Recently, I have been unable to do the kind of research I need in order to prepare features for this blog. But I do have the time and inclination to share with you some of the interesting stories about history that I see around me. Here are two, one a biblical controversy and one about a smallpox discovery.
A Precursor to the Book of Deuteronomy?
The New York Times has written a fascinating story about a discovery even more exciting than the Dead Sea scrolls found in 1947—unless this discovery is a fake! The story goes back to 1883, when a dealer in antiquities claimed to have found fragments of the original book of Deuteronomy—far older than the Dead Sea scrolls, which go back to the third century BC.
He offered them to the British Museum for 1 million pounds. But a famous expert declared them forgeries, as did the museum, and they disappeared. Now, scholar Idan Dershowitz argues (in a book and a peer-reviewed paper) that they may be genuine. Furthermore, says the Times, the manuscript may be “a precursor” to the book of Deuteronomy. “That would make it the oldest known biblical manuscript by far, and an unprecedented window into the origins and evaluation of the Bible and biblical religion.”
Because Dershowitz, an Israeli-American who works at a German university, did not have the original fragments, he studied “scattered transcriptions and a handful of drawings of one fragment,” says the Times. What led Dershowitz to think the fragments were original? The big thing was that “there were too many features that eerily lined up with discoveries and hypotheses about the Bible’s evolution that scholars would only arrive at decades later, after the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls.”
Now that his findings are public, they are of course controversial. The Times story, extending over two full newspaper pages, includes the objections critics have made to Dershowitz’s claims.
The Idea behind the Smallpox Vaccine
“[T]he general idea behind vaccination was brought to the attention of the western world, not by brilliant and privileged professors, but by a black slave and a woman.,” writes science author Matt Ridley on Warp News. He goes on:
“His name was Onesimus and he lived in Boston, as the property of Cotton Mather, a well-known puritan preacher. Her name was Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu, the literary wife of the British ambassador to Constantinople.”
Smallpox was a devastating disease in the eighteenth century. Around 1715, says Ridley, Onesimus told Mather that in West Africa taking a small bit of “juice” from a pustule of a smallpox survivor and putting it into the veins of another person could protect that person from the disease.
Mather also read about the technique (called “variolation”) in reports that came from the Ottoman court in Constantinople.
In 1721, Mather convinced a Boston physician, Zabdiel Boylston, to try “variolation” when a ship came into Boston harbor with sailors infected with smallpox. Boylston was the only doctor out of the 14 Mather appealed to who was willing to try; he tested it on his son and two slaves. (“Imagine how brave, even foolhardy, this act was,” comments Ridley.) It was successful, but Boylston was roundly denounced. “He hid in a closet for nearly two weeks to escape lynching,” writes Ridley.
“At almost the same time in Britain, a brave woman pioneer, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, was introducing variolation to London society, having learnt of the practice while in Constantinople as the wife of the ambassador. ” She successfully inoculated her son and daughter.
Variolation set the stage for vaccination. In 1796, Edward Jenner used material from a milkmaid’s much milder cowpox virus to protect against smallpox. This was safer and proved effective.
(If you are like me, you were surprised that Cotton Mather had a slave.) I’ll share a couple of other stories soon.
Image is the Book of Deuteronomy, Debarim. Hebrew with translation in Judo-Arabic, transcribed in Hebrew letters. From Livorno, 1894 CE. Moroccan Jewish Museum, Casablanca.jpg” by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg) is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.