At a talk given at Michigan State University (MSU) in 2014, Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies Robert T. Anderson described the day that he discovered a trove of artifacts from the Samaritan community of Nablus under the east side bleachers of the MSU football stadium. It was spring 1968, and the university had begun a project to construct shelving underneath the stadium amid 110 yards of “attic” that it used as excess storage space.Footnote 1 When the construction manager discovered three cardboard boxes of “stuff” labeled “Palestine,” Anderson, a Bible scholar, was called to consult. On top of the first box was a marble inscription written in Samaritan Hebrew, which Anderson quickly recognized from a recent article published on Samaritan inscriptions in the journal Revue Biblique. The article’s author, John Strugnell, had lamented only being able to work with a nineteenth-century plaster casting of this inscription, having conducted extensive and ultimately fruitless research trips trying to find the original within major Semitic collections in Chicago, at the University of Pennsylvania, and at the University of Michigan. Strugnell assumed the artifact must have been lost.Footnote 2 As it turned out, it was more accurately described as forgotten. For almost two decades, it had been perched on top of a collection of Samaritan Pentateuchs in a cardboard box labeled “Palestine” and stored alongside purloined Native American and other communities’ artifacts underneath a sports arena in Michigan.
How did these historic collections come to sit forgotten underneath the bleachers of Spartan Stadium? There has been a proliferation of scholarship recognizing the presence of religious leitmotifs in sports contexts, though few who have described the Durkheimian effervescence of a college football game have likely imagined that what lies beneath the bleachers may be equally as compelling for Religious Studies scholars as the people sitting above singing fight songs in color-coordinated attire.Footnote 3 Yet, while it is noteworthy that these objects were discovered underneath the MSU football stadium, the significance is not any associations between the objects and sports per se. The clumsy storage of these historic Samaritan artifacts underneath a sporting arena is revealing less as a data point showing that religion is to be found in surprising places, and more as an indication that the significance of religious objects can be misconstrued by academic institutions and scholars.
This article explores the politics and the personalities that shape the acquisition of religious material culture by academic institutions. It uses as a case study the collection of Samaritan artifacts once stored in three cardboard boxes under Spartan Stadium, now accessioned in special collections at the MSU library as the Chamberlain Warren Samaritan Collection. The collection totals roughly fifty objects, including the marble inscription of Exodus 15:3,11, which was carved sometime between the third and sixth centuries CE. It also includes eighteen Samaritan Pentateuchs, three written in the fifteenth century; a brass scroll case created in the sixteenth century; a series of liturgical texts; and a collection of twenty-four textbooks written for Samaritan children.Footnote 4 This article is not about the collection itself, in the sense that it does not attempt to analyze the artifacts and assess their informative potential for our understanding of the Samaritan past. Rather, it analyzes the various investments that set this collection on its journey to Michigan State—a journey that began in Nablus in Palestine, proceeded through the American Colony in Jerusalem, and, due to the intercession of a Boston-based Congregationalist minister, came to the small town of Three Oaks in Michigan before the collection was deposited underneath the east side bleachers in 1950.
To write an acquisition history of non-Western artifacts that have been acquired by Western universities is to engage in a postcolonial project of unearthing the shifting investments and the mechanisms of power that move objects between owners and repositories.Footnote 5 It proceeds from the supposition that processes of acquisition offer “repositories of social history in material form,” revealing how, why, and when objects have been deemed to hold significance for different intellectual and ideological projects.Footnote 6 That the meanings of things can be transformed through acquisition was brought to the foreground of anthropological studies of objects more than thirty years ago by Arjun Appadurai, who proposed that mapping the “social life of things” reveals how the significance of objects is not inherent to them, but rather is assigned by the social and cultural contexts in which they are acquired.Footnote 7
In contexts of religious object acquisition, Appadurai’s framework is helpful but also somewhat circumscribed. Religious items call for acquisition histories that can account for both consistent and inconsistent attributions of significance, sufficiently capacious to articulate how values ascribed by the community of origin may persist alongside new associations invested in objects by buyers and acquirers. Objects might be venerated as embodied evidence for deep theological convictions, or honored as material repositories of sacred contact, community values, communal history, or ritual authority. Rather than an object biography, which implies a linear process of movement and change, this article emphasizes how various personalities, both religious individuals and Religious Studies scholars, maintained overlapping entanglements in the Chamberlain Warren Collection as it traversed a complex itinerary of acquisition and ownership.Footnote 8 It emphasizes that, while processes of acquisition may unmoor objects from the multiple religious, cultural, and ancestral investments of their communities of origin, those stakes do not disappear, even as the significance of object collections is re-narrated, including in cases when they are re-narrated as possessing no significance at all.
