Hebrew Voices #204 – Safeguarding History: Part 1

Dr. Nehemia Gordon - Bible Scholar at NehemiasWall.com

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In this brand new episode of Hebrew Voices #204, Safeguarding History Part 1, Nehemia speaks with collectibles expert Leven Parker who makes a case for the private ownership of artifacts and manuscripts over libraries and museums. They discuss the important role of chain of custody, and the present - and potential future - dangers of historical documents in government hands.

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Hebrew Voices #204 – Safeguarding History: Part 1

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Leven: There’s this impression that the best way to protect anything is through institutions and museums. And that’s just not true, and history has not borne that out.

Nehemia: Shalom and welcome to Hebrew Voices! I’m here with TikTok creator Leven Parker, who makes videos advocating and educating on collecting. He has a focus on stamps, and I guess I would call him an expert on philatelic matters. What’s that word, Leven?

Leven: You got it, buddy! You did it right!

Nehemia: Is that right?

Leven: You got it right!

Nehemia: What do you call stamp collecting? There’s a big word I can’t say.

Leven: Philately is…

Nehemia: That one!

Leven: Yes, yes!

Nehemia: Alright! So, this is a little bit off topic for me, and I’ll just put it out there, something that you said to me when I asked you to do the interview. You said, “Look, I’m not an expert on Hebrew stuff or manuscripts.”

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, I’ll just put that out there. I saw a really interesting video that you did where you advocated for the importance of private collections. And the reason I was interested in that is that my main focus right now is Hebrew Bible manuscripts. And most of the important Hebrew Bible manuscripts are in public collections such as museums and libraries. But most of them started out in private collections, and then gradually over time became part of public collections.

And I had one particular colleague who said, “All those private collectors, their collections should be nationalized,” this person is European, “and they should become the domain of the state.” So, you made a really interesting case for private collections; not talking about manuscripts, but in general. And I was like, “Wow, I’ve never heard such a good case made for private collecting.” I want you to share that, just because. I don’t know if anybody else will be interested in this, but I’m interested in this.

Leven: Yeah, well I appreciate that. That’s one of those videos that didn’t do well, necessarily, compared to some of my other videos, but it was really one of my personal favorites. Because I think it’s a discussion that desperately needs to be had, because there’s this impression that the best way to protect anything is through institutions and museums. And that’s just not true, and history has not borne that out. I mean, when you have major cultural destructions, it’s because you have all of these items that are gathered in one place, and so, they’re vulnerable just because of their density.

When you think about things like the library of Alexandria or what happened in the Middle East with ISIS when they destroyed… I don’t know the names of everything that got destroyed, but watching those museums be pillaged and plundered was horrifying to see.

Nehemia: The pillaging and the plundering, which I kind of expected more, but ISIS in 2015 and thereabouts, when they conquered certain areas, they actually said, “These are ancient artifacts to collectors, but to us these are idols, and it’s idolatry, and our religion says we should destroy all idols.” And they just blew stuff up for no good reason.

Leven: Yeah, yes, and that’s exactly what I was referring to. I was thinking about it, it was probably a 20-foot-tall statue or something that they were just going at with a jackhammer and explosives. I mean, it was just horrifying…

Nehemia: There’s the famous example of the giant Buddha statues in Afghanistan that were blown up by… what were the people? The Taliban.

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: That was even before ISIS. Now, those aren’t actually movable.

Leven: No, but…

Nehemia: But there were things in museums that they actually went and blew up and destroyed.

Leven: Yeah. And that’s all that I’m saying, is that the first step to making sure that you can preserve that history is redundancy; getting it to where it’s not isolated in one area, where it’s not subject to a single event like war, or fire, or tsunami, or whatever the case may be. Whenever you concentrate that many important things together, you’re opening yourself up to a larger level of risk.

In addition to that, as you mentioned, almost everything in museums started… almost everything in museums started in either a private collection or was ill-gotten through colonization. That’s the vast majority of what’s in museums, is stuff that came out of private collections. And I think that without an active collector market, you don’t have that farm team on the ground able to ferret out all of those important things.

I mean, right now is a fascinating time to be a postal history collector because all of the World War II material is now 70, 90 years old. I mean, it’s getting to that point where you’re having all of this stuff coming out of attics, and if you don’t have a really active collector market that’s out there trying to pick these things up, then it’s all going to get lost to history. And the best way to ensure that there is no collector market is to make it illegal to be a collector or to put hindrances on being a collector.

