Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
I’ve been fighting a bad cold as well as dealing with the fallout from our cancellation debacle at the University of Amsterdam, so I haven’t gotten out much. This is a great pity as the weather had been good, though now it’s turned rainy.
This evening I will give a talk on science vs. religion at Tilburg University, founded as a Catholic school in 1927. Now it’s only technically Catholic, and is described by Wikipedia as “a public research university specializing in the social and behavioral sciences, economics, law, business sciences, theology and humanities. . . ”
We have had no threats of disruption (Tilburg is a few hours south of Amsterdam), so I’m not worried about that. Tomorrow Maarten Boudry and I, plus perhaps a surprise guest or two, will tape the discussion that was deplatformed at the University of Amsterdam.
At any rate, here are a few snapshots from my limited incursions in Amsterdam.
I’m surprised that this is my third visit to Amsterdam, and up to now I’d missed the “Stolpersteine” (literally, “stumbling stones”) which one encounters from time to time in the pavement in front of houses. They’re easy to miss, which is why I haven’t seen them before. Wikipedia describes them like this:
. . . . a ten-centimetre (3.9 in) concrete cube bearing a brass plate inscribed with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution. Literally, it means ‘stumbling stone’ and metaphorically ‘stumbling block’.
The Stolpersteine project, initiated by the German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992, aims to commemorate persons at the last place that they chose freely to reside, work or study (with exceptions possible on a case-by-case basis) before they fell victim to Nazi terror, forced euthanasia, eugenics, deportation to a concentration or extermination camp, or escaped persecution by emigration or suicide. As of June 2023, 100,000.Stolpersteine have been laid, making the Stolpersteine project the world’s largest decentralized memorial.
They mostly commemorate Jews, but are also laid for murdered Romani, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and others persecuted by the Nazis. Here are three I found within two blocks from where I’m staying (there is a pair representing a man and his wife):
It says, “Here lived Elisa Frederika De Jon van Biema, born 1901, abducted 1944 to Westerbork, killed January 27, 1945, Auschwitz.” Westerbork was the infamous Dutch camp where detainees, including Anne Frank and her family, were kept until they were transferred to the concentration camps (in this case Auschwitz). Elisa was killed at 44.
Below are the stones for a Jewish man and his wife who were deported together; the man died at Westerbork and his wife at Auschwitz. Prisoners were sent to other camps, too, like Sobibór. All told, about 98,000 Jews were deported from Westerbork to the camps, and nearly all of them were immediately gassed upon arrival.
Although some people object because these small stones allow people to walk over memorials for dead Jews, I find them moving because, once you look for them, they are easy to find but distressingly common. The houses of the murdered, of course, are still there, so the memorials are ineffably evocative.
Another Jewish man and wife, arrested on April 8, 1943, and gassed at Sobibór only two weeks later.
On a lighter note, here are two pictures from the local “supermarket”, which is a market but much smaller than American supermarkets. Nevertheless, it has a huge supply of cheese, which of course is a speciality of the Netherlands. Look at all the different kinds of cheese!
If you follow this site, you know I always check out the cat food in markets, to see if there’s any local flavor to what they feed the moggies. Here there was nothing special (France has an array of gourmet-named cat foods), but they did have paté. The label reads, “complete pet food for adult cats.”
And a takeout meal last night from the local Balinese restaurant: rice, beef, chicken, eggplant, beans, and mixed veggies:
I’ve just finished watching the movie “Rustin“, which came out last year. Civil rights leader Bayard Rustin (1912-1987) was most famous for organizing the March on Washington in 1963, the event at which Martin Luther King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Over 250,000 people showed up, and the force of their presence, and of MLK’s speech, was arguably the pivotal event leading to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And he influenced Martin Luther King’s approach to civil rights activism, particularly by emphasizing nonviolence. But despite Rustin’s influence, how many people remember him?
They will if they see this wonderful movie, which recounts not Rustin’s whole life, but the short period of a few months over which he organized the March. Played by Colman Domingo in a bravura performance, Rustin was marginalized by the movement largely because he was a former Communist and had been arrested and served time for homosexuality—”sex perversion,” as it was called in those days. His homosexuality figures largely in this movie, threatening at times to derail the March, but King, with whom he had a fraught relationship, defended Rustin publicly and got the event back on the rails.
Domingo’s performance has earned him an Oscar nomination this year for Best Actor (awards yet to come), and the film nabbed a critics’ rating of 84% on Rotten Tomatoes, with a viewers’ rating of 85%. Although it starts a bit slowly, it quickly gains momentum and culminates with King’s famous speech given as Rustin stands by with smiles and tears. By that point I was in tears, too. At the end, Rustin, taught to see anybody who helped their people as a worthy person, appropriates a garbageman’s sack and starts cleaning up the grounds around the Lincoln Memorial
Wikipedia notes that “Rustin” was produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company Higher Ground, and it’s a worthy effort. It’s definitely a film worth seeing, and also carries lessons today about how a combination of peaceful behavior, a righteous cause, and civil disobedience can move mountains. I remember those times, but they seem to have vanished.
