A scholar’s son was convicted last week of using online aliases to harass and discredit his father’s detractors in a heated academic debate over the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
A Manhattan jury convicted Raphael Golb on 30 of 31 counts, including identity theft, forgery and harassment. He was acquitted of one count of criminal impersonation.
Prosecutors said Golb, a 50-year-old lawyer, used fake e-mail accounts and wrote blog posts under assumed names to take his father’s side in an obscure but sharp-elbowed scholarly dispute over the scrolls’ origins.
Golb didn’t acknowledge crafting the e-mails or blog posts. But his lawyers said the writings amounted to academic whistle-blowing and blogosphere banter — not crime.
The more than 2,000-year-old documents, found in caves in Israel in the 1940s and ‘50s, contain the earliest known versions of portions of the Hebrew Bible and have provided important insight into the history of Judaism and the beginnings of Christianity.
Golb’s father, 83-year-old University of Chicago Professor Norman Golb, said nearly a decade ago that Dr. Lawrence Schiffman, chairman of New York University’s Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, had plagiarized his research. But he has never had to answer for it, and that so angered Golb that he broke the law, prosecutors said.
Raphael Golb, 50, created an e-mail account under Schiffman’s name, then sent a message from it to Schiffman’s colleagues admitting plagiarizing Norman Golb’s work. Golb says his actions were not criminal. Rather, he said he was engaging in a spirited debate about the history of the texts and trying to highlight the fact that his father, a longtime scholar of the scrolls, was plagiarized by a rival professor. — ap