Marc Shapiro on Rabbinic Forgery

The strongest section is the first, on the phantom “A. Rosenberg.” Solomon Friedlaender forged a Yerushalmi to Kodashim, then invented a student, Rosenberg, to defend the forgery. The student praised the master. The master praised the student. Both were the same hand. Shapiro then traces a second and possibly third Rosenberg, and walks through the suggestion that Saul Lieberman (1898-1983) wrote the 1928 book under that name. Shapiro kills the theory with evidence rather than assertion. He notes that Lieberman had no academic training before 1928, that the book is riddled with fraud Lieberman would not have committed, that the book misquotes Solomon Buber to say the opposite of what Buber wrote, and that the whole thing turns out to be serial plagiarism, including a passage lifted word for word from Aptowitzer. That is good detective work. He lets the dating and the textual parallels do the arguing.
What makes the Lieberman material land is the Sussman anecdote. Lieberman, asked about the book, snapped “Sheigetz, how did you come to this book?” and refused to say more. Shapiro reads the silence as concealment, then notes the harder fact: Lieberman never cites this book anywhere in his own Yerushalmi work, even though it does the same job. A scholar who disagreed would say so. A scholar who had nothing to do with it would have no reason to hide. The non-citation is the real puzzle, and Shapiro is honest that he cannot solve it. דבר זה אומר דרשני, he writes. The thing demands interpretation.
The Lieberman-and-Kaplan herem detail is the sharpest single line in the post. A witness saw Lieberman step out of the Seminary elevator the moment Mordecai Kaplan (1881-1983) stepped in, because Lieberman held the herem against Kaplan as binding. Lieberman taught at the Conservative seminary and treated its most famous theologian as untouchable. The man lived inside a contradiction and managed it by physical avoidance. Shapiro reports it through a hostile source, the pseudonymous “Dayyan al-Yahud,” whom he then identifies as Israel Elfenbein (1891-1964). That identification, and the digression into Elfenbein’s path from Pressburg semikhah to JTS to Orthodox prominence, is the kind of thread Shapiro cannot resist. It has nothing to do with the title and it is one of the more interesting things here.
The R. Yitzchok Scheiner (1922-2021) section is corrective rather than revelatory. An ArtScroll biography by Nachman Seltzer compresses Scheiner’s year and a half at Yeshiva College into a single paragraph that never names the college, and Shapiro catches the omission with a yearbook photo: Scheiner captained the chess team. ArtScroll writes hagiography, and the house style cannot admit that a future Kamenitzer rosh yeshiva sat in a secular college and posed for a yearbook. Shapiro enjoys these corrections. The Matzav.com interview that drops the Yeshiva College years entirely, “or perhaps this was censored,” is the same point made twice. He has documented this pattern of haredi biographical scrubbing for years, and the Scheiner case is a minor entry in a long file.
The Kaplan-semikhah note is the cleanest piece of original research. Everyone assumed Kaplan traveled to Lida to get ordination from R. Reines on his honeymoon. Shapiro produces a 1908 Cracow newspaper placing Kaplan and Reines together at the Frankfurt Mizrachi conference, which explains the Frankfurt ordination Schacter had already documented. He adds a fact rather than a theory.
Sections three through six are leftovers: a Twersky video featuring a young Alvin Bragg, a Marvin Fox (1922-1996) mehitzah correspondence reproduced through photographs of letters, a Gifter jab at Bernard Revel’s red beard, and quiz answers. The Fox letters are primary sources Shapiro is parking in public, valuable to a specialist and inert to anyone else. The footnote on how to pronounce מעין, with the complaint about the Bergen County girls’ school spelling its name “Ma’ayanot,” is pure Shapiro: he cannot end without a pedantic flourish that he half-concedes everyone ignores in practice.
The through-line, if you want one, is pseudonymity and concealment. Friedlaender hides behind Rosenberg. Lieberman writes under .ל.ל and בלי שם and maybe behind Rosenberg too. Elfenbein attacks under “Dayyan al-Yahud.” ArtScroll hides Scheiner’s college years. Matzav hides them again. Shapiro is drawn to the gap between the public record and what men did when they thought no one was filing it. He does not theorize the pattern. He just keeps finding it.