In addition to that, when you’re a collector and you pay serious money for any kind of item… and even if you don’t pay serious money, anything that you buy, you’re actually going to take the time and look at it and do some research on it. And that’s simply not true for most museums. Most museums have an enormous backroom and warehouses and have unbelievable amounts of stuff that sits, for hundreds of years in many cases, and never is looked at by anybody. And when you have somebody that’s putting some skin in the game and is buying it and is trying to assemble a collection… For example, I saw a presentation from a gentleman that was doing blockade-run mail during the Revolutionary War here in America.

Nehemia: Tell us what that means, blockade-run mail. What’s the blockade?

Leven: The British had blockaded ports. And I don’t want to speak specifically… I believe New York, but I don’t know all of the history specifically and I don’t want to get it wrong, but they blockaded a number of ports. And so there were privateers that were running those blockades in order to get mail through. And he actually identified… I can’t remember the number, but it was significant, it was somewhere between 7 and 12 covers that were not previously known to be blockade-run covers that he had identified and brought to light. And they were sold as such.

And collecting is full of examples of literature of people that are doing real scholarship on the items that they collect. And to say they don’t add something to the history is, in my opinion, just ridiculous.

Nehemia: So many things come to mind here. I don’t know where to even start.

Leven: Sorry, that was a lot.

Nehemia: No, that’s great! It really is amazing stuff. I think this is a really important conversation. It’s the kind of conversation that normally doesn’t take place. There is this issue in my field… For example, one of the places I lecture pretty much every year is called the SBL, The Society of Biblical Literature, and they have a policy, an actual official policy… and this is really interesting. They have a policy that anything that is in private hands with a questionable provenance… and you can talk about what provenance is…

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: You’re not allowed to give a lecture on it. And it can’t be published in a journal associated with the SBL, which is many American scholarly journals in biblical studies. But they have a special exception for Cuneiform tablets, which are tablets written in the ancient languages of Iraq, basically, and other parts of the Middle East use the writing as well. And why is that? Because without that there would be no Cuneiform studies. There’s so much in private hands that they had to carve out a special exemption!

And I’ve spoken to scholars; I interviewed one on this program who was involved in Edomite inscriptions, which are this very niche thing, that come from the mountains around Hebron. And all of them were pillaged in recent years, in the last 20 to 30 years. And by pillaged, I mean they weren’t official archeological excavations. It was some guy who comes in the middle of the night with a shovel, and he digs up and finds these inscriptions.

So, the entire corpus of Edomite inscriptions, except for maybe a couple dozen, come from illegal excavations. And it’s a bit complicated, because if they come from areas that are a part of Israel, well, the Israeli government claims ownership over them. If they come from the Palestinian territories, what’s called Area A and Area B, the Palestinian Authority makes a claim over them. Well, who knows where they come from?

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: We don’t know exactly. And it’s a difference of a few miles, sometimes a few hundred meters. So, talk about provenance.

Leven: Provenance is one of those things that is a double-edged sword. Provenance is simply the history of where an item came from, who’s owned it, and whose hands it’s passed through. In the case of archeology, where was it originally dug? Who was it dug by? And where it was transferred from there. For most collectible items, it’s the discovery of it, and then it goes through the line of whoever has bought it from one to the next.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Leven: And provenance is important. But I think that one of the things to really consider is also that you don’t want to just disregard things about provenance. That’s why we have experts. Because in order to fool the guys that I know of that do top end postal history, it’s not that it doesn’t happen, it’s that it’s so difficult to happen. And I’m just a collector of relatively modest means, but I can tell you, trying to pass off an envelope that was mailed out of my special area, out of Wyoming, and be able to get away with it, the knowledge that I have is not in any book at all. It’s through 20 years of research.

And there are so many collectors out there that are better at really specific niche areas than anybody in scholarship, because it is a lifelong pursuit. It’s not one thing that they’ve done at one time. And I think, to disregard collector scholarship would do an enormous disservice to history because collectors find things all the time, every single day, that do have significance and that are important, even without, necessarily, the provenance.

Now, I’m not as knowledgeable about all the archeology ins and outs. I read about it, and I follow it, and the drama is interesting, but I definitely think things should be taken as they are. And there are many items that I would say, “Yes, it doesn’t have a provenance and there’s something about it that makes it kind of dodgy.” And so, you do have to discard those and play those games. But I think that to disregard anything a collector is doing as being useless or insignificant without it going through official hands is hubris.

