebrew had been taught in Cambridge since the 16th century. Cambridge has had a professor of Hebrew since the 16th century. Why do we have a professor of Hebrew? Because Henry VIII wanted to divorce his wife.

Nehemia: Okay! So, he’s like, “We better get back to the source so I can find a reason for this divorce.”

Ben: And he ran out of reasons in the New Testament, so he started looking for the Old Testament and the Talmud. So, the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud. And for that he needed specialists.

Nehemia: Okay. I didn’t know that. So, it was Henry VIII.

Ben: Henry VIII owned a whole copy of the Talmud because…

Nehemia: Really? Has that survived?

Ben: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it was bought by… I think it was collected by… the Valmadonna guy. Can’t remember.

Nehemia: Yeah. Okay. Wow. Okay. Yeah.

Ben: So, anyway, Henry VIII created the Regius Professor of Hebrew here in the 16th century to interpret the Old Testament.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And the idea was really to interpret it in his favor, of his…

Nehemia: Well, you know the story of the Bologna Scroll? So, there was this meeting in 1530 between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope, and one of the things they discussed was King Henry’s great problem, which was he wants a divorce. And the Holy Roman Emperor says, “Well, here in Bologna we have the original Pentateuch written by Ezra,” which is what they believed, it’s what they would tell visitors to this church in Bologna. “This isn’t just a Torah scroll; it’s the original one written by Ezra.” So, they open it up to see, does it have the verse that Henry is citing as his justification for the divorce? And today we have that scroll, and that verse has been erased.

Ben: Ah.

Nehemia: Which is really strange, because we have an account from 1531 which says they found the verse and decided, “We don’t care what the verse says, we do what the Pope says.”

Ben: Okay, okay. That’s interesting.

Nehemia: So, that’s interesting that ties into Cambridge… and wow! Everything ties together.

Ben: It’s also… I just point out that’s not the original scroll written by Ezra…

Nehemia: No, of course not.

Ben: Because that’s in the Ben Ezra Synagogue.

Nehemia: Oh. Okay.

Ben: So, that… until today, I think, tourists are told that scroll is in the synagogue.

Nehemia: Really?

Ben: It was looked at by Adler, when Adler… he wrote his book… he traveled around Jewish communities of the Middle East, and he wrote his book about Jews in Many Lands. And he went to the synagogue, and he looked at the scroll and he said, “It’s like a 16th, 17th century one.”

Nehemia: Oh, wow. Okay, so, I don’t know about this scroll in the Ben Ezra Synagogue…

Ben: Yeah, I don’t know if it’s still there, but…

Nehemia: That’s really interesting. So, I just heard last week there’s a Torah scroll in Germany in a place called Kassel, and it has an inscription there, and I don’t remember if it’s Latin or German, and it says, that “this was written before the birth of Christ, although we’re not sure how many centuries.”

Ben: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: And it’s like 14th century or something, right? That’s interesting; this is the kind of story that Jews would tell, or maybe Christians would tell as well, about these Torah scrolls. That’s really interesting.

Ben: Yeah. I mean, Torah scrolls are impressive objects, and so, when you see one, you sort of… I can imagine they accrue legends around.

Nehemia: Well, so the Karaites in Israel in one of the synagogues have a Torah scroll which they believed was an ancient Torah scroll, a thousand or more years old, I don’t remember the exact legend. And so, I got some photos of it and sent them to some people who know Torah scrolls, about dating them. I want to say it was like a 19th century Syrian scroll or something like that. But it’s a much better story to say it’s a thousand years old. And look, it was old, right, but 19th century isn’t really that old. That means it… this legend couldn’t be that old. This is a legend probably from the last generation or two. Or they’re like, “Oh, this is a really old scroll,” and then they project it back further in time. It shows you how quickly these legends can develop.

Ben: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you can see that. And maybe over time the scroll changes, and each time it gets a new… as they throw away the old scroll, this one is the new one, but this one is old.

Nehemia: Or “this is the old one we don’t use”, and then they start to spin stories about when it’s from…

Ben: Yeah. And obviously, I think… the Ezra Scroll in the Ezra Synagogue, Ben Ezra becomes associated with Ezra the Scribe.

Nehemia: Ezra the Scribe, okay, that makes sense.

Ben: But in fact, that name must have been given to it by some Ottoman guy who gave money to rebuild the synagogue, probably.

Nehemia: Somebody named Ezra.

Ben: Yeah, it’s probably some donor, some rich donor.

Nehemia: So, the theory with the Bologna Scroll is that when they gave this… because the Jews gave it to the Christians to actually the… or was it the French? No, the Dominicans, they gave it in 1304, in southern France. And the theory is that they explained… the Jews probably explained something like, “This is the original format that the Torah was written in by Ezra according to rules that Ezra established,” and then that kind of got misconstrued and misunderstood to, “This was the scroll that Ezra himself wrote.”

Ben: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Or maybe they just made it up. Who knows?

Ben: That’s it. That’s the problem. Yeah. And the name Ezra always gets sort of… over time, everyone always associates the name Ezra with the Ezra.

Nehemia: Well, in the Talmud, we have the Sifrei Ha’azara, the Temple Courtyard Manuscripts of the Torah, and that’s corrupted in some manuscripts to the Scrolls of Ezra.

Ben: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: As if Ezra himself wrote them.

Ben: Yeah. Yeah. So, we had a teacher of Hebrew here, so Rabbinics.

Nehemia: What does that mean, Rabbinics, for the audience who may not know?

Ben: Well, this means teaching everything, you know, after the Hebrew Bible, really.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: The idea being that, so the Mishnah and so on, they are important for understanding the context in which Jesus arose. That’s it. So, it’s the Second Temple period, that kind of thing.

Nehemia: So, they had that concept even back then. Because I’ll often hear that this is something that was kind of revolutionized by David Flusser, that up until then Christians didn’t really look to the Mishnah and the Talmud to understand the life of Jesus…

Ben: Well…

Nehemia: But it sounds like they had some notion of this even back then.

Ben: Well, I think this possibly, what you really do see… So, these were lone Jewish scholars in a Christian university, right? Solomon Schiller-Szinessy, in those days… so his salary, I think, was paid by the Montefiore family, not by the university, but he taught here. And when Schiller-Szinessy died in, I think, 1890, Schechter took over, I think in 1890. I think his salary was also still mostly paid by the Montefiore family. So, they were kind of like, sort of… they did important work, but you get the feeling they weren’t exactly welcoming, Cambridge. It wasn’t like… they weren’t rolling out the red carpet for Jews in the University of Cambridge, which was still… I mean, it’s a conservative organization even today, but in those days, they’d only just relatively recently allowed fellows, teachers, in the university, to marry, because until that point they had to be bachelors.

Nehemia: Really?

Ben: Yeah. Yeah. Like the old monastic principles.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And that had changed in the 19th century.

Nehemia: So, Henry can get a divorce, but the professors at Cambridge can’t get married.

Ben: No, no. Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: [Laughter]

Ben: No, no, not at all. Anyway, so Solomon Schiller-Szinessy, when he got the job here originally… Cambridge is sort of a democracy in that everyone has a vote in the Senate.

Nehemia: Really?

Ben: All the permanent staff have a vote in the Senate. And the account of the vote for Schiller-Szinessy is that he was much opposed because he was a Jew.

Nehemia: Wow. Like, openly they didn’t have a problem saying that.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: It reminds me of… and I don’t know if this is apocryphal or not, but there’s a story about Benjamin Disraeli, who later became the prime minister. I think the first and only Jewish prime minister of the United Kingdom. I was going to say England, but I’m not sure that’s accurate. And so there was a debate in one of the House of Lords, or whatever it was, and… sorry, I’m American. I don’t know… one of the houses of your parliament, and they called him a barbaric Jew or something to that effect. And he responded famously, perhaps apocryphally, “When my ancestors ruled the world, your ancestors were running around painted blue.”

Ben: Yeah, yeah! So, yeah, it’s true.

Nehemia: And Disraeli was actually a Christian. He was a very devout evangelical Christian. He had converted, but still he was a barbaric Jew to his opponents.

Ben: Yeah. Yeah. He was also a great novelist. The idea of him being a barbarian…

Nehemia: Was he?

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: I didn’t know that.

Ben: I don’t know, possibly the only prime… No, no, there’s been other prime ministers who’ve written… oh, Boris Johnson. He wrote a novel.

Nehemia: Did he?

Ben: All right. Sorry. No. Anyway, let’s move on from that.

Nehemia: All right.

Ben: So, when Schiller-Szinessy started teaching here, he definitely brought a different side to the study of Hebrew. So, he exposed scholars who previously had studied Hebrew, essentially studying the Hebrew Bible, to the range of Jewish commentators on the Bible.

Nehemia: Mmm.

Ben: And you can see this by the time that Schechter is here, one of Schechter’s friends is Charles Taylor, who becomes the master of Saint John’s College. Cambridge is a collegiate university, lots of these old, again, kind of almost monastic houses, colleges.

Nehemia: So, unlike in the United States, here you have a university and there’s a bunch of colleges that make up the university.

Ben: That make up the university, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: And each one of those is pretty much independent or autonomous.

Ben: Yeah, they’re all independent financial institutions. They’re all charities.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: They’ve all got their different customs. They’ve all got different ages. The oldest is Peterhouse, which dates back to 1284 or something like that. I don’t know. But a lot of the oldest colleges have been lost and amalgamated into new ones, because they were… that sort of religious orders are now disappeared and things…

Nehemia: And something that really surprised me is, you could be on staff here at the university, but you don’t have privileges at one of the particular colleges because you’re not a fellow of that college. Meaning, like, I encountered that with one of the people who works with you, that we tried to go to this particular library, and they said, “Oh, well, who are you? You’re not a fellow here at this…”

Ben: Yeah. So, Cambridge colleges are…

Nehemia: I’m like, what?

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: And I’m like, “Okay, I understand that for me.” And it was actually easier for me to get in than it was for her.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: Which, like, that’s crazy!

