Egypt Library Removes Anti-Semitic Tract (The Guardian


Saturday December 6, 2003 10:01 PM

By NADIA ABOU EL-MAGD

Associated Press Writer

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - The Alexandria Library has withdrawn the first Arabic translation of the ``Protocols of the Elders of Zion'' from an exhibit after U.N. cultural officials questioned the display of the 19th century anti-Semitic tract.

In a statement faxed to The Associated Press on Saturday, library director Ismail Serageldin denied allegations that the book was displayed next to the Jewish holy book, the Torah.

[...]

Youssef Ziedan, who as director of the library manuscript center made the decision to display the book, noted the exhibition including the book was only open to researchers doing postgraduate studies.

``My professional view is that it is a silly book,'' he said. ``Its only significance is that it is the first Arabic edition of the book that has influenced the Arab mentality to a great extent.''

[...]

Love and marriage in Talmudic times
By Hananel Mack

"Zahar unekeva bera'am [Male and Female He Created Them]" by Adiel Schremer, Shazar Center, 395 pages [In Hebrew (seems not to be listed in Amazon - JRD)]

For a number of years, the social aspects of history have attained a respected position in research on the medieval and modern periods. Historians of the ancient period, on the other hand, have yet to fully appreciate the value of the social component in the understanding of history, although the picture is gradually changing even in the historiography of ancient times.

Adiel Schremer's book, which deals with Jewish marriage in the late Second Temple, Mishnaic and Talmudic periods, reflects this innovative trend and makes a major contribution to current research on ancient Jewish society, in which marriage occupied a pivotal position.

Although our knowledge of the institution of marriage is not derived from the Bible, the foundations of Jewish marital relations are based on biblical law and on the reality depicted in some of the books in the Bible. As in other fundamental issues, the classical rabbinical authorities (hazal in Hebrew) regarded the Bible, its laws and heroes and heroines, as the formal and ideational source of both Jewish law (halakha) regarding marriage and some of the less binding Jewish traditions on that subject.

Nonetheless, it is obvious that the marital arrangements practiced in the classic rabbinical age have only a limited connection with the Bible or with the reality depicted there. Family life is one of the most important and most sensitive issues in Jewish law and Jewish tradition, and marital relations were part of the extensive and detailed network of Jewish laws regarding the family. Any attempt to establish a direct link between the Bible and the laws promulgated by the classic rabbinical authorities and the way of life they prescribed in the area of marital relations would be in vain - just as vain, in fact, as the attempt to learn directly from the Bible the Jewish laws on the Sabbath and the festivals, kosher dietary rules, economic activity, prayer and other fundamental issues in Jewish law.

And, in fact, the Bible is absent from this book. Scan the book and you will quickly discover that the books of the Bible do not appear in the table of contents or in the bibliography. Similarly, you will find few references to the Bible in the text itself. In contrast, there are extensive discussions of many classical rabbinical works, as well as passages from the Apocrypha, the Qumran writings and early Christian literature.

The book is divided into 12 chapters (including an introduction discussing the research methodology used) and these chapters are devoted to various aspects of the subject. In most of the chapters, the author is careful to provide separate discussions of the reality and Jewish laws in the Holy Land and Babylon respectively. Such a discussion naturally requires a cautious handling of the sources that depict the two major centers of the Jewish world in the ancient period and which reflect the teachings of the rabbinical authorities in those two communities.

[... much more]

AD Nuttall's Dead from the Waist Down (Yale University Press) is a superbly witty, lively and illuminating study of three related figures, Isaac Casaubon, Mark Pattison and Mr Casaubon in George Eliot's Middlemarch. Pattison served as Eliot's model for her unfortunate Casaubon, Dorothea Brooke's first husband. Pattison also wrote the best book on Isaac Casaubon, whose scholarship exposed the Hermetic Corpus as emanating from the second century of Alexandria in the Common Era, rather than from ancient Egypt. One can say that Nuttall charmingly reveals the spiritual impotence of many literary scholars today.

UNESCO Plans to Denounce Anti-Jewish Text (The Guardian)


Friday December 5, 2003 11:16 PM

By FRANCES D'EMILIO

Associated Press Writer

ROME (AP) - The U.N. culture agency plans to denounce the so-called ``Protocols of the Elders of Zion'' amid reports that the text, long dismissed as a forgery to discredit Jews, was on display at a prominent Egyptian library.

