In Memory of Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl:
Torah Sage and Hidden Hero of the Holocaust

Part One: Selected time-line of events relating to encryptions in the five Books of Moses, from Cracking the Bible Code

Passages in the Hebrew Scriptures and commentaries from the time of Daniel and Jeremiah (2,500 years ago) refer to various encryption methods. Among them are "equidistant letter skips," created by reading the letters of a text vertically. One tradition holds that the Prophet Daniel interpreted the famous "handwriting on the wall" in Nebuchadnezzar's palace by reading a mysterious inscription in this way; or permuting letters so that "the first shall be last, and the last first," the second second to last and so on. Found in the Book of Jeremiah, this is called Atbash, the oldest use of a "letter substitution cipher." There exist allusions to other permutation methods as well, but no one seems ever to have noted the striking mathematical relationship between one permutation method and another.

Cryptology--the art of making and breaking codes--did not become an important pursuit in the West until the Renaissance. That changed at a stroke when Giovanni Battista Alberti--the man after whom the term "Renaissance Man" was coined--suddenly invented the "Cipher Disk," a "wheel within a wheel" that allowed code-makers to create so-called "polyalphabetic" substitution ciphers. By spinning the inner wheel against the outer more than once in the course of encrypting a message, a very complex series of letter-permutations could be created. The numeric value of the first few letters of the hidden message itself provided the key to how far and how often the wheels needed to be turned. According to the eminent cryptologist, David Kahn, once this method was adopted, the West took the lead in cryptology, and has yet to lose it. (Though we may well, and soon.) No one knows how Alberti came up with this method. It seems to have appeared in his works without prior influence.

In fact, however, there is a much older history to "polyalphabetic ciphers." The ancient Jewish Kabbalists from as long as two millennia ago rarely described their methods in detail, but only in hints. In the 18th century, a Kabbalist and sage who spent most of his time trying to protect Jewish communities from regular depradations published a text in which he explained --diagrammatically-- not only the ancient method of "Atbash" from the time of Jeremiah, but all the related substitution methods as well. They are all contained within this one encryption wheel, a "polyalphabetic" substitution cipher disk of great subtlety from 2,000 years before Alberti. Using this method, the ancient Kabbalists claimed to have uncovered "multiple permutations" of hidden facts in the creation account in the Book of Genesis. When the Romans destroyed ancient Judea and sent the Jews into exile, most of this knowledge was lost to the world at large.

In the late middle ages, a revered Kabbalist and Torah commentator named Rabbenu Bachya discussed how, using "multiple permutations," it was possible to read out of the creation account in Genesis an encoded date at "equidistant letter skips" from which an extremely precise length of time could be obtained for the long-term average of the lunar cycle. (The lunar month varies by a small amount in a cycle that takes over 600,000 years to repeat.) Details of the method he refers to come from authors who lived as long as 1,900 years ago.

Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl was a young man in Slovakia before World War II. Even as a child he was renowned as a prodigy in both Torah studies and mathematics. A few days before his Bar Mitzvah at age 13, his grandfather, also a revered sage, asked to read the young Weissmandl's Bar Mitzvah address. When he finished it, he made of the boy a strange request: that Weissmandl not deliver the address at all. The boy agreed, and by way of compensation, his grandfather gave him some coins with which Weissmandl bought himself a book: the Torah Commentary of Rabbenu Bachya. R. Bachya's description of the encoded astronomical data ignited in the boy a passion for the hidden layers of the Torah that was never extinguished, not even by the Holocaust. But why did Rabbi Weissmandl's grandfather want him not to give an address, always a part of the ancient ceremony? It was so brilliant that he feared the adulation that was sure to follow would be a destructive force on the emerging character of his grandson. It was, after all, character that counted most. Rabbi Weissmandl did not present his Bar Mitzvah address to anyone until decades later, a few years before his death, after the Holocaust. It was hailed by listeners even then (who did not know its origin) as of unexampled brilliance.

To facilitate his investigations into the phenomenon discussed by R. Bachya, R. Weissmandl wrote out the entire text of the Torah in rectangular grids. The opening passage of Genesis shows, among other things, the vertically encoded date from which one one may calculate the length of the lunar cycle (to within 2 parts in one million of modern estimates). The copy of R, Bachya's commentary given him by his grandfather was one of but three items that Rabbi Weissmandl kept with him throughout the Holocaust. All his other possessions were destroyed by the Nazis--including "boxes and boxes" of his decryptions of the names and important dates and details of most of the great sages of Jewish history.

Go to Part Two: Selected time-line of events relating to encryptions in the five Books of Moses, from Cracking the Bible Code