Ben: Yeah, yeah. Cambridge colleges are a bit… they’re very old fashioned. Not as bad as Oxford, but they’re very old fashioned. I mean, you’ve seen the college porters, the guys who control the access to and from; they often wear bowler hats.

Nehemia: Yeah, and they’re not actually porters; they don’t carry your bags for you.

Ben: Oh, God, no!

Nehemia: So, what does “porter” mean, then? Is that what it originally meant?

Ben: Yeah, a porter. I don’t know. No, porter is something to do with… isn’t it to do with doors?

Nehemia: I don’t know.

Ben: Isn’t it like guarding the door? Port?

Nehemia: From the port? That makes sense.

Ben: Yeah, I think so. But anyway, I’m…

Nehemia: So, whenever I’m here, I stay usually at one of what we call dormitories. What do you call it, accommodations or something? Like where the students sleep.

Ben: Yeah. College accommodation, college rooms.

Nehemia: College rooms, okay. I call them dormitories in America. And then you check in with the porters’ lodge.

Ben: Yes.

Nehemia: And you’re always constantly dealing with the porters’ lodge. Yeah, it’s very old fashioned. And they do wear the bowler hats, that’s right.

Ben: They do. And some of them are rude because that is the history of their position in that college. So, Trinity porters are famously very rude because they have always been rude. And so, every new Trinity porter who starts work there knows that he has to be rude.

Nehemia: So, I can say from my experience, I’ve never had a negative experience with them. They’ve always been very polite to me, but I never stayed at Trinity College, so I don’t know.

Ben: Yeah, and maybe it’s changing, but that used to be the Cambridge thing.

Nehemia: And maybe it’s the renting. So, what I do usually is I’ll go between terms when the students aren’t there, and so I can sleep in one of the dorms. They’re basically like a hotel, but it’s like four minutes from this library, so it’s amazing.

Ben: Yeah, fantastic.

Nehemia: But no, they’ve always been really polite to me, really nice to me. It is kind of strange; I’m a grown man sleeping in a dorm room, but it’s better than staying somewhere that’s 30 minutes away, so I appreciate it.

Ben: Yeah, okay. Well, my understanding is that… the scholar of Rabbinic texts, Jacob Neusner…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Ben: A famously productive scholar, that he once came to give a lecture and he stayed in a college room. And I think I got this story from my predecessor, Stefan Reif, which means it must be true. Is that Neusner arrived, and the porter was rude to him, so he picked up his suitcase and left without ever giving the lecture.

Nehemia: Wow.

Ben: That sounds like a real… that sounds like a true Cambridge story to me.

Nehemia: Okay. All right, but I’m sure that was quite a few decades ago. And…

Ben: Yeah, that was some time ago.

Nehemia: And now you can do a bad review on universityrooms.com if they do that, so maybe they’re more careful.

Ben: Yeah, there you go. That’s right, that’s right. Yeah, no, TripAdvisor has probably changed everything.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, anyway, one of Schechter’s friends, he mentored in Jewish texts, following in the footsteps of Schiller-Szinessy. It was Charles Taylor who was master of Saint John’s College, became master of Saint John’s College. He was a mathematician.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Ben: He wrote about maths, cones or something. He did… I don’t know. Anyway, but he was far more interested in God because he was a devout Christian like many of them in the university in those days. And he had taken instruction from Schiller-Szinessy and from Schechter, and he wrote a commentary on Pirkei Avot, on a tractate in the Mishnah.

Nehemia: Ethics of our Fathers, it’s usually called in American English.

Ben: And that commentary is surprising for the number of Jewish sources which it uses.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: Which would be unheard of for a Christian scholar to do that. But the fact is, he’d been exposed by Schiller-Szinessy and Schechter to all the Jewish sources, and that commentary, I think, is still regarded today as the best commentary on Pirkei Avot written by a Christian mathematician.

Nehemia: So, that’s really interesting… [Laughter] Well, how many have been written by Christian mathematicians, to be fair? So, it’s really interesting… so, you do have this phenomenon that some of these Christian Hebraists, they would open up some Jewish text, and it would be like they were discovering it for the first time, like no one had ever read it or commented on it. And here you’re saying he’s within this whole internal Jewish dialogue of, “What does this passage mean? And how do we understand it? And what are the parallels?” And he’s drawing on all that. That’s really interesting.

Ben: And if you look at the college libraries… So, we’re in the university library, which is the main library of the university and has an official role in our guarding the intellectual knowledge of the nation as well, because we’re a copyright library. You get we get a copy of every book published in the UK.

Nehemia: Wait, so there’s multiple libraries like that in the UK?

Ben: Yeah, it’s about…

Nehemia: Because in the US there’s only the Library of Congress.

Ben: No, no. So, there’s Edinburgh, there’s us, there’s Oxford and Dublin. So, it goes across to the former member of…

Nehemia: Dublin in Ireland. So, in the US you publish a book, and you have to send two copies to the Library of Congress. Israel has a very similar law. What’s the rule here in the UK? Do you send it to each of those libraries? Or do you send it to one of those libraries?

Ben: There is an office in London that in the old days, when it used to be physical copies, used to collect them, and then I think it was up to the libraries to put in a claim.

Ben: Oh, okay.

Ben: Never having dealt with that side of libraries, so I can’t be sure that what I’m saying is true at all. But now it’s electronic deposit.

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Ben: So, many of them, we just get electronically.

Nehemia: Okay. As far as I know, if you print a book in the US today, you still have to send two copies to the Library of Congress. Now, whether they keep those or not, because they couldn’t possibly have enough room for every book that’s published. And maybe some people don’t do it, but big publishing houses definitely still do it.

Ben: Yeah, we do it. We do it, and the great thing is that we get books that are withdrawn subsequently.

Nehemia: Oh, really?

Ben: So, we have copies of books that are effectively forbidden…

Nehemia: Wow!

Ben: And we have to put them in a special collection which is known as the Ark Collection.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: So, things like the first edition of Ulysses and so on, that was banned for a while. A recent publication by the Museum of the Bible that was withdrawn by its publisher…

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: Has also now had to go into the Ark Collection.

Nehemia: So, is this accessible, things in the Ark Collection? or is it…

Ben: I’m not too sure how you get to see something. I think everyone thought that we had like this vast store of pornography because we get everything and we lock it away, when in actual fact, the books that we lock away are the ones that people steal or the ones that the publishers have withdrawn.

Nehemia: What do you mean they steal?

Ben: Some books are very popular to steal.

Nehemia: Oh, you mean readers might steal them?

Ben: Yes. Yeah, yeah. So, like, first edition Harry Potter is worth a lot of money.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And we’ve got first editions of every book, you know.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Ben: And there’s… yeah, there’s all sorts of weird things that get stolen. We also have pornography locked away, because I found that the other day.

Nehemia: [Laughter] Really?

Ben: The other day somebody told me they found a bunch of publications by our unit, the Genizah unit, in the 1970’s. They published these big catalogues, and they found a whole store of them unsold downstairs. And I had to go and get a special key to access them, because they were right next to all the pornographic magazines.

Nehemia: [Laughter] That were also deposited as part of the copyright. That’s funny.

Ben: Yeah. And they’re locked away so librarians can’t go and have a look at them. You have to get a key from a supervisor.

Nehemia: Wow, that’s… in some ways that’s like very quaint because, like, I mean… yeah, that’s interesting. Okay, all right, let’s move on!

Ben: Anyway. So, Solomon Schechter…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Ben: You know, was the sort of pointy tip of Cambridge’s long interest in Jewish studies and in Hebrew in particular. But Cambridge did have a very long interest in Hebrew. We’ve had a professor of Hebrew since 16th century. We’ve been collecting Hebrew manuscripts since the 16th century, and every college library has a collection of Hebrew books, some of them very old, from the early days of printing, showing that the people who worked in Cambridge were engaging with Jewish scholarship, engaging with Jewish texts, engaging with Jewish ideas throughout. And much of this was the Reformation, the interest in Judaism and the Hebrew Bible at that stage, but all through up to the present day. But Schechter and Schiller-Szinessy, his predecessors, were new, because it wasn’t just Jewish books; these were actually Jews in the university who were teaching, which was very unusual.

Nehemia: And they were Jews who hadn’t converted to Christianity, who were still within the Jewish milieu.

Ben: Exactly. So, both of them were still very much in the Jewish milieu, especially… I mean, well, both of them, but especially Schechter, who went on to America to save Conservative Judaism in America, was his job.

Nehemia: So, just let’s sidetrack for a minute, which I love doing. So, you mentioned all these manuscripts that they’re collecting for centuries before Schiller-Szinessy and before Solomon Schechter. So, you have a cache of manuscripts here which were brought over from India by this priest named Buchanan, and they include things like a Torah scroll from India. They include a Hebrew translation of the New Testament, or let’s be more neutral, a Hebrew version of the New Testament, which presumably is a translation. I think we even today… well, there’s a theory today of who translated it. It was this Jewish convert to Christianity in the 17th century in Amsterdam who then went to India and worked among the Indian Jews, and he apparently is, according to some scholars, he’s the one who translated it. You have the words of Gad the Seer.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: Which is an incredible story in itself.

Ben: Yeah, yeah, a really odd manuscript that just pops up here and nowhere else. A unique text.

Nehemia: Yeah. Well, there’s a debate now in Israel between two scholars. One is the grandson of the founder of Bar-Ilan University, whose name is Meir Bar Ilan.

Ben: Meir Bar Ilan.

Nehemia: And he claims that’s a copy of an earlier work that was brought from Yemen, which goes back to the Second Temple period, and it was something like the Book of Jubilees, meaning it was one of these pseudepigraphal works, attributed to Gad the Seer. The other opinion, who is the critique… I forget his name, Hillel something, of Bar-Ilan, he says, “No, no, no. This was translated by the same guy who translated the New Testament, this 17th century Jew who converted to Christianity.” And he also apparently translated, this same 17th century Jewish convert to Christianity also translated the Quran into Hebrew, which is now in the Library of Congress. So, makes sense… and I’ve seen some of the evidence, like, it’s frankly really bad Hebrew, although really bad Hebrew could just be Hebrew from the Second Temple period that I’m not familiar with. Right?

