Is the British Museum Falling Down?
How the British Museum has been quietly erasing Jewish history
The British Museum’s cancellation (and subsequent postponement) of Paul Collins’ talk on the history of ancient Israel has recently made headlines.
Less reported is the fact that something much darker has been going on within the walls of the British Museum.
“The British Museum just postponed a Jewish Culture Month lecture, but it’s been erasing Jewish history long before that“, writes federal judge Roy K. Altman in A Jewish History Heist at the British Museum, published in the Free Press – essential reading.
In his article, Altman draws attention to a sign at the entrance to a room filled with ancient Israelite artefacts. The sign reads:
“THE PHOENICIANS
By the beginning of the first millennium BC the Israelites occupied most of Palestine except for the southern coastal strip, which continued to be held by the Philistines….”
This is a historical impossibility, Altman argues. The Israelites could not have “occupied most of Palestine.” The name “Palestine” didn’t exist for that region until roughly 1,000 years later. The Romans coined it after the Bar Kochba Revolt in a deliberate act of erasure to sever the Jewish people’s connection to their land. They named it after the Philistines: a Greek people, ancient settlers of what is now Gaza, who were long extinct by the time the Romans arrived. A people with no historical connection to Muslim Arabs, who wouldn’t exist for another 500 years.
In one short signpost, the British Museum has distorted history by casting the Jews, an indigenous people, as “occupiers” of their own land.
A second sign, for the Ancient Levant exhibit, reads:
“7500BC–332BC
The ancient Levant comprises modern Jordan, Israel, Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon and western Syria. The region was home to two great indigenous peoples – the Canaanites and the Amorites.”
Despite archaeological evidence of their presence sitting inside the museum itself, the Israelites are not mentioned. As Altman notes, the Jews are “the only ancient Levantine people still around today.”
These are only two of the examples that Altman brings to the fore.
“This is a political project of ideological erasure and malicious incitement“, Simon Sebag Montefiore wrote in the Jewish News, on the cancellation of Collins’ talk. “But it also attempts to deny or erase Jewish history itself”. In light of what Altman has uncovered, these words bear even more significance.
Malicious or not, the British Museum is perpetrating a dangerous inversion of the historical reality of the Jewish people. The damage is already vast.
Defending a civilisation
Entrusted with one of the most sacred of tasks – the education of society – the British Museum appears to be submitting to the fabrication and erasure of an entire nation’s history.
“To defend a civilisation you need education”, Rabbi Sacks zt”l understood. Let the British Museum not become an active participant in its destruction.
To the British Museum,
This quiet erasure of Jewish history is a betrayal of your institution’s very purpose.
You are bowing to ideological pressure – to the historically illiterate and the hysterical mob.
By doing so, you are deceiving the six million visitors who walk through your doors each year in search of education. What they are receiving instead is deliberate misinformation.
Your stature, built over the last 270 years, is at risk of crumbling.
These texts, amongst others, must now be addressed and corrected, lest the credibility of this great institution fall further from grace.
If we are not for ourselves, who will be for us?
If you are reading this and find yourself troubled, this is sadly not a time in which one can afford to look away. Now is the time to act.
Hope is an active virtue, Rabbi Sacks taught.
Hoping for change without acting is not hope – it is naive optimism.
When we each, as individuals, do not act, we extinguish a realistic possibility of change.
This is a task for We The People, the civic responsibility Rabbi Sacks argued for in Morality.
What could you do?
Read Altman’s full article in the Free Press. Write to Sir George Osborne, Chairman of the British Museum. Write to its trustees. Share it with your communities. Share it with newspapers. Share it with the world.
We each have a responsibility for our nation.
Our people’s history must be heard, told and remembered – not erased.
אִם לֹא עַכְשָׁיו, אֵימָתַי
If not now, then when?
