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Bedouin shepherds found it. A bishop sold it. An Israeli agent bought it. Now you can see it up close.
The magnificent 717-centimeter ancient Isaiah scroll on view right now at The Israel Museum, for the first time in 60 years, is drawing so many people that the museum has set strict guidelines for visitors.
To see the scroll — meaning the original, handwritten, non-facsimile, version that survived for two thousand years in jars hidden in a cave — with your own eyes, all 23 1/2 feet of it, you need to register by 8 a.m.
Once you are at the exhibit entrance, you need to wait your turn; you have to watch a film first about the incredible story of how the Isaiah scroll was found by Bedouin shepherds in a remote cave near the Dead Sea, sold to Archbishop Samuel, head of the Syrian Orthodox Monastery of St. Mark in Jerusalem, then read and evaluated by a professor whose son became Israeli military royalty, photographed by an American scholar, sent by the bishop to the U.S. for a tour of several leading universities in the hope of snaring a very high price, and then at long last, clandestinely purchased by an agent hiding that he was representing Israel from a small and seemingly innocuous ad in The Wall Street Journal. Then you have exactly 10 minutes in a temperature-controlled room with the scroll.
There is something spiritual and moving about seeing this gigantic, complete, handwritten scroll that was literally hidden in a cave for millennia. What is remarkable about it, Professor Noam Mizrahi of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem explains in a video you can watch after you check the scroll out for yourself, is first of all its age.
“It is over two thousand years old,” he explains. To be precise, the scroll was written in 125 BCE. The other amazing aspect of it is its fullness — not only are all 66 chapters there, but the Hebrew is written in a full way.
What does that mean, exactly? Consider the first line, “This is the vision of Isaiah the son of Amotz,” written in the scroll as “Yishayahu ben Amotz.” You can see with your own eyes that the original scribe wrote “Yeshaya,” and that another, later, scribe, added a letter, the ayin, so that it now reads “Yishayahu” as Isaiah is pronounced in today’s Hebrew.
It offers a glimpse into ancient pronunciation, Mizrahi explained. I would add that it also offers a glimpse into editing — writers are never done.
And maybe the Jewish people are never done discussing what the vision of Isaiah is, and what it means. This particular scroll wasn’t a museum artifact in the early days.
“It was in use for at least 100 years,” Mizrahi said — you can tell from the corrections.
But back to that fullness. This is a neatly written scroll of a text so many of us recognize — timeless, the curator Hagit Maoz commented in the video, and about peace, and justice. Maybe my vision is failing, but it was hard to make out psukim, or verses, I knew by heart.
This is not because the handwriting wasn’t neat — each aleph was distinct and perfect — but because the letters are small. I found myself cheating by taking a picture with my phone and enlarging it. Then I felt guilty for wasting a bit of my precious ten minutes on technology.
My group included a woman with a seeing-eye dog. If I could barely make out the letters, what could she see?
But the scroll is not just about seeing. It is about feeling. You can feel that this text is connected to this place. It’s the feeling of being here, of being near something written thousands of years ago by hand, something ours, something whole. There is the feeling that this is where Isaiah roamed, and this is where this incredible book — this timeless piece of Jewish literature — began.
Once the ten minutes are up, visitors are ushered into another room with a copy of the Isaiah scroll enlarged, and with key verses highlighted. There was the dream of peace, I thought as I looked at individual verses — the wolf dwelling with the lamb — and then there is the reality. The other day, I heard a young guy tell a date he had done 600 days of miluim, or reserve service.
I found myself refocusing on the true story of how the Isaiah scroll made it to the public. I couldn’t get enough of the details.
From shepherds to The Wall Street Journal
When Bedouin shepherds chased a sheep sometime in early 1947, they reached challenging terrain across from the northwest rim of the Dead Sea that no one else was willing to enter.
They heard a piece of pottery in a cave crack.
