We have been informed that the author Charles Gadda is in fact an alias of a man that has been arrested for impersonating people in order to discredit their work on the Dead Sea Scrolls.
We are re-printing part of an article sent to me from San Diego Jewish World that explains in detail this terrible event.
THE JEWISH CITIZEN
SAN DIEGO—Let me begin this column with a heartfelt apology to Dr. Risa Levitt Kohn, the professor of religious studies at San Diego State University who served as the curator of the Natural History Museum’s exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Similarly I would like to apologize to her many colleagues who helped make the exhibition a reality; to Risa’s family and to any other persons close to her who shared her pain. I am truly sorry.
At the same time let me announce that for the first time in this publication’s history, we have withdrawn four articles from the archived record. All the articles had appeared in 2007. Two were short items about a controversy over the origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and two were articles—one in the form of a letter to the editor, the other in the form of a guest column — purportedly written by a man calling himself Charles Gadda.
In response to a query for verification, I was informed on March 6 by spokeswoman Alicia Maxey Greene of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office that “Charles Gadda” was not a real person, but in fact was an alias used by Raphael Haim Golb in a “campaign of impersonation and harassment” to discredit scholars who disagreed with his father, Norman Golb, about the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
For readers’ background, I am reprinting a press release that the Manhattan District Attorney’s office issued on March 5, and then will go on to explain how San Diego Jewish World unwittingly got sucked into Gadda/Golb’s alleged campaign. Finally, I will ask your suggestions how situations like this one can be avoided in the future.
Here is the press release, which to avoid confusion I am setting in a different type font:
Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau today announced the arrest of a 49-year-old man for creating multiple aliases to engage in a campaign of impersonation and harassment relating to the Dead Sea Scrolls and scholars of opposing viewpoints.
The defendant, RAPHAEL HAIM GOLB, was arrested on charges of identity theft, criminal impersonation and aggravated harassment. The crimes in the Criminal Court Complaint occurred during the period of July to December of 2008.
The investigation leading to today’s arrest revealed that GOLB engaged in a systematic scheme on the Internet, using dozens of Internet aliases, in order to influence and affect debate on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and in order to harass Dead Sea Scrolls scholars who disagree with his viewpoint. GOLB used computers at New York University (NYU) in an attempt to mask his true identity when conducting this Internet scheme. He gained access to NYU computers by virtue of being a graduate of the university, and having made donations to its library fund.
The investigation, which included a court-authorized search warrant that was executed this morning at GOLB’s apartment, began in response to a complaint by Lawrence Schiffman, Ph.D., that he was impersonated over the Internet. Dr. Schiffman is a NYU professor, chairman of the Hebrew & Judaic Studies Department and a leading scholar in the field of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In August 2008, Dr. Schiffman became subject to a campaign of impersonation and harassment through the Internet, by an anonymous individual. An investigation by the District Attorney’s Office revealed that this individual was GOLB, the son of Norman Golb, Ph.D., a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar who resides in Chicago. RAPHAEL GOLB used methods which were intended to maintain his anonymity, and opened an email account – larry.schiffman @ gmail.com – purportedly in Dr. Schiffman’s name and sent 11 emails to multiple NYU recipients, in which he pretended to be Dr. Schiffman, and purported to admit to plagiarism. Simultaneously, RAPHAEL GOLB, using other Internet aliases, sent emails to NYU personnel and administration accusing Dr. Schiffman of plagiarism, and created Internet blogs accusing Dr. Schiffman of plagiarism.
GOLB also created email accounts in the names of other individuals active in the field of Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship, including Stephen Goranson and Jonathan Seidel.
The Dead Sea Scrolls consist of roughly 900 documents, including texts from the Hebrew Bible, discovered between 1947 and 1956 in 11 caves in and around the ancient ruins of Qumran, on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, in present-day Israel. The texts are of great religious and historical significance, as they include the only known surviving copies of biblical texts made before 100 A.D., and preserve evidence of considerable diversity of belief and practice within late Second Temple period Judaism, the Judaism of the second and first centuries B.C. and the first century A.D. These manuscripts generally date to between 150 B.C. and 50 A.D. Publication of the scrolls is now complete, however it was delayed for many decades.
