12-11-2025, 02:11 PM
The presumption that Wilfrid was Jewish appears in the FBI dossier as well. It all reeks of early 20th-century anti-semitic tropes...the Jew as money-grubbing, dishonest, physically "bent". We really need to be careful about how we interpret descriptions like that.
As I have said on numerous occasions, all bookdealers were cagey about provenance back then. It was standard practice. Nothing about Voynich's secretiveness or inventiveness surprises me in the least or makes me suspicious. It was how they all operated, although some were more guilty of it than others.
Today, that kind of imprecision would not be acceptable, as many collections (including Beinecke now) will not purchase a manuscript if it has any holes in its recent provenance. But back then, no one was really worried about it. That speaks to a collecting culture steeped in colonial practices and notions of American exceptionalism...if a manuscript was in the U.S., then that was all that mattered. No one was particularly interested in how it got there unless the story was mysterious and romantic (for example, finding a manuscript in an old castle in Europe, or asserting it was formerly owned by royalty, or claiming that it was a lost work by Roger Bacon).
As I have said on numerous occasions, all bookdealers were cagey about provenance back then. It was standard practice. Nothing about Voynich's secretiveness or inventiveness surprises me in the least or makes me suspicious. It was how they all operated, although some were more guilty of it than others.
Today, that kind of imprecision would not be acceptable, as many collections (including Beinecke now) will not purchase a manuscript if it has any holes in its recent provenance. But back then, no one was really worried about it. That speaks to a collecting culture steeped in colonial practices and notions of American exceptionalism...if a manuscript was in the U.S., then that was all that mattered. No one was particularly interested in how it got there unless the story was mysterious and romantic (for example, finding a manuscript in an old castle in Europe, or asserting it was formerly owned by royalty, or claiming that it was a lost work by Roger Bacon).
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