Here’s the trailer for the movie:
If you watch the film, you’ll surely want to learn more about Rustin, and, fortunately, you can do that by reading Coleman Hughes’s new article in The Free Press by clicking below:
An excerpt:
When I was an undergraduate at Columbia University during the turbulent years of the Trump administration, there was a racial controversy on campus almost weekly, with some students claiming they experienced white supremacy “every day.” Yet as a black student myself, I detected almost no racism at all. In my search to explain this gulf between rhetoric and reality, I looked back at texts from the civil rights era and found, in the essays and letters of Bayard Rustin—texts I had never encountered on any syllabus—a prescient analysis of everything going on around me.
Rustin, who was born in 1912 and died in 1987, was a key ally of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
. . . . Rustin himself was a discovery; a courageous activist, organizer, writer, and descendant of slaves who had been arrested and beaten for refusing to sit at the back of a Jim Crow bus in 1942, when he was 30 years old—a full 13 years before Rosa Parks made history by doing the same. A Quaker and conscientious objector, it was Rustin who introduced Martin Luther King to Gandhi’s theory of nonviolent resistance and persuaded King, his close friend and confidant, to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, though Rustin omitted the word Christian in his original plan.
Six years later, Rustin organized the landmark March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Rustin had put it together in a matter of months and created “the blueprint for the modern American mass political rally.”
How was it possible for a figure so central to the civil rights movement—who had not only envisioned but helped bring about a world in which black Americans demanded and achieved full citizenship—to wind up, in the words of his biographer John D’Emilio, “a man without a home in history”? By any objective measure, Rustin belongs in the pantheon of great Americans every schoolchild should know. And yet, as D’Emilio put it in his biography, Lost Prophet, “Rustin hardly appears at all in the voluminous literature produced about the 1960s.”
The short answer is that Rustin lived as an openly gay man at a time when every state in the U.S. outlawed homosexuality. His civil rights colleagues could imagine the end of legalized white supremacy but could not envision a world in which Rustin could live as a gay man without fear of arrest. The long answer has something to do with those prophetic essays.
You can read about his “prophetic essays” and ideas in the rest of the article—views that are especially salient during today’s “racial reckoning.” Read the article (Hughes is, of course, a “heterodox” black man) and see the movie.
Reader Jim Batterson sent me this illustration from the textbook he used in his seventh-grade “Virginia History” class in Newport News, VA. He was about 13 years old at the time. And this is the kind of stuff that people have, for good reason, tried to purge from secondary-school education. Fortunately, this kind of distortion isn’t found in modern textbooks. But look at the picture below: a fanciful depiction of a slave family meeting “the master.” It implies that slavery was a good thing, and everyone was happy.
Here’s what Jim said:
Here in Newport News, I remember that the VA history we got was much like what is discussed briefly in the link with the drawing of a well-dressed slave family arriving to the warm handshake and greeting of his white master. I think the illustration says it all.
I ran across the drawing in a book review last week. Gov Linwood Holton helped get rid of these texts when he was governor in the 70’s; and the introduction of “standards of learning” with broader public input in the late 80’s and 90’s led to vast, though not perfect, improvements in presentations on how non-whites were treated if I recall correctly. Gov Holton, a moderate Republican, was Sen. Tim Kaine’s father in law and sent his kids to desegregated public schools. I thought that you would find the drawing to be of interest…it was taught through the 1960’s!
I was in elementary school only in the sixth grade in Arlington, Virginia, and don’t remember taking any Virginia history, and by the time I returned from Germany and went to school in Arlington for the 11th and 12th grades, they no longer taught Virginia history (it was taught in the 4th, 7th, and 11th grades).
But this drawing gives me the willies. Warm handshakes all around, a well-dressed slave with a hat and valise, and a well turned-out family. Now what are the chances that, after an Atlantic crossing in the hold of a ship, an enslaved person would look like that?
Source: Citation: Virginia: History, Government, Geography. F226 .S5 1957. Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA Original Author: Francis Simkins, Sidman Poole, and Spotswood Hunnicutt, authors Created: 1957
A well-dressed Black family is cordially greeted by a white man—presumably their enslaver—in this fanciful illustration above the chapter title,”How the Negroes lived under Slavery.” Given that the family was arriving via a sailing ship, the reality is that they had probably been recently sold at auction, forcibly transported by boat while being closely guarded, and then delivered to their new “owner.” This illustrated page is from Virginia: History, Government, Geography (1957), the state-sanctioned seventh-grade history textbook that was written with the express intention of presenting a Lost Cause view of slavery as a benign institution. The accompanying text claims that slave laws were “not strictly enforced” and that slave masters were kindly, since “they knew the best way to control their slaves was to win their confidence and affection.” The text goes on to portray the lives of the enslaved as being carefree and happy, as they were supposedly free to gather for dancing, singing, and celebrating religious events—and even, on occasion, having the right to own “guns and other weapons.” The brutal, de-humanizing institution of slavery was far from this gentle depiction; yet these sanitized textbooks remained in use in some Virginia schools until the late 1970s.
