(31 May 2013) SHOTLIST
1. Mauro Perani, Professor of Hebrew at the University of Bologna, and Alberto Sermoneta, Chief Rabbi of Bologna, unrolling Torah scroll
2. Close-up Mauro Perani's finger pointing at Torah scroll
3. Medium Torah scroll
4. SOUNDBITE (Italian) Mauro Perani, Professor of Hebrew at the University of Bologna:
"When I stumbled upon the scroll, and I had the document of the 1889 cataloguer, I immediately realised, as I know the ancient writings, that this was a very ancient way of writing, an eastern squared writing, and that it should have been dated around the first two or three centuries of the second millennium."
5. Close-up Perani pointing at Torah scroll
6. SOUNDBITE (Italian) Mauro Perani, Professor of Hebrew at the University of Bologna:
"At that time the instruments for assigning the date to a codex were inadequate because codicology and Hebrew paleography were born in the 1960s. So one year and a half ago, I suggested to the director of University Library of Bologna Biancastella Antonino to make a new catalogue."
7. Pan left Torah scroll (that has to be read from left to right)
8. Wide Mauro Perani and Alberto Sermoneta looking at the Torah scroll
9. Close-up Torah scroll
10. SOUNDBITE (Italian) Alberto Sermoneta, Chief Rabbi of Bologna:
"Most of the letter characters have resisted the passage of time perfectly, and this is a wonderful thing. It almost seems that miraculously the text survived to tell history, the history of the Jewish people, from three thousand years ago."
11. Wide of university library of Bologna
12. SOUNDBITE (Italian) Biancastella Antonino, Director of the University Library of Bologna:
"There is a special armoured warehouse where manuscripts, codex and scrolls are kept at the University Library, and obviously, to facilitate the study, it (the scroll) will be digitised, with very modern techniques."
13. Close-up Torah scroll being rolled up
14. Pan left Piazza Maggiore, Bologna city centre
15. Medium towers in Bologna city centre
STORYLINE
An Italian expert in Hebrew manuscripts has claimed to have discovered the oldest known complete Torah scroll, a sheepskin document dating from 1155-1225.
It was right under his nose, in the University of Bologna library, where it had been mistakenly catalogued a century ago as dating from the 17th century.
"When I stumbled upon the scroll, and I had the document of the 1889 cataloguer, I immediately realised, as I know the ancient writings, that this was a very ancient way of writing, an eastern squared writing, and that it should have been dated around the first two or three centuries of the second millennium," Perani said.
The 1889 cataloguer, a Jew named Leonello Modona, had described the letters in the scroll as "an Italian script, rather clumsy-looking, in which certain letters, as well as the usual crowns and strokes, show uncommon and strange appendices," according to the University of Bologna release.
"At that time the instruments for assigning the date to a codex were inadequate because codicology and Hebrew paleography were born in the 1960s," Perani said.
The find isn't the oldest Torah text in the world; the Leningrad and the Aleppo Bibles, both of them Hebrew codexes, or books, pre-date the Bologna scroll by more than 200 years.
But this is the oldest Torah scroll of the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, according to Mauro Perani, a professor of Hebrew in the University of Bologna's cultural heritage department.
Few such scrolls have survived since old or damaged Torahs have to be buried or stored in a closed room in a synagogue.
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