Magnificent Obsession: The Private World of an Antiquities Collector

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The first time I telephoned Shlomo Moussaieff I naturally began by introducing myself. “I’m Hershel Shanks, editor of—”

“I know who you are,” he interrupted. “I’ve been avoiding you for 20 years.”

He has a high-pitched, almost whiny voice, heavily-accented with his native Jerusalem Hebrew. He has lived in London for over 30 years, but still speaks English poorly. From his voice, I imagined him a wizened old man, small, slight and twisted. When I later met him, I found that the only thing that matched his voice was his shuffle: He never lifts his heels, as if it were too much effort. But when he opened the door of his immense apartment overlooking Grosvenor Square—formerly the London 024pied-à-terre of Jordan’s King Hussein, who gave it to him, Moussaieff says, as a gift—I found a youngish-looking man for 72, of medium height, not unpowerful build, with large tortoise-shell glasses and strong enthusiasms expressed with that same high-pitched voice that now somehow seemed stronger. One of the world’s major collectors of Near Eastern antiquities, Shlomo Moussaieff had decided to let the editor of Biblical Archaeology Review into his world.

Most collectors of Moussaieff’s stature shun publicity. Not that they are reticent. On the contrary, they like nothing more than to discuss their treasures and show them off. But they also simply want to avoid “problems”—not only the late-night calls and the pesterings of amateurs, but more importantly government harassment and denigration from academics. Official antiquities authorities and large segments of the archaeological establishment regard collectors with disdain. The only lower form of life, in the imagination of governmental authorities and field archaeologists generally, is the antiquities dealer, the go-between who connects the looter and the collector.

The reason for this is that collectors and, even more so, dealers are seen as encouraging illegal excavations—that is, looting, which is now rampant in much of the Near East. Discourage collecting, eliminate antiquities dealers and you will discourage, if not eliminate, looting—so the argument goes. Without collectors to buy the loot and dealers to serve as middlemen, there would be no incentive for looting. For the past several years, the Israel Antiquities Authority has supported legislation that would outlaw antiquities dealers in Israel. 025Such laws are already on the books in Egypt, Turkey, Greece and Italy, as well as in Arab countries.

The response of the collectors and dealers is simple: Outlawing dealers and harassing the collectors only drives the market underground, as has happened in countries with such laws on the books, and deprives the public of the knowledge contained in the treasures the collectors and dealers trade in. As proof, Moussaieff points out that antiquities from all of these countries are pouring into London, now the center of the trade.

Robert Deutsch, a Tel Aviv antiquities dealer, agrees. He is devoting his life now to publishing epigraphic finds in private collections,^a something few field archaeologists would do. Deutsch doesn’t care, however, whether the artifacts he is publishing are looted or not—although he suggests that many if not most were discovered by chance rather than in an illegal excavation. In either case, he is willing to publish them. “To ignore items just because they weren’t found in an excavation run by a university is crazy,” he says. Even if it’s looted? I ask. “I don’t mind. If I found the Bible illegally excavated, I would publish it. The fact is that some important finds do not come from controlled excavations. So what do you want to do with them? Nothing?”

Doesn’t this encourage looting?

“This is an argument I can just laugh at,” he replies. “You know that in Greece and in Italy and in Turkey and in Syria and in Iraq, if they catch you with [illegal] antiquities, they put you for 20, 30 years in jail. Nobody is looting there? If you want Greek items or Italian items or Iraqi items or Egyptian items, go to London and you can find as much as you want.”

Shlomo Moussaieff traces his family back to a certain David, the brother of Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, better known as the Rambam or Maimonides, the great 12th-century Jewish philosopher (Guide of the Perplexed), compiler of Jewish law (the Mishneh Torah) and court physician (he wrote a treatise on sexual intercourse for the Sultan Omar, son of Nur al-Din). As we will see, this connection to Maimonides played a part in Moussaieff’s move from Jerusalem to London in 1963.

This ancestor David, while living in Samarkand (in Bukhara, modern Uzbekistan), was commissioned by the ruler as a gem and pearl dealer, a trade the family has followed ever since.^b The finest pearls recovered from the Persian Gulf were used to decorate the vestments of Genghis Khan himself. In the 18th century, the family expanded its businesses by importing silk from China along the newly opened Silk Road—through Bukhara and on to Europe. Still later, the family developed an especially lucrative tea business, importing the finest teas from India and China. They also established the first bank in Bukhara, the Bank Musa.

Always devout, by the 18th century the family was making frequent pilgrimages to Jerusalem. Finally, in 1890, prodded by increasing anti-Semitism, Shlomo Moussaieff’s grandfather (also named Shlomo), together with the entire clan, moved permanently to Jerusalem. According to family lore, as recently reported in an article in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Achronot, the family traveled to Jerusalem in a caravan of 500 camels, with trunks of gold and diamonds. A private army of a hundred swordbearers provided defense and security. They arrived just in time to celebrate Passover. To this day the entire clan (including people from as far away as the United States), numbering in the hundreds, celebrates Passover together in Jerusalem, fulfilling the millennial hope that concludes the Passover Seder, “Next Year in Jerusalem!”

Not long after his arrival, Shlomo’s grandfather built a mansion for himself in what would become the Bukharan quarter of the city, between Mea Shearim and the Street of the Prophets. It was there in 1923 that Shlomo was born. By this time, the Bukharan quarter was the most elegant residential section of the city. A hundred yards away was the beautiful Habi 027Saleh mosque. Young Shlomo developed a close and abiding friendship with Ahmed, the son of the muezzin who called the faithful to prayer five times a day from the mosque’s minaret. Together Shlomo and Ahmed would listen as Ahmed’s father read the Koran in Arabic; and Shlomo soon learned to speak Arabic like an Arab.