According to The Virginia History and Textbook Commission, which also reproduces this page, these textbooks were removed from schools only in 1972, a year after I graduated from college in Virginia:
The Virginia National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) opposed the textbooks, and the Virginia Teachers Association (VTA), a Black educators organization, successfully promoted an accurate telling of Black history that led to the adoption of Black history courses throughout the commonwealth beginning in the 1960s. By 1965, educators were widely complaining that the textbooks amounted to propaganda. Nonetheless, in 1966 the State Board of Education extended the use of the textbooks for another six years.
By 1972, of course, schools had been desegregated for 18 years, but there was still de facto segregation based on segregated neighborhoods—and no busing. I remember having black classmates in elementary or junior high schools, and only a few in my high school, Washington-Lee (now renamed) in Arlington, Virginia. And that despite there being plenty of African-Americans in northern Virginia: they simply lived in completely different areas.
As Jim notes, many Virginia kids, weaned on a diet of this kind of segregationist pap, grew up thinking that slavery wasn’t so bad, and, in modern times, that it was natural to have a racial hierarchy, with white people being in positions of power over black people. (I can’t resist adding that Palestinian children grow up with similar kinds of supremacist textbooks, with theirs extolling martyrdom and calling for the death of Jews.)
Today we have a text-and-picture essay by Athayde Tonhasca Júnior. It’s a wonderful set of pictures and narrative that takes us back to 1913.
Athayde’s text is indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
One fine day in 1913
If you find yourself in northern England and in search of history—after all, ‘Europe is where history comes from’ (Eddie Izzard)—you could hike along Hadrian’s Wall and visit the excellent Vindolanda Museum. You could also consider a trip to Beamish Museum, which is a ~30 min drive from Newcastle. This open-air museum is dedicated to ‘preserving an example of everyday life in urban and rural North-East England at the climax of industrialisation in the early 20th century.’ You could spend a whole day exploring its 140 ha on foot, tram or bus, and still not see it all.
From the entrance, you can walk to town (about 20 min), take a bus…
… or a tram. In Britain, electric trams began replacing horse-drawn trams in the 1890s, which was a huge environmental improvement. In 1900s London, over 50,000 horses transported people around the city. Each horse produced 7 to 15 kg of manure/day, to the joy of millions of flies that transmitted typhoid fever and other unpleasantries:
The town area, depicting a 1913 British urban environment. You can visit a printer’s office, a bakery, a Masonic Hall, a Co-operative Society store, a bank, the stables, or this motor garage, which holds a collection of cars, motorcycles and bicycles. Only one in 230 Britons owned a car in 1913, and motorist Rudyard Kipling described automobile journeys as a catalogue of ‘agonies, shames, delays, rages, chills, parboilings, road-walkings, water-drawings, burns and starvations’. Nonetheless, 1913 marked the start of a motoring revolution with the car factory built by Henry Ford in Manchester:
Jubilee Confectioners, purveyors of traditional sweets and chocolate, which the hoi-polloi could not afford in 1913. Among all the operating stores in the museum, the sweet shop has the longest queue. Not surprising, as the UK is working hard to catch up with America on the Fatso Index. 1 in every 4 adult Britons and 1 in every 5 children (10 to 11 yrs.) are ‘living with obesity’, according to the emotionally hemophiliac (h/t Bill Maher) National Health Service:
You can buy Beamish soap, Beamish perfume and other Beamish beatification goods at the local apothecary, but the products in the coloured bottles and on shelves are for display only. They include old favourites such as leeches, sulfa, morphine, arsenic, mercury (for those ignominiously afflicted with syphilis), cocaine drops (for toothache) and assorted quackery. The pharmacy would make Gwyneth Paltrow envious:
All your smoking needs at the General Store. Cigarettes (Woodbine was a favourite brand) overtook pipes during World War I, as they were a more convenient way to get your nicotine fix while manning the trenches. Tobacco helped soldiers endure the horrors of war, so newspapers, the government and of course the tobacco companies did their best to keep the boys well supplied. Smoking was a man’s pastime until the 1920s – the general view was that only women of loose morals did it. Lauren Bacall, Marlene Dietrich and other female celebrities made cigs glamorous, thus encouraging women to have the same lung cancer and emphysema rights as men:
Just a glance at this foot-powered, agonisingly slow dental drill in the dentist office will remind you how lucky you are not to be alive then. The rack of canisters just seen on the lower right side are bottles of laughing gas, which was the only anaesthetic available. But you had to pay extra for it. And as you may have guessed, most people couldn’t afford it:
The town’s attorney’s office, which was manned by a man. Women were barred from practising law in England until the 1919 Sex Disqualification Act. Gwyneth Bebb (1889-1921) challenged the ban in 1913 (Bebb v The Law Society), but the judge in charge ruled with the superb Catch-22 logic that no woman had ever been a solicitor, therefore no women could be solicitors. Back then, the quality of your legal representation was directly related to how much you could pay. Imagine that:
From 1850 to 1913, over 41 million people left Europe for a new life elsewhere, mostly the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. About one third of these migrants were from the United Kingdom (Hatton, 2021). If you wanted to try your luck abroad, you needed to procure an emigration agent, who would tell you that all your worldly possessions had to fit in a suitcase such as the one on the counter. The agent would issue you a one-way ticket to your destination. In 1913, the British Empire was 10 years from its territorial peak, so there were plenty of places to choose from. But if things didn’t work out in Johnny Foreigner land, you’d have to pay for your journey back. Very few who wanted to return could afford it:
Troublemakers’ mark in 1913. ‘Deeds Not Words’ was the battle cry of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). The Daily Mail (who else?) derided pesky women demanding the right to vote, or suffrage – from medieval Latin suffragium (support, ballot) – so it scornfully labelled WSPU members suffragettes. The slight backfired, because the activists though the term catchy and adopted it. And what were the suffragettes’ deeds? Fund-raising events, demonstrations, protests, a weekly newspaper. Also, assaults against public figures, arson, vandalism and lots of bombings. Way before the IRA and Just Stop Oil, the suffragettes pioneered the techniques of packing explosives with nuts and bolts for maximum damage, and crying for attention by attacking art, such as the slashing of Velazquez’s Toilette of Venus. As the saying goes, one woman’s terrorist is another woman’s freedom fighter. But the suffragettes had a long struggle ahead of them: voting rights equal to men’s in Britain were not achieved until 1928:
A pit village (mining village), built and owned by the colliery company. Pit villages popped up wherever there was coal, and their survival and growth depended on the mine’s production:
A miner’s home, comprising a living room/bedroom, a kitchen, and an outhouse. This abode may look modest, but miners’ wages were above average. Housing and coal were free, but the ever-present worry of losing them bedeviled those who could not work because of injury or infirmity; eviction was their fate. Having many sons, who were likely to follow dad’s footsteps into the earth’s bowels, was a good insurance against destitution. Notice Queen Vic on the wall, surveying the surroundings:
Each family tended their vegetable garden and raised fowl for meat and eggs. The building at the back is the village chapel, and the shacks over the right fence are canary aviaries. These delicate birds are highly sensitive to carbon monoxide, which is colourless, odourless, and deadly. If a caged canary dropped dead inside a mine, the miners would skedaddle. Canaries were under involuntary employment until 1986, when electronic detectors became available:
Children experiencing school in 1913. Notice they all had tablets (slates). No TikTok, though. Pupils would leave school at the age of 12 and the lucky ones would be employed by the company, although they could not go underground until 14:
Goin’ to haul King Coal. Which, according to today’s Woke canon, was the sustenance of the Industrial Revolution, the mother of white evil. George Orwell had a different view: ‘Our civilization… is founded on coal, more completely than one realizes until one stops to think about it. The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism of the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil’. (Down the Mine, 1937). Collieries employed over a million British miners in 1913, the industry’s height. In the Beamish area alone (County Durham), over 165,000 men and boys worked in 304 mines:
Men going down, coal coming up. After 92 miners died in the Felling Mine explosions in 1812, the Society for the Prevention of Accidents in Coal Mines pushed hard for a safety solution, which resulted in the development of the mining safety lamp, an ingenious device that became a miner’s inseparable friend. Many retired miners have their lamp on display in their homes. In the National Coal Mining Museum, you can go into a pit and have the claustrophobic experience of a lifetime:
Today we’ll have the second and last part of Michael Glenister’s photos of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Vesuvius (part 1 is here). Today we feature Pompeii; Michael’s text and captions are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.
Now while Herculaneum felt like you were visiting an ongoing excavation; Pompeii felt like you were visiting a pioneer village – just without staff walking around in period clothes, eg. dressed as Centurions, etc. The site of Pompeii is basically a very large park, with the ruins of a large town within, but is being somewhat restored by growing grapes in the ancient vineyards, trees, etc.
