A Jewish convert to Christianity born in 19th-century Russia, Moses Wilhelm Shapira spent most of his life in Jerusalem, where became a prominent antiquities dealer. He managed to stay in the business even after he was caught selling a number of fake pottery artifacts he himself had a hand in forging. But the great scandal of his career came later, and is the subject of a new book by Chanan Tigay. Beth Kissileff writes in her review:

Shapira’s final attempt to sell manuscripts to the British Museum was the one that proved his undoing—and provided the story behind Tigay’s book. The “Lost Scroll of Moses” consisted of manuscripts of Deuteronomy that Shapira claimed were found by Bedouin in a cave in an embankment overlooking Wadi Mujib, east of [the Dead Sea]. From a man eager to give people what they wanted, these scrolls had a version of Deuteronomy touted as “a more original version of the Hebrew Bible” with which, Tigay says, Shapira was “hoping to make the Christian interpretation of the Bible seem to be the more authentic one.” . . .

Obviously, the parallels are tantalizing between ancient scrolls that might give a more “original” version of a biblical text than the Masoretic one, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, found in thirteen caves and containing 800-900 scrolls, 50,000 fragments in total. . . .

Shapira brought the scrolls to London in 1883. . . . At the time, though there was much debate, the scrolls were declared a hoax, and the British Museum declined their purchase. Shapira traveled to Rotterdam, Holland, where he committed suicide. . . . But when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in Qumran in clay jars in 1947, scholars recalled the similar story of Shapira’s claim about the origins of his scrolls. . . . One scholar . . . suggested in 1956 that Shapira’s scrolls might have been genuine and forerunners of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Tigay claims to have resolved the question of the scrolls’ authenticity while searching through Shapira’s papers (the location of the scrolls themselves remains uncertain).

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.