Scrolls Arouse Anonymous Ire
Back in the "good old days" people used to write pen and ink anonymous letters in order to slander or harm another person. The person affected faced two problems: the first was getting anyone to show any interest in the matter. The police tended to feel that anonymous letters were too trivial to bother with unless there was fraud involved or someone was killed or - in rare cases - committed suicide.
The second problem was to find the anonymous author. Generally investigators would ask the recipient of the letters to list anyone who might be an enemy and then they would go and compare that person's handwriting with that of the offending letters. Handwriting experts would be called in to decide whether the handwriting was disguised and whether the sample, written in pencil was the same as the letter written in ink. In later years there were clever means for identifying typewriters, then, as technology progressed, ammended to clever means for identifying dot-matrix printers and then laser printers. In some cases it even reached the stage of having detectives watch post boxes that were used by the anonymous letter-writer to try and spot the moment one of the letters was posted.
And then came the internet. Anonymity became the norm rather than the exception, as all sorts of people posted all sorts of rubbish under assumed names. Most of it was fairly inoffensive: someone wanting to express his disapproval of an actress' looks would post as "bugs bunny" in the belief that no one would ever realise that he was really the ultra-respectable businessman down the road. Occasionally it was offensive or even actionable - as when people denied the Holocaust or tried to stir up racial hatred - and then the offended person found the same two problems.
The first was even worse, as the police were less interested than ever in "wasting" time and money in tracking down the author of a few words that - so they thought - were as transient as electrons. The second was also worse, because how do you trace an e-mail?
Gradually, however, things began to improve on that score. ISPs were forced to divulge the real addresses of their customers and clever software enabled investigators to trace an e-mail back through all the computers that handled it to the original computer that sent it. Usually that was a good thing, as when good governments tracked down terrorists; sometimes it was a bad thing, as when bad governments tracked down human rights protestors or political activists.
Yet most people fail to realise just how easy it has become to trace e-mails or overestimate how easy it is to disguise one's identity. It is easy to forge a "Return:" address in an e-mail - my son doubted it so I sent him an e-mail ostensibly from his own address. It is much less easy to forge the unseen addresses that accompany every e-mail - strings of numbers and cryptic names that mean nothing to you and me but everything to the geeks and nerds who thought them up in the first place.
Raphael Golb, a 50-year old American real estate lawyer, has just discovered this to his cost. According to prosecuting lawyers, Golb was responsible for a long, elaborate campaign to discredit New York University professor Lawrence Schiffman. The reason for this vicious smear campaign? The Dead Sea Scrolls!
Soon after the Scrolls first came to light scholars suggested that they were the work of the Essenes, a mysterious sect within Judaism. Josephus mentions them as one of the three Jewish sects- Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes - and credits them with great religious purity as well as supernatural powers of prophecy. The Essenes were said to live down by the Dead Sea and the Scrolls were found down by the Dead Sea, so the case was considered proven.
The many water cisterns, complete with steps, found at Qumran was held to be evidence of the Essene's desire for ritual purity. Shattered writing desks were evidence that the inhabitants of Qumran had produced scrolls. It all seemed to hang together.
Of course, alternative explanations were possible. For a peaceful community, the buildings at Khirbet Qumran appeared rather too much like a military fortress. For a group allegedly dedicated to celibacy and sexual abstinence, the presence of female bodies in the nearby cemetery was disturbing. In addition, some of the teachings of the Dead Sea Scrolls appeared to be at variance with the little we know about the beliefs of the Essenes.
One of the champions of these alternative explanations is Norman Golb, a professor at the Univeristy of Chicago. He believes that the Scrolls were written by many different Jewish sects and communities and were taken down to the Dead Sea for safe-keeping. At most the Qumran community acted as librarians, but possibly they had nothing to do with the strange people who kept turning up from time to time and leaving bundles of parchment in nearby caves.