A large amphitheatre near one of the entrances. Pink Floyd performed there in 1972:
One of the many roads in the city:
The garden in the courtyard of one of the many houses:
The artwork in Pompeii is better preserved as it was buried in ash, rather than by the very hot pyroclastic flow that buried Herculaneum:
The garden in the courtyard of another house, showing the water system:
Another road in the city:
Inside the amphitheatre where Pink Floyd performed:
A kitchen (I think):
Inside one of the buildings:
City square with Vesuvius in the background. I like how the clouds over Vesuvius look like the mountain is smoking:
A map of Pompeii. The amphitheatre is on the far right. The red marker is the city square:
A smaller amphitheatre, found in the bottom middle of the map:
Plaster casts of some of the victims of the eruption:
On Wednesday I spent about four hours at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and even that wasn’t long enough to see all the interesting stuff. There are four bits to peruse: archaeology (not just in Israel, but throughout the world), things reflecting Jewish life, art (including Impressionist and post-Impressionist painting), and, in a separate building (“The Shrine of the Book”), the Dead Sea Scrolls (only a bit of the original on display) and the Aleppo Codex (fully on display). As Wikipedia notes:
The Israel Museum (Hebrew: מוזיאון ישראל, Muze’on Yisrael, Arabic: متحف إسرائيل) is an art and archaeological museum in Jerusalem. It was established in 1965 as Israel’s largest and foremost cultural institution, and one of the world’s leading encyclopaedic museums. It is situated on a hill in the Givat Ram neighborhood of Jerusalem, adjacent to the Bible Lands Museum, the Knesset, the Israeli Supreme Court, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Its holdings include the world’s most comprehensive collections of the archaeology of the Holy Land, and Jewish art and life, as well as significant and extensive holdings in the fine arts, the latter encompassing eleven separate departments: Israeli Art, European Art, Modern Art, Contemporary Art, Prints and Drawings, Photography, Design and Architecture, Asian Art, African Art, Oceanic Art, and Arts of the Americas.
Among the unique objects on display are the Venus of Berekhat Ram, the interior of a 1736 Zedek ve Shalom synagogue from Suriname, necklaces worn by Jewish brides in Yemen, a mosaic Islamic prayer niche from 17th-century Persia, and a nail attesting to the practice of crucifixion in Jesus’ time. An urn-shaped building on the grounds of the museum, the Shrine of the Book, houses the Dead Sea Scrolls and artifacts discovered at Masada. It is one of the largest museums in the region.
I’m surprised they don’t mention the Aleppo Codex, the oldest Hebrew Bible in existence (there are older versions in Greek), also a big draw to the Museum. But more on that later. I’ll include some labels with the object to avoid taking a lot of time simply to retype them.
The entrance to the Museum Complex, which (save the Shrine of the Book) is in several interconnected buildings, is long and spooky, and reminds me of the underground connection between the two parts of Terminal 1 in O’Hare airport:
Two locks of hair found at Masada. Could they be from Jews who decided to commit suicide rather than be captured as slaves by the Romans? We don’t know, and, as I’ve noted, the “mass suicide” story of Masada may be fictional.
A big mosaic; I photographed only part of it:
The centaur is on the right.
A famous bit of cuneiform writing, which fascinates me:
On to Jewish Life. Here’s a Jewish wedding dress from Morocco:
The ketubah is a unilateral agreement drawn by witnesses in accordance with Jewish civil law, in which they testify that the husband guarantees to his wife that he will meet certain minimum human and financial conditions of marriage, “as Jewish husbands are wont to do.”
It is not a ceremonial document of scripture or prayer. That is why it is written in Aramaic, the technical legal language of Talmudic law, rather than in Hebrew, the language of the “Song of Songs.” Neither is it a state document establishing the new relationship of man and woman. It makes no mention of the confirmation of G‑d or of society. It is not an instrument of the privileged class, as in ancient societies, but one obligatory on every person. It is also not an affirmation of perpetual love. It is a statement of law that provides the framework of love.
The ketubah restates the fundamental conditions that are imposed by the Torah upon the husband, such as providing his wife with food, clothing, and conjugal rights, which are inseparable from marriage. It includes the husband’s guarantees to pay a certain sum in the event of divorce, and inheritance rights obligatory upon his heirs in case he dies before his wife.
It is not a mutual agreement; the wife agrees only to accept the husband’s proposal of marriage. It is assuredly not a bill of sale; the man does not purchase the bride. In fact, the ketubah represents the witnesses rather than husband or wife. Through this instrument they attest to the groom’s actions, promises, and statements, and to the bride’s willing acceptance of the marriage proposal.
I’m wondering whether the small letters at the lower left around the square are the signatures of the witnesses. Note both the Hebrew and the Aramaic.
NOTE: Joseph points out in the comments that the photo below is not a mezuzah but a megillah. I have crossed out what I wrote before and added what seems to be the correct information. This shows that I am not a very good Jew!
Below is a very fancy mezuzah, a container affixed to doorways in Jewish homes, each containing a klaf, a piece of parchment on which there’s verse from theTorah (see above). The scroll itself is a lot more important than the container, and, if prepared in the kosher way, can cost a lot more than the container (check Amazon). When I owned a house in Maryland while I had my first job, there was a mezuzah attached to the front door frame, with the top pointing inward, as is the custom. That was one of my only concessions to religious Judaism, and I don’t have one now. Even secular Jews do it (see from the Wikipedia article below)
I didn’t write down the source or date of this mezuzah, but it’s very fancy, with a silver case and a very long handwritten klaf:
This is not a mezuzah, but a fancy megillah scroll in a silver case, which contains parts of the Bible read on special occasions (this one is small, about 6 inches long). The Britttanica explains the scrolls:
Megillah, also spelled Megilla, Hebrew Megillah (“Scroll”), plural Megillot, in the Hebrew Bible, any of the five sacred books of the Ketuvim (the third division of the Old Testament), in scroll form, that are read in the synagogue in the course of certain festivals. The Song of Solomon (Song of Songs) is read on the sabbath of Passover week, the Book of Ruth on Shavuot, Lamentations of Jeremiah on Tisha be-Av, Ecclesiastes on the sabbath of the week of Sukkoth, and the Book of Esther on Purim. The reading of Esther on Purim is prescribed in the Mishna; other readings were introduced in post-Talmudic days.
