A group of ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jews and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee
pray at Joseph's Tomb, Nablus, May 22, 2017 (screenshot from YouTube)
pray at Joseph's Tomb, Nablus, May 22, 2017 (screenshot from YouTube)
In a recent blog post, Christopher Jones discussed the evolution of frameworks for dealing with
cultural heritage over the last two centuries. The current framework is
centered on national sovereignty, as Jones notes: national cultural heritage
laws generally vest ownership of artifacts and monuments (unsurprisingly) in
the nation-state, and international agreements center on national signatories
and mechanisms to repatriate to source countries. But Jones notes increasing
tensions with this framework – both international (the concept of global
heritage) and local. When we say that something is global heritage, or shared
heritage, that appears to be staking a claim to ownership of that heritage. It
is no longer national.
Erich Hatala Matthes, a philosopher
focusing on the ethics of heritage, has identified a similar tension between
the value of cultural heritage for specific groups and the universal value of
cultural heritage.[1]
His work suggests, however, that it is possible to bridge the gap between these
two views.[2] He points to alternative ethical accounts of recognition of value, or respect
for heritage – that some things may be valued without ownership, or recognized
to have value, or respected by everyone, regardless of whether everyone finds
them actually valuable. Matthes is less concerned with arguing for the fact of
universal value – his starting point is that at least some examples of cultural
heritage have (or appear to have) universal value, and is merely trying to
explain why that might be. (This marks a contrast with the concept of global
heritage, which is often invoked with the assumption that all heritage should
matter to everyone.) These models would relieve the tension between the
universal and the national.
Or do they? With heritage –
at least as heritage is understood under the current framework – I have become
increasingly skeptical of our ability to escape ownership claims. For those who
claim merely to value heritage, or that it is cultural or spiritual heritage
(and not a literal claim to ownership), these concepts often bleed together –
including insisting what other countries should do with their heritage.
Consider the case of Palmyra, where, after three centuries of seeing the ancient ruins as part of
their own past as opposed to that of the people living there, Europeans and
Americans can still lecture Syrians on how to reconstruct (or not) the site
after ISIS. Or the case of the Parthenon sculptures (aka the Elgin Marbles),
where the British Museum uses “shared heritage” as justification for its continued ownership of the
sculptures and refusal to repatriate them to Greece.
The Parthenon sculptures
point toward the clearest problems: cases of contested heritage, where multiple
groups (nations, ethnic groups, religious groups, etc.) directly vie for physical
control of a monument or group of artifacts, even vying for control of the
meaning – who gets to determine what it means. Having worked for many years in
Israel, I have continually come across examples of contested heritage. Here I
would like to highlight one specific example that may be illuminating: Joseph’s
Tomb at Nablus.
Restored tomb, c. 1900 (via Wikimedia Commons)
The place was considered
sacred by Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Samaritans alike. 18th-century itinerary
books for Jewish pilgrims included Joseph’s Tomb at Nablus among their lists of
sacred places and provided a prayer to be said. Explorers in the 19th century
noted Hebrew inscriptions on the wall, one dating to 1749 (in the month of
Sivan 5509 in the Hebrew calendar) describing a repair of the building at that
time. They also noted that Jews and Samaritans burned incense in the hollowed
tops of the two columns that flanked the cenotaph (the empty above-ground
monument marking the place of burial) in the center of the tomb building. Travelers
focused on the shrine’s importance to Jews and Samaritans, but they routinely observed
that Christians and Muslims also considered it a holy place. The shrine itself looks
like a typical Muslim sanctuary or maqām: a small room with a dome on top, and an adjacent partly-closed
courtyard. Tawfiq Canaan, author of the definitive study of Muslim sanctuaries
in Palestine (1927),[4] remarked
that in his time Muslims understood the shrine to be the shrine of the son of
Jacob. All religious communities, it seems, understood the site as dedicated to
the same biblical/quranic figure.[5]
But in recent decades this
situation has drastically changed. After 1948, many Muslim shrines lost
importance among local communities; some of the festivals (such as the Nabi
Musa festival for the Jerusalem region and the Nabi Rubin festival in the
southern coastal plain) were suppressed by Jordan or Israel. With Israel’s
takeover of the West Bank after 1967 came visits of religious Zionists to
Joseph’s Tomb – while Palestinians were banned from the site in 1975. Even
after Israel transferred jurisdiction of Nablus to the Palestinian Authority in
1995, it still maintained control of the tomb with an IDF outpost there. A
yeshiva with extremist ties named Od Yosef Chai (“Joseph still lives”) had been
founded at the site in the 1980s, but was relocated to the nearby settlement of
Yitzhar in 2000.[6] At
that time, with the beginning of the Second (Al-Aqsa) Intifada, residents of
Nablus burned the tomb, destroyed the yeshiva, and killed a Druze border
policeman; subsequently Israel completely withdrew from Joseph’s Tomb and Nablus.
