Sadly, Bar Kochva became a brand name, a national legend, which served national-Zionist goals. He was internalized and absorbed into the national bloodstream, took on the same sanctity as the other myths - and anyone that tries to pose questions about the commander of the revolt, his character and path, is perceived as a saboteur, a vandal. Will this national phase obscure the historical truth?
"'God's Secretaries': Blessed Are the Phrasemakers"
This work was refined and prepared in order to be heard and memorized, by a congregation still largely illiterate, and to be recalled in time of trouble or of need. Print was secondary: no doubt the audience of the later misprinted 1631 edition, when instructed by Exodus 20:14 that ''thou shalt commit adultery,'' understood that a ''not'' had been omitted at the press rather than in Sinai.
Dear Mr. Uwe Siemon-Netto
United Press International
tips@upi.com
Dear Mr. Siemon-Netto,
My friend, Mr. Harold Clumeck from San Rafael/California has forwarded me to your article of May 8, 2003.
I have to make some corrections to your positive attitude article.
The Samaritans divide in two centers, 350 in Holon/Israel and 310 in Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim. Most of the Samaritans speaking Arabic in a special dialect of the Syrian Palestinian dialect of the Arabic. But this is third dialect to their original Ancient Hebrew and Samaritan Aramaic that all of them learn in the ages 5-15 after school hours every day, and to the modern Hebrew that most of them speak as it is spoken in the State of Israel. I am speaking about the whole Israelite Samaritan people as one.
I had to make these corrections not to let the readers of your article to have the wrong impression that we are struggling to preserve a special Samaritan Arabic dialect. As far as I know it is only Syrian-Palestinian dialect with some different Samaritan Arabic idioms that spoken for the last 1200 years and never entered our ritual practices. It is naturally spoken but again it is only third to the Samaritan Hebrew and Samaritan Aramaic we have preserved proudly for thousands of years and we still use it in our prayers and many new composition.
Dr. Arnold Werner is my close friend. I am sorry to say that some of his words were taken in the wrong way. In the contrary I have followed him to the all Samaritan personalities he spoke with for his research and we both never found any difficulty of these personalities in speaking the different languages.
Scholars and readers of your article are welcomed to visit the organized Israelite-Samaritan web-sites www.mystae.com/samaritans.html and www.the-samaritans.com and learn more about our current rich cultural activities.
We are keeping our survival and our own struggle to keep our original languages, the Ancient Hebrew and the Samaritan Aramaic, that according to scholars have never changed since Second Temple period, it is part of our survival. Come to visit us and enjoy the Ancient languages by the Samaritans. At present times that languages spoken by tens and hundreds of million peoples close to be dying before the English language influence the way we preserve our original languages without change and other language influence considered to be a great achievement.
Yours,
Benyamim Tsedaka
Head of the A.B. - Institute of Samaritan Studies
Co-editor of A.B. - The Samaritan News
"The Dead Sea Scrolls" exhibition will include fragments of 12 different scrolls, including fragments from the books of Exodus and Psalms. There are also numerous artifacts from Qumran, the ancient Judaean settlement located near the caves where the scrolls were discovered, including ancient coins, leather sandals, a scroll storage jar, and a pottery inkwell believed to be connected with the writing of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
"The Think Tank of the Arab League:
The Zayed Centre for Coordination and Follow-Up (ZCCF)"
By: Steven Stalinsky
Since its founding in 1999, The Zayed Centre for Coordination and Follow-Up has hosted events and produced studies on a variety of issues. The Zayed Centre has dealt with the September 11th attacks, arguing that they were perpetrated by Americans and Israelis. It has discussed "[The] Factual Protocols of the Elders of Zion," and has hosted Holocaust deniers. Dr. Umayma Al-Jalahma, known for her article explaining how Jews use the blood of non-Jews for pastries for the Jewish holiday of Purim, was a recent lecturer at the Centre. A report today suggested that the SARS virus could be a product of "an American war against the world."
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"Al Buraq Wall Not Wailing Wall" is the title of a report released by the Zayed Centre on December 20, 2001. [36] The Zayed Centre website's summary of the report states: "This study is released in line with the Centre's message to serve Arab causes and refute the false Zionist allegations in regard to Palestine� and shows the falsehood of the Zionist religious claims and anthropological fabrications. The study gives a historical account of the Jews from the days of the Temple of Solomon, which was destroyed in 586 B.C., through their persecution under Roman rule, to the occupation� The study also underlines that Al Aqsa Mosque was built more than a thousand years before Solomon, giving evidence that refutes the Zionist allegations that the Mosque was constructed on the ruins of Solomon's Temple� all of which demonstrate that the Zionist alleged rights to the [Wailing] Wall are simply baseless."
