French National Library Curator Accused of Thefts
A former senior curator at the French National Library in Paris appeared before a magistrate June 27 and pleaded innocent in the theft of 25 rare manuscripts and 121 pages removed from books and incunabula, according to the June 28 U.K. Guardian. Michel Garel, an internationally known expert on Hebrew texts, had been arrested in July 2004 after an anonymous letter to library officials drew attention to the sale of the library’s copy of a 13th-century Pentateuch at Christie’s auction house in New York in 2000.
Last year, Garel admitted forging certificates of authentication that allowed him to sell the Pentateuch at auction for some $300,000, the Tel Aviv Ha’aretz reported last August 8. But Garel now claims he had confessed under duress and to avoid jail. “I have proclaimed my innocence from the day I was handcuffed,” he said in the June 26 Paris Le Figaro. “I am the ideal scapegoat.
. . . I have never accepted a centime for anything belonging to the [National Library] or any other public collection.” He blamed his arrest on “tense relations” with the library’s senior managers over the past 10 years.
Unrelated to Garel’s case, Le Figaro also published details of a 2004 inventory, commissioned by Library President Jean-Noël Jeanneney, that found some 30,000 books and 1,183 manuscripts missing since the previous major shelf-reading in 1947. Library Director-General Agnès Saal commented to reporters, “To turn the library into a locked safe would be easy, but it is not our vocation. Unlike museums, our documents are there to be consulted.” Since the library’s move to its current location in 1996, officials have tightened security considerably, including rotating staff members so they do not spend too much time working in the same collection.
The U.K. Independent reported June 27 that part of the case against Garel has collapsed because there was no licensed interpreter present when an anonymous Anglo-Israeli bookseller gave evidence against him. He remains under investigation but has not yet been formally charged.
Posted July 1, 2005.
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