A Torah Scroll at the University of Bologna Library is being called the oldest Torah scroll in existence. They have used carbon dating to date the scroll to have been written between the years 1155 and 1225. While the scroll has been in the Library for centuries, a librarian's error had dated the scroll to only the seventeenth century.
In 1889, an Italian librarian's faulty identification
sentenced to archival obscurity an antique Torah scroll that has turned
out to be the oldest complete such scroll in existence.
This week, University of Bologna Professor Mauro Perani announced the results of carbon-14 tests authenticating the scroll's age as roughly 800 years old.
The scroll dates to between 1155 and 1225, making it the oldest complete Torah scroll on record.
Like
all Torah scrolls, this one contains the full text of the five Books of
Moses in Hebrew and is prepared according to strict standards for use
during religious services.
What a 19th-century
cataloguer had interpreted as clumsy mistakes by what he guessed was an
awkward 17th-century scribe provided the very clues that led Perani to
investigate further. National Geographic spoke by telephone to Perani
about his rediscovery.
What led you to take a second look at the scroll?
In
2012, a colleague and I decided to write a new catalog of the
[University of Bologna] library's Hebrew manuscript collection. The
original librarian and cataloguer from 1889, Leonello Modona, was an
educated man but not a scholar. He had dated this scroll to the 17th
century with a question mark.
He described the writing
in this scroll as "an Italian script, rather clumsy-looking, in which
certain letters, as well as the usual crowns and strokes, show uncommon
and strange appendices." But when I went to examine the scroll, I saw
immediately that it was not the "bad" writing that Modona described.
These Hebrew letters were in the Oriental style, not of Palestine, but
of the Babylonian tradition, and from a much earlier time than the 17th
century.
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