New Online Access to Records from British Mandate Palestine
018
Digitization projects on both sides of the Atlantic are bringing to life old photographs and forgotten letters from early-20th-century Palestine.
The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) has undertaken an effort to make digital scans of the entire British Mandate Antiquities Department archive—a collection of some 40,000 documents, including maps, correspondence between archaeologists, early excavation permits and site photos. The $400,000 project is part of a national heritage preservation program in the prime minister’s office.
The archive is of great interest to archaeologists and historians today because it preserves records and pre-excavation photos of sites that are much changed today, such as Capernaum. Letters also show the role that archaeological artifacts played in British treaty renegotiations with the Turks following World War I. Dozens of documents relate to archaeological artifacts taken to Turkey from Palestine during the final years of Ottoman rule, including unnamed objects from Megiddo, Jericho and Sebastia. One of the few named artifacts is the Siloam Inscription from Hezekiah’s Tunnel in Jerusalem, well known to BAR readers. Seeking help from the Zionist Organization of America to bring about the inscription’s return, the Zionist Commission for Palestine wrote in a 1919 letter that the Siloam Inscription was “of immediate interest to us as Jews … as the only specimen of a Hebrew text known to us outside of the Bible.” To no avail, however—the inscription remains in Istanbul to this day. (BAR’s efforts, too, failed—even to allow a loan.a)
In 1921 Britain and Turkey were negotiating changes to the Treaty of Sevres that ended World War I in the Middle East. Herbert Samuel, the British High Commissioner for Palestine, wrote to Winston Churchill, then Britain’s secretary of state for the colonies, asking to suspend the talks because of the artifacts that had been taken when the Turks left Palestine. Samuel suggested to Churchill, “If the treaty with Turkey is to be revised, and if any concessions are to be made to Turkey, among the compensations that might be demanded should be the return to Palestine of antiquities removed.”
Winston Churchill appears, quite literally, in another archive that was recently digitized and put online. The United States Library of Congress recently scanned more than 10,000 photographs in its collection from the archives of the American Colony, a group of Christians who lived in Jerusalem from 1881 until the 1940s. After returning to the United States, the American Colony photographers left their collection to the Library of Congress in 1978. The photos include Churchill’s 1921 visit to Jerusalem, the elegant (but failed) Palace Hotel, the construction of Tel Aviv, and Jewish expulsions from the Old City of Jerusalem during Arab riots.
Digitization projects on both sides of the Atlantic are bringing to life old photographs and forgotten letters from early-20th-century Palestine.
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.