ON INCITING RELIGIOUS HATRED: The bill to make illegal the incitement of religious hatred in Britain passed its second reading in the House of Commons last Tuesday. It now "goes to committee" for further review and then to the House of Lords. You can read the British Government's case for it here.

This is what the bill is about, according to the Goverment website FAQ:

* The Government is extending protection to prevent hatred being stirred up against people targeted because of their religious beliefs, or lack of religious beliefs, as well as people targeted because of their race.
* This is being done through the Serious and Organised Crime and Police Bill, by expanding the existing criminal offences of incitement to racial hatred contained in the Public Order Act 1986.
* The provisions make it an offence for a person to knowingly use threatening, abusive, or insulting words or behaviour with the intention or likelihood that they will stir up hatred against a group of people based on their religious beliefs.
* It is about protecting people who might be the object of someone else�s hatred because of their religion; not about protecting religion itself.

Here are a couple of passages from this FAQ that should be underlined:

In keeping with similar legislation, the proposals do not define the meaning of religion. �Religious hatred� is defined as �hatred against a group of people defined by their religious beliefs or lack of religious belief�. Explanatory notes have been published which provide a non-exhaustive list of widely practised religions and clearly explain that the protection also covers people identified with a particular branch of a religion. They also stress that the protection of the offence covers Atheists, Humanists and Agnostics. When the circumstances are unclear, the courts will decide whether a particular group of people is protected, in the wider context of the criminal behaviour being considered. If the courts ruled that a new religious movement qualified as a religion for the purposes of the new offence, that would not prevent criticism of the practices of that movement.

And this:

The proposed and existing offences both carry a high threshold in order to protect freedom of speech. Words, behaviour or material used must be threatening, abusive or insulting and must either be intended to or likely to stir up hatred. The hatred must be aimed at people who are members of that group, not ideologies. Hatred is a strong term; which goes beyond ridicule, prejudice, dislike, contempt, anger or offence. A further safeguard in the legislation is that a person who does not intend to stir up hatred is not guilty of an offence if they did not know that their words, behaviour, written material, recording or programmes were threatening, abusive or insulting. Furthermore the offences do not apply to anything that takes place in one�s own home. All prosecutions require the consent of the Attorney General, which will prevent the offences being misused through private prosecutions. We believe the wording of the offences, the public interest test applied by the CPS, and the veto of the Attorney General are sufficient to safeguard freedom of speech.

There are some points about this proposed law which I would like to make. I'm not the first to make any of them, but they are worth belaboring.

First, there is no need for it. There are already laws that protect people from religious persecution (i.e., violence against one's person or property, or threats of or incitement of others to violence). People do not need to be protected from having someone hate their religion or express that hatred in words that fall short of threat of or incitement to violence. Sticks and stones, etc.

Second, even if this law results in only a few prosecutions (and I'll believe that when I see it), it will have a chilling effect on free speech. People will censor themselves when talking about religion, which is not good. It will push actual religious hatred underground without diminishing it, and at the same time will stifle legitimate debate about religious issues. In both cases, problems that might benefit from open discussion will fester rather than having a chance to come to any resolution.

Third, ultimately the legislation assumes, indeed requires, the goodwill of the government. The term "religion" is explicitly not defined, and probably couldn't be defined for a purpose like this. That means there's never any way to be quite sure what the law is about. The Attorney General is given tremendous latitude, and therefore tremendous power, to interpret this law, since no one actually knows what it means. It may be that this power will be used wisely and justly. But it may not be, even in the short term. Once the government has the power, it can do whatever it wants with it, whatever promises it may have made. It is not unheard-of for politicians to break their promises. And in the long run, there is serious danger that mission creep and growing distance from its original context will lead to this law being misused to criminalize legitimate free speech.

There is a larger problem here that should be mentioned: the danger of "positive rights." The point of the Bill of Rights of the American Constitution is to lay out a broad range of areas in which the government does not have the right to interfere in the life of the individual. These are "negative rights" and they are the foundation of any free society. Positive rights, that is rights to particular things which the government has to enforce, are necessary in some cases (see above for examples), but are carry serious risks of abuse and need to be strictly circumscribed. The "rights" to, say, education or "access to placement services" or -- the issue in question here -- freedom from hatred being directed toward your religion by other citizens (again, short of violence or threat of/incitement to violence) increase the power of government to interfere with individuals and the last in particular increases it in an open-ended, unpredictable and uncontrollable way. The preoccupation with positive rights is a central failing of EU legislation and is one of the problems with the (now hopefully defunct) European Constitution and one of the reasons it was the size of a telephone directory.

Obviously, this legislation against inciting religious hatred could have profound implications for academics who specialize in religion and for bloggers who write about it. If the law passes, it can scarcely be doubted that there will be people who test it by trying to bring charges against others even on specious or frivolous grounds, and it is scant comfort that the Sword of Damocles will be restrained only by the thread of the Attorney General's goodwill and good sense.

This is no way to govern. We can only hope that the mounting backlash against this bill will stop it before it is made into law.

UPDATE: Greetings Daily Dish readers. While you're here, please have a look at the "Memorable PaleoJudaica Posts" link and my recent article "Assimilated to the Blogosphere: Blogging Ancient Judaism."

UPDATE (28 June): Here's a concrete example of what such laws lead to.

UPDATE (3 July): Welcome also to readers of Britblog #20.

THE SUDOKU CRAZE leads the Jerusalem Post ("Crazy about numbers") into an excursus on numbers in Judaism, especially gematria.

The Jewish people are no newcomers to numbers, or even to doing mental gymnastics with them. We find numbers in ancient Jewish sources: Starting off in the Bible with the days of the creation, there are the dimensions of Noah's Ark, the numbers of its inhabitants, and so forth (or fifth). Indeed, a whole book of the Pentateuch is entitled "Numbers" in English, because of the census of the Jewish people in the desert. Numbers featuring in the Bible's text range from one to 100 million (Daniel 7:10).

The traditional Pessah Haggada is positively overflowing with numbers, and the climax of the Seder is the numerical riddle song, "Who Knows One?" Numbers mentioned in the Haggada text range from 1?2 to 10 9 (one billion, or one with nine zeros after it).

Numbers often feature in discussions in the Talmud, and of course there is the discipline of gematria, which uses the numerical values of the letters in the Hebrew alphabet (aleph = 1, kaf = 20, koof = 100) as a means of interpretation and commonly accords significance to concepts or phenomena which share the same numerical value. There are several weird and wonderful methods used in calculating gematrias, such as "small numbers," "filling," "great numbers" squares and factorials.

Examples follow.

The craze (Sudoku, not gematria) has hit Britain too. My wife and son are working on Sudoku puzzles here even as I write.

THOUGHTS ON ANTIQUITY is a newish blog by Chris Weimer, a student at the University of Memphis, Tennessee. The blurb for the blog is as follows:

This weblog focuses on Ancient Cultures of the world, from the Ancient Mesopotamian world to Egyptian pyramids, from Greek mysteries to Roman commissatio, from China to the Aztec, all things in antiquity.

See also his website called Neonostalgia.

MORE ON MESSIANIC JEWS: David Klinghoffer published an essay on them a while ago in the Forward. It's been reprinted in various places, most recently (as noted by Michael Pahl) in Jewcy, evidently as a counterpoint to the essay by Rabbi Marc Howard Wilson on Jews for Jesus, discussed here. More evidence for the complexity of real-life religious identities.

Are we fair to messianic Jews?
Some criticize messianic Jews for blurring the distinction between Judaism and Christianity. But are they any different from those who blur traditional Jewish values and those of secular liberalism?

HEROD'S TEMPLE REBUILT ON ARTHUR'S SEAT?

Herod the one about an MSPs' temple on top of Arthur's Seat?

IAN SWANSON
SCOTTISH POLITICAL EDITOR (The Scotsman)

THE controversial �431 million Holyrood parliament could one day be replaced by a replica of Herod's Temple positioned on the top of Salisbury Crags, according to a new book.

Edinburgh-born architect and author Alan Balfour came up with the vision as he tried to imagine what the Scottish Parliament would be like in 500 years' time.

But Mr Balfour, now a professor of architecture in New York, is quick to make clear he is not advocating such a plan. But in a new book on Enric Miralles' Holyrood building, Creating a Scottish Parliament, he visualises how the parliament will develop over the next 50, 100 and 500 years.

By 2505, he says, the current parliament will be too small. And he goes on: "Imagine it sitting in the shadow of its successor - a new building, formed to the disgust of those who would wish to separate religion from politics, in the most theatrical reconstruction of Herod's Temple, spread across the crest of Salisbury Crags.

[...]

Yeah, and imagine how much that project would go over its budget.

THE PETRA EXHIBIT at Calvin College is profiled by the Northwest Indiana Times:

One Tank Trip: Grand Rapids, Mich
Travel back to a Middle East metropolis in Grand Rapids, Mich.

BY JANE AMMESON
Times Correspondent

This story ran on nwitimes.com on Saturday, June 25, 2005 1:04 AM CDT

Travel back several millenniums to "Petra: Lost City of Stone," an exhibit at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., about 2-1/2 hours northeast of Munster.

Petra, once a major Middle East metropolis carved out of red sandstone cliffs (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was filmed here), stood at the crossroads of the silk and spice trade routes. Considered a major exhibit with 200 artifacts including a life-size bronze cast of a Roman goddess never displayed before, this is Petra's last stop in the U.S.

Petra is where the Nabataeans built temples, tombs, houses, altars and aqueducts and became one of the major metropolitan outposts of its time, home to some 20,000 people. During its prime, in the century or so before the birth of Christ, the city was considered the wealthiest and the Nabataean empire included parts of Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia.

[...]

It looks pretty accurate, apart from the first line: I don't think Petra has existed for several millennia.

A BIBLICAL GARDEN IN PENNSYLVANIA:

Biblical garden features plants used centuries ago

By Candy Williams
FOR THE [PITTSBURG] TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Saturday, June 25, 2005

The sweet smells of summer are a little sweeter this season at the Rodef Shalom Biblical Botanical Garden in Oakland.

From intense jasmine to the delicate scent of a rose, from the pungent leaves of oregano to the welcome aroma of the cinnamon tree's bark, spices and fragrances from biblical times to the present are the focus of an exhibit created by Irene Jacob, of Point Breeze, founding director and caretaker of the garden for 19 years.

Through plantings, programs and tours, her display welcomes visitors to a virtual journey through thousands of years of taste and smell. The exhibit opened June 1 and runs through Sept. 15.

Jacob has taken special care to identify plants, the country of origin and Bible verses in which they are mentioned on markers staked in the ground next to different species. ...

NAHUM SARNA has passed away. Jim West has some information. May Professor Sarna's memory be for a blessing.

UPDATE: Jim e-mails to note that Tyler Williams has some biographical and bibliographical information, as well as a photo, posted on his Codex blog.

UPDATE (25 June): The New York Times has posted an obituary:

Nahum Sarna, 82, a Translator of the Torah, Is Dead

By WOLFGANG SAXON
Published: June 25, 2005

Nahum Sarna, a biblical scholar who did notable translations of Scripture for modern readers, notably his work on the Jewish Publication Society's "Torah (New Translation)," died on Thursday at his home in Boca Raton, Fla. He was 82, and a former resident of Newton, Mass.

[...]

UPDATE (29 June): for corrections to this obituary, see here.

SOME CRITICISMS OF THE INK AND BLOOD EXHIBITION, which opens today in Lexington, Kentucky:

Bits and pieces of early Bible writings

SOME QUESTION EVANGELICAL UNDERTONES

By Sarah Vos

[LEXINGTON] HERALD-LEADER STAFF WRITER

Ink & Blood, an exhibit on the history of the Bible that opens here today, has been heavily promoted on radio and television by a former Miss America and touted by area churches.

In ads, Heather French Henry calls it the "most comprehensive museum exhibition ever on the Bible."

But some scholars say the exhibit has more of an evangelical Christian spin than a historical one, that its advertising of the pieces of Dead Sea Scrolls is misleading and that one of the exhibits, the Marzeah Papyrus, may be a modern forgery.

In case you're not familiar with the somewhat acrimonious origin of the exhibit, this article summarizes it:

Ink & Blood: Dead Sea Scrolls to the English Bible was organized by Dr. William Noah, a Nashville-area pulmonologist, and traces the evolution of the Bible from early writings to the Dead Sea Scrolls to translations into Latin, German, French, and, most importantly from the exhibit's point of view, English.

Noah, 44, pulled the exhibit together from private collections, including his own. He doesn't have any formal training in biblical studies, but he has studied on his own and traveled around the world to see important Bibles and other artifacts. He wrote the panels that explain the objects and had scholars in the field review them, he said.

Ink & Blood isn't Noah's first Bible-related exhibition. In Dallas and Akron, Ohio, Noah and Bruce Ferrini, an Ohio art collector, and Lee Biondi, a California antiquities expert, put together an exhibit under a company called HisStory LLC. That exhibit included Dead Sea Scroll fragments from Ferrini's private collection.

The partnership broke up, and HisStory filed for bankruptcy in February 2004. In a related lawsuit, Noah accused Ferrini of taking close to $400,000 of the Dallas exhibition's profits and not giving Noah some $28,000 from gift-shop sales of videotapes and books created by Noah.

Since the breakup of HisStory, Biondi has put together a competing traveling exhibition called The Dead Sea Scrolls to the Bible in America. That exhibit was in Paducah earlier this year.

The first criticism is that the Dead Sea Scrolls fragments are not much to look at:

The pieces in the Lexington exhibit are small. They measure in centimeters, and the letters are no longer visible because time has blackened the animal skins they were written on. Some contain only a few letters from the scroll they were once a part of.

Weston Fields, executive director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation, which helps coordinate Israeli Antiquity Authority-approved exhibitions of the scrolls, calls exhibits like Ink & Blood misleading.

"It's not really being honest with the public to advertise these tiny little things as a Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit," Fields said, despite the fact that they are genuine.

I believe this has been called the "burnt cornflake" look.

The second criticism is that the prominently featured "Marzeah Papyrus" may be a fake:

But Christopher Rollston, a paleographer at the Emmanuel School of Religion in Tennessee, said there are hundreds of written documents from the period. The papyrus is significant because it talks about a Marzeah, an ancient ritual gathering that is mentioned twice in the Old Testament and in the literature of other cultures. Scholars don't know exactly what it is.

But, it's the writing, along with the papyrus's mysterious origins, that makes Rollston wonder if it isn't a fake. To him, it looks like a mixture of Aramaic, Hebrew, Moabite and Anamite.

"I think that the forger didn't really do his homework on scripts," Rollston said. "Because we never have this mixture of scripts in any other inscriptions."

In addition, the papyrus wasn't found in an archeological dig, which means scholars don't know where it came from or how it was discovered. It first appeared on the antiquities market sometime during the last 25 years. In that same period, several modern forgeries purported to be religious antiquities have appeared on the market.

Over at Ralph, Ed Cook has also questioned the authenticity of the Marzeah Papyrus and has noted Rollston's reservations about it.

PROSTITUTION IN ANTIQUITY: Ha'aretz ("Origins of the sex industry") summarizes the latest issue of the journal Zmanim, which issue is devoted to this subject. Excerpt:

Mayer Gruber of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) reaches more solid conclusions in "Prostitutes and Prostitution in the Biblical World." He starts by exploring the many meanings of the Hebrew word "zona" in the Bible. Usually it means a woman who sells sex for money. But in some cases, the verb "zana" (whored) is synonymous with "na'af" (commited adultery) and refers to a married woman who sleeps with a man who is not her husband. The prophets used zona as a metaphor for a society that has abandoned the pursuit of decency and social justice. They compared the Israelites, who turned their back on God and embraced other gods, to a woman who has violated her marriage vows.

"The Torah, the prophets and rabbinic literature were critical of the profession," writes Gruber, but nowhere in these texts is there any allusion that prostitutes or those who availed themselves of their services were punished or deserving of punishment. Most surprising of all is Gruber's conclusion that there were no cult prostitutes in biblical times. "There is no evidence, either in the Bible or Ugaritic and Akkadian texts, of sex being part of any religious ritual," he stresses. "This is a myth which spread from book to book, very much like a computer virus."

Incidentally, the articles on "Prostitution" and "Prostitution (Cultic)" in the Anchor Bible Dictionary come to the same conclusion.

JOURNAL OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE 124.2 (2005) has just been posted. Back issues are available for free, but you must log in as an SBL member to view the current issue. Here is the table of contents:

Exodus 31:12�17: The Sabbath according to H, or the Sabbath according to P and H?
SAUL M. OLYAN

The Ambidextrous Angel (Daniel 12:7 and Deuteronomy 32:40): Inner-biblical Exegesis and Textual Criticism in Counterpoint
EUGENE P. MCGARRY

On the Dating of Hebrew Sound Changes H > H and G > and Greek Translations (2 Esdras and Judith)
RICHARD C. STEINER

Defending the �Western Non-Interpolations�: The Case for an Anti-Separationist Tendenz in the Longer Alexandrian Readings
MICHAEL WADE MARTIN

The Character of the Lame Man in Acts 3�4
MIKEAL C. PARSONS

1 Corinthians 11:3�16: Spirit Possession and Authority in a Non-Pauline Interpolation
CHRISTOPHER MOUNT

The Last Battle of Hadadezer
STUART A. IRVINE

Book Reviews

Index

SILWAN HOUSING-DEMOLITION UPDATE:

J'lem offers compromise on Silwan demolitions
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS (Jerusalem Post)

The Jerusalem Municipality has proposed that Arab residents of the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan present the city with an alternative housing plan to scores of illegal constructed homes in the area which had been slated for demolition, the city and residents
said Tuesday.

[...]

(Via Bible and Interpretation News.)

SERVING THE WORD is now a group blog with a somewhat wider agenda: not exclusively "posts on ancient Israel" and "narrow old topics (the shape of letters in 8th-6th century B.C.E. inscriptions)," but also "we (collectively, not royally) will begin to post irregularly on other topics, always keeping focused on the politics and mystery of language." I look forward to reading about those good old narrow topics and the broader new ones.

JEWS FOR JESUS: Michael Pahl points to an interesting article by a Rabbi Marc Howard Wilson on Jews for Jesus in Jewcy Magazine (formerly Jewsweek):

A deceptive name -- a deceptive assertion
Were they to make themselves known not as "Jews for Jesus," but as "Jews Who Have Chosen to Practice Gentile Christianity," the results might be equally lamentable, but the honesty would be refreshing.

My interest here is sociological. The controversy over Jews for Jesus reflects in some ways the controversies between Jews, Jewish-Christians, and gentile Christians in the early centuries CE. I've been thinking about these conflicts for some time because of the implications they have for understanding the Old Testament pseudepigrapha. They show that there was not necessarily a hard and fast distinction between Jews and Christians in antiquity, but rather a continuum between Torah-observant Jews and non-observant gentile Christians, with both Jewish-Christians and gentile Judaizing Christians fitting somewhere on the continuum in-between. (Something of the same continuum exists today, as the Jews for Jesus movement demonstrates.) If we have an OT pseudepigraphon that contains both (Torah-observant) Jewish ideas and also Christian ideas, how can we tell (or can we tell) if it was written by an observant Jew and edited by a gentile Christian or written by a Jewish-Christian or a Judiazing gentile Christian? Often, we can't. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is the paradigmatic example of such a text. We know that the author(s) used Jewish sources (Aramaic Levi, Hebrew Naphtali) but we don't know what else they used or what they were making up themselves.

I discuss some of these issues in my online piece "Jewish Pseudepigrapha and Christian Apocrypha: (How) Can We Tell Them Apart?", in which I support Jonathan Z. Smith's "polythetic" approach as the most useful etic methodology for unraveling the problems. This 2002 conference paper is a short and now out-of-date summary of chapter 1 of my forthcoming book, The Provenance of the Pseudepigrapha: Jewish, Christian, or Other? You can read much more on the subject in the book when it comes out, I hope in the fall (shameless self-promotion alert). I don't discuss the Jews for Jesus movement in the paper or the chapter, but I would evaluate it polythetically as a borderline case, one which has some features of the category Judaism and accepts itself as belonging to the category, but which is rejected from the category by (I believe) all other groups who class themselves in the category. It's a nice example of how complicated religious movements and their interrelationships can get in the real world.

UPDATE (23 June): A reader writes to point out that Jews for Jesus is only one segment of the "Messianic Jews" movement, which movement comes in a wide variety of levels of observance and not all of whom proselytize Jews. Fair enough. I was using Jews for Jesus as a specifice example of an interesting point on the continuum, one of many such points between strictly Torah-observant Judaism and non-observant gentile Christianity. And a one-dimensional continuum is itself is a fairly simplistic way of conceptualizing the situation.

UPDATE (25 June): More here.

