A HISTORICAL puzzle over the authorship of a 19th-century religious work has been solved with a paradoxical trick: throwing away what looks like the best data.
Moshe Koppel and Jonathon Schler from Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel, were approached by historian Shlomo Havlin, also at Bar-Ilan, with a famous Jewish text called the Torah Lishmah. A rabbi called Ben Ish Chai published the collection of letters, ostensibly written by other rabbis, in Baghdad in the late 1800s. Ben Ish Chai claimed he had stumbled across them, but many historians think he wrote them himself.
Koppel and Schler’s task was to…