UNESCO has asked Egypt's Alexandria Library about allegations that the book was displayed along with the Torah, or Jewish holy book, and that the library director allegedly made anti-Semitic comments.

[...]

UNESCO's director-general, Koichiro Matsuura planned to denounce the book this weekend at a seminar in Venice pegged to the 100th anniversary of the forgery. The seminar was organized in part by the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles.

[...]

Antje LABAHN - Ehud BEN ZVI, �Observations on Women in the Genealogies of 1 Chronicles 1�9� , Vol. 84(2003) 457-478.

Abstract: These observations address the construction of women and their roles in the genealogies of 1 Chronicles 1�9. References to women in these chapters construed them as fulfilling a variety of roles in society, and characterized and identified them in various ways. To be sure, the genealogies reflected and reinforced the main construction of family and family roles in a traditional ancient near eastern society. But, numerous references in these genealogies indicated to the early (and predominantly male) readers of the book that ideologically construed gender expectations may and have been transgressed in the past and with good results. By implication, these references suggested to the readers that gender (and ethnic) boundaries can and even should be transgressed on occasion, with divine blessing, and resulting in divine blessing.

ROME, Italy (CNN) -- Mel Gibson has pulled "The Passion of Christ," depicting Jesus on screen, from a Vatican-sponsored film festival -- because his movie is not ready.

The unreleased, but controversial, movie about the final hours of the life of Jesus was scheduled to be shown Tuesday to a select group of Roman Catholic officials as part of the "Christ and the Cinema" festival.

But Gibson had "second thoughts" about some of the scenes and is re-editing the film, the movie's producer Nick Hill wrote in a letter to the organizer, Andrea Piersanti.

The former actor, who has written and is co-producing the film, said he would be happy to schedule a preview in the Vatican once the movie is finished, the letter added.

[...]

Expectations and the Expected One: 4Q521 and the Light It Sheds on the New Testament

TORONTO � There's a tiny ivory pomegranate from Solomon's Temple, an engraved slab of stone that alludes to the biblical House of David, and three fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls, arguably the most important archeological discovery of the 20th century. All of these are among a stunning collection of more than 100 artifacts that go on display Friday at the Canadian Museum of Civilization near Ottawa.

The exhibition, developed by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in collaboration with Montreal's Museum of Archaeologiy and History, where it was shown earlier this year, covers a period of roughly 1,900 years, from the 12th century before the birth of Jesus to the seventh century AD. It's a span that includes seminal events of ancient Western civilization -- the destruction of the First Temple and the exile of the Jews to Babylonia, their subsequent return and the construction of the Second Temple, and the schisms in Judaism that ultimately gave rise to Christianity.

The Ottawa exhibition even contains scroll fragments that have not yet been displayed In Israel, including the so-called Isaiah B portion.

"When my eyes fell upon the rare copy of this dangerous book, I decided immediately to place it next to the Torah. Although it is not a monotheistic holy book, it has become one of the sacred [tenets] of the Jews, next to their first constitution, their religious law, [and] their way of life. In other words, it is not merely an ideological or theoretical book.

"Perhaps this book of the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' is more important to the Zionist Jews of the world than the Torah, because they conduct Zionist life according to it� It is only natural to place the book in the framework of an exhibit of Torah [scrolls]."

Thank you, Jim, for reponding so quickly to my communication. It would perhaps be helpful for readers of this Blog if I charted the substantial areas of agreement that exist between you and me:

1. We agree that The Sory of Zosimus�is the best title for rhe whole text, with The History�of the Rechabites being reserved for chapters 8-10 alone (using Charlesworth's chapter divisions)
2. We agree that HistRech is a separate�text, that has been inserted into StorZos at some stage after the creation of a form of StorZos.
3. We agree that HistRech is currently only extant within StorZos
4. �We agree that HistRech is a Greek composition
5. We agree that StorZos is - in its current and final form - a Christian work
6. We agree that the only certain date we have for HistRech is the date of the oldest ms of StorZos
7. We agree that HistRech is pseudepigraphical
8. We agree that HistRech is short and that, therefore, coming to any conclusions about it is very difficult.

In all of these, there is perhaps more�common ground between�the two of us than between either of us and Charlesworth and Martin.