On January 27, 2002, Dr. Hassan Ali Khater, editor-in-chief of the Al Quds Al-Sharif Encyclopedia, spoke at the Zayed Centre. [37] A summary of his lecture on the Zayed Centre website states: "Dr. Hassan Ali Khater� added that Israelis are falsifying history by inscribing Jewish inscriptions on rocks [and] then calling international experts to re-discover [them] as Jewish monuments."
Dr. Hassan Ali Khater, the chief editor of �Encyclopedia of Al Quds Al Shareef� commenting on Israeli designs of Judaization of Jerusalem said, �There are 15 Israeli concepts to occupy Jerusalem. The Mosque is in danger to collapse due to underground diggings and use of acids to dissolve rocks. Nobody knows the degree of damage caused to the structure due to Israeli obsession with the idea of building The Solomon Temple, the foundation stone of which was laid down in the glare of media a few months ago in spite of the historical facts that deny existence of any such temple.
"Uncovering an ancient maze" (International Herald Tribune)
Andree Brooks NYT
Saturday, May 17, 2003
In the Italian dust, signs of a past Jewish life
VENOSA, Italy Amid rolling pastureland about 300 kilometers southeast of Rome, dust is flying. Workers carefully dig through crumbling sandstone deep beneath the surface of a grassy hillside. Stout wooden beams support a makeshift entrance and a labyrinth of newly exposed passageways that lead into an ancient underground maze. A loopy string of construction lamps illuminate the way.
An excited archaeologist leads a visitor to a wooden board protecting a discovery made just the previous afternoon. It is a seven-branched candelabra, the original symbol of the Jews, carved into a slab found at a burial niche. The carving is so sharp and clean, it might have been completed yesterday.
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The quality and clarity foreshadow even more important finds likely to come. The catacomb is only one of dozens of Jewish sites, artifacts, documents, rare books and manuscripts being discovered, analyzed and restored in southern Italy and Sicily. This work by scholars and government authorities is beginning to flesh out the largely unknown story of vibrant yet long-lost communities of Jews that inhabited the region from Roman times to the end of the Middle Ages. Jews were expelled from southern Italy, known then as the Kingdom of Naples, in the 16th century. Few returned even after the ban was lifted in the 18th century.
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Historians associated with the excavation believe the catacomb may be the largest ever found in Western Europe. Hundreds of niches have already been cleared, the bones either looted or reburied according to ritual law. What is striking is that the inscriptions on the burial slabs found thus far are almost all in Greek. There is little or no Hebrew. When Hebrew is used, the characters mostly spell out Greek or Latin words. Both Greek and Latin were commonly used in that part of Italy at the time. This suggests an assimilated life for the Jews who may have lived here outside Venosa between the third and seventh centuries. "Our Jews were not separated from everyone else in those early centuries," said Cesare Colafemmina, visiting professor of Hebrew and Hebraic literature at the University of Calabria.
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Documents indicate that Emperor Titus brought 5,000 captives to the region after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in A.D. 70, Colafemmina said. But hundreds more are thought to have settled here before and after that, simply because it was a prosperous crossroads of maritime trade. And Jews played a vital role in Mediterranean commerce. By the end of the fourth century many towns were dominated by Jews. They even became political and community leaders, he said.
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The media made a big deal about the 39,400 manuscripts that were found back in a bomb shelter in western Baghdad and said that they were from the National Museum in Baghdad. This greatly helped to fuel the impression that the losses at the Museum were nearly non-existent after all. Now, from all info I have and from Edouard M�t�nier's assessment, it sure looks like this is the Saddam House of Manuscripts collection instead (split off from the National Museum in the 1990s). My question is: why has the scholarly community, esp. the ACCICH, not checked this issue ASAP and then contacted the media to make sure this gets the proper attention? We can roll our eyes when the umpteenth journalist writes that only some tens of artifacts are still missing from the Museum, but don't we need to be more actively countering this intentionally- or unintentionally-spreading wrong perception?
