Conclusions

"So too, the Holy One blessed be He looked in the Torah and created the world." (Bereshit Rabbah 1) 

According to this midrash, or a genre of Jewish exegesis, God, in the act of creation, first consults the Torah. This legend relays the importance of the Torah in Jewish life. According to scholars, the central significance of the Torah emerged both in Judaism's innovation as an aniconic religion and the loss of physical place (i.e. the Temple,) in times of exile. 

One of the Deuteronomists' (reformers in the ancient Kingdom of Judah) central projects in the 6th and 5th centuries B.C.E. was the elimination of cult images.¹ The vacuum left by the removal of cult images from religious life was filled by the Torah. As such, the Torah began to serve some of the same functions as idols, "they were each an embodiment of the sacred, and both were perceived as incarnations of God.”² This was the inception of the Torah as an important embodiment of God. 

In the periods of exile, the Babylonian exile following the destruction of the First Temple in 587 B.C.E and the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. marking the beginning of the diaspora, the Torah achieved a new importance. Dr. Emanuel Maier refers to the Torah as "moveable territory." He argues that, "The role of the Torah as moveable territory developed as a substitute and in compensation for the loss of actual territory.”³ And as such, after the destruction of the Second Temple, the Torah became the Jews' "most precious possession"⁴ in the diaspora. 

This importance of the Torah as a physical embodiment of the sacred, further imbued with additional import overtime, helps us understand why the communities would keep the Torah and Esther Scrolls now in HWS' possession for hundreds of years, carrying them for thousands of miles. How then, would this sacred text be acquired by President Potter in 1891? We cannot know for sure. However, one possibility is that the Torah scroll incurred irreparable damage. Once a scroll is deemed as such, it is not fit for public reading, and according to Jewish tradition, unusable Torah scrolls should be buried: 

"Mar Zutra said: With regard to wrapping cloths of Torah scrolls that have become worn out, they may be made into shrouds for a corpse with no one to bury it [met mitzva], and this is their most appropriate manner for being interred." (Babylonian Talmud Megillah 26b:15) 

Though, clearly, the Torah scroll in HWS' possession was not interred but instead sold or given away. For what reason, and under what circumstances, we cannot be sure.

Endnotes

1. Karel van der Toorn, "The Iconic Book: Analogies Between the Babylonian Cult of Images and the Veneration of the Torah" in The Image and the Book: Iconic Cults, Aniconism, and the Rise of Book Religion in Israel and the Ancient Near East, ed. Karel van der Toorn (Peeters Publishers Leuven, 1997), 240. 

2. van der Toorn "The Iconic Book," 242. 

3. Emanuel Maier, "Torah as Movable Territory" in Annals of the Association of American Geographers 65, no.1 (1975): 20, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2562041.

4. Maier, "Torah," 22.