Wily Scholars and Detectives
Since the publication of my book, I have received a variety of messages from characters who want/believe the ossuary and tablet to be real. They consistently accuse me of having had an agenda in writing the book, which simply stated is to advance the agenda of the Israel Antiquities Authority, which faked the fakes, and then planted evidence against Mr. Golan, in the interest of destroying the Israeli antiquities trade itself.
By Nina Burleigh
Nina Burleigh is the author of four critically acclaimed nonfiction
books. Her latest, Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed
and Forgery in the Holy Land (Collins, 2008), tells the story of
the unraveling of a Bible relic forgery scheme in Israel, and the
intriguing world of biblical archaeology and relic collectors.
February 2009
Last year in Israel, poking around
in the dust near the Dead Sea, I
kicked over a curiously inscribed
stone, carved with words in a
language I could not read. Realizing
that I might have stumbled upon
an important piece of Holy Land
archaeology, I took the object to a
well-known epigrapher in
Jerusalem, who, after examining the piece for
some hours,
concluded that it said, in ancient Hebrew:
"And lo, in the
year 2008, Y____h will inflict upon you a Madoff, and
your
prosperity will dry up like the earth after a hundred-year
drought;
all your goats and all your wives and all your dwellings
will
evaporate like water in the sun."
The epigrapher advised me that
the rock was most likely a fake since
the word "Madoff"
was not one commonly used by the ancients to refer
to a plague.
Imagine my shock then, to read last month that a man
named Madoff
did indeed, in the year 2008, cause prosperity
to
evaporate.
Unfortunately, I left that stone behind in my
hotel room in Jerusalem,
after deciding I didn't want to add its
weight to my luggage, already
loaded with Herod-era coins that I
had been assured by dealers might
well have been handled by the
money-changers in the Temple. I suppose
my Madoff rock will soon
turn up for sale in the Old City, and I
already regret my
ignorance, and, especially, the skepticism of my
friend, the
renowned epigrapher.
Most readers will recognize the above as
an obvious attempt at a joke.
I say "most" because some
consumers in the proof-for-faith market
might actually believe it.
Others will not be amused, and will, on the
contrary, take it as
yet more proof that I, an American journalist who
has dared to
look from the outside in at the arcane and highly
specialized
field of biblical archaeology and the trade in ancient
Holy Land
objects, am a tool of the dreaded and mighty Israel
Antiquities
Authority, in that agency's relentless and unscrupulous
effort to
1) prove the Bible false and 2) deprive the Israeli
antiquities
dealers of their means of livelihood.
I first got interested
in the tale of the forged James Ossuary when I
read about the case
in the New York Times around the last week of
2004. The
Israeli government had indicted five men for forging
archaeological
objects – most famously the James Ossuary and Joash
Tablet -
purported to prove various Bible characters or stories
true.
The authorities were calling it "the fraud of the
century."
I assumed at first that the main market for
these objects was among
evangelical Christians in the U.S. As I
began researching the story,
I realized that while the
evangelicals were a factor in the marketing
of fake Bible proof,
they were not the real marks. The real marks were
high-end
collectors like Shlomo Moussaieff and other billionaires,
whose
wealth allows them to indulge a voracious taste for
extremely
expensive ancient stuff.
Before I got into this
story, I knew absolutely nothing of the
antiquities trade or these
men. I hail from Illinois, and I got my
start in journalism
covering politics in Springfield, Illinois,
currently having its
15 minutes of fame as the backdrop for the antics
of Gov. Rod
Blagojevich. Blagojevich's behavior doesn't shock me or
anyone
else who spent any amount of time covering the capitol city of
the
Land of Lincoln. I have lost count of how many governors of
Illinois
in my lifetime have ended up wearing prison stripes – it is
either
two or three – and that's only in the executive office. For
years
after I left Illinois, I've read of former sources or subjects
of
mine facing federal and state corruption charges, and often,
doing
time behind bars.
In Illinois, I learned a pretty
crucial lesson for a journalist. From
a pretty young age, I came
to know that while lots of people do bad
things for ideology, or
out of passion – the latter always good for a
story - a much
larger class of people are motivated to break the rules
out of
mundane avarice. I never studied banking or became adept at the
kind
of investigative business reportage that reveals money trails,
but
I did come to understand the concept of following the money.
I
wrote Unholy Business out of curiosity, with the aim of
describing
an intriguing alleged crime, from the point of view of
the detectives
who uncovered it. I also wanted to describe the
victims and the
accused. Whether innocent or guilty, their voices
were integral to the
story I was telling.
