“Mr. Sharp-eye-ra” by Edward Linley Sambourne (1844-1910)</span>

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Mr. Sharp-eye-ra

Edward Linley Sambourne (1844-1910)

Wood engraving

Punch (8 September 1883): 118

Punch’s Fancy Portraits No. 2

“Showing, in a very fanciful Portraiture, how Detective Ginsberg actually did Mr. Mr. Sharp-eye-ra out of his Skin.”

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According to Fred N. Reiner account of this once-famous apparent scandal, “in July 1883, Moses Wilhelm Shapira, a well-known Jerusalem dealer in antiquities and ancient manuscripts, offered to sell a scroll of Deuteronomy to the British Museum, one of his regular customers. Thus began one of the most celebrated incidents in the history of biblical scholarship, a saga that continues more than a century later.” Shapira, a Polish Jew who had converted to Christianity, offered for sale fifteen fragments of a Deuteronomy scroll, but Christian David Ginsburg, a leading biblical and Masoretic scholar, ultimately decided that they were forgeries. With his reputation destroyed, Shapira left England and six months later committed suicide. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls prompted some biblical scholars to wonder if Shapira’s scrolls were in fact genuine. Reiner’s article in the British Library Journal contains an extensive bibliography of discussions of the affair and its aftermath.

Bibliography

Reiner, Fred N. “C. D. Ginsberg and the Shapira Affair: A Nineteenth-Ventury Dead Sea Scroll Affair.” British Library Journal. (1995): 109-27. Web. 13 September 2021. Available online.

Created 13 September 2021