Hebrew Voices #198 – Nehemia on “Grotto in the Tar Pit”: Part 2

Dr. Nehemia Gordon - Bible Scholar at NehemiasWall.com

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In this episode of Hebrew Voices #198 - Nehemia on "Grotto in the Tar Pit": Part 2, Nehemia rejoins the Grotto in the Tar Pit podcast to discuss medieval equivalents of Hamas's October 7th Massacre and how examining the Vatican secret archives leads to the discovery of fragments from lost Hebrew manuscripts.

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Hebrew Voices #198 – Nehemia on “Grotto in the Tar Pit”: Part 2

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: One of the Old Catholics, meaning who wasn’t of Jewish descent, he gets all excited and he shouts for joy, and he says, “The crucifix at the front of the church has just shined a light on us. This is a great miracle. Jesus is answering our prayer.” And one of the, what they call the New Christians, Nuevos Cristianos, who was born a Jew and raised a Jew and sprinkled with water, forced to convert to Catholicism, he says, “That’s just the way the sun is reflecting off the silver crucifix. That’s not a miracle.” And the Old Catholics spend the next few days massacring the Jews throughout Lisbon.

Here’s the crazy thing; why does the Catholic Church have the authority to burn people at the stake? Because, like, we have this idea of the separation of church and state. Sort of, we do, right? We’ll say, well, “Google isn’t the same as the government.” But it has more power than many governments. If Twitter can ban a head of state, and I’m not talking about the United States… There’s African countries where the head of state was banned by Twitter. Imagine that. You’re a country of like 10 or 20 million people, and this corporation, which has a higher annual revenue, higher annual profit than your GDP, bans your head of state. What are you supposed to do?

So, that’s pretty much the state of the Catholic Church, if you’re going back… certainly 500 years ago, and to some extent into some regions much later than that, where you have this non-government entity which has more power than the government itself. And so, imagine now you’re the king of Portugal in 1497, and you had opened up the door to the Jews, and you promised, “I’ll never do to the Jews what the Spanish did.” And the Catholic Church comes to you and says, “Well, how would you like to burn in hell forever? We’ll excommunicate you if you don’t do what we say.” “Okay, well, I don’t really believe that necessarily, but if you excommunicate me, my cousin’s going to slit my throat and claim that he’s king. That’s what’s really going to happen. Some relative of mine who has a claim to the throne is going to murder me in my sleep, probably with the help of my confessor, who I’ve trusted my whole life. So, I better do what the Catholic Church says.”

It’s a parallel to… they call this unpersoning, where one of these tech oligarchs will put you under what’s effectively excommunication. “Okay, maybe I don’t care that I’ve been banned from Twitter.” Really? Try operating in the 21st century without a bank account. See how that goes.

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: Without the ability to have a bank account.

Sergio: That’s the next step.

Nehemia: Well, what do you mean, the next step? They’re already doing it now. They’re literally already doing it now.

Sergio: Yeah. Like they did with the truckers in Canada when they… Yeah, and they shut down their GoFundMe and took all the funds out of it.

Nehemia: Right. That’s insane.

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: Well, no. And GoFundMe can say, “We’re a private company. We’re allowed to do that.” Really? So, let’s say I have a bank… which I don’t, but let’s say I had a bank, and somebody comes in in the United States and says, “I want to open up a bank account. And by the way, I’m an African American.” “Oh, we don’t allow African Americans to have bank accounts.” Well, they’ll be immediately shut down. And the argument is that you’re open to the public. You have to be open to any reasonable… Now, somebody’s coming in and trying to scam you, that’s a different thing. They’re saying my name is… whatever. If somebody is committing fraud, that’s a different thing. But if somebody comes in with legitimate papers and they’re an upstanding citizen, and they’re not trying to commit a crime, and you say, “I’m not going to allow you to have a bank account in my bank because I don’t like your politics.” Well, that’s what the Catholic Church was doing 500 years ago, and they had the ability to burn people at the stake.

Sergio: Wow.

Nehemia: Thankfully, the tech oligarchs don’t currently have that ability, but they can unperson you in a way. There’s this beautiful exchange between Nachmanides, who’s also known as Rabbi Moses Ben Nachman, sometimes confused with Maimonides, who is Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon. They had different…

Sergio: Now you just confused me!

Nehemia: So, one’s father’s name was Maimon, and the other was Nachman. So Nachmanides, who’s about 50 years after Maimonides dies, he has this debate with the Catholics in Barcelona, and it’s known as the Disputation of Barcelona. And it’s really an important event in medieval Jewish-Christian relations, and, really, in medieval Jewish history.

Sergio: Well, is he the one who used Shem Tov’s Hebrew Bible, or Hebrew Matthew?

Nehemia: Nothing to do with it. No, no connection whatsoever. That was a rabbi named Shem-Tov ibn Shaprut.

Sergio: Okay.

Nehemia: And this is a rabbi named Moshe Ben Nachman, or Ramban, he’s also called, who’s confused with Rambam, which is Maimonides. All right. So, Moses Ben Nachman, or Nachmanides, he’s forced into this debate with a Jewish convert to Christianity by King James I of Aragon. Nothing to do with King James Bible, which was King James I of England. Or whatever he was king of, I don’t know, England and Wales, something like that. This is King James I of Aragon. He forces Nachmanides into a debate, and Nachmanides is like, “I don’t want to have this debate.” And the king says, “What, are you afraid you’re going to lose?” He’s like, “Oh, I’m not afraid I’m going to lose. I’m afraid I’m going to win. And it’s not that I’m afraid. All the people around me, all the other Jews, are saying, ‘Don’t have this debate. If you win, we’re going to be persecuted.’” And guess what happened? He won and they were persecuted. He specifically was exiled from Spain.

