In Michael Pollak's article A Preliminary Study of Twelve Detached Skins from a Centuries-Old Chinese Torah Scroll the authors tracks down and examines detached portions of Genesis, presumably from a Kaifeng Torah Scroll. Pollak provides a photo of a skin:
This article was published in 2001, and presents work that was done in the 1980s and 1990s. Where are the skins now, and has any work been done with them?
Pollak details the efforts he made to examine these skins. They went up for auction at Sotheby's in 1986, and it took him a decade to examine them. They were sold to the Van Kampen Foundation, in Michigan. The skins, and other holdings were transferred to The Holy Land Experience theme park in Florida. One source notes that when the Holy Land Experience went out of business in 2021, the collection went back to the Van Kampen Foundation. I am trying to get fresh information on this.
Pollack examine the skins in 1999. We know that Torahs Scrolls numbered 1,3,8,10, 11 have no documentation at all. Are these skins part of one of the post-1642 Flood effort on behalf of the Kaifeng Community to copy twelve scrolls? It seems this is not the case, as the twelve skins Pollak examined are heavily damaged by water:
It seems this is a pre-flood scroll that was dried out after it was recovered. Rather than gidin, the skins are held together with silk thread - which is common to all other extant Kaifeng Scrolls.
Pollak tells us that with the exception of the ABS Scroll, which shows water damage, all post-Flood scrolls are numbered on the reverse side of each skin. The Van Kampen skins are not so numbered. The water damage is so severed, that the ink of the Genesis text has bled though the skins three times.
Uncharacteristically, Pollak disparages the Kaifeng scrolls:
Did the Kaifeng Jews really "hire" Chinese scribes to blindly copy their Torah Scrolls? This is a strange assertion. Regardless, the VK skins were brought to HUC in 1999, and examined in some details. It was even examined alongside the HUC Genesis square portion and the ROM Genesis Square portion. He details numerous divergences between the VK text and modern versions.
One of the more interesting ones is a repetition of the word ve'ad in Genesis 7:23. A "roughly drawn oval" was written around the second va'ed, and Pollak says "it is possible that in the years that it was in use one of the rabbis or congregants of the Kaifeng synagogue noticed the error and penned in the oval to caution the reader against chanting the redundant word." It is also possible, he continues, "that the scribe himself caught the error and inserted the oval rather than going though the trouble of erasing the redundant word." Pollak essentially calls the scribe lazy as the fix would have not involve much work. There is also an issue with the Tetragrammaton in Genesis 18:16 which Pollak harshly judges. As we have seen before, we hardly learn anything substantive from such harsh readings of Kaifeng books.
Pollak appraises the the scroll is was written before 1642, and "was used in the synagogue of Kaifeng as early as 1500 (or even as much as a century or two before that)." He is certain that it was written in China.
The work of this author is vital, as no one else has written about these skins. But the results are disappointing. A fresh and non-judgement of these skins are in order.
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