The American Jewish Archives Journal, Volume LXI 2009, Number 1

several decades at the College, in which positive appreciation of the scrolls was
nourished in the graduate school but largely dismissed in the rabbinical program
(see below). With regard to his experience in that first class, Sanders reports:
I was the only student in the class! Yet, Sonne stood each meeting and lectured
as though he was addressing a full room of students. I thoroughly enjoyed
the readings he had me do, in the Cave One mss of course, and learned a
great deal.… I had had courses on the Scrolls both at Vanderbilt University
with J. Philip Hyatt and in Paris at the École des Hautes Études with André
Dupont-Sommer, but since I was alone in Sonne’s class I learned far more
than in the earlier ones. 71
Sonne’s earliest public comment on the scrolls was his appearance at the
April 1949 meeting of the Midwest Region of the SBL on the HUC-JIR campus
in Cincinnati. 72 In the paper, “The Newly Discovered Isaiah Scroll,” he argued
that the section divisions in the Isaiah Scroll from St. Mark’s suggested that the
manuscript was likely used for the sabbatical reading of the prophets and that
the “best historical setting for the Isaiah Scroll would seem to be the second and
third centuries A.D.” 73 This dating of the scrolls was consistent with his previous
conclusions, which he had reached based on the Gnostic and anti-Christian
tendencies found in the available scrolls, particularly the Thanksgiving Psalms.
One month before the annual meetings, Nelson Glueck invited John Trever,
then of the Council for Religious Education in Chicago, who had photographed
the first scrolls for ASOR, to visit the Cincinnati campus to meet with faculty
and students and to share his research. 74 Primarily he discussed the discovery
of the scrolls and how they came to ASOR for examination. 75 The visit had a
tremendous impact on Sonne, which resulted in a correspondence between the
two scholars. According to Sonne, he derived further inspiration for his work
on the scrolls “from Dr. Trever’s interesting lecture on the scrolls last month
in the College. On this occasion I had the opportunity for the first time to see
photographs of the two Daniel fragments.” 76 The two scholars most certainly
impressed each other.
In late February Trever met with the archbishop Athanasius Samuel at Duke
University, where his scrolls were on display. The archbishop had with him two
Torah scrolls that he wished to sell. Trever recognized that they were modern
scrolls, but he hoped that Sonne might be able to guide him in negotiating the
purchase, particularly with respect to the value of these types of documents. 77
Although Trever assured Sonne that he would take the information to the
archbishop and see if arrangements could be made for Sonne to examine the
Torah scrolls for the College, nothing came of the efforts. 78 Simultaneously,
the men discussed Zeitlin’s challenge to the scrolls’ authenticity. These communications
led Trever to forward Sonne’s reconstruction of the opening lines
of the Manuscript of Discipline to Millar Burrows, who was publishing the
12 • American Jewish Archives Journal