Excerpt from Chanan Tigay’s ‘The Lost Book of Moses’

As the authenticity of his Moabite pottery collection came under withering attack, Moses Wilhelm Shapira fell into a depression that put his business and his family under strain. His reputation had been marred. He spent a growing amount of time fighting to regain it—holding meetings, dashing off letters to the editor, trekking into Moab to prove his point. But receipts at the shop suffered. He argued with his wife Rosette and ignored the children. Maria, his youngest daughter, cried just looking at him.

Shapira was not yet fifty years old and his career was at the edge of a cliff. The pottery that had once seemed the key to his prospects was now the source of financial strain and embarrassment. The scholars he had so hoped to impress dismissed him. Schlottmann was livid. But it was attacks in the English papers from his nemesis, the French archaeologist Charles Clermont-Ganneau that did the most damage. If Shapira was teetering at the cliff ’s edge, that “horrid man” Ganneau was right behind him, sticking him in the flank with a hot poker.

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