THE DEMISE OF A FORGER.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1182, 24 May 1884, Page 3

THE DEMISE OF A FORGER.

No forger in modern times ever attracted so much attention as Solomon Shapira. He must have been a genius, because without more than a limited education, and without the advantages of Oriental scholarship, he committed his forgeries so cleverly as to deceive some of the most learned men. He confinad hisforgeries for the most part to the Old Testa ment Scriptures contained in the Book of Deuteronomy, and to certain supposed sacred inscriptions, as the ' Moabite Stone.' This was not only spurious, but Shapira continued to sell 'squeezes' or impressions from the stone, and, in a financial way, did a good thing out of the fraud. The number of fraudulent manuscripts which he manufactured and sold is not known. Many persons who had been deceived in a way to involve their scholarship would not care to make known the fact. Shapira wanted pounds for his pretended di>cov> r., of a new version of Deuteronomy. If it had been genuine it would have been worth the money, in the opinion of archaeologists. The manuscript antedated any genuine manuscript of Deuteronomy by several centuries. It contained a new and different version of the Ten Commandments. It waswritLeu on dingy pieces of leather, in the Phosnecian character. Some of the German scholars were dereceived. There was a lengthy controversy on the question of the genuineness and value of the manuscript. But the fraud was finally exposed, and then scholars wondered how they could have been deceived for a day. Shapira was shown up as a fraud. Since that lime little has heen heard about him. The telegram announcing his suicide at Rotterdam gives a fitting finale to the life of one of the shrewdest rogues of modern times. Most rascals who commit the crime of forgery are sooner or later brought up with a round turn. Shapira ended his own infamous life only a year or two after he was on the point of securing a million pounds sterling for the most adroit forgery of the sacred writings ever attempted in modern times. Had Shapira received the price of his fraud, it is not at all likely that he would have been in a hurry to leave the world.