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, how do you know, sometimes? But apparently, he’s also the one who translated the Quran and the New Testament and wrote the words of Gad the Seer. That’s the claim of the opponents of Bar Ilan.

Ben: Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. So, yeah, we got the Buchanan manuscripts just sort of by chance.

Nehemia: So, that’s amazing. So, what do you know about that that you can tell us? Like, what’s the back story? Because I don’t know… I just know Buchanan brought these manuscripts from India.

Ben: I don’t know enough about it. I know that they were already here when Schechter was here because Schechter…

Nehemia: Yeah, he was like 1802, Buchanan. He came back from India.

Ben: Yeah, he catalogued… Schechter catalogued them, and he was… Schechter was super skeptical about the claims for the antiquity of Gad the Seer and so on. He sees Kabbalah in some of the writing. He can see that it can’t be earlier than 16th century.

Nehemia: Yeah. So, for the Hebrew New Testament, from what I’ve looked at it, for example, in Acts chapter 2, where they talk about Shavuot, the word there is pentecosta. So, that would suggest it was translated from a European language, because otherwise, why not just say Shavuot?

Ben: No, it’s a good collection. We’ve got these copper plates as well that are…

Nehemia: Oh, tell us about the copper plates!

Ben: They are records of… they are sort of legal deeds of rights given to the Jews, and they are in sort of Malayalam and various…

Nehemia: Is that in India?

Ben: Yeah. The language.

Nehemia: Oh! The language, okay.

Ben: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but they have some Hebrew names on them…

Nehemia: Wait, and that’s part of the Buchanan Collection?

Ben: The Buchanan Collection, yeah.

Nehemia: Copper plates?

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: Wow.

Ben: The thing is, and these were originally in the synagogues and in the places he went to in India, but he made copies of them. So, these are copper plates produced by Indian artisans based on the original copper plates.

Nehemia: Okay, so these are made under the auspices of Buchanan.

Ben: Yeah, and I think people haven’t realized that. Some people thought he carried away the originals, but in fact, the originals, I think, have now been lost. But these are copies, and it’s just sort of odd…

Nehemia: And when are these from, do we know?

Ben: Some of the deeds are supposedly quite ancient, but I don’t know enough about them. And since these are copies of… they’re not entirely reliable, the copies, because they were hand produced in India in the 19th century.

Nehemia: Okay, so you know what this evokes for me? Wow, and this is the early… so, like, around 1802. I think he made several trips to India, because there are different dates on some of the different manuscripts, 1802 and a little bit later. But what this immediately makes me think about is the gold plates of the Book of Mormon, because I’ve studied quite a bit about Mormonism, and I don’t remember anybody ever mentioning this. It would be a beautiful parallel to bring. I once asked a scholar from BYU, “Why are Mormons so interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls?” And he said, “It makes…” and look, this was just his personal opinion, I guess. He said, “For me, it makes the story of the gold plates more plausible, because here you have ancient documents that have survived, and then you have, of course, we have the Copper Scroll.”

Ben: The Copper Scroll, yeah.

Nehemia: Which they love, because, okay, it’s written on metal, and it survived. It’s not gold. So, I thought that was really interesting when he explained that to me, and then I said to him, like, I mean, “Do you really believe that these gold plates were written by an ancient American Indian? And you don’t have them, you’ve never seen them?” He said, “Well, you’ve never seen the Ten Commandments and the original tablets.” I’m like, “Well, that’s a good point. Okay. But yeah, it’s an interesting point. Fair enough.”

Ben: Okay. Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Anyway, so wow. So, you have copies of copper plates from India. Tell us about what… we’re going to get back to Solomon Schechter, because that’s where we want to get to, but the Nash Papyrus, that’s also here, isn’t it?

Ben: Yeah, and that arrived probably… we got that at the beginning of the 20th century, I think. So 1902, ‘03, ’04, something like that. And so, it’s called the Nash Papyrus because it was the Reverend Nash who gave it to us…

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And he acquired it from a bookseller in Egypt, I think in the Faiyum in Egypt. So, down the Nile a bit. And it is a very small item. It’s a strip of papyrus about, I don’t know, six inches or less, maybe. And on it, in what we now regard as a Herodian style of script, it has the Shema and the Ten Commandments.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And when that was discovered, it was the earliest piece of the biblical text. It’s in an early hand from about the 2nd century BCE.

Nehemia: Wow, that’s amazing! So, that really… so, until the Dead Sea Scrolls, that was the oldest known…

Ben: Yeah, until 1947, that was the oldest piece of the biblical text that had been discovered. Now, since then, you’ve got the Dead Sea Scrolls, plus you’ve got the silver whatevers from…

Nehemia: Yeah, from Ketef Hinnom in Jerusalem, the Silver Scrolls.

Ben: Yeah, but this was… in character it’s very like the Dead Sea Scrolls, but it is not a Dead Sea Scroll. It was probably written in Egypt. It’s on papyrus…

Nehemia: And is it an amulet of some kind? Is it a mezuzah, tefillin? That’s what it sounds like.

Ben: No, nobody knows. Yeah, the size and shape of it suggests that it was of an amuletic property, so that it was to be rolled up and put in something, you know…

Nehemia: Right. Either for some kind of religious ritual, or maybe just for protection or…

Ben: Yeah, because these are sort of fundamental parts of the Jewish religion.

Nehemia: Right.

Ben: The Shema and the Ten Commandments.

Nehemia: Right.

Ben: What’s interesting about it, apart from that it is genuinely very old, and it was dated to the 2nd century BCE, I think by Albright or someone quite early on, or various people worked on it…

Nehemia: So, now you’re making me suspicious. I want to do carbon-14 on it.

Ben: It’s too small.

Nehemia: That’s a problem if it’s too small. Okay.

Ben: Yeah, we can’t afford to lose it. Plus, over the years, it’s been… it’s not been well-handled. It’s sort of been backed onto cardboard.

Nehemia: Oh, then you can’t…

Ben: Not by us. And then, it appears to be painted over with some kind of varnish, or something was put on it quite early on as well. Again, not by us. And it’s very fragile…

Nehemia: That’s probably because the ink was flaking, and that would protect the ink. But now you can’t really carbon-14 test it because you’re getting different layers of different material.

Ben: No. I don’t know. You’d have to strip the layers off and pull a bit out of the middle…

Nehemia: Yeah, we’re not going to do that, probably.

Ben: But the thing is, it was dated to the 2nd century BCE by the early scholars. So, Burkitt published it, various others worked on it… and there was some skepticism, but generally consensus was around 2nd to the 1st century CE. And then when the Dead Sea Scrolls came along, lo and behold, it is a pretty good match to the handwriting of that period, of the earlier scrolls.

Nehemia: So, you have some incredible treasures in this library, and we’re going to get to the most important treasure of all, which is the… well, maybe it’s not the most important treasure, but it’s the treasure that you’re focused on, which is the Cairo Genizah Collection. Arguably, it is the most important. I guess it depends what your perspective is. Like, some people might say Codex Bezae, which is also here. That’s one of the key manuscripts of the New Testament… is here in the library.

Ben: Yeah, one of the outliers, because it represents a slightly… considerable differences from the kind of received text.

Nehemia: But it’s one of like the five great uncials.

Ben: Yes. And it was deliberately… it was ganeezered in Cambridge. No, it’s absolutely true. So, Theodore Beza, who gave it to the university… I think we still have the… do we still have the letter that he sent with it? I think we do. He sent it to Cambridge. One, to sort of preserve it, but also two, to keep it out of the way so that people… because it was sufficiently divergent from the standard text of the New Testament that it’s…

Nehemia: Wow.

Ben: …better if, you know, people don’t look at it that much.

Nehemia: That’s interesting. So, I wonder to what extent that’s still the case. Meaning, the text of the New Testament in the Greek has, now… we have sort of a critical edition with Nestle-Aland, I think we’re at 28. So, I wonder how different it is today.

Ben: I think it’s less different today, and we can see where it fits into the different… like the Alexandrian stream and all that. We can see where it fits within those streams.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: It’s still a very precious manuscript, and it’s one that, again, we don’t show very often because it’s a beautiful manuscript with parchment so thin that it’s sort of translucent. But it’s very fragile. So, like the Nash Papyrus, we tend not to show that, although it is among our greatest treasures. So, yes. So, Cambridge has a pretty good record of biblical treasures. And also, we’ve got… so, in Jewish treasures. I mean, we’ve got a thousand Hebrew manuscripts of various kinds, codices, books…

Nehemia: Yeah, like one that is often like overlooked is Add. 1753… is one of the manuscripts that these great scholars of Masoretic studies, like Yeivin and Dotan…

Ben: Oh the… Yemenite one.

Nehemia: It’s a Yemenite one from the 16th century, but the claim is that it was copied either directly, or maybe several generations removed, from the Aleppo Codex, and it includes parts of the Aleppo Codex that are now missing.

Ben: Yes.

Nehemia: So, it’s one of the key manuscripts that when, like Breuer was comparing all the different manuscripts of the Tanakh, he considered this one of the key witnesses, like…

Ben: Yeah, yeah. I think that we should really digitize that manuscript. I don’t know why…

Nehemia: I photographed the whole thing, so I’m happy to share the images. But you can photograph it much better than I can with your sophisticated… well, really, it’s about the lighting, right? And you have to spend quite a bit of time to position it, but that absolutely needs to be digitized. It’s really an important manuscript.

Ben: Yeah, yeah. Yes, that’s true, and it’s a good example of how medieval manuscripts are important. It’s not just all about the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls will tell you a story about the Bible, but it’s actually… it’s a different story. It’s not the Urtext. You’re not searching for the best best edition of the final text for the Dead Sea Scrolls, because the Dead Sea Scrolls represent a text still in flux.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm. Well, in this case it’s a really late manuscript, but it may represent a textual tradition 700 years earlier.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: At least that’s what Breuer’s claim was. So, a lot of times we’ll say, “Oh, that’s a late manuscript. We can ignore that, it’s not important.” But sometimes the later texts preserve an earlier version of the text.