Where we disgaree is over whether HistRech is a Jewish or a Christian composition, and whether we have enough evidence to tell. In considering this issue, I will freely admit that I was swayed by the views of McNeil, Martin and Charlesworth - and will observe that, when I first started researching HistRech in 1986, Charlesworth's�standing as an OT Pseudepigrapha scholar was very high indeed. Perhaps I instinctively felt that, as a mere doctoral student, there were limits to how far I could disgree with C! It's interesting that it's taken 10+ years for a better classification of what is Jewish and what is Christian in the parabiblical literature to emerge!

What we have to take into account with HistRech are:

1. Its clear use of the Septuagint, and its Greek language, and when the LXX stopped being used by Jews in antiquity
2. Its clear affinities with some rabbinic traditions about the Rechabites, and whether these affinities are coincidental or not.
3. Its lack of what�I would term 'high profile' Christian signature features, as McNeil so clearly observed
4. The extent to which the nudity command and NT quotes in it are (or are not) integral to the text - on literary-critical grounds, not theological ones. If they are integral and not inserted by a redactor then, clearly, it is most unlikely that�HistRech is Jewish.

It may be that we should see HistRech as a�Christian composition, composed by someone familiar with Jewish rabbinic traditions. I certainly have no vested interest in HistRech being Jewish, beyond having to rethink what�I said in my contribution to Roots in the Future, the Festschrift for Alec Graham, the previous Bishop of Newcastle, in 1997, where I talked about 'The Christian Use�of Jewish Writings: Ancient Example and Modern Practice'. I have also been at pains to observe in all my articles on the text that my conclusions were only preliminary, and open to development and revision. Of course, the editors of JSJ and JSP�might be concerned - although the editors of the Ante-Nicene Fathers will be rejoicing in heaven.

But I'm still not convinced that we are unwarranted in claiming that is likely to be Jewish- but your skepticism is well-taken, Jim!

Like you, I wonder if Ronit is�out there somewhere reading this ... or perhaps even Charlesworth, or Martin, or McNeil?

Best wishes,

Chris Knights

VATICAN CITY - Movie director Mel Gibson has turned down a request from the Vatican to have an advance look of his movie about the last hours of Jesus of Nazareth, the film's producer said yesterday.

The Pontifical Council for Culture asked for the showing in the context of a congress here on the theme "Christ and the Cinema," which has brought together experts from Roman Catholic universities around the world.

Producer Nick Hill said the film was not ready for showing because Gibson was in the cutting room "softening" the most violent images of the crucifixion of Jesus.

Beginning Friday, 137 ancient artifacts unearthed at the Bethsaida site by [Elizabeth] McNamer [adjunct professor of philosophy and religion at Rocky Mountain College] and others will be on display at the Yellowstone Art Museum. The exhibit titled "Bethsaida: Life Revealed in the Layers" will remain in Billings through March 14.

[...]

Visitors to the exhibit will see such items as pottery, coins and fishing implements that date back to the first century A.D.

"We found a fisherman's house that was quite large," McNamer said. "Fishermen were middle-class businessmen."

Members of the archeological team found wine bottles imported from the island of Rhodes in a fisherman's house and golden jewelry, McNamer said. A gold earring will be on display at the museum.

Interestingly, continued excavation of the site unearthed a city that existed in the time of Israel's King David, McNamer said. Bethsaida most likely served as the capital of the kingdom of Geshur.

"We have unearthed the city gate that David would have walked through - it's the largest city gate ever unearthed in Israel," she said.

The exhibit will include a full-scale replica of a stele, a marker with the image of a moon god, to whom people paid homage when they entered the ancient city. According to McNamer, the city was destroyed by the Assyrians in 732 BCE (before the common era).

The city was not rebuilt until a couple of centuries before Jesus' time, McNamer said. In the year 30 A.D., Philip, the son of Herod the Great, dedicated a temple built at Bethsaida in honor of Livia Julia, Julius Caesar's wife.

An incense shovel from the temple and incense bowls were both discovered, McNamer said, and they will be part of the exhibit.

Bethsaida was destroyed in the year 70 A.D. by the Romans. Sixty years later, a great earthquake changed the topography of the land "and because of that, the city was never rebuilt," McNamer said.