But he makes this incredible statement to the king, where he says, “How can I possibly” and I’m paraphrasing here, “How can I possibly have a debate if I’m not allowed to speak freely?” And the king says, “Well, why can’t you speak freely?” And he says, “Well, in previous debates there were limits imposed on the Jewish position. The Jews weren’t allowed to say anything that the Catholics considered offensive. Like, if they said, ‘You’re idolaters for praying to the Virgin Mary,’ which…” And if you’re Catholic, I’m not trying to offend you. But that would be the classic position of a Jew in the Middle Ages. That if you’re praying to someone who’s a flesh and blood human being, who even according to Catholic theology was a flesh and blood human being, fully human, I believe they say, I don’t know… that that would be idolatry. So, if a Jew said that in the debate, they would be persecuted and all the Jews would be persecuted, so they weren’t allowed to say that.

So Nachmanides says, “How am I supposed to debate if I’m not allowed to speak freely? What I believe is going to be blasphemy to you, and what you believe is going to be blasphemy to me. Otherwise, we would have the same belief.” And the king says, “Okay, I’ll give you freedom of speech.” So Nachmanides goes into the debate, and he wins, but then the person he was debating, named Pablo Christiani, who was a Jew who had converted to Catholicism back in France… his family was from France, he then wrote an account of the debate. And in his written account, Pablo Cristiani won.

And so Nahmanides said, “What you’re saying is a lie. That’s not what happened.” And he wrote his own account, and then he was sentenced to death by the Catholic Church. And he said, “Wait a minute. You gave me freedom of speech.” And the king says, “Well, I control speech. I don’t control what’s written on Twitter.” And I’m joking, half-joking.

Sergio: Right.

Nehemia: In other words, the king said, “I don’t control what’s written. That’s controlled by the Roman Catholic Church. And if the priests say that what you’ve written, you deserve the death penalty, I can’t absolve you.” So, what the king ends up doing is commuting the death sentence to exile. In other words, what the king was able to say, “You can’t continue to live in Spain,” where your ancestors have lived, maybe for over a thousand years, since the time the Phoenicians came here with Israelite traders, merchants. “You got to go.” And so, he ended up leaving Spain as an exile. Imagine; he’s an old man, and he’s got to go on the road with pirates on the seas, and he’s got to travel and hope he doesn’t get killed. And he ends up in Israel.

Sergio: Now, is that the story where the guy he was debating was actually one of his… he used to be his mentor?

Nehemia: No, I don’t know that story. I don’t know that story.

Sergio: Yeah, it’s something about… he had to debate, and they invited him over, and his former student was there eating pork just to show him that he was going to…

Nehemia: Find out the details of that story, I’d love to read about that.

Sergio: Okay.

Nehemia: I don’t know about that. There were a lot of debates in the Middle Ages. The Jews generally didn’t want to engage in the debate, because it was no win. If you win, then you’re persecuted. If you lose, well, now you have to convert to Catholicism because you lost. Well, who judged the debate? The Catholic king and the Catholic monks. I think usually it was the Dominicans, who really hated Jews.

There’s a famous incident that’s called the… and people should look this up… it’s called the Lisbon Massacre. So, there were hundreds of thousands of Jews who flee to Portugal, and in 1497, they’re sprinkled with water, or they’re told, “convert and die.” And now they’re living as Catholics; they have no choice. And there was a great famine, I want to say it was around 1507 or 1508…

Sergio: So, that’s all it takes for them to declare you a Catholic is, they sprinkle water on you and now you’re Catholic?

Nehemia: In that situation. I mean, I don’t think they’ll do that today. I can’t imagine they would do that today, but I don’t know. They did it back then. Now, was that, strictly speaking, legitimate according to Catholic law? I don’t know. Maybe you could get a hearing at the Vatican and try to get out of it, but good luck with that. They were deemed, for all intents and purposes, Catholics at that point, and then they had to be forced to follow Catholicism.

So, there’s this draught, and everyone’s ordered to go to church and pray, and they’re sitting in church, and there’s this one Jew sitting in the cathedral… I believe it’s the cathedral in Lisbon. And one of the Old Catholics, meaning, who wasn’t of Jewish descent, he gets all excited and he shouts for joy, and he says, “The crucifix at the front of the church has just shone a light on us. This is a great miracle. Jesus is answering our prayer.” And one of what they call the New Christians, Nuevos Cristianos, who was born a Jew and raised a Jew and sprinkled with water, forced to convert to Catholicism, he says, “That’s just the way the sun is reflecting off the silver crucifix. That’s not a miracle.” And the Old Catholics spend the next few days massacring the Jews throughout Lisbon, being egged on by the… I believe it was the Dominicans. It could be the Franciscans… somebody look it up and fact check me.

But there were these orders of people, meaning, like, Dominican Order. They were monks who had devoted their lives to the Catholic Church, and they go around telling everybody, “The Jews have just blasphemed Jesus and the crucifix, and that’s why we’re suffering. That’s why you don’t have bread on your table, because these new Christians are not good Christians and God’s punishing us.” And they spend days massacring the Jews, until the king’s men show up and they stop the massacre. But by then, hundreds of Jews had been killed in Lisbon.

So, this was… I mean, look, this was like the October 7th of the early 1500’s. Happened all the time. We call these in history “pogroms.” That’s a term from Eastern Europe, but it happened all over the Muslim and Christian world, or Catholic world… but not just Catholic, Greek Orthodox as well, where the Jews are accused of something and they spend days massacring them, and sometimes more.

