Missing objects, missing subjects: the colonization of Jewish ethnography in the Israel Museum

In 1998, several festive exhibitions were staged at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem (IMJ), in honour of Israel's jubilee anniversary. The milestone came three years after the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had signed the Oslo Accords in the years before his death. The nineties were a time of political disagreement and sociocultural controversies in Israel, both between right- and left-wing forces, Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, and Israelis and Palestinians. In the jubilee events organized by the IMJ, this tense atmosphere was clearly on display. In the article, I examine the various exhibitions and draw an analogy between the hierarchy reflected in how different types of objects were displayed and the unequal relations among social groups in Israel. The article focuses on the ambivalent place the IMJ afforded to modern Jewish ethnographic objects. While these objects signify diaspora, tradition, and non-sovereign Jewish collectivity, they also constitute an irruption in the Zionist narrative. I demonstrate how the museum's discourse and curatorship disciplined these objects and their significance, curtailing their irruptive meaning. In addition, I argue that it is not the ethnographic objects per se that were on display, but rather their Zionist transformation into new objects that are similar to the traditional ones, but that are now aligned with the ongoing settler-colonial project. I examine the way that the museum created and juxtaposed categories such as ‘universal’ and ‘ethnic’ to categorize its artifacts, as well as what objects it signified as ‘national,’ as opposed to other objects supposedly devoid of political meaning. Finally, I offer a new way to understand the role of these ethnographic objects in the IMJ exhibitions, one in which these objects exceed the narrow space allocated to them by the IMJ and overturn the story it seeks to tell.