Curious, they went inside and found seven scrolls inside jars in the cave. They took them out, not knowing what they were. The museum explains that the bishop, who purchased the scrolls, consulted Eleazar Sukenik of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who immediately realized he was looking at an ancient Isaiah scroll and copied some sections; he told the bishop he was interested in purchasing the scrolls, both the ones in his possession and those still with the shepherds.
According to the Israel Antiquities Authority website when Sukenik learned of the scrolls’ discovery, he set out to investigate their significance. “Braving Arab-Jewish tensions, he travelled to meet the Armenian dealer at the British divided military zone of the Jerusalem border. In this clandestine meeting, the dealer held up a fragment of leather for the professor to examine. As Sukenik peered through the wire, he recognized the ancient writing.”
Incredibly, on Nov. 29, 1947, on the very same day as the United Nations vote on the Partition Plan, the historic vote which led to the establishment of Israel, Prof. Sukenik bought three of the seven scrolls.
Meanwhile, the bishop decided to get another opinion on his four scrolls, from an American scholar in Jerusalem who was the first to photograph them. By March 1948, convinced of the scrolls’ value and concerned for their safety as the War of Independence raged, the bishop had his assistant take the scrolls to a bank in Beirut, where they were held in a safe.
In Dec. 1948, the bishop headed to Beirut, picked up the scrolls, when gone to New Jersey, where he hoped to sell them.
Echoes of history
Learning of the scrolls, I couldn’t help but think of the great Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever and the Paper Brigade in Vilna. As the Nazis tried to annihilate the Jewish people, great writers risked their lives to save Jewish literature and culture, to hide it for the future. It’s a repeating theme in Jewish history — the military battle and the cultural battle, continuing at the same time.
Sadly, Professor Sukenik lost a son to battle in the war.
Then the professor himself died.
But the family’s passionate connection to the Isaiah scroll was not over. The professor’s other son, Yigael Yadin, who would become both a major scholar and a military leader, was in New York in the early 1950s and happened to read a small advertisement in The Wall Street Journal offering four scrolls. He guessed that the Isaiah scrolls his father wanted had been spirited off to the United States; he wired Israel to tell the new government to find $150,000. (Here, some Jewish philanthropy helped.)
It turns out that the bishop’s representative had tried to sell — to the Library of Congress, the Walters Gallery in Baltimore, Duke University, and The University of Chicago — but all refused. He failed because Jordan claimed the scrolls belonged to it because of where they had been found, while Israel claimed they were theirs because of cultural heritage.
Yadin hired an agent to conceal that Israel was the actual buyer, and the four were purchased on July 1, 1954. On July 9, the Isaiah scroll was separated and spirited to Israel by plane, with other planes escorting it for safety.
The Israel Museum built the Shrine of the Book to house the scroll, and it was opened to the public in 1955. But in 1968, the real scroll was replaced with a very good facsimile for the scroll’s continued safety.
Now, in honor of the museum’s 60th anniversary, the real thing is on view. My advice — don’t miss it.
“A Voice from the Desert: The Great Isaiah Scroll” is on view at the Israel Museum through Oct. 3.
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Whatever you think of Ilhan Omar, these threats are unconscionable
The Trump administration is reportedly planning to build a case to strip Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) of her citizenship and eventually deport her.
It is my hope that American Jews — even those who do not like Omar and can recite every questionable comment she has made over the past 15 years to illustrate why — will understand this as offensive and outrageous not only because they are Americans, but because they are Jews.
The Trump administration may claim that it is building a case against Omar due to paperwork (reports suggest that they are interested in whether her father listed her age as 17 on her citizenship application when she was really 18). It is similarly filing dozens of lawsuits attempting to denaturalize citizens by trying to prove they lied in the process of gaining citizenship. However, that this is happening now, ahead of the midterm elections against a sitting member of Congress, a high-profile progressive whom the president has said should “go back” to her country of origin, suggests that it is, to put it mildly, politically motivated.
