Oldest known Torah scroll found in Italy
http://www.times-standard.com/lifestyle/ci_23517818/oldest-known-torah-scroll-found-italy
ROME
-- An Italian expert in Hebrew manuscripts said May 29 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 meters (40 yards) long and 64
centimeters (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 recognized the scroll had been wrongly dated
by the
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last cataloguer in
1889, because he recognized that its script and other graphic notations were
far older.
Specifically, he said the scroll doesn't take into account
the rabbinical rules that standardized 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 1800s, since 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 Aitken, 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 Pfann, 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,” Pfann said.
There are far older scraps of Torah scrolls that can be
dated back to the 8th century, but Pfann said it was rare to find a complete
manuscript.
The find was also emotionally important, he said because the
scroll, as opposed to a bound book, is used for reading Torah portions
throughout the year in synagogue.
”It's almost a friendship -- that they have come to know the
Torah scroll in their midst, and they draw their knowledge and focus on worship
on how they live their daily life,” Pfann said.
Perani said it remains a mystery how the scroll came to be
part of the Bologna
university library but that he anticipated further study would now begin.
The scroll remains in the library and doesn't require any
extra conservation precautions beyond what it already has, he said.