Trafficking Fake ‘Ancient’ Torahs in Turkey: A Media Analysis

Abstract

Over the last decade, scores of supposedly ‘ancient’ manuscripts have been seized by police in Turkey. Although reports of the seizures regularly feature in the country’s media, the ‘ancient’ manuscript industry has received only sporadic scholarly attention. As a consequence, very little is currently known about the scope and scale of this persistent, peculiar, and now decade-old phenomenon. To understand the various factors that facilitate its growth, this article investigates how the trade, its participants, and the manuscripts themselves have been represented in the Turkish media over the past decade. Through a review of approximately ninety-three news articles published online between 2012 and 2022, I argue that the trade in ‘ancient’ biblical manuscripts in Turkey is legitimized by a narrative of the phenomenon that is fuelled by sensationalism, uncritical reporting, and an indifference to expert opinion.

KEYWORDS:

• fake
• forgery
• antiquities trafficking
• Turkey
• Jewish manuscripts

Notes

1 This research was undertaken as part of the Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP170104196, ‘Forging Antiquity: Authenticity, Forgery, and Fake Papyri’ (www.forgingantiquity.com). The author would like to thank Rachel Yuen-Collingridge, Malcolm Choat, and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and advice throughout.

2 To date, the most extensive treatment of the phenomenon has been by Sam Hardy 2009; 2015; 2018; 2020a; 2020b. See also Malul, 2019; HyeTert, 2019; Klein, 2021; Lever, 2022.

3 The news articles were located through a series of manual searches of Google and Google News. The data were collected over a two-week period in February 2023.

4 Photographs of the codices can be found at ‘Diyarbakır'da altın yazmalı İncil ve İbranice işlemeli ferman ele geçirildi’, CNN Türk [online] September 2019 [accessed 16 December 2022]. Available at: https://www.cnnturk.com/turkiye/diyarbakirda-altin-yazmali-incil-ve-ibranice-islemeli-ferman-ele-gecirildi?page = 1; and R. Kılıç, ‘Jandarma alıcı kılığına girdi, 6 tarihi eser kaçakçısı yakalandı’, TRT Haber [online] January 15, 2020 [accessed 19 July 2021]. Available at: https://www.trthaber.com/haber/turkiye/jandarma-alici-kiligina-girdi-6-tarihi-eser-kacakcisi-yakalandi-454437.html

5 My PhD research focuses on the production and proliferation of bad forgeries in the twenty-first century. As part of my ongoing research I have investigated the scope and scale of the fake manuscript trade on YouTube. See also figure 16 in Al-Azm & Paul, 2019: 14, 54; see also figure 4.8 in Sargent et al., 2020: 60.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Evie Handby

Evie Handby is a PhD candidate in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her research interests centre around forgery, the illicit antiquities trade, social media, and media history. Guided by theories of nonhuman agency, Evie’s PhD research investigates the production and proliferation bad fakes in the twenty-first century. Correspondence to: Evie Handby. Email: [email protected]