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PDF FormatMoreover, these sharp divisions leave no room for the display of historical objects falling somewhere between or outside archeology and ethnography. Thus there is no obvious home in the Israel Museum for items from the Khazar kingdom (eighth century) or the Sabbatean crisis of the eighteenth century, or exhibits about the Zionist Congresses, the Holocaust or the creation of the state in the twentieth century. The most one can hope for is that these key moments in Jewish history will merit some attention in temporary exhibits, showcased in yet another separate building, divorced from any greater historical context.
Consider, for example, the Judaica collection. Although expressly and exclusively dedicated to items of both Jewish and historical import, this wing somehow remains free of any chronological motif. It is not by accident that the brochure outlining a “Quick General Tour” for visitors recommends traversing this section in reverse—it makes absolutely no difference. All the Hanukkah menorahs are displayed on one “experiential” wall lacking chronological classification, while other walls present a panoply of etrog boxes, spice containers, Tora scrolls, kiddush cups, and so on. As befits ethnic folklore, the Judaica collection is organized around themes such as “Sabbath,” “Holidays” and “Communal Life,” based on fairly superficial stereotypes of the lives of eighteenth-century Jews, with other periods in the nation’s history evidently considered irrelevant to this section of the museum. In the area on “Jewish Art,” one will find no ancient mosaic from the synagogue at Ein Gedi, no cylindrical Holy Ark from the talmudic era; nor will the “Holidays” section ever display the cart used at Kibbutz Degania to carry the first fruits for the Shavuot festival celebrations. Instead of displaying items in their larger historical context, the hidden narrative here is that of the wandering Jew experiencing the elements of Jewish life in exile—Sabbath, community, synagogue—while floating in a bubble completely detached from time and place.
Similarly, the museum’s collection of ancient coins is displayed in an “educational” exhibit on the use of money—from conch shells to credit cards—separated physically from anything else Jewish or archeological: Coins from the Bar Kochba era appear in the exhibit “How Much Does It Cost?” while coins from the ancient synagogue in Gush Halav appear under the heading “Devaluation.” Instead of placing these coins within a larger historical context, the museum’s curators saw fit to place them with objects whose connection is purely associative—such as a sketch by Rembrandt entitled Jesus Banishing the Money Changers from the Temple. Perhaps most disturbing of all is the isolation of the Yehud coin, probably the oldest Jewish coin ever found (fourth century B.C.E.). This important historical artifact can be found languishing on a dimly lit table in a dark corner of the archeology wing, together with non-Jewish coins of the same period, under the heading “Coins in Local Circulation During the Persian Period.”
While the Judaica wing opens with a Holy Ark from the seventeenth century, the archeological wing greets visitors with the remnants of a magnificently horned prehistoric bull, proclaiming from the outset that this track does not concern things Jewish. Here again the layout of the exhibit is not accidental: It largely tells the story of archeologists, its narrative linked more to accounts of excavations and less to the historical picture they reveal; and, oddly, the weight accorded the various exhibits reflects primarily the scope of the findings at each site, not the relative importance of the findings. Although ordered chronologically, beginning from the dawn of humanity, the exhibits peter out at around the point where archeologists lose interest, about a thousand years ago.
It is here that the thorniest questions arise regarding the Israel Museum’s guiding principles. As opposed to the art galleries, or even the Judaica section, for which many parallels exist around the world, the archeology section of the Israel Museum is the one place that could have displayed the priceless artifacts of Jewish communal life in the land of Israel dating back to the biblical period. The planners of this exhibit, however, seem to have gone out of their way to blur the Jewish character of any findings by presenting them in a context devoid of national meaning. For instance, the museum’s program refers to the “Period of the Judges” in the archeological wing, yet no hint of such a period actually appears in the exhibit; and what the program identifies as covering the “Period of the Kings of Israel” is revealed to be a series of relics found in excavations of minor temples located nowhere near Jerusalem, with no reference to David, Solomon or the First Temple. Three pagan ritual pedestals from Ta’anach and Beit Shean are exhibited prominently in the main display case, but it takes a minor miracle to discover in the side cabinets Hebrew potsherds from Arad and inscriptions from the City of David. All of the coins, documents, seals and oil lamps from this period have been exiled from this hall to separate exhibits, divorced from the chronological story: No attempt has been made to integrate even a small number of them into a coherent framework describing the Israelite period. And there is no mention at all of the inscriptions of Gezer and Shiloah, or the hundreds of discoveries from the Temple Mount and the Upper City of Jerusalem. Even if not all of these findings can be displayed here, this gallery could and should contain some representation of them.
In the gallery on the Second Temple period, things are even worse. Unlike the earlier halls, this one does not merit a separate title, so that it appears to be an incidental continuation of the preceding room. Of all the possible opening displays on this subject, what greets visitors at the entrance is not an inscription by Mattathias Maccabee, a drawing of the Temple candelabrum, or even a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but a bust of Alexander the Great. Perhaps the most striking feature of this small gallery is that it contains not a single diagram, model or pictorial illustration of the nature of the period—certainly nothing comparable to the huge map displayed in the exhibit on “Neighboring Cultures.”
A similar situation is found with respect to the mishnaic and talmudic periods. Although the latter is mentioned in the museum program, the exhibit itself describes it as simply “Roman.” Herod’s monumental constructions, from the Tomb of the Patriarchs to Jerusalem, are ignored in their entirety. But the insensitivity to the Jewish experience reaches its peak with the positioning of a bronze statue of Hadrian facing a cluster of his Roman legions as the hall’s chief protagonists—a device not entirely different from placing a giant portrait of Adolf Hitler at the entrance to Yad Vashem. The sole reference in the exhibit to the hundreds of synagogues discovered from this period is by way of an artistic comparison to churches, instead of, for instance, showing a map of their locations throughout the land, or comparing Jewish communal life in Israel with that of the Babylonian exile, in accordance with the basic Jewish narrative of the period.
Yet the archeological wing’s most profound statement can be found not in what is displayed, but in what is missing. Some of the Jewish people’s most important sites—Massada, Gamla, Herodion, and even the Temple Mount—are not represented in this section at all, and consequently are missing from the entire museum. After completing a tour of the archeological wing, will the visitor have any idea that he has just passed through a thousand years of Jewish hegemony in Jerusalem and the surrounding region, and centuries more of Jewish settlement in the Galilee and the Golan? It seems rather unlikely.
No better is the famous Shrine of the Book, the Israel Museum’s centerpiece. This modest yet strikingly conceived pavilion answers one of the museum’s planning flaws by providing a place for ancient manuscripts and findings from the Bar Kochba Revolt (second century C.E., during the museum’s “Roman” period), there being no suitable site for them within the narrative of the archeological wing. Despite the power of the Shrine, its exhibits, too, reflect the Israel Museum’s basic approach: They follow no chronological order (the Aram Tzova Crown is displayed next to a scroll which predates it by a thousand years); no historical explanations accompany the exhibits (Who were the Dead Sea sects? Who was Bar Kochba?); and, even within this small structure, the Bar Kochba letters displayed on the upper floor are inexplicably separated from the other archeological findings from the same cave at Nahal Hever, which are found in the underground-level display. Within the framework of a national museum, the story of the Bar Kochba Revolt should be displayed prominently as an integral part of the historical saga of the Jewish people, not hidden away in the basement of the Shrine of the Book. But at the Israel Museum, this is clearly too much to ask.
