Cleaning Out the Mailbag: The Semitic Museum

In his article in the December 13 Crimson Professor Frank Moore Cross demands that I "repudiate the anti-Semitic interpretation generally given to [my] remarks" about Professor Lawrence E. Stager. It is Cross who should repudiate this interpretation since this twisted construction is his. But, for the record, let me state the obvious and the superfluous: the present controversy over the Semitic Museum has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. When I wrote to the Crimson late last month I actually had some vague impression--erroneous, it seems--that the Dorot Professor of the Archaeology of Israel is Jewish. Since the question of whether he is or is not Jewish was, however, of no moment I never asked. What I did know is that Stager had studied at the Hebrew University and that he had been favored in the assignment of sites to excavate by Israeli archaeological authorities who wouldn't have so favored him if he were anti-Semitic. Or, to quote Cross' strange characterization, Stager's "whole history is philo-Judaic."

To be fair to Cross, a few of Stager's other friends have also imputed to me an imputation of anti-Semitism to him. The most interesting instance of these is Leon Levy, the Wall Street Financier who provides the funds for Stager's Ashkelon dig. Levy and I have known each other for some years, and we met by accident in the lobby of a London hotel only ten days ago. He upbraided me for what he called my "anti-Semitic insinuations about Stager." I was appalled, and told him that this was an invention (maybe his, maybe Stager's) which had no basis in my text or in my head. He said he believed me. But, clearly, he didn't believe me enough to forgo writing a letter to The Crimson (December 10), and what a letter! The letter compares me to Senator Joseph McCarthy, the hoariest of gambits to try to shut someone up, but an insidious gambit, nonetheless.

Why, I ask myself, do Stager's friends insist on defending him against imagined charges of anti-Semitism? I am afraid they need this distraction because they cannot defend him against the real criticisms and charges that have, in fact, been made against him, not only be me but, most tellingly, many people who worked under his jurisdiction: he raised no money for the museum; he bullied and intimidated museum staff; he curbed free speech by forbidding museum employees to speak about the museum without his approval; and he violated their right to privacy by hi-tech scavenging for mail not addressed to him.

Of all these, the last must be most embarrassing to his friends and to Harvard itself, especially now that Stager's assistant has, in an interview with The Crimson (December 11), tried to make university counsel complicit with his ugly and, what she herself calls, "desperate" acts.

What is at stake in Professor Stager's determination to throttle the Semitic Museum is nothing less than the definition of a field. God bless the Philistines interred at Ashkelon, and God bless those who have exhumed their remains. But Semitic scholarship is no longer riveted simply on monuments and shards. Semitic cultures and civilizations survive and flourish in our time. President Eliot and Jacob Schiff understood that this would be so, and the men and women who reopened the Semitic Museum in 1982 understood this, too. Over the last decade the Museum has exemplified the extension of the field from an exclusive concentration on the Semites of antiquity to an inclusive vision of Semites throughout history. The intellectually and methodologically, a reactionary one. Still, the dean and the president have not quite foreclosed their options regarding the important photographic and ethnographic collections which so enrich understanding. If they treat these with the respect they deserve and assure preservation, scholarly use and public access they can make what is now a very sad story not a little less sad. Lecturer on Social Studies   Editor-in-chief, The New Republic