Ben: Yeah. And if we’ve decided the Aleppo Codex is the text that we want, then any witnesses to it are important because of the great loss that happened to the manuscript itself.

Nehemia: No, he was focusing on things like gayot, and that kind of obscure linguistic features. The problem with that is there was this claim by almost everybody who wrote a manuscript in Yemen that it was based on the Aleppo Codex. It’s kind of a formula that you spit out, because Maimonides gave the stamp to the Aleppo Codex.

Ben: That’s right, and they worshipped Maimonides…

Nehemia: And whatever Maimonides… well, he basically, as they saw it, at least, saved Yemenite Jewry from persecution.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, they became devotees of Maimonides, yeah. This has been an amazing conversation. Any last words you want to share about the Cairo Genizah, the future of the research…

Ben: Well, you know, the Cairo Genizah has been around a long time, 125 years in Cambridge. Genizah research, since the days especially of digitization, that’s the thing. And I know what a big fan you are of going around and photographing manuscripts, and in that you’re following in the footsteps of the Presbyterian sisters as well. And also, they’re the good ethical principles to that, so you’re not disturbing the original items, you’re not removing them from their rightful home. You’re just photographing and making them available.

Cambridge has always sought to make the collection available, because partly it’s aware of the fact that it’s slightly odd that the Cairo Genizah is here in Cambridge. Why isn’t it in Cairo? It’s just an accident of circumstances and fate that meant it got here. But had it not arrived here, would it be as important and well known as it is now? It’s unlikely, because it really did take someone like Solomon Schechter to show how important… If this had fallen into the hands of Neubauer in Oxford, it would probably still be moldering in a chest in Oxford, right? People wouldn’t have realized that.

So, the fact that it’s sat here for a long time, and it was neglected for many years, really, until the 1960’s, after Schechter’s time, and yet we’re still working on it. There’s still so much more to be done. And part of that is because it’s such a huge collection, but also the fashions, as I was saying, the fashions in scholarship changes. So, while you and I today are talking about the Bible, and I’ve always been very big about… because when I first took over the Genizah, no one was interested in the Bibles of the Cairo Genizah. Davis had done the catalogue, but even Yeivin is kind of sniffy about medieval Bibles that aren’t the Aleppo Codex and the big codices. He lumps all the Cairo Genizah fragments in his category of “most of them are too late to be interesting”. And by promoting the collection and having great scholars like Yosef Ofer come in and Mordechai Weintraub now, work that Kim Phillips has done, we can find Samuel Ben Jacob, the Scribe of Leningrad, in the Genizah. We can find the earliest Torah scrolls we have outside of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Cairo Genizah. And they’ve been under our noses this whole time!

Nehemia: Yeah.

Ben: It shows that it just takes a little bit of change in scholarly outlook, and we find all sorts of new stuff in the Genizah. So, it’s always going to be the collection that keeps on giving. Twenty years from now, we’re going to be looking for different things, and find all these things we never knew were there.

Nehemia: In 20 years from now, I’m going to be saying, I stared at that fragment and had no idea how important it was.

Ben: Yeah, exactly.

Nehemia: When somebody else discovers it’s important.

Ben: Exactly.

Nehemia: Thanks so much for joining us. This has been amazing conversation.

Ben: It’s a pleasure. Thank you very much.

Nehemia: Thank you.

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VERSES MENTIONED
Esther 3:9; 4:7

BOOKS MENTIONED
Jews in many lands : Adler, Elkan Nathan, 1861-1946

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OTHER LINKS
Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit | Cambridge University Library
Jewish Quarterly Review
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The post Hebrew Voices #189 – The Cairo Genizah: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #188, Writing a Torah Scroll: Part 1, Nehemia learns about an ancient Torah scroll from Yemen written by a woman, how modern scribes use archaeology to illustrate the scroll of Esther, and how the history of Egypt helps us understand what the Torah originally looked like when Moses wrote it.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: Wait a minute. You’re telling me there’s a Torah scroll written by Miriam of the Benayahu family, a woman scribe, that was used in Yemen, in the National Library of Israel. That’s incredible… Wait, so if there’s no colophon, how do they know she wrote it?

Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices! I’m Nehemia Gordon, and I’m here today with the female scribe, the soferet, Avielah Barclay. Shalom Avielah!

Avielah: Shalom, Nehemia.

Nehemia: So, you actually work as a scribe, which is somewhat unusual to be a woman who’s working as a scribe, but it’s becoming more common these days, isn’t it?

Avielah: It is becoming more common, yeah. We do have records of there being historical soferot, female scribes, that did ritual items like Torah scrolls and Tefillah.

Nehemia: I didn’t know about that. Tell me about that. What I did know about is there were female scribes who wrote regular manuscripts.

Avielah: Yeah.

Nehemia: Like there’s a famous one, I believe she’s from France or something, called Paula Ha’soferet, “Paula the Scribe.”

Avielah: Oh right, yeah.

Nehemia: I did a course at Oxford. And they brought out this manuscript, and it was like a commentary on the Talmud.

Avielah: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Some really obscure text.

Avielah: I’ve seen that. Really intense writing. It’s very consistent.

Nehemia: Well, it’s a text that the average male Jew would not understand.

Avielah: No.

Nehemia: Because it’s a very complicated subject matter.

Avielah: Yeah.

Nehemia: And there’s no way you can copy something like that unless you understand it. And her father was a scribe.

Avielah: Yeah.

Nehemia: And he trained her, and she wrote it.

Avielah: Yeah. That’s how a lot of historical soferot became soferot.

Nehemia: And soferim right? Their father trained them.

Avielah: Well yes, exactly. One good example is in Yemen. There was a whole family of scribes, the Benayahu family.

Nehemia: Okay, I know them! Meaning, I know the manuscripts written by the Benayahu family.

Avielah: Exactly. And it was a family that had been scribes for multiple generations.

Nehemia: Right.

Avielah: And there was a daughter named Miriam, and she was also taught to be a soferet just like her brothers were taught to be soferim.

Nehemia: Okay, wow.

Avielah: And she wrote colophons, and she wrote codices. But according to a couple of the book binders, and artists, and scribes, and people that I know in Jerusalem, she has a Torah scroll that’s in the Israel National Library.

Nehemia: Really?

Avielah: Yeah. And she lived in the 1500’s.

Nehemia: Wait a minute. You’re telling me there’s a Torah scroll written by Miriam of the Benayahu family, a woman scribe, that was used in Yemen, in the National Library of Israel. That’s incredible… Wait, so if there’s no colophon, how do they know she wrote it? From the handwriting, or…

Avielah: It was referenced in Even Sapir, which was a book… There was an Ashkenazi rabbi that decided he was going to leave Jerusalem and go collect money all over the world, all over the Jewish world, for the poor of Jerusalem, and he ended up in Yemen. And he wrote this whole book, and it’s a really interesting book. You should read it.

Nehemia: Yeah?

Avielah: It’s in English as well. So, he referenced it there, and there were also multiple… Like I said, I know people who’ve seen it, but I haven’t seen it myself.

Nehemia: So, he’s around at the time of Miriam the scribe. Is that what it is?

Avielah: No, that was later on.

Nehemia: Oh, it was later on. Okay.

Avielah: He was later on. I’m really sorry, off the top of my head I can’t remember the name of the rabbi, but it was…

Nehemia: Okay. Well, this was very common, that there were these emissaries that would go out from Jerusalem…

Avielah: Yes.

Nehemia: And they would collect money on behalf of the Jews of Israel.

Avielah: I think that’s really brave. And also, at the time, you’d literally be walking, you’re traveling around with loads of cash on you. How is that safe? When you consider…

Nehemia: Well, traveling without the cash wasn’t safe.

Avielah: No, it probably wasn’t safe.

Nehemia: Traveling was so unsafe that there’s a traditional Jewish prayer, Tefilat Ha’derech.

Avielah: That’s right.

Nehemia: “The prayer of the traveling.” And I remember when I was a kid, and I was raised Orthodox, and we would recite this when we’d drive down to the Indiana Dunes. And my father would say, “Okay, we’ve got to recite Tefilat Ha’derech,” “The prayer for traveling.” And I’m like, “Armed robbers and bandits? What is this about? Why do we need to do this?” But you know what? There’s a lot of places in the world today that aren’t that safe to travel. And boy, back then, any kind of travel meant you were taking your life in your hands.

Avielah: You really were. You might not come home again.

Nehemia: So, this guy comes from Jerusalem, and he arrives in Yemen, and he finds out there’s a Torah scroll written by Miriam the scribe. I’ve got to hunt this down now and find out what is this Torah scroll…

Avielah: Good! Because if I have got any incorrect information from any of my sources, then obviously that would need to be corrected.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Avielah: This is exciting to me. But she’s not even the first one, because there have been female scribes all over the place. There’s a long list of them, a lot of Italian female scribes, mostly writing Megillot Esther as far as we know, and decorating them of course, because it’s Italy, so you have to decorate things.

Nehemia: And you’re allowed to decorate a Scroll of Esther, but you’re not allowed to decorate a Torah scroll, right?

Avielah: That’s correct, yeah.

Nehemia: Unless you call the Sefer Tagin, that we were talking about, decoration.

Avielah: That’s not the same as decoration. I’m talking about illustration.

Nehemia: Oh, like actual drawings. Yeah.

Avielah: Yeah, drawings or even…

Nehemia: And is that kosher to read from in a synagogue, if it has those drawings?

Avielah: Oh yeah, a lot of Megillot Esther are… it depends on how much money the future owner wants to spend on it, basically.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avielah: But yeah, they’re absolutely kosher to read from. You can yotzei the entire community. The whole community is included. Whoever hears it read will be included in the mitzvah, in the commandments.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avielah: They would have completed their mitzvah.

Nehemia: So, have you done Esther scrolls where they were decorated as well?

Avielah: Yes, I’ve done multiple ones of those. Probably the most elaborate one I’ve ever done… I did one, actually, just a few years ago for Rabba Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz, Dr. Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz, who also went through the Maharat program. So, she’s essentially an Orthodox rabbi as well.

Nehemia: I don’t know what that is.