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"Iraq museum chief accused of looting plot"
May 11, 2003 The Sunday Times of London
Matthew Campbell, Baghdad
THE furore over the looting of Iraq's national museum took an unexpected turn yesterday when workers accused their director of conniving in the theft of priceless antiquities during the chaotic collapse of the regime in Baghdad. Fifty museum employees staged a protest in which they waved placards under the noses of American investigators proclaiming that Jabir Khalil, chairman of the Iraqi state board of heritage and antiquities, was a 'dictator' and a 'thief'.
Report: Romanian intelligence foiled attack on Israeli target (Ha'aretz)
By Yossi Melman and Amos Harel, Haaretz Correspondents, and DPA
BUCHAREST - Romanian intelligence agency SRI has reported that terrorists and staff at the Iraqi embassy in Bucharest had planned to attack Israeli and Western targets in Romania before the Iraq war, the Romanian news agency Rompres said Thursday.
Last week, The New York Times reported that American troops in Baghdad found a collection of Iraqi intelligence documents related to Israel, including maps of terrorist strikes against Israel over the last 12 years, a satellite picture of the Dimona nuclear reactor and detailed mock-ups of the Knesset, downtown Jerusalem and other official Israeli buildings.
SRI claimed that, in cooperation with foreign partner intelligence agencies, it had prevented the terrorists' plans. The terrorists would have used AG 7 grenade-launchers, which were to be supplied by a colleague employed as a spy by the Iraqi embassy.
The existence of these plans had been confirmed by documents found by coalition forces searching the information ministry in Baghdad after the fighting had ended.
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Soldiers from the MET Alpha unit, the "mobile exploitation team" responsible for the search for nonconventional weapons, discovered the documents in a flooded Baghdad basement while in pursuit of an unusual quarry: a copy of the Talmud said to date from the seventh century, which would make it one of the oldest Talmuds in existence.
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A holy war (Ha'aretz)
By Yair Sheleg
While the Israeli public focused on the war in Iraq, ongoing terror attacks and the economic crisis, those prominent in religious Zionism, or at least its rabbinic elite, have been agog over a different subject entirely: a new Talmud-study curriculum designed for the national-religious school system. The reactions? A free-for-all.
The "Revadim" ("Layers" in English) program is a method in which Talmudic tests are examined through a prism that differentiates between the various layers inherent in the text. A world war of sorts has erupted over the teaching method to the point that one of the critics of the curriculum proclaimed it worse and more dangerous than any act of terrorism.
Lest there be any doubt, the program is not the brainchild of secular Education Ministry officials. Nor was it spawned in a Conservative or Reform seminary. In fact, Revadim was devised in the very core of the national-religious establishment: the Department of Talmud at Bar-Ilan University.
The biography of the program's originator and designer, Rabbi Dr. Pinchas Hayman, 51, seems kosher. He was raised in an assimilated Jewish family in California and as a teenager became Orthodox. Hayman earned a bachelor's degree at the University of California in Los Angeles, in classical languages and philosophy. He then came to Israel, where he studied for two years at Jerusalem's Yeshivat Hakotel, in the Old City's Jewish Quarter.
Hayman then returned to the U.S., studying for the rabbinate at Yeshiva University, the flagship institution of Modern Orthodoxy in the United States. He also completed a master's and a doctorate in Talmud and Semitic languages at YU. Hayman then worked as a rabbi in Canada for seven years before immigrating to Israel in 1987. After living for several years in Ra'anana, he settled in Elkana, in western Samaria.
Four years ago, as a lecturer in the Department of Talmud at Bar-Ilan, Hayman established the "Program for Advanced Methodologies for the Teaching of Mishna and Talmud," which was intended to be an application-oriented research institute. The decision was prompted by the continuing crisis in the attitudes of national-religious youth to Talmud study. Numerous studies carried out by the Education Ministry's Religious Education Authority (which is responsible for curricular development in the national-religious sector), as well as those by independent scholars, indicated that for many religious young people, Talmud - a subject to which many hours are devoted each school day - is the most hated subject.
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In order to adapt the method to the didactics of Israel's educational system, especially at the elementary-school level, Hayman has even "colored" the different layers in the text with different colors. He states that even before he had a chance to propose the method to the educational establishment, schools that had heard about it were asking to use it, as a means of contending with the crisis of Talmudic instruction. "I am not only talking about elementary schools, but religious high schools as well, such as the Bar-Ilan school in Netanya, and the technological high school on the Bar-Ilan University campus. Even a few yeshiva high schools, including the yeshiva in Kiryat Shmuel and yeshivas in Ra'anana and Tiberias, expressed interest in implementing the program," says Hayman.
