My first day in Jerusalem I spent at Yad Vashem; my second at the Israel Museum; my last (for a few hours) at the Rockefeller Museum, which preceded it and is now a part of the Israel Museum Archaeology Wing. None of these museums allow photographs. For a couple of reasons, words are best here anyway.
YAD VASHEM
Critical thinking vanished for me in fifteen minutes, replaced by aches in the heart and gut. I exited the main hall after four hours, to look out (as the museum intends) on a quieting Jerusalem vista. I couldn't maintain my sense of horror, to my regret. Yad Vashem presents this as a crime against Jews, which it was, but it was also a crime of Europe, of Germany, of Christianity and above all of human self-knowing against itself. Israel brings all its youth but it should be in the global school curriculum. Always and everywhere this is how bad it can get.
It also explains Israel, to a far greater degree than the country's collectivist origins. Everything I've seen in this country points to its organizing ethos being: Jews won't be victims, at least the first victims, ever again. I find this reasonable. Guns in Israeli hands are everywhere and the victims are Arabs. This is rotting Israel but it is reasonable vigilance when facing Islamic governments like those in Iran. However it will become a bankrupt attitude if most North Africa Islamic countries find their way, like Turkey, to civil society and tolerance.
A photo of a large wedding from 1937 and documentation of when and in which camps the celebrants died.
ISRAEL MUSEUM
The archaeological wing is magnificent, with artifacts from 8,000 B.C. through Ottoman rule of Palestine and great presentations. There is a second, terrific building housing the Dead Sea Scrolls that the museum owns. Yet the whole thing hides in plain site a great joke: the Hebrews didn't leave much behind besides words. In the ascendant Hebrew period, roughly 1200 to 500 B.C., there is a wealth of artifacts from the Canaanites and the Philistines (actually Cretans), but almost nothing from the Hebrews. Few pots, tools, weapons,etc. What the museum primarily has to show is a few written references to the Hebrews (words on pottery shards). Then the Dead Sea Scrolls treats as visual artifacts the one thing the Hebrews left: words!
Only the Greeks left visual and literary art that went as deep as Hebrew literature,. Other cultures left visual art, or written laws, but only the Greeks and Hebrews left transcendent written stories. And only the strange Hebrews, keeping their eyes glued to their written stories.
23And he rose up that night, and took his two wives, and his two handmaids, and his eleven children, and passed over the ford of the Jabbok. 24And he took them, and sent them over the stream, and sent over that which he had. 25And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. 26And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was strained, as he wrestled with him. 27And he said: ‘Let me go, for the day breaketh.’ And he said: ‘I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.’
At least on the long walk I take to the Israel Museum I pass a 5th century church built by the mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine.
Days later I stop in at the Rockefeller Museum, in Arab East Jerusalem near the Damascus gate of the Old City. It was decades in the making and it was built, with Rockefeller funds but not participation, on a prime hilltop.
For a long time it was the center of Archaeological research in Palestine; now it is a warehouse and research facility owned by the Israel Museum. The presentation is minimal, most artifacts are simply numbered with a brief description of the general period. Few museum guards. I sneak one photo, of an art form now sadly lost: face painting on skulls:
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