Drawing of Fragment E prepared by Dangerfield Lithography (London, 1883).
Source: Dershowitz, Idan (2021). The Valediction of Moses: A Proto-Biblical Book. Forschungen zum Alten Testament.
The Myth of Moses Shapira[1]
Michael Press
*Note: this article originally appeared in Hebrew at Hazman Hazeh.
This March, readers of the New York Times were presented with the tale of Moses Shapira[2], an antiquities dealer from Jerusalem, who showed up in London in 1883 with 15 leather strips that he claimed were an ancient — maybe even Moses’s original — copy of the biblical book of Deuteronomy. He had acquired the strips five years earlier, he said, from Bedouin who had found them in a cave on the east side of the Dead Sea. The British Museum was interested in buying the manuscript — for a reported 1 million pounds (over 120 million pounds in today’s money!) — and commissioned an expert, Christian David Ginsburg, to study it. The British public was ecstatic and crowded around a display in the British Museum in an effort to glimpse even part of it. Just when it looked like the museum would buy it, Charles Clermont-Ganneau, the great French orientalist (and Shapira’s long-standing nemesis) showed up. After barely looking at the strips, Ganneau declared them a forgery. Every other scholar quickly fell in line behind Ganneau, including Ginsburg himself. Shapira fled London in disgrace, losing his mind and wandering the continent aimlessly for six months before he killed himself in a Rotterdam hotel. Now comes the stunning coda: a researcher claims that they might have been authentic.
The basic outline of that story, told by the Times much as it is told so often, is essentially true. But, appropriately for a tale of forgery, the details are full of errors and speculation, simplifying the narrative to make it more dramatic — and more misleading. It was the newspapers at the time that sensationalized the story by suggesting the manuscript was from the time of Moses. (Shapira himself, familiar with ancient inscriptions and modern biblical scholarship, suggested instead that it may have been written hundreds of years later, around 600 BCE.) Journalists, too, appear to be responsible for the claim that Shapira was asking a million pounds for the manuscript. Ganneau’s concerns were well-founded, so much so that several other scholars had already concluded independently that the strips were fake. Shapira seems to have had his sanity for some time after the incident, selling authentic early modern manuscripts to the British Museum not once but twice within the months after the Deuteronomy strips were rejected.
As it’s usually told, the story also neglects the rest of Shapira’s career. Far from appearing out of nowhere, he had already been famous, notorious even, as a bookseller and antiquities dealer in Jerusalem for over a decade. There, Shapira had offered literally thousands of fake antiquities for sale. Over a span of five years in the 1870s, he had some 2,000 “Moabite” pottery vessels and clay statuettes on sale in his Jerusalem shop, managing to sell around 1,700 to the Royal Museum in Berlin. They, too, were all fake. Shapira did sell hundreds of authentic medieval and early modern manuscripts, but acquired them in dubious fashion: claiming to be a rabbi —he was actually a Jewish convert to Christianity — to convince Jewish communities in Yemen to sell him their scrolls, or simply bribing officials to help him take them by force. Shapira appears to have doctored at least one manuscript and told lies about others. Among the remarkable items for sale in his shop over the years were, according to Shapira, an inscription set up by Moses to celebrate his conquest of Moab, an ancient Moabite parchment describing their gods, and a manuscript of the book of Jeremiah from the time of Jesus.
Nor is this the first time that a researcher has suggested Shapira’s Deuteronomy manuscript was authentic. Nearly every decade, it seems, a handful of scholars, journalists, and other enthusiasts comes forward to suggest that Shapira’s manuscript was actually authentic — or at least that the “case” should be “reopened” as if it were a criminal investigation.[3] It may be more dramatic to portray a lone scholar challenging the consensus, but this is rarely what happens. This year alone, there are not one but two: Idan Dershowitz (The Valediction of Moses) and Ross Nichols (The Moses Scroll) have each published a book arguing that the strips were a genuine ancient manuscript.[4] What are we to make of their claims?