Evidently, the Trump administration sees citizenship not as a right or a responsibility but as a reward, one that can be taken away if that is seen as useful to the president and his adherents. That use could be silencing political opposition or something as simple (and callous) as an opportunity to brag about the sheer number of attempted denaturalizations.
Jews, too, have found themselves on the wrong end of political denaturalization. I do not mean to compare the Trump administration to the Nazis, but the stubborn fact is that Jews were indeed stripped of their citizenship as part of a political project in Germany and elsewhere in Europe in the 1930s and 40s. And in the early 20th century in the United States, it was Jews who politicians claimed were incapable of assimilating, of ever really being a part of the United States. These arguments culminated in legislation that kept out Jews who could have found refuge here. The threat of denaturalization and the experience of perpetual otherness is a grievous part of modern Jewish history; we should be offended by its presence in our political present.
Jewish tradition as well as history encourages us to stand up to authority when that authority is wrong. Mordecai refuses to bow to Haman; Nathan yells at King David for sleeping with Bathsheba and having her husband killed; Moses famously urges Pharoah to change his oppressive ways. Even God is on the receiving end of pushback when Abraham pleads and negotiates to spare Sodom.
I do not think one needs to be Jewish to be outraged by the attempt to denaturalize Ilhan Omar. I think it is also bone-chilling as an American who believes we, including our elected officials, have the right to openly oppose our president, and I am worried as a person who thinks it would be good to continue to live in a democratic republic. And I am sure that there are Jews who will say that Omar deserves to lose her citizenship because she has said things about Israel they do not like.
But the Jewish lens through which I see this is that it is right to challenge power when it is abused, and it is wrong for the powerful to make a show of trying to cast their opponents out of the country.
The point is not whether Trump can make good on the threat to strip Omar of her citizenship and deport her, but that it is obscene to use denaturalization as punishment for being a high-profile political opponent in the first place. If he is trying to make it more dangerous to speak out while being from the “wrong” country, then the rest of us need to say that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be an American citizen.
We should do this because we are Americans and we should do this because we are Jews. We should do this because of the ways in which our American and Jewish identities bleed into one another. And, we should do this because we may not know exactly whether it is as Americans or as Jews that we know we have to protect the right to speak truth to power, but we know we need to do it all the same.
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Germany couldn’t stop Hitler’s election tactics; can America stop Trump’s?
Herding political opponents into prisons and concentration camps, suspending civil liberties, and sending SA thugs to destroy newsrooms and beat up journalists were among the means used by Adolf Hitler to game Germany’s parliamentary election of March 5, 1933, won by the Nazis.
As much as Donald Trump might fantasize about deploying such brutal tactics to subvert our midterm elections, he hasn’t done so — yet. But his objective is the same: Detonate constitutional barriers standing in the way of his lust for power. “Cheat like hell,” Trump told the GOP’s midterm convention last month.
Historian Timothy Ryback has just published a book about the last gasps of the Weimar Republic, titled 53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled A Democracy. The 53 days begin when Hitler becomes chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, and end with the Reichstag’s March 23 passage of the Enabling Act, which gave him absolute power.
For our own perilous time, there is another number to take note of: 652 — the number of days between Trump’s second inauguration and our Nov. 3 midterm elections.
Hitler’s long march to despotic power occurred over 3,422 days — from his failed Beer Hall Putsch on Nov. 8-9, 1923, up until passage of the Enabling Act.
After spending less than a year of a five-year sentence for the failed 1923 coup, Hitler returned to a Nazi party that was in utter disarray. But the Great Depression turned the Nazis’ fortunes around, as jobless and disaffected Germans flocked to Hitler with his promises to make Germany great again. In parliamentary elections in 1930, the number of Reichstag seats held by the Nazis rose dramatically from 12 to 107, and more than doubled that in elections in 1932, making them the largest party. After some backroom political wheeling and dealing, President Paul von Hindenburg offered the chancellorship to Hitler, which he accepted on Jan. 30, 1933.