The Haggadah is a Jewish text, read on Passover, that contains the story of the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt. It is not lifted from the Old Testament but recounts a similar story of Exodus. It was written no earlier than 170 A.D.
The Birds’ Head Haggadah (below) is very famous, as it’s the oldest surviving Passover Haggadah from Ashkenazi Jews. As it says below, it was written about 1300 A.D. Wikipedia has a long article on it that gives theories for why all the humans have bird heads, as in the photo below.
The Birds’ Head Haggadah is so called because all Jewish men, women, and children depicted in the manuscript have human bodies with the faces and beaks of birds. Non-Jewish and non-human faces (such as those of angels, the sun, and the moon) are blank or blurred. Numerous theories have been advanced to explain the unusual iconography, usually tied to Jewish aniconism. The Haggadah is in the possession of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where it is on permanent exhibition.
Here’s a later Haggadah, apparently from Moravia, and written four centuries later:
The Torah is the archetypal document of Judaism, comprising the first five books of the Old Testament. It is written by hand on a scroll that is kept in the synagogue and read at least once a week. See below for more information. In the bar mitzvah ceremony of becoming a man, a Jewish boy must be able to read from the Torah. (I was never bar mitzvahed because I flunked out of Hebrew school.)
Here’s a section of a Torah from the Museum. The calligrapher has do do a good job because, as it says above, if you make a single mistake, the entire document becomes worthless and you have to start again from the beginning.
There are dozens of fancy Torah cases in the Museum; here are two.
Menorahs are Jewish “candelabras” that burn oil and there are two types. Temple Menorahs have seven branches for fuel and are rarely if ever lit. All temples have one, but it’s mostly symbolic.
Here’s one from Wikipedia with the caption, “Reconstruction of the menorah of the Temple in Jerusalem, created by the Temple Institute of Israel”
The more famous menorah is the Hanukkah menorah, which has nine branches with the middle one higher than the others. From Wikipedia:
A Hanukkah menorah, or hanukkiah, is a nine-branched candelabrum lit during the eight-day Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. Eight of the nine branches hold lights (candles or oil lamps) that symbolize the eight nights of the holiday; on each night, one more light is lit than the previous night, until on the final night all eight branches are ignited. The ninth branch holds a candle, called the shamash (“helper” or “servant”), which is used to light the other eight.
The Hanukkah menorah commemorates, but is distinct from, the seven-branched menorah used in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. Along with the seven-branched menorah and the Star of David, it is among the most widely produced articles of Jewish ceremonial art.
Miracle of the cruse of oil (Hebrew: נֵס פַּךְ הַשֶּׁמֶן), or the Miracle of Hanukkah, is an Aggadah depicted in the Babylonian Talmud as one of the reasons for Hanukkah. In the story, the miracle occurred after the liberation of the Temple in Jerusalem during the Maccabean Revolt, and it describes the finding of a jug of pure oil that was to be enough to light the lamp for one day, but that lasted for eight days.
The Museum has dozens of menorahs of all types from around the world: here’s a wall display (click to enlarge):
And there are a ton of paintings in the art wing. I photographed three by famous artists, though hardly their best work.
From Gauguin:
An early and rather crude van Gogh:
And a not-bad Kandinsky, who’s one of my favorite artists.
More art, this time from the New World:
There was a special and rather grim exhibit of the garb that Jews put on their dead when they’re buried. This male garb has a hat.
I believe these are shrouds for Jewish women:
There was a detailed outdoor model, quite fascinating, of what Jerusalem looked like in the Second Temple Period (ca 516 B.C.-70 A.D.), starting when the Second Temple was built and ending when the Romans put the Jews to flight. The caption is below:
Below: the very large reconstruction, showing the city walls enclosing houses, shops, and, in the center, the Second Temple, which now remains only in the Western Wall and other stuff buried in the Temple Mount.
The structure in the middle of the Temple presumably held the “Holy of Holies“, the inner sanctum that held the Ark of the Covenant said to contain the Ten Commandment stones. Only one person could approach it, the head priest, and then only once a year. Many ultra-Orthodox Jews won’t even climb up the Temple Mount (allowed briefly a few times a week) for fear that they’d be stepping atop the Holy of Holies.
Click to enlarge:
There are two possible Western Walls here, so I took a picture of the two possibilities. Maybe a reader knows which one faced west.
Or is it this one?
