A glimpse of ‘ancient’ Israel

Two exhibitions display attempts to document the biblical past by photographing the exotic present.

By CARL HOFFMAN
'Women Grinding Grain' 521 (photo credit: Courtesy/Eretz Israel Musem)
'Women Grinding Grain' 521
(photo credit: Courtesy/Eretz Israel Musem)
Sometimes it is one of the minor, fleeting episodes in a novel that turns out to be one of the most memorable.
Buried way toward the end of James Michener’s 1965 best-seller The Source, for example, is a short but striking vignette which suggests that Christian fundamentalists were not always as supportive of the modern State of Israel as they claim to be today.
The book’s protagonist, archeologist John Cullinane, is in Israel to direct a major archeological dig at a site in the Galilee, which Michener calls “Tell Makor.” One morning, he has a chance meeting with a Prof. Thomas Brooks, teacher at a small Protestant Bible college in Davenport, Iowa. Brooks is making one of his regular visits to Israel with his wife, Grace, to take slide photos of people and places to illustrate his lectures on “Old Testament Times” and “Scenes from the Life of Christ.”
Having just wound up his 1964 photographic tour of Israel, a somewhat embittered Prof. Brooks tells Cullinane, “I can’t approve of what’s been going on here in Palestine. Who wants to see a great gaping ditch run smack down the middle of the Holy Land?” When Cullinane counters that the new State of Israel must have water, Brooks peevishly replies that the ditches, factories, towns and modern new roads springing up everywhere “destroy the feeling we used to get from this land.”
Mrs. Brooks dutifully agrees: “I remember when we first came here, the British administered it then, and it looked just as it must have in Bible times.”
Prof. Brooks concludes, “I remember when we first came here, you could find in almost any village a water well which looked exactly as it must have in the time of Christ. We got some of the most extraordinary pictures of women walking to the well with great earthenware jars on their heads. You could have sworn it was Miriam or Rachel. Now it’s nothing but deep artesian wells… One gets a much better sense of the Holy Land in Muslim Jordan than he does over here in the Jewish sector.”
When Brooks tells of going to Jordan to photograph Arabs who look “just like prophets from the Old Testament,” Cullinane wonders aloud whether Jeremiah dressed like an Arab. Mrs. Brooks retorts, “Our audiences think he did.”
ONE GROUP of people who became famous for catering to such audiences was a utopian Christian society founded in Jerusalem in 1881 by Americans Horatio and Anna Spafford. Horatio Spafford had been a prosperous attorney and Presbyterian church elder before he and his family were afflicted with a succession of personal disasters, beginning with the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which devastated their city and destroyed their home. After a decade of further misfortune – which included the deaths at sea of all four of their young daughters – the Spaffords arrived in Jerusalem with 13 other pilgrims, rented quarters in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City near Damascus Gate, adopted a communal lifestyle and began to engage in philanthropic activities. These would eventually include such initiatives as soup kitchens, hospitals and orphanages, as well as a small farm, dairy, bakery and carpenters’ shop, among other projects.
In time, the group became a largely self-sufficient community, known as the American Colony.
After a few years of desultory picture taking, the American Colony established a full-fledged photography department in 1898. This was more than just a name. By the early years of the 20th century, the department’s skilled photographers and photographic assistants were creating images of the Holy Land, which were developed and printed by in-house lab technicians and then hand-colored by the department’s own photo-tinting artists. An American Colony store, near Jaffa Gate, then sold prints, theme photo albums, stereoscope and panoramic photographs, postcards and glass magic-lantern slides. Aside from selling these products at the store itself – chiefly to tourists, pilgrims and other Western visitors to the Holy Land – the American Colony made a tidy income filling international orders of custom sets of photos, thematic albums and glass slides.
Not surprisingly, the subjects and themes of these photographs were geared toward audiences who genuinely considered the Holy Land to be holy – the actual, living Land of the Bible, the land where King David ruled, the prophets thundered and, later, where Jesus lived and preached.
Eighty of these photographs are currently on display at the Eretz Israel Museum in Ramat Aviv in an exhibition entitled “Images from the Land of the Bible: People, Lives and Landscapes, 1898-1934.” Exhibition curator Dr. Etan Ayalon focused on pictures depicting exotic and presumably biblical-looking Arabs and Beduin engaged in daily life and work – plowing, fishing, drawing water from village wells, tending flocks of sheep, working at carpentry and other domestic labors – in ways that both the photographers and their audiences believed had remained virtually unchanged since Old and New Testament times.