Ahmed’s father also told the boys stories from the Hebrew Bible. One of Shlomo’s favorites was the story of Joseph and his brothers. Another was the story of Pharaoh and Moses. According to Ahmed’s father, when the Lord split the Red Sea, he gave the Children of Israel the Promised Land only on condition that they keep his laws and commandments. Because they failed to abide by these laws and commandments, the land was given to the Arabs. God’s promise to Abraham and his descendants, on the other hand, was unconditional, unlike the promise to Moses. When the Jews failed to obey God’s laws, the Lord simply gave the land to another of Abraham’s children, to Ishmael, the ancestor of the Arabs. Shlomo didn’t like this story, but he learned to love the Koran and Arabic culture.

He also learned to love the New Testament—at least the parts he heard about. He remembers going every day to the English missionary hospital to have a foot infection dressed. There, each morning from 6:00 until 8:00, he waited his turn, while a very well-spoken man told him stories from the New Testament. The man told Shlomo that he too could get to heaven, as it is written. One day, the man gave Shlomo a New Testament in Hebrew. Shlomo brought it home and showed it to his father. At the time, Shlomo was a student at a Talmud Torah, an intensely religious school that was traditional among devout Jerusalem Jews. Shlomo’s father cut to pieces the New Testament Shlomo had brought home and threw it away. But Shlomo still remembers the stories fondly. Even as a boy, he was struck by the dissonance between these lovely stories and what he saw in his visits to the rich, gaudy churches in the neighborhood. On a visit to the nearby German church, he saw for the first time a swastika on the German flag.

Shlomo’s family life was not a happy one. According to Shlomo’s sister Tersa, Grandfather Shlomo was an abusive husband who often beat his wife. When he died, he left all his property to his sons, entirely excluding his daughters. Shlomo’s father, Rehavia, apparently inherited many of the grandfather’s qualities. Once when Rehavia hit Shlomo’s mother, Leah, Shlomo and his brother knocked their father to the floor, threatening to kill him.

Nor was Shlomo a good student; he is somewhat dyslexic, although this, of course, was not diagnosed at the time. And he was a disappointment to his father.Shlomo, for his part, bridled at the obsessively strict religious observance demanded by his devout father and hated the beatings with a stiff stick he received for even minor religious infractions. At the age of 12, Shlomo Moussaieff left home for good. He was never bar mitzvahed—the traditional rite of passage for Jewish boys who, at the age of 13, chant the Torah portion before the synagogue congregation. Shlomo lived for the most part in the burial caves known as Sanhedria, then open and unguarded, where he had hidden from his father when he played hooky from the Talmud Torah. Shlomo soon learned that there were coins lying around, scattered among old oil lamps, and even pieces of ancient glass. With a little digging, he could find more. At the age of 12, he became an antiquities collector—and an antiquities dealer, too. He sold some of his finds to major collectors and academics—like Eleazar L. Sukenik, Yigael Yadin’s father; Dr. Boris Schatz, the founder of the Bezalel School of Art; A. Reifenberg, a leading coin collector, whose loan subsequently formed the core of the Israel Museum’s coin collection; and the father of Ya’akov Meshorer, the current curator of archaeology at the Israel Museum and the world’s leading authority on Jewish coins.

When he was 15, Shlomo found a decorated lead sarcophagus. He decided to cut it up with an ax and sell the pieces to an Armenian who would mix the lead with silver to make jewelry. As he was hacking away at the sarcophagus, however, Shlomo was caught. He was taken before an Arab judge, who found him guilty and sent him away to a school/prison for delinquent children. Most of the other young boys were Arabs, and the few Jews were not well treated, so Shlomo, although not denying his Jewishness, said he wanted to learn the Koran. In his nine-month incarceration, he claims to have learned the entire Koran by heart.

Upon his release, he returned to the antiquities business, this time, however, buying from Arab villagers. He also worked with the biggest coin dealer in the city, a man named Schwartz, who lived in Mea Shearim. All the Arabs brought their coins to Schwartz. Shlomo soon became their friend, buying their coins directly. At the same time, he began keeping the best pieces for himself.

When Shlomo didn’t sleep in the Sanhedria tombs, he slept in the huge synagogue established by his family. Thousands of Jews came there to pray each day. The first morning service would begin at 4:00 a.m.

Subsequent services would follow one after another until noon. Then it would start all over again with the afternoon service. Each minyan (a quorum of at least 10 men, the minimum required for a service) prayed according to a different traditional chanting (nusach)—Yemenite, Bukharan, Saloniki, Izmir (Smyrna), Afghan, Persian and so on. Shlomo learned them all. He also learned the entire Hebrew Bible (Tanach) by heart.

During Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, Shlomo was taken prisoner in Jerusalem’s Old City by the Jordanians. He was about to be shot when he literally talked his way out it. “Yours is a noble religion,” he told his captor; “would you kill a man without giving him a last wish?” The Jordanian soldier agreed.

Shlomo asked for a cigarette. While he smoked, he explained to the soldier how much he (Shlomo) could do for him—by praising him to his superior officer, taking care of him after the war and getting him enough money to buy a “city” wife (a far more expensive commodity than a village girl). It worked! The man ultimately became a captain and got his city wife, to whom 030he is still happily married. As a civilian the former soldier served as go-between for Shlomo and his Jordanian antiquities sources.

Some time after hearing this story, I was at Moussaieff’s apartment when a prominent Jordanian visited him—the most important antiquities dealer in Jordan, I was told. I listened as Shlomo and the dealer reminisced about how long (42 years) they had worked together, having met through the Jordanian soldier who nearly killed Shlomo. They talked about how UN personnel—and later, when Shlomo was in London, Jordanian embassy personnel—had smuggled antiquities out of Jordan.

