America’s Hebraic Awakening

In a single afternoon, a visitor to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem can walk through several thousand years of Jewish life. The Ketef Hinnom scrolls, with their priestly blessing, predate the Babylonian exile. There are reconstructed synagogue interiors carried out of Germany and India and Suriname and Italy, silver Torah cases from Persia, bridal costumes from Morocco, illuminated manuscripts from medieval Spain. Each object encodes a way of life, customs of marriage and burial, a liturgy, a set of distinctively Jewish answers to the permanent questions of how to live and what to pass on. Most of the communities that produced these objects are gone. The Jews survive, thank God, but the societies that wrote these scrolls have dissolved into history.