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“Really? Really? If I email somebody an annoying question, I get a year?”Judge Robert Smith, to a New York prosecutor, 2014 appellate court hearing
Why did Professor Norman Golb of the Oriental Institute need to be silenced? Why did a small clique monopolize access and publication rights to the Dead Sea Scrolls for more than four decades? Why does the truth matter about where the scrolls came from?
For over seventy years, the true historical significance of the scrolls has been obscured by the institutional influence of a threatened scholarly establishment. Never were the stakes made clearer than when powerful Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau took action to protect the reputation of well-connected scroll figures, both in New York and across the United States.
In this documented memoir, Raphael Golb exposes the inside story of the Dead Sea Scrolls controversy and its scandals. He describes how he himself became involved in the controversy—and ended up fighting to stay out of Rikers Island.
Raphael Golb’s memoir of his journey through the system—in a case that almost reached the Supreme Court—poses the question of where we stand with the First Amendment today. While reigniting the great debate over who wrote the scrolls, Golb’s account also sheds light on broader issues involving academic revolutions, censorship, and how easily power can be abused in a democratic society.
“Not even a quarter of an Essene was at Qumran… The scrolls were the outcome of flight from Jerusalem and other areas that were densely settled with Jews.”Yitzhak Magen (2009)
Reviews
The Qumran Con has elicited numerous reactions.
One prominent lawyer writes:
In France, the book was featured in the September, 2024 issue of the Paris-based Booksletter magazine, a primary source of information for French readers interested in non-French language books:
https://www.books.fr/chasse-aux-sorcieres-theologico-universitaire/
Amazon reviews include the following:
“As the old quip goes, academic controversies are so intense because the stakes are so small. But what if one side can use the criminal justice system against the other? That’s what happened to the author of this memoir. He vividly takes the reader through a gripping first person account … and [offers] an explanation in layman’s terms, dispassionately and persuasively, [of] the evidence for his side of the controversy. Indeed his whole book, despite the facts that he’s a lawyer and a Harvard Ph. D., is not only jargon free, but the kind of well written participant observer journalism that this reader couldn’t put down.”
Also on Amazon, a rabbi and former university professor writes: “Mr. Golb is an educated accomplished attorney who has published a fascinating memoir of his struggle to set the record straight about his father’s scholarship … a mesmerizing memoir of a tragic string of events….”
Another noted rabbi emails the author: “It is an impressive and worthy tribute to your father, Norman, of blessed memory, and, even more, to truth itself. It is a comprehensive work of scholarship in and of itself. I hope that it will be widely read and discussed.”
An ivy league professor emails the author: “The story you tell is … extremely important. I’m very glad that you’ve told it here in such detail and with such clarity. I’ve requested that [the university library] order a copy.”
“I read in today’s NYTimes…that while your basic approach to Qumran now predominates… you were excluded by people who would not come if you were invited… That is chilling, a disgrace to the scholarly world.” Jacob Neusner, email to Norman Golb (2002)
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