Even though Hitler was chancellor, his coalition wasn’t dominated by Nazis. When the Reichstag went up in flames on Feb. 27, 1933, der Führer had the pretext he needed to begin dismantling the last remnants of democracy. The Nazis’ first targets were Communists. More than 4,000 were arrested in the initial hours after the fire. It didn’t take long for Social Democrats, trade unionists and Jews to also face raids, arrests, beatings and terror, as Hindenburg — at Hitler’s urging — issued a decree that suspended Germans’ civil liberties.
There was still a barrier standing in Hitler’s way: the Reichstag. But Hitler had a scheme for getting rid of it: calling for a new election and ultimately engineering a vote by the Reichstag to abolish itself.
In the days and nights before the national election, set for March 5, Nazis carried out a campaign of repression and menace across the country. Brandishing firearms, storm troopers ruled the streets. Homes of Hitler critics were raided. His campaign speeches were blasted from loudspeakers. Voters were offered rides to the polls in transports organized by the Nazis, an unsubtle hint at which party they should vote for.
In the election, the Nazis and their Nationalist allies won a majority of seats in the Reichstag but fell short of the two-thirds needed to amend the constitution. But Hitler had a workaround: Convene the Reichstag to vote on a measure that would allow him to declare laws without the approval of the federal legislative body. With Communist delegates of the Reichstag either in hiding or in custody, Hitler already had a structural advantage; they wouldn’t be there to vote. With the Reichstag building destroyed, the delegates convened on March 23 inside the Kroll Opera House, which swarmed with armed storm troopers and members of the SS who harassed and threatened delegates who were either on the fence about giving Hitler absolute power or were known to oppose it.
In the end, weeks and months of trying to tilt elections through terror and intimidation gave Hitler his ultimate prize: of 538 delegates in the Kroll Opera House, only 94 — all Social Democrats — voted against the Enabling Act. In effect, German democracy was steered by Hitler into committing suicide.
In an essay for Literary Hub, Timothy Ryback noted parallels between Hitler’s election victory on March 5, 1933 and our midterm elections and cataloged them.
They include Trump’s “brazen attempt to quash negative press coverage” and Hitler’s and Trump’s virtually identical pre-election low approval ratings. Both the Nazi leader and the American president had gone to court to try to have earlier election results overturned, and the German election, like our fast-approaching midterms, was seen as a referendum on the nation’s leader.
“Amidst all the turmoil, everyone understood that the March 5 election was a make-or-break moment not only for the Hitler chancellorship but for democracy itself,” Ryback wrote.
With the midterms just around the corner, this can be said about America as well.
Since Trump’s second inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025, he has thrown more effort into trying to rig the midterms for the Republicans than into virtually any other endeavor — other than perhaps misusing his powers to enrich himself and his family, and dreaming up monuments to himself.
Trump’s pardon of 1,500 insurrectionists who stormed the capitol on Jan. 6 was an early signal that the defeated president had no intention of playing fair during the 2026 midterms. What followed was a barrage of assaults on the election system. Here’s just a partial list: lawsuits demanding sensitive voter data, the gutting of oversight bodies, intimidation of election officials and orders for key GOP-led states to redraw their congressional districts — all designed to both undermine Americans’ trust in the election system and manufacture pretexts for contesting any midterm outcomes that displease him.
Amid these relentless attempts to subvert the midterms, the Democrats have had success at blocking some of Trump’s poisoned salvos, such as holding the line against the so-called SAVE America Act and fending off Trump’s attempts to seize voter information. But none of this deters Trump, who just comes back with more schemes. The latest revelations come from documents obtained by Democracy Forward, a legal advocacy organization.
