Jewish Scrolls in Christian Hands: Torah Scrolls in Early Modern Germany. by Noam Sienna
Channel: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Date: 15/08/2022

In this paper, I demonstrate how the meaning of the Torah scroll — a rolled manuscript of the Hebrew Pentateuch — changes as it moves across and between communities, through following how Torah scrolls entered Christian individual and institutional collections in Germany between the 16th and 19th centuries. Drawing on my current book project, I argue that the Torah scroll as a material object becomes a staging site for changing ideas about Jews and Judaism. Analyzing selected case studies of how individuals and institutions sought out, acquired, and studied Torah scrolls, I demonstrate how Torah scrolls served as useful objects for Christian scholars in early modern Europe, bearing witness to their imaginations of a Biblical past. As they began asking new questions about the Bible and its text(s), they sought out Torah scrolls in the hopes that they might offer a way to access Biblical truth without having to work through the lens of the rabbinic tradition. Over the course of the 19th century, while it had become clear that the Torah scroll would not offer the hoped-for textual insights, it took on a different significance: as a pedagogical tool for illustrating the world of the Bible, and in particular the original form of the text as Jesus knew it. In the larger international context of how Jewish and other Oriental manuscripts entered academic collections, this paper demonstrates the importance of attending to provenance and acquisition histories to fully understand the history of a collection and its constituent books. 

Dr Noam Sienna (Ph.D. University of Minnesota) is a sofer, author, and Jewish educator in Minneapolis.