The Israel Museum and the Loss of Jewish Memory

A first visit to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem can be overwhelming. The museum’s renowned Judaica collection, the sculpture garden, the Shrine of the Book, and the astonishing collection of archeological finds reaching back to the dawn of Jewish collective memory and beyond—all these can leave the visitor in a state of awe, as if he has come upon one of Israel’s greatest treasures, a magnificent repository of the nation’s most cherished art and artifacts.

Well, sort of. While asserting that it “fills the role of a national museum” (per its promotional material), the Israel Museum somehow ignores completely what should be the most significant story in the national museum of the Jewish state: The story of the Jewish people. Nowhere in this grand structure is any effort made to present the chronicle of the Jewish people through the generations: Not in the archeology wing, which houses countless relics of Jewish life during the biblical period; not in the Judaica wing, where vast displays of items evoking the mores and modes of life in the diaspora are presented according to abstract categories, rather than historical periods; not in the Shrine of the Book, which apparently has been designated the museum’s “miscellaneous” department, for exhibits such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and artifacts from the Bar Kochba revolt that do not quite fit anywhere else; and certainly not in the rest of the museum, whose galleries of captivating art and sculpture lack any reference to the Jewish people and their history. Instead, the museum’s disjointed presentation celebrates the grandeur of the items on display while emptying them of their historical and national significance.

Stranger still, the betrayal of Jewish history, while particularly striking in the case of the Israel Museum, is by no means limited to that venerated institution. Throughout Israel, museums have abandoned outright the story of the Jewish people, ever seeking other stories to tell, arranging their exhibits and their great halls always according to other considerations, selecting artifacts and facsimiles, selling memorabilia and promoting their exhibits, all according to criteria other than their significance to the grand tale of Jewish history. In the culture of Israel’s museums, the story of the Jews is simply left untold.

In a given museum exhibit, the items on display are not presented at random, but are carefully planned in accordance with the narrative idea the curator has in mind. Like editors, curators piece together a coherent story, told through the selection and positioning of items within an exhibit, and the progression of exhibits from one display hall to the next. In this way they teach visitors not only that a given object is important, but why it is so. An ancient potsherd bearing a religious inscription will possess one meaning in an exhibit devoted to the development of the alphabet, and another meaning entirely in an exhibit about the religion that the inscription concerns. Items on display draw their power not just from their “objective” value, but also—often primarily—from the context in which they are presented. The nature of the connections between objects in an exhibit might be categorical (e.g., on telephones, the Internet and other means of communication), geographical in relation to a particular subject (items from Yemen alongside similar items from India), visual, artistic, or even associative (an exhibit on children’s fairy tales and their influence on the conquest of the moon). Yet, because the presentation of objects in chronological order is an especially effective method of conveying meaning, most museums rely on chronology-based sequences to develop their narratives, whether depicting the artistic development of a painter through his works, or the evolution of a species through fossils.

The importance of a museum’s narratives cannot be overstated. Every year, any major museum can expect hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of visitors—tourists, public officials, citizens from all walks of life, and especially schoolchildren—to pass through its halls, who will accept as truth the information so powerfully presented through the museum’s narratives. By its careful implementation of narratives, a national museum can help shape the historical consciousness of generations.

Small wonder, then, that so many countries are willing to dedicate massive resources to establishing lavish national-historical museums. In recent years, appreciation for the importance of such museums has increased around the world: While most countries boast a variety of museums on subjects such as art, science, aeronautics, agriculture, or even taxation, many countries have also instituted a central national museum to relate the history of the society and culture as a whole. Such institutions not only centralize and preserve the country’s archives and important national assets for future generations, they also help shape the country’s very identity. By way of example, consider the network of Smithsonian Museums in the United States and, in particular, its National Museum of American History; the Historical Museum in Germany; the Rekihaku National Museum for Japanese History; and the History Museum in Athens.