In the years since, visits to the tomb in the middle of the night by groups of
religious Israeli Jews, escorted by the Israeli military, are regular occurrences.
One such trip earlier this year included roughly 4000 Jewish worshipers plus
former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. Palestinians in Nablus now maintain –
in contrast to widespread belief before 1948 – that the tomb is merely that of
a local sheikh named Yusuf.
Local residents have vandalized the tomb multiple times.
Group of religious Jews and soldiers at Joseph's Tomb, November 2009.
Note the damaged dome.
(Photo by Shuki, via Wikimedia Commons)
What accounts for the
massive shift in Palestinian attitudes toward the tomb, between the British
Mandate and today? In Facts on the Ground
(2001), Nadia Abu El-Haj suggested that the tomb – given its handling in the
decades of Israeli control – had come to be seen as monument to Israeli
colonialism.[7]
This conclusion parallels
Morag Kersel’s work on looting in the West Bank.[8]
While it is commonly believed that antiquities looting is caused primarily by
economic factors, and it is true that collectors’ demand for artifacts is a
central driver of the market, this is only one of four major motivations
identified by Kersel based on interviews with Palestinians. One of the other
three is resistance: “In repeated interviews I was told that one of the
motivating factors for looting was a resistance to the Israeli occupation and
subjugation of the Palestinian people.”
Even if the looted artifacts
are (or could be understood) as part of the Palestinian past, looters see them
only as belonging to the Israeli past: “Interviews with Palestinian
archaeologists and government employees confirmed that the Palestinian looter,
regardless of whether he digs in Israel or the PA, does not identify the
material remains as his or her past but as an Israeli past, and it therefore
should be eradicated.” For many (not all) Palestinians, Joseph’s Tomb has been
transformed from a sacred place to a symbol of occupation – it is what Lynn
Meskell has identified as “negative heritage.”[9]
It conjures not positive but negative memories, in a way we normally ignore
when we think about heritage.
However much we may deplore
vandalism and destruction, can we expect or even demand that everyone respect
or recognize the value of Joseph’s Tomb? We are in a situation where two groups
attribute meanings to the structure – one positive, one negative – that directly
conflict; and where a single group’s meaning underwent significant change within
a few decades. Can we as scholars or outside observers insist on treating only
one view – the Israeli one – as legitimate? This question is not just academic.
Several scholarly reviews of Abu El-Haj’s Facts
on the Ground harshly criticized her merely for trying to understand
Palestinian motivation for vandalizing Joseph’s Tomb.[10] Especially
in the context of occupation of the West Bank, it seems superficial to focus on
condemning vandalism and damage to a building – though the loss of life in the
2000 attack is another matter.
Certainly not all forms of heritage are as
contentious as Joseph’s Tomb, not all places filled with as much tension as
Israel/Palestine. In places like the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount, Palestinians
and Israeli Jews attribute different meanings even to metal detectors. But the
same issues, in stark outline there, can be found all around us once we start
looking for them – often just waiting for the time to erupt. In the U.S. they
are the natural product of disturbing aspects of history like slavery, Jim
Crow, and displacement of Native Americans. Recent examples include fights over
Confederate monuments, Native American sacred sites and burial grounds, and so
many more. I am still working my way through these issues; with all of their
complexity, I imagine we all are. But I am increasingly uncertain of any
universal model for respecting or recognizing the value of heritage.