Nehemia: So, there’s actually two issues here. Provenance is a fancy way of saying, “How did that artifact get into the hands of that particular person or collector?” And it’s really interesting… so, there’s two issues here. One is, how do we know it’s real? Did it come from an archeological excavation? And it went from the excavation to, let’s say, the Israel Antiquities Authority. And then sometimes the Israel Antiquities Authority will say, “We have 10,000 of these. We’ll give a license to a dealer who wants to sell another sarcophagus, because how many do we need?”

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: And then, when you buy that in the private market, you want to be able to show, “Hey, I have this letter from the Israel Antiquities Authority given to me by the dealer, and it shows it came from this and this place.” That’s provenance; it’s kind of the chain of custody.

Leven: That’s exactly what it is.

Nehemia: So, it does two things. One is, it shows that it’s real. Or, if it was faked, it was faked by the archeologist, which is pretty unlikely. But it does happen.

Leven: Yeah…

Nehemia: And I’ll bring an example in a minute. And number two is, it shows that it wasn’t stolen. And that’s a really big deal. There’s a famous case of the Museum of the Bible who purchased, I believe it was tablets from Iraq, if I’m not mistaken, and they had them as part of their collection very publicly. And it was pretty easily shown that they were taken illegally out of Iraq. And they had to, number one, give them back to Iraq. And the word “back” is interesting; we can talk about that. They had to give them to Iraq. And number two, they were fined millions of dollars. I think it was three million dollars or something. So, they weren’t fake, but they didn’t have ownership over them. And this goes to a really interesting issue, which is that there’s this international treaty called UNESCO, if I’m not mistaken…

Leven: Yeah, I think so.

Nehemia: Which says that an artifact belongs to the country where it originated unless that country relinquishes ownership, or it was owned before they signed the UNESCO treaty, and it went into effect in that country.

So, for example, if you have an Egyptian sarcophagus from a hundred years ago, you’re allowed to own that privately. But if the government of Egypt says, “Wait a minute. That was taken out of our country in 1985,” then they might not have even known it existed. That’s the crazy thing.

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: That’s what’s really interesting about UNESCO. Even if they don’t know the artifact existed, they can claim ownership over it if it’s proven… and this is an international treaty, that it was taken out of the country without permission after a certain date.

I once bought a book from Italy, and it was from the 1600’s. So not that old; it’s a printed book. It wasn’t that rare, but it was expensive. It was like, I don’t know, a few hundred dollars. And the guy in Italy said, “You know…” I tried to buy it. And this was on AbeBooks.com, not some illicit site.

Leven: Yeah, I buy off of there. I love AbeBooks, yeah!

Nehemia: So, he said, “I live in this little village in Italy, and if I want to send this to you, because you’re outside of the European Union, I’ve got to go to the nearby town, which is a day’s journey,” meaning back and forth, and parking, and waiting, and getting permission.

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: He said, “Look, this just isn’t worth it. Next time somebody buys something I’ll include yours as well, but I’m not going to go there especially for you.” I ended up buying that book from Belgium, and the guy did the same thing, but he lived in some big town. He literally had to go to a government agency to get permission to ship it outside of the European Union.

And this is an interesting thing that happened with the Museum of the Bible; they purchased a Valmadonna manuscript, which is the earliest Hebrew manuscript from England that’s survived.

Leven: Wow!

Nehemia: It’s a Bible from the 1100’s, so the 12th century, if I’m not mistaken.

Leven: And it’s in Hebrew?

Nehemia: It’s in Hebrew. There were Jews in England before they were expelled.

Leven: Wow, that’s a fascinating artifact!

Nehemia: Oh, it’s very fascinating. So, it’s the earliest Hebrew manuscript from England, or maybe Bible manuscript from England, and so they purchased that at an auction in Europe. But it wasn’t obvious that they’d be allowed to take it out of the European Union because they said, “Okay, you own it. But it has to stay within the European Union unless you can get permission.” In the end they were given permission because it was… I think it was in Italy. So, they said, “Well it started in England anyway. It didn’t originate in Italy. So, if you take it out of Italy…” Meaning, their thought was, if it was written in Italy and it’s in Italy now, it should remain in Italy. That was the Italians’ position. “But since it was written in England, what do we care? You can take it to the United States or take it to some other country. It doesn’t come from here.” But that was a decision of a government bureaucrat, or a set of government bureaucrats.

Leven: Yeah!