Working on the
book in Israel and in the U.S., I met some of the most
unusual,
eccentric people I have ever met, and I entered a subculture
average
Americans know nothing about. The people and the experience
inspired
me, and I wrote a book that I believe captures the back story
of
the world of antiquities trade in the Holy Land in an engaging
way.
After writing the book, I sent a copy of the galley off
to an American
publisher named Hershel Shanks. I was well aware of
his keen interest
in the James Ossuary, his selling the movie
rights to it, touting it
in his magazine, writing his own book
about it, and following the
forgery trial closely for years in
print. His magazine, Biblical
Archaeology Review, was a
great source of documents for me about the
case, and I had
interviewed him in Washington, and he seemed to be
open to
considering all sides of the debate.
To my surprise, about a
month after I sent him the galley, I received
a long email from
Israeli collector Oded Golan, accused by the Israeli
government of
forging the James Ossuary and several dozen other
objects. It
turned out that rather than review my book, Mr. Shanks
had taken
the rather unusual step, for a book reviewer, of sending
the
uncorrected galley off to the accused, who in turn had written
me an
email in perfect English (Mr. Golan's English during
interviews had
been charming but not always fluent), and using
alarmingly
professional-looking Latin legalese like sub
judice.
After politely sending a few corrections to my
publisher, Mr. Shanks
never mentioned my book in his magazine,
even though it details the
case against the Ossuary, and, more
interestingly for his readers, the
various characters involved on
both sides of the case. Nor did he ever
answer an emailed question
about mailing the galley off to the
accused.
Since the
publication of my book, I have received a variety of
messages from
characters who want/believe the ossuary and tablet to be
real.
They consistently accuse me of having had an agenda in writing
the
book, which simply stated is to advance the agenda of the
Israel
Antiquities Authority, which faked the fakes, and then
planted
evidence against Mr. Golan, in the interest of destroying
the Israeli
antiquities trade itself.
My problem with this
conspiracy theory is pretty simple. As a
journalist schooled in
follow-the-money, I don't believe that the men
I met who worked
for the antiquities authority hate the antiquities
trade enough to
engineer a massive conspiracy involving faking fakes.
And I don't
see how they could possibly enrich themselves by
destroying it.
Nor were they strongly ideological on the issue.
The chief
detective involved was a young army lieutenant, a father
with
young children, being called up to fight Hezbollah in Lebanon,
in
addition to trying to fulfill his charge to protect
30,000
archaeological sites from plunder. One of the chief
scholars, Tel Aviv
University archaeologist Yuval Goren, struck me
as a serious, sober,
and un-flamboyant man who seemed happiest
looking through a microscope at rocks. To hear his challengers,
Goren is an avowed enemy of Israel who hates the Bible and is
hell-bent on disproving it.
Without evident motives of
avarice, ideology, or passion driving the
detectives and scholars,
it was and is much easier for me to believe
that people who wanted
to make money off gullible billionaires had a
fake factory than to
believe agents of an under-funded Israeli agency
concocted a
global conspiracy.
I marvel every day at the breadth and
ferocity of the global public
relation campaign underway not only
to "prove" the alleged fakes are
real (and curiously,
the only fakes this pr campaign ever addresses
are the three very
famous ones – the ossuary, tablet, and Israel
Museum's ivory
pomegranate, and not the numerous other items in the
trial) but to
vilify the scholars and authorities who have opined that
the
objects are fake. The campaigns always use the word
"hate"—"Goren
hates the antiquities trade"
(BAR, Hershel Shanks, March-April 2005,
p. 67). "Shuka
Dorfman, the head of the IAA, hates antiquities
collectors and
antiquities dealers and the antiquities trade."
After my
own book came out, I received one email from a member of
the
pro-tablet and ossuary crowd accusing me of having an affair
with the
detective. Another psychoanalyzed me, writing "don't
you see, Nina,
you unconsciously became the horn of the IAA?"
