Hebrew Voices #148 – Looking Under the Hood of a Torah Scroll: Part 1

Transcript

Hebrew Voices #148 – Looking Under the Hood of a Torah Scroll: Part 1

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nelson: What we're doing and what we're bringing to them is the opportunity to, metaphorically speaking, go under the hood to see all of the working parts and all the mechanics that go behind our printed Bibles, the manuscripts, and all of the technical aspects that go along with those manuscripts.

Nehemia: Shalom, we’re here today with Nelson Calvillo, who is a research assistant at the Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research, and he joined me at the World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, where on August 8th, 2022, I gave a lecture to some of the top scholars in the world.

Now, just to give you an idea, we've done a program before which we called SBL Reactions, or Society of Biblical Literature Reactions,which is an annual conference every year here in the United States on biblical studies, and in American terms that would be called like the World Series of Biblical Studies or the Superbowl of Biblical Studies. The World Congress of Jewish Studies is like the Olympics - it's like every four or five years or something like that, and it really is, in some sense, a much higher level of lectures because it’s not every year. I had the opportunity there, for the first time, to speak about the topic: A Newly Identified Tenth to Eleventh Century Oriental Torah Scroll in the National Library of Russia, in Saint Petersburg. And boy, I could unpack all of these phrases there…

What we're going to do is we're going to play the video of my lecture, and then Nelson and I are going to discuss it, because we decided that… well let's be honest, it's a really technical and complicated topic.

Nelson, I actually had somebody walk up to me at the end of my lecture, and this was a very intelligent, knowledgeable scholar, he said, “Nehemia, you have this incredible skill to take something really boring and make it interesting.” And he said, “Most people here at this Congress are taking something really interesting and making it boring.” And I said, “I think this is actually interesting.”

And it is interesting, but I had very little time, technically I had twenty minutes and I went on for twenty-five, so I overstepped my time for about five minutes. And so, I had to just rattle off the information as quickly as possible. What I didn't have time for was to explain what, for an academic scholar, would be considered basic concepts. I just assumed they knew what I was talking about. But for the audience, I want us to take the time and discuss those things.

Before we get started, I do want to explain this term “Oriental;” it's somewhat of a misnomer. In the United States “Oriental” would imply East Asia. That's not at all what it means in biblical studies, at least. In Jewish studies, “Oriental” is a stand-in for the Hebrew word Mizrachi which is “Eastern.” And even that's not really an accurate term, because what Mizrachi really means are Jews who lived in Muslim countries. So here you have this ironic thing where a Jew who lives in Morocco would be considered Mizrachi, “Oriental”, whereas a Jew who lived in… well, my ancestors came from Lithuania, which is far to the east of Morocco, would be called “occidental” or “Western”. Well, what's Western about it? It's actually far to the east. So, it's a very strange term, and I think it's a term that has more to do with frankly Britain, and maybe Germany, who coined these terms, but that's the term Oriental.