There is considerable academic scholarship that surrounds the Dead Sea Scrolls, with areas of general consensus, and with areas of debate and differing opinions and theories. Because of the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and because of the delay in publication, the scrolls are also subject to some conspiracy theories.
Many scholars view the scrolls collection as having been assembled by an ancient Jewish sect, which many call the Essenes. Furthermore, many scholars believe that this sect resided in the settlement in Qumran, in close proximity to the caves where the scrolls were found.
The defendant’s father, Dr. Norman Golb, is a professor at the University of Chicago. He has been a proponent of the viewpoint that the Dead Sea Scrolls found in the caves of Qumran had nothing to do with the buildings and settlement at the Qumran site. He believes that they were not the product of the Essenes, but of many different Jewish sects and communities of ancient Israel, who hid the scrolls in the caves at Qumran while fleeing from Jerusalem.
RAPHAEL GOLB, through his Internet aliases, promoted the theories of his father and criticized the theories of others. Frequently, he criticized the manner in which the Dead Sea Scrolls have been exhibited, for not giving sufficient attention to the theories of his father.
GOLB is charged with Identity Theft in the Second Degree, a class E felony, which is punishable by up to 1? to 4 years in prison; Identity Theft in the Third Degree, Criminal Impersonation in the Second Degree, Forgery in the Third Degree and Aggravated Harassment in the Second Degree, all class A misdemeanors, which are each punishable by up to 1 year in prison. He is scheduled to be arraigned today in Manhattan Criminal Court.
The investigation is continuing.
The investigation and prosecution of this case is being handled by Assistant District Attorney John Bandler of the Identity Theft Unit, under the supervision of Antonia Merzon, Unit Chief. Analyst Sarah Briglia of the Identity Theft Unit participated in the investigation. Investigators from the District Attorneys Investigation Bureau, including Senior Investigator Patrick McKenna and Investigator Ariela Fisch, participated in the investigation, under the supervision of Investigation Bureau Chief Joseph Pennisi.
Defendant Information:
RAPHAEL HAIM GOLB, 1/10/1960
206 Thompson Street
New York, New York
Below this article should be seen as a sad commentary and betrayal of trust.
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 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.
The excluded researchers have concluded that no kind of religious “sect” ever lived or wrote scrolls at Qumran, and that the Dead Sea Scrolls are the remains of Jerusalem libraries, hidden in the desert during the Roman siege and sacking of the Jewish capital in 70 A.D. (For further information, see the list of news items linked at the bottom of this article.)
I have examined the appearance of impropriety surrounding some of the current exhibits in a series of postings on the Now Public site; see, e.g., this article.
Recently, a number of major news sources have reported that the exhibits are the subject of “controversy.” See, e.g., this article from the National Post concerning the upcoming Royal Ontario Museum exhibit in Toronto.
(See also University of Chicago historian Norman Golb’s scathing review of the San Diego exhibit catalog, which was prepared by the same person who will be curating the Toronto exhibit; the letter by Michael Hager, director of the San Diego museum, attacking Golb; and Golb’s response to Hager.)
While a certain amount of information is thus beginning to trickle out a topic that will be of concern to many readers, there is perhaps not enough general awareness of the background leading up to the current situation. It is, I believe, best exposed by focusing on the role that antisemitism has played during fifty years of Dead Sea Scrolls research.
The elements of this scandal have been documented in many venues, including, most recently, Edward Rothstein’s New York Times review of the scrolls exhibit that recently took place at the New York Jewish Museum.
Rothstein explains that in the aftermath of the 1948 war, Jordan had control of the Qumran caves and, hence, of the hundreds of scrolls discovered in them during the ensuing decade. The scrolls were kept in the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem, and the Jordanian government appointed a team of “editors” to publish them, led by Father Roland de Vaux of the École Biblique (a Dominican institution, also in East Jerusalem).