Sometimes it comes directly from the government. There’s the famous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was a forgery produced by the secret police of the Tsar. It’s actually kind of crazy because… I mean, it’s completely crazy, but what’s crazy about it is we know some of the sources of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. There was a grandson of Napoleon Bonaparte named Napoleon III, and he was a ruler of France, and one of his enemies wrote a fake account of his plan to control the entire world. And there are entire paragraphs of that forgery, which was written in French, which were translated into Russian and became part of the protocols of the Elders of Zion. That’s how bad a forgery it was.

But it was promoted by the Russian government, and today it’s promoted throughout the Islamic world. I mean, it’s crazy. It’s literally taught as fact in certain parts of the Muslim world, this thing that was a conspiracy about Napoleon’s grandson. I mean, it’s crazy. And now it’s… say, “Well, the Jews are really trying to control the world.” And look, when the Holocaust happened, what did those people say? I don’t know if I’m allowed to say in a podcast. What did Hitler say? What did the Nazis say? What they said is, “The Aryan people are fighting for their very existence against their Jewish persecutors.” That could be Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas. There really is not that much difference. Maybe you say there’s the racial aspect, which is different, but the basic idea that Jews are our persecutors, and we’re the persecuted fighting against our persecutors. In the paranoid fantasy of Hitler, that’s what was going on.

Sergio: Well, hasn’t Mein Kampf become a…

Nehemia: What’s that?

Sergio: Hasn’t Mein Kampf become a bestseller amongst Muslims in recent years?

Nehemia: Oh, yeah. Yeah, it’s really interesting. So, I did a podcast about a copy of Mein Kampf that was found in Gaza, and somebody was like, marking it up with notes. They were studying it. And so, I went on Amazon to see, can I get an Arabic copy of Mein Kampf? And there was somebody who was selling one. And I’ve been buying from Amazon for over 20 years. Think about that. I have been buying stuff from Amazon… originally it was books, right, for over 20 years, and I’ve never had this happen before. I buy the book, and the seller calls me up on the telephone, and he’s like, “Why do you want to buy this book?” I said, “Well, I’m researching this. What do you mean? I’m researching.” He says, “Do you want any other Arabic books?” I said, “No, just this one.” And he hangs up the phone and cancels the sale.

Sergio: Whoa!

Nehemia: Because he didn’t want to sell Mein Kampf in Arabic to somebody who wasn’t a believer. Meaning, a believer in the message of “Jews are horrible”. And my name is Nehemia Gordon, he can see that.

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: And he sees this is some Jew who’s trying to…

Sergio: He Googled you.

Nehemia: Well… you don’t even need to Google me; the guy’s name is Nehemia. It’s obvious that I’m not Muslim. If my name was Muhammad or Nehamallah, which is the Arabic of Nehemia, I suppose, then maybe you would. Maybe he would have sold me the book. And I’ve never, in over 20 years, had a seller not just sent me an email, which I don’t think I’ve ever had either. But to call me on the telephone, on my personal cell phone, which you have to put in when you’re doing a shipment; never had that happen. I don’t even know if they’re allowed to do that. But he did it. And the sale was canceled because, yes, they’ll sell that book to each other, but they don’t want us buying it because… they know they’re not supposed to be disseminating Mein Kampf.

Sergio: You run into these situations all the time, like when you were buying the flash drive with all the Hebrew writings.

Nehemia: I’ve had some weird stuff happen. Some things I probably shouldn’t talk about, so let’s move on. I’ve had to smuggle flash drives with stuff that… there were governments that didn’t want me to have that information. More importantly, they didn’t care if I looked at it. They didn’t want their citizens seeing information that I had on a certain flash drive. Because they had committed massacres and didn’t want their people to know about it, so… I won’t go into more detail.

Sergio: 00-Nehemia.

Nehemia: What’s that?

Sergio: 00-Nehemia, with the microfilm now…

Nehemia: I don’t know about that, but yeah. No, I mean, anyway… So, I mean, today you would just send that file over some kind of a file transfer thing, but back then you couldn’t do that. Yeah. So, yeah. So, you have… I don’t know how we got onto the topic of pogroms. Oh, I guess we were talking about you having Jewish ancestry coming from the Iberian culture.

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, here’s an interesting thing that happened. So, up until about 20, 30 years ago, if you were a Jew from Iraq, Jews from other places referred to you as a Sephardic Jew. Which is a bit strange because the Jews from Iraq have nothing to do with Spain, in the sense that Jews went to Iraq, what today is Iraq, in the time of the Babylonian exile… And technically speaking, there were Jews already there, in what today is Iraq, in 732 BCE, when… I want to say it was Tiglath-Pileser III or somebody like this. One of the Assyrian emperors invaded northern Israel and took Israelites exile to what today is Iraq. So, that’s 732 BCE. So why would you call them Sephardic Jews?

Because what happened is, in 1492, and then in 1497, in Portugal, you have Jews that are fleeing. Because even in Portugal there were Jews who were able to escape. And they’re going all over the world, and a lot of them… and this is the intellectual elite of the Jewish world. So, you have rabbis who are some of the top rabbis in the world, the most educated Jews in the world, certainly in Jewish subjects, end up getting on a boat in the middle of the night and sneaking out, and they’re like, “Where do I go?” And they end up in Iraq. A lot of them end up in what’s the Ottoman Empire. That’s how they end up in Iraq. And so, they end up in different parts of the Ottoman Empire, which is like, “Oh, Jewish merchants, that sounds great. People who can read and write. We don’t trust our own people, so we’ll have them do our accounting for us.” And that’s not a joke, that’s actually what they did.

So, you have Sephardic Jews who are literally from Spain, from Sepharad, who end up as this intellectual elite going to Egypt and Syria, and to some extent to Iraq. But where they really were heavily concentrated was in what today is western Turkey, Croatia, the Balkans area, Greece. This is incredible. I found this book that was written in Ladino, that was published in what today is Izmir, Turkey, in like, I don’t know, the 1800’s. There were newspapers in Ladino, which again, is, you would call it a dialect of Spanish or related to Spanish. If somebody read it to you, you would probably understand it if you speak Spanish, or certainly if you speak, like, Castilian.