Avielah: The Maharat program?

Nehemia: What’s that?

Avielah: It’s essentially an Orthodox Rabbinical program for women.

Nehemia: Really?

Avielah: Yeah, it’s out of HIR.

Nehemia: Which is? Hebrew… what is HIR?

Avielah: The Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, Rabbi Avi Weiss, and… there’s all kinds of names that are not coming to me now. And I’m going to say the wrong thing now, and then people write to you and me and say, “That’s not true!” Because I can’t remember!

Nehemia: I get that all the time!

Avielah: Yeah, but I don’t like it. I don’t want to get it! I want to be really responsible about what I’m saying!

Nehemia: I also do hundreds of hours, probably a year, of recordings. And I’ll say, “As it says in Psalm 22,” and someone will write in, “Nehemia, that liar. He’s trying to deceive people! It’s not Psalm 82, it’s Psalms 28!” And I had switched the numbers or something.

Avielah: Yeah, yeah. But they won’t be nice about you just making a mistake.

Nehemia: No.

Avielah: Transposing numbers, right?

Nehemia: No, of course, I did that so that people would be deceived. Because it couldn’t be that I possibly just made a mistake.

Avielah: No, exactly, that’s impossible! Kind of like a scribal error.

Nehemia: Right. Well, it’s interesting. I forget what it was, but there was something where we were exchanging text messages to organize this, and you had a scribal error. I forget what it was, or maybe I did, where we transposed the numbers of the time or something. I don’t remember what it was. And I was like, “Here’s a scribal error!” A modern scribal error in WhatsApp!

Avielah: Exactly.

Nehemia: So, wait, there’s a Rabbinical training program for women?

Avielah: Yeah.

Nehemia: In Orthodox Judaism?

Avielah: Yeah.

Nehemia: Is that accepted by most Orthodox Jews, or…?

Avielah: It’s an ongoing conversation.

Nehemia: Okay. That sounds like a different podcast there!

Avielah: Yes, it does, and better, you should talk to someone who’s actually been through the program. And there are many women in the United States, Britain, Israel, and actually, all over the world, because… I think the first graduate of the program, Rav Sara Hurwitz, was I think about 15 years ago. There’s been quite a few intakes since then.

Nehemia: Oh wow, okay. Alright, so you’ve done scrolls of Esther that are decorated.

Avielah: Yeah.

Nehemia: Because you also do art. Tell us about your art.

Avielah: Yeah, so the most elaborate one I did, actually, I did in between all of the columns, and the beginning and the end, the chelek, the pieces of parchment at the beginning and at the end, I did everything based on the archeological findings in the Louvre and here in the British Museum that they had taken from the Palace at Shushan, The Palace of Susa.

Nehemia: Wow!

Avielah: Because that’s the palace where it…

Nehemia: That’s cool!

Avielah: …was supposed to have happened, the story of Esther.

Nehemia: Right.

Avielah: Shushan Ha’bira, “the city of Susa,” Shushan. So, at the beginning, I have Achashverosh, the king, and I’ve got some attendant boys behind him with the feather fans and everything. And it was all based on actual statues and bas-reliefs, and things like that.

Nehemia: Oh, wow!

Avielah: And the whole thing, in between the columns and all along the top and bottom, are all the tiles. So, I used gouache…

Nehemia: What’s that?

Avielah: …which is a traditional water-based paint that’s basically pigment and binder. And that’s very common to be used in manuscripts, gouache. From hundreds of years ago they were using gouache, and the color stays the same.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avielah: And so, I did that. And I copied all the tile designs that they found in Shushan.

Nehemia: Wow!

Avielah: And I did color matching and everything, so it was in this particular color palette.

Nehemia: Oh, that’s cool!

Avielah: With the kind of technology they had for firing tiles, and glazes, and things like that at the time, so I did that. And then at the end, I had Esther and Mordechai in the garden reclining and having a little libation under the stars and everything.

Nehemia: Wow.

Avielah: And I obviously also did gold leaf. Yeah, it was all very Babylonian and all very period.

Nehemia: That’s pretty cool.

Avielah: It’s actually in Ontario now. A family sponsored that, and now it’s in a synagogue in Ontario.

Nehemia: That’s pretty cool.

Avielah: Yeah, it was fun. It took a long time, though.

Nehemia: How long does it take you to write a Scroll of Esther? And then how long in addition to that to decorate it?

Avielah: Well, it depends on the decorations. The one I wrote for Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz has a different kind of crown at the top of each of the columns, with the exception of the aseret bnei Haman, “the ten sons of Haman” in the story, because they’re all the baddies. Here, I’ll just find, here we go.

Nehemia: It has a special layout.

Avielah: It has a special layout, as you can see there. So, I didn’t put a crown up there, I put it at the top of every other column.

Nehemia: What do you mean a crown?

Avielah: Oh, I literally illustrated a crown.

Nehemia: Like a crown worn on the head?

Avielah: Yes!

Nehemia: Not like crowns like we were talking about in letters, like tagin?

Avielah: Not tagin, it’s more like an aterah, “a crown”. But the crowns were all based, again, on period Achaemenid Persian Empire crowns.

Nehemia: Oh, cool.

Avielah: So, their theme tended to be, like, chrysanthemums and daisies and different kinds of flowers. And particular shapes, like these architectural… And they were worn by kings and queens and princes and different idols and things like that. People who, in Zoroastrian religion, were maybe considered gods and goddesses, or like in the previous pagan religion. So, I used all of those, because that’s the time period that it occurred in.

Nehemia: Right.

Avielah: And I thought putting a European crown there would be a bit like, “Uh…”

Nehemia: That’s interesting. A lot of the scrolls of Esther I’ve seen from… I don’t know if they’re technically from the Middle Ages, because they might be 16th or 17th century. But they’re the Italian ones with all the decorations, and you see these European courtiers. And you’re like, “Wait a minute. That guy could be in a Shakespeare play. That doesn’t look like somebody from the time of Haman and Esther.”

Avielah: Right, but they had no way of knowing though, did they?

Nehemia: Right, right.

Avielah: Because they didn’t have the archeological evidence that we have now.

Nehemia: That’s so cool. So, you’ve taken the fruits of this historical investigation that’s taken place over the last few centuries and put it into a modern Jewish ritual artifact. That’s incredible! That’s really cool!

Avielah: What can I say? I love my research.

Nehemia: That’s very cool!

Avielah: I love my research!

Nehemia: That’s a very cool thing to do. Wow!

Avielah: So, that’s a simpler way of doing it, where you might just put one crown. Because that’s one of the traditional ways of illustrating it, to just put a crown or something like that that’s very simple. Or it can be full color and painted. Parchment is an amazing material. It can take a lot of art supplies, basically!

Nehemia: I saw a Scroll of Esther where every time the word Esther appeared, she had a crown. Meaning the word Esther had a crown on top of it.

Avielah: Nice, yeah.

Nehemia: Which, I’m like, “I didn’t know you’re allowed to do that.”

Avielah: I actually do a special thing with Vashti.

Nehemia: What do you do with Vashti?

Avielah: Well, there’s all kinds of different ways that, according to Sefer Tagin, you could write… There’s different kinds of crowns that you could write.

Nehemia: On Vashti.

Avielah: Onto the different letters of Vashti, different variations. Because I think Vashti gets demonized and bullied, but she knows who she is, and she stands up for herself. And I think she’s sometimes forgotten. In a lot of traditions, she’s sort of… “Hmm, Vashti. We didn’t like her anyway, so it doesn’t matter,” kind of thing. But I think she sets a very good example by saying, “No, I’m not going to be humiliated. I’m not going to have someone cross my boundaries like that.” So, I think she deserves to be recognized and decorated and admired for that as well. Just because she doesn’t end up being the heroine of the story…

Nehemia: Right.

Avielah: …and she’s not the savior of the Jewish people the way Esther is, she’s still done the right thing though, Vashti.

Nehemia: But even on the peshat level, the “plain level,” she’s not a bad character.

Avielah: No, not at all.

Nehemia: In other words, I think there’s this thought that making Vashti into a heroine is revisionism.

Avielah: Oh yeah, I don’t think she’s a heroine. I think she just stood up for herself and said no because it was an unreasonable request. It was humiliating.

Nehemia: Well, the question is, what exactly was the request? Meaning, tell… what was the request that was unreasonable?

Avielah: I feel much more comfortable when I can quote things, because if I paraphrase in this case, it could come out really wrong.

Nehemia: Okay, so, one interpretation of the story… Achashverosh, or Ahasuerus, or however it’s pronounced in English.

Avielah: I don’t bother pronouncing it in English.

Nehemia: Achashverosh is…

Avielah: Xerxes.

Nehemia: …he demands that she appear before him during his drunken stupor party, and one interpretation of that is he demands that she appear before all of his friends naked. And that certainly is an unreasonable request.

Avielah: It is.

Nehemia: And in that case…

Avielah: It doesn’t say “naked” in the scroll.

Nehemia: No, it doesn’t. I’m saying that’s one interpretation.

Avielah: Yes.

Nehemia: Meaning… the question is, just show up. What’s the problem? Your husband asked you to show up and show your beauty to his friends…

Avielah: Because they’re having a little locker room talk.

Nehemia: Okay, that’s not in the scroll either, right?

Avielah: No. But why show off what your wife looks like to a giant room full of drunken men? Is that really a good situation to put your wife into?

Nehemia: Yeah, that probably isn’t going to end well.

Avielah: Is that a room any woman wants to walk into?

Nehemia: Right, right.

Avielah: It doesn’t matter whether it’s nowadays or back then.

Nehemia: And there was definitely a theme in the scroll of Esther where this is one big drunken stupor. It’s such a big drunken stupor, he’s like, “I’m not even going to rule this kingdom. Who’s the highest bidder? I’ll just give him my signet ring.”

Avielah: Right.

Nehemia: And then he gives it to Haman.

Avielah: Yeah. Boo!

Nehemia: How would history have turned out differently if, in so many different periods, if alcohol wasn’t involved?

Avielah: It’s very funny how there’s so much drinking on almost every page.