We thus see a young Beduin shepherd hurling a stone from a woven slingshot in a photo that is clearly meant to reference the story of David and Goliath. We see a young Arab woman drawing water from Jacob’s Well in Nablus on the plot of land that Jacob is said to have purchased in the city of Shechem. A stern-looking Beduin sheikh – dressed in a woolen outer garment, scarf and keffiyeh, and with a knife and sword at his side – glowers at the camera, depicting the photographer’s image of a biblical patriarch.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the bulk of the photographs are intended to reference New Testament scripture.
Exotically garbed Arab women draw water from Mary’s Well in Nazareth, where Christian tradition says the Angel Gabriel told Mary she would give birth to Jesus. Beduin rest with their sheep at night in Shepherds’ Field in Bethlehem, where shepherds were told of Jesus’s birth. Recalling the deep connection between Jesus and fishermen of the Kinneret, pictures show fisherman casting and dragging nets at the Sea of Galilee.
Years before the widespread use of color film, many of the pictures were hand colored by artists who specialized in this technique. Some of the people in the pictures have obviously been posed in scenes clearly staged by the photographers, like the photo of the boy with the slingshot. One or two photos are actually biblically incorrect, such as a picture of a village farmer plowing a field with “an ox and an ass together,” a combination prohibited in Deuteronomy 22:10.
Significantly, of the 80 American Colony Photo Department pictures presented in this exhibition, only one depicts Jews. We see a photo, taken sometime in the 1920s, of Jewish children picking almonds in Rishon Lezion. That and nothing more.
Curator Ayalon’s explanation of the photo is that while American Colony photographers captured many scenes of Jewish life in the towns and cities, they regarded the Arabs as “perpetuators of biblical tradition.”
RUNNING CONCURRENTLY with “Images from the Land of the Bible” is another exhibition of roughly 100 photographs that also attempt to depict “ancient” “biblical” Israelites.
But in this exhibition, “A Yemenite Portrait: Jewish Orientalism in Local Photography, 1881-1948,” the photographers were Jewish, the subjects of the photos were all Jewish, and one suspects that the audience for these photos was largely Jewish as well.
In his introduction to the exhibit, curator Guy Raz says, “Imagine a picture dated 100 years ago, let us say 1911. A Jewish photographer who has recently emigrated from Russia sets up a heavy tripod and positions his camera.
Slowly a group of Jews who have recently come from Yemen gathers in front of him, and the photographer, with his Western European background and technical skills and his Zionist-cultural emotions and way of thinking, is now faced with what he perceives as his long-lost relatives who come from a Mizrahi… tradition and customs reminiscent of the biblical Jew.”
The assembled Yemenite immigrants, says Raz, are about to have their picture taken by “a classical European documentary photographer trying to capture, domesticate and contain the portrait of the Jewish noble savage.”
Indeed, looking at many of these photographs – sepia-toned studies of handsome, craggy-faced, wise and dignified- looking Yemenite Jewish men bedecked in their traditional regalia and gazing pensively into the distance – one is reminded of strikingly similar photographs of North American Indians taken by Edward Sheriff Curtis at roughly the same time. Herdsmen and warriors abound in these pictures, as do sages and prophets. Photographs portray pensive young Ephraims and Manassehs, as well as Sarahs, Rebekahs, Rachels and Leahs whose costumes and adornments are beyond “exotic.”
As the years pass and the First and Second Aliya photographers from Russia and Poland slowly give way to a new influx of photographers from Germany and Austria, we can see the emphasis in photography begin to change from Orientalism and a Zionist desire to reconnect with biblical roots to greater degrees of modernism in both subject and technique. Newer and better cameras enable a wider range of possibilities, along with a desire to show the Yemenite Jews integrating with a burgeoning new Israel. Rather than attempt to make the Yemenites look “ancient” or “biblical,” many of the new photographers prefer to document the immigrants’ transition to contemporary life as farmers, fighters and students in modern schools.
The lesson one draws from this new approach – of photographing people as they are and not as how we would like to imagine the past – is simple and profound: What was, was. And what is, is.
“Images from the Land of the Bible” is showing until September 30 and “A Yemenite Portrait” until April 30 at the Eretz Israel Museum, 2 Haim Levanon Street, Ramat Aviv, Tel Aviv. For further information, call (03) 641-5244 or visit http://www.eretzmuseum.org.il.