Nehemia: Alright, so talking about provenance…

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: …I’ve seen examples where… well, we mentioned the Museum of the Bible, it’s the famous example with the tablets. But there are examples where somebody bought something at a public auction, so it’s got the seal of approval of, like, Sotheby’s, and Sotheby’s is saying that yes, this comes from a private collection, and it hasn’t been stolen. And later they find out no, it was actually stolen from… Well, “It came from such and such a museum and there’s no evidence the museum agreed to that.” It was World War II or something, and after World War II it was missing. I know examples of that.

Leven: Yeah, there’s definitely examples of that.

Nehemia: So, number one is that it’s stolen, and number two, is it fake? That’s why provenance is important. So, talk to me about… you’re saying they can’t fake it in your field. Or maybe it’s not worth faking it.

Leven: You know, I’m not saying that it can’t happen, but I’m saying that to immediately dismiss everything without provenance defeats the point of scholarship. I think that you definitely have to take into consideration, and give better credence to, items that do have provenance. But when you take a look at any field, there are so many intriguing items that don’t have that clear chain of custody. But even without that clear chain of custody, I think that things can be learned from them. Because, assuming that everything that doesn’t happen by a procedure that was created in the 1920’s, 40’s, 50’s, I don’t know when, that everything that wasn’t discovered that way is automatically not put into consideration. I don’t think that makes sense. And I think that any collector, and most museums would agree with that, is that you assess an item based upon its own right. And there’s lots of stuff that you say, “This is cool, but I don’t know.” That definitely happens.

But I think that people get too caught up in just that process, saying that everything has to be cut and dried. And the truth is, a lot of things are messy. A lot of things are not black and white. A lot of things do have a lot of questions attached to them, and that’s why we take so much time to study and see what fits together, and what doesn’t. And what registers, and what makes sense, as far as in my field of postal markings. But the same is true in any field; there’s all kinds of things that it has to fit consistently with the rest of the record that’s on hand and show signs that would exclude it from being fake. I’m not sure if I’m answering your question.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Leven: I think provenance is important, but it’s not the be all and end all of everything. And I do think it’s important that we consider where things originated from. And I think all of those treaties… it’s definitely way above my pay grade, and it’s understandable why a lot of these countries are very defensive. I mean, Italy has amazing stuff and they’re notorious for having huge bureaucracies.

Nehemia: Yeah. So look, the issue of provenance for, let’s say the SBL, The Society of Biblical Literature… and this is what they say, is that, if they allow you to work on things that the provenance isn’t clear, what it will do is encourage the guy who goes with a shovel in the middle of the night and digs stuff up. So, if you allow it into the scholarly field, it ends up encouraging that. And they don’t want to encourage the people who are pillaging.

Look, the Dead Sea Scrolls started out with a Bedouin… the story is, he was looking for his sheep. And he threw a rock into a cave and heard a jar break. And he said, “Why is something breaking in the cave?” And he went and found these scrolls. Well, recent scholarship claims that’s actually not true, that this Bedouin was looking for artifacts, probably silver and gold, and he found leather. And he’s like, “Okay, this has got to be worth something.” But the bottom line is, nobody disputes the Dead Sea Scrolls started out in a private collection.

Leven: And I think you also that have to… to me, it’s all about efficacy, and the idea that not working on those items in any way betters a Bedouin who is trying to make just a couple of bucks for his family by finding artifacts in the desert. The idea that that has any impact on those items being dug is, in my opinion, ridiculous. There’s going to be people that are willing to buy old stuff, and the bottom line is, those items are going to come to light. So why would we miss great opportunities of history because of that? Because stopping work on those items only harms our understanding of history. In no way does it change the trade in illegal antiquities.

Nehemia: So, talk to me. This is a question that… how do I put it? It’s not obvious that somebody would collect old stuff, so why should someone be a collector? Let’s start from scratch.

Leven: I can tell you, because, actually, as I’ve done with my TikTok channel, I put a lot of thought into that question, about what it is that draws me to collecting. And I think the answer that I’ve come up with is that, to me, collecting is an anthropological expedition. It allows me to understand what it was like to live on the plains of Wyoming in the 1920’s versus the 1870’s, versus the 1850’s. Or understand what the motivations were behind somebody that lived inside a big city in the 1930’s. It allows me to put myself in somebody else’s place because it’s completely unfiltered history. It is something that was physically there, and in their hands, and the way that it was used. And so, it gets rid of the narrative that you receive in any textbook, no matter what it is, that they’re looking at the types of items that I collect in order to write histories. And so, the more I can expose myself directly to those items, the better I understand.