Most specifically, the intervention pursued in this article is to illuminate the entanglements of American academic institutions, and especially American scholars of religion, in processes of religious object acquisition, observing that scholarly investments have frequently overlapped with the interests of religious collectors. It draws on scholarship highlighting the culpability of biblical scholars in fueling the manuscripts and papyri trade, motivated by ambitions to advance careers, secure livelihoods, and chase personal and institutional “fortune and glory.”Footnote 9 Roberta Mazza, and Candida Moss and Joel Baden have emphasized how the collections of the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, were built through collaborations between Bible scholars and religiously motivated collectors in a process blighted by illegal acquisitions and negligent handling of artifacts from abroad.Footnote 10 Jason Kalman and Jacqueline S. du Toit have shown how McGill University’s purchase of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls served both institutional ambitions and, more broadly, national political aspirations to build public confidence in Canadian higher education and its investments in Christian cultural concerns.Footnote 11 As archaeologist Michael Press and biblical scholar Årstein Justnes succinctly observed, through the pursuit of legal, illegal, and quasi-legal purchases, the advancement of assessments of seemingly promising “discoveries,” and even collusion in cases of outright forgery, the trade in religious manuscripts has indelibly shaped the field of Biblical Studies.Footnote 12
This article situates these insights into the entanglements of Bible scholars and the trade in religious antiquities within the broader context of American religion, and within the history of the academic study of religion in a US context. It emphasizes how the entanglements of religiously motivated buyers and the ambitions of scholars and institutions have intertwined to shape assessments of the significance of religious object collections. The artifacts in the Chamberlain Warren Samaritan Collection were initially acquired by Edward Kirk Warren, a wealthy industrialist from Three Oaks, Michigan, and an executive committee member of the World Sunday School Association (WSSA), an international organization that sought to promote Christian education across the globe. Warren visited the Samaritan community and maintained an active correspondence with its high priest, Jacob, from 1901 until Jacob’s death in 1916, during which time he acquired the objects in the collection. Warren conducted these transactions both independently and through the American Samaritan Committee (ASC), an organization formed under the auspices of the WSSA. Among the ASC’s board of directors was Congregationalist minister and aspiring Religious Studies scholar William Eleazor Barton, a friend of Warren’s who acted as adviser on the purchases.
Both men invested high stakes in the significance of the Samaritans and their material repositories. Warren’s Evangelical commitments, actualized through the WSSA, formulated a vision through which these artifacts became commodities that he desired to purchase. Describing the Samaritans as “biblical remnants” and embodied evidence of the truth of scripture, Warren ascribed significance to these objects by virtue of what he deemed that they might signify in relation to his broader religious concerns. Barton, however, hoped to use Warren’s financial investments to establish his own reputation within the academic world of biblical scholarship, and attempted to forge a role as an intermediary between the Samaritans in Nablus and scholars with stakes in their manuscript traditions. Once incorporated into the repository of the MSU Library, this assemblage of Samaritan texts and artifacts have continued to be used by scholars to build careers and reputations, while MSU has lauded ownership of such a historic collection as evidence of its Research 1 bona fides. For all of these parties, this collection has been deemed significant when it has been understood to be useful for the purposes of actualizing ideological claims or advancing professional standing, both personal and institutional.
The Chamberlain Warren Collection’s journey to Michigan is one example among many of a lively antiquities market for Western acquisition of artifacts out of Palestine during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Warren represents one of a cadre of successful Christian businessmen of the era who enabled it, using his financial largesse for purposes of religious acquisition.Footnote 13 While this is certainly not the only example of a collection of religious artifacts extracted by religiously motivated collectors that were ultimately acquired by a US academic institution, what is especially informative about this case study for scholars of American religion is that it patently reveals how “historical significance” has functioned as a highly contingent category. Kathryn Gin Lum has advised Religious Studies scholars to “pay attention to the looping nature of time and the multiplicity of pasts drawn on by individuals with differential access to power” to understand how ideas about historical time and historical significance shape the study of religion.Footnote 14 These dynamics are especially evident in the rhetorical claims constructed around collections of religious material culture. Both religious collectors and scholars of religion have pursued ownership of objects they deem historically significant, motivated by convictions that those objects embody evidentiary claims for the histories of the religious communities that they are most concerned about.