Nehemia: It’s a central theme there.

Avielah: Yeah. And it goes on for a long period of time, actually. It’s not just a weekend. The story doesn’t take place over a week or two, it takes place over many months.

Nehemia: It’s an extended period.

Avielah: Yeah. Over a year.

Nehemia: And even at the plain level of the text, he sobers up the next day, and he’s like, “Oh, what did I do?”

Avielah: Yeah.

Nehemia: “I banished her.” Or in one interpretation, he executed her. But it doesn’t say that.

Avielah: It doesn’t say that either.

Nehemia: He just deposed her.

Avielah: Yeah.

Nehemia: And he sobered up and he’s like, “Oh, now what do I do?”

Avielah: Oops.

Nehemia: Yeah, exactly, so… it’s interesting. You were talking about female scribes, and you said there are other examples from history.

Avielah: Right, yeah. And also, there was a prince in Tawuk or Dakuk.

Nehemia: Where’s that?

Avielah: It’s in Persia. And he was always referred to as ben ha’soferet.

Nehemia: The “son of the female scribe”.

Avielah: Right.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avielah: So, nothing about his dad. They weren’t saying anything about his dad, they were just referring to that.

Nehemia: Okay, wow.

Avielah: And there was Rebbetzin Dulcea of Worms…

Nehemia: Tell me about that.

Avielah: …who was the wife of the rokeach, of Rav Eleazer of Worms.

Nehemia: Wow! The early 13th century.

Avielah: During Crusader times, because unfortunately she and two of her daughters were murdered by Crusaders. She used to sew the iriyot of the Sifrei Torah together.

Nehemia: The sheets, she would sew them together.

Avielah: The sheets together, she would sew them together, yeah.

Nehemia: That’s interesting.

Avielah: I don’t know if she did anything else, but that’s just an example of places… there’s many different places where it’ll say, “And don’t let a woman write this,” or, “Don’t let a woman sew that. And if she has, maybe unpick it and resew it.” And then another opinion will say, “Maybe not.” It’ll say something else.

Nehemia: So, this is really interesting. She sewed together the sheets of the Torah scroll. So, you know what it implies? That she was literate. Because how would you know which sheet to sew to which other sheet unless you read what it said?

Avielah: I suppose… in theory I suppose her husband could have said, “Can you sew this one to that one?” You could make that argument.

Nehemia: Yeah, it’s possible, but…

Avielah: But when you consider what a big rabbi he was, and the fact that his rulings influenced basically all of Ashkenazi Jewry, even until today, he’s a very important rabbi. And his wife was doing that.

Nehemia: He’s one of the key figures of medieval mysticism. He wrote a series of books, one of the more famous ones is Sodei Razaya, and that’s actually a collection of a bunch of works. It’s basically “The Secrets of the Mysteries”, or something like that, is the translation.

Yeah, so he is one of the key authors of medieval mysticism and all kinds of other works. And yeah, that’s interesting. I didn’t know. So, his wife sewed Torah scrolls together, the pieces of the scrolls. One of the things about the Torah scrolls is, there are catch words. So, in a codex, you’ll have a quire, which is basically a little notebook.

Avielah: Yeah.

Nehemia: And there will be the first word of the next quire. So, all you have to do is be able to read that word, not all of the context, to figure out what goes with what. Whereas in Torah scrolls, with the exception of the Bologna scroll, we don’t have catch words. And so, if you want to know which goes to which, you’ll have to like, “Read this verse… oh yeah, this lines up here.”

Avielah: And you’ve got your tikkun, obviously, to show you what goes with what.

Nehemia: Right. So, she could have been checking a tikkun. I suppose that’s possible.

Avielah: It’s possible.

Nehemia: Or other Torah scrolls.

Avielah: That was pre-printing press obviously, so it’s more likely back then that people were copying from other Torah scrolls.

Nehemia: No, no, but they had tikkuns. We have a tikkun from…

Avielah: Yeah, but they would have had to be handwritten.

Nehemia: For sure.

Avielah: Yeah.

Nehemia: We have a tikkun from, I believe it’s in Hamburg. And it is the exact layout of several Torah scrolls that we have that are today in Berlin.

Avielah: Yeah?

Nehemia: And it’s almost certain that either they were copies… well, it is certain, that they were either copied from that tikkun or they were both copied from a common source. That’s always the question.

Avielah: Right, yeah.

Nehemia: Whenever you have A and B, was A copied from B? Was B copied from A? Or were they both copied from C? That’s always the question. But there’s no question that this tikkun matches at least two Torah scrolls in the layout, meaning how each column begins.

Avielah: That’s really interesting. I did not know that. But then, that’s your field not mine.

Nehemia: So, we have tikkunei soferim that are handwritten.

Avielah: That’s one of the advantages of a codex, and that is one of the ways that it can be an improvement in technology.

Nehemia: How so?

Avielah: Well, it depends on what you’re using the words for. It depends on whether you’re traveling with it. It depends on whether you’re holding it in your hands when you’re reading it, or whether you’re putting it on the table to read it. It depends on whether it’s public or private.

The Torah scroll we have now, which is the five Books of Moses, used to be five separate books of Moses. And it used to be more democratized, in that people used to be able to potentially afford it, or write their own if they were literate enough, because they were smaller. And then it was only later on in Jewish history that the rabbis decided, “Oh no. We’re going to sew them all together and we’re going to have them in the synagogue, and then everyone will have to come there to hear it.” And it’s so big that your average person can’t afford it, and it’s so big that you generally can’t travel with it, again, because it’s handmade. You can make them quite small. There’s many small ones out there that literally the writing is like a Mezuzah; tiny, tiny, tiny.

Nehemia: I’ve seen ones where the writing’s much smaller than that.

Avielah: Smaller than that. Yeah, so have I. They are unusual but yes, they’re very easy to do hagbah.

Nehemia: Yeah! Well, that’s interesting. Hagbah is where you lift up the scroll in the synagogue.

Avielah: That’s right, and you show it to everyone. “This is the Torah.”

Nehemia: So, there’s a scroll in Berlin which I’ve been told… I haven’t lifted it up myself. I’ve seen it but I didn’t weigh it. I’m told it weighs 60 kilos, which is about 120 pounds. So, how on earth… it couldn’t have been one person, it had to have been at least two people, I would think, to lift that up.

Avielah: It’s kind of dangerous, though!

Nehemia: Yeah, you would think it would rip, because…

Avielah: Well, it depends on how much tension you put it under and how it’s sewn together…

Nehemia: You have to be really careful.

Avielah: Really careful.

Nehemia: Yeah. And Marc mentioned in the program we did together, a series of programs, that a lot of the scrolls he’s repaired are when someone did hagbah, and it ripped!

Avielah: Yeah, either a hagbah accident, or sometimes some synagogues for Simchat Torah will unroll… They’ll either be a Simchat Torah accident, potentially, where we take them all out and we do hakafot, we dance around the synagogue with them.

Nehemia: Right.

Avielah: And you can sometimes have an accident then, if you’re not careful. And also, sometimes some synagogues like to unroll the entire Sefer Torah all around the entire inside of the synagogue and have everyone hold onto it at the top and see the whole thing.

Nehemia: We have to talk about this. There was an incident…

Avielah: Of course there was!

Nehemia: It must have been about 10 years ago, where there was this Christian pastor who had had some kind of a scandal… I don’t even know the details. I was going to say I don’t remember the details…

Avielah: Let’s not gossip!

Nehemia: No, no, no, but here’s the part that’s important.

Avielah: Yeah?

Nehemia: When he came back out of exile, let’s call it that, he brought in a Messianic Jewish rabbi who took out a Torah scroll, unrolled it, and wrapped this Christian pastor in the Torah scroll. And this became an international scandal because they were touching the Torah scroll with their hands. You had people who were holding it, and it was this international scandal. It’s cultural appropriation, which I don’t entirely disagree with. It’s desecrating the Torah scroll, which I don’t entirely disagree with. But it’s something that Jews don’t do. And Jews do do that, that was just a lie.

Avielah: No. Jews don’t wrap another human being in the Torah scroll, though.

Nehemia: No, no, they don’t. But they do unravel an entire Torah scroll and they have people hold onto it and they have them touch it with their bare hands.

Avielah: They’re not supposed to do that.

Nehemia: But you just described how they’re holding it, right?

Avielah: So, this is only something that started happening with the baby boomer generation, with the Jewish Catalog generation and the Pnei Or Movement.

Nehemia: What’s the Jewish Catalog generation? I don’t know what that is.

Avielah: Oh, there’s the first, second, and third Jewish Catalog.

Nehemia: Never heard of it.

Avielah: They first started writing them, I believe, in 1968, 1970, something like that. It was basically Jews who are of the baby boomer generation who felt dissatisfied with… and they didn’t feel that they connected well with their parents’ Judaism.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avielah: And that’s fair. Every generation makes decisions like that for itself, right?

Nehemia: Yeah, sure.

Avielah: I’m a gen X’er. We did things differently too!

Nehemia: Okay.

Avielah: And now we have more generations who do things differently.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avielah: That’s just how it goes.

Nehemia: So, what was the catalog? I’m not familiar with that.

Avielah: The catalogs… well, they collected lots of different things and they illustrated it themselves and they wrote in it. There’s a bit on scribal arts in the first Jewish Catalog. There’s a bit on different creative ways of making different Jewish rituals meaningful, because a lot of people, if they had a very American identity and maybe they had become divorced from their tribal Jewish heritage and their religious affiliation and everything, then they didn’t necessarily find it meaningful. Because all that was left was the ritual and because the meaning hadn’t been passed down to everybody it was sort of hollow for them. So, they were trying to reclaim it.

As you know, a lot of people of that generation changed religion. And that’s the first generation, really, where it was becoming not unheard of for people to change religions, to convert to different religions. Now it’s very common. Yeah, so they wanted to reconnect with their Judaism. So, they did this, and it was amazing. So many people have benefited from the Jewish Catalogs. So many of them.

Nehemia: I have to learn more about this. I’ve literally never heard of it.

Avielah: They’re so good.

Nehemia: Are they books? What are they?

