He acquired his fondness for antiquities and commerce as a boy, while stealing coins from the Sanhedrin Caves in Jerusalem. He sold them, he said, to famous archaeologists, professionals and amateurs, including Eleazar Sukenik (Yigael Yadin’s father) and Moshe Dayan. On one occasion, he was caught and sent to an institution for young offenders. It wasn’t his only tangle with the law. In the 1950s, he was arrested on suspicion of stealing coins and seals from the Hebrew University. In the 1990s, he was prosecuted by the Iraqi government for holding an engraving that was stolen from the ruins of Nineveh.A couple of past PaleoJudaica posts in which he speaks for himself are here and here. And Robert Deutsch has posted a more positive assessment of his life on Facebook here.
“They hated me, calling me an antiquities thief. But what do all the museums in the world contain? Artifacts they find themselves?” he told Channel 2 in an interview. “I told them, ‘Blessed is the Arab farmer who brings our history out of the ground.’ So they’re angry at me? Let them be angry.”
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