How Shlomo came to live in London is another story. Because he traced his family history back to Maimonides’ brother, he was especially pleased to obtain for his collection three autographed pages written by Maimonides himself. When Israel’s rabbinical authorities built their headquarters (Hechal Shlomo) in downtown Jerusalem, they wanted the Maimonides autographs for their museum. Moussaieff refused to sell, even for $3 million. At this time Moussaieff had an antiquities shop near Jaffa Gate and was having some trouble with the antiquities authorities. They searched his home looking for illegal antiquities, questioned his records and ultimately took away his license as an antiquities dealer. Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek offered to arrange a rent-free jewelry shop for Shlomo in the Jerusalem Hilton if he would give up the Maimonides pages. When Teddy failed to convince the Jerusalem Hilton owners of the plan, the owners of the London Hilton came forward with a similar offer—a lengthy lease for $5,000 a year. Moussaieff accepted. (His London lease has recently run out and he now must begin paying market rent. From $5,000 a year, it went up to $750,000 a year—which gives some idea of how much the original lease was worth.)

But Moussaieff does not sell antiquities in his prominent Hilton store. He is now solely a collector. He buys; he does not sell. He makes his money as his family always has—selling fine gems to the wealthy, mostly Arabs. He also manages $500 million dollars for his Arab clients, arranging everything from marriages to real estate deals. When he arranged a large sale of Jordanian arms and declined a commission, King Hussein gave him the apartment on Grosvenor Square that Moussaieff now lives in with his wife and daughter (one of three). He also has apartments in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa, and a home in Monaco (where he lives for tax reasons).

Like most collectors, Moussaieff specializes in discrete segments of the market—in early Semitic writings (of which he claims to have the world’s largest private collection) and symbols. He owns cuneiform inscriptions on tablets and prisms; Aramaic incantation bowls; Hebrew, Edomite, Ammonite and Moabite seals and bullae (he claims to have 600 such seals and 350 bullae); inscribed arrowheads; glass; oil lamps; ostraca; amulets; ancient synagogue lintels; menorot (600 of them); and on and on. In many of these categories, his collection rivals, if it does not exceed, those of the 031great museums of the world—the Metropolitan in New York, the British Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Each of them would love to have his collection. At least two of them actually have designs on it. But he hasn’t yet made up his mind. He has an ambiguous, one might say love-hate, relationship with Israel because of how the authorities have treated him over the years. Nevertheless, he is deeply devoted to the Jewish homeland. He is thinking of leaving his collection to the British Museum, if they would create a Bible room. He is also thinking of providing that after 50 or 100 years the collection would go to Israel—after the current crop of small minds are all dead.

Some of the fascinating objects in his collection:

• A ten-inch-high, four-sided cuneiform prism, in almost perfect condition, that contains the name “Abraham” as well as the names of several of Abraham’s relatives mentioned in the Bible;

• A bulla impressed with the seal of Baruch, the prophet Jeremiah’s friend, confidante and scribe;^c

• An elaborately engraved kuduru, or boundary stone, used by the Babylonians to commemorate royal grants of land, dating to about 1000 B.C.E. and containing depictions of two figures (one probably a god) along with a cuneiform inscription;

• A beautiful translucent orange chalcedony seal, dating to the eighth century B.C.E., that belonged to the prime minster of Hoshea, the last king of the northern kingdom of Israel.^d

Moussaieff’s collection also includes an extraordinary group of artifacts containing Christian symbols, which he says he likes very much, especially the oil lamps. He was able to acquire them years ago relatively cheaply because they were not highly prized in Jewish Jerusalem.

He also has three prize glass pieces signed by the great Greek glassmaker Ennion, a first-century C.E. glassmaker from the Phoenician city of Sidon. He has ancient manuscripts on leather and papyrus. He owns thousands of pieces of Judaica.

A conservative estimate numbers his collection at over 10,000 pieces. It has never been catalogued, although he expressed to me a willingness to have this done.

What motivates a man like Shlomo Moussaieff? The same thing that motivates most collectors. Tel Aviv University archaeologist David Ussishkin calls it “an inner need to possess things.” Robert Deutsch, the Tel Aviv collector and dealer who is publishing some of Moussaieff’s collection, calls it a sickness. “The true collector cannot stand not to buy something if he likes it. And he loves every piece he owns.” Why couldn’t you call it a love affair instead of a sickness? I asked him. “You can call it a love affair. But a collector cannot control his love.”

Moussaieff himself would not disagree. “You get addicted,” he told me. “Once you’re in it, you cannot leave it. Everyday there is something new, something to complete your collection. There is no end.”

Deutsch told me he has never bought a collection from a collector directly, only from his widow or children after the collector died. Collectors themselves just don’t sell. Eventually, however, all the antiquities in private hands “will come back on the market; they are not perishable; they are like pictures; and the most important thing is that the significant pieces will end up in museums.” Deutsch estimates there are five, maybe ten collectors in the world like Moussaieff.

Many collectors, however, combine their addiction with a kind of recluse psychology. One archaeologist compared it to the person who steals a famous painting from a museum. He cannot show it to anyone, but each day he goes to his secret room to look at it.

If Shlomo Moussaieff was once like this, he has now changed. He still has the addiction, but he is not 032reclusive about it. He is now willing to have his material published—though in his own way. The question is whether the academic community will welcome this. In its disdain for the collector and the dealer, much of the academic community also shuns the artifact.

“If you can’t try the looter, try the loot,” seems to be the attitude. Simply declare the looted object as non-existent; if it hasn’t been “excavated,” ignore it.

