Local Jewish academic impersonated

By Michael Orbach

Issue of March 13, 2009 / 17 Adar 5769

Lawrence Schiffman is happy to have his name back.

The Great Neck resident, chair of New York University’s Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and one of the leading scholars in the field of the Dead Sea Scrolls, was the recent victim of identity theft and harassment by the son of a rival academic.

According to the Manhattan District Attorney, Raphael Haim Golb, the son of University of Chicago professor Norman Golb, is accused of using NYU servers to open an e-mail account under Schiffman’s name and sending out e-mails to Schiffman’s colleagues and students purporting that Schiffman had plagiarized his research. Golb also attempted to discredit Schiffman and other Dead Sea scholars via blogs and other internet aliases.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, 900 documents discovered between 1947 and 1956 in the ancient ruins of Qumran in Northern Israel, contain the oldest surviving Biblical texts, most dated before 100 A.D. The accepted consensus about the Scrolls is they belonged to the Essenes, an ancient Jewish mystical sect. Golb’s theory is that the texts were collected from various libraries and then placed in Qumran.

Schiffman, an Orthodox Jewish historian, told The Jewish Star that the attacks and impersonation began in August. After six weeks, he began collecting evidence and tracing the e-mails to the NYU library, at which point he handed the information over to the District Attorney who investigated and charged Golb on Thursday.

Golb was arrested on charges of identity theft, criminal impersonation and aggravated harassment. The crimes in the Criminal Court Complaint occurred during the period of July to December of 2008.

Schiffman said that the older Golb has been unusually aggressive defending his theory and his son’s action follow suit.

“This should be an academic discussion,” Schiffman lamented, “but instead you’ve got him going way overboard and his kid going even further.”

Though academic discourse on the Dead Sea Scrolls has always been a controversial topic, this is the first time it has spurred a criminal investigation.