In the Bible, the Hebrew word “shoah” connotes a sudden disaster or catastrophe. Thus, “the Shoah” strikes many scholars as a more descriptively accurate term by which to refer to the persecution and murder of European Jewry between 1933 and 1945 than the more commonly used “the Holocaust.” That word, of Greek origin, means “a sacrifice (or offering) totally consumed by fire.” However, few, if any, of the killers of the Jews during the Nazi era were seeking to propitiate divine power, many of those who were massacred would have rejected an attribution of religious meaning or purpose to their deaths, and burning is not how vast numbers of the victims either died or were disposed of. By virtue of being direct and unmetaphorical, “the Shoah” avoids the sanctification of senseless killing that is implicit in the word “holocaust.”
Leningrad Codex is the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew. Manuscripts earlier than the 13th century are very rare. The majority of the manuscripts have survived in a fragmentary condition.The oldest complete Torah scroll still in use has been carbon-dated to around 1250 and is owned by the Jewish community of the northern Italian town of Biella.