Sergio: So…

Nehemia: You understand most of it. That’s being published in the 1800’s. It’s incredible. In Turkey.

Sergio: When the Jews started coming back to the Holy Land, what were the Sephardics mostly speaking?

Nehemia: So, this is a really interesting thing. So, there were a lot of Sephardic Jews… and here, Sephardic in a very broad sense. It includes… again, it could be a Jew who’s coming from Damascus but had an ancestor… and they distinguished. If you were a Jew in Damascus, you knew if you were a Jew whose ancestors were from Syria, or if they were from Spain, or Iberia. Could be from Portugal.

So, like, for example, in Amsterdam, there was the Sephardic synagogue, and then there was the Ashkenazi synagogue, and they were separate. In Hamburg there was a Sephardic Jewish community. So, what were they speaking? So, some of them were still speaking Ladino, and there were words… this is really cool. There are words in Modern Hebrew that come from Spanish, but really they come from Ladino. So, one of the foods that we eat in Israel… it’s kind of like getting like chicken nuggets in America, it’s called bourekas. I don’t know if you have that food. Do you have that food in your culture, bourekas? So, bourekas is a Spanish word, apparently. Even the -as ending, you could tell, it’s not a Semitic ending. It comes from Ladino, “bourekas”. It’s kind of like a phyllo pastry dough filled with cheese or potato. Somebody post in the comments if you come from a Spanish speaking country and you eat bourekas.

Sergio: If I ask my mom, she would probably know.

Nehemia: It’s probably called something else there, I don’t know. Another word is hanukiah. So, the candelabrum that has 8 or 9 branches, I grew up calling that a menorah or a Hanukkah menorah. In Modern Hebrew, that’s called a hanukiah. Hanukiah is a word in Modern Hebrew, but it comes from Ladino, and there’s a whole host of words that end in -iya in Modern Hebrew. And all of those, or most of those, come from Ladino. And some of them are Modern Hebrew constructions. So, for example… and this is really cool, listen to this example. So, to hitchhike, in British English, is called “to tramp”. They call it “tramping”, or they used to at one time. So, Israel was occupied by the British from 1917 to 1948, and so the word came from British English, tremp. Tremp is to hitchhike, to tramp. And the place where you catch a train, that’s…

Sergio: That’s got a whole ‘nother meaning these days!

Nehemia: Maybe, but in British English, at one time at least, it meant to hitchhike. So, the place where you catch a hitchhiking ride is called a trempiyada. So, what’s this yada ending? That comes from Ladino.

Sergio: Yeah, that sounds…

Nehemia: Trempiyada is a Ladino ending, meaning Spanish, or Judeo-Spanish, you could call it. Olympiyada is the Olympic Games.

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: That comes from Spanish… or it comes from Ladino again. So, you have a lot of words… I don’t know if it’s a lot… there’s a list of words that come from Ladino and from Jews whose ancestors had come from Iberia, who spoke Spanish. By the way, some of them didn’t necessarily come from Spain. Some of them might have come from Sicily, which was ruled by Spain, or Naples, which was ruled by Spain, and so they spoke Spanish, because they came maybe earlier from Iberia.

So, the Jews, a lot of them who came to Israel in the 1800’s spoke Spanish. Some of them came centuries before that. We have this really cool thing where there’s a rabbi who arrives in Tzfat in northern Israel in the 1490’s. And he was a refugee from Spain, and they established a Jewish community. It actually becomes the intellectual center, one of the great intellectual centers of Judaism, in the 1500’s. It was established by Jewish refugees from Spain in Tzfat, or Safed in English. And in fact, what most people would refer to today as Kabbalah, which is kind of Rabbinical Jewish mysticism, most of that was formulated in Tzfat, in Safed, in northern Israel, by Jewish refugees from Spain. A lot of the great works of early modern Jewish literature were made by Jewish refugees from Spain. It really became a major center of Jewish learning because the Jewish refugees that were given an open invitation to come into parts of the Ottoman Empire. And the Ottomans ruled… I don’t think… did they rule Tzfat already in the 1490’s? I don’t remember. They may have. But eventually, they come to rule Tzfat and northern Israel. I know Jerusalem they took in 1517, but northern Israel, they might have ruled earlier. And you end up with them speaking, still, Ladino up until the 20th century.

And then you have a really interesting thing that happens in Modern Hebrew. This is really cool. So, you have Jews who are coming to Israel, fleeing the Russian Empire, and their native tongue is Yiddish, which is… you could call it a Jewish dialect of German. And they meet these Jews in Israel whose native language is Ladino, which is a dialect of Spanish. And they’re like, “I don’t understand. I don’t understand Yiddish.” “I don’t understand Ladino.” “How can we communicate?” “Well, we both know Hebrew.” And they end up communicating with each other in the marketplace. So, the myth is, the story is… and it’s a great story, and it’s kind of true, that Eliezer Ben-Yehuda resurrected the Hebrew language. There’s truth to that story, but he was…

Sergio: I love that story.

Nehemia: He was only able to do that because there were already people who spoke Hebrew not at home. That’s where Eliezer Ben-Yehuda comes in. They weren’t necessarily speaking Hebrew at home. But when they went to the marketplace and they wanted to buy a chicken from another Jew, and at home I speak Yiddish and you speak Ladino… so I go to the market, I go to the shuk, and I talk to you in Hebrew because we don’t have another common language. Some of them spoke Turkish and some of them spoke Arabic, but why would they speak Turkish or Arabic? It was much easier to speak Hebrew because they had learned Hebrew in synagogue.