Scholars of American religion should be attentive to the construction of this rhetoric of historic significance, to how it is narrated and framed, and to how it has changed over time. Investment in objects as evidence for the history of religions has not only functioned as a tool for the extraction of artifacts from religious communities but also as a barometer for assessing the significance of the religious people who produced them. Tracing the acquisition histories of religious objects as they have moved between owners uncovers how claims for the significance of religious groups have been constructed by different parties, and how they have been shaped by different ideological, institutional, and theological convictions. Invested with high theological and historical stakes by Warren and Barton, the objects in the Chamberlain Warren Collection were initially described as treasures, worthy of acquisition due to their perceived theological significance and their potential for career making in the academic field of Religious Studies. Stripped of these theological and scholarly investments years later, however, they were sent by Warren’s descendants to East Lansing. There they became one among several collections of objects sacred to cultural and religious communities entrusted to conservators who, having few stakes in their historical significance, placed them into storage under the eastern bleachers of the football stadium.
Extraction
Edward Kirk Warren was by no means the first Westerner to seek to acquire Samaritan artifacts. Europeans developed a fascination with Samaritans in the seventeenth century, with the 1623 arrival of a Samaritan Pentateuch in Paris.Footnote 15 In the European press, Samaritans were pronounced remnants of the biblical era, a direct throughline to the Good Samaritan described in the Gospel of Luke, and thus, to the New Testament itself. While some certainly sought to bring them into the Christian fold, interest in the Samaritans was vested in their significance as historical specimens and not only in their candidacy for conversion. Bible scholars leaped upon variations in the Samaritan text of the Pentateuch to speculate that the community might possess ancient manuscripts that could shed light on their theological concerns and illuminate their study of the Bible. They devised a variety of schemes, some legitimate, others nefarious, to try to expatriate Samaritan manuscripts abroad.
Samaritans themselves were understandably unwilling to part with their sacred writings, and, until the nineteenth century, only a few manuscripts made it into Western hands. Their preservationist stance began to erode in the mid-1800s, a consequence of both increasing poverty and the acumen of a few members of the community who fashioned a consumer market from the growth of Western “Holy Land” tourists willing to pay handsomely for a relic or text. A stream of Samaritan artifacts began to flow out of Nablus, acquired by buyers motivated by a variety of theological and acquisitionist concerns. Some wished to possess an “authentic” biblical souvenir from their Holy Land travels, to show in material goods their connection to the place.Footnote 16 Bible scholars, on the other hand, continued to harbor hopes that Samaritan texts might offer independent validation of the Christian New Testament, and eagerly sought to procure the community’s most ancient manuscripts. They were often frustrated by enterprising Samaritan merchants who were well attuned to the financial prospects of exploiting tourist naivete.Footnote 17 Shrewd scribes wrote new manuscripts for tourists which they masqueraded as ancient, or retrieved texts relegated to the genizah, marketing them for sale as sacred scrolls.Footnote 18 Many Samaritan manuscripts that made their way into Western hands thus hardly delivered on the ambitions their new owners harbored for them—if, indeed, their owners ever succeeded in having them translated.Footnote 19 As Bible scholar Brent Nongri observes, such imaginative fictions were part and parcel of a variety of ways in which locals addressed the imbalances of power inherent in transactions with Westerners around sacred objects, telling tourists what they wanted to hear as a form of everyday resistance to their acquisitionist commands.Footnote 20
Warren had initially become acquainted with the Samaritans in 1901 on a family trip to Palestine.Footnote 21 A committed biblical literalist and a trustee of the Moody Bible Institute, he was among the many devout Christian travelers of his era who embraced an emergent industry for pilgrimages to the Holy Land. Upon meeting the Samaritans of “Shechem” (Nablus), he became enchanted by the idea that the continued existence of the small community offered evidence for the historical credibility of biblical texts that told of their ancient ancestors.Footnote 22 He returned to Michigan convinced that the Holy Land offered embodied evidence for the claims of Christian scripture, a “fifth gospel” attesting to the life and teachings of Jesus.Footnote 23
Warren was a businessman and industrialist who became prosperous when he intuited that the bones discarded from feathers plucked for the manufacture of home goods might offer a more economical stay for corsets than costly and precarious whalebone—thus pioneering the featherbone corset. He earned a fortune from his invention, yet his true passion in life was Christian education. The potential of the physical tangibility of Palestine for making Christian religious teachings legible was especially compelling for Holy Land travelers like Warren who were invested in Christian education at a time when science, secularism, and free thought were interpreted as undermining the truth claims of the Bible. A widely selling collection of photographs of the Holy Land billed as “the earthly footsteps of the man of Galilee” were organized by John Heyl Vincent, founder of the Chautauqua Institution, a summer institute of religious learning directed principally toward Sunday School teachers. An even more ambitious attempt to make the Holy Land real was a scale topographical model of Jerusalem organized by Vincent at Chautauqua. Sunday School teachers attending the institute’s summer Bible Institute were encouraged to traverse its miniaturized hills and valleys and imagine themselves visiting Palestine while reading relevant scriptural passages aloud.Footnote 24 Other commercial ventures packaged material goods from Palestine as props for object lessons in classroom instruction. In 1874, the American Holy Land Exploration Society marketed a “Treasure Box from the Holy Land” containing leaflets and objects, including flora and fauna, that promised to show how “the land of Holy Scripture sustains the accuracy of the Book.”Footnote 25 These material renderings of the lands of the Bible offered an iconic link between the model and the real, marketed as geographical evidence of theological claims.Footnote 26
Warren shared these investments in using the physical evidence of the Holy Land for pedagogical purposes. He was an executive committee member of the WSSA, a federation of national and international Sunday School councils created to support and extend the reach of the Christian Sunday School worldwide.Footnote 27 At its third convention, held in London in 1898, Warren was unanimously elected President of the WSSA’s next meeting. At his insistence, the location was set for Jerusalem. This was an impractical destination for delegates coming mostly from North America and western Europe. Warren himself confessed that the location was “relatively inaccessible” for most attendees, “possible only through the expenditure of time, money, and energy.”Footnote 28 Nevertheless, he was determined that holding the convention in the Holy Land would be inspirational for Sunday School teachers: it would show that biblical narratives occurred in a real place and in real time. It would bring, he assured, “to each reverent pilgrim a new sense of the genuine-ness and vitality of the Word of God.”Footnote 29 To secure the confidence of the executive committee of the WSSA, Warren pledged to financially guarantee the entire enterprise.Footnote 30
Warren was disposed toward utilizing his wealth to enact his theological commitments. Beginning in 1899, he arranged for the Warren Featherbone Co. to make annual payments of $250 to the Three Oaks village treasury on the condition that no saloon be allowed to open in the community, an extension of his temperance convictions.Footnote 31 His engagement with the WSSA was not a departure from his business ventures; rather, he and those around him saw his financial success as an extension of his commitments to Sunday School work. Warren was known “throughout the world” as a leader in his line of business, wrote Charles G. Trumbull, the editor of the Sunday School Times. Yet he was also “a Sunday school man to the core … a fact for the world to ponder.”Footnote 32 This economic theology framed Warren as financially successful because of his Christian faith, and as amassing financial resources precisely to deploy them for the benefits of religious education. Holding the 1904 World Sunday School Convention (WSSC) in the unlikely destination of Jerusalem enabled Warren to craft an experience that used the Holy Land as the basis of a claim for the truth of the gospel in an increasingly secular age. It also staked an important role for the small Samaritan community of Nablus in an unfolding Christian eschatological schema.
The Cruise of the 800
The “magnificent twin-screw steamer” SS Grosser Kurfürst departed New York on March 8, 1904.Footnote 33 On board were 800 delegates on their way to the WSSC in Jerusalem. The party would later rendezvous with a French steamer carrying an additional 472 pilgrims, mostly from the United Kingdom. On the first day at sea, passengers gathered on board to be ceremonially presented with gold and enamel pins by the daughters of Edward K. Warren, designating them as official delegates of the WSSC.Footnote 34 When they arrived in Palestine, the company would embark upon a well-trodden tour of biblical sites, including a trip to the biblical town of Shechem, contemporary Nablus, the ancient home of the Samaritan community. The official itinerary published to accompany the cruise described the Samaritans as a “unique biblical race” and encouraged the delegates to look forward to seeing this community of “biblical remnants” up close.Footnote 35 The visit to Shechem came in anticipation of the high point of the Sunday School convention, an address by the Samaritan High Priest Jacob, who came at the personal invitation of Warren himself. “There was no more striking incident,” one delegate would later write, “than the address of Jacob, High Priest, Son of Aaron, to this Christian audience, and the translation of his words by a Hebrew speaking ‘Christian Jew.’”Footnote 36
The seventy-one-day “cruise of the 800” was not only a pragmatic initiative to transport these 800 Sunday School workers to the location of their upcoming convention. It was a theological performance of travel in which each new visual marker was made sacred in the context of a narrative proclaiming the literal truth of the Christian New Testament and its importance for the contemporary world. As performance studies theorist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has argued, resonance in tourist experiences is not derived from an object or place being of visual interest, per se, but rather is created through narratives that make the destination meaningful. “All interest,” she suggests, “is vested.”Footnote 37 The 1904 trip to Palestine vested the significance of the WSSC, and the tour that the delegates took to get there, in a mission to proclaim the truth of the Bible throughout the world.Footnote 38 During scheduled stops on the way to Palestine, the passengers of the Grosser Kurfürst would disembark to meet locals at pre-arranged assemblies where Warren would address the crowd to wax lyrical on the significance of their trip. Charles Trumbull, editor of the Sunday School Times and a passenger on the voyage remarked that there was, for example, undoubtedly truth in Warren’s assertion during their scheduled stop in Madeira “that the two great events in the history of Madeira were the visit of Columbus on his way to the discovery of America, and the visit of the Sunday school pilgrims, on their way to the World’s Convention in Jerusalem.”Footnote 39 In both cases, the actual place and its inhabitants were significant only as way stops toward a larger purpose, on a voyage of discovery toward a certain sort of promised land.