As late as the 19th century in England, a forfeiture suit would lie against any instrument of death. In this way, horses, oxen, carts, boats, mill-wheels and cauldrons were commonly forfeited. Thus was vengeance wreaked upon the instrument of death, whether animate or inanimate, and whether any fault was found or not. The law was finally done away with after a steam-engine, which ran off the tracks and killed someone, was declared forfeit.¹ As Pollock and Maitland have remarked, “Many horses and boats bore the guilt which should have been ascribed to beer.”²

It’s somewhat the same with “unprovenanced” artifacts.^e

For example, the Archaeological Institute of America will not permit an artifact in a private collection to be announced and discussed in a paper at its annual meeting if the artifact is in a private collection and was acquired after 1973, unless it was part of a previously existing collection or has been legally exported from its country of origin.

In early 1990, Moussaieff gave Robert Deutsch permission to publish some fifth-century B.C.E. bronze bowls inscribed in Phoenician and Aramaic; these bowls had been uncovered by a contractor excavating a construction site in the Sharon plain in central Israel and had somehow found their way to Moussaieff’s London apartment. Although he is a licensed antiquities dealer, Deutsch is also a serious academic archaeology student, specializing in epigraphy (inscriptions). Born in Romania, Deutsch immigrated to Israel in 1963, the same year Moussaieff moved to London. Deutsch was the same age—12—when he came to Israel as Moussaieff was when he left home. Deutsch and his parents—his father is a dentist—were among those who were literally purchased from Romania’s dictator Nicolae Ceausescu; in those years he was willing to sell Jews—that is, permit them to leave Romania—for varying amounts of money, most commonly $10,000 a head. Various Jewish philanthropic organizations were the purchasers. Deutsch’s family was among the lucky ones.

Wandering through Jerusalem’s Old City after the Six-Day War, Deutsch remembers seeing all the Arab antiquities dealers—all very legal. Finally, in 1980, Deutsch decided to open up an antiquities shop of his own in colorful Old Jaffa, in south Tel Aviv. He would buy in Jerusalem and sell in Tel Aviv. Eventually, he decided to become an archaeologist and epigrapher, taking courses at Hebrew University and enrolling as a student in Tel Aviv’s Institute of Archaeology. He has participated in a number of digs and will shortly 033receive his master’s degree. After that, he intends to pursue a Ph.D. Several of his teachers regard him highly.

To assist him in the publication of Moussaieff’s inscribed bronze bowls, Deutsch enlisted the cooperation of a senior scholar at Haifa University, Michael Heltzer. Together, Deutsch and Heltzer submitted a scholarly manuscript on Moussaieff’s inscribed bronze bowls to the most prestigious archaeological journal in Israel, the Israel Exploration Journal. The article was turned down, according to Deutsch, because of a new rule that the journal would not publish unprovenanced artifacts.

Deutsch and Heltzer then submitted their manuscript to Tel Aviv, the archaeological journal of the Tel Aviv University’s Institute of Archaeology. This time it was accepted. After it was set in type, however, two leading members of the institute faculty objected. If Moussaieff’s inscribed bronze bowls were published in Tel Aviv, they threatened never to publish an article in the journal again.

Fearful of a “scandal,” as one member of the editorial board explained, and wishing to avoid an internal controversy, the editors relented and rejected the article—or, more technically, Deutsch agreed to withdraw the article to avoid causing embarrassment to his teachers.

The Tel Aviv galley proofs, however, were made available to the authors, so they decided to add a number of other unpublished artifacts in private collections and publish them privately in a small book, which they proceeded to do under the title Forty Ancient West Semitic Inscriptions. The publisher is the Archaeological Center in Jaffa, the name of Deutsch’s antiquities shop.

When I checked this story with the Israel Exploration Journal, I learned that there is no such rule against the publication of unprovenanced artifacts. Whether the journal will publish an unprovenanced piece depends on the judgment of the editors at the time and who submits the article. Some of the most eminent scholars in the establishment have published unprovenanced pieces. Nahman Avigad, who at his death in 1992 was one of Israel’s most respected archaeologists and its leading epigrapher, published hoards of seals and seal-impressions (bullae) in numerous scholarly periodicals, including the Israel Exploration Journal, and nothing was ever said. Harvard’s Frank Moore Cross, America’s leading epigrapher, has likewise published unprovenanced pieces. It was the eminent French epigrapher André Lemaire who first published the only artifact to survive from the Solomonic Temple—the famous inscribed ivory pomegranate that surfaced, not in an excavation, but on the antiquities market. The Israel Museum, where it is now prominently displayed, ended up paying $550,000 for it after it had been smuggled out of Israel.³

Deutsch’s comment: “Avigad could do it. Nobody in Israel could criticize him because he was Avigad, a name everybody respected. Cross has the same kind of name.”

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I spoke with one leading American scholar who declared himself willing to publish some of Moussaieff’s pieces, but said that younger, untenured faculty would be fearful. “It could bollox their careers forever.” In Deutsch’s words: “No excavator in Israel will publish the material; they will be criticized by their colleagues.” A senior American academic worried that his university might be punished, either by other academics or by the Arab countries where members of his faculty were digging and where the particular artifacts we were discussing may have come from.

Deutsch himself isn’t worried. “I don’t have this problem. My name is soiled already because I am an antiquities dealer. Even though I am licensed by the Antiquities Authority, it doesn’t matter. My name is soiled. So I cannot soil it more. Everything I am doing now can only add to my name.”

Deutsch then points to the most obvious example of illegally excavated materials that were published by academics. The vast majority of the Dead Sea Scrolls were recovered from the antiquities market. They were excavated not by archaeologists, but by Bedouin from whom the archaeologists purchased them—often through antiquities dealers who had purchased them from the Bedouin. The scholars who were then handling the matter realized—it took no genius to recognize this—that either they must deal with the “looters” and the dealers or be deprived of the precious documents. They wisely chose the former alternative. “You have to confront the question,” said Deutsch, “what to do with 035material that is on the market, to take it into consideration, to publish it, or to see it as not existing.”

