Part of attempts to ban all research that involves human fetal tissue, because the superstitious feelings of anti-choice fanatics over useless, garbage corpse flesh is apparently more important than any number of entire human lives.
Don’t forget that what the U.S. is doing matches the U.N.’s description of a genocidal act. -V
So… Anyone remember when the Hobby Lobby people were busted for smuggling artifacts, and we were all shocked and confused and then forgot about it?
Well, the artifacts they were actually busted for are Mesopotamian clay tablets. But… those aren’t the only artifacts they’ve been dealing in.
I just found out that they have thousands - thousands! - of Torah scrolls, which they then donate to other Evangelicals for financial reasons and political leverage. (In one case, they donated a 16th-century scroll to Liberty University. It was completely unfurled and directly handled in an auditorium. By untrained students.) Almost two thousand of them are sitting in an explicitly Evangelical museum full of supercessionist bullshit, and the text of the largest display talks about how they were “saved” from burial or the genizah.
Saved.
From proper Jewish ritual handling.
By Evangelical Xians.
Who then donate these things to other Evangelicals who mishandle them.
For money.
I… I think I’m going to cry.
I was just about to post this! I even got a little shout-out in the article. :)
The notion of “build[ing] a Christian museum on the backs of Jewish items” is, as I’ve come to understand in my research of the history of Judaica collecting, goes back several centuries to the origins of the modern museum itself. But it is particularly disturbing to see how this classically-supersessionist and fossilizing language (“God gave those people [Jews] a job, and they did that job well,” Steven Green explains, referring to the “job” of preserving the Torah text in identical copies so that evangelical Christians could prove the Bible’s unerring nature) is intertwined with corporate capitalism and greedy tax evasion. If only there was something in all those Torah scrolls on the subject…
Not okay. Not even a little.