Pilgrims onboard the SS Grosser Kurfürst would later describe the trip as confirming the veracity of the Christian message in a so-called secular age. The preface of the souvenir record of the voyage published by the WSSA in 1905 dedicated its message to “the pastors, superintendents, teachers, and scholars of the Sunday schools of the world … with the hope that in the study of its pages the land, the birth, the life, the death, the resurrection and the ascension of The Christ [sic] may become more real to them as they have become to the members of the cruise.”Footnote 40 Another book-length account of the trip, published by Trumbull, began with an account of a woman “from the Southern States” who had reportedly come to doubt whether the Holy Land was real. “I would surely love to see somebody who has seen that far off country,” Trumbull’s straw-woman is reported as saying. “Some folks say there aint no such place, and I aint rightly ever known whether there is or not.” It was to this woman, and to others who had been waylaid by critiques of biblical historicity, that Trumbull dedicated his book. “This record of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem,” he explained, “is an attempt to make the Holy Land real.”
Once in Palestine, pilgrims journeying toward the WSSC embarked upon a well-trodden Christian tourist itinerary. They visited major biblical landmarks and sites relevant to the life of Jesus, a “textually directed movement through space” that explored the New Testament geographically.Footnote 41 A visit to Samaria and the biblical city of “Shechem” was a common destination on the Christian Holy Land tour itinerary, albeit one that visitors sometimes remarked offered few exciting attractions. In Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain scornfully recalled that “there was nothing to do in Samaria but buy handfuls of old roman coins at a franc a dozen and look at a dilapidated church of the crusaders and a vault which once contained the body of John the Baptist.”Footnote 42 Similar sentiments were penned by Anna Robinson Black, a delegate to the 1904 WSSC and a young woman from Indiana who was on her first trip outside of the United States. She filled the travel memoir that she later published, A Hoosier Girl Abroad, with recollections of the inconveniences that she experienced on her travels and condescension toward the locals she encountered. The members of the Samaritan community whom she met on the tour’s scheduled stop in Nablus were no exception. “They are dwindling away,” she wrote succinctly. “Only a few left, and it will be a blessing when they are all extinct as a sect.”Footnote 43 All interest is vested, and Black’s was vested in the comforts of her native Indiana.
