Celebrating the Scroll

The “Book of the Week” for this week is in a different format. The codex is what we usually think of when we think of a book today; but books bound together on one edge, with pages that can be turned, were only invented about 2000 years ago. Before that, a book may have been a clay tablet or a scroll. Roman books were typically scrolls made out of long sheets of papyrus.

This example from the MTSU Art and Design Historical and Teaching Collection is a reproduction of a Roman scroll. It includes Book II of Virgil’s Aeneid and must be read by rolling the sheet from one page to the next.

The scroll format offered some problems for the reader, such as identifying the text, since there is no spine on which to attach a label (hence the tab with the author’s name, which you can see in the top image). The other logistical problem was having to “rewind” the text after finishing it, to get back to the beginning.

Scrolls are not used in many contexts today, but one place to find scrolls is in Jewish synagogues. The torahs that are read at bimahs every week are always in the form of a scroll; although torah scrolls are made out of parchment rather than papyrus. But, like ancient Roman scrolls had been, they are still written by hand.

A torah from the former Glockengasse Synagogue in Cologne. This is now on display in the Kölnische Stadtmuseum. (Photograph by W. Horsch and distributed under a CC-BY 4.0 license. See this page.)

The torah scroll is celebrated in a holiday that is being observed today, as this post is being written. The torah is read in Jewish Synagogues over the course of a year and the holiday of Simchat Torah (which means rejoicing in the Torah), marks the end of one cycle and the beginning of a new one. On this day, the last passage of Deuteronomy is read, and the text is begun anew, with the reading of the beginning of Genesis. In celebration of coming to the end of the scroll and returning to the beginning, the torahs are removed from the ark and are carried around the synagogue seven times. This aspect of the celebration was documented in this painting by the Anglo-British artist, Solomon Hart, after a visit to Italy in the middle of the nineteenth century:

“The Feast of the Rejoicing of the Law at the Synagogue in Leghor, Italy” depicts a Simchat Torah celebration and was painted in 1850 by the British artist, Solomon Alexander Hart. This painting is housed at the Jewish Museum in New York.

Of course, returning to the beginning means rewinding the scroll. The act of rewinding has became a joyous celebration in its own right, as the community has an opportunity to see, and even hold, the torah unfurled in its entirety, as shown in the videos below: