Author’s Blog

As the second week of Ginsburg’s analysis came to an end, and with public interest on the rise, two of the leather strips were placed on display in a poorly-lit glass case in the King’s Library of the British Museum. Each day, between the hours of ten and four, under...

On Saturday, 11 August 1883, Christian Ginsburg published his first of three installments in The Athenæum. The first publication gave readers the Hebrew text and an English translation of the Ten Words as presented in the manuscript. Additionally, Ginsburg...

On Friday, 10 August 1883, The Jewish Chronicle featured two articles, both bearing the same title, “The New Manuscript of Deuteronomy.”[1] The New Manuscript of Deuteronomy p. 9 The remarkable “find” of Mr. Shapira, described in another column, comes as a...

On the afternoon of Tuesday, 7 August 1883, Moses Shapira went to meet Dr. Ginsburg, but after some time of waiting and Ginsburg not showing up, Shapira returned to the Cannon Street Hotel. The next day, from the hotel, Shapira wrote a note to Dr....

Since the original publication of this blog post, I have expanded my research into the provenance of the Shapira fragments with a more comprehensive paper. This work compares six key nineteenth-century accounts that document the origin and history of these enigmatic...

Having read the newspaper reports in The Times and The Jewish Chronicle over the previous weekend from his room in the Cannon Street Hotel, Shapira knew that he had to provide his side of the Moabitica scandal since it was obvious that this unfortunate incident had...