And so, I think the fascination with collecting for me is that I gained a deeper understanding of humanity and the way people work and what their motivations are, and a deeper understanding of why things happen. Because so often with those narratives of history, we say, “Well this happened because of this.” And that’s almost never true. There are almost always 40,000 things that influenced one thing that happened. And the deeper you can immerse yourself in the actual items that existed and were around then, and that they were exposed to and that were influencing them, whether it be advertising or postal history, or whatever the case may be, I think it gives you a deeper anthropological intimacy with our forefathers and with everybody that came before us.

And it’s allowed me… I mean, I live way out isolated in western Wyoming, so trying to understand the universe of somebody that’s grown up in the inner city of Chicago is something that’s extraordinarily difficult to do because I have no frame of reference for it. But through items, I feel like it gives me an opportunity to at least get some small pictures into that life.

Nehemia: I grew up on the North Side of Chicago in the city, but I wouldn’t call it the inner city.

Leven: I think you would agree that I have no idea what that life is about, growing up in Wyoming!

Nehemia: So, it’s really interesting. I lived almost my entire life in apartment buildings, and when I moved into a house four years ago, it was like, “Wow! This is a completely different way of living.” If you hear something moving upstairs, it’s rats, not the neighbor’s kid who is jumping around and playing. It’s a different kind of way of living, for sure.

Wow, so, interesting stuff. So, you mentioned the blockade. So, I was looking here, and I found it. I discussed this in a podcast I did with Micheal Kochin a few years ago, and we’ll put up a link to it on the page. It’s called Jewish Freedom in America. But we discussed this letter. It was written… In fact, I’m going to share my screen here. This is JSTOR, where a scholarly article was written about it. It was a letter of Jonas Phillips, dated July 28, 1776, and it was written to a Jew named Gumpel Samson, and was written in what we call today Yiddish. When this was published back then it was called Judeo-German, meaning it was published in 1894.

Leven: Okay.

Nehemia: It’s a letter in which he mentions the American Revolution. And the letter today is in England, or the United Kingdom, because it says here it was intercepted by the British.

Leven: Yes.

Nehemia: So, here we have an actual letter that somebody wrote.

Leven: Yes.

Nehemia: So, that’s maybe an example of philatelic history.

Leven: And I tell you what, actually what I can do is, I believe I know a website where there’s a link to that entire collection display. You should see the display on postal history. The folks… they put…

Nehemia: Give me the link and we’ll put it up on the page, on NehemiasWall.com.

Leven: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying, is that I can show you specific examples of those because of the scholarship he did on that… and there are thousands and thousands of exhibits like that where people have gone to incredible depths to find information and uncover new truths about history that’s done in just my field, much less every other collecting field.

Nehemia: Yeah. So, what’s interesting about this letter is, number one: here’s information about the American War of Independence, or Revolutionary War, that we normally wouldn’t think about. It’s from a Jew in the colonies, or now the nascent United States, who’s writing, not in English, but because he’s writing to another Jew, he’s writing in his native language, or the language he knows at least, which is Yiddish. Which is, like I said, they called Judeo-German because it’s German written in Hebrew characters but with lots of Hebrew and Slavic words, so it’s not exactly German. And then we only have that letter… So, this is another interesting point. This is not a letter that was meant to be preserved.

Leven: No.

Nehemia: So, you used that word when I was talking to you on the phone about things; ephemera.

Leven: Yes.

Nehemia: This was ephemeral. This was not meant to be… tell us what ephemera are.

Leven: Ephemera simply means something that had a utility that was meant to be discarded, and generally it’s referred to with paper. But ephemera is exactly what I collect, and the reason that I collect ephemera, whether it be letters or small magazines or whatever the case may be…

Nehemia: That’s a big word. Tell us what ephemeral is. What does that mean?

Leven: Ephemeral just means fleeting. It means it’s here and it’s gone. The whole idea is that it’s not supposed to be preserved. And in my opinion, ephemeral material is much more honest than any other material because it was designed to be used for a specific purpose at that point in time and then to go away. Whereas, even with things like journals and diaries, when folks write those, they often write them with a view towards posterity and pushing forward a narrative. But when you have a private letter between two people that is supposed to be discarded, that was never intended for consumption anywhere else, I believe you get a much more honest viewpoint. And the fact that you found a letter written in Hebrew during the Revolution is fascinating. I think that’s one of the most interesting things about getting into collecting. One of my favorite items that I have is a letter that’s from Kemmerer, Wyoming in 1900, and it’s all done in Chinese because there were a lot of Chinese laborers here.

