The British Museum just postponed a Jewish Culture Month lecture, but it’s been erasing Jewish history long before that.
by Roy K. Altman
I have witnessed the way the British Museum has been quietly participating in the erasure of Jewish history for some time now. A few years ago, I visited the British Museum with my wife to see the Lachish bas-reliefs and the Kurkh Monoliths—ancient stone carvings from the Assyrian empire, centered in what’s now northern Iraq—which provide unambiguous evidence of ancient Jewish rule in the Land of Israel. The Lachish bas-reliefs depict the siege of Lachish—an ancient Israelite town, a few miles from Jerusalem, destroyed by the Assyrian king Sennacherib in 701 BCE. The mesmerizing scenes, carved in gypsum, progress from the initial invasion of the Kingdom of Israel on the far left to the siege and battle reliefs in the center, culminating in the destruction of Lachish and the enslavement of its Jewish inhabitants on the extreme right.
Archeologists have now corroborated this Assyrian depiction of the destruction of Lachish—which is described in the Bible, twice—by excavating in and underneath Lachish itself. Geologists have established that a fire consumed (and then destroyed) the settlement toward the end of the eighth century BCE—which is consistent with the Assyrian destruction of the town in 701 BCE. In addition to uncovering the telltale signs of an ancient battle—arrows and spears, for instance—at that specific historical layer in the underground sediment, archeologists have shown that the civilization the Assyrians vanquished was indisputably Jewish. In fact, Lachish is one of the only places (outside Jerusalem) where archeologists have unearthed the now-famous LMLK seals, bearing the Hebrew letters Lamed Mem Lamed Kaf, meaning “belonging to the King.” The king these seals refer to is Hezekiah, the ancient Israelite monarch who ruled toward the end of the eighth century BCE in Jerusalem, when Sennacherib’s Assyrian army came knocking.The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, depicting military campaigns and receiving tribute, 858–824 BCE. (PHAS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
You would be hard-pressed to find any connection to Jewish history in the museum’s labels—and the Lachish bas-reliefs are not the only example. The Kurkh Monoliths—giant limestone stelae—provide even older evidence of Jewish indigeneity in the Land of Israel. They record the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III’s account of defeating Ahab, the king of Israel, at a battle fought near the ancient city of Karkar in 853 BCE. And Shalmaneser’s Black Obelisk depicts a long procession of enslaved Israelites, their king bowing before his Assyrian conquerors—what most scholars consider the oldest image of a Jew anywhere in the world, a Jewish prince who lived not in Poland or Belarus or Brooklyn, but in Israel. But most of the descriptions I’ve provided here cannot be found on any of the museum’s inscriptions. And these priceless items of ancient Jewish history don’t appear in a wing dedicated to Israel or Judaism at all. Instead, they’re all on display in the Assyrian section of the museum—far removed from any mention of Israel or its pesky Jewish inhabitants.
Which brings us to the heart of the matter. In all its many rooms and floors, covering thousands of years of human history—and featuring plenty of now-extinct peoples like the Etruscans (Room 71), the Lycians (Room 20), and the Anatolians (Room 54)—the British Museum doesn’t actually have a dedicated wing to the people who brought us monotheism, Jesus, and the Bible. There are, it’s true, individual items of ancient Jewish origin. They just aren’t displayed with descriptions that make clear the ancient and continuous connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. Here’s a photograph I took of an absurd sign at the entrance to a room full of ancient Israelite artifacts:Phoenician sign at the British Museum. (Courtesy of author)
That opening line should shock anyone who knows even a little bit of ancient Levantine history: “By the beginning of the first millennium BC,” the museum’s curators wrote, “the Israelites occupied most of Palestine.” But that’s a historical anachronism. There was no such thing as Palestine at the beginning of the first millennium BC. The Land of Israel wouldn’t be renamed “Palestine” until a thousand years later, after Rome crushed the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 135 CE, after which the Emperor Hadrian renamed Judea (Hebrew for land of the Jews) Palaestina for the Philistines—a Greek people who had invaded the area of modern-day Gaza in ancient times, who had gone extinct long before the Romans arrived, and who had absolutely nothing to do with Muslim Arabs, who wouldn’t exist for another 500 years. Palestine was thus a name Hadrian concocted to punish the Jews for their treachery and encourage the world to forget the Jews’ ancient connection to their homeland.
Here's the picture from the article
The British Museum is knowingly erasing Jewish indigeneity and Jewish Peoplehood as a whole, portraying Jews as both non-existent and occupiers at the same time. This is nazi level propaganda.
