Scrolls raise questions as to Afghan Jewish historyWhat is it with shepherds and caves and scrolls?
By GIL SHEFLER (Jerusalem Post)
01/02/2012 21:49
Scholar hopes findings might shed light on medieval merchants.
An Afghan shepherd enters a wolves den perched high in the mountains of Samangan province looking for a sheep that went astray.
Inside, he doesn’t find what he is looking for, but just as he is about to leave he notices something strange: Pieces of old parchment lie strewn on the dirt floor.
So goes one of the stories behind the recent discovery of about 150 manuscripts and artifacts in a remote cave that belonged to a medieval Jewish community.Commendable skepticism. I hope that at some point this cave can be located and excavated, as the Qumran caves eventually were.
“But there are several and they are always the same about shepherds looking for sheep,” admitted Prof. Haggai Ben-Shammai of the Hebrew University on Sunday.
“Who knows how they were really found?” Scholars are currently in the early stages of poring over the texts dating from the 11th century and written in Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Persian.
“They have dates so we can date them precisely,” said Prof. Shaul Shaked of the Hebrew University.If Shaul Shaked thinks the fragments are genuine, then that's the way to bet.
“There’s no doubt that they are authentic. They correspond with similar findings from the past.”
The expert in ancient Persian languages said the scrolls included an ancient copy of the book of Jeremiah; hitherto unknown scholarly works by the medieval sage Rabbi Sa’adia Gaon; personal poems of loss and mourning and even bookkeeping records that could teach us about everyday life in the community.
“The person who wrote it, a Jewish merchant, keeps track of who owed him how much,” said Shaked.
He added that the texts show the community may have been Karaite, a sect of Judaism which strictly adheres to the bible rather than the Talmud and other later Jewish texts, and name several early Karaite leaders.
[...]
The headline and the article refer to "scrolls," but in this period I would expect codices (i.e., something more like a bound book as we know it). But the "bookkeeping records" might well be on individual sheets of parchment.
The 150 "manuscripts and artifacts" (the former reportedly poorly preserved, as one might expect) seem to be the entire lot from this cave. But Professor Shaked seems optimistic that there will be "many more" such "findings in that part of the world." I hope he's right.
(Via Joseph I. Lauer.)
Background here.