Michael Graves, The Origins of Ketiv-Qere Readings

Abstract: Attempts to explain the origins of the Ketiv-Qere readings have centered around two basic models. According to one model, both the Ketiv and the Qere represent variant readings which can be traced back to an ancient collation of manuscripts. According to the other model, readers introduced the Qere into the written text (the Ketiv) with the intention of correcting what they perceived to be an error. Views that combine features of these two models also exist. The author suggests that the two traditional models have not supplied an adequate framework for evaluating the origins of the Ketiv-Qere readings and that a better approach can be established by focusing on the central questions which cut across both traditional positions.

Since bissel can mean �cook,� and hlv can refer to �fat,� and the Israelites were apparently permitted to eat fat as long as it did not come from a sacrificial offering, I propose translating our prohibition: �You may not cook a kid in its mother�s fat.� If so, we would be dealing not with an arcane or enigmatic dietary injunction, but with a wise counsel, an aphorism, instructing a farming community not to squander the bounties that God has given Israel. For, to cook an animal in its mother�s fat would require the slaughter of both the mother and the young. The imprudent killing of the producer and the produced on the same occasion would lead to a serious reduction in stock, with potentially disastrous results.

The same kind of prudent advice is found in Deuteronomy 22:6-7: �Should you chance upon a bird�s nest before you on the road, on any tree or on the ground, as hatchlings or as eggs, with the mother sitting by the hatchlings or on the eggs, do not take the mother along with the young. Shoo away the mother and take the young, so that you may prosper and live long.� As in our prohibition, banning the killing of the mother bird allows the mother to produce more eggs to chance upon later.

[...]

Within a couple of centuries after the Hellenistic period, the interdiction against cooking a kid in milk itself developed from a quaint, narrowly interpreted practice to one with a sweeping application against mixing milk and meat. In passages of the Talmud, the injunction inspired a major segment of Jewish traditional practice of kashruth, or kosher laws. In turn, as it has been persuasively argued, this attachment to a remarkable interpretation of dietary rules and regulations became a bulwark for Jewish survival. Adopting them, observant Jews found it necessary to avoid intimacy with populations that obeyed no religious rules concerning the eating of meat, preserving their distinctiveness as a community in faith and practice.

I have sought to explain the original meaning of a law that remains enigmatic to scholarship. Yet this explanation should prove irrelevant to how traditional Jews today display their attachment to their faith. Traditional Judaism owes its rules of practical life to biblical laws as interpreted by the Jewish sages. This means that lasagna and cheeseburgers must still not be served at their tables.

The exhibition includes portions of three of the first Dead Sea scrolls ever found � the Isaiah B Scroll (one of the oldest biblical manuscripts known), the Community Rule and the War Scroll. The Isaiah B Scroll has never been displayed, even in Israel, before being brought to Canada.

A somewhat different version of this exhibition was on view in Montreal at the Museum of Archeology and History over the summer.

But the Ottawa museum is putting more emphasis on some of the artefacts accompanying the scrolls � seven of which were not part of the Montreal exhibit and will be making their Canadian debut in Ottawa.

One of the most startling of these artefacts: a replica of a foot bone, discovered in Jerusalem in 1968 just after the Six Day War, which provides the only known physical link to the practice of crucifixion.

"It's the cast of a heel bone," says [curator Adolfo] Roitman, an energetic 46-year-old visionary who moved to Israel from Argentina as a young anthropology scholar.

"This heel, dating back almost two thousand years, was discovered in an ossuary, which is a box for bones," he explains.

The heel bone had a nail through it, and a piece of wood was still attached to the nail. According to Roitman, the discovery of this remnant had major implications for the reconstruction of history.

"The practice of crucifixion was a reality for many years in the eastern Mediterranean," Roitman explains. "It was a widespread practice of the Romans, and thousands of victims were crucified.

"But for centuries, we had to rely on literary descriptions and images rendered by artists using their imaginations. Until this discovery, we had no physical indication of just how it was done, in the case of Jesus and

Thank you for bringing my researches on StorZos/HistRech to a wider audience at the recent SBL meeting. It's also pleasing to hear that there is someone else in the world who shares my love for what my wife has for years called 'The Ripping Yarn'... although I did suspect that you had an interest in the text, as one of your students, Alan Turnbull, did contact me a year or so back in connection with an essay he was writing. Your survey of the secondary literature suggests to me that no-one else has produced anything on the text of late. I'm not in an academic context, so keeping up with research, either my own or others', is virtually impossible. There was, I seem to remember, a research student at the Hebrew University called Ronit Nikolsky a few years back, whose own research had some overlap with mine, but where she has got to I don't know.

