Russian Culture Minister Alexander Avdeyev: U.S. claims to Schneerson library provocative

The "Schneerson Library" is a collection of old Jewish books and manuscripts, put together by rabbis of the Chabad Jewish community in the late 18th century in what is now Belarus. Part of the collection amassed by Lubavitcher Rebbe Yosef Yitzchok Schneerson (Lubavitchers are adherents of one of the Hasidic movements), was nationalized by Bolsheviks in 1918 and ended up at the Russian State Library. The other part was taken out of the Soviet Union by Schneerson, who emigrated in the 1930s. Added to the collection were about 25,000 pages of manuscripts which had got into the hands of the Nazis. These were later seized by the Red Army and handed over to the Russian State Military Archive. Since the 1980s, the US Chabad Jewish community have sought the rendering of the part of the Schneerson collection held abroad to them. Amazingly, on August 6, 2010, a federal judge in Washington, Royce Lamberth, ruled that the Hasids had proven the legitimacy of their claims to the ancient Jewish books and manuscripts, which, in his definition, are kept at the Russian State Library and the Russian Military Archive "illegally" (eh?). He ordered Russia to "return" (sic) them to the American group. The Russian Foreign Ministry [has] challenged the judgment.

Russian Culture Minister Alexander Avdeyev has said that the manuscripts held in the Russian state archives are today part of the country's unalienable property and a reflection of the diverse and multicultural history of the region. "The library forms part of the Russian library reserve and is inalienable. The history of its claiming by U.S. plaintiffs appears to us provocative," Avdeyev told a press conference on Friday. He accuses the U.S. plaintiffs of aiming to spoil the bilateral relations between the two countries. Meanwhile, U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Beyrle has assured Russian officials that the 2010 U.S. court ruling will not lead to a seizure of Russian cultural property loaned to the United States for exhibition.

Interfax, 'U.S. claims to Schneerson library provocative - Avdeyev, Moscow, January 13 2012.

Juliet Torome on "Africa’s Stolen History"

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Juliet Torome, a Kenyan writer and documentary filmmaker now living in California reflects on a party that she attended recently. The rich American host was proudly showing his guests around showing off his collection of paintings and sculptures. One object caught the journalist's eye:

...an animal skin stretched and decorated with colored beads, and framed behind glass. The beads were the same kind that my people, the Maasai, use, but the dominant color was blue, not our preferred red. “Where is that from?” I asked, pointing at the piece on the wall. “That is from Zimbabwe,” our host replied. “It’s a wedding skirt that was worn in a Ndebele royal wedding in 1931.”

For an African away from home, finding even the most insignificant African object on display can make you happy. When I see Kenyan or Ethiopian coffee for sale in New York or Paris, for example, it makes me proud that there are Americans and Europeans who consider a product from my homeland valuable. Learning that a wealthy American had found a traditional African skirt worthy of a place in his home triggered the same feeling. But our host’s next remark erased it instantly.

He boasted that he had acquired the skirt illegally through a friend who had “paid” a Zimbabwean government official to smuggle it out of the country. My friend and I looked at each other, trying hard not to show our disapproval. “I’m so disgusted,” my friend said a moment later. “Let’s leave before I get drunk and say something inappropriate to this guy.”

We left the party. On the way home, we ranted angrily about what we had witnessed. But our contempt was driven more by the West’s role in supporting corruption in Africa than by the fate of the specific Zimbabwean artifact we had seen.

The writer recounts that it was only later when she "heard that Yale had returned the Peruvian objects" that she "began to think about African artifacts as culturally and historically important". As she points out the many African artefacts that have ended up in foreign museums or in the hands of foreign private collectors "are largely the loot that Europeans pillaged from Africa during the slave trade and the colonial period". When on display, African art often gives details about each piece’s origins, which are often tied to a specific African kingdom or polity. There is rarely such expansiveness about the artefact's journey out of Africa, she says - citing the New York Times account of the exhibition of the famous Bangwa Queen last year in which it merely said that the sculpture had been owned by many famous collectors “since she left her Cameroonian royal shrine in the late nineteenth century”. This left unsaid anything about the role of Gustav Conrau, a German colonial explorer who later gave the statue to a museum in his home country.

Peru’s reclamation of its cultural heritage made me wish the same for Africa’s looted artifacts. But Peru is fundamentally different from any African country. Its demand reflected a reverence for its past. To Peruvians, the artifacts are a reminder of the great Inca civilization that European conquerors destroyed. Africans, on the other hand, tend to discount their past. To some extent, Africans appear to have internalized the condescending colonialist idea that Africa was primitive and needed to be civilized. We don’t treasure our historical artifacts, because they remind us of our rich civilizations’ supposed inferiority. It is no wonder that an object as culturally important as a royal wedding skirt can be smuggled out of a country without anyone noticing. Until Africans recognize the value of their history, their cultures’ artistic output will continue to be up for grabs.

In other words collectors' continued acquisition of such cultural items, far from helping to perpetuate cross cultural understanding as they so often claim, merely perpetuate the patterns of dominance and submission as a legacy of the colonial era.

Juliet Torome, 'Africa’s Stolen History', Project Syndicate 13th Jan 2012.

Stephen Fry on the Parthenon Marbles

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"It’s time we lost our marbles" quips Stephen Fry ("Greece is the Word", December 19th, 2011.

Finders Not Keepers: Yale Returns Artifacts To Peru

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Between 1912 and 1915, Yale explorer Hiram Bingham III excavated thousands of artefacts from Machu Picchu — an Inca site perched high in the Andes Mountains. They were taken back to Yale University in Connecticut for study under a decree of the Peruvian government, but for 100 years they remained in Yale (in the Peabody Museum in New Haven) where they were at the centre of a long-running international cultural property custody battle. Many of those objects have now been returned to Peru, the university is giving back thousands of ceramics, jewellery and human bones to the International Center for the Study of Machu Picchu and Inca Culture.

Yale anthropology professor Richard Burger points out that "The Machu Picchu situation and dispute was really fundamentally different from other repatriation issues", unlike many art and artifact disputes, this one was not about stolen goods. Sharon Flescher, executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research, explained that "They were never allegedly taken in violation of patrimony laws, or clandestinely dug up [...] This was really much more of a contractual dispute". Peruvian officials contended that the materials were loaned to Yale for research.

After World War I, the university returned some of the artifacts, but argued that the school could keep the rest under the laws of the day. Over time, Peru's demands grew louder. Machu Picchu is an iconic place for the Peruvian people, and the idea of bones and artifacts from Peru being held in the U.S. took on a powerful symbolism. In 2008, Peru's government filed a lawsuit against Yale. Negotiations intensified, and a letter from Yale alumni urging their alma mater to return the artifacts helped move the process out of the courts. Peruvian historian Mariana Mould de Pease was happy to avoid the expensive legal route. She says Yale alumni played a key role in "getting this matter where it has to be — in the academic world." In November 2010, Peruvians held a demonstration in Lima demanding that Yale return the artifacts taken by Bingham.

The dispute was finally resolved through two separate agreements. The first, between Yale and the Peruvian government, established that the university would return all of the objects by the end of 2012. The second established a partnership between Yale and the San Antonio Abad University in Cuzco to share stewardship of the collection. The schools will also collaborate on academic research. This agreement shifts the emphasis from the issue of the ownership of the objects to stewardship and preservation and research and exhibition.

As a result of the repatriation of the excavated material,

alongside the hundreds of thousands of tourists who pass through Cuzco each year to visit the terraced stone ruins of Machu Picchu, the citizens of Peru will be able to see the historic relics which many have never seen before.

Diane Orson, 'Finders Not Keepers: Yale Returns Artifacts To Peru', NPR 18th Dec. 2011.

Photo: The ruins after excavation.

Jordan Will Submit UNESCO Complaint Over Dead Sea Scrolls?

The Jordanian media are reporting that Jordan may complain to UNESCO over Israel's exhibition of the Dead Sea scrolls in the US. The scrolls went on display in New York for the first time on Friday. The West Bank was under Jordanian administration between the Arab-Israeli War in 1948 and its capture by Israel in the Six Days War in 1967 and the manuscripts were discovered there between 1948 and 1957 by Jordanian archaeologists following the first find by Palestinian Bedouins in 1947. The scrolls were curated and first put on display in a Jerusalem museum administered by the Jordanian government.

A year after Israel occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967, the Jordanian government filed complaints to UNESCO complaining of Israeli appropriation of the manuscripts, which include religious and secular texts over 2,000 years old. [...] Faris al-Hamoud, Director of the Department of Antiquities in Jordan, told Jordanian daily Al-Arab Al-Youm that his office plans to notify UNESCO of the international exhibition currently on tour, and complain of Israel's use of stolen Jordanian artifacts.

Jordan's territorial claim to the region in 1948-67 was never formally recognized by the international community, with the exception of the United Kingdom, though it seems that the United States de fact accepted the situation but never formally recognized it. When the scrolls went on display in Canada in 2009, the Palestinian Authority wrote to the government saying the seizure of the artefacts from Palestinian territories was illegal.



Source: 'Jordan to complain to UNESCO over Dead Sea scrolls', Ma'an News Agency 18th Dec 2011.
Map, the findspot of the scrolls (NE end of the Dead Sea), Photo, some of the Scroll Caves.

Bloomsbury man makes historic contribution to Crisis at Christmas with magnificent gift to Greece

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As reported today by the usually well-informed 'ArtNose':

LONDON: Saint Neil MacGregor, the quietly spoken patron saint of Bloomsbury today astonished the museum world by sending the Parthenon Marbles back to Athens. As the ancient fragments were loaded on to the back of a flatbed truck outside the front entrance to the British Museum, Saint Neil took a small chopped shallot from his inside pocket and wiped a tear from his eye. Visibly moved by his own magnanimity and clearly struggling to maintain his legendary composure, he clutched to his breast a copy of his recently-penned international best-selling blockbuster A History of the World in 100 Looted Objects Belonging to the British Museum and to Nobody Else, So There. "Greece is teetering on the edge of the abyss," said the frail Scottish saint as he watched the venerable ancient fragments being man-handled onto the back of the waiting lorry. Wiping his nose on a dog-eared replica of the notorious firman that had enabled Thomas Bruce, Seventh Earl of Elgin to desecrate the Parthenon in the early nineteenth century, Saint Neil's voice cracked as he delivered a rousing valediction to the objects that have for so long mired his museum in ignominy and shame.

[more here]


Percy Flarge [Editor], 'Bloomsbury man makes historic contribution to Crisis at Christmas with magnificent gift to Greece', Artnose (www.artnose.co.uk)

Would that it were true.

image: http://www.artnose.co.uk/

Mokomokai Repatriated

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Twenty tattooed Maori heads have been repatriated from France to New Zealand after more than 200 years. A team from Wellington's Te Papa museum plans to trace the origin of the heads and return them to their communities. More than 500 heads of Maori ancestors remain in collections around the world.
There is a video here. Source: Reuters Friday 27 January 2012