Few countries are as overdue for the establishment of a national history museum as Israel. On the one hand, Israel is a young, immigrant nation whose fundamental national identity has been in a state of flux for decades; on the other hand, rare is the nation whose heritage spans so many centuries, and which has managed to preserve so many, varied artifacts from millennia of kingdom and exile. Having emerged from the economic hardships of its first decades, one might have expected Israel to establish not one but several impressive museums celebrating the nation’s heritage from any number of perspectives.

Yet, somehow, the opposite has happened. Israeli museums barely hint at the extent and meaning of the Jewish people’s vast historical, cultural, artistic and religious traditions. A look at the country’s principal museums reveals that not one of them makes the overarching story of the Jewish people its centerpiece. As guardians of the country’s most important artifacts, perhaps these institutions have fulfilled their minimal duties. But as tellers of the national story, Israel’s museums—and above all the Israel Museum—have failed utterly.

The Israel Museum is the country’s showcase museum. Its Jerusalem location, its dramatic setting and proximity to the Knesset and the halls of government, its architecture, the Shrine of the Book, its sculpture garden, and its breadth of purpose clearly place it a step above all other museums in Israel. Here, more than in any other museum in Israel, we expect to find the Jewish people’s narrative, to feel with unmediated force the magnificent story of the Jews and the numerous milestones of the Jewish experience, as told by the archeological and cultural artifacts, works of art, manuscripts and historical documents in the museum’s extensive collections.

To this expectation, the Israel Museum offers only silence. In the whole museum not a single gallery presents the history of the Jewish people as its guiding narrative. Virtually the entire emphasis is on the presentation of alternate stories, from the development of the alphabet to comparisons of the artistry found in Jewish and Christian oil lamps. In the process, the museum discards the national context in favor of a universal typology of its various artifacts, and blurs the national connectedness within and among the displays.

The problem is made worse by the museum’s overall structural design. For the Israel Museum is really not “a museum” at all; it is, rather, five different museums, each possessing its own narrative, each taking the visitor along a path which never relates to, or even meets up with, any of the others. Immediately upon entering the museum’s main building, the visitor must choose among three possible routes: To the right a doorway leads to the “World Art” wing; to the left, a set of stairs leads down to two other tracks, the “Judaica” wing on the left and the “Archeology of the Land of Israel” exhibit straight ahead. Each of these is a kind of mini-museum in its own right. Two additional departments, the sculpture garden and the Shrine of the Book, are not even physically connected to the main building, but are located instead on the other side of the museum grounds. Fracturing the museum collection among these distinct, unrelated exhibit areas guarantees a complete disjunction between Israeli art, out there somewhere between East Asian and twentieth-century art, and the ethnographic Jewish art in the Judaica wing; it precludes any association of the more modern articles of Judaica with their antecedents, which are scattered through the archeology department; it obscures any relationship between the Kumran scrolls in the Shrine of the Book and Jewish artifacts from the same period discovered at other sites around the country.

Moreover, 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.

The Israel Museum’s disregard of the Jewish collective memory is so sweeping and consistent that it is hard to avoid the conclusion that it is also deliberate. This becomes all the more obvious when one looks at the other major museums in Israel, and discovers that everywhere, just as at the Israel Museum, the Jewish collective memory has been completely abandoned.

Take, for example, the Tel Aviv Museum. Dedicated exclusively to art, one might excuse it from presenting historical exhibits. Yet even within the limitations imposed by its focus on art, this museum rejects any narrative that might convey a national context. Its position seems to be that the importance of Jewish artists stems only from their place in the general art world, or their role in the local Israeli art scene, but never within a narrative connecting, for example, Chagall, Agam and Danziger as Jewish artists whose works reflect the story of Jewish art. At the Tel Aviv Museum, no such story exists—a viewpoint assumed at the Ramat Gan and Kfar Saba museums, and other art galleries, as well. This is not meant to diminish these museums’ value as showcases for outstanding works of the graphic and plastic arts; the point is that nowhere in Israel can one find the pantheon of Jewish artists represented within the larger historical context of Jewish art, to say nothing of the Jewish spiritual experience as a whole.