"PETRA AND THE BIBLE." Philip Hammond publishes this essay on the Bible and Interpretation website. The biblical connections with Petra are mostly post-biblical. The reference to the ten thousand Edomites cast down from "the rock" is in 2 Chronicles 25:12.

"THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS OF THE SETTLEMENT OF NEW JERSEY." Really.

THE LAND OF THE MIDNIGHT SUN: In honor of the summer solstice, I've been sitting in my living room reading by sunlight until a few minutes ago. It's getting a little dark for that, but it's still quite light out and it won't get darker than twilight at night for another couple of weeks.

SITE LOOTING IN IRAQ: The good news is that site protection forces in Iraq are finally having an effect on the site looting. The bad news is that many of the already looted artifacts have not been showing up on the antiquities market and it's possible they may be held in storage for many years in the hope that ardor for recovering them will cool down. Meanwhile:

On the ground, archaeologist Abdal Amir Hamdani, in charge of antiquities for Dhi Qar province, home to some of Iraq's most famous archaeological sites, says his focus has shifted from looters to smugglers.

"I'm not an archaeologist. I'm a policeman," he says.

Hamdani uses what he calls a "hunting dog" -- a former looter turned paid informant -- who follows up on rumours and goes out with a digital camera and global positioning system (GPS) equipment to locate and mark smugglers' houses.

Italian carabinieri forces disguised as Bedouin then go with Hamdani to carry out often fruitful raids.

"This is the war within the war, the forgotten war," he says of his dangerous job.

Last October, eight Iraqi customs officers were found dead and their recently seized cargo of antiquities disappeared on the road to Baghdad.

Al-Fajir, 100 kilometres (60 miles) north of Hamdani's base in Nassiriyah, is rife with smugglers and dealers, he says, and 60 suspect homes in the small town of 10,000 have already been identified.

Hamdani shows photos of seized artifacts: Parthian glasswork, Sumerian statues and erotic images on temple tablets, hundreds of coins, gold jewellery and bowls inscribed in ancient Aramaic, some clumsily glued together, damaged forever.

This, incidentally, is the first reference to looted Aramaic incantation bowls I can remember seeing.

Here's a photo of some recovered antiquities.

(Via Frances Deblauwe and Archaeology Magazine News.)

UPDATE: Michael van Rijn links to an article on the Iraq Museum website on Internet sales of Iraqi artifacts. It has photos of Aramaic incantation bowls for sale on EBay and elsewhere. At least one has been brought to the attention of the FBI for return to Iraq.

UPDATE ON LATEST GOSPEL OF JUDAS ENTRY: The photo was of a codex of the Four Gospels, not the Gospel of Judas.

ANOTHER UPDATE (21 June): Matthew Hamilton e-mails:

1. check the Michel van Rijn website for photographs of the Gospel of Judas.
2. regarding the possibility of the Gospel of Judas being divided into parts or at least having stray leaves, the Gospel of Judas was apparently found with other MSS, including a codex of Exodus from the mid 4th century, with parts of the Exodus codex found in at least 4 collections.

I have noted Michael van Rijn's website on this subject earlier. And I'm about about to add an update to today's "Iraqi site looting" post with more from him (scroll up).

Also, go to Sunday's post on the Dead Sea Scrolls in Singapore for an update.

SOMETHING MISSING HERE?

Egypt's other pasts

By Sylvia Smith for CNN
Sunday, June 19, 2005 Posted: 1550 GMT (2350 HKT)

CAIRO, Egypt (CNN) -- Although Egypt stands at the crossroads of continents and civilizations, images of pyramids, The Sphinx and mummies dominate, eclipsing its other historic cultural and religious strands.

Now attempts are being made to redress the balance and to put the Pharaonic period in context through an ambitious renovation project in Cairo and a series of cultural events in the United States.

Tourism has flourished under the watchful eyes of the Pharaohs with the majority of foreign visitors being attracted by the prospect of viewing ancient tombs and temples.

But this rather blinkered view of Egypt's past has been criticized because it overlooks the county's debt to the heritage of the Greeks, Romans, Copts and Islam.

[...]

True, and worth belaboring. But what about the Jews? For example, the Septuagint as the earliest translation of the Bible, Philo of Alexandria as an important Middle Platonist, the vibrant Jewish community in ancient Alexandria in general, etc. There's no mention of any of these in the article. I hope the project itself is more balanced. Does anyone know more?