So far as I have been able to learn, no one has ever criticized the decision to publish the Dead Sea Scrolls, even though most of them were acquired on the antiquities market. What has been criticized is a decision by Yigael Yadin in 1967, then Israel’s leading archaeological luminary, to confiscate the famous Temple Scroll from the home of Kando, the dealer who had handled most of the Dead Sea Scroll sales on behalf of the Bedouin. For seven years, Yadin had been attempting through intermediaries to purchase the Temple Scroll (although at the time he did not know what it was). He could not deal directly with Kando because east Jerusalem, where Kando had his shop, and Bethlehem, where Kando lived, were under Jordanian control until the Six-Day War in 1967. Immediately after the war, Yadin sent a military officer to Kando’s home to confiscate the scroll. Later, Kando was paid $105,000 for it, but in the years before the war he had turned down $130,000 that Yadin had offered through an intermediary.^f Kando had wanted a million dollars for the scroll. According to one person who knew him well, Kando was a broken man after the confiscation of the Temple Scroll by an Israeli military officer. Kando regarded himself as a legitimate merchant and was accustomed to dealing with the scholars on that basis. He did not regard himself as the possessor of contraband, although technically, under Jordanian law, this was the case.

Those who are critical of Kando’s treatment in connection with the Temple Scroll—he may even have been threatened or actually charged criminally—point out that no Dead Sea Scrolls have surfaced since that time. One collector claims that three months before Kando’s death in 1993 he purchased from Kando 2,000 Dead Sea Scroll fragments, which he now keeps in a London vault.

Some may seek to support the decision to publish the scrolls, despite their poor pedigree, on the ground that at least we know where they came from. But does that mean we wouldn’t publish them if we didn’t know where they came from? We don’t know where the inscribed ivory pomegranate came from. We don’t know where the seals and bullae Avigad published came from.

Nevertheless, it often takes a Lemaire or an Avigad or a Cross to publish unprovenanced artifacts.

Shunning unprovenanced artifacts might be compared to a boycott. But a boycott always raises the question of secondary boycotts. And that is precisely what has happened in the case of publication of unprovenanced artifacts. Will Deutsch’s book be reviewed? Kyle McCarter, who holds the W.F. Albright chair at Johns Hopkins and is probably America’s leading younger epigrapher, has reviewed the book in BAR.^g André Lemaire is preparing his own review. But will the book be reviewed in the Israel Exploration Journal, Tel Aviv or the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, which is the leading academic journal in this country relating to Near Eastern archaeology?

And then there is the question as to whether scholars should cite works like Deutsch and Heltzer’s. As I write, this question is being seriously considered by the American Oriental Society.^h

Deutsch is incredulous at the situation. “If someone is going to deal with inscriptions of this period and these inscriptions are relevant to his work, how can he ignore [the inscriptions in his book]?” Any scholar who wishes to ignore his book and yet deal with this subject will “have to change his profession, because he can never write a complete analysis if he refuses to look at what’s new in the field.”

On the other hand, the scholarly community is legitimately concerned not only with the repercussions from publishing unprovenanced artifacts, but also over the quantities of illegally acquired antiquities that are pouring into London, Zurich and other European centers, especially from Iraq, Kuwait and Lebanon, war-ravaged countries that are most subject to looting.

The Iraqi government has published a catalogue of artifacts missing from Iraqi museums to alert collectors and dealers. Whether this depresses the market is unknown. Although this is one category of artifacts that almost no one would touch, others find this a peccadillo. Better in western hands, where it will eventually end up in a public museum, than in Iraqi hands, is the private feeling of some dealers and collectors, as well as scholars. No one, however, would say this for publication.

Whether Israel should follow other countries—from Italy, Greece, Turkey and Egypt to Lebanon, Syria and Iraq—in banning antiquities dealers depends in large part on whether such legislation would be counter-productive. The supporters of the legislation claim the moral high-ground, and also argue that banning the dealers would be efficacious as a practical matter. The opponents say the legislation will only drive the trade underground—as has happened in these other countries, they contend. There is no scarcity of product on the London antiquities market from any of these venues.

In the case of Israel, such a law would even encourage the export of such articles, say the antiquities dealers and collectors. One Israeli collector told me that he purchases artifacts on the London antiquities market to bring them back to Israel. But for the time being, he must keep his purchases secret, lest he be harassed by the authorities. Of late, he has even engaged in the clearly illegal activity of purchasing illegally excavated artifacts to prevent them from being smuggled out of the country. A devoted Zionist, he says of his illegally acquired antiquities, “When they honor me, I will sing.”

What he really means is that if he could be assured that he would not be harassed by the authorities and vilified by some members of the scholarly community, 062he would let the public see what he has.

People like Deutsch point to what has happened to one of the world’s most famous collectors and dealers, Elie Borowski. With a collection estimated to be worth more than $50 million, Borowski, now past 80, decided to let the world see his treasures—or at least some of them.ⁱ Then-mayor Teddy Kollek gave Borowski a prime piece of Jerusalem real estate adjacent to the Israel Museum. On it, Borowski has built the widely praised Bible Lands Museum, where he elegantly displays that part of his collection he has chosen to make public by giving it to the museum. At the museum opening in 1992, some archaeologists damned the collection, saying it “smelled.” Others boycotted the event. Borowski’s collection was “stolen property,” said David Ilan, a young archaeologist from Hebrew Union College’s school of archaeology. “The exhibition of unprovenanced (i.e. looted) antiquities should be anathema,” Ilan said. He would not even publish anything in Borowski’s collection. As for Borowski himself, he is a “megalomaniac,” says Ilan. Borowski was deeply hurt. As a result of the way Borowski and his museum have been treated, other collectors are sometimes reluctant to contribute or even lend their pieces to the museum.

Yet as one well-known restorer/collector/dealer who asked not to be named told me, “No collectors, no museums!” He was referring to the fact that many museums, including the Israel Museum, opened mainly with gifts from private collections. In the case of the Israel Museum, these collections included some of the collectors to whom Shlomo Moussaieff sold coins from the Sanhedria Tombs half a century ago.