At the Land of Israel Museum in Ramat Aviv one encounters a different form of aversion to the narrative of the Jewish people. In this museum’s extensive displays of original historical articles and archeological finds, transitions are based not on chronology but on broad categories of human activity—spheres of daily life, agriculture and so forth. Moreover, the Land of Israel Museum focuses far more upon the “Land” than upon “Israel”: Essentially taking a territorial focus that brings to mind Israel’s “Canaanite” movement in art and culture, the museum is virtually devoid of any essential connection with the Jewish people. Even in those few instances when the museum hosts an exhibit of national significance, it carefully downplays that aspect. For example, coins from the Bar Kochba era are presented in the same exhibit as ancient coins from Thailand, rather than with Hebrew letters and scrolls from the time of the revolt. Perhaps the most blatant case of the curators’ disdain for the Jewish national story is the display of ancient Tora scrolls at the entrance to an exhibit entitled, simply, “Folklore.”

Only two major museums in Israel place the Jewish people at center stage: Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, and the Diaspora Museum at Tel Aviv University. Yet these are not historical museums in any real sense of the word. Yad Vashem concentrates on an extremely narrow period in Jewish history; and the Diaspora Museum explicitly avoids presenting a chronological narrative of the nation’s history: “The Diaspora Museum does not tell the history of the Jewish people in exile according to the sequence of historical periods,” announces a sign at the entrance, “but rather according to subjects: Family, community, belief….”—a description reminiscent of the Land of Israel Museum, or the Israel Museum’s Judaica wing. Moreover, the Diaspora Museum emphasizes education by way of elaborate models and the staged reconstruction of events rather than by the use of original artifacts. Its time frame is also constricted: By definition its narrative is limited to the centuries of Jewish exile; in fact, about eighty percent of the museum’s exhibits concern the last few centuries only. The Diaspora Museum cannot, and does not even pretend to, play the role of a national museum offering a comprehensive account of over three millennia of Jewish history.

A distant relative of the historical museums is the Tower of David Museum in Jerusalem’s Old City. Here, the museum grounds (the Tower of David itself and the park which surrounds it) are the only original artifacts. The rest of the museum is no more than a visitors’ center which, like the Diaspora Museum, employs models and audiovisual displays to describe the history of Jerusalem—and only Jerusalem. This museum, too, skirts the fundamental Jewish narrative, asserting in no uncertain terms the equal importance of Jerusalem to all three monotheistic religions. The result is that equal weight is accorded to the period of Solomon’s rule, when Jerusalem was a major international center, and the Mameluke period, when the city’s significance in regional affairs was marginal at best.

At the archeological museums, the narrative of the chief exhibits is always chronological. Yet this chronology, as a rule, is not that of the Jewish people but something in the best tradition of the British Archeological Society. At the Rockefeller Museum of Jerusalem, for example, the official chronology completely sidesteps the period of the Israelites, designating the First Temple period as the “Iron Age” and the Second Temple period the “Persian and Hellenistic Era.” Conspicuously, all other historical periods are defined according to whoever ruled the land of Israel at the time, from the Canaanite period to the Islamic or Crusader period. Perhaps this indifference (underscored by the sign at the entrance reading “State of Palestine” and the display of Hasmonean coins under the heading “Coins of Palestine”) is an unfortunate legacy of the British Mandate. But what is one to make of the fact that the Lachish letters—among the most important ancient Hebrew artifacts in the world—are thrown together in a single display case with a pile of jewelry, weights and axes of the same period? What message does this setting convey about their value? And this is only one of many examples of the museum’s systematic rejection of the historical-national meaning of the artifacts it exhibits. A forgettable, not to mention neglected, museum, the Rockefeller nevertheless houses many of our most treasured national assets. That their surroundings and presentation are so much less than they deserve is simply an affront to the Jewish heritage they represent.