Avielah: Yeah, yeah, they’re books. They’re like this big, and when you see them, you’ll be like, “Oh yeah. That’s very late 60’s or early 70’s.”

Nehemia: It’s a catalog of what? Of practices?

Avielah: Just loads of things.

Nehemia: It’s not like the Sears catalogs. What is it?

Avielah: Every single catalog there will be like, “Let’s learn about this stuff and put that in.” And then everyone was like, “This is amazing! Let’s learn about more stuff and put that in!” And that’s why there’s three of them with an index and everything.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avielah: And they helped that generation, and subsequent generations, actually, because Jews reconnected with their Judaism and understand it better. And then it inspired so many people to learn more and reconnect. And if this was the beginning, the seeding of their reconnection, then they could find their own way.

Nehemia: Okay. And they described this unraveling of the Torah scroll?

Avielah: No. Not that I recall. I mean, there’s three catalogs. I can’t remember everything that’s in it.

Nehemia: Okay, but was your point…

Avielah: My point is that that is something that didn’t used to happen.

Nehemia: Well, I agree. It didn’t happen 100 years ago.

Avielah: And then if I’m not mistaken, it started happening with either the rabbis or the followers of the rabbis associated with Pnei Or and the Jewish Renewal movement, like Rebbe Solomon Schechter-Shalomi, who was a lovely man by the way. May he rest in peace. He was also a sofer.

Nehemia: Oh, really?

Avielah: Yeah, he gave me advice, actually, about spacing, which I appreciate.

Nehemia: Spacing words?

Avielah: Well, he said, and not every sofer or soferet will agree with this, but he said that when you write a pasuk, a sentence, he said there are rules about how much space you put in between words and how much space you put in between letters. But he said, “But at the end of a pasuk, at the end of a sentence, just add a little tiny bit more space. Don’t put the exact amount of space that you would between words, because that way when the person is reading it, their brain will register the very slight wider space. Don’t make it two spaces because that’s not allowed! Just like one-and-a-half, one-and-a- quarter spaces, because the eye and the brain will still see that. And then it’ll be easier for them to go, ‘Ah, that’s the end.’ And if they’re chanting it then it just makes it easier for them to read and to serve the community.”

Nehemia: So, do you know? That’s one of the characteristics of medieval Ashkenazi Torah scrolls.

Avielah: I have seen those; they actually have quite big spaces sometimes.

Nehemia: Very big spaces.

Avielah: Yeah, definitely two or more spaces!

Nehemia: There’s no question… Well, they want to make sure it’s not a Parashah Setumah, a closed Parashah.

Avielah: Yeah, but you have to have quite a few letters for that.

Nehemia: Right. But there’s a distinctive space… and by the way, they did it in mezuzahs as well.

Avielah: Yeah.

Nehemia: And it was done up until the 19th century, and possibly even the 20th century. It’s not just in the Middle Ages.

Avielah: No. I was going to say, I’ve seen one from 1790 that definitely had really wide spaces, that was from Germany.

Nehemia: And I’ve seen it in 13th century Torah scrolls.

Avielah: Really? I’m not surprised.

Nehemia: It’s a distinctive Ashkenazi practice to put spaces between verses.

Avielah: Right.

Nehemia: In Italian Torah scrolls they actually put a dot between verses, which is definitely forbidden in Masechet Soferim, and then somebody would often come along and erase all the dots.

Avielah: Right.

Nehemia: And you’ll see these Torah scrolls where there’s a scratch-off after every verse.

Avielah: Wow!

Nehemia: And sometimes they missed it, and you can still see… but it’s obviously a scratch-off in the shape of a dot.

Avielah: Originally, the Egyptians used to put a dot in between all the words because that’s before we invented spaces.

Nehemia: In Paleo-Hebrew they did that, for sure.

Avielah: Exactly. That was where I was going with that. We used to put a dot in between every single word because nobody… So, there’s this Midrash, there’s this idea that when Moses wrote the Torah and God was dictating the Torah to Moses, that he just wrote it as one long utterance, one long sentence.

Nehemia: With no spaces between the words.

Avielah: And there were no spaces, that’s right. And so, you think, “This sounds a bit mystical and some kind of mythological thing.” And the story goes on… but really, then, if you understand the history of writing, you go, “Oh, but there wouldn’t have been any spaces actually, because we didn’t invent spaces first.”

Nehemia: No, but there were dot dividers between the words.

Avielah: There were dot dividers, but that didn’t take up a whole space.

Nehemia: And sometimes you had two words that were together, and so it would be like, “et ha’aretz”, and that’s not an actual example, but if you look, for example, in the Siloam Inscription or the Lachish letters, it’s very common that when you have a small word, that word is attached to the following word. And we have represented in the Masoretic text with the makaf, with the hyphen, where essentially two words for the purposes of the accents, of the trope. The ta’amim are treated as one word, and that may reflect these dots that were word dividers. By the way, the Samaritans still do that. They divide the words with dots.

Avielah: Yeah! I’ve seen that, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: But you have that in the Lachish letters, the Arad Letters, you have that in the Siloam Inscription…

Avielah: It was normal.

Nehemia: You have it in the Mesha, which isn’t Hebrew, it’s Moabite. But it’s basically the same thing.

Avielah: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: So, I want to go back to this unrolling of the Torah scroll.

Avielah: Right. So, that is a beautiful way for people to connect with the Torah scroll. And it means a lot to them, and their hearts are very full. And that is an important thing. Whatever religion or group you’re going to be a part of your heart has to be in it. You have to have a sense of belonging. And there are many ways of doing that. But when you think about the laws and the Halakhot, they’re not just there to keep things separate, or apart, or mysterious. That being said, sometimes it’s appropriate for things to be separate, and apart, and mysterious, because that’s a part of how it has its value. People don’t understand how to treat parchment. They don’t know that even if your hands are clean, if you touch that, then in 50 years your fingerprints are going to show up on it, and it will cause damage because there’s always acids in your fingers. That’s why you always have to work with paper down and sleeves. You have to be very careful, and some scribes work with gloves on.

Nehemia: That’s very controversial today.

Avielah: Because of the change in the haptic feedback, yeah.

Nehemia: So, basically the belief in most libraries that I have gone to with medieval manuscripts is that, if you have gloves on, you’re going to cause more damage than if you don’t.

Avielah: Yeah.

Nehemia: Because you don’t have the dexterity to turn the pages, and then Torah scrolls aren’t pages. But still, I can think of two, maybe three, libraries that I’ve ever been to that asked me to put on gloves, and every other place said, “No, you’re not allowed to put on gloves.”

Avielah: You’re not allowed to. Because, like you say, you don’t have that haptic feedback, you can’t feel the pages the same way. Very early on I was writing a Torah scroll, and the place that I was writing wasn’t heated because someone was offering attic space for me to work in. So, I wore gloves. But then, of course, I couldn’t feel the quill properly, really. So, then I ended up using gloves that had no fingers, it was like the fingertips were not there. And then I realized that they’re a little bit too fuzzy, because the tiny bit of fuzz, that was really microscopic, was dragging through the fresh ink because I’m right-handed.

Nehemia: Oh, no!

Avielah: So, I was like, “Okay, I can’t use these either.” Luckily God’s name was not involved.

Nehemia: Okay, wow. You were going to demonstrate some things for us.

Avielah: Right, okay.

Nehemia: Is that your keset ha’sofer?

Avielah: Yeah, sort of. Well, it is really, but yeah. I’ve actually got one…

Nehemia: Because keset could also mean “a bag”.

Avielah: I’ve got one. I’ve got a brass…

Nehemia: Oh, nice.

Avielah: Yeah, it’s amazing.

Nehemia: So, what are we doing here?

Avielah: Well, I thought I would just try to write some letters, if that’s alright with you?

Nehemia: Oh, that’s great.

Avielah: Is that alright?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Avielah: I didn’t cut this very well, actually. It’s not behaving well.

Nehemia: And this is a goose feather?

Avielah: Yeah, this is goose. It’s not turkey… I actually prefer turkey.

Nehemia: I heard that turkey is the best…

Avielah: Oh yeah, this is not the standard recording. I’m making very bad letters with this.

Nehemia: So, I heard turkey is the best quill.

Avielah: Okay, no, you’re not keeping that. Here, I’ve got some here. I prefer turkey because the feather is really thick, and the thing is that… I should have brought a bigger one as well. The thing is, you see all these surgical scars?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Avielah: So, my hand got crushed.

Nehemia: Oh, no!

Avielah: No, it’s part of my seferot journey. It’s fine, it turns out. So, that’s why I used to be a gemologist, and then I stopped being a gemologist, because I couldn’t handle tweezers anymore because my hand was crushed in a car accident.

Nehemia: Oh, no.

Avielah: And I had to have my hand put back together.

Nehemia: Wow, well that’s good.

Avielah: So, now she’s faster, stronger and better, we have the technology!

Nehemia: The Bionic Woman.

Avielah: Right, exactly.

Nehemia: Can you tell us what all these tools are?

Avielah: Well, yeah, these are just different kinds of kulmuses, these are just different…

Nehemia: That’s not a kulmus, is it?

Avielah: It is. This is one that’s usually… I forget the name of this.

Nehemia: Is this metal?

Avielah: No, it’s not. This is a particular kind of wood; I think it’s ebony or something. I got this from an Arabic calligrapher supply store. Because you get different… I’m going to use this one.

Nehemia: Now, would you be allowed to write a Torah scroll with this?

Avielah: Yeah, you absolutely can, because it’s wood.

Nehemia: Okay. Just not metal?

Avielah: Well, there are a lot of scribes today that will use metal pens that are basically like fountain pens.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avielah: So they don’t have to dip as much, and so they can write faster, so that they can get the Torah scrolls written faster.

Nehemia: So, they are allowed to do that?

Avielah: Only one authority, which was Ganzfried, said that was okay. No one else says it’s okay.

Nehemia: Are there Orthodox scribes who do that?

Avielah: Yeah.

Nehemia: Really?