The “Shrine of the Book” is famous mainly for holding the Dead Sea Scrolls, only one bit of the originals on display at once. (They’re alternated so they won’t fade.) They were written during the Second Temple Period and discovered in caves on the West Bank between 1946 and 1956. A bit about them from Wikipedia:
. . . the Dead Sea Scrolls are considered to be a keystone in the history of archaeology with great historical, religious, and linguistic significance because they include the oldest surviving manuscripts of entire books later included in the biblical canons, along with extra-biblical and deuterocanonical manuscripts that preserve evidence of the diversity of religious thought in late Second Temple Judaism. At the same time, they cast new light on the emergence of Christianity and of Rabbinic Judaism. Almost all of the 15,000 scrolls and scroll fragments are held in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum, located in the city of Jerusalem. The Israeli government’s custody of the Dead Sea Scrolls is disputed by Jordan and the Palestinian Authority on territorial, legal, and humanitarian grounds — they were mostly discovered following the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank and were acquired by Israel after Jordan lost the 1967 Arab–Israeli War — whilst Israel’s claims are primarily based on historical and religious grounds, given their significance in Jewish history and in the heritage of Judaism.
The Shrine building is striking, and is modeled to resemble the tops of the jars in which the scrolls were found. Fountains and a pool surround it.
The eerie underground entry to the exhibits:
And an original bit of a Dead Sea Scroll, many of which are in bad condition; the text was painstakingly reconstructed. You can make out the Hebrew letters.
The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa) is one of the original seven Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in Qumran in 1947. It is the largest (734 cm) and best preserved of all the biblical scrolls, and the only one that is almost complete. The 54 columns contain all 66 chapters of the Hebrew version of the biblical Book of Isaiah. Dating from ca. 125 BCE, it is also one of the oldest of the Dead Sea Scrolls, some one thousand years older than the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible known to us before the scrolls’ discovery.
The Aleppo Codex, written in Israel about 920 AD, is of comparable historical interest, and sits one level below the Dead Sea Scroll display. In this case you can see the original.
As I mentioned above, it’s the oldest extant version of the Bible in Hebrew, and has been used as a benchmark for accuracy by, among others, Maimonides. Much of it has gone missing, perhaps through theft.
Here it is on display:
And a close-up of the text, 1,100 years old:
Lovely gardens surround the Museum. Here’s an olive tree in case you haven’t seen one:
For some reason there are many rubber ducks on sale in the Museum Shop. Perhaps a reader can explain them to me.
Notice the variety, including devil ducks, surgeon ducks, Viking ducks, athlete ducks, and Santa ducks. What’s going on here? Is this Judaica?
Back in town: post-Rosh-Hashanah sale: mini shofars on sale for only five bucks!
And my customary lunch: a falafel sandwich with all the trimmings. I’ve had meat only once in Israel, and haven’t touched a drop of alcohol (I lose my desire to drink when I travel). I had a delicious meat lunch today, though, and you’ll see it in my next (and last) post from Israel.
Here are two women in he falafel shop. Their covered heads and long dresses led me to believe they were Orthodox Jewish women, but their clothing was strikingly attractive and stylish. I thus sent the photo below to a friend who had lived here, along with the question:
Are these women Jews (Haredim?). They have long dresses and big headscarves, but their clothes are pretty fancy. They are buying falafel sandwiches.
And the reply:
Yes, they are. Fancy clothes are ok, as long as they cover. You are supposed to please your man for continuous procreation.
That made me laugh out loud, though it’s probably true.
Today we feature another travel/historical/picture contribution from Athayde Tonhasca Júnior. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Macedonian treasures
Macedonia, in northern Greece, is the descendant of the Kingdom of Macedon of Alexander the Great fame, and not to be confused with Northern Macedonia, the independent country resulting from the dissolution of Yugoslavia. The young country’s choice of ‘Macedonia’ for its name caused a 25-year kerfuffle with Greece, which is still bitter about it (source of the images in parentheses).