Yet today these collectors are more likely to be vilified than honored. Deutsch and Heltzer have now written a second book in which they publish additional inscriptions in private hands.^j Indeed, Deutsch has decided to devote his life to the publication of inscriptions in private collections. His master’s thesis publishes over 200 inscribed bullae that have been put at his disposal. Several collectors have declined to make their works available to Deutsch for publication, however, because they are worried about government harassment or academic vilification. Especially in Israel, they are fearful that “if they publish something from their collection, someone from the authorities may come to ask questions or just to see it. They don’t want problems.”

Moussaieff says he knows collectors with the same fears. Perhaps that is why publication of an artifact, oddly enough, reduces its value on the market. Although this contradicts common sense, both Moussaieff and Deutsch agree that it is the case—publication reduces the value of a piece. Moussaieff describes some of the collectors who fear publication—and even publicity—as paranoid: “They’re afraid some authority will come and take their collection. [In Israel] some of them told me that the new antiquities law is that if you cannot prove where it came from, that means it is stolen. So they have a right to be paranoid. I don’t blame them.” Moussaieff is referring to a 1978 law declaring all antiquities in the ground or found on the surface to be the property of the state. Before 1978, if someone found a coin and took it home, says Deutsch, “he would be regarded as a lover of his country and its history. Today, if he does the same thing, he is a thief.” The effect of the law, he says, is that pieces are smuggled out of the country instead of coming to the Israeli antiquities market.^k

Moussaieff has his own fears about publishing his collection. “I’m testing the waters. I’ve decided to publish, but very slowly, slowly. I’m afraid that one day an officer of the head of the antiquities department will tell me, ‘Listen, I don’t like you; get out of this country.’ Or some officer will say, ‘Listen, first leave everything you have here and then you can leave the country.’”

A year ago Moussaieff was searched as he was leaving Israel. As he described it, “They searched me like a criminal. They searched my daughter. They opened my suitcase for everybody to see. I need to smuggle something out of there myself? I can get things everywhere in the world. I don’t need to be so stupid [as to bring it out myself].”

In fact, it’s pretty easy to smuggle something out. Small things like seals can simply be swallowed—or more likely hidden on the body or among clothes. Messengers are easy to find; bags are rarely searched. Another method is to obtain an export certificate for a common item such as a bowl that can be legally purchased in any antiquities shop and then substitute a rare inscribed bowl. Even a customs inspector would be unable to detect the difference—assuming he found the bowl in the first place.

Moussaieff does not know why the Israel Antiquities Authority tried to humiliate him by searching him. “Because [retired General Amir] Drori [head of the Antiquities Authority] is a general, he thinks this is the way to do things—to search people. He thinks I am an Arab terrorist or something like that. He has the search mentality, so he searched.”

When I asked Moussaieff about his relations with Drori, he waxed wrathful:

“Well, I called him. He said he apologized. ‘So please apologize in the newspaper.’ ‘Oh, no, this I am not going to do.’ I asked him why do you search me? ‘Well, you have to know, I have to fulfill my duty.’ I said, ‘Eichmann also said the same thing; he had to fulfill his duty. Duty to whom? Duty to what? This is not an answer for me.’ I know him very well. He did it to show me he’s a strong man; he wants to teach me a lesson.”

A law requiring contractors who come across antiquities in a construction site to pay for an archaeological excavation before construction can continue has also been counter-productive, according to several sources: The contractors either destroy the antiquities or, as in the case of the inscribed bronze bowls, smuggle the finds out of the country. They want to avoid having their project delayed.

Moussaieff regards the archaeological community as stupid: “They have no budget; they could have a budget; they could make millions, but they don’t do it. They do nothing.” Leading archaeologists come to him for help in financing their excavations. He gives them help, mostly $10,000. “They dig two meters and make a big noise, finding nothing—a few pieces of broken pottery. This is not excavation.” But they could dig like the Arabs and recover real treasures, he says. “The Arabs work all day and all night to find something—all the family, all the tribe.” Moussaieff claims that quantities of precious inscribed bullae have been found by Arabs who sift excavators’ dumps. According to Moussaieff, a hoard of inscribed bullae he showed me was recovered from a Jerusalem excavation dump in this way. “This is not stealing,” he says, “It’s better this way than the rain should come and spoil everything [in the case of unbaked bullae].”

Another reason archaeologists don’t find the important pieces is that they don’t dig in the right places, according to Moussaieff. The Arabs do. They dig mainly in burial caves, not tells. In tells, whole vessels are rare. As Deutsch confirmed, “Iron Age cooking pots you don’t find on the market,” even though they are very common in the excavation of tells, “but you will find juglets and oil lamps that were buried in caves.” That 063is why the looters dig mostly in caves, according to Moussaieff and Deutsch. It’s a little like Willie Sutton, the great bank-robber, who was asked why he robbed banks. “Because that’s where the money is,” he replied.

Archaeologist William Dever, former director of the William F. Albright School of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, agrees. “Better than 99 percent of the material on the antiquities market [in Israel and the West Bank] comes from tombs. The tells are well-protected by the Antiquities Authority. But it’s very hard to police isolated tombs. The Arabs dig out there in the morning with a guard posted outside [to warn of danger].” Dever himself has published inscriptions purchased on the market, but complains that some of his “own” (that is, American) scientific journals won’t publish other artifacts he would like to expose to the world.

Yet Dever would surely defend the archaeologists who dig in tells rather than in tombs. Archaeologists are looking not for treasure but for the detritus of history that reveals how people lived, how social change occurred and what forces propelled society.