To put it simply, there are many problems. Each of the strips has lines carefully incised close to the edge of each column, serving as margins, margins that the writer of the text largely ignored. The script includes a combination of letter forms attested on Iron Age inscriptions, on Jewish coins centuries later, and some otherwise unknown. The language, too, is a combination of biblical and later Hebrew, including various grammatical features that were especially common in 19th-century Hebrew.[5]
Dershowitz presents an important new piece of evidence, a manuscript claimed to be Shapira’s original transcription of the Deuteronomy manuscript but doesn’t spend enough time considering the many plausible alternative interpretations (Is it part of Shapira’s attempt to plan the forgery? One of the several copies he made? A retroactive attempt to show Shapira’s supposed decipherment in progress, complete with errors?) Inevitably, arguments for the manuscripts’ authenticity involve guessing what forgers would or wouldn’t do — a game played by many leading scholars of antiquity over the past decade, with other unprovenanced antiquities (like the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife and the supposed Dead Sea Scroll fragments recently purchased by the Museum of the Bible and other institutions), all of whom have lost.[6] Scholars have routinely underestimated forgers or simply guessed wrong. Meanwhile, even Dershowitz and Nichols, while they present some of the most detailed accounts of the Deuteronomy incident, give very incomplete versions of Shapira’s earlier career.
But the biggest problem is one of burden of proof. In scholarship as in legal cases, it’s essential to understand who needs to prove what. In this case, the consensus in 1883 was forgery, meaning the burden is on those wanting to prove that the manuscript is authentic. And that burden is almost impossibly high, for one reason above all: the strips have been missing for around 130 years. (Our knowledge of the text comes largely from transcriptions and translations made in 1883.) Without them, as is the case with any other dubious document, it’s very hard if not impossible to prove they’re authentic. (Despite this problem, Dershowitz and Nichols each present a critical edition of the manuscript.)
In 1883, opinions on Shapira himself were mixed. For some, he became the embodiment of the unscrupulous antiquities dealer or forger. For others, he was an unfortunate dupe. But the consensus was universal: the manuscript was fake. What has changed? Why are the facts of the affair so confused today?
In part, this change is due to the simple passage of time. The principal figures died, public memory faded, details of the incident were forgotten. People, even scholars, are no longer very familiar with Shapira's broader career: they may be vaguely aware of the Moabite pottery; but they're usually unaware of the many other fake objects he tried to sell, and the stories he often made up about them. Shapira’s story is typically told third- or fourth-hand, with predictably sloppy results — as in my own first foray into “Shapiriana” seven years ago.[7]
Something needed to fill the growing holes left in the public memory of Shapira. The seemingly unlikely solution was a popular French novel published in 1914. History is written by the winners, as the saying goes, and in 1883 Shapira had lost. The winners at that time were the scholars like Ganneau who had detected the forgery, and they were the ones who told the story.[8] But history is constantly being written anew. In Shapira’s case, it was most convenient that his younger daughter, Maria, became a famous author in her day and could literally rewrite history.
Under the pen name Myriam Harry, Maria Shapira Perrault wrote a series of biographical novels, including fictionalized accounts of her upbringing in Jerusalem. In these she appears as Siona — the feminine form of Zion, “Jerusalem.” The best known of these novels, The Little Daughter of Jerusalem, centers on the Deuteronomy affair.[9] Written three decades after the events it describes, by Shapira’s daughter, who had been a teenager at the time, it is hardly an unimpeachable source of historical information. Myriam Harry’s Shapira (“William T. Benedictus”) is not a flawless individual. He cheats on his wife and abandons his family for long stretches — just the sorts of things a child might be upset about. But Benedictus also loves his daughter, plans for her happiness (he dreams of selling the Deuteronomy manuscript at great profit not to enrich himself but his two girls). Harry shows him constantly toiling away at transcribing — not forging — the Deuteronomy. And she shows him pressured to seek greater profits by an acquaintance, a Professor Hartwig of Berlin, who has a major conflict of interest in declaring the manuscript genuine: Benedictus plans to use part of the profits as a dowry for the wedding of his daughter to Hartwig’s son. Finally, we see Benedictus driven insane after the villain, Merle-Vanneau (Clermont-Ganneau’s fictionalized name is an especially thin veil), condemns the strips as a forgery, losing his mind and wandering around Europe for months until he kills himself.