And this was controversial. Some people said, “No, we can’t use Yiddish when we’re haggling over the price of a chicken in the marketplace.” Literally. But then others are like, “Okay, what? How am I supposed to haggle over the chicken? He doesn’t know Yiddish and I don’t know Spanish, and I don’t know Ladino.” So, this actually becomes really important in the modern rebirth of Hebrew, that you have this massive population of Ladino-speaking Jewish descendants of Jewish refugees, and they encounter these refugees who are speaking Yiddish, and their common tongue is Hebrew. It’s beautiful.

Sergio: Yeah, that is beautiful. Yeah, that is. One thing I wanted to ask you is about the Vatican files, or the files that you found in the Vatican. What else… did you find anything else interesting in there?

Nehemia: I found all kinds of interesting things at the Vatican, some of which I can’t talk about right now.

Sergio: Oh, okay.

Nehemia: Let’s save that for a future time.

Sergio: Okay.

Nehemia: But I think what you’re referring to, there’s Hebrew manuscripts of the New Testament in the Vatican.

Sergio: Yeah, the Hebrew gospels.

Nehemia: And some people have misunderstood what I said and thought, “Oh, Nehemia’s saying that’s from the 1st century AD.” It’s not what I said. What I said is, “We have these fragments of Hebrew texts of the New Testament in the Vatican. Shouldn’t we investigate these and find out when they’re from?” And if you want to say they’re all translations from Latin, okay, that’s fine, but let somebody put in the work and do that investigation. I think that’s worth it.

One of the really interesting things that I found, that I think you’re referring to, is what I call the Vatican junk box. And I’ll explain what I mean. So, the Vatican has millions of pages of manuscripts. Literally. If you include the archives, it’s tens of millions.

Sergio: And there’s only so much people that are allowed to even look at it, right?

Nehemia: Most of it is accessible if you can get the right credentials. They won’t let you take photographs of it, but they’ll let you in to examine it today. Things have changed. The Vatican is much more open. Like, online, I believe online, you can see that what they call the Vatican Secret Archives, where they started to photograph millions… And why are they secret archives? Because you could have… So, the Vatican keeps really good records. And I don’t know that there’s… and I’m giving you a hypothetical example, because I’m not an expert in the secret archives.

So, the secret archives are communications between the Vatican and its emissaries around the world. And what do I mean by “emissaries around the world”? Essentially every Catholic priest and monk is an emissary. So, if you had… and this, I think, is an example, you have these Jesuit priests who go to China in the 1500’s and they talk to the emperor. And the emperor is like, “Wow, this Catholicism, this Christianity thing, sounds really interesting. I could get some trade relations with this, with Europe, and these people are really advanced. Okay, maybe I’ll become a Christian or a Catholic.” And so, he sends a letter to the Pope, and there’s an exchange with the Pope. It’s incredible! And they have the original letter that the emperor sent. Now it’s translated, I think, into Latin by these Jesuits, so I don’t know if it’s in Chinese or not. I don’t know. But they have these documents.

Now, why would I care about that as a Hebrew scholar? So, here’s what happens… and they have millions of documents like this. Not just with the Chinese emperor, but like, if there’s a Jesuit, like in Macau or something, in 1650, and he’s sending a report back to his superior at the Vatican, or wherever, the Vatican still has those documents! It’s incredible. And there’s literally millions of pages of these documents, as far as I know.

So, why is that important to me? So, you have this collection of letters, and what you do is you bind it, and you say, “You know what? Here’s all the reports from Macau from the 1650’s. I can’t have them as loose letters, they’ll get lost.” So, you bind them. Okay, what do you bind them with? They’re written on leather, certainly the earlier ones. Some of the later ones are written on paper. So, here’s what they would do. They would take old books and cut them up and use those to bind their collection of letters. Well, maybe what they cut up is an old Hebrew book. And they found over a thousand pages of Hebrew manuscripts as bindings in other manuscripts.

And I’ll give you an idea of what we’re talking about. Well, so this isn’t in a binding, this is where they erased the Hebrew manuscript. They took water and washed off the Hebrew letters, and they wrote a Greek medical text over it. That’s an actual example. And that’s in the Medici Library in Florence. And they took pieces of six Torah scrolls, some of which are the oldest known Torah scrolls in Europe. They predate the year 1000.

Sergio: Wow.

Nehemia: Now, before we found this, I don’t know that there was anything written in Hebrew from Europe before the year 1000. I’m not sure. But certainly, these are the oldest known Torah scrolls from Europe, and they’re written on… somebody literally took a razor, cut up a Torah scroll, washed off all the ink, and then wrote a book over it.

Sergio: Wow!

Nehemia: And so sometimes in the Vatican archives… but not just the Vatican archives, this was done all over Europe. You have, I don’t know, you had a ledger like in the church, and the ledger said, “In such and such a year, so and so was born, and in such and such a year the plague came,” and these various events had happened. So, they have these documents. In every church they have these. Okay, well, what do you bind that with? Well, we just took some books from the Jews, let’s cut those up and use them as a binding.

Now, to be fair, sometimes they did that with their own books. It wasn’t just Jewish books. But they found over a thousand pages of Hebrew books in these book bindings. And some of them are really important lost… like lost things that we don’t really have other copies of, or we don’t have a lot of copies. Like, they found two pages from the Jerusalem Talmud, which we have, but we only have one manuscript. So now we have a second manuscript. That’s incredible! That really is incredible. Like, that’s a really big deal. I don’t know if I can convey what a big deal that is.

Sergio: Oh, yeah.

