American Biblical Archaeologists And Zionism

228 Pages·2015·1.24 MB·English

by  Brooke Sherrard

Florida State University Libraries
Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School
2011
American Biblical Archaeologists and
Zionism: The Politics of Historical
Ethnography
Brooke Sherrard
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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

AMERICAN BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGISTS AND ZIONISM:

THE POLITICS OF HISTORICAL ETHNOGRAPHY

By
BROOKE SHERRARD

A Dissertation submitted to the
Department of Religion
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded:
Fall Semester, 2011
Brooke Sherrard defended this dissertation on October 21, 2011.

The members of the supervisory committee were:

Amanda Porterfield
Professor Directing Dissertation

Peter Garretson
University Representative

John Corrigan
Committee Member

Matthew Goff
Committee Member

Adam Gaiser
Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and
certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

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To my parents, Cindy and Steve Sherrard, for everything,
but especially for letting me write most of this at their kitchen table more than a decade
after I thought I had left home for good. As it turns out, we never do.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

At FSU, I learned a tremendous amount from my faculty that shaped this project. My adviser,
Dr. Amanda Porterfield, was consistently encouraging and supportive during my five years in
Tallahassee. Dr. John Corrigan, Dr. Amy Koehlinger, and Dr. Curtis Evans prompted me to think
through difficult questions about race, religion, ethnography, and history, questions without
which this project could not have been written. Dr. Matthew Goff, Dr. Adam Gaiser, and Dr.
Peter Garretson were not only knowledgeable in related subject areas, they were kind enough to
serve on my committee. Dr. David Levenson and Dr. Aline Kalbian offered a special and
unexpected insight into my topic owing to their personal connections to some of the individuals
discussed here.
The entire American religious history colloquium at Florida State University aided in this
project by reading a chapter and commenting on it. I would especially like to thank Cara
Burnidge and Lauren Gray for their prepared comments. While at FSU, my fellow graduate
students Monica Reed, Joshua Fleer, Nahed Artoul Zehr, Shannon Dunn, Rosemary Kellison,
Jennifer Collins-Elliott, and James Broucek endured multiple conversations about my topic and
responded cheerfully and helpfully. Susan Minnerly and Jon Bridges, from their offices on the M
floor of Dodd Hall, helped make graduate school a little less harrowing for all of us.
At the University of Iowa, I was fortunate to develop relationships with Dr. Ralph Keen,
Dr. J. Kenneth Kuntz, and Dr. T. Dwight Bozeman. Dr. Shira Robinson taught at the University
of Iowa only briefly, but by an accident of fate I signed up for her graduate readings course on
the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In Iowa City I also started ongoing conversations about religious
studies with Denise Kettering, Eric Dickman, and David Howlett.
Three religion faculty at my undergraduate institution, Truman State University, have
supported my aspirations in religious studies: Dr. Mark Appold, Dr. Mike Ashcraft, and Dr.
Dereck Daschke. I would especially like to thank Dr. Appold for inviting me to tag along on his
study abroad trip to the Middle East last summer, where I participated in my first and only
biblical archaeology dig, the Bethsaida excavation’s twenty-fifth consecutive season.
As all historians know, archivists are some of our most helpful allies. I would like to
thank Batya Kaplan, librarian at the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, for pulling folders
related to Nelson Glueck’s presidency. I would also like to thank Frances O’Donnell, the curator
of manuscripts and archives at Harvard Divinity School, who provided access to George Ernest
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Wright’s papers. Cynthia Rufo guided me through the archival materials of the American
Schools of Oriental Research, both those held at the organization’s offices in Boston and those
housed at the Semitic Museum at Harvard University.
I would like to thank Florida State University for a dissertation research grant that
allowed me to travel to the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, Ohio. While there, I
benefited from the expertise of Elise Nienaber, assistant to archivists; Kevin Proffitt, the senior
archivist for research and collections; and Dana Herman, academic associate. I would like to
especially thank Dana for introducing me to Jason Kalman, a faculty member at Hebrew Union
College in Cincinnati, who shares an interest in Glueck’s career and provided valuable citations.
I would also like to thank the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia for a
generous one-month Library Resident Research Fellowship that allowed me to spend time with
the papers of William Foxwell Albright. I would especially like to thank Charles Greifenstein,
manuscripts librarian; Earle Spamer, reference archivist and library programs coordinator; Roy
Goodman, assistant librarian and curator of printed materials; and Lydia Vazquez-Rivera, library
access officer, for their assistance with the logistics of the archive and for their insight into the
project.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations ………………………………………………………………………. vii

Abstract …….……………………………………………………………………………… viii

INTRODUCTION ….……………………………………………………………………….. 1

1. WILLIAM FOXWELL ALBRIGHT AND THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN
SCHOLARLY OBJECTIVITY AND POLITICAL ZIONISM …………………………… 35

