Join in the Feldstein Library at Neveh Shalom for a special discussion of The Lost Book of Moses by Chanan Tigay.

In 1883, Moses Wilhelm Shapira, an antiquities merchant and inveterate self-promoter, announced that he had come into possession of the world’s oldest biblical manuscript. Surprising the scholarly and antiquity-collector communities, Shapira’s announcement challenged the divine authorship of the Bible in a period when new methods in historical criticism were already sending shockwaves across the fields of Biblical and Oriental Studies. Denounced as a fraud, Shapira fled and was found dead in Rotterdam six months later. The manuscript was not to be found. Despite its tragic ending, Shapira’s fascinating life and the hunt for his controversial manuscript holds the reader’s full attention in Chanan Tigay’s The Lost Book of Moses: The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Bible. In 2012, Israeli filmmaker Yoram Sabo set out to solve the Shapira mystery and films a documentary. The documentary (50 minutes) is available here: https://vimeo.com/99821693