Avielah: And I shouldn’t have that disparaging tone in my voice, because I shouldn’t really judge them.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avielah: But to me… I mean, it’s a completely different thing. That’s why they have to go through and put all the tagin on later on with basically a little art pen, like a felt pen kind of thing, because you can’t make tagin with these pens, these metal pens that are basically for fancy writing.

Nehemia: Because they’re not fine enough, is that why?

Avielah: They’re not fine enough, but also you don’t get the same snap. You don’t get the same flexibility. You can’t make it as thin, and you don’t get the same snap to it. You can’t use the spitz to make a proper letter.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avielah: But economically, I don’t judge them at all, because… See? This is so much better. Look at that!

Nehemia: So, while you’re doing this, talk about…

Avielah: I still made the nose too short though. It’s still an unacceptable letter.

Nehemia: Tell us why a robot can’t do this.

Avielah: A robot has no kavanah.

Nehemia: So, as you’re writing for a Torah scroll…

Avielah: That’s also not going on!

Nehemia: …you have to have some level of intent which a robot can’t form.

Avielah: Yes, you have to have intention about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. And you have to have in mind that it’s a mitzvah, even though it’s considered, depending on the list, the 613th mitzvah, to write a sacred Torah. You don’t make a blessing over a Torah scroll before you start writing it, but you do… This is another argument as to why women should be able to do it, because it’s not really time bound, is it? And also, women are potential teachers of Torah, and that is actually what a Torah scroll is for, it’s to teach Torah.

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Avielah: But again, it depends on which authority that you’re going to listen to.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avielah: So, I’ll try again.

Nehemia: There’s a type of inscription we see in medieval manuscripts, in codices, where somebody comes along and writes…

Avielah: There we go, that’s better!

Nehemia: “Nisiti ha’kulmus.”

Avielah: Nisiti?

Nehemia: “I tried the pen,” “I tried the pen,” “I tried the pen,” and they’ll write it over and over. And it’s usually in the flyleaf on the back page…

Avielah: Oh!

Nehemia: Uh oh.

Avielah: Okay…

Nehemia: I guess that’s the problem with wood!

Avielah: Umm… it can be, yes. I didn’t think I was being that tough on it! I was just being intense, like I am.

Nehemia: Ooh.

Avielah: Okay, well, I’ve got one left. It’s fine.

Nehemia: And tell us what the plastic one is.

Avielah: Well, the plastic one I really just got to experiment myself with art. As you can see, it’s been stained red. I’ve never used this for soferut. In fact, I’ve never used any of these for soferut because I was trained on a feather. And I may be biased, but that’s one of the reasons why Ashkenazi lettering looks different from Sephardi, and Mizrahi, and all the other lettering… Yemenite lettering… because the tools are different. And so, each tool lends itself to different letter shapes.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avielah: And different angles and things like that. So, I have collected these because I am an aficionado, and I also care very much about different scribal practices. And I also actually loan these out to people when I go and teach, and it’s like, “Do you want to try these? Do you want to try feathers?” And then they can see how hard it is, actually. So, this I’ve only ever used…

Nehemia: What would you even do with that?

Avielah: This? You dip it in ink or paint or whatever, and you can still use it as a stylus. You can use it basically as a brush, or you can do large letters. But I would only do this if it was big calligraphy, as it were.

Nehemia: I see.

Avielah: I would never use this on a… Because one of the things that is a concern if you use metal, or like, this is basically acrylic, this plastic, is that it will imprint. And that is actually another one of the rules; that you’re not allowed to stamp in or imprint in any of the letters. They have to be written.

Sorry it took me three Alephs just to make a good Aleph. But I changed the styluses. I cut this earlier, but the slit down the center is off-center. One of my mentors, who will obviously remain nameless, because he confided in me and Marc, he was like, “I’m not very good at cutting quills.” And it’s like, “Oh, wow, okay, that sucks!” So, he said he has to work really, really hard and cut them many, many, many times until he finally gets a good one. So, he spends a large proportion of his time actually making the tool correct so that he can actually make the right letters.

Nehemia: What do you do with the razor? Is that to erase letters and also to cut the quill?

Avielah: This?

Nehemia: No, I meant this thing.

Avielah: Oh, this? This is literally like a quill knife.

Nehemia: Okay, that’s to cut a quill.

Avielah: Yeah, you can use it to cut a quill. It’s got a blade here and it’s got a blade here. This is actually really more of a European tool, because… I don’t know what you grew up calling those little flip knives, like a pocketknife.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Avielah: Did you grow up calling it a pen knife?

Nehemia: I’ve heard that term, yeah.

Avielah: Okay, well that’s why.

Nehemia: Oh!

Avielah: Because all small knives, especially ones that folded and went in your pocket, that was so that you could cut your pen.

Nehemia: They were used to cut pens! I didn’t know that! That’s so cool.

Avielah: And everyone who was literate knew how to make a pen.

Nehemia: Wow!

Avielah: Because you would make it out of a feather, usually.

Nehemia: You’d grab a feather, and you’d make it. Wow!

Avielah: Yeah.

Nehemia: I didn’t know that.

Avielah: That’s why it’s called a pen knife.

Nehemia: That’s really cool.

Avielah: Yeah.

Nehemia: That’s fascinating. I did not know that.

Avielah: Yeah, and you can actually get them… you can get Victorian ones and even older ones on auctions sites or ebay, or whatever. And sometimes they’re sterling silver, sometimes they’re wood, it depends on how wealthy… And they have different sized knives and sometimes they have a little tool to pull out. It’s kind of like a corkscrew tool to pull out all of the stuff that’s inside the feather. I can’t remember what it’s called. There’s lots of compartments in there that you have to pull out when you’re cutting it, so the ink doesn’t end up getting caught in any of them and blobbing out later on.

Nehemia: Ooh.

Avielah: Yeah. So, it’ll have two different sized knives… But this I use to make the slit down the center.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avielah: And you can only use it once. You can only use one spot once.

Nehemia: Did you make this ink? Or you bought this ink? How does it work?

Avielah: This is ink that I bought, actually, yeah.

Nehemia: Do you ever make ink?

Avielah: I do. I forage for it.

Nehemia: Seriously?

Avielah: Yeah.

Nehemia: Tell me what…

Avielah: I go foraging on my own sometimes, but I also go foraging with my good friend and neighbor, Joumana Medlej, who is a Lebanese calligrapher who does Arabic calligraphy. She’s an artist.

Nehemia: What do you forage for?

Avielah: We forage for things like gall nuts.

Nehemia: You find gall nuts here in England?

Avielah: I have got a pile… I should have brought some.

Nehemia: I would love that.

Avielah: I knew I’d forgotten something! Yeah, I have loads of different gall nuts.

Nehemia: Really?

Avielah: I’ve actually got some… So, a bookbinder friend of mine, Yehudah Miklaf, you’d love him. Oh my God, he tells the best stories.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avielah: He used to be a monk.

Nehemia: He used to be what?

Avielah: He used to be a monk, and now he’s an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem with grandchildren.

Nehemia: Oh, wow! Okay.

Avielah: Yeah, and he’s a bookbinder.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avielah: And he made books for the Pope, and the Queen, and everything. And he tells the best stories because he’s had an amazing life.

Nehemia: You have to email me his contact number.

Avielah: Yeah, I will do. Like I said, he tells the best stories. And it’s very funny, because last year, we discovered that we are distantly related!

Nehemia: Wow.

Avielah: Which is awesome!

Nehemia: It’s a small world.

Avielah: Because it’s 500-years-ago related, something like that.

Nehemia: One of those, okay.

Avielah: So, why was I telling you about him? Oh, right. So, I go foraging with Joumana, and we find gall nuts… He gave me a suitcase full of gall nuts that had been smuggled out of Persia at one point.

Nehemia: What?

Avielah: Into Israel. And he was like, “I’ve got loads of these. Here, have some.” So, then I brought them back to Canada. This was a long time ago; I’m sure the statute of limitations has run out. I don’t even know if it was okay for me to do that or not, I just wanted to have gall nuts! But yeah, you can get them here. They’re mostly on oak. Sometimes you can find them on sumac, but they’re pretty much always on oak. And there are different variety of gall nuts, because the Middle Eastern gall nuts are a different size and texture.

Nehemia: It’s on the Atlantic oak, isn’t it, in the Middle East? Or the Aleppo oak, or something like that.

Avielah: I wasn’t going to say Atlantic oak. I don’t know.

Nehemia: No, no, it’s the Atlantic.

Avielah: Atlantic?

Nehemia: So, the oak trees in Israel are very unusual because they come from the Atlantic region, and there was some kind of thing where they were very common, widespread all over the region, and then there was a climatic change…

Avielah: Okay.

Nehemia: …where the climate somehow shifted, and they were trapped there. So, there’s this small region… Like, you’ll have these Atlantic oaks that have no business in the Eastern Mediterranean, they’re just left over from some kind of earlier climate.

Avielah: Huh! That’s very interesting.

Nehemia: And they look unusual within the environment.

Avielah: I’m sure they do.

Nehemia: There aren’t other trees like that around there…

Avielah: Because if they look like they’re North American… there’s different varieties of varieties of Northern American oak as well.

Nehemia: No, they don’t look North American.

Avielah: They look English?

Nehemia: They look like something you would find on the western coast of Spain.

Avielah: Oh, okay, like that.

Nehemia: Something like that, I don’t know exactly. But yeah, it’s kind of this islet that got left when there was a shift in the climate.

Avielah: Right. I did not know that. That’s really interesting.

Nehemia: Yeah. And so, the oak tree is… and they have these gall nuts. It’s interesting…

Avielah: On my Instagram, I show you pictures of where I bray, and then where I actually…

Nehemia: Bray?

Avielah: Yeah, so, braying something is to crush it into bigger pieces, not to crush it into powder. So, I’ve got different sizes. I’ve actually got one that’s this massive brass one that has got Jerusalem written on it in Amharic. I’m like, “What? How did that happen? Weird.”

Nehemia: Wow. That is weird.

Avielah: So, I use the gall nuts. And the other thing I use is, we grow grapes at our home, and so, when I prune the grapes every year, I keep the grapewood, and then I…