Edward Warren’s interest, on the other hand, was vested in the Samaritans. More specifically, it was vested in the idea that the survival of this small community of Israelites implicitly confirmed the historical veracity of biblical narratives that described their ancient ancestors and thus a divine eschatological plan for the return of Jesus that he believed the New Testament foretold. Warren’s entreaties toward the Samaritans were driven by a conviction that the group represented the living remnants of the religion of ancient Israel prior to the rabbinic “deformation” of biblical Judaism. He insisted that the community had maintained its ancestral “purity” by refusing to intermarry and by maintaining their ancient rites. Employing a selective reading of the New Testament, Warren even framed biblical Samaritans as especially receptive to the message of Jesus, offering the account in Acts 8:4–40 as illustrative that the people of Samaria “gave heed” to the message of Philip the apostle in contrast to “the awful rejection of the gospel by Jewish leaders.”Footnote 44 At issue here was less an explicit move toward antisemitism per se and more the construction of a truth claim that made Christians rather than Jews into the true heirs of the Holy Land.Footnote 45 It used the miraculous survival of the small band of Samaritans as evidence that Jews had deviated from the religious destiny invested in the land, rather than remaining within its covenant. The Samaritans “are living exhibits of the truthfulness of the scriptures,” Warren explained to a group of missionaries gathered in Michigan in 1914. “There is a great mine of Bible study for us in the circumstances of these unique people, all undiscovered and unused, and yet ready to be brought forth and used in confirming our faith in the Bible that God has given us.”Footnote 46
Warren’s descriptions of the theological utility of the Samaritans objectified the community as relics, “undiscovered and unused,” existing outside of Western linear historical time. Like Christian missionaries of the era who presupposed that non-Christians had no history of their own, when Warren spoke about the Samaritans to American Christian audiences he typically described them as objects to be used toward specifically Christian theological ends.Footnote 47 He believed that philanthropic work on behalf of the community was necessary so that the Samaritans should survive to fulfill their divine destiny. “They are too valuable,” he explained, “to be lost.”Footnote 48 He arranged for the 1904 WSSC to be held in Jerusalem in no small part because he hoped to raise awareness among his fellow Christians of the small band of Samaritans still living in Nablus and demonstrate what he believed to be their significance in the divine plan. Disheartened by their poverty and moved by what he considered to be their theological import, Warren devised a variety of schemes to support the community and invest in them financially. His most public venture was to extend an invitation to the Samaritan high priest, Jacob, to address the WSSA at its 1904 convention in Jerusalem. The spectacle was intended, Warren later wrote to Jacob, to call “the attention of a large number of Christians from all parts of the world to your cause.”Footnote 49
In the years following the convention, Warren and Jacob maintained an active correspondence, and Warren regularly sent funds at Jacob’s request to attend to financial concerns incumbent upon the community. “Last Remnant of Great Samaritan Race Being Cared for By Americans,” Warren pronounced in a 1918 article penned for The Pittsburgh Gazette. “The Lord seems to have maintained them for some special purpose, which His plans may yet unfold.”Footnote 50 In return, the Samaritans extended some hospitality. Warren wrote letters of introduction on behalf of friends visiting the Holy Land that secured them access to the high priest and a peek at the coveted Abishua scroll, the sacred Pentateuch revered by the Samaritan community.Footnote 51 Nine years after Jacob’s stirring address in Jerusalem, Warren invited him once again to address the international meeting of the WSSA, this time at its 1913 Convention in Zurich. When Jacob declined, owing to the coincidence of the meeting with the Passover festival, Warren interpreted Jacob’s suggestion that Warren himself speak to the delegates about Samaritan needs as indicative that Jacob had appointed him “the official representative of the Samaritan congregation.”Footnote 52 In Zurich, Warren made a presentation on the Samaritans and their various predicaments, and he subsequently organized a special meeting in their interests. The 300 people in attendance resolved to form the ASC, dedicated to raising funds to support the community and provide for their many needs.
Over the next thirteen years, from 1913 until its dissolution in 1926, the ASC set about a variety of projects to aid the Samaritans. Most of the funds were supplied by Warren. He sent money to agents located in Palestine—principally John Whiting at the American Colony in Jerusalem—and entrusted them to oversee the implementation of philanthropic initiatives. The most significant of the ASC’s projects was the establishment of a Samaritan school. Though undoubtedly generous, the theological import that Warren attributed to the Samaritans evidently legitimated a logic of ownership that set terms around his philanthropy. Nowhere did he express these convictions more candidly than in conversations with High Priest Jacob over the curriculum to be taught in the school. The Samaritans requested that English be taught to facilitate the children’s prospects, and to enable them to develop a tourist industry from their steady stream of Christian visitors. Warren refused, writing to Jacob that, as the community had “preserved a continued line of the Priesthood and have maintained at the cost of suffering and sacrifice your worship on Gerizim, thus the preservation of your people intact as a nation is a most valuable consideration from a historical and religious point of view.”Footnote 53 As the chief benefactor of the ASC, and of the school that it financed, Warren articulated an assumption of ownership when he denied the request to teach English, seeking to preserve the isolation of the Samaritans for his own theological purposes.Footnote 54
Other philanthropic ambitions harbored by the ASC included the procurement of land for a new, protected neighborhood in Nablus, and purchase of the Samaritan holy precinct on Mount Gerizim, though neither project is known to have been fulfilled. Indeed, some of the pipe dreams that Warren attempted to realize through the ASC were naive at best. One source tells of his cherished hopes of arranging a meeting in Paris between the Jews and the Samaritