Silencing the Torah in Museums
This paper contends that the way a museum treats the concept and object of Torah sheds light on the museum’s overall dramaturgy and ideology. The first step is unpacking the concept of Torah, distinguishing between different meaning of it as text, Law, subject, and a material object in the form of the Torah scroll. The work of Theodor Adorno and the idea of “silencing objects” by Philip Fisher then serve as a theoretical framework to analyze the way material objects, space, lighting, and multimedia come together in order to ascribe certain meanings of Torah and silence others. I focus on three case studies: The Jewish Museum London (JML), Polin: Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, and the Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C. (MOTB). The JML puts the Torah in the center of an exhibition that follows a Life Cycle approach in a way that detaches it from a historical narrative and risks essentialzing Judaism. Polin takes a narrative-oriented “Theater of History” route, which leads to focusing on the idea of Torah rather on actual representation of actual Torah scrolls as material-historical objects. The MOTB treats and presents multiple Torah scrolls and other related objects, but in order to ultimately serve a supersessionist agenda that seeks to “eradicate biblical poverty.” The comparison between the three museums and the choices they make shows their broader ideological agendas, as well as the ways the curatorial praxis leads to the silencing of objects.