The crucial fact, as Rothstein indicates, is that “Jewish scholars were deliberately excluded from de Vaux’s original eight-member team, which was dominated by Roman Catholic priests and scholars.”
According to Rothstein, De Vaux “rejected offers by Israelis to help his team and persisted in referring to Israel as Palestine.” Other members of the team also had a “scorn of political [and] religious aspects of Judaism.”
Rothstein explains that while the theory that the scrolls were produced by a sect of ascetic Essenes was first proposed by a Jewish scholar teaching at the Hebrew University, “that vision was filled out by de Vaux and his colleagues,” who argued that Qumran housed a “monastic celibate group living in the desert, isolated from other Judaic movements,” and espousing messianic views that “embodied almost proto-Christian sensibilities.”
Referring to what is commonly known as the Dead Sea Scrolls monopoly, Rothstein reminds us that “the scrolls were passed among generations of scholars like esoteric possessions,” and that the Qumran-sectarian theory “became orthodoxy, made immutable because until the 1990s the texts were largely inaccessible to outsiders.”
Rothstein observes that “the scholarly cult devoted to these scrolls was as tightly knit, self-regarding and monastic as the cult those scholars imagined produced the scrolls.” According to a Forward editorial by Golb, the “complex history of the Palestinian Jews on the eve of the First Revolt” was “pushed aside in favor of a bizarre, Christologically colored thesis.”
This “Christologically colored” state of affairs continued until recent times, because when Israel conquered the West Bank in 1967, it failed, according to Rothstein, to “assert any real authority over the project.”
John Strugnell, an early appointee of de Vaux, became head of the team in the 1980s, and in 1990 gave an interview in which he described Judaism as a “horrible religion” that “should have disappeared.” (For more on Strugnell, see his New York Times obituary by John Noble Wilford, where we learn, for example, that he never received a Ph.D.)
Another member of the monopoly, John Allegro, issued an antisemitic book, The Chosen People (1971), which is regularly cited on “maverick” websites: see, e.g., this page, where we learn that “the best study … for the general anti-Semite to read is John Allegro’s ‘The Chosen People’ … which details just how blood-thirsty, organized and generally genocidal the Jews were.” The author of this statement explains that Allegro was a “theologian who focused on ‘macro-theology’ and the Essene connection to Christianity.”
To be sure, Allegro left the editorial “team” before he published his “scholarly” diatribe; Strugnell himself was dismissed after making his antisemitic statements; and in the 1990s the group was gradually opened to a number of Jews, after Oxford scholar Geza Vermes — another convert to Christianity and an adamant defender of the Qumran-sectarian theory — admitted that the monopoly was “the academic scandal par excellence of the 20th century,” but entered into a controversial deal to obtain copies of the unpublished scrolls for Oxford under the condition that only individuals selected by the “official” editors could see them.
Despite the grudging expansion of the “team,” today it remains a fact that no one who fundamentally disagrees with the old Qumran-sectarian theory has ever been included in it.
As for the current museum exhibits, while a variety of Jewish scholars have been invited to give lectures at them, I can only repeat that the views of the key opponents of the sectarian theory — in particular, of the prominent scholars in Israel and elsewhere who have argued for a specifically Jewish, as opposed to sectarian, theory of scroll origins — have been largely downplayed and excluded from these venues (with, it would seem, the single exception of the Jewish Museum exhibit in New York).
Is it insignificant that an antisemitic insinuation has appeared in a press release announcing at least one of the exhibits, and that concerted efforts to prevent the public from finding out about opposition to the exhibits appear to have been engaged in by interested parties, some of whose work histories include, for example, employment in companies with names like “Christianity.com”?
Clearly these are difficult questions. Nor can antisemitism alone be held responsible for the current crisis in scrolls research: personal enmities, financial interests, the ordinary desire for power are surely all partly to blame. This being said, the question of how much influence the shadow of the original monopoly continues to exercise over public perception of the scrolls remains a pressing issue to this day, and one is entitled to wonder whether inviting a few Jewish people to participate in the exhibits isn’t a bit like that old story: “Oh, but I have many Jewish friends…”