But the tombs tell this story, too, and the archaeologists won’t excavate the tombs even when they know where they are. For example, in Deir el-Balah, the Bedouin dug up dozens of fantastic anthropoid coffins that came onto the antiquities market, together with the associated grave goods of jewelry, alabaster and bronze vessels, Egyptian scarabs, carnelian beads, gold amulets and fine Mycenaean and Cypriot pottery. When the archaeologists discovered where these anthropoid coffins were coming from and sent an expedition to excavate, they dug only four additional coffins,^l leaving no one knows how many in the ground, abandoning the graveyard for the nearby settlement, which had no museum-type artifacts.

In Jerusalem itself, First Temple period tombs were discovered at a site called Ketef Hinnom.^m One of the tombs was found to contain an unrobbed bone repository—the roof had collapsed in antiquity—with hundreds of artifacts, including two silver amulets containing the oldest biblical texts ever discovered. Many more tombs lie unexcavated in this extraordinary cemetery. “The archaeologists,” charges Deutsch, “are not interested in digging another burial cave. They’ve dug enough caves. They have other interests.”

Do you want to know who the people were who lived at Qumran, the settlement adjacent to where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found? Scholars are fiercely debating who these Qumranites were—Essenes or something else—yet they ignore the cemetery of approximately 1,100 tombs adjacent to the settlement.

In short, the illegal diggers know where the gold is—and they are willing to dig for it. But not so the academic community, which claims it is interested only in history, not treasure.

Scorned by the archaeological establishment, the collector is also the target of the fake-maker. How difficult the problem can be became clear when Moussaieff showed me two ostraca, inscribed potsherds, containing Semitic writing in the kind of letters used before the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. If authentic, the ostraca are extraordinarily important. At least one purports to be written by a king’s scribe and refers to three shekels of Tarshish silver. Tarshish is the mysterious place where King Solomon sent his fleet to bring back “gold and silver, ivory, apes and peacocks” (1 Kings 10:22). Moussaieff hands the ostraca to me. The letters on the potsherds are only dimly visible, but when Moussaieff sprays them with distilled water, they suddenly jump out for a few seconds with unmistakable clarity, only to fade away again as the water evaporates.

To my unpracticed eye, the writing seems almost too perfect. The letters are distinct and properly spaced, filling out the irregular shape of the potsherd quite precisely. I secretly congratulate myself when André Lemaire, one of the world’s most renowned epigraphers, arrives at Moussaieff’s apartment about an hour later and ends up with the same judgment. Lemaire looks at the ostraca slowly, carefully, and smiles as is his wont. “I don’t know. I am suspicious,” he says. “It is almost too perfect.”

Moussaieff is clearly disappointed. He very much wants them to be genuine. The price for the pair is $200,000. It is not clear whether Moussaieff has already purchased them or is considering purchasing them. He gives different stories at different times. Moussaieff is paleographically knowledgeable enough to discuss the shape of various letters with Lemaire. Lemaire does not budge from his judgment, however. “I am not sure,” he insists and smiles. Then Moussaieff plays his trump card. “Look at the irridation,” he says, referring to the powdery white crust or patina that irregularly blotches the potsherd.ⁿ “The letters are under the irridation. There is no way they can fake the irridation.”

Like all ostraca, these two are written on so-called body sherds, potsherds from the body of the vessel, rather than on the base, rim or handle. Any excavation will produce thousands of such sherds, although those with writing on them are rare. It is easy enough to get a body sherd on which to fake an ostracon, even one with a patina on it. But the faker must be careful to avoid the patina that often develops on the sherds: If he writes over the patina, that will be obvious. And there is no way yet known to fake the patina, says Moussaieff. If the writing is under the patina, the writing is older than the patina.

Lemaire is an expert in paleography, the shape and form of ancient letters. He could date the writing, if it was genuine, to about the seventh century B.C.E. But he is not an expert in patinas and their development. All he can say is, “I am not sure.” He smiles.

Later, in Tel Aviv, I ask Deutsch if he has seen the ostraca. “Yes. They are 100 percent genuine. If they are a fake,” he says, “I know who did it. There is only one man in the world who knows enough to fake them—Frank Moore Cross,” referring to the Harvard professor whom many consider the greatest living paleographer. “Don’t they seem too perfect?” I ask. Deutsch has two replies. First, they were made by a king’s scribe. Second, the two were in a lot of nearly a dozen other ostraca; the others are not so perfect; these are the best of the lot.

Back in London, I am looking at the ostraca again when a leading restorer arrives from Zurich. He asks that his name not be used. With water to bring out the letters, Moussaieff shows the restorer the potsherds and begins reading the startling Hebrew contents to him; the restorer promptly interrupts Moussaieff and brushes aside his hand pointing to the letters. “They’re fakes!” the restorer exclaims with an air of complete certainty. Moussaieff’s argument about the irridation doesn’t move him a bit. “Look at the back of the sherd,” he says. There is no irridation on the back, implying that the irridation too had been faked. “Why no irridation on the back?” But the back has a rougher surface than the burnished front on which the scribe had written. Perhaps that’s why irridation did not form. “Look at how carefully, slowly, the letters were written,” the restorer goes on, pointing to the thick, even lines of the letter shin (SH). “Look at how the tail of the lamed [L] doesn’t become thin as it does in the case of a practiced scribe writing quickly.”

The restorer wets a spot on one ostracon and then touches it with the end of his index finger, alternately pressing the wet spot with his finger and then removing it. He detects glue in the patina that the faker had put on the sherd after inscribing it. The restorer has me perform the same experiment. I try to feel the glue holding on to the tip of my finger as I press and then release it. Perhaps I can feel a little glue, but I am not sure. Moussaieff says he will arrange for laboratory tests.

A few days later, Moussaieff calls me from London: He tells me that he has spent half an hour on the telephone with Yossi (Joseph) Naveh, who, since Nahman Avigad’s death, is now Israel’s leading paleographer. Naveh 064says he cannot be 100 percent sure, but he is 99.9 percent certain it is genuine.