Nehemia: Imagine you have two manuscripts out of the whole thing, but of this like section, and one of them comes from a book binding from some book that has nothing to do with it. So, the point is there are probably tens of thousands…

Sergio: So, can you even see the letters? Or is this from your imaging where you’re seeing the letters in the background?

Nehemia: So, that was discovered by somebody else, the Jerusalem Talmud, decades ago, and we have a full photograph of it. There is a beautiful thing where they took it out of the binding and photographed it, so we have a full high-resolution photograph that’s available now of two lost pages from the Jerusalem Talmud. They’re not really lost because we had one other manuscript, but that manuscript was one witness. Now we have two witnesses to this text. That’s a big deal. That’s not a small thing. Imagine…

Sergio: So, how’d you get into the imaging of all these manuscripts? Because like, I know you’ve been flying all over the world imaging all these ancient manuscripts, and it sounds like really exciting.

Nehemia: I’ll tell you the real answer. I was working on my PhD dissertation, and I looked through photographs, black and white photographs, of something like 90,000 pages of manuscripts, and I was looking for a certain type of thing in these manuscripts. And I had over 90,000 pages, something in that neighborhood. But I only had two Torah scrolls in that whole collection. And I thought, “That’s not really scientific.” And it’s difficult to say how many manuscripts because it depends how you count the manuscript, but over 90,000 pages of manuscripts. You could have a manuscript that’s a thousand pages, and you could have a fragment of a manuscript that’s not even a whole page.

But I’d looked through over 90,000 pages of codexes. A codex is in book form, as opposed to a scroll, which is rolled up. And I only had two Torah scrolls and I said, “I need more Torah scrolls.” Where do I get Torah scrolls? So, I had to travel places and say, “Can I look at your Torah scroll?” This is a crazy thing. I went into a synagogue, an Orthodox synagogue, and I said, “I’m doing my PhD, and I want to look at your Torah scroll. It’s not that old, your Torah scroll. It’s 150 years old. But I want to look at it because I’m looking for a certain phenomenon that was done by scribes. And I don’t care if it was done a thousand years ago by scribes or 50 years ago by scribes. I want to see what the scribal tradition over time is.” I mean, I do care if it’s older; that’s interesting. But I’m also willing to look at more recent stuff, especially in Torah scrolls, because the old practices are still continued to some extent. Not as much as I thought, but they’re still continued. They’re still continued to some extent.

Sergio: You mean modern day scribes, right?

Nehemia: Modern day scribes are still doing things that were done in the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, not knowing it was done in the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s pretty cool. Knowing it was done a thousand years ago, but not realizing how old it was. And maybe they’re doing it for different reasons, but they’re still continuing some really early practices where they don’t even know where it came from, which is really cool.

All right. So, I go to the synagogue, this Orthodox Jewish synagogue, and I tell them what I’m doing. And he said, “Okay, you can examine my scroll. You can come with your camera and your little measuring tapes and everything. Come back on Monday,” or whatever it was. I come back on Monday, and the rabbi sits there with this kind of, like, smug look. And he says, “When I met you, I had…” and he uses this phrase, he said, “My Spidey-sense went off.” I’m like, “Okay, what do you mean?” He said, “I looked you up and I saw you were a Karaite Jew.”

Nehemia: I said, “Yeah, I’m a Karaite Jew. That’s not really… what’s your point?” He’s like, “Well, I was wondering, you would be studying Torah scrolls and didn’t come to my synagogue, or I didn’t know you, how big is the Orthodox community?” “Like, I’m not Orthodox. What’s your point?” He’s like, “All right, I’m gonna let you examine the Torah scroll.” Okay, that’s kind of weird. Like, I’m a scholar who’s working on a PhD at the time, like…

I’ll tell you what was weird about it. I went to examine a Torah scroll in an Anglican church of the Catholic rite, where you walk into an Anglican church and you smell the incense, and there’s a statue of Mary. I’ve been examining manuscripts at the Russian National Library. I’ve been examining manuscripts at all kinds of places all over the world. And I never had somebody say to me, except that one incident, like, “Oh, you’re affiliated with this particular branch of Judaism.” What would that have to do with my research of… I’m not… and…

Sergio: So, this was for the dissertation or something?

Nehemia: That was part of my PhD dissertation, which was at Bar-Ilan University.

Sergio: Man, you really went above and beyond for that one!

Nehemia: And Bar-Ilan University is an Orthodox Jewish university. So, at Bar-Ilan University, I never had a single person say, “Wait, you’re doing a PhD at Bar-Ilan, but you’re a Karaite.” Because there were Muslims who were doing PhDs at Bar-Ilan University. There were Christians… I actually met a Messianic believer doing, I think he was doing a master’s at Bar-Ilan University, or maybe an undergrad, I don’t remember, but he was at Bar-Ilan. So, the point is that if you’re an academic institution, there should… unlike on the American left, there is not a… what’s the word? What do they call it… a religious test. So, one of the core concepts in American civil discourse is that there is not allowed to be a religious test for public office.

Now, if I go to work for Focus on the Family, and they want me to sign a certain doctrinal statement about the Trinity, that’s totally legitimate because they’re a religious institution. But if I go to work for the State of Colorado, they are not, by the American Constitution, allowed to administer a religious test. I actually saw the other day… what’s that guy’s name? Ben Shapiro appeared before the United States House of Representatives, or something like that, and literally this representative who, I don’t know… Oh, he’s the Chinese agent, I forget what his name is. This like… literally he was involved with a Chinese agent. He administers a religious test on Shapiro. He says, “Do you believe such and such is a sin?” So, if you want to ask me, even on a podcast, do you believe such and such is a sin? That’s a fair question. But if you… if I go to testify in court in a public context, in civil public discourse, it’s not relevant whether I think a certain thing is a sin or not.