Thank you also for praising my work, and for agreeing with it in many respects.

Can I respond - briefly - to your main contention? I actually agree with you (and have thought for a while) that my attempt to claim a Jewish origin for AbBles rests on a very shaky foundation. Rereading that article now shows to me that it is little more than special pleading. But - as I noted at the end of 'An Initial Commentary' - my real interest is in the Rechabites, and I guess that I should have stayed with just StorZos 8-10.

Despite your observations, and noting all that you say about some early Christian texts containing little that is explicitly Christian and about early Christian writers being aware of some early Jewish traditions, I would still claim that HistRech is more likely to be Jewish rather than Christian in origin. I dispute your apparent claim that just because StorZos is a Christian monastic text, we must read all of it as such and only as such - that would be close to saying that any attempt to perceive the text's sources is unwarranted (which, clearly, you wouldn't subscribe to).

Of course, like all our theories of the tex's sources and redactions, it is all entirely subjective (in the same sense as JEPD and Q are subjective), but it seems to me that what we have in HistRech echoes too much that we find in the rabbinic references about the Rechabites (not just the late ones) - and nothing else - for it to be other than Jewish in origin. Couple this with the lack of explicit Christian motifs in the chapters and the argument is complete.

I came to the Story of Zosimus and HistRech after studying the Biblical material about the Rechabites, then the Qumran material that is not about them (pace Matthew Black - see my piece in JSP 10) and then the Rabbinic references to them - so I was reading (and still read) HistRech against a Rabbinic background.

You sugest that these similarities are coincidental, and seem to me to rather dismiss them. But who knows? Of course, you have done more work on the whole business of whether ancient texts are Jewish or Christian - and I will read your paper on that subject in due course, and look forward to reading the monograph when it appears. I've only worked on the one text, in the way that I've described, and not recently even on that one. Certainly, for me, reading HistRech against the background of all the Rabbinic references to the Rechabites makes me believe that it is Jewish in origin.

I had hoped - but never had opportunity - to look at the early Christian references to the Rechabites, as you obviously have - although I did do some work recently on how the Independent Order of Rechabites, a nineteenth century temperance organisation, used the biblical material, which appeared in The Expository Times a year or so back.

TREADING THE BOW
J. A. Emerton

HEBRAISMS IN THE OLD LATIN VERSION OF THE BIBLE
Matthew Kraus

IN SEARCH OF TREES: ISAIAH XLIV 14 AND ITS IMPLICATIONS
Simon J. Sherwin

THE PROPHET AS INCOMPETENT DRAMATIST
John G. F. Wilks

DELIVERANCE OR DESTRUCTION? ISAIAH X 33-34 IN THE FINAL FORM OF ISAIAH X-XI
G. C. I. Wong

2 CHR. XXVI 22: ISAIAH BEN AMOZ OR ISSHIAH THE PROPHET?
John W. Olley

Leonard Greenspoon and Sidnie White Crawford, The Book of Esther in Modern Research

Todd Klutz, Magic in the Biblical World: From the Rod of Aaron to the Ring of Solomon

Thomas L. Thompson, Jerusalem in Ancient History and Tradition

Ian Young, Biblical Hebrew: Studies in Chronology and Typology

Among the country�s selling points are the old city and Western Wall in Jerusalem, the international opera festival at Caesarea, the site of Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, and scuba diving at the Red Sea resort of Eilat.

[...]

The value of tourism to Israel has fallen from �2.3 billion in 2000, with 3 million visitors, to �1 billion last year. But the Israel Tourist Board has found that the figures are reviving this year, with large numbers of Christian groups visiting religious sites alongside Jewish travellers.

Visitor numbers began to increase after the Iraq war, with 54 per cent more people coming to the country in July than in the previous summer.

A spokesman for the Israel Tourist Board said: �Even though the media magnify the problems in Israel, the reality is Israel is a safe place to visit. Security is stringent and tourists are not targeted, while El Al is probably the safest airline flying at present.