MSU’s Chamberlain Warren Samaritan Collection

The Chamberlain Warren collection of Samaritan materials at Michigan State University includes a fine selection of relatively scarce artifacts and manuscripts.

The materials were acquired in the early part of this century by E. K. Warren, a wealthy manufacturer from Three Oaks, Mich., who first encountered the modern Samaritan community during a visit to Ottoman Palestine in 1901. Impressed by their poverty and disturbed by the abandon with which they were selling their precious religious artifacts, Warren formulated a plan by which the community could gain financial security.

In the meantime, Warren purchased many of the treasures to hold in safekeeping until the Samaritans could repurchase them. The plan never came to fruition; Warren died and the Samaritan materials were shipped to Three Oaks, where they were placed in a Warren family museum.

In 1950, the Warren family closed the museum, and after negotiations with several institutions, the various collections were given to the MSU Museum. The then-museum director tried – to no avail – to garner interest in the collections from other universities, but finally placed the collections in a museum storage area under the bleachers.

Eighteen years later, the museum decided to reorganize the storage area, and came upon three boxes labeled “Palestine.” The museum consulted Robert Anderson, who was then teaching Bible for MSU’s Department of Religious Studies, to learn more about the materials. Now emeritus, Anderson was one of a few experts on the Samaritans.

The oldest item in the collection is a piece of bluish-streaked, white marble bearing an inscription from Exodus that dates from between the third and sixth centuries. It is believed to be one of four Samaritan inscriptions found at Emmaus and was probably a lintel over a synagogue doorway.

Three 15th-century manuscripts and a fragment of a fourth, handwritten on animal skins, are the most dramatic of a series of Pentateuchs. Known to Jews as the Torah or the first of three sections of the Hebrew Bible, Pentateuch is also known to Christians as the first five books of the Old Testament.

Two of these manuscripts (probably by the same scribe, although he used two different names) are fine examples from the well-known Munes family of scribes in Egypt, a major center of the Samaritan diaspora.

Another 15th-century Pentateuch in the collection is a product of the other major center of the Samaritan diaspora, Damascus, source of the first Samaritan manuscripts to reach Europe (in the early 17th century).  

Also from Damascus is a handsome brass scroll case bearing inlaid silver inscriptions and designs. The case was crafted in 1524, as revealed by the inscription, which also identifies both the case maker and the person who did the inscriptions. Scholars believe that this case once held the famous Abischua scroll in the Samaritan synagogue at Nablus.  

The remaining items all date to a later time:

• A Samaritan Pentateuch written in Arabic in 1685 underscores the excitement caused by the arrival of a Samaritan Pentateuch in France earlier in that century. The latter appeared in two polyglot editions, and a leading scholar of the time, Jean Morin, published a work arguing that the Samaritans preserved the original text as revealed to Moses.
• “Jacob’s Bible” is one of two fairly recent Pentateuch with special interest. Jacob, high priest of the Samaritan community from 1861 to 1916, copied this text in three columns bearing Samaritan Hebrew, an Aramaic Targum and Arabic. Notes in the text indicate this was a particularly difficult period in his life, as three sons died in quick succession. In the back of the volume he records each time he read through the book: a total of 460 times.
• The “Tailor’s Copy” is the other unique modern work. A 1920 letter from William Barton to F. W. Chamberlain describes it as a “dainty little volume for which I see Mr. Warren paid the equivalent of $25 to help a crippled tailor. It was a high price but it is a very pretty little book.” A note attached by a later curator states that the tailor bought a sewing machine with the money. It is a tiny volume measuring 10.9 centimeters by 9.7 centimeters, with 36 lines of text to a page, and the minuscule pages are decorated with several slogans and acrostics worked into the pattern of the text.
• The collection also includes a copy of the fourth-century Memar Markah, the chief theological work of the community and several liturgical works for use in the various Samaritan festivals. Most of these date from the 18th  century. The paper bears a variety of watermarks and several volumes are bound in tooled leather with multicolored doublaires (patterned inside covers), string binding and projecting flaps to cover the front of the book when the volume is closed.

The Chamberlain Warren Samaritan Collection at MSU can be viewed at MSU Libraries Special Collections by appointment. For more information, please call (517) 432-6123 Ext. 100 or visit http://specialcollections.lib.msu.edu/.

 

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