Nehemia: Wow!

Leven: And it’s really important to remember that history is not… we say, this is the way people were, but it’s not the way people were. People are the same way they are now, where everybody’s different and everybody has opinions, and everybody has a different experience. You and I will both do this interview, but your experience of it and my experience are going to be different. Only by taking a look at those many different viewpoints, because I’m sure that a Hebrew’s impression of America during 1776 or 1778, or whenever that was written, is probably very different than many of the Englishmen or the Americans that may have stood on the same exact ground that they did. And to me that’s real history, and that’s what really attracts me is that it gives you that depth of understanding that you really can’t get any other way because it’s just too much to put in a book. You have to condense in order to be able write that narrative, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s always more complicated than it seems in books. And collecting lets you look at that complication.

Nehemia: Hmm. So, it’s really interesting. There is this kind of clash between the desire to have things in public institutions and the advantage of having it in private hands. And the example that comes to mind, which was recently sold, and it was the most expensive book ever sold, $38.1 million, the Sassoon Codex. So, I went to Geneva in 2019 and examined it when it was in the hands of the private collector.

Leven: Oh, wow! What a treat!

Nehemia: Yeah, it really was. It was amazing.

Leven: Wow!

Nehemia: And then it was sold. But it was bought by a private person who then donated it to the ANU Museum in Tel Aviv. The ANU Museum didn’t have $38.1 million, but there was some private collector who did. And I don’t know what he said, but presumably he said something like, “I’m not getting this for me, I’m getting it because it’s part of the national heritage of the Jewish people. It should be in Israel.” I guess that was his thinking, I don’t really know. And I understand that.

So, here’s an interesting consideration, just something to think about. I’ve been to a lot of libraries where they have priceless manuscripts, and sometimes priceless books that are printed. Sometimes an early printed book could be more expensive than a manuscript.

Leven: Yes.

Nehemia: Like, the earliest printing of the Talmud is worth more than most manuscripts because there’s only one copy.

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: It’s from 1520, I want to say 1524, sometime around that time, 1521.

Leven: Wow!

Nehemia: And they only made 300 copies, or something, and there’s no other complete copies. There’s one copy at the Hebrew Union College. So, I remember when I was there in Cincinnati at the Hebrew Union College. And people can find the interview I did here on NehemiasWall, on my website. The librarian explained to me, he said, “You know, we made a very conscious decision when we put in the fire suppression system. We could have put in halon gas.” Because they have this massive vault. And when I say vault, it’s not like when you think of a bank vault. It’s a warehouse, basically, that has reinforced concrete or whatever.

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, it’s a vault, with a blast door kind of thing. When there’s a fire you can use halon gas, and all the artifacts will be preserved. But anybody who remains in this vault after something like 90 seconds will be dead.

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: “And so, we made the decision,” he told me, “To use water, which will destroy the artifacts, but it will save human lives.” Now, is that a wrong decision? Well, I don’t know, but it is a consideration. There could be some kind of false alarm, even. It doesn’t even have to be a real fire, and all those artifacts are going to be soaked and maybe damaged beyond repair.

Leven: Well, that’s one of the other things to consider about institutions versus private collectors. There’s this false narrative that private collectors don’t know how to handle items. They don’t know how to preserve them, they damage them. But the truth of the matter, at least in my experience and all the serious collectors that I know, is that when you’ve paid serious money for something and you have skin in the game, and you personally have five grand in that item, you have a very different level of protectiveness over it than somebody who works for an institution.

And so, the idea that private collectors are not protecting their items is flat wrong. And I would say that there is much more mishandling of items that happens by nature in large institutions because there are so many people that are there, and they don’t all have the same incentive that a collector does. Not just financial, but, you know, when you’re deciding you’re going to buy a letter that somebody should have thrown away and spent $5,000 or $10,000 for it, you really believe in that piece of history, and it fulfills a larger narrative. So, you’re naturally going to handle it accordingly.

Unfortunately, as you get into large institutions, there are so many examples. I mean, the British Museum just lost thousands of items that got sold on eBay by one of their employees. But the mishandling, and the fact that you have items that sit in museums in drawers for hundreds of years, that type of thing is what causes some of that damage. And so, the idea that collectors aren’t as good at protecting them is just not true.

