Jordan wants Dead Sea Scrolls back from Israel

[cali]

AP

AMMAN, Jordan – Jordan's tourism minister said Thursday that her country was seeking the help of Western nations to regain possession of the Dead Sea Scrolls Israel seized from a Jerusalem museum during the 1967 Mideast war.

Maha Khatib said Jordan has given up hope that Israel would directly give back the more than 2,000-year-old scrolls and now hoped Western nations would return them to the Arab kingdom when they host them in exhibitions.

Israel rejected the Jordanian claim to the scrolls, which include the earliest known version of portions of the Hebrew Bible and have shed important light on Judaism and the beginnings of Christianity. Their origin is the subject of an insular, but notoriously heated, academic debate.

They will next be exhibited in Milwaukee, WI, starting Jan. 22.

Jordan says Israel seized 14 scrolls kept in a museum in the eastern sector of Jerusalem when its army occupied that Jordanian-controlled part of the city along with the West Bank in the 1967 war. Israel annexed eastern Jerusalem soon after the war and now says the entire city is its unified, eternal capital.

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100114/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_jordan_dead_sea_scrolls

[azurnoir]

1. Canada refused to do this

I seriously doubt that the US will even hear the Jordanians as far as I know the scrolls will be in my area from March--October of this year after that I have no idea where they will be going but if this gains any momentum it will almost certainly be back to Israel, if that was not where they would have been going anyway

[xchrom]

2. Other treasures, art, artifacts have returned

To countries of original ownership --
why not these?

[cali]

3. and most hasn't been returned.

I don't really have strong feelings one way or another- though certainly the scrolls are more a part of Jewish heritage than Jordanian.

[Xolodno]

4. Thats the big question.

Who actually owns those scrolls?

The underlying theory that they were just part of the writings of a splinter group in self-exile has been losing a lot of traction. And instead, the idea that these may very well been part of the Jerusalem Library of the Second Temple has been gaining steam. So ownership is a real big fiasco. I suspect they will tell Jordan they will "consider" it once the Vatican returns all the Jewish Artifacts they requested from them.

[Igel]

5. For a few reasons.

First, they didn't originate in Jordan. They originated in the West Bank. So by current standards we'd not return them to Jordan.

Second, some weren't originally owned by Jordan. They were owned by people and what we'd call NGOs now, and placed in a museum in Jerusalem during the Jordanian occupation of E Jerusalem. Others were claimed as Jordanian because Jordan had occupied and later annexed the West Bank. It's a messy question as to who owns some antiquity discovered in occupied territories that aren't yet part of an acknowledged country.

Third, they weren't created by ethnic Arabs or Muslims. Now, there's substantial genetic continuity so you could say that the Palestinians largely derive the original population, mostly Jewish but certainly including others, from 100 BCE. Thing is, there's also substantial genetic continuity with modern Jews. As for religious continuity, that gets dicier, with Muslims saying the majority of Jews have no Levantine ancestors (at least not for the last 10k years or so) and claiming that the real Jews were actually Muslims anyway. And cultural continuity is even dicier, with modern Jews hardly preserving non-religious aspects of 200 BCE culture, and Arabs arguably preserving at the very least no more. Let's just write that off as a snakepit and move on to more pleasant things, like boils over 80% of our bodies.

Fourth, and this is possibly also less pleasant than boils, when Israel expanded (consider "established" to be a kind of expansion for this discussion) any governmental holdings stayed governmental. But just as Ottoman land became British became Israeli near, say, Tel Aviv, so when Israel moved into E. Jerusalem government land became Israeli land, and land abandoned for whatever reason by Arabs became Jordanian. Notice that Jordan had the exact same practice, substituting "abandoned for whatever reason by Jews" for the reference to Arabs, so they can't claim any kind of moral superiority on this count. If Israel claimed to annex E Jerusalem then they annexed Jordanian property there. Oddly, I think that this will strike people as unconscionable more than the Jordanian claim that since they annexed the West Bank everything found there is actually Jordanian, even though they reduce to essentially the same argument.

Jordan's request could go to any or all of these points, as well as others and mitigating the shame of having lost a valuable antiquity.

The Palestinians would have a far greater claim, once they establish a state. However, their claim would also not be absolute.

[upi402]

6. Fictitious belief artifact conflict:; War at 5.

Imagine no religion...