The story of the Dead Sea Scrolls discovery and fate — and how fragments ended up in Teaneck — “is enormously interesting,” said Hershel Shanks, the founder of the Biblical Archaeology Society and the editor of Biblical Archaeology Review.

The author of several books on the scrolls, he was instrumental in widening scholars’ access to them. (And that is a story in itself.)

The story “goes back to 1947,” he said in a telephone interview from Rehovoth Beach, Del., “when the first scrolls were found by the Bedouin” in a cave in Qumran, near the Dead Sea. More than 900 were eventually discovered in the Judean desert, in 15,000 fragments.

They are “the greatest manuscript discovery in the 20th century, certainly as concerns biblical studies,” he wrote in his 1992 book “Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

Hershel Shanks, an authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls, says they are “enormously important to the Jewish people.” Courtesy Biblical Archaeology Review

This makes the fragments’ journey to a church in Teaneck, called “the Jerusalem of the West” by The New York Times, all the more fascinating.

Even how four scrolls came to “Mar Samuel,” as Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, the Syrian Orthodox metropolitan (archbishop) of Jerusalem was called, is something of a comedy of errors — almost a tragicomedy.

As Shanks told the tale in his book, two Bedouin had arranged with Samuel to bring some of the scrolls from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. It was July 1947. “The tide of violence between Jew, Arab, and Briton,” which would culminate in the War of Independence, “was swelling. Jewish terrorism, mostly directed against the British, was beginning to be heavily felt in certain Arab areas…. In this atmosphere Samuel became anxious when the Bedouin and their scrolls had not appeared by noon.”

What happened? They had been turned away by a monk who saw, in Shanks’ words, that the scrolls they brought were “[p]robably old Torahs from somewhere, but filthy and covered with pitch or something else that smelled equally bad. These he steadfastly refused to allow within the monastery walls, still less into His Grace’s presence as the bearers demanded.”

The Bedouin had gone back to Bethlehem, and it took two weeks before they and the scrolls could return to Jerusalem and Mar Samuel, who bought them, according to Shanks, for what amounted to $97.

Samuel then sought authentication and scholarly help and eventually made his way to the United States in 1949.

“He tried to sell them and couldn’t,” Shanks said. Samuel exhibited them in the Library of Congress and then advertised them in The Wall Street Journal in 1954. (The ad has achieved a certain believe-it-or-not fame. Headed “The Four Dead Sea Scrolls,” it went on to say that “Biblical Manuscripts dating back to at least 200 BC are for sale. This would be an ideal gift to an educational or religious institution by an individual or group.” A box number at the WSJ was provided.)

The sale of the four scrolls to archeologist Yigal Yadin for $250,000, for Israel, was arranged through a front man, Shanks said, the scholar Harry Orlinsky of Johns Hopkins University posing as “Mr. Green.”

“One of the odd things that fascinate me” about the scrolls, said Shanks, is “whether Mar Samuel knew that he was selling them to Israel. The only reason Yadin got them so cheap,” he added, “is that Jordan,” which controlled the west bank when the scrolls were discovered, “asserted a claim to them.”

The epilogue to the tragicomedy of the sale of the four scrolls is that while the proceeds were to go to Samuel’s church, the legal papers were poorly drawn and the U.S. Internal Revenue Service wound up with the lion’s share.

‘Enormously important
to the Jewish people’

The Dead Sea Scrolls are “enormously important to the Jewish people,” Shanks went on. “They contain about 200 biblical manuscripts that go back to the Second Temple period…. They include every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther and the Song of Songs.”

The scrolls also include “three books quoted in the New Testament — revealing the Jewish roots of Christianity.”

It’s particularly noteworthy that the scrolls reveal “a highly developed code by this time — 200 C.E. — materials that can tell us about the development of halacha,” Jewish law, “and its variations.”

In his 1998 book “The Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Shanks wrote of the stringency of the halachic rulings in the scrolls: “Take the law regarding what I call the Backward-Jumping Impurity Up a Stream of Liquid. To understand this law, start with a pitcher of water, both the pitcher and the water being pure. Now pour some of the water into another vessel that is impure. Clearly the water in the second vessel is now impure by virtue of its contact with an impure vessel. But what about the water still in the pitcher? And what about the pitcher itself? Did the impurity of the water in the second vessel render the water remaining in the pitcher (and the pitcher itself) impure? The Qumran sectarians … said yes…. Other Jews … said no.”

Another noteworthy difference is that the Qumran Jews used a solar calendar, while the rest of us use a lunar calendar. Thus, for example, “they would be celebrating Yom Kippur on a different date and yet be Jewish.”

The scrolls, Shanks said, shine “a light onto the variations of a different Judaism of the time, of different movements. The roots of rabbinic Judaism are here.”

Fragments from Dead Sea Scrolls from Jerusalem. courtesy yeshiva university

Throngs of Jews walk past St. Mark’s Syrian Orthodox Cathedral in Teaneck every Shabbat on their way to shul, unaware that the church is the caretaker of an ancient and precious piece of Jewish history.

When Archbishop Mar Athanasius Yeshue Samuel arrived in New Jersey in 1949, he brought with him four scrolls and fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which include the earliest known texts of books of the Bible. Although the scrolls were later sold to an Israeli archeologist, Samuel kept the fragments and they are to this day under the care of the Eastern Diocese of the Syrian Orthodox Church, headquartered in Teaneck.

“His eminence was really firm he wanted [the fragments] to stay with the church because it’s been a privilege for our church to have those fragments and to make them again available,” said the church’s Very Rev. John Meno, who served as Samuel’s secretary from 1971 until the archbishop’s death in 1995.

Archbishop Mor Cyril Aphrem Karim, Samuel’s successor, is the official caretaker of the fragments, but could not be reached for comment. One fragment is on loan to the Milwaukee Public Museum. (The fragments have been lent out over the years to various libraries and museums.) In 2009, researchers from the West Semitic Project photographed the fragments in Teaneck for a project based at the University of Southern California. (See page 24.)

The Milwaukee exhibit is the first time the fragments have left Teaneck since they were returned in 1995 after a 25-year exhibition at the American Bible Society in New York City. Concerned for the fragments’ security and proper care, Karim personally escorted them to Milwaukee. A number of archeological organizations have approached the church about selling the fragments, but, Meno said, Samuel had been adamant that they remain in church hands.

Archbishop Athanasius Yeshue Samuel brought fragments from Dead Sea Scrolls from Jerusalem to Teaneck. courtesy st. mark’s syrian orthodox cathedral

“I hope we’ll always be able to keep them and maintain them as they should be properly kept and that they will always be available for scholars, old and young,” he said.

The story of how the fragments ended up in Teaneck dates back to their initial discovery more than 60 years ago. In 1947, Bedouins stumbled upon a number of scrolls in the Qumran caves near the Dead Sea. Unfamiliar with the language on the parchments (Hebrew), a group turned to St. Mark’s Monastery in Jerusalem after somebody told them the writing looked Aramaic — the liturgical language of the Syrian Orthodox Church. Samuel, then the Syrian Orthodox metropolitan — archbishop — of Jerusalem, instantly recognized the scrolls for what they were, said Meno.

“His eminence told me a number of times, ‘As soon as I put my eyes on the pieces, I knew it was something very, very special,’” Meno recalled. “He was one of the first really, I think, to sense the value and importance of the scrolls.”

When Samuel came to the United States in 1949 to collect funds for Syrian Orthodox Christians affected by Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, he brought the scrolls with him. In 1952, the church appointed Samuel patriarchal vicar to the United States. In 1957 he was appointed the Syrian Orthodox archbishop of the United States and Canada and established St. Mark’s in Hackensack before it moved to Teaneck. Samuel died in his Lodi home on April 16, 1995, and Karim was appointed a year later.

Meno grew up hearing stories that the church housed the scrolls, but they had long been sold when he came to Teaneck in 1971. Still, as Samuel’s secretary he frequently saw the fragments.

“It’s an awesome thing to be able to hold in your hands documents of that age,” he said, “documents of the recorded word of God, documents that have played such a crucial and important role in biblical research and scholarship since they’ve been discovered. It’s a very special thing.”

The archbishop, Meno said, created a trust fund upon his arrival in the United States to ensure that the scrolls could be properly cared for.

“He hoped the scrolls would remain here in the United States in proper housing and would be made accessible to scholars and to anyone who wanted to view them,” he said.

In 1954, Samuel made what Meno said was a very difficult decision. To raise funds to restore a parish devastated by fire in Central Falls, R.I., Samuel put the scrolls up for sale. Israeli archeologist Yigal Yadin bought the four scrolls for $250,000 and they are now in the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem. Samuel held on, however, to three fragments, which are kept in airtight containers in a bank vault when not on display.

The Very Rev. John Meno, secretary to the late Archbishop Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, tells of the Dead Sea Scroll fragments’ sojourn in Teaneck. Jerry Szubin

“He really did not want to sell the scrolls but he was in a situation where the community here was in need of assistance,” Meno said. “So he prayed a lot on the matter and felt it would be best to sell them. He did it with a lot of reluctance. I know that he was always grateful that at least he held on to those few fragments.”

St. Mark’s, named for the monastery in Jerusalem built on the site where the apostle Mark is thought to have lived, plans to build a new facility in Paramus, where it owns five acres on Midland Avenue. No construction start or completion date has been set, but the proposed facility will include a section to display the fragments.

“God willing, if the center works out in Paramus, the scrolls will be on display there under proper circumstances,” Meno said.