Nehemia: So, here’s another consideration. One of the librarians at the Bodleian Library in Oxford said to me, “We’re asset rich but cash poor.” Meaning, “We have hundreds of millions of dollars worth of manuscripts,” in particular he was talking about, “but we don’t have the money. If a particular manuscript needs restoration or it should be photographed at high resolution, we need someone to donate that, because we don’t have the tens of millions of dollars that it would take to restore these things. We have artifacts,” manuscripts in this case, “that have been there at this library for 400 years.”

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: It’s really interesting. Some of the manuscripts there, when they were purchased weren’t that old. But the library has been there for so long that now they’re old and unique. They bought a Torah scroll that was maybe 100 years old at the time… I mean, you can buy a 100-year-old Torah scroll on eBay. It’s not a big deal today. When they bought it, it wasn’t that big of a deal. But now it’s a 500-year-old Torah scroll, and there aren’t that many of those.

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: Because the Jewish practice was to actually bury them in a cemetery when they were no longer useful.

Leven: Interesting.

Nehemia: Yeah, it’s interesting. We actually have fewer Torah scrolls than we have codices. A codex is like a book form. So, Torah scrolls are relatively rare because they were this ritual object. When people were done with them, meaning, they couldn’t be used anymore because the ink was flaking off or something. Or the rules had changed of how to write them, and so they were no longer considered kosher. They would bury them in a cemetery.

I was at this lecture about a year ago, and this librarian from Lithuania told me how, after the Soviet Union fell, these rabbis came from Israel, and they had hundreds of non-kosher Torah scrolls at this library. And they said, “Okay, the proper thing to do is to bury these in the cemetery.” And I was horrified!

Leven: Wow!

Nehemia: Because we don’t know if those are 500, 1,000-year-old Torah scrolls. We have no idea. Or is it a 100-year-old Torah scroll? And even if it’s a 100-year-old Torah scroll, 300 years from now that’s going to be very rare, and you already had it in a public institution. So, here a public institution said, “We want to be sensitive to,” in this case, “the religious sensitivities of an ethnic minority that used to live in this country and there aren’t too many left. So, we don’t know what to do with it. All the Jews have been killed or fled.” And so, they’re like, “Okay, what do you guys do with an old Torah scroll?” “Well, we bury it.”

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. I understand why they do that. And so, here we have to balance religious sensitivities with the historical importance of something.

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: And a public institution might not be suited for that. A private collector would say, “Oh, Okay. I just paid $1,000 for that Torah scroll. I’m going to preserve it the best I know how, at least.”

Leven: Yeah, guaranteed. And not only that, but I think that’s another thing that a lot of people don’t consider. When you nationalize any type of collectible and you say, “Okay, all of this belongs to the government and all of it’s going to be controlled,” or a single organization, or whatever the case may be. Unfortunately, there becomes an ability there to manipulate what the history says.

Nehemia: Oh, wow.

Leven: And as much as you want to believe that nobody will ever do that, life is long, time is long, governments change, and things happen. And so, when you have all of this history that’s in government institutions, you open yourself up to the opportunity of somebody down the road, however long, changing the history, because there’s no dissemination of that. And there’s no way to refute it because everything’s in a single institution’s hands. And so, democratizing that and allowing it to be dispersed throughout the collector community is a hedge against authoritarian regimes, or religious leaders or whatever the case may be, trying to change the history by controlling the artifacts. And that has happened numerous times. I mean, how many times have we seen book burnings, and like we were talking about, destroying statues?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Leven: But that’s one of those things that a lot of people don’t consider. They’re like, “Well the government will protect it.” Well, maybe this government, but what about in 100 years?

Nehemia: Right. Well, an example that I experienced… In China there’s this ancient Jewish community that’s been there somewhere between 800 and 2,000 years. A minimum of 800 years.

Leven: Fascinating…

Nehemia: And there are these three stelae, these stone monuments, written in Chinese, giving their history. They were written… I want to say they were written in the 1500’s or thereabouts, and they’re in a museum in China. I went there and I asked to see them, and they weren’t on display. They’re up in this attic, and they were like, “We don’t really let people see this. This isn’t part of the museum. It’s not for public consumption.” They eventually let me in there, but they wouldn’t let me even take a single photo. I was like, “This is really strange.”

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: “Why are they hiding this part of the history?” I mean, there’s 300 Jews today in China.

