462 THE ADVOCATE
VOL. 79 PART 3 MAY 2021
The words, however, were none he had ever read before—in other words, it
was biblical Hebrew, but not from the Bible. With trembling hands and heart
pounding, he realized that the scroll he was reviewing was an ancient
Hebrew scroll that had not been read for over 2,000 years. He purchased
Salahi’s collection and eventually reunited the scrolls with the ones at St.
Mark’s Monastery (which sold them to Sukenik for a cool $1,900 profit),
thereby solidifying the greatest archeological find of the 20th century.
Professor Sukenik’s involvement in the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls
more or less coincided with the United Nations’ partition of Palestine and
the formation of the modern state of Israel on May 14, 1948. Thereafter, the
plot twists and turns like that of a John Le Carré novel, with scholars, businessmen
and even the CIA vying for decent copies of the scrolls during the
Arab-Israeli War. Apart from the car bombings and explosions a fierce theological
and academic debate about content, meaning and ownership of the
ancient texts, one would be forgiven for concluding that it was only a matter
of time before the law would become involved.
Sayre’s law tells us that “academic politics is the most vicious and bitter
form of politics, because the stakes are so low”. In the case of the Dead Sea
Scrolls, an early and predominant theory was that the scrolls had been produced
by a Jewish sect called the Essenes who, in their messianic beliefs
and monastic tendencies, may have exerted a strong influence on another
breakaway group called Christians. But a professor at the University of
Chicago named Norman Golb theorized that the scrolls encompassed the
thinking of diverse communicates of Jews in the Holy Land, not just the
Essenes. He posited that the scrolls had originally been moved from
libraries in Jerusalem to the caves they were found in to save them from an
anticipated Roman siege of the city in 70 A.D. “There’s no rational basis for
the Essene hypothesis, except for 40 years of commitment to an old idea by
a clique of scholars,” Golb told The New York Times in 1989.
Whether he was aware at the time or not is unclear, but Norman Golb had
an ally who was willing to go to bat for him: his son, Raphael Haim Golb, a
part-time lawyer and part-time scholar (his interest being French secularism)
living in New York. The son was incensed at the way his father’s theories
had been ignored by various museums staging exhibits related to the
scrolls. He therefore decided to do something about it by using the internet
to argue his father’s case. He first created a number of blogs using a variety
of pseudonyms that supported his father’s work. Then he got involved with
forums and engaged in academic discussions about the theories surrounding
the controversies. Under a variety of “sock puppet” pseudonyms (as many as
80), he debated others and linked his own blogs and other posts to create the
impression of many individuals supporting Professor Golb’s theories.