Sergio: Unless it’s a court of law, right? Unless it’s a court.

Nehemia: Well, in a court of law, if you ask me, do I think…and I guess maybe there’s context. Is it against your beliefs to administer the death penalty? And you’re on a jury, they’re allowed to ask you that. But if I’m engaging in a public office, and that would include being at a university, a university does not belong to a particular religion. I, as a Jew, as a Karaite Jew, I could go and… in theory… I could go and work for Georgetown University, which is a Jesuit institution. And if they said, we’re not going to hire you because you’re a Jew, they would, and should, lose all government funding. Now, whether a university should have government funding or not is a different question. But in American civil life, there is a separation of church and state, and administering a religious test… this is what it’s called in American law, a religious test, on someone…

Now, at a synagogue, if he says, “I don’t want to let you in here because you’re not an Orthodox Jew or because you’re a Karaite Jew,” he’s allowed to do that. It was just a bit weird because I wasn’t coming as a Karaite Jew, I was coming as a scholar. But if he says, “You know what? I only let Orthodox Jews in here.” Okay, it’s your synagogue. Do whatever you want.

This was an ironic thing. I went to examine a Torah scroll, that was… a Torah scroll that survived the Holocaust, at SMU, Southern Methodist University. And the interesting thing about their Torah scroll is it was a kosher scroll, meaning it could be used in a synagogue. And then I went to examine another Torah scroll at a synagogue nearby, and it wasn’t a kosher scroll.

Sergio: So, they couldn’t actually read it.

Nehemia: They weren’t allowed to read from it in the prayer services. And so, why did they have it? Because it represents the people who didn’t survive the Holocaust. Here you have an artifact from the Holocaust, and the fact that this scroll survived but the people who used it 150 years ago… and they’re dead now… Now, at the time of the Holocaust it might not have been kosher either, but it survived the Holocaust and has been preserved. That is their physical connection to people who did not survive, and the entire Jewish civilization of Europe that was wiped out during the Holocaust. So, I understand why they have it, and I think it’s a beautiful thing they have, the synagogue. But I think it was ironic.

Southern Methodist University, which allowed me to examine their scroll… and both scrolls came from what today is the Czech Republic. So, they let me examine their scroll, and it turns out, as far as I could tell, at least, it was a kosher scroll. And the one at the synagogue, this other synagogue, was completely not kosher and they didn’t claim it was, right? Like, the letters are actually flaking off because it’s so old. That happens, especially from the 18th, 19th century. The ink was kind of a poor quality and it starts to flake off over time.

So anyway… so yeah, I’ve had some interesting experiences, gone to some interesting places, had some interesting adventures. And if I went to the Anglican church and they said, “Oh, we only let Anglicans in to examine our Torah scroll.” Okay, it’s your church, do whatever you want. But they didn’t say that. They were totally open. They loved that somebody was coming to examine… it was called Pusey House at Oxford. They loved that somebody was coming to examine the scroll, who was a scholar, who would be able to glean some benefit from it, some historical insights. Which I did. It was a really fascinating scroll.

Sergio: To you, what’s the most exciting thing you’ve gotten to see?

Nehemia: Well, that’s easy. The most exciting thing I’ve gotten to see is the Aleppo Codex. That, hands down, immediately, the Aleppo Codex. I spent nine hours over three days examining the Aleppo Codex with a microscope, and with certain other instruments, and I was able to see things that you can’t see in any available photo. Just this morning I was looking with some scholars at something in the Aleppo Codex, and I said, “I think that’s such and such, but I really can’t tell because it’s not a great photo.” So, I’m kind of guessing. Well, when you’re holding it in front of you and you pull out a microscope, you can see things you can’t see in the current available photos. Now, maybe there’ll be better photos in the future, but… That’s the most exciting thing I’ve done in my life manuscript-wise, is examine the Aleppo Codex.

Sergio: And I know that you’ve gotten some new imaging equipment. How did you… how were you able to acquire this new imaging equipment to be able to do it?

Nehemia: Well, I mean, I was able to acquire it by just purchasing it, but it was more a question of how did I know what to purchase.

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: And some of the stuff you can’t actually purchase; it has to be granted to you, let’s put it that way. I was really blessed by… I went and I studied at Oxford University during a two-week seminar under the… who I believe is the greatest scholar of Hebrew paleography in the world, of this generation. Or let’s say active working Hebrew paleographer, this woman named Judith Schlanger. And she said, “You know, if you’re going to really be serious about working on these Torah scrolls and studying this particular scribal practice, you should go talk to this scientist in Berlin named Ira Rabin.” So I go to Berlin, and I meet Ira Rabin, and she completely changes my life. Because up until then, pretty much everything was just about speculation and could never be proven or disproven. Like this morning. I think a certain letter has been erased, and it used to be something else, and now it’s this, but I don’t know. I’m looking at a photograph which was done at 20 megapixels, which was a really big deal ten years ago. Today it’s not. On my iPhone I have 45 megapixels. We can do better.

So, it completely changes my life because I’m like, “Wow, I can actually prove some of these things I’ve been speculating for years, and we can do some really cool scientific tests.” It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done, was with this scientist in Berlin. We went to the Vatican, and we did these tests on Codex Vaticanus, which is a Greek manuscript. And I’ll talk about that more some other day. But, yeah, that was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. After the Aleppo Codex, that’s probably it.

Sergio: Okay. And… I know there’s a lot out there, so if you could be in front of any other manuscript today… What are you hunting for now?

Nehemia: The Aleppo Codex! I want to go back to the Aleppo Codex and examine it using X-ray fluorescence technology.

Sergio: Again?

