Moses Wilhelm Shapira

Moses Wilhelm Shapira

Moses Wilhelm Shapira ( Hebrew מוזס וילהלם שפירא, born in 1830 in Kamyanets-Podilskyj , Russian Empire ; died March 9, 1884 in Rotterdam , Netherlands ) was an antique dealer in Jerusalem . He was involved in forgery scandals of Moabite art objects in the 19th century.

Life

Moses Wilhelm Shapira was born in 1830 as the son of Polish Jews. In 1856 he emigrated to Jerusalem in the Ottoman Empire . He converted to Protestantism and married the Hessian deaconess Anna Magdalena Rosette Jöckel. They had two daughters together, one of whom was the French writer Myriam Harry (1869-1958).

Shapira opened a trade in antiques for tourists, which he bought from local Arabs.

In the wake of the discovery of the Mescha stele , numerous forgeries of Moabitic works of art, the so-called Moabitica , appeared at Jerusalem's antique market . Shapira was also involved in these forgeries. However, since there were no comparable objects at the time, the forgery initially went undetected. German archaeologists in particular bought Moabitica to compensate for the loss of the Mescha stele to France and Great Britain.

Charles Clermont-Ganneau (1846–1923), who had excavated Gezer , was the first to question the authenticity of the Moabite finds. Emil Kautzsch shared this opinion . Shapira defended his artifacts as real, against the resistance of researchers. He continued his trade, but turned to the sale of Hebrew manuscripts from Yemen .

In 1883 Shapira offered the British Museum in London 15 scrolls containing pieces from Deuteronomy , including the Ten Commandments , for one million pounds sterling. After a detailed examination by Christian David Ginsburg, the fragments were revealed to be forgeries. However, only after two of the scrolls had already been presented in a major exhibition.

After this scandal, Shapira traveled through Europe and finally committed suicide with a gun on March 9, 1884 in the Hotel Bloemendaal in Rotterdam .

Shapira's scrolls were auctioned off at Sotheby’s for 10 guineas . They were believed to have been destroyed in a fire in 1899.

literature

• John Marco Allegro : The Shapira Affair. Doubleday, Garden City NY 1965.
• Efrāt Karmôn (Ed.): Truly Fake. Moses Wilhelm Shapira, Master forger. = Ziyyûf amîttî. Israel Museum, Jerusalem 2000, ISBN 965-278-242-4 ( Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Catalog 441).
• Shulamit Lapid : He came into the hand of the Lord. Novel. Goldmann, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-442-72205-5 .
• Andreas Reichert: Julius Euting, the Pseudo-Moabitica and 'La petite fille de Jérusalem'. New finds from an old affair. In: Christl Maier (Ed.): Exegesis on site. Festschrift for Peter Welten on his 65th birthday. Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig 2001, pp. 335–367.
• Myriam Harry : La Conquête de Jérusalem . Calmann Lévy, Paris, 1903

See also

• Thankmar von Münchhausen (diplomat) (1835–1909), who helped Shapira as German consul in Jerusalem