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Secret Codes Protect Ancient Torahs

Posted by timothy on from the never-thought-about-that-before dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A story on Wired News reports the problems Jewish synagogues have protecting their Torahs from theft. The Torah scrolls, containing the five books of Moses, are hand lettered over the course of a year, are often hundreds of years old, and can sell for $50,000 or more. But Judaic law "dictates that not one character can be added to the 304,805 letters of the Torah's text", which makes them untraceable and easily sold on the black market. Rabbinic authorities have recently approved two computer-based systems to make the scrolls traceable: one takes a digital fingerprint of a Torah, a second makes microperforations in the parchment that yield a unique identifier."

6 of 679 comments (clear)

  1. How will it look like? by DegeneratePR · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Anyone have an idea how the Torahprints will look like?

  2. Related by pHatidic · · Score: 4, Interesting
    There is a tiny town in Israel, iirc called svadt, that has an artform called microcalligraphy which is not practiced anywhere else in the world. They are able to fit the entire Torah onto a single page, they they make the torah into a design.

    This is the first example that was found by Googling for microcalligraphy. I wonder if this technique could also be used on those works of art, which are extremely rare and expensive but also quite beautiful.

  3. What is considered an addition to the text? by magarity · · Score: 3, Interesting

    not one character can be added to the 304,805 letters of the Torah's text", which makes them untraceable and easily sold on the black market

    Just a few quick questions:

    Is putting some kind of ownership label on the inside cover really 'adding to the text'? I don't think anyone would mistake "From the Library of Hiram Goldstein" as part of the actual text. Can you buy a Torah at the bookstore? If so, does it have publisher's information? Further, 'character' is pretty specific to alphabetic writing. I wonder if a Chinese idiograph or Egyptian hieroglyph count as a 'character'?

    1. Re:What is considered an addition to the text? by Lehk228 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      IIRC there is a great Jewish tradition of getting around dogma on technicality, such as a prohibition against counting people in attendance at the synogogue(sp?) and so it is "not 1, not 2, not 3"

      Reference 1 Reference 2

      --
      Snowden and Manning are heroes.
  4. Re:Amazing, two systems of justice... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting


    > What makes Jews so special?



    Well... there's this I guess...

    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/science/03gene.h tml

  5. Re:OSS? by WindBourne · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That is about as real as somebody complaining about OSS being used In Syria, China, Cuba, and North Korea, while ignoring the fact that each of these countries are currently based on MS Windows XP. And to make matters interesting, these were sold by MS directly to the countries.

    --
    I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.