A Reply to Martin Peretz

Despite the swirl of controversy over the Harvard Semitic Museum and its restructuring, and my deep commitment to the future of the museum, and its return to its primary function as an archaeological museum, I have chosen not to speak publicly, but to remain in peaceful retirement. I am a long-time friend of most of the principals in the dispute, and have had no desire to hurt any one of them. I have written to Dean Jeremy R. Knowles expressing my hearty and unqualified approval of the report of the Advisory Committee to the Harvard Semitic Museum. In fact, the report quotes favorably my own comments made in 1982 on the full reopening of the Museum to the public:

"The Department [of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations] and the [Harvard Semitic] Museum were conceived as mutually supporting and equally necessary parts of a single endeavor. The Museum was designed to function particularly as an agency for archaeological research and exploration in addition to its role as home of the Department and repository for artifacts and monuments which made up the collections for teaching, research and public display. Its central focus must increasingly be that for which it was founded, namely ancient Near Eastern archaeological exploration, research and publication. The quest for endowment must be first of all to satisfy these primary goals."

The recent attack on the person of Dorot Professor of the Archaeology of Israel Lawrence Stager by Martin Peretz is too full of calumny, whether uttered out of ignorance or malice, to let pass without a public response on my part.

Peretz begins with a history of the Museum laden with an encrustation of folklore and plain errors in fact. Among other things he speaks of the "forty-year exile" of the Semitic Museum. At the opening of the Museum to the public on April 4, 1982, I began with the following remarks, "The Harvard Gazette announced this week that the Semitic Museum was reopening after forty years. I found this notice of interest. In fact the Museum was forced underground twenty-five years ago. However, the Gazette [or rather its source] preferred the biblical and Semitic round number forty and `stretched' the truth."

The Museum was closed for five years during World War II when occupied by the Armed Services. But when I arrived at Harvard in 1957, the Museum had been open for more than a decade, its public exhibits intact. The truth was more dreadful. Between the death of Robert Pfeiffer, the Museum's long-time curator, in the early spring of 1958, and my appointment as curator in July, 1958, the public exhibits of the museum were dismantled to make room for the Center for International Affairs. Plans had been formally discussed before Pfeiffer's death of splitting the collections of the Museum between Fog and Peabody, and it was recommended that the Semitic Museum be "sold" to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. McGeorge Bundy, then dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, had flatly refused to continue to pay the large deficits of the Museum--a situation not dissimilar to the present crisis--and the matter was resolved finally through the intervention of an Advisory Committee and President Pusey's agreement to refurbish the Museum's basement from University funds making it fit for research collections, and to "rent" the upper floors of the Museum building to the Center for International Affairs for a period of five years. In fact, the CFIA remained twenty-five years.

Other corrections in the history of the Museum are in order, but let me mention merely one. Peretz states that President Lowell's hostility to the Museum, prompted he implies by his "hostility to almost anything that smacked of Jews," caused him to prohibit the curator of the Museum in 1926 from raising any funds for the museum at all. I think Lowell's anti-Semitism is well documented. But in fact he did not forbid the curator from raising funds in 1926. Rather, he crossed out certain names on a list of names submitted by the curator for approach for gifts. This is an old practice of the University--clearing and assigning approaches to donors.

I must interpose a remark about the problem of funding the Museum. In my thirty-five years at Harvard, no president has allowed the Harvard Semitic Museum to participate in a major capital drive of the University. This should be Peretz' complaint.

However, Peretz' account of the sins of Lowell in forbidding money raising by the Museum is meant to be placed in parallel with the alleged behavior of Lawrence Stager in forbidding Carney Gavin from raising money for the Museum. This parallelism suggests to an literate reader that Stager, like Lowell was moved by anti-Semitic impulses. This is libel. I am told that Peretz has denied that he meant to brand Stager an anti-Semite--a charge which if believed could end Stager's career as archaeologist in Israel. I must confess that I regard his demurral, if correctly reported to me, as disingenuous.

Stager's whole history is philo-Judaic. Part of his graduate training was taken at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; he was a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University. In his early years he was a beloved protege of Benjamin Mazar, the doyen of Israeli archaeologists. Stager was awarded one of he largest and richest of the pristine archaeological sites left in Israel by the Israeli Council on Archaeology. To pair Stager with Lowell is unconscionable, and Peretz should publicly apologize, or in any case repudiate the anti-Semitic interpretation generally and most plausibly given to his remarks.

Stager did not issue a flat ban on the raising of funds. Rather, during the life of the Advisory Committee, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, supported by Stager, required that any approaches for money be cleared through the Dean and the Director of the Museum. This was prudent. If the Museum goals were to be redefined in order to focus them on the museum's central tasks in the University, attempts to raise funds should not be sought primarily or wholly for peripheral projects, binding the Museum to continue its lop-sided program indefinitely into the future. Peretz' claim that Stager unilaterally barred all fund raising (in his claimed parallel with Lowell) is untrue.

Stager came to Harvard from the University of Chicago in 1986, and in July, 1987 became Director of the Museum. Peretz observes, "Put starkly, he had zero interest in the work it did. A learned, but extraordinarily narrow specialist, he saw the space and the moneys of the museum uses as assets he could annex to his own archaeological enterprises."

