This month's museum pick...

The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Home from the Diaspora, Israel’s Greatest Museum Documents Mideast History

Even now, 1,500 years after its collapse, the echoes and reverberations of Rome’s strides upon the historical stage can be heard and felt. From the Langobards and Vandals to the Greeks and Egyptians, no ancient European or Mediterranean nation was untouched by Rome.

Perhaps the people most affected by their encounter with Rome were the Jews, the primary inhabitants of Palestine, a province that already had a long history of political violence and conflict when the Romans conquered it in the first century BC.

Thanks to the world view of the Jews, who held that not even mighty Rome, but God alone, could lay an ultimate claim on their loyalties, the province became the most nettlesome and rebellious of all the empire’s possessions. By 70 AD, at the end of a four-year rebellion against Rome led by the Zealots and other revolutionary groups, a determined Roman army ended the siege of Jerusalem and violently set about producing the First Diaspora, the grimly efficient exiling of the Jews from their homeland.

Modern history classes, having to contend with the Holocaust and the mass murders of Communism, tend to miss the significance of what Rome did 1,931 years ago. After systematically sacking and pillaging Jerusalem, her soldiers began the crucifixion of its inhabitants. They took a grim toll. The Jewish historian Josephus, in the hire of the Romans to record the reconquest of Palestine, recorded approximately 1 million deaths at the hands of the legionnaires.

One million victims in an empire of 100 million people.

Beyond the slaughter, the Jews were pushed into an exile from their homeland that would last almost 2,000 years. In their absence, Palestine continued to be a crucible or a stage for major historical events – the rise of Islam, the Crusades, the ascendancy of the Ottoman Turks, the imperial rivalry between France and Great Britain.

So it is no surprise that after the restoration of the Jewish homeland in 1948 the Israelis would produce a magnificent museum chronicling the history of Palestine and the Middle East. The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, founded in 1965, is a 20-acre complex that draws almost 1 million visitors a year to its unmatched collections of Judaica and Middle Eastern archaeology, which include the priceless Dead Sea Scrolls.

The museum is eclectic in its offerings. Past exhibitions have included, “Drink and Be Merry,” a look at wine and beer in ancient times; “Hidden Passions,” Indian paintings from the 17^th-19^th century; “Knights of the Holy Land,” a profile of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem; “Present Tense 4,” a series of exhibitions form the museum’s contemporary art collection; “Current Disturbance,” paintings by Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum; and “Under the Huppah,” about Jewish wedding rituals in the Diaspora.

Current exhibitions include recent acquisitions from Africa, Oceania and the Americas; the art and symbolism of the Zodiac; jewels from the Jewish world; Islamic water pipes; and “Images of the Canaanite Storm God,” a history of one of the Semitic world’s most important deities.

The museum’s web site at http://www.imj.org.il/ is beautifully organized and comprehensive. It also has a Hebrew-language option. — Patrick Totty

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