Ancient Jewish Scrolls Found in Northern Afghanistan

The Jewish community in Afghanistan is proud of their rich heritage in an Islamic land no longer exists …

By Amie Ferris-Rotman – “KABUL (Reuters) – A cache of ancient Jewish scrolls from northern Afghanistan that has only recently come to light is creating a storm among scholars who say the landmark find could reveal an undiscovered side of medieval Jewry.

The 150 or so documents, dated from the 11th century, were found in Afghanistan’s Samangan province and most likely smuggled out — a sorry but common fate for the impoverished and war-torn country’s antiquities.

Israeli emeritus professor Shaul Shaked, who has examined some of the poems, commercial records and judicial agreements that make up the treasure, said while the existence of ancient Afghan Jewry is known, their culture was still a mystery.

‘Here, for the first time, we see evidence and we can actually study the writings of this Jewish community. It’s very exciting,’ Shaked told Reuters by telephone from Israel, where he teaches at the Comparative Religion and Iranian Studies department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The hoard is currently being kept by private antique dealers in London, who have been producing a trickle of new documents over the past two years, which is when Shaked believes they were found and pirated out of Afghanistan in a clandestine operation.

It is likely they belonged to Jewish merchants on the Silk Road running across Central Asia, said T. Michael Law, a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Oxford University’s Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.

‘They might have been left there by merchants travelling along the way, but they could also come from another nearby area and deposited for a reason we do not yet understand,’ Law said.” Read more.