The ground for this tragic tale had been laid before. Already on Shapira’s death, the Journal de Genève ran an obituary that portrayed Shapira as a tender father, and insisted Ganneau had killed him through his accusation of forgery, eventually leading to “derangement.”[10] But The Little Daughter of Jerusalem provides much more: a complete narrative, attractively romanticized through unverifiable details, with Shapira emerging as a tragic hero. The new narrative fits in with the exotic stereotype of 19th-century Jerusalem and the emergence of archaeology there: a dangerous foreign city, filled with adventure and colorful characters. In the recent New York Times article, Ganneau is presented as a “swashbuckling French archaeologist,” evoking Indiana Jones more than reality.
Shapira has gained sympathy, too, as the perceived victim of antisemitism. The last several decades have seen increased sensitivity to antisemitism in general and the specific sense that Shapira may have been unfairly treated because of it. Many, including both Dershowitz and Nichols, point to an infamous 1883 cartoon from the British humor magazine Punch, showing a guilty Shapira with a stereotypical hooked nose, caught by the heroic Ginsburg.[11] But, here again, we see how sketchy the general understanding of this affair really is. One cartoon, however prominent or troubling, is not evidence of widespread antisemitism, yet advocates of this idea present little other evidence. While there was some anti-Jewish sentiment in the reaction to Shapira at the time, it was limited and includes skepticism of Jewish converts to Christianity, or of converts in general. And in the story, Shapira was not the only Jewish convert. So was Ginsburg, who is the hero of the Punch cartoon, which definitely does not depict him with negative ethnic stereotypes. If anything, the evidence suggests we need a more nuanced understanding of just what the term "antisemitism" might mean.
In fact, the most hostile reactions to Shapira the man, in both the 19th and the 20th centuries, came from Jews. They saw him, as Yoram Sabo has pointed out, as an apostate, a traitor.[12] In the 19th century, bibliographer Ephraim Deinard, a famous gossip, spread all sorts of rumors about the “apostates” Shapira and Ginsburg, describing them in nasty terms.[13] In the 20th century, it was Jewish scholars like Moshe Goshen-Gottstein and Oskar Rabinowicz who made the harshest attacks on both Shapira and those who suggested his Deuteronomy manuscript was authentic.[14] Most 19th-century European Christians, meanwhile, bent over backward to absolve him of blame.
But, in the story of how attitudes toward Shapira have changed, the most important character of all may be a young Ta’amireh Bedouin named Jum’a Muhammed Khalil. In 1946, or maybe it was 1947, he and his cousins were herding sheep and goats along the cliff by the western shore of the Dead Sea, near an ancient site called Qumran. Looking for a stray goat, the story goes, Khalil threw the stone into a cave and heard it smash something inside. Two days later, one of the cousins, Muhammed Ahmed el-Hamed (nicknamed edh-Dhib, “the wolf”) entered the cave and removed the first of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls from jars in the cave.
The fame of the new discovery impacted everything it touched, including Shapira’s strips. Of course, the discovery story (Bedouin in a cave near the Dead Sea) was a tantalizing echo of the origin story Shapira had given for his Deuteronomy — so much so that Solomon Zeitlin, a respected scholar, insisted that the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves were another forgery along the lines of Shapira’s.[15] But there was more. Before the Ta’amireh Bedouin’s discovery, Shapira's Deuteronomy, if authentic, would have been so much older than other known biblical manuscripts that it was suspicious. Now we had not only ancient manuscripts but ones that look like Shapira's strips in several ways.
That those similarities are actually superficial ends up beside the point. With the search for new ancient manuscripts, especially the most ancient biblical manuscripts, eternally popular, it was inevitable that Shapira’s Deuteronomy would receive new attention.
Shapira has since become the subject of television and radio documentaries, and, picking up where Myriam Harry left off, a popular character in historical fiction.[16] A group of “Shapiramaniacs” — the term is their own — obsess over details of Shapira’s life and the Deuteronomy affair, working to rehabilitate the reputation of Shapira, or of his Deuteronomy manuscript, or both. Shapira is now a legend, and his Deuteronomy the Holy Grail. “My dream,” Dershowitz tells the Times, is that one day it [the Jerusalem street named after Ganneau] will be named Wilhelm Moses Shapira Street.”