2. WILLIAM FOXWELL ALBRIGHT, MILLAR BURROWS, AND CONFLICTING
VIEWS OF ANCIENT CULTURES AMONG ASOR LEADERS … ………………….... 89

3. “THE COMPULSION OF GEOPOLITICS”: NELSON GLUECK’S SHIFT FROM
FAVORING CULTURAL HYBRIDITY TO JEWISH NATIONALISM ………………. 110

4. “THE OLD TESTAMENT AGAINST ITS ENVIRONMENT”: TRUE RELIGION
VERSUS FALSE RELIGION IN GEORGE ERNEST WRIGHT’S THEOLOGICAL
ARCHAEOLOGY ………………………………………………………………………... 134

5. PAUL LAPP AND ALBERT GLOCK: THE NEXT GENERATION’S REBELLION
AGAINST OBJECTIVITY AND ZIONISM …………………………………..………… 159

CONCLUSION: AVRAHAM BIRAN AND WILLIAM DEVER: THE DEFENSE OF
NEUTRAL, NON-POLITICAL SCHOLARSHIP ………………..………………….…... 178

EPILOGUE …………………………………………………………………………….…. 192

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ……………………………………………………....…. 200

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ……………………………………………………………... 227
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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AJA: American Jewish Archives
APJI: The Archives of Progressive Judaism in Israel at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem
APS: American Philosophical Society
ASOR: The American Schools of Oriental Research
FSAC: From the Stone Age to Christianity
HDS: Harvard Divinity School
HUC/BAS: Hebrew Union College/Biblical Archaeology School
SBL: Society of Biblical Literature
YDS: Yale Divinity School

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ABSTRACT

This project explores the relationship between American biblical archaeologists in the mid-
twentieth century and the most pressing political issue of the context in which they lived and
worked, Zionism. It focuses on a set of American religious studies scholars who engaged the
rapidly changing Middle East from the American Schools of Oriental Research in Jerusalem
during a time when the area changed from British to Jordanian to Israeli rule. While much recent
scholarship historicizes academics and critiques the politics of scholarship, very little work has
been done to understand these scholars’ positions in the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,
thus allowing the aura of scholarly objectivity, neutrality, and commitment to value-free science
that has long surrounded them to continue. But as I show here, archaeologists did enter the
debate over Palestine in a substantial way, with their positions on the conflict during the decades
before and after the state of Israel’s founding weaving their way explicitly and implicitly through
both their personal papers and publications.
I draw on theoretical insights about history, ethnography, and historical ethnography that
have engaged the field of North American religions in recent decades to reconstruct the
archaeologists’ cultural theories and how these theories underpinned their political desires for the
area they considered the Holy Land. The defining difference in their arguments was their
understanding of culture. I argue that those archaeologists who envisioned the ancient world as
replete with cultural change and hybridity opposed the establishment of a Jewish state, while
those who envisioned the ancient world’s ethnic boundaries as rigid and impermeable favored it.
I support this argument by combining readings of the archaeologists’ writings with archival
research documenting their heretofore almost unknown political involvement either for or
against the establishment of an ethno-national state in Palestine.
Many of the scholars in the latter group belonged informally to the “Baltimore school,”
founded by William Foxwell Albright, who held that biblical archaeology was corroborating the
Hebrew Bible’s historicity and showing how different the ancient Israelites and Canaanites had
been, as discussed in Chapter One. During the 1940s, Albright also lectured frequently on behalf
of a Jewish state. Others, most prominently Millar Burrows, discussed in Chapter Two, held a
more cautious view of the Bible’s historicity and believed the archaeological data showed that
the ancient Israelites and Canaanites were culturally similar, not different. Burrows resigned his
positions in scholarly organizations in order to publish a book about the Palestinian refugee crisis
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in 1949. Chapter Three details American rabbi-archaeologist Nelson Glueck’s mid-career shift
from opposing a Jewish state to supporting it and the dramatic corresponding shift in his
scholarship about the ancient past. It is important to note that when Glueck and Burrows opposed
a Jewish state, it was not because they favored an Arab state. They rejected ethnic nationalism in
any form, and they used the theoretical basis for that opposition—that cultures are not essentially
homogeneous, or mutually exclusive, or unchanging over the centuries—to combat modern
ethnic nationalism through their scholarship.
Chapter Four shows the way the differences between Israelites and Canaanites were
drawn in even bolder lines by biblical theologian and archaeologist George Ernest Wright, who
considered his support for Israel non-political and harshly criticized archaeologists who took pro-
Palestinian positions. Chapter Five shows the way that two archaeologists who became
associated with pro-Palestinian positions, Paul Lapp and Albert Glock, grounded their arguments
in an appeal to the flexibility and hybridity of cultures and a rejection of scholars’ ability to be
objective. The epilogue discusses the way this debate is playing out today at the City of David
archaeological site in Jerusalem.
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