Archbishop Mar Samuel, head of the Syrian Orthodox Monastery of St. Mark in Jerusalem, was one of the first to purchase Dead Sea Scrolls off the black market. Unlike the other scroll dealers, Mar Samuel didn’t like dealing directly with Israelis. To him, all Jews were representatives of the enemy nation. Mar Samuel brought the…
In October 2016, UNESCO’s executive board ratified a resolution which attempted to erase 3,000 years of Jewish religious history in Jerusalem. The resolution was drafted by Jordan and submitted by Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, and Sudan—with the enthusiastic support of the Palestinian Authority, a full member of UNESCO since 2011. The central aim…
On November 24, 1947, with the British Mandate approaching expiration, the nascent Jewish nation was caught up in a bloody civil war with Palestinian nationalists. Jerusalem was divided by barbed wire, booby traps, and makeshift walls as British troops strained to quell the violence. Professor Eleazar Lipa Sukenik, from Hebrew University, received a call from…
On March 20, 1952, Henri de Contenson, a young French scholar, mounted an expedition to scout desert terraces and cliffs in the Judean desert. They were looking for Dead Sea Scrolls. They were racing against the illicit Bedouin excavations by basically using their own team of hired Bedouin. The expedition was sponsored by the Jordanian…