Norman Golb
Norman Golb is the Ludwig Rosenberger Professor in Jewish History and Civilization at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. He earned his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1954. He joined the faculty of the Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati in 1958 before settling at the University of Chicago, where he has worked since 1963. Golb has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Wisconsin, Harvard University, and Tel Aviv University.
Golb has been a key proponent of the viewpoint that the Dead Sea Scrolls found in Qumran were not the product of the Essenes, but rather of many different Jewish sects and communities of ancient Israel, which he presents in his book Who Wrote The Dead Sea Scrolls?: The Search For The Secret Of Qumran. In the 1990s, Golb was an advocate for the freeing of the Scrolls for general scholarly studies.
Golb was also the discoverer, in 1962, of the Kievan Letter, the earliest document attesting to Jewish habitation of Kiev. He also identified Obadiah the Proselyte as the author of the oldest known manuscript of Hebrew music, the earliest extant legal record of the Jews of Sicily, a new document dealing with the First Crusade and new manuscript materials relating to the Jews of Rouen. Finally, he recovered a genizah document describing a European convert to Judaism and an original manuscript of the Khazars.
He was born in Chicago, Illinois.Selected bibliography
- The Jews in medieval Normandy: A social and intellectual history New York: Cambridge University Press.
- Judaeo-Arabic studies: proceedings of the Founding Conference of the Society for Judaeo-Arabic Studies Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.
- Who wrote the Dead Sea scrolls?: The search for the secret of Qumran New York: Scribner.
- "The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Ethics of Museology"
- "The Freeing of the Scrolls and Its Aftermath"
- "The Qumran–Essene Hypothesis: A Fiction of Scholarship"
- "Khirbet Qumran and the Manuscripts of the Judaean Wilderness: Observations on the Logic of their Investigation"
- "The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Perspective"
- Les Juifs de Rouen au Moyen Age: Portrait d'une culture oubliée Rouen: Université de Rouen.
- "A Marriage Document from Wardunia de-Baghdad"
- with Omeljan Pritsak: Khazarian Hebrew documents of the tenth century Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
- "The Problem of Origin and Identification of the Dead Sea Scrolls"
- Toledot hayehudim be'ir rouen bimé habenayim Tel Aviv, Israel: Dvir Publishing House.
- A Judaeo–Arabic Court Document of Syracuse, A.D. 1020
- Spertus College of Judaica Yemenite manuscripts Chicago: Spertus College of Judaica Press.
- The Music of Obadiah the Proselyte and his Conversion
- Notes on the Conversion of Prominent European Christians to Judaism During the Eleventh Century
- "Literary and Doctrinal Aspects of the Damascus Covenant in the Light of Karaite Literature"
- "Sixty Years of Genizah Research"
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