When he first looked at the fragile red-tinged parchment in front of him, the expert scribe wasn’t sure the Torah scroll, by all accounts a very rare specimen with a storied past, could be saved.
“I immediately noticed how ancient it is, so to speak,” explains Chabad-Lubavitch Rabbi Reuven Margolin, chief scribe at the National Scribal Center in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. “The parchment was very worn out and in some places, it was as thin as a fine paper. All the letters had micro cracks. The holes in the parchment were formed naturally and their edges were testifying about the old age of the scroll.”
Red from the type of deer hide chosen for its manufacture, the Torah scroll – written in the Sephardic style – was practically without equal. Most today are made from cowhide.
“Amazingly, the color of the letters still remained black,” recalls Margolin, “which means that the scroll was always properly preserved.”
The rabbi decided he would do what he could to bring the scroll back to a useable state. If it could talk, he realized, what a story it would tell.
Somehow it ended up in the hands of a Persian Gulf sheikh who showed it to a Jewish Ukrainian businessman. Aware of the importance of such a find, the businessman exchanged his special edition of the Koran for the Torah scroll and brought it back to Kiev.
He called the scribal center and asked for a scribe to come and take a look at his discovery and another old scroll written according to the Eastern European tradition. Because even a single missing or misshapen letter invalidates an entire scroll for ritual use, Torahs must often be repaired.
“The case began as an average call from someone looking for an expert evaluation of two Torah scrolls,” says Margolin, who is often invited all over the former Soviet Union to evaluate aging scrolls.
It wasn’t until he studied the red scroll for himself that he figured out its approximate age.
The first hint that it was more than 500 years old was the script. It was written in what is called ktav valish, a flourishing form of the letters only used before the Jewish expulsion from Spain in 1492.
Clues led Margolin to date the scroll much older. Gaps between paragraphs were spaced according to the opinion of Maimonides, signaling that it must have been written before 1300, when the accepted style was changed to reflect the rulings of Rabbi Asher ben Yechiel, an Ashkenazic Talmudist known as Rabbeinu Asher.
And the Tetragrammaton – the four-letter unpronounceable name of G‑d – was written according to teachings found in the Holy Zohar, which was first printed around the 1300s. Together with Israeli scribal history specialists, Margolin noted that the style of the shape of the letters is very similar to those of Rabbi Moshe Zabaro and Rabbi Azaria Pidjo, Spanish scribes who fled the Inquisition.
Oldest in Recent Memory
Margolin estimated that the Torah scroll was about 700 years old, the oldest he had ever seen.
Rabbi Elisha Baram, who directs the center of 14 scribes and has supervised the restoration of 50 Torah scrolls in all, was flabbergasted.
“This is the oldest I’ve seen,” he states. “I’ve seen one that was written 500 years ago, but never before one that was written 700 years ago. It’s really very old.”
Baram assigned five of his scribes to the restoration project.
“Four scribes from the center started working on the scroll under my supervision, fixing up thoroughly every single letter in the scroll,” says Margolin.
All 304,805 letters.
Because of the age of the parchment and the cracked letters, the scribes could not use a regular quill, known as a kulmus.
“So we created a special kulmus from an isograph with a very soft pen point and a special ink system so there was no need to dip the quill in the ink all the time,” explains Margolin.
Made from gall-nut juice and gum, the special ink was prepared according to the rulings found in the Code of Jewish Law. But in this case, it had to be diluted with water and vinegar to flow better in the special quill.
“After fixing the letters, we patched up all the holes and replaced the unfixable parts of the text by cutting out those pieces of parchment and replacing them with new ones,” describes Margolin.
When all the parts were ready, the scribes sewed them together using special threads made from kosher animal sinews. They also used a special chemical on the edges of the parchment to prevent it from disintegrating further.
The whole repair process took six months.
After Margolin returned the Torah scrolls to Kiev, he was given an award from the United Jewish Community of Ukraine in recognition for his work. For his part, he’s just happy he is able to do what he loves in his hometown.
Born and raised in Dnepropetrovsk, he first learned the scribal arts in 1999 when Rabbi Shmuel Kaminetsky, the city’s chief rabbi, brought a scribal instructor to the city. By 2005, Margolin was the chief scribe of the Ukraine and Baram brought a highly skilled teacher just to improve his knowledge and skill.
And although he and his fellow scribes write Torahs from scratch, the act of repairing a scroll gives him a special feeling.
“I feel like I redeemed a Jew that was imprisoned, or even like I resurrected someone from the dead,” explains Margolin. “It’s a great feeling and I’m glad I’m doing this kind of job.”
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