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According to Jewish tradition, all 304,805 characters of the Torah must be written by the hand of a trained scribe.


As a teenager, Jamie Shear met a scribe in Jerusalem and was instantly intrigued. “He showed me how parchment was made and letters were written—the significance of everything. That was very very fascinating to me. Shortly after, I was determined to find a teacher.”


“The Montreal Jewish community raised me up as a scribe. They supported me from the very beginning,” he said.


At 19, Shear came to Israel and spent the year studying in a Jewish seminary. During that time, he found a mentor in Jerusalem who began teaching him the basics of Judaic calligraphy. Although he was not raised in an observant home, Shear said he had taken upon himself a more serious observance of Jewish ritual shortly before attending seminary.


While studying biology in university, Shear continued to learn the rules regarding the creation of Torah scrolls and other holy texts. In 2000, after nine years of practice, he began work on his first Torah. 

Jamie Shear works on a Torah scroll at his workshop at the Jerusalem Fifth Quarter art gallery in Jerusalem's Old City on June 30, 2015. Shear is a professional scribe and artist who specializes in several forms of calligraphy. Photo by Micah Bond

Shear said the laws and traditions regarding the creation of a Torah are very specific with many subtle nuances which often interact with each other to form exceptions or variations on the basic rules. The laws and guidelines that must be followed number in the thousands, he said.


For example, no two letters may touch even by a hairsbreadth and any tiny blemish on a letter will render it invalid. “There are a lot of different principles and those principles have paths and tributaries, all these different complications of law,” he said.


“The laws that we have today for writing the Torah came separately from the written tradition. They came orally.


“An oral tradition is something that’s organic, that grows and changes through different communities. You have opinions. You have stringencies. You have leniencies but you also have laws and the laws are not to be found in the Torah.”


Shear said it can take up to 16 months to complete a single scroll. The eight Torah scrolls he has written have been sent to synagogs in Canada, Israel, America, and China.


Shear is currently practicing calligraphy at the Jerusalem Fifth Quarter, a collective of Judaic artists in Jerusalem’s Old City. 

Jamie Shear carves a turkey feather into a quill before beginning work on a Torah in Jerusalem on June 30, 2015. A Torah can be written with many different instruments but Shear prefers working with a feather quill. Even tiny adjustments of a tenth of a m
Jamie Shear examines a quill before starting work on a Torah scroll at his workshop at the Jerusalem Fifth Quarter art gallery in Jerusalem's Old City on June 30, 2015. Even tiny adjustments of a tenth of a millimetre will effect the formation of the lett
A scroll for a Tefillin sits among strips of parchment on a workbench at the Jerusalem Fifth Quarter art gallery in Jerusalem's Old City on June 30, 2015. Photo by Micah Bond
A partly finished Torah scroll sits with a reference sheet on a workbench at the Jerusalem Fifth Quarter art gallery in Jerusalem's Old City on June 30, 2015. Even if a scribe knows the Torah by heart, he must still copy it from another source in order to
Jamie Shear works on a Torah scroll at his workshop at the Jerusalem Fifth Quarter art gallery in Jerusalem's Old City on June 30, 2015. Shear is a professional scribe and artist who specializes in several forms of calligraphy. Photo by Micah Bond
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