Hershel Shanks,
responding to a piece I wrote for the LA Times,
stated that because I
have a job at People Magazine, I
can't possibly understand the issues
involved in the case of the
ossuary. And finally, my favorite so far,
a man named Victor
Sasson, who, according to Wikipedia, is an
Iraqi-born Jew and
scholar in London, and who has self-published a
"novel"
about the Joash Tablet and also a screed about his feminist
ex-wife
called "Confessions of a Sheep for Slaughter: Memoirs
of
Feminist Wolves" posted an attack on me, calling for
nothing less than
God's protection: "May God protect and
shield us from … third-rate,
nimble, and abusive journalists who
prostitute their pens in
specialized fields about which they know
nothing!" (source Jim West's
blog
http://ia310817.us.archive.org/0/items/sasson/VictorSasson.pdf)
[View as HTML]
Thus
I have joined the ranks of the wily scholars and detectives
engaged
in an assault with ulterior motives on the trade in
antiquities in
Israel.
The detectives and many of the scholars – Goren,
included – have
consistently refused to get into the fray and
defend themselves. But
other scholars are so upset about the
attacks that they have
responded, and the results of these pissing
matches are fairly easy to
follow in BAR. One of these
individuals composed a heavily footnoted
paper documenting the
"smear campaign" against fellow scholars. The
scholar
offered me the paper but asked to remain anonymous. Here are
some
excerpts:
“The ‘smear scripts’ censor opponents
indirectly by defamation and
destruction of professional standing.
Here and there, censorship is
applied directly. For instance, Dr.
Jeffrey Chadwick submitted his
paper on why he thought the
inscription on the ‘James’ Ossuary was a
forgery to the BAR.
The paper was refused and the contents were
inaccessible; however,
a rebuttal of Dr. Chadwick's points appeared in
Shanks and
Witherington's, The Brother of Jesus book in March 2003.
Dr.
Chadwick's paper was finally published in November 2003.”
“Dr.
Karen Vitelli refuses to support the ‘Free the antiquities
dealers
and collectors’ lobby, a feature of the BAR for more than
ten
years. In the ‘First Person’ editorial of the
November-December 1999
BAR, Shanks states that Dr. Vitelli
used money from collectors to
finance archaeological digs;
therefore, she is a ‘hypocrite’ and 'has
no right to' say
anything. Collector Shelby White states her position
against
Shanks and his ‘Free the antiquities dealers’ program. In
the
March-April 2003 issue of BAR, White is a ‘hypocrite’
and has ‘no
right to’... along with a revolting cartoon
caricature. This ‘First
Person’ editorial is so offensive that
Dr. Joe Seeger, former
President of ASOR, spoke out against
it.”
"The combination of ‘amateur’ with ‘no right
to’ is by far the most
common theme aimed solely at the most
dangerous opponents to whichever con is being promoted. To state
that a professional in a field is an
‘amateur’ asks for a
libel suit. The stockyard terminology of the
"smear scripts"
employs a number of different strategies to defame an
expert as an
‘amateur.’"
"In the July-August 1994 issue of
BAR, Shanks claims Dr. Elisha
Qimron, granted his Ph.D. in
1976 and a world expert on the Hebrew of
the DSS, is just a
‘research assistant.’ A ‘research assistant’ is a
graduate
student, someone who has done the coursework but is an
‘inexperienced
amateur.’ After declaring Dr. Qimron an ‘amateur,’
Shanks
asserts that Dr. Qimron has ‘no right to’ copyright his
work.
This combination against Dr. Qimron appears from 1994
through the
January-February 2001 and March-April 2001 issues of
the BAR. Shanks
lost the copyright violation suit anyway.
Making Girling's point in
his ‘King Tut tut tut’
article, Shanks had help from the media, from
blogs, from articles
on copyright, from lawyers, from panel
discussions, and from
disgruntled scholars who abetted the smear
campaigns.”
"With
complete contempt for the consequences, articles absurdly easy
to
prove as adhering to the designated ‘smear scripts’ that appear
in
the BAR under the name of Hershel Shanks sneak into
other newspapers,
journals, magazines, and books, and onto
scholarly lists and web-sites
under assorted by-lines."
The
mainstream news media is bored by the interminable trial underway
in
what one observer called "a room the size of a broom-closet"
in the
East Jerusalem courthouse. The details of the trial itself,
including
really damning evidence involving numerous lesser known
objects the
fakery of which is not being disputed, rarely get
attention. However,
every new "expert" who comes forward
for the defense to say that the
Ossuary or Tablet is real gets
amplified by interested parties.
Suspicious? Rather.
All
of this is not to say that I believe Mr. Golan, who has protested
his
innocence from the beginning, or Mr. Deutsch, the other man in
the
dock in Jerusalem, are criminals. As far as I am concerned,
they are
innocent until proven guilty. What is really on trial is
the soundness
of biblical archaeology and its scholars.
