Appreciation: Elie Borowski, 1913–2003
021
The Passionate Collector Who Founded the Bible Lands Museum
So the great man is gone. He was a big hulk of a man who moved as if his shoulders wanted to precede him. He moved like a racing rhinoceros. He would grab you by the arm and pull you close to his face. Every sentence that came out of his mouth was an impassioned one.
I first met Elie Borowski, who died in January just short of his 90th birthday, in 1984 when he was still living in his museum/home in Toronto. He was agitated even then. He was willing to donate his collection to the world—or to Canada—if only someone, he would howl, would construct a building to display it. Elie was one of the two or three greatest collectors of Near Eastern antiquities in the world. It goes without saying that his taste was superb, his knowledge extraordinary and his relations with the antiquities underworld highly honed from decades of negotiating.
In the end Canada failed to come through, despite all kinds of plans and promises. The best thing that happened to Elie in those years was his late-in-life marriage to Batya, a savvy, organized, confident American woman who was the only one capable of handling him—and he knew it. It was under her influence that he decided to relocate to Jerusalem. And it was then-Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek who, with his customary uncanny foresight, gave Elie a prime piece of real estate adjacent to the Israel Museum to build his museum.
Now all that was needed was the money to build it. In the end, he could not raise it—or even any significant part of it. There was nothing he could do but build it with his own money. And he did. Almost all of the $12 million came from the sale of artifacts in his collection. It was like giving up his own children.
Elie did not name the museum after himself but called it simply the Bible Lands Museum. The building is low and sleek, the exhibits are superbly designed to give a feeling of openness and spaciousness, the artifacts are the rarest and most beautiful, almost all of them from the civilizations of Israel’s neighbors, thus meshing nicely with the material in the Israel Museum. All this gets very high marks—but it is caviar to the general. Even when the tour buses were jamming Israel’s roads, they would circle past the Bible Lands Museum to the parking lot of its behemoth neighbor with its Israelite antiquities and the Shrine of the Book housing the Dead Sea Scrolls. On a brief tour there was no time for the Bible Lands Museum. And it was costing the Borowskis a million dollars a year just to operate it.
The question has always been whether some day the Bible Lands Museum would be absorbed by the Israel Museum. Never, if Elie had anything to do with it. The stories are endless. He felt slighted when the Israel Museum was establishing itself. Even so, he lent them numerous pieces for their opening. When he came to the opening, he bluntly declared the newly acquired centerpiece of the collection—a head of the Mesopotamian ruler Gudea that Yigael Yadin had purchased for the then-enormous sum of $30,000—a fake! It was several years before the museum admitted Elie was right. Today the Gudea serves as a paperweight in an assistant curator’s office.
Several years ago Batya assumed the helm of the museum, and is now assisted by her daughter Amanda. They share Elie’s vision. If anything, they have expanded the museum’s program of research, publication, exhibits, lectures, concerts, innovative 070children’s events and even computer-delivered materials. But there is no easy answer to the question of the museum’s future.
Elie Borowski was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1913, the son of a flour merchant. At 17 he entered the famous Mir Yeshiva for strict rabbinical training. Gradually, he moved to less Orthodox seminaries, where he was also exposed to secular studies, but still destined to become a rabbi; he ended up in Florence, by way of Berlin, at the Collegio Rabbinico Italiana. But he also enrolled at the University of Florence. Next he went to Rome on a fellowship at the Pontifical Biblical Institute, where he studied Assyriology and learned to read cuneiform. In 1938 he moved to Paris where materials were available for the completion of his doctoral dissertation. But the Second World War intervened.
Borowski volunteered for a Jewish unit of the French army. When Poland quickly fell to the Nazis in 1939, he was transferred to a Polish unit under the command of the French army. But in 1940, France also surrendered to the Nazi juggernaut. Borowski’s unit continued the fight, but was finally pushed to the Swiss border. When the soldiers fled to Switzerland, they were interned. Borowski served as a janitor, but also as an interpreter, since he was fluent in Polish, German, Italian, French and English (to say nothing of Hebrew, Yiddish, Akkadian and Sumerian). In this capacity he was transferred to Geneva, where he was given access to the Geneva museums and antiquities collections. This changed his life. He became an expert in the glyptic art of ancient Mesopotamian seals and was consulted as an expert by collectors and antiquities dealers. And he was soon collecting himself.
After the war, he went back to Poland. The culture and civilization—and his family—were all gone. The Polish authorities would give him permission to leave, however, only if he surrendered his passport. Believing there was no future for him in Poland, he gave it to them—and became a stateless person. He lived in Switzerland for 22 years, then he moved to Canada, which granted him citizenship. In gratitude, he planned to establish his museum there. But his efforts came to naught. In the meantime, he married Batya, his third wife, whose Yemenite father had lived in Jerusalem. Batya’s devotion to Israel led to the couple’s move there in the 1980s and with it the dream of their museum, now realized.