Those documents show that “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) collected tens of millions of voter records, explored undercover investigations against voter registration groups and considered feeding state election data into a system used to locate people for deportation as part of a sweeping federal effort to find alleged voter fraud ahead of the 2026 midterms,” according to Democracy Docket, which reviewed the documents.
“This is an absolute smoking gun,” said Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias.
Trump has openly suggested a federal takeover of election administration, and during the past several months it seems like he’s been laying the groundwork for that to happen if he doesn’t get the results he wants on Nov. 3. It’s all too easy to imagine horror scenarios: Trump claims massive voter fraud, his supporters storm county election offices in protest, the FBI seizes ballots and voting machines, unrest erupts across the country, Trump declares martial law.
If Trump’s schemes trigger the kind of disorder he appears to be preparing for, the question will be whether our courts, our press, our civil servants and our voters stand firm. Germany’s institutions bent until they broke. Ours have bent, but they have not yet snapped. What happens next will reveal whether they still possess the steel that Germany’s lacked.
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Sally Rooney’s publisher stops selling her books in Britain, citing ban on pro-Palestinian group she backs
(JTA) — Sally Rooney’s publisher says it will stop supplying her books in the United Kingdom because current legislation prevents it from passing her earnings on to her.
The best-selling Irish writer, whose work includes the novel “Normal People,” which was adapted into a hit BBC drama, has long been a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause.
Faber said it would no longer supply her books in the United Kingdom because of her backing for Palestine Action, a group that the British government last year proscribed as a terrorist organization, saying it had “orchestrated a nationwide campaign of direct criminal action against businesses and institutions.”
“Current legislation in the UK has led to circumstances where Faber cannot pass on UK earnings to Sally Rooney for her work,” the publisher said.
“To sell a writer’s work and not be able to pass on earnings is an unconscionable situation for a publisher,” it said. “As such, and in full agreement with Sally, we have taken the decision that we can no longer supply her works in the UK in any format. We remain the proud publisher of her remarkable body of work, which we will continue to sell in other territories.”
Faber had no further comment, the statement said.
Yvette Cooper, then the Home Secretary, banned Palestine Action last year following an attack by the group on the Royal Air Force base at Brize Norton which caused millions of pounds of damage. It had previously targeted businesses and premises which it said were linked to Israeli defence companies.
Soon after the announcement, Rooney wrote an opinion piece in the Irish Times in which she doubled down on her support for Palestine Action, adding that she would give the proceeds of her books to back the group. “If this makes me a ‘supporter of terror’ under British law, so be it,” she wrote.
In a statement following the action announced by Faber, Rooney cited her Irish Times opinion piece as she explained that the publication of her books “could now constitute a serious criminal offence.”
The ban of Palestine Action has proven to be highly contentious in Britain. Back in February, the group’s co-founder Huda Ammori challenged the move in the High Court, with Rooney providing a supportive witness statement. She said at the time that she was “almost certain” her work would be dropped in Britain if the ban persisted.
The court ruled in Ammori’s favor, but that decision was overturned by the Court of Appeal in June. The Supreme Court is due to hear an appeal next month.
Rooney said on Wednesday: “After a process of consultation and deliberation, and with my full agreement, my publisher Faber has therefore determined that it can no longer supply my work within the UK.
“I have made every effort to be honest with the public about my beliefs and intentions, and I am wholly prepared to accept the consequences.”
Rooney’s support for the Palestinian cause predates the attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza. In 2021 she declined to sell Hebrew translation rights for her novel “Beautiful World, Where Are You?” to the Israeli publisher that had previously released her books in Hebrew.
At the time, she said she supported the BDS movement and would not work with an Israeli publisher unless it is willing to “publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the U.N.-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people.”
That move prompted backlash in Israel and beyond, including calls to boycott Rooney’s work. Israeli bookstore chains reportedly removed some of her books from shelves.
However, earlier this year she agreed to have her latest novel, “Intermezzo,” published by an Israeli publisher approved by boycott activists.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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