Old Torah scroll found in Italy university library
An Italian expert in Hebrew manuscripts said last week he has
discovered the oldest known complete Torah scroll, a sheepskin document
dating from 1155-1225. It was right under his nose, in the University of
Bologna library, where it had been mistakenly catalogued a century ago
as dating from the 17th century.
The find isn't the oldest Torah text in the world: The Leningrad and
the Aleppo bibles - both of them Hebrew codexes, or books - pre-date the
Bologna scroll by more than 200 years. But this is the oldest Torah
scroll of the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, according to Mauro
Perani, a professor of Hebrew in the University of Bologna's cultural
heritage department.
Two separate carbon-dating tests - performed by the University of
Salento in Italy and the Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory at the University
of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign - confirmed the revised dating, according
to a statement from the University of Bologna.
Such scrolls - this one is 36 metres (40 yards) long and 64
centimetres (25 inches) high - are brought out in synagogues on the
Sabbath and holidays, and portions are read aloud in public. Few such
scrolls have survived since old or damaged Torahs have to be buried or
stored in a closed room in a synagogue.
In a telephone interview, Perani said he was updating the library's
Hebrew manuscript catalogue when he stumbled upon the scroll in
February. He said he immediately recognised the scroll had been wrongly
dated by the last cataloguer in 1889, because he recognised that its
script and other graphic notations were far older.
Specifically, he said, the scroll doesn't take into account the
rabbinical rules that standardised how the Pentateuch should be copied
that were established by Maimonides in the late 12th century.
The scroll contains many features and markings that would be
forbidden under those rules, he said.
The 1889 cataloguer, a Jew named Leonello Modona, had described the
letters in the scroll as "an Italian script, rather clumsy-looking, in
which certain letters, as well as the usual crowns and strokes show
uncommon and strange appendices," according to the University of Bologna
release. Perani, however, saw in the document an elegant script whose
square letters were of Babylonian tradition, the statement said.
Perani told The Associated Press it was "completely normal" for a
cataloguer to make such a mistake in the late 1800s, given the "science
of manuscripts was not yet born."
Outside experts said the finding was important, even though older
Hebrew bibles do exist.
"It is fairly big news," said James Aiken, a lecturer in Hebrew and
Old Testament studies at Cambridge University. "Hebrew scholars get
excited by very small things, but it certainly is important and clearly
looks like a very beautiful scroll."
However, Giovanni Garbini, a leading expert on ancient Semitic
languages and retired professor at Rome's La Sapienza university, said
the discovery doesn't change much about what the world knows about
Hebrew manuscripts.
"It's an example of an ancient scroll, but from the point of view of
knowledge, it doesn't change anything," he said in a telephone
interview. But Stephen Phann, acting president of the University of the
Holy Land in Jerusalem and an expert in ancient Jewish manuscripts, said
if accurately dated, the scroll is a rare and important find. "We don't
have anything much from that period," Phann said.
AP
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