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Secret Codes Protect Ancient Torahs
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."
Oy!
So much for looking for a signed copy...
It doesn't solve the problem of theft. If one is stolen, it might take years to recover it, if at all. Once it is recoevered, it isn't in pristine condition anymore. More attention should be focused on solving the problem itself than making it easier to apprehend the criminals.
Oy, these Rebbes today, so unimaginitive. Whatever happened to REAL anti-theft devices for holy artifacts, like the one on the Ark of the Covenant that melted your face off?
Anyone have an idea how the Torahprints will look like?
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.
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'?
The price represents about a year's labour for a Sofer (Jewish Scribe) and the cost of the parchament and ink itself. The cost of the materials is something like $5-10K, while the rest is the labour.
Most Sifrei Torah (Torah Scrolls) are not particularly ancient, although scrolls which are a couple of hundred years old are quite common.
-David Barak
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Nope, sorry. The formulation of the ink is specified by Jewish Law, and has remained the same for a few thousand years.
Besides, individual signatures added to ink wouldn't scale in any case.
-David Barak
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
"Hey... at least now they'll have a Safer Torah!"
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<bah-dum-ching!
"... and if they got away with it, they'd be getting Loot of the Frum!"
<boo hissss
$ touch
> What makes Jews so special?
Well... there's this I guess...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/science/03gene.
Who would pay $50,000 for a stolen Torah? Surely somebody that would place that much value on a book would actually have read the book and be attempting to follow the laws therein, especially the one about "Thou shalt not steal" -- or encourage others to steal! I can't beleive people could buy this without the provence of them documented, and then claim they just didn't know it was stolen.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
> We all have a right to our opinion
Ah good.
My opinion is that you're an uneducated ass.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
"And the educated have always had more sex, money, power and influence."
I'm quite certain the uneducated have more sex. Those in the ruling classes always have more societal structures in place, that are aimed at *preventing* sex.
The money, power and influence parts, I won't argue with. But peasants definitely have more sex.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Except that a) not all Rabbis will recognize that ruling (in Judaism, there is no pope or other central organizing figure - there are organizations, heirarchies, but in the end none of them is TRULY authoritative, although I've been hearing about a sanhedrin, and if that was established, then it would be pretty authoritative), and b) not all Jews will recognize what those Rabbis rule. In Judaism, you're SUPPOSED to question authority, and not just swallow it down. It'll be awhile (give it a few hundred years) for it to be either globally accepted or rejected. Halachah changes SLOWLY..
. Define sqrt(x) as something really evil like (x / rand()), and bury it deep. Watch your coworkers go nuts.
The halakha (Jewish Law) works like this - the text must be readable, and printed correctly. There can't be any holes inside the margins; however, holes or tears outside the margins are parmitted, although they're not mehudar (nice).
My synagogue, Kesher Israel has one particular Sefer Torah which has about a 2" tear over one of the columns at about Parshat Pinhas (Numbers 25:10 - 30:1), which is quite apparent every time we read it - it'd be quite hard to fix, so we're waiting until we can take that one out of circulation for a few months...
-David Barak
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
As an observant Jew, I'd be a little bit skeptical about reading from one...
OK, so I'm entirely too Scando-Anglo in my heritage (considering the topic), and specifically not religious... so this will seem, well, cheeky (at best).
How does any modification to the physical nature of the book/scroll, other than a change that actually alters the words therein, change the message? Meaning, Shakespeare is still Shakespeare whether in paperback, parchement, or HTML. Aren't the (apparently never changing) 300k-some characters in the Torah, well, the same every time? I understand that handling a carefully loved artifact can help put on into an introspective mood, but surely one with invisible changes (microscopic holes) isn't damaging to your spirituality - isn't content king, as it were?
Now, all that being said, how about high-res digital images of a few of the pages? If they're hand made, no two are exactly the same, and matching a high-contrast calligraphic image against a database would surely be no harder than matching digitized finger prints, right?
Anyway, I guess I'm just scratching my head about the "unfit for use" part. Surely the things Moses said and did, for example, aren't any different if the very same words telling the story are on a piece of paper with microscopic holes you can't even see? And, aren't whatever cultural and contemporary spiritual lessons one is supposed to glean from reading those words what really matter? I'd always thougth that "observant Jews" (as you put it) would be more about the message than the medium. But then, I suppose this is really a larger-scale, lukewarm semi-rant about orthodoxy and dogma in general - no need to pick on any particular flavor, but I saw your comment and thus you win my rant-prize for the evening.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
While each scribe, called a "sofer" (long o) has unique calligraphic penmanship, the form of the letters are highly detailed and specific to the calligraphy of writing a Torah. To go from one Torah to the next you would see no difference in the way each letter is formed.
Responsibility is the punishment for compentenc
I don't know about "no difference". Some sofers make nice even letters. Others start the line well enough but then buncheverythingup as they get to the end. Others realize they're going to get to the end of the line too quickly and stretch out some letters (which is allowed) to the point where they're hard to read. And on one torah I read from, the sofer went crazy with the crowns. We called that the 'trippy torah'. Here's a link to a sofer's site with lots of pictures and explanations: http://www.bayit02.freeserve.co.uk/index.html
"...dictates that not one character can be added to the 304,805 letters of the Torah's text..."
:)
how about two?
The laws of writting a kosher Torah are quite complex. For example with 6 exceptions each page must begin with a specific letter "Vav".
There are complex laws for how a Torah is written, read etc. If you drop one of the floor everyone in the room is required to fast for 40 days (generally Monday and Thursday for the next 20 weeks). This is an object for us that is increadably special to us.
I should point out that most Jews I know also own at least one printed version with commentary etc. In my case its a Hebrew/English translation but as I live in Israel many folks have a Hebrew only version.
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What about the right to make derived works?