The Voynich Manuscript: Understanding the Untranslatable with Lisa Fagin Davis

[nablator]

I didn't say he was Jewish - I was quoting the Bureau dossier, where there is a note suggesting he was. I have no idea what his faith or the faith of his family was. It certainly doesn't matter to me and it shouldn't matter to anyone else...but it would have mattered in the 1910s.

Yes you did, matter-of-factly, so it is impossible to tell if you were quoting a (false) information or if you meant it as a (true) fact.

And so they immediately started investigating him as a spy. Especially because he had this mysterious background, right? He had a background, you know, as a Russian revolutionary. He was Jewish, you know, he was so very suspicious of him as a Eastern European immigrant just after World War One. And you know, so this sort of anti-immigrant hysteria, he fit right into that. And no matter how many times he says that it's a medieval manuscript. It is not a code book for the US Army. It took several years for him to be exonerated.

He takes it all over the country and he's showing it to people. One time, he's at a dinner in Chicago and he's bragging about his mystery coded manuscript and someone overhears, someone who works for the FBI and decides that he has to be investigated because he's got this thick Polish accent and he was Jewish and he was very suspicious.