The Bible Lands Museum adjacent to the Israel Museum also falls short. Visually stunning, it manages to combine in extraordinary fashion authentic pieces together with illustrative models. Yet the museum’s aim is not to present the Jewish narrative but to enrich the biblical narrative (with which it presumes visitors are already quite familiar) by offering a broader archeological and historical context. The result is a connection to the Bible that is purely associative: For example, a verse from Ecclesiastes, “There is a season for everything, a time for every purpose under heaven,” is juxtaposed with findings concerning the worship of time in Larasa a thousand years before Ecclesiastes was written. Here, it is as though the biblical narrative is but a device for teaching visitors about archeology, rather than the other way around.

One exception which might have proved the rule is the Hecht Museum at Haifa University. Although small in size and secondary in importance, this museum is faithful to a basic historical logic in its chronological presentation of exhibits, dividing them into periods such as the “Mishnaic and Talmudic Period.” Yet the Hecht Museum also confines itself to chronicling Jewish settlement within the boundaries of the land of Israel alone, and its location and limited scale preclude its ever filling the need for a national Jewish museum.

Perhaps the most appalling consequence of the loss of Jewish memory in Israel’s museums is that in numerous instances items of the utmost importance end up falling between the categorical cracks, not really Wtting into any of the museums’ currently featured story lines, and in some cases becoming completely lost. A few years ago, the remnants of an entire ship from the Second Temple period, astonishingly well preserved, were discovered near Ginosar in the north. From a historical point of view, this was one of the most important discoveries ever with respect to the Jewish settlement in the Galilee. Instead of relating to this ship as a national asset which belongs in a Jewish national museum, the state of Israel turned it into a tourist attraction—shamelessly dubbing it “the Jesus Boat.” Without batting an eye, the government decided to lend the ship to the Pope in honor of the year 2000, when it will join countless other Jewish pieces from the same period in the Vatican’s collection.

How does it happen that we simply transfer one of our national treasures into foreign hands? Does it have anything to do with the fact that no organized presentation of the Jewish settlement in the Galilee is maintained in the Israel Museum or any other museum in Israel; that, in effect, we have nowhere to put the ancient ship? The inevitable conclusion is that when museums adopt a narrative stance divorced from the Jewish historical narrative, even objects of the greatest historical-national value lose their importance in the eyes of museum curators and archivists. Where would we display an original copy of the decree of expulsion of the Jews from Spain, or the spicebox of the Ba’al Shem Tov? If we were suddenly to come across King Solomon’s crown—would we have any idea where to put it?

The rejection of the story of the Jews by Israel’s curators might have been written off to incompetence or indifference. Yet this is a virtually unanimous rejection, a policy adopted by the curators of Israel’s museums, somewhere along the line, that the story of the Jews is somehow not that important. Nor can one maintain that the Jewish narrative is too grand, its demands too high, to bring under a single roof: While other museums successfully claim millions of years of the evolution of species, or the entirety of mankind’s scientific endeavor, as their founding narrative, Israel’s museums have not seen fit to organize the wealth of her treasures into what ought to be a fairly straightforward, chronologically based presentation of the Jewish people’s fantastic—yet by no means indescribable—odyssey.

The establishment of a Jewish National Museum, whether within the framework of the Israel Museum or as a separate institution, is a fundamental need of the Jewish people and the Jewish state. Obviously, such an undertaking would involve a monumental series of decisions and details, yet a few basic principles can be outlined regarding its purpose and design: The Jewish National Museum should undertake to recount, in one overarching chronological narrative, the saga of the Jewish people from its initial appearance on the stage of history to the present day; it should display the wealth of original pieces that convey an understanding of the life and works of the Jewish people, regardless of type, period or location; it should express the intensity of the life force of the Jewish people across the generations, their bond to the land of Israel, and the significance of their contributions to world culture. A museum of this type would for the first time provide a permanent setting for the most important objects and artifacts that tell the story of the people through the ages, serving as a solid cultural foundation for Israeli society while reinforcing individual and national identity. Other nations have built museums of this type in order to strengthen their citizens’ knowledge of their heritage and identification with their homeland. Is this not a goal of fundamental importance to the Jewish people as well?

Azure no. 5, Autumn 5759 / 1998

The Israel Museum and the Loss of Jewish Memory