A week later I again talk to Moussaieff, who reports that a lab to whom he had sent the ostraca has detected some glue on the surface. Moussaieff is shaken but still confident. He is going to send it to five other labs, just to make sure. As of this writing, that is where the matter stands. “You think it’s easy to be a collector—to be always in a constant battle with the faker, to waste money on fakes?” asks Moussaieff. “I can do a million things, other things that I can benefit a million times more.”

Nobody really knows how many fakes there are in private collections and in museum vitrines. Few dealers and collectors will deny that they have, at one time or another, been taken in by a fake. In 1883, antiquities dealer Moses Wilhelm Shapira shot himself in the head after manuscripts of the Ten Commandments he had offered to the British Museum were declared fakes. At the opening of the Israel Museum, Elie Borowski, then a leading collector and dealer, declared the prize artifact in the opening exhibit, a head of Gudea purchased for the occasion, to be a fake. Borowski still smarts from the treatment he received from the museum authorities for his pains. Ultimately, however, they were forced to agree with him; the Gudea head now serves as a paper weight in a junior curator’s office. The stories are endless. It is cheap and easy, Deutsch tell me, to cast suspicion on practically any unprovenanced find of recent vintage. The rumors fly.

Another problem facing collectors and dealers is dating the finds. This is usually done by comparison with similar objects that have been found in excavations and are securely dated themselves. Most of the time, these comparisons provide a more accurate date than carbon-14 or thermoluminescence tests. We now know enough about Semitic writing in the seventh century B.C.E., for example, so that we can easily date unprovenanced inscriptions to that time.

Academic opponents of collectors and dealers often declare unprovenanced artifacts “worthless.” But this is a foolish exaggeration. The unprovenanced artifact is worth less, but it is clearly far from worthless, especially in the case of inscriptions. If we knew where it came from and whether it was carefully excavated with the most modern methods, we would have more confidence in the dating and we would know the archaeological context in which it was found. From this, we might learn a great deal both about the object and the context. But the loss is often exaggerated. For example, how much more do we know about the inscribed Hebrew bullae found in Yigal Shiloh’s stratigraphically first-rate excavation in the part of Jerusalem known as the City of David than we do about similar bullae that have appeared on the antiquities market? Some, but not a great deal.

The problem is greater, however, with unprovenanced artifacts for which there is no easy comparison. For example, Moussaieff has three seals that he claims date to the tenth century B.C.E., the time of the United Kingdom of Israel, the time of King David and King Solomon. One of the greatest archaeological cruxes concerns the lack of archaeologically recovered material from the tenth century B.C.E., the time of Israel’s greatest glory. Based on the paucity of archaeological material from this period, some scholars have declared King David and King Solomon to be largely fictional characters, with as much historical reality, say, as King Arthur.^o The Biblical stories, these scholars contend, were made up centuries later to give Israel a magnificent, if legendary, past.

In this context, Moussaieff’s tenth-century seals, if that’s what they are, are extremely important. Only one of them has been seen by the outside world, but it is, according to Moussaieff, the seal of King Solomon himself. The seal contains three Hebrew letters, shin, lamed and mem, which spell the name Shlomo, the Hebrew form of Solomon. Usually a fourth letter, heh, follows these letters; the heh is sometimes omitted in very early spellings of certain words when, as here, it has no phonetic value. The seal also contains the figure of a man in what may be royal headgear.

Moussaieff allowed Manfred Lehmann, an independent scholar (unaffiliated with an academic institution) who adopted Moussaieff’s dating, to publish the seal in an obscure New York Jewish newspaper named the Algemeiner Journal. The publication caused no waves; no one took note of it. I asked one scholar, who asked not to be named, about the seal. Clearly eighth century, he said, based on his analysis of the letters. That is, at least 200 years after King Solomon’s time.

Moussaieff disagrees. His reasoning illustrates the way he thinks—with a kind of speculation that most scholars vehemently resist. “He [the scholar] never saw a seal like this before. What he never saw before does not exist. They have never found a tenth-century seal in an excavation. So they have nothing to compare it to.”

He sees the building on the seal as a temple. On one side of the seal, a figure stands in front of the temple, in a blessing gesture; on the other side of the seal, is a man in the temple. Nothing like this can be found in the eighth century. “It’s completely different from any eighth-century seal. Even its shape is different. In the Bible you have a long description of King Solomon praying at the temple and blessing the people. And then there’s the name [on the seal]. What can it be but Solomon and the Temple?” Moussaieff asks. “Everything more or less fits. You need a bit of imagination. You cannot be so precise to say that because of this dot [in the inscription] it’s one way, and if the dot is not there, it’s not tenth century.”

Is there a part of Shlomo Moussaieff that identifies with his namesake, Solomon? If collecting is an addiction with him, it is nevertheless an addiction defined and guided by his love for the Bible and everything related to it. That—and a reverence for Jewish history—is the principle that largely determines what he collects. In a sense, the Biblical past is his present; his home, after all, is a kind of temple, or maybe a shrine. As Moussaieff holds his dramatic representation of the Akedah (Abraham’s binding of Isaac), or the seal he claims belonged to Solomon’s court, or his bulla from the prophet Jeremiah’s scribe, or an oil lamp inscribed with the Christian cross, one feels that the Biblical stories he memorized as a boy are flashing across his mind—that he inhabits them.

But there’s the other Moussaieff, too, the hardened collector and deal-maker, the boy from Uzbekistan who spent his youth in Jerusalem’s caves. Although he’s convinced that the seal dates to the time of Solomon, this practical man is nevertheless going to ask two other experts for their opinion.

The first time I telephoned Shlomo Moussaieff I naturally began by introducing myself. “I’m Hershel Shanks, editor of—”