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[Rabbi Moshe] Bleicher [head of the Shavei Hebron Yeshiva] went so far as to assert that the dangers of the program were even worse that those of terrorist attacks: "All of the killing and the attacks initiated by all the terrorists from the outside against the Jewish People are nothing compared to the danger that is liable to develop from this act of terrorism being perpetrated from within our ranks. The terrorists kill and strike at our bodies, but here they are killing the Torah and the soul of the nation." Bleicher was unwilling to be interviewed for this article, and said that he had no interest in disclosing details of the debate to "an audience that in any event will not learn Talmud, not with Revadim, not without it."
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"Experts search for grave of legendary Gilgamesh" (ABC News online, via Archaeologica News)
[...]
Ricardo Eichmann, of the German Archaeological Institute, swatted down suggestions that Gilgamesh's grave was about to be unearthed.
He said the "anomaly" pinpointed by studying the magnetisation of the soil was problematic.
He warned it was "pure speculation" to tie it to Gilgamesh, suggesting the structure could date from the millennium before Christ, some 1,500 years more recent.
He said it would be like asserting that King Arthur, the legendary lord of Camelot, really existed.
"We don't even know where the river ran at that time," he added, saying it had changed its course by as much as several kilometres over the centuries.
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U.S. Scholarly Organizations Unite to Protect Iraqi Cultural Heritage (Ascribe)
ANN ARBOR, Mich., May 12 (AScribe Newswire) -- Representatives of major scholarly societies and research centers active in archaeological and cultural work in Iraq met on Tuesday, May 6 at the Institute for Fine Arts of New York University in conjunction with the opening ceremonies for the exhibition on the "Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus" organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
By unanimous consent, the 31 representatives created the American Coordinating Committee for Iraqi Cultural Heritage (ACCICH). The Coordinating Committee will represent the constituent organizations in response to the catastrophic harm suffered by Iraqi museums, libraries, archaeological sites, and cultural properties. It will coordinate activities to avoid duplication of efforts.
It will work with various agencies in the private and public sector to channel American fund-raising activities. It will represent American scholarly expertise to government and non-government agencies. It will facilitate liaison between American scholars and European colleagues as well as with international organizations responding to the Iraqi crisis. The committee will designate working groups and subcommittees for specific tasks, in consultation with constituent organizations.
The committee's first and most urgent concern is for the security of Iraqi cultural sites and properties. It is imperative that the authority structures in Iraq seal the borders to prevent cultural properties from leaving the country. It is also imperative that the same designated authorities establish and maintain guards at all museums, libraries, and archaeological sites to prevent further destruction.
It is also imperative that only competent scholars and experienced museum professionals supervise the handling of objects and records to prevent further harm to surviving or recovered materials.
[...]
Dead Sea Scrolls coming to capital
Exhibition starts in December at Museum of Civilization (Canada.com)
Paul Gessell
The Ottawa Citizen
Wednesday, May 07, 2003
Portions of three of the first Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947 east of Jerusalem are coming to the Canadian Museum of Civilization in December along with 100 ancient Israeli-area artifacts, including an ivory carving from King Solomon's temple.
The scroll fragments and other artifacts will first be exhibited at the Montreal Museum of Archeology and History at Point-�-Calli�re in the Old Port area of Montreal from June 17 to Nov. 2 and then move to the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau from Dec. 5 until April 12 next year.
Two of the three scrolls have never been exhibited outside Israel before, Stephen Inglis, the Gatineau museum's director of research, said in an interview yesterday.
Those two are: the War of the Sons of Light with the Sons of Darkness (otherwise known as the War Scroll) and the Isaiah B. scroll. The third one, the Community Rule scroll, has not left Israel since 1954, when it was purchased from an American collector.
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Feature: Preserving Samaritan speech
By Uwe Siemon-Netto
UPI Religion Editor
From the Life & Mind Desk
Published 5/9/2003 12:17 PM
View printer-friendly version
WASHINGTON, May 9 (UPI) -- The Samaritans, arguably the people with the best press in the New Testament, have a big problem: Not only have they shrunk to a minuscule community, but their language is threatened with extinction.
To preserve Samaritan Arabic for eternity, the Semitic languages department of Heidelberg University in Germany has recorded and archived a text spoken by a prominent member of this ethnic group. One text can now be heard in the department's Web site (semarch.uni-hd.de). The speaker is Benyamim Tsedaka, publisher of the magazine "A.B. -- The Samaritan News."
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