XKV8R

regarding the judgment of tzvee zahavey, his conclusion sounds quite similar to the argument made in the motion to dismiss and by some new socks.

the notion that 'since there is no (fiscal) loss, then there is no crime,' or that, 'it may not be very nice, but it's not illegal' has been a mantra from golb for years. he said it about me when his father posted a review of my unpublished script online. university lawyers made him take it down (re: copyright), but they told him if he took out the quotations, he could post it elsewhere on his private page.

golb's intent was to harm- reputation, financial, it didn't matter. he didn't want some of us giving lectures, selling books, and gaining visibility working with the dss exhibits. he tried to harm ticket sales at the museums. likewise, he sought gain (financial, visibility via media reports, lectures, etc.) for his father. had he kept doing what he was doing, golb risked action in civil court. but, when he crossed over to impersonation and forgery, well, he brought his civilly questionable activities into the criminal realm, and therefore acted criminally. you'll note that the charges are limited to the schiffman case, and don't involve other forms of defamation against others (which are rightly reserved for the civil courts).

==

did i mention that the entire introduction of the motion to dismiss appears to have been written by golb? imho, it's all rehash of old blogs and posts, including this space. i'm working on a critical examination of the motion (just for exercise). if you read it, there are so many self-praising moments in the intro, that only a self-obsessed author could have produced it.

kuby's a good lawyer. he wouldn't write that introduction. (i mean, he could, but i wouldn't bet on it.) in fact, the second half of the motion reads quite differently. golb could have helped with that too, but that at least looks like the hand of representation and not of the defendant.

my $0.02.

manwithdream

I have heard that Orthodox Jews have strict rules about when it is OK to call the police on other Jewish people. It has to be a really bad crime because the jails are considered to be very bad places for Jewish people to be. Since Golb is being charged with a crime for things not worth putting a fellow Jew in jail for, I can believe a rabbi spoke out against his charges. Schiffman could have sued him or taken him to a Jewish court, but he might be in trouble with other religious Jews for criminal charges against Golb.

Jeffrey Gibson

Are you an attorney? Are you in any way legally competent to say what is and what is not worth putting anyone away for? By your analogy, the law should not prosecute bad cops because, if convicted, jail would not be a very nice place for them too.

And what's with the impugning through insinuation of Shiffmann's character?

What's more, isn't it very curious that just after Golb was given permission to blog again, we suddenly have a host of newcomers writing under pseudonyms who are not only intent to speak about Golb's case in the way that Golb wants it to be defined, but who will not actually engage with those that Golb is restrained by law from contacting in any form or fashion?

Jeffrey

manwithdream

Jeffrey,

I never said I was an Orthodox Jew. I only said that they don't like Jewish people to call the police on other Jewish people or to even take them to civil courts. Here is an interesting link.

http://www.mishpattsedek.com/KolKoreh-70Rabbis.htm

I'll find another one about calling the police soon.

Kenneth Greifer

Jeffrey Gibson

And I never asked if you were. What I want to know is whether or not you are an attorney.

JG

manwithdream

Jeffrey,

I am not an attorney, but I was just saying that Orthodox Jews don't believe in calling the police on other Jewish people unless it is for the most dangerous crimes.

See this article.

http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/fai...shiva-234.html

Kenneth Greifer

fitter

My, my, quite a few developments here. Some of it seems a bit fanatical, but a few things caught my attention.

Spin makes a good point. Maybe the professor was pissed. That definitely makes sense. My only question is, if he was pissed, which "allegations" got him pissed? Because there seem to be a few of them going around.

Man-with-a-dream, too (cool name! wish I had thought of it), seems to have put his finger on something.. That is, we seem to have a rabbi here who has gone to the FBI and maybe some other non-Jewish people too, and by doing that it seems like he violated a precept of Jewish law that's supposed to prevent exactly the sort of foul ugliness we're seeing now. In that case, we would be dealing with a pretty serious violation, one which might even require the excommunication of this great chairman of a Jewish department.

But this all depends on a number of things, doesn't it? Maybe the professor doesn't belong to the kind of Judaism followed by the rabbis that signed this text. Or maybe he did go to a Beis Din and we just don't know it. Or maybe Raphael Golb is a "public danger," in which case the holy law says Jews are allowed to sick the cops on their fellow Jews. The New York Times says Raffi is a "guerrilla fighter." Which sounds like a public danger to me.

And if Raphael Golb is a public danger, then everyone should be doing what they can to get him convicted, shouldn't they?

Jeffrey Gibson

Developments of what?

Jeffrey

spin

From what I have heard, email was circulated under Schiffman's name admitting plagiarism. This would be identity theft in order to impute his scholarly position, which would threaten his livelihood.

I don't care at all about any of the other stuff: the old school routine has been a curse on the scrolls. I cannot wait until the unscholarly bunch who have basic hegemony over mainstream scrolls interpretation fall on their swords. Golb senior has a valid position regarding the scrolls given the current state of knowledge. It seems to me that he has been treated as a pariah for a couple of decades by the It-Has-To-Be-Essenes brigades. And these don't have the intestinal fortitude to put up a scholarly presentation of the consensus view. Magness in her archaeological presentation merely assumes her conclusions. VanderKam in his contribution to The Meaning of the DSS couldn't do any better and these two at least had the courage to attempt a presentation, unscholarly as they appear to me. Yet it is Golb senior who is on the outer. I thus can see some reason for much of Charles Gadda's efforts, though I could not in any sense condone the anti-Schiffman activities.


spin

fitter

Thanks for clarifying. If the crime of identity theft was committed against Rabbi Schiffman, then perhaps he is not a "Moser" or traitor after all, because this crime certainly creates a grave public danger. (IMO, the use of aliases may also create a public danger, especially in the area of Dead Sea Scrolls studies, but that is another issue.)

Maybe we can pin this down a bit further. Here is the Wikipedia summary of identity theft:

So to get to the bottom of this business and show that Rabbi Schiffman was not a "Moser," all we need to do now is pinpoint in which category of identity theft we should put these publicly dangerous email admissions of which he was a victim.