All of this activity has had unintended side effects. Starting in the 1970s, Uri Katz, a professor in Jerusalem, began acquiring a collection of Shapira fakes. Stumbling across some “Moabite statues” on the roof of a house in Jerusalem, Katz is said to have inspired a renewed interest in Shapira’s forgeries.[17] For Katz, what sets Shapira apart is his creative genius, his ability to fabricate an entire Moabite world.[18] Katz and other collectors (like Shulamit Lapid, author of a Shapira novel herself and mother of television host turned politician Yair) began to focus on a series of stone heads, stylized, usually male, often with a mustache and a star on the forehead, with inscriptions in Greek or Latin or ancient Hebrew.
But there’s a problem: there’s no evidence that Shapira ever sold any of these heads, let alone faked them himself. Fake stone heads are rarely mentioned in sources contemporary with Shapira, and the one seller named is someone else. Decades later, Theodore Meysels, a journalist for the Palestine Post, reported that a group of them had been found in a cave near Motza and Qaluniya, west of Jerusalem (this was in 1943).[19] He gives a familiar description of statue heads made of stone, some with mustaches, some with inscriptions. To Meysels this discovery indicated a forger’s workshop, abandoned long ago. It has no known connection to Shapira — it’s not even clear that he would have ever seen them. So whose genius, exactly, have Uri Katz and others been collecting?
It’s not just the collectors who have inflated Shapira’s reputation. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, scholars, too, have contributed to the picture of Shapira as a “master forger.” Amulets, a fake stone bowl, a Palmyrene relief, even possibly the Jehoash Inscription (a fake ancient tablet supposed to record repairs to the First Temple in Jerusalem) — all these have been drawn into his orbit.[20] As Shapira has attained legendary status, any possible 19th century is suggested to be his, although there were many other dealers of antiquities, both real and fake, at the time. And of course, among those 19th-century “Shapira” forgeries, scholars, too, have come to identify the stone heads.
Shapira fakes, or supposed fakes, have been the subject of two exhibitions at Israeli museums (the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv in 1989, the Israel Museum in 2000). In the catalogues for these exhibitions, we see the progression from pointing out lack of evidence associating the stone heads with Shapira, to suggesting he might have sold them, to suggesting he forged them (among many other things).[21] Nowadays, supposed Shapira stone heads appear at auction, fetching upwards of $1500.[22] Just associating a fake with Shapira raises its value, creating a market in turn for fake Shapira fakes.
Was Shapira a master forger, or did he have “the eyes of a sad visionary” (as Myriam Harry has the biblical scholar Franz Delitzsch comment in one of her later novels)? [23] Why not both? “In Shapira, I came to realize, I had stumbled on another genius, the situational genius,” writes one Shapiramaniac, the journalist Chanan Tigay. “He was, to be sure, a virtuoso forger.”[24] But the real genius, it seems, is that of the connoisseurs and experts for creating the image of a genius in Shapira.
For many Shapiramaniacs, like Tigay, the quest for the Deuteronomy strips is a quest for “the truth about Shapira” himself.[25] But the real Shapira is unknowable. Among the many reasons for the slipperiness of Shapira’s story, this may be the most important of all. The one constant running through his professional career is fraud: whether selling thousands of fake objects, making up stories about them, or falsely representing himself as a rabbi. This is hardly surprising. As Lenny Wolfe warns, “generally, you have to be very careful of what a Middle Eastern antiquities dealer tells you. You're probably safer not believing it.”[26] The kicker: Wolfe himself is a Middle Eastern antiquities dealer. Where the antiquities trade and forgeries are concerned, as we’ve seen, every story is suspect.
So we are left with the image of Shapira — and that image, of a master forger and genius, is now entrenched. It seems impervious to the reality that he forged almost nothing himself, that he mostly sold fakes made by others. It seems unaffected by the fact that he and his collaborators were actually poor forgers. Good fakes are often not detected for decades, fooling all the experts in the meantime. With Shapira’s forgeries, almost no actual experts were ever fooled. Every one of the thousands of forgeries that we know of was detected in his lifetime. (The one possible exception, a Torah scroll that Shapira apparently doctored and sold to a collector from Philadelphia, was uncovered within months of his death.)
In the end, one thing does seem knowable about Shapira: he was apparently a very good con man. He was adept at preying on the gullible or trusting or simply unaware. And his cons are still finding new “marks,” nearly a century and a half later.
[1] Thanks to Stephen Press for research assistance and Årstein Justnes for his comments.