Leven: Because it doesn’t fit their narrative.

Nehemia: Well, no, it actually is dangerous to them. China has a majority population called the Han, H-A-N, the Han. Most people haven’t heard of them, but Han is the main ethnic group of China. It’s 92% of the population, but that’s a story the government tells. They say there’s 55 ethnic minorities plus the Han, who are the majority. So, 8% of the population, which is tens or hundreds of millions of people, I don’t know, is the minority. And they only recognize 55 ethnic minorities. In reality, there’s thousands of ethnic minorities!

Leven: I was going to say, those numbers don’t make sense. I mean, that’s ridiculous.

Nehemia: It doesn’t even make sense according to the official Chinese narrative.

Leven: Yeah.

Nehemia: Because they say Taiwan is part of China. And Taiwan has the indigenous population which isn’t Han, and they’re not included in the 55. So, even from that there’s more than 55.

Leven: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: But that’s like, somebody didn’t think about Taiwan when they came up with the 55 number. And among those 55, some of those are multiple ethnic groups that have very little to do with each other and consider themselves different groups. So, here’s what China’s really thinking; they’re worried, “If we recognize that there’s a Jewish minority, that means that there’s other minorities that we haven’t recognized. And maybe they’ll say one day, ‘I don’t want to be part of China. I want my own state.’” Now, the 300 Jews aren’t going to say that because they’re not even a single building in China. A building in China would be more than 300 people. But there’s ethnic minorities of millions of people who are considered Han, and they’re considered Han, so they don’t say, “Wait a minute. Why am I being ruled by this imperialist power in Beijing? We’re this group that’s been here for thousands of years. We should have our own country.” That’s what they’re really afraid of. So, because of that they’re suppressing this pathetic group of 300 Jews who want to embrace their history and be part of a larger Jewish world.

So, there’s an example where literally the only documents are in government hands. We actually have lithographs of those from before the Communist Revolution, so we know what it says. But it would be nice to get a modern, high-resolution photo and see if maybe the guy who transcribed it 100 years ago, or whatever, made a mistake. And maybe they have the wrong century or the wrong dynasty because they wrote the wrong character. We know more today, or somebody knows more today about the Chinese than they did 100 years ago, but we can’t do that because the government wants to suppress that. Another example that comes to mind is in the book 1984.

Leven: I love that book!

Nehemia: Oh my God! Everybody needs to go and read that book. It’s really an important book for today, I think.

Leven: May take you a day, two max. Yep, it’s a great book.

Nehemia: It’s amazing. So, one of the main story lines there is the main character works in the government archives of the newspaper, and it’s his job to change history. So, there are these three different superpowers, countries, and the alliances keep shifting. And when the alliance shifts, he has to go and burn the old newspaper articles and rewrite them to say, “We’re at war with East Asia. We’ve always been at war with East Asia! We’ve never been allies, even though last year we were allies and it says that in the newspaper. But let’s destroy the archives and get rid of them so that people think we’ve always been… And who’s going to go check the government archives or the newspaper archives? But just in case anybody goes to check that, we have to, literally, rewrite history, because we have a monopoly on these historical sources.” So, I see here what you’re saying.

Leven: Well, I think you can tell how impactful it is by how much energy is spent trying to destroy past histories. When you look at the way fascism came into Europe, and you look at the Communist Revolution, and you look in the immediate aftermath of how much culture was destroyed, it shows you how much power it has. Because when they devote that much energy to destroying the history, it shows you how impactful it can be. And it should make us even more interested in making sure that these items are dispersed as widely as possible, because that’s the only true hedge against exactly that kind of manipulation. And it can happen anywhere, anywhere in the world, that that kind of concentration leads us to the possibility of history being changed in order to fulfil somebody’s narrative.

Nehemia: Well, thank you so much for joining me. This has been a fascinating discussion. It’s a little bit off topic of what we usually do, but I learned a lot. This has been really fun.

Leven: Well, thank you, I had a great time!

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VERSES MENTIONED
2 Timothy 4:13

BOOKS MENTIONED
1984
by George Orwell

OTHER LINKS
Revolutionary War Blockade Run Mail
A Letter of Jonas Phillips to the Federal Convention
Thief sold stolen gems to at least 45 buyers on eBay, British Museum says
MTV deletes news archives from internet, erasing over two decades of articles
Letter from David Maimonides to his brother Moses

The post Hebrew Voices #204 – Safeguarding History: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.

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