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.

Quid Pro Quo: Egyptian Artifact Distribution and the Bureaucracy of Gentlemen’s Promises

Early in 1926, C. T. Currelly, Director of Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), sent a letter to the Mary Jonas, General Secretary of England’s Egypt Exploration Society (EES). Recalling a promise made to him by the famous excavator and papyrologist Bernard P. Grenfell some 20 years prior, Currelly asked Jonas that a collection of Arabic papyri be delivered to Toronto. These papyri, he claimed, were promised by Grenfell as a token of gratitude after Currelly had secured a substantial amount of money to support EES excavations. The request is notable, not because Currelly asked for papyri, but because it prompted internal debate over the handling and dispersal of Egyptian antiquities by the EES.

This paper argues that Currelly construed Grenfell’s promise according to the structural logic of EES artifact distributions, thereby ensuring that his request be given due consideration by EES officials. Crucial to this argument is my characterisation of EES artifact distributions as a quid pro quo arrangement – something received for something given. More specifically, the EES had committed to distribute Egyptian artifacts to given public museums in proportion to moneys given to the Society through subscription, a practice that has seen the dispersal of Egyptian artifacts (including papyri) to public institutions across the globe. At a time when museums and papyrologists alike are grappling with their complicity in the colonial appropriation of Egyptian cultural heritage and the trade in antiquities, this paper shows how the distribution of Egyptian artifacts was energised by a dynamic relationship between its official and public-facing commitment to distribute artifacts in proportion to subscription, “backroom” agreements negotiated by individual men, and in a bureaucracy mediated by the sitting EES Secretary.

Fragmented Promises, Pentimento & the Salvage Paradigm

This talk considers the meaning of promises un/made and re/made through worldmaking in common law, constitutional narrative, treaties with and oaths taken by the Crown. Together, we will examine worldviews reinforced through art and visual culture that romanticize Indigenous peoples, idealize empty promises, and fragment meaning.

Longing and Belonging in a Time of Post-Coloniality: Amel’s Chedda

Drawing on work on how politics shape kinship (Bennett, 2010; Lemons, 2019), this essay follows Amel’s chedda, a traditional western Algerian wedding garment, through four moments – her wedding procession, at a wedding show, at a meeting with friends outside of Paris, and in the preparations before the wedding party with her neggafa (bridal assistant) – to consider her transnational and trans-generational post-coloniality. I reflect on how both the benefits and burdens of Amel’s “postcolonial past” are woven into and negotiated through this garment and associated rituals (Guénif-Souilamas, 2000; Stoler, 2002; Surkis, 2010). Marriage partner preferences for “traditional” partners among my Muslim French of Algerian origin interlocutors in a northwestern Parisian suburb are part of a web of relations and desire tangled with post-colonial politics (cf. Salvatore, 2009:5). Prevalent scholarship characterizes “tradition” as a religious response to a secular France that, increasingly, demands the relegation of visible religiosity out of the public sphere, and surveils non-EU transnational marriage (see Robledo, 2007; Cole, 2014; Selby, 2017). In contrast, I aim to privilege desire and kinship to understand these preferences. Given how the control of intimacy and sexuality are central to colonial politics, including in France, I frame Amel’s desire for this marriage partner with specific “non-traditional” rituals as evoking her post-coloniality. Put differently, part of this seeking and reconstituting of traditionalism and the bled at the time of marriage is a bodily and emotional response to post-colonial identities. Islam is sometimes referenced and sometimes ignored. For many of my participants, like for Amel, the social bonds of tradition are best expressed through kinship ties in marriage.

Truth-Telling and Religious Difference in Colonial Australian Courts

British colonial authorities in the late nineteenth century were preoccupied with lying. As the administrative apparatus of the empire expanded, officials became increasingly invested in preserving the integrity of institutions that sorted, counted, judged and managed the empire’s subjects. However, the fear that colonial agents might be deceived – by a person who lied to a census-taker about their age, who underreported their profits or concealed evidence of a crime – was perennial. In colonial India, for instance, medical and legal textbooks warned of Indians’ supposedly innate mendacity, and offered officials strategies for detecting subterfuge. Lying was considered particularly noxious – and likely – in the legal sphere, where colonial authorities were keen to avoid relying on the testimony of witnesses whom they did not trust. In response, British and British imperial authorities embraced what historians of colonial India have called ‘truth technologies.’ New technologies like fingerprinting and serology, and bodies of expertise like medical jurisprudence and crime scene investigation emerged. Old ones, like oath-taking in court, were renovated and adapted to suit novel colonial contexts.

I propose to explore legal oath-taking as a colonial truth technology as it was used in nineteenth-century Australia, departing from the more familiar (to scholars) British Indian context. I focus in particular on cases involving Chinese Australians, many of whom came to the Australian colonies during the mid-century gold rushes. As they did in England, British officials in the empire relied on oaths to encourage witnesses to tell the truth on the stand. These oaths, however, invoked a Christian theological framework that most Chinese migrants, whom Britons tended to assume were either Confucians or Buddhists, did not share. Without the threat of judgment and punishment by a Christian god, authorities worried that their traditional truth technology would fail. And so, they developed a ritual that they claimed was rooted in ‘Eastern’ theology – blowing out a candle – that they hoped would bind the conscience of Asian witnesses of a variety of non-Christian confessions. My paper explores the invention of this tradition, and situates it within a broader colonial imaginary, which cast Chinese Australians as fatalistic, mystical, and alien. This colonial understanding shaped the fortunes of Chinese people in Australia in their interactions with legal institutions, including police, the courts, and prisons. Debates about the reliability of Chinese testimony also shaped colonial justice, as its agents grappled with the religious and cultural diversity of the empire.