Some of the 266 fragments of the Derveni Papyrus, the oldest European ‘book’ and one of the documents in the UNESCO’s ‘Memory of the World’ Programme. The papyrus roll from the 3rd-4th c. BC was found carbonized among the remains of a funeral pyre in northern Greece. The text, read with special photographic techniques, consists mainly of an allegorical-philosophical interpretation of a poem ascribed to the mythical poet Orpheus. One of the lines read: Zeus is the hea[d], Zeus the mid[dle], and from Zeus all things are ma[de], which unsurprisingly resonates with the idea of a Grand Poobah from the Abrahamic religions. Most modern myths such as the Flood, Immaculate Conception, Chosen People, Garden of Eden, Hell, are not original – the Ancient Pagans thought of them first. (Thessaloniki’s Archaeological Museum, AM):
A bill of sale from 3rd c. AD.: Titos, son of Lykos, buys from Amphotera a two-month old slave girl. The girl’s name is Nike. The price is set at 15 silver pieces. Slavery was a fact of life for the Greek city states and every other ancient civilisation. (AM):
JAC: I’ve highlighted Nike’s name
Aphrodite, or Venus for the Romans. Her family tree was unusual even for the imaginative Greeks: she was born from the white foam produced by the severed genitals of Uranus (Heaven), after his son Cronus threw them into the sea (aphros means ‘foam’). Aphrodite had a wide portfolio: goddess of sexual love, beauty and fertility, she was also worshipped by seafarers, prostitutes and warriors. This terracotta figurine is an early representation of Aphrodite, with no features to distinguish her from other goddesses. (Pella Archaeological Museum):
Hermaphroditus, the son of Aphrodite and Hermes. The water-nymph Salmacis, seeing him bathing in a pool, fell in love and prayed that they may never be separated. The gods acquiesced and joined the pair into one body with a dual nature, boy and girl. Among Greeks and Romans, Hermaphroditus was worshipped by – unsurprisingly – hermaphrodites, and also by ‘effeminate men’. But he was also seen as a deity of marriage for representing the union of a man and a woman. Hermaphroditus has experienced an unexpected revival into the modern pantheon, as the Church of Woke often cites him in mendacious arguments for the idea of sex as a continuum. (AM):
A votive relief dedicated to Hades, the god of the dead and the ruler of the underworld. 2nd c. AD. The Greeks had a god or demigod for any imaginable situation or activity. Listeners of A Way with Words mentioned some gods missing from the museum, including: Lemonades, god of cool refreshments; Ledes, god of low power lamps; Marmalades, god of chunky fruit spreads; Seus, god of children’s literature; Mediocretes, god of things that are slightly below average; Herpes and Chlamydia, the incurable romantics; Auricles and Ventricles, protagonists of a heart-breaking story; Apallo, god of shock and dismay; Diabetes, the god of carbonated sodas; and Phlebotomies, god of vampires. (AM):
You may have attended symposiums, but not likely the ones put together by the Ancient Greeks. Symposiums were gatherings of upper-class men in the andrones (‘men’s quarters’), which were furnished with couches along the walls. The lads would dine and drink in a semi-reclining position, which was a mark of elegance and decorum (the standing figure is a slave, who are always depicted as small). Household women did not take part: instead, cultured and sophisticated courtesans (the hetairai) were hired to entertain the guests with music, songs, dances and their ‘feminine charm’. (AM).
A helmet and funerary mask from ~520 BC. The warrior was buried wearing his helmet and his face was covered with a golden mask. The facial characteristics must have been created by pressing the gold sheet against the dead man’s face. (AM).
This gold chest is believed to have held the bones of King Philip II, and the gold wreath of oak leaves adorned his dead body. Philip II turned the kingdom of Macedonia into a regional power and prepared the ground for his son, Alexander the Great. The discovery of Philip’s tomb near modern Vergina in 1977 by Greek archaeologist Manolis Andronikos is one the most remarkable archaeological findings ever. (Royal Tombs of Vergina):
A replica of the Horologion of Philippi from 250-350 AD. This amazing instrument was used to calculate time, latitude, the height and the azimuth of the sun or some other star. You can find out how it works here. Only the Antikythera Mechanism could be more spectacular and awe-inspiring (AM):
A clay alabastron (a vessel used for storing oil) with a bust of the god Dionysus from the 2nd-1st c. BC. It is shaped like a phallus, which was a symbol of fertility and well-being, and a charm to avoid bad luck. Phallic amulets, often in the form of winged willies, really took off with the Romans. They were depicted in jewellery, pendants, lamps, relief carvings, mosaics, etc. and given to male children to ward off the evil eye and keep them healthy during their early years. These phallic charms were known as fascini (sing. fascinus), which is fascinating. (Museum of the Roman Agora, Thessaloniki):
Alexander III, aka the Great (356-323 BC). As king of Macedonia, Alexander created the largest empire in the ancient world until the Romans came to the stage, and he laid the foundations for the Hellenistic Period, when Greek language and culture spread throughout the Mediterranean. Alexander was no thicko: he studied literature, science, medicine and philosophy under the supervision of Aristotle, his private tutor. This head bust embodies all that riles the Woke apostles: empire, male dominance, whiteness. So inevitably the Classics are being cancelled, sometimes by classicists themselves. (Pella Archaeological Museum):
This lead tablet from the 4th c. BC contains a curse in the dialect spoken by the population of Pella (the ancient capital of Macedon). Among other things, it says: ‘…were I ever to unfold and read these words again after digging (the tablet) up, only then should Dionysophon marry, not before; may he indeed not take another woman than myself, but let me alone grow old by the side of Dionysophon and no one else”; ‘But please keep this (piece of writing) for my sake so that these events do not happen and wretched Thetima perishes miserably’. Curse tablets with magic texts intending to cause harm or to ward off evil were a big thing among Greeks and Romans. They were placed in graves, thrown into wells or nailed to the walls of temples. A whole collection of them was found in the English city of Bath. (Pella Archaeological Museum):