Surprisingly, such an arcane debate arouses intense emotions. Magen Broshi, who used to be curator of the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, denounces Norman Golb's theory as "foolishness and mean-spirited" and goes on to say that he is "a mediocre scholar who went into an area not his own. He adheres in a sick way to his positions which are not accepted by anyone in the world."
Another Magen, Dr Yitzhak Magen, who has excavated at Qumran and is Chief Archaeology Officer for the civil administration of the area, disagrees. Like Golb, he claims that "not even a quarter of an Essene was at Qumran". Others go so far as to claim that at least some of the Dead Sea Scrolls were written by Christians - and that arouses people to fury. For some people "the scrolls are a part of Jewish history, a basis for Zionism, and anyone who undermines this is seen as undermining Israel", laments Dr Yaakov Tepler of Beit Berl Academic College.
Among those stirred to fury - so prosecutors claim - is Raphael Golb, son of Norman Golb. In the trial before Manhattan Supreme Court, the prosecutors allege that Raphael set up 70 e-mail accounts, at least five of them in the names of scholars who disagreed with his father, such as Stephen Goranson and Jonathan Seidel, and used them to try to discredit Dr Lawrence Schiffman. In the e-mails sent out under Shiffman's name, Schiffman supposedly admitted plagiarising Golb and/or misrepresenting his theories. Schiffman also apparently asked for help in covering up his academic misdemeanours, with the result that fellow academics who received these e-mails, apparently from him, began to shun him.
The really ironic thing is that the two protagonists, Lawrence and Norman, know each other and respect each other's opinions, even though they disagree. They have met, they have debated, but on an academic level, without becoming personal. Neither man would accuse the other of being "meanspirited" or "foolish". Even more ironically, Raphael's campaign in support of his father has backfired spectacularly and even fewer people are now prepared to consider the elder Golb's arguments dispassionately.
Perhaps that is because of the issue referred to by Dr Tepler. Raphael claimed that his father was the victim of a Christian anti-Jewish conspiracy. "A considerable body of evidence indicates that a group of largely Christian 'Old Testament' scholars have been using blockbuster exhibitions of the Dead Sea Scrolls to propagandize (sic) an old, and increasingly disputed, theory of scroll origins. In effect, the creators of these exhibits have been presenting outdated hypotheses as facts, while carefully excluding and distorting the results of the research of their key Jewish opponents." (I read this in a posting on the newsgroup sci.archaeology where it was posted by someone using the name Charles Gadda.)
According to Golb/Gadda, to claim that Essene Jews wrote the scrolls makes you an anti-semite. Exactly how it does so is not entirely clear to me, but what is clear is that Raphael Golb has more or less admitted writing the offensive e-mails but claims that they are a normal part of the "blogosphere", that everyone writes under a pseudonym (70 of them?) and that he was just being satirical. Alas, another part of his defence is that Schiffer has actually plagiarised his father, leading Golb's lawyer, David Breibart, to admit that "it's not going to be an easy case. ... There are going to be some difficult questions."
However if the case against Raphael Golb appears open and shut, he can at least take comfort in the tendency of American courts to arrive at perverse decisions. When Lori Drew helped her daughter and a friend pose as a teenage boy to cyber-bully a 13-year old neighbour, the unforunate victim of their vicious attacks committed suicide. Drew was arrested and a federal jury in California considered her case. After intense deliberation they found her guilty of "accessing computers without authorisation", a mere misdemeanor. She appealed and was aquitted.
In any civilised country she would have been found guilty of fraud, impersonation and, at the very least, manslaughter and the three of them would have been punished severely - but then, this is a country where McDonalds can be fined several million dollars for serving hot coffee, a policewoman can sue Victoria's Secret because she was too fat for the skimpy underwear she purchased, and the family of a man who sneaked into Sea World and jumped into the killer whale tank is allowed to sue the Florida marine park because the whale - er - killed him.
The chances are high, therefore, that the judge and jury will decide that it is perfectly reasonable to have 70 e-mail addresses in false names, entirely logical to post lies while pretending to be someone else, and absolutely normal to take such radical offense over an academic disagreement.
© Kendall K. Down 2010
