If you read the literature of the Kaifeng Jews, eventually someone will quote Rabbi Solomon Mayer Schiller-Szinessy's infuriated comments about the Kaifeng Torah Scroll in possession of the Cambridge University Library. His largely unpublished comments are thus:
"One does not know what to say of this copy... so marvelous a production is it [in its display] of human ignorance, coupled with impudence. Lu lo ra'iti lo he'amanti! [If I had not seen it myself, I would never have believed it!] I am compelled to explain. It is possible that people who seem to not have the smallest notion of what a Jewish sofer ought to be can sit down & fill the space of 239 columns of beautifully prepared goatskin with the Pentateuch, which they do violence to in almost every column? Why, one of the numerous MSS. hunters, folks anxious to establish variant lectiones, needs only to get a hold of this or a similar copy & we shall be blessed with important discoveries!"
In other words, only a dilettante, like me, would have an interest in this scroll. Examining the Torah scroll is useless, he explains, and it is only worth anything because of hits beautiful goatskin. Its variants with other scrolls are of no particular or real interest. He also thinks that the Kaifeng scribe had the text dictated to them:
"...to the best of my knowledge and conscience only a copy of the Pentateuch read by someone to the scribe, or the numerous interchanges between aleph and he, ayin and aleph, he for het, het and kaph, &c. could be accounted for."
For Schiller-Szinessy, the only explanation for the variants in the Cambridge Scroll is that the scribe was having the text dictated to them, from another person. It is not possible that the scribe had a text in front of them with variant spellings!
I disagree with this strongly. If this was true, the result would be either better or far 'worse' than the scroll we have. For one, if two people with very imperfect knowledge of Hebrew, one dictating and the other writing, were engaged in such an activity, one would think there would be far more variants than there already are! Also, the very act of dictating and writing Hebrew from one person to another presumes a fairly good knowledge of the language. If this was not the case, this scroll would have far more variants than it already does.
Schiller-Szinessy wrote this in 1876, well before more modern understandings of Hebrew texts, their dating, evolution, and regional characteristics. Schiller-Szinessy was a rabbi, and may have understood the transmission of the Torah traditionally; therefore his understanding of the scrolls was dangerously ahistorical. To be fair, however, his biography shows a man of contemporary influences:
SCHILLER-SZINESSY, SOLOMON MAYER (1820–1890), rabbi and scholar. Born in Altofen (Budapest), Schiller received a traditional rabbinic education, attending Hungarian and other institutions, notably the Lutheran College at Eperjes (Presov); he graduated from the University of Jena in 1845. At Eperjes Schiller was given a faculty appointment for Hebrew and also became the local rabbi, and the atmosphere of tolerance in the college influenced him permanently. He succeeded markedly in child education, and through his eloquence in the pulpit, he fostered Hungarian patriotism. His rabbinical teachers, who included Aaron *Chorin, were moderates, but in 1845 he vigorously attacked in print the Reform resolutions of the Frankfurt Rabbinical Conference. During the Hungarian revolution, led by Kossuth (1848–49), Schiller added the Magyar "Szinessy" to his name and enlisted; he was wounded and captured but escaped from Temesvár via Trieste to England, where in 1851 he became rabbi of Manchester. While endeavoring to keep traditionalists and would-be reformers together, he became embroiled with the chief rabbi Nathan *Adler by attempting to extend his ecclesiastical jurisdiction over northern England; he was then persuaded by the reformers to join their new dissident synagogue, although his personal practice and outlook remained strongly traditional throughout his life. Schiller resigned his rabbinical post in 1860 and moved in 1863 to Cambridge. His bibliographical erudition earned him the appointment in 1866 as teacher (later reader) of talmudic and rabbinic literature at Cambridge University. He was the first professing Jew formally entrusted by Cambridge with the subject, and he taught and inspired a distinguished list of gentile rabbinical scholars, which included C. Taylor and W.H. Lowe. Schiller's principal scholarly achievement was his prolix Catalogue of Hebrew Manuscripts Preserved in the Cambridge University Library, a portion of which was published in 1876. He edited Book One of David *Kimḥi's commentary on the Psalms (1883) and *Romanelli's account of his Moroccan travels (Massa ba-Arav, 1885).
One thing is certain, his comments, reproduced widely, have damaged the enthusiasm of the study of the Kaifeng Torah Scrolls. If they are truly worthless, why study, let along devote a life of scholarship to these scrolls? The Kaifeng Scrolls were first saddled with the expectation of the seventeenth century Jesuits, and their Medieval slanders that such scrolls as those at Kaifeng would contain ancient references to Jesus, long excised in Western copies by the early rabbis of the Jewish tradition. Now they are hampered by the ahistorical diagnoses of Schiller-Szinessy; and the scrolls languish for want of professional investigation ever since these intemperate words were set down.
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