[1] Matthes, “Saving Lives or Saving Stones?” The Ethics
of Cultural Heritage Protection in War, in Public
Affairs Quarterly. (I am grateful to Dr. Matthes for sharing a draft of
this paper.)
[2] See also Matthes’s Impersonal
Value, Universal Value, and the Scope of Cultural Heritage, Ethics
125 no. 4 (2015): 999-1027.
[3] I sincerely recommend the Wikipedia entry on
Joseph’s Tomb (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph%27s_Tomb), which is detailed and well-presented. I found it
helpful in providing references for some of the discussion that follows.
[4] Taufik Canaan, Mohammedan
Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine (London: Luzac & Co., 1927;
reprinted from the Journal of Palestine
Oriental Studies 4-7 [1924-1927]), pp. 294-295.
[5] Incorrect claims about the history
of the building circulate widely. For instance, Sandra Scham, By the Rivers of
Change: Strategists on the Heritage Front, in Controlling the Past, Owning the Future: The Political Uses of
Archaeology in the Middle East (ed. Ran Boytner, Lynn Swartz Dodd, and
Bradley J. Parker; Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010), p. 97: “Among
these are Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus, which was sacred to Muslims and Samaritans
but not traditionally identified by other Jews before 1967 as the tomb of the
biblical Joseph.” Alex Shams, meanwhile, suggested that the identification of
the tomb as the burial place of the biblical Joseph was invented by an Irish
journalist, William Cooke Taylor, in the 1830s (Why Do Palestinians Burn Jewish
Holy Sites?: The Fraught History of Joseph’s Tomb, Mondoweiss, November 12, 2015
[6] The yeshiva would be seized by the IDF in 2014, apparently the first time a yeshiva was closed by
the Israeli government, for repeated violence against Palestinians as well as Israeli
forces.
[7] This conclusion has been echoed by Palestinian
archaeologist Adel H. Yahya: Heritage Appropriation in the Holy Land, in Controlling the Past, Owning the Future: The
Political Uses of Archaeology in the Middle East (ed. Ran Boytner, Lynn
Swartz Dodd, and Bradley J. Parker; Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010),
p. 147; and Shams, Why Do Palestinians Burn Jewish Holy Sites?
[8] Morag M. Kersel, Transcending Borders: Objects on
the Move, Archaeologies: Journal of the
World Archaeological Congress 3 no. 2 (August 2007): 81-98.
[9] Lynn Meskell, Negative Heritage and Past Mastering
in Archaeology, Anthropological Quarterly
75 no. 3 (Summer 2002): 557-574.
[10] Aren M. Maeir, Review of Facts on
the Ground, Isis 95 no. 3 (September
2004), p. 524; Alexander H. Joffe, Review of Facts on the Ground, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 64 no. 4
(October 2005), p. 303; Jim Davila, Review of Facts on the Ground,
Paleojudaica.com, September 27, 2007 (http://paleojudaica.blogspot.com/2007/09/review-of-nadia-abu-el-haj-facts-on.html). This passage has also seized on
in popular accounts; e.g., Bari Weiss, Facts in the Air, Haaretz,
November 29, 2007. Maeir claims further that the tone of her description of the
vandalism is “gleeful” and that she “condones” the act. I find his claims
puzzling, as I fail to see how anyone can read the relevant excerpt from Abu
El-Haj’s book and come away with this impression. Unfortunately, until Abu
El-Haj herself addressed such claims in print earlier this year (Academic Freedom at Risk: The Occasional Worldliness of
Scholarly Texts, in If Truth Be Told: The
Politics of Public Ethnography [ed. Didier Fassin; Durham: Duke University
Press, 2017]), the only person of whom I’m aware to come publicly to her
defense on this matter is James G. Crossley, Jesus the
Jew since 1967, in Jesus beyond
Nationalism: Constructing the Historical Jesus in a Period of Cultural
Complexity (ed. Halvor Moxnes, Ward Blanton, and James G. Crossley; London
and New York: Routledge, 2014 [Equinox, 2009]), p. 123; see also Jesus in an Age of Terror: Scholarly
Projects for a New American Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2014
[Equinox, 2008]), p. 168.
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