[2] Jennifer Schuessler, Is a Long-Dismissed Forgery Actually the Oldest Known Biblical Manuscript?, New York Times, March 10, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/10/arts/bible-deuteronomy-discovery.html
[3] שמואל ייבין, המגילות הגנוזות, הארץ, 20 אפריל 1956, עמ’ 9
(Shmuel Yeivin, HaMegillot HaGenuzot, Haaretz, April 20, 1956, p. 9)
J. L. Teicher, The Genuineness of the Shapira Manuscripts, Times Literary Supplement, March 22, 1957; Menahem Mansoor, The Case of Shapira’s Dead Sea (Deuteronomy) Scrolls of 1883, Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 47, 1958, 183-225; John Marco Allegro, The Shapira Affair, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1965; Helen G. Jefferson, The Shapira Manuscript and the Qumran Scrolls, Revue de Qumrân 6 no. 3, February 1968, 391-399; Shlomo Guil, The Shapira Scroll Was an Authentic Dead Sea Scroll, Palestine Exploration Quarterly 149 no. 1, 2017, 6-27; James Tabor, Moses Shapira and His “Dead Sea Scroll” Last Seen March 8, 1889, Taborblog (jamestabor.com), March 8, 2021
https://jamestabor.com/moses-shapira-and-his-dead-sea-scroll-last-seen-march-8-1889/
[4] Idan Dershowitz, The Valediction of Moses: A Proto-Biblical Book, Forschungen zum Alten Testament 145, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021; Dershowitz: The Valediction of Moses: New Evidence on the Shapira Deuteronomy Fragments, Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 133 no. 1, 2021: 1-22; Ross K. Nichols, The Moses Scroll: Reopening the Most Controversial Case in the History of Biblical Scholarship, St. Francisville, LA: Horeb Press, 2021.
[5] For detailed discussions of these and other problems, see
Benjamin Suchard, The “Valediction of Moses” is Not a Proto-Deuteronomy: Evidence from the Verbal System, Academia Letters
Suchard, A Valediction to Moses W. Shapira’s Deuteronomy Document, Bibliotheca Orientalis, forthcoming
https://www.academia.edu/48862842/A_valediction_to_Moses_W_Shapira_s_Deuteronomy_document
and Matthieu Richelle, The Shapira Strips in Light of Paleography, Semitica, forthcoming
https://www.academia.edu/48905750/The_Shapira_Strips_in_Light_of_Paleography_forthcoming_in_Semitica
[6] See, for example, Ariel Sabar, Veritas: A Harvard Professor, A Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, New York: Doubleday, 2020; Årstein Justnes, De falske fragmentene og forskerne som gjorde dem til dødehavsruller, Oslo, Cappelen Damm, 2019.
[7] Michael Press, “The Lying Pen of the Scribes”: A Nineteenth-Century Dead Sea Scroll, The Appendix 2 no. 3, July 2014.
[8] Charles Clermont-Ganneau, Les fraudes archéologiques en Palestine, Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1885. Also: Charles Clermont-Ganneau, Genuine and False Inscriptions in Palestine, London Times, December 26, 1883, p. 10 and December 27, 1883, p. 10 (reprinted in Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement January 1884, pp. 89-100).
[9] Myriam Harry, La petite fille de Jérusalem, Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1914. (Translated into English as The Little Daughter of Jerusalem, trans. Phoebe Allen, New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1919.)
[10] Étranger: Angleterre, Journal de Genève, March 30, 1884, p. 2.
[11] Punch’s Fancy Portraits—No. 152: Mr. Sharp-Eye-Ra, Punch, or the London Charivari, September 8, 1883, p. 118.
[12] יורם סבו, בין מומר לזייפן: מוזס וילהלם שפירא ופרשת חרסי מואב, זמנים 123, קיץ 2013: 70-81
(Yoram Sabo, Between Apostate and Forger: Moses Wilhelm Shapira and the Moabite Pottery Affair, Zmanim 123, Summer 2013, 70-81.)
[13] See Brad Sabin Hill, Ephraim Deinard on the Shapira Affair, The Book Collector: Special Number for the 150th Anniversary of Bernard Quaritch, 1997, pp. 167-179.