A Personal Reminiscence
I first encountered Elie Borowski four years before I actually met him. In 1950–1951, while in Europe as a Fulbright student, I took the opportunity to look up my great-uncle Otto Rubensohn in Basel, Switzerland, whom I had not seen since before the Second World War. “Onkel Otto” was trained in classical archaeology and had dug on Paros and Naxos, among the Greek islands, and, more importantly, at Syene (Assuan) in Egypt, where he first discovered many of the Elephantine papyri, which revealed a colony of Israelite mercenaries in the service, successively, of the area’s Egyptian and Persian rulers. Forced into early retirement from his posts in Berlin, Rubensohn had found refuge in Basel and remained active into his nineties. Among his prize “exhibits” was Elie Borowski, to whom he had become an informal mentor. At our reunion, Uncle Otto solemnly presented me with his copy of Elie’s dissertation, personally inscribed to him, and entitled Cylindres et Cachets Orientaux conservés dans les collections suisses, with an even longer subtitle. From beginning to end, it featured my uncle’s penciled notations, underlinings and even drawings, all showing how carefully he had read the book. To this day it remains a valued part of my library.
With this introduction, I was prepared to meet Elie in person when I visited Toronto, in April 1955, to participate for the first time in a meeting of the American Oriental Society—or I thought I was prepared. I looked him up at home one day and the next was attending a symposium at the meeting, having carefully chosen a seat at the front of the auditorium to record the proceedings for an article I had planned to write (my first as a “pro”). Elie burst into the hall, spotted me and literally dropped into my lap a pile of cuneiform texts and fragments wrapped in old newspaper. “See what you can do with 070these,” he said, and then disappeared. Eventually I recovered from my surprise sufficiently to study them more carefully, and thus began a lifetime of involvement, not only with these texts but with their flamboyant and endlessly fascinating owner.
One of Elie’s texts proved fairly routine, a duplicate of a well-known clay cone of King Lipit-Ishtar of Isin (c. 1934–1924 B.C.E.), which I duly, if coyly, recorded in my “Bibliography of Early Old Babylonian Royal Inscriptions” (1961) as “Unpublished; temp. in the author’s possession.” The second was more significant: a merchant’s balanced account that led me to a reconsideration of this entire genre of texts from the neo-Sumerian period of the 21st century B.C.E. I enlisted the help of John B. Curtis, a post-doctoral student at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, where I had meantime begun my teaching career, and together we published the text and a study of the genre, then known from 15 other examples. Years later, I recruited Daniel C. Snell to restudy the genre, now grown to 44 with new publications and acquisitions, for his Yale dissertation, and it appeared in print as Ledgers and Prices: Early Mesopotamian Merchant Accounts (1982), with Elie’s exemplar still prominently featured, but now placed in a wider context.
It was the third text, however, that really fanned my excitement. When Elie gave it to me, it consisted of dozens of fragments, large and small. I spent the next several years painstakingly gluing these fragments back together. What emerged was a large cuneiform tablet of nine columns (four on the obverse, five on the reverse), with more than 600 lines. Its broken date could be restored just enough to indicate that it belonged to the first half of the long reign of king Rim-Sin of Larsa (c. 1822–1763 B.C.E.), an older contemporary (and ultimately a victim) of Hammurapi of Babylon. More specifically, it proved to be the record of a ten-day ritual from the cult of Larsa, with a core of seven days of parallel rites that seemed to foreshadow the Biblical week. I assigned the text to my first doctoral student, Edwin C. Kingsbury; a precis of his dissertation was published in the HUC Annual in 1963, together with a hand-copy and photographs.
By this time I had moved on to Yale. With the vastly better facilities of the Yale Babylonian collection at my disposal, I disassembled the tablet again, baked it and reassembled it more expertly. Improved photographs and copies of the tablet have since appeared in various publications of the Bible Lands Museum (to which I returned all three texts long ago).
I found several more opportunities to visit Toronto. On some of these visits I was accompanied by my late wife, Edith, and we soon formed a friendship with Elie and Batya when she became a part—indeed, a crucial part—of his life. At the time he was providing for his growing collection of antiquities with a house that ingeniously combined the functions of residence and museum by the simple device of an enclosed passage connecting two separate structures.
Elie was less successful in persuading the Royal Ontario Museum to provide a permanent home for the bulk of his collection—willing enough though they were to exhibit major portions of it temporarily. Despairing of finding a home in his adopted city for his beloved antiquities but knowing full well their extraordinary value, he began to cast about for other possibilities. It was then that he turned to Jerusalem and found in Teddy Kollek, its mayor, a convinced and energetic supporter—but not before he had eyed New Haven. I was unable to persuade the Yale authorities to meet his terms, but my personal contacts with Elie and Batya continued unabated. They have been gracious hosts to me and my new wife, Nanette Stahl, on every one of our visits to Jerusalem—in their beautiful home, a veritable museum in its own right, when they both were in town, or at a local restaurant when Batya was away. I have admired the Bible Lands Museum as it took shape and have enjoyed many of its special exhibits since then. I have benefited from the numerous publications based on these exhibits, many of them edited by my fellow Assyriologist, Joan Goodnick Westenholz. I have sat on the museum’s advisory board and attended meetings and receptions with my fellow committee members in New York.
But beyond all these pleasant contacts, it was the larger-than-life personality of Elie that worked its fascination over me for half a century. Endowed with a scholar’s eye for the authentic and the beautiful in antique art, he surpassed all his professional colleagues in his ability to assess the pecuniary worth of his acquisitions. But he never lost sight of their educational and spiritual value. With unwavering determination, he succeeded in creating the Bible Lands Museum as a memorial to his martyred parents. It will surely stand as a monument to him as well.
The Passionate Collector Who Founded the Bible Lands Museum
You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.