In fact, Stager came to the museum with an enormous interest in the traditional archaeological and teaching tasks of the Museum, for which it was founded, for the exploration of the ancient Near East, and for the academic training of a new generation of archaeologists in the field, as well as for its public exhibits of artifacts won in the field work of the museum. Indeed in the raising of the endowment for the Dorot Professor of the Archaeology of Israel, one of the chief arguments made to the donor was the desperate need for a distinguished archaeologist to give leadership to the Semitic Museum.

The claim of Peretz [surely not on the basis of his own knowledge] that Stager is an extraordinarily narrow specialist can be answered easily by drawing on the dossier collected to present to the President's ad hoc committee appointed to review his appointment to the Dorot Chair. A leitmotif in the recommendations of senior scholars from many nations, including Israel's most distinguished archaeologists, was the extraordinary breadth of Stager's scholarship both in his field and in adjacent fields including anthropology [Stager is a member of Harvard's department of Anthropology], historiography, and historiographic theory, ancient Near Eastern and European. I shall quote only one letter, that of Robert McCormick Adams, the distinguished anthropologist and Mesopotamian archaeologist, sometime director of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, Presently head of the Smithsonian Institution. I quote him with his permission:

"[I] have the impression that he [Stager] may well be the best and broadest of the Palestinian archaeologists who are currently working. Broadest is perhaps the more salient and unambiguous of these two terms; best after all, conjures up methodological pyrotechnics and irreducible antagonism between different nations and disciplinary traditions. But who can match Larry in his capacity to move incisively and yet serenely from later prehistory to Iron Age, from Carthage to the Euphrates. Even more impressive in some ways, is his conceptual and disciplinary range. The need to combine philogical and archaeological approaches and considerations he learned already at Harvard. But at Chicago he has gone much further, as I have had the gratifying opportunity to see on numerous occasions in the marvelous seminar that Momigliano [the late classical historian] has run with major contribution from Valeri and Sahlins in Anthropology, and Stager on the Orientalist side. He now holds his own with bristly graduate students expounding semiotics and structural Marxism, and returns the fire of central-place theorists with the historicism of a la longue duree. And yet through all of this the logic of his own work, his own work, his capacity to conceptualize and direct the truly significant Big Dig, continues to unfold."

Toward the end of my administration and continuing in Stager's administration, increasing deficits threatened to sabotage the proper work of the Museum. The traditional center of the Museum's activity, exploration and excavation of sites of the ancient New East expanded as the Museum became the sponsor of the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon ion 1987. This continued the enterprise of the early days, the excavations at Samaria, funded by Jacob Schiff, the benefactor who provided funds for the building of the Semitic Museum, and the excavations at Nuzi (with the Fogg Museum), and later (with the Museum underground) at Shechem, Idalion in Cyprus, Carthage in Tunisia, Numeirah in Jordan, and (underwater) at Tharros in Sardinia. Stager heads the current, primary enterprise of the Museum in the field, the excavations at Ashkelon, Which in addition to its contributions to Israeli and Mediterranean archaeology and history, serves as a training ground for archaeological scholars of the next generation. Ashkelon is the most ambitions American excavation in Israel since the University of Chicago's excavations in Israel since the University of Chicago's excavations at Armageddon (Megiddo).

If one reads Peretz, the Museum's primary activity at Ashkelon is labeled Stager's personal research, not the Museum's. This is bizarre. It is the Museum's most important project. In fact the major effort of the Museum at Ashkelon has been fully funded through the efforts of Professor Stager. But the fact that Ashkelon has not contributed to the Museum's deficit does not disqualify it as a Museum program. Similarly the publication of the Harvard Semitic Museum's two series, the Harvard Semitic Museum Monographs and the Harvard Semitic Museum Studies are among the major activities of the museum, but both have been fully funded by the efforts of the director of the Museum. More than 80 Volumes have been published since 1962.

A particularly successful part of the Museum's work has been the series of exhibits for he University community and the public mounted since 1982, thanks largely to the energy and imagination of Nitza Rosovsky, the curator of exhibits. Her resignation from the Museum staff I regard as tragic. While the exhibits have added to the deficit, owing particularly to the overhead costs of the Museum staff, they are an aspect of the Museum's life which must be continued, but focused more on its core collections.

The chance recovery of an important collection of nineteenth-century photographs of the Near East in 1970 has led, slowly and steadily, to a distortion of the primary tasks and goals of the Museum. The collection of old photographs proved a marvelous source of publicity and a lure for important gifts culminating in the gift of king Fahd of Saudi Arabia which funded the staff of the Museum for some three years. The staff of the Museum has traveled worldwide to add to the collection. The king Fahd Archive has become the primary source of the Museum's deficit, as well as monopolizing the time of most of its staff. I think it is fair to say that the majority of us in the department regard this archive as a luxury, of little relevance to the teaching and research of the Department and the Museum. The Photo-Archive account is responsible for more than 70 percent of the deficit of the Museum according to the Advisory Committee's report, a sum now just over 1 million dollars. This is intolerable in the view of the administration of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In response to the administration, the Advisory Committee has proposed that the Museum continue its important work of exploration, teaching, and research, and continue its program of public exhibits, but curtail its practice of pouring money we do not have into the bottomless pit of the photo Archive. Unfortunately this can be done only by radically streamlining the Museum staff.

Frank Moore Cross, Emeritus Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages, served as the director of the Semitic Museum from 1974-1987 and as its curator from 1958-1961.