Nehemia: Well, back then I didn’t have that access to that technology. There’s a certain scientific technique that you can use where you can see things that you can’t see with the naked eye. You can’t even see it with a microscope, and you can turn speculation into definitive answers. So, that would be one thing I would love to be able to do. There’s some other things that I won’t share at the moment, because I’m trying to get… hopefully I’ll be able to do them.

But yeah, that would be incredible to be able to examine… There are certain questions that we have in these… There are things in the manuscripts that we’ve been speculating about, we meaning scholars, for over a hundred years. In some cases, much longer than that. And you can actually answer questions now in an objective way. And look, things are developing over time, where 50 or 100 years from now they’ll look back at what we’re doing and say, “Oh, isn’t it cute? They used that tool.” All right, but it’s better than nothing.

Sergio: The 5 megapixel.

Nehemia: Right, right. Or “Oh, they did 50X. Isn’t that adorable? They did a 50X imaging. And today we have… we’re using an electron microscope or something.” I don’t know, whatever. Or some technology that hasn’t even been born yet. Somebody walks around with an electron microscope in their pocket.

Sergio: Yeah.

Nehemia: Like, I’ll give you just a quick example. So, there was this little dot in the Aleppo Codex that I saw, and I examined it with a 200X microscope, and it turned out it was a freckle. It wasn’t a dot of ink. And you can tell the difference. Not always… but in this case, it was actually a freckle. Like, I have freckles on my skin. So, the cow had something like a freckle, or a melanoma… I’m not a dermatologist, but it had some kind of blemish on its skin, and people looked at that. Actually, that happened in the… and that wasn’t my discovery. That happened in the Leningrad Codex, where people had transcribed these freckles as vowels, as Hebrew vowel points. And it turns out it’s literally just some kind of blemish on the animal, of the skin, the skin of the animal… the animal of the skin! The animal skin, and so I saw a similar thing in the Aleppo Codex, and that was pretty cool.

Sergio: And what’s…

Nehemia: Another thing I looked at, and I’m like, “Okay, that’s ink, beautiful. Now, I know, it’s not just a guess.”

Sergio: What’s the oldest manuscript out there? That we know of?

Nehemia: You have to say what you mean by the oldest manuscript. You mean the Bible?

Sergio: Yeah, of the Torah.

Nehemia: Because you could say the oldest manuscript is a clay tablet, which is counting somebody’s sheep or something like that, written in Sumerian. That would probably be the oldest…

Sergio: No, of the Torah.

Nehemia: But the oldest fragment of any biblical manuscript is what’s called the Silver Scrolls. They were discovered in a place called Ketef Hinnom, dated to around 650 BCE. They say it’s from the time of King Josiah. They were found in a tomb, in a burial cave. Today it’s part of the Begin Heritage Center. At the time, it was on a cliff, or a slope, really, which comes down from the Scottish Church… if people from Jerusalem know where that is.

Sergio: Is that the one with the Aaronic Blessing on it?

Nehemia: It is, it’s exactly what it is. It also has a verse from Deuteronomy that most people don’t know about that they were able to read using high resolution imaging about 10 or 20 years ago. Where first, if I remember correctly, refers to God as “shomer habrit vehachesed,” “He who keeps the covenant and the chesed,” it’s such a beautiful word, “and the loving kindness.” I believe it’s a verse from Deuteronomy, but it also has the Aaronic Blessing, yeah. And look, anybody can see that at the Israel Museum.

I guess you could say that’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen, is that. But everybody gets to see that, so maybe that shouldn’t diminish from it, but it is amazing. I mean, think about it; it’s a fragment of the Torah, a very small fragment, written on a silver scroll. It was probably an amulet that somebody used to for some kind of superstitious protection, ironically, but it is a quotation from parts of the Torah, and it is the oldest surviving fragment that we have. It’s pretty cool.

Sergio: Yeah. Well, I know you’re a Karaite Jew. And you were Rabbinical, and you kind of left that all behind. Is there any wisdom that we can actually glean from the Mishnah and the Talmud?

Nehemia: Absolutely! So, well, look, the Mishnah and the Talmud… First of all, there’s an entire section of the Mishnah called Ethics of the Fathers, or Ethics of Our Fathers, which is beautiful wisdom literature. It’s great advice. Some of its advice you might not agree with, but other things there are… I was talking to somebody other the other day, and they said, “If not now, when?” I said, “You just quoted a rabbi from the Mishnah.” “If not now, when?” is “Im lo achshav, eimatai?” I believe that was Shammai who said that. And then he said, “Im ein ani li, mi li?” which is kind of a tongue twister. “If I’m not for me, then who is for me?” And he said, “If I’m only for myself, then what am I?” Which is, I mean, beautiful, profound wisdom. There’s also a lot of important historical information that we can see in the Mishnah and the Talmud and other Rabbinical literature.

I hate to run after an hour-and-a-half.

Sergio: It’s okay. Yeah…

Nehemia: But I’ve got to wrap it up. I’ve got another meeting now. It was really good talking to you, Sergio. I really, really enjoyed it.

Sergio: Yeah, I enjoyed it too. Can you do us a favor and pray us out before we go?

Nehemia: Sure. I’ll pray the Aaronic Blessing, what’s on those two Silver Scrolls. Yevarechecha Yehovah ve’yishmarecha. Yehovah bless you and keep you. Ya’er Yehovah panav eleicha ve’yichuneka. Yehovah, shine His face toward you and be gracious towards you. Yissa Yehovah panav eleicha, Yehovah lift His face towards you, ve’yasem lecha shalom, and give you peace. Amen.

Sergio: Amen, amen. Alright. Well, thank you, Nehemiah. Hopefully I can have you back on some other time, because I only got a little chunk of what I wanted, but it’s cool!

Nehemia: All right, shalom.

Sergio: Yeah, shalom.

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