[14] מ. גושן-גוטשטיין, מגילות קמראן וזיוף ספר דברים של שפירא, הארץ, דצמבר 28, 1956, עמ' 10
(M. Goshen-Gottstein, Megillot Qumran ve-Ziyuf Sefer Devarim shel Shapira, Haaretz, December 28, 1956, p. 10)
M. H. Goshen-Gottstein, The Shapira Forgery and the Qumran Scrolls, Journal of Jewish Studies 7 nos. 3-4, 1956, pp. 187-193; Oskar K. Rabinowicz, The Shapira Forgery Mystery, Jewish Quarterly Review 47 no. 2, October 1956, pp. 170-182; Rabinowicz, The Shapira Scroll: A Nineteenth-Century Forgery, Jewish Quarterly Review 56 no. 1, July 1965, pp. 1-21.
[15] For example, Zeitlin, The Alleged Antiquity of the Scrolls, Jewish Quarterly Review 40 no. 1, July 1949, p. 67.
[16] יורם סבו, שפירא ואני 2014
Films include Yoram Sabo, Shapira & I, 2014; see also Fred N. Reiner, C. D. Ginsburg and the Shapira Affair: A Nineteenth-Century Dead Sea Scroll Controversy, British Library Journal 21 no. 1, Spring 1995, p. 123. Historical fiction includes Lionel I. Casper, The Agreement: The Epic Struggle for the Temple Mount, Jerusalem: Gefen, 1996; Sue Kerman, Between Heaven and Earth: A Story of Nineteenth-Century Jerusalem, Jerusalem and New York: Gefen, 2011.
1984 שולמית לפיד, כחרס הנשבר, ירושלים, כתר
(Shulamit Lapid, As a Broken Vessel, Jerusalem, Keter, 1984)
[17] אלי שילר פסל של הזייפן שפירא במוזיאון הפטריארכיה היוונית-אורתודוכסית אריאל : כתב עת לידיעת ארץ ישראל 68-70 43 ,1990 ינואר
(Eli Shiller, Statue of the Forger Shapira in the Museum of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, Ariel 68-70, January 1990, 43.)
[18] Irit Salmon, Truly Fake: Moses Wilhelm Shapira, Master Forger, Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 2000.
עירית שלמון
זיוף אמיתי: חייו וזמנו של זייפן העתיקות מוזס וילהלם שפירא
מוזיאון ישראל, ירושלים 2000.
pp. 10, 13
[19] Theodore F. Meysels, The Cave of False Idols, Palestine Post, June 6, 1943, p. 2; see also Meysels, Faked Antiquities Exhibition at Palestine Museum, Palestine Post, November 8, 1943, p. 4.
[20] David Whitehouse, Roman Glass in the Corning Museum of Glass, vol. 3, Corning, NY, Corning Museum of Glass, 2003, p. 112; Yana Tchekhanovets, A Stone Bowl with Greek and Armenian Inscriptions: Yet Another Old Forgery?, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 196, 2015, 142-146; Nathaniel Greene, The Fallout of Empire: Forged Palmyrene Antiquities from a Contemporary Perspective, paper given at 2019 American Schools of Oriental Research Annual Meeting; André Lemaire, Jerusalem Forgery Conference, in Jerusalem Forgery Conference, ed. Hershel Shanks, Biblical Archaeology Society Special Report, 2007, p. 27.
[21] לרר יעקובסון, גוסטה
זיופים בעתיקות מאוספים בארץ
(1989 תל אביב, מוזיאון ארץ־ישראל)
Gusta Lehrer-Jacobson, Fakes and Forgeries from Collections in Israel, Tel Aviv: Eretz Israel Musuem, 1989;
שלמון, זיוף אמיתי
Salmon, Truly Fake
[22] Kedem Auction House, Auction 50: Jewish and Israeli History and Culture, Objects and Numismatics; Lot Number 579: Stone Head — Forgery Attributed to Moses Shapira, March 16, 2016
[23] Myriam Harry, Siona chez les barbares, Paris: A. Fayard, 1918, p. 158.
[24] Chanan Tigay, The Lost Book of Moses: The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Bible, New York: Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers, 2016, p. 328.
[25] Tigay, Lost Book of Moses, p. 26.
[26] Ben Harris, “Mystery swirls around Judaic manuscripts discovered in Afghanistan,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, January 24, 2012