Earlier this month, it emerged that prominent rabbinical judge and law professor Michael Broyde invented the character of an older rabbi who would go online to praise Broyde’s scholarship. The comments left by this fictitious elder were really left by Broyde himself.
After Broyde admitted as much, he lost his seat on the rabbinical court, but not his professor job at Emory University.
Now, Emory may be forced to reconsider. It seems that Broyde created, out of thin air, yet another elderly religious scholar, Rabbi David Tzvi Keter. According to the tenacious Steven I. Weiss at the Jewish Channel, Broyde, posing as Keter,
…alleged he’d had conversations with now long-dead sages in the late 1940s or early 1950s. The alleged conversations were used to produce a manufactured history of statements from long-dead scholars that buttressed an argument that Broyde had made in a highly-touted article published in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. Broyde, in a later publication, subsequently quoted this second identity’s alleged findings as further proof of his original argument.
Now we’ve crossed into new territory — that of fraudulent scholarship. Broyde’s previous fabulation was shameless but not that shameless. This new one, if it checks out, would appear to be the academic equivalent of suicide.
If Broyde created this second identity and alleged historical evidence, that would “clearly be false scholarship” and “clearly require disciplinary review,” according to Professor Celia Fisher of Fordham University, where she is director of the Center for Ethics Education.
For a man who was a top candidate for the U.K.’s Chief Rabbi job just last year, Broyde’s fall from grace is a stunner.
Anyway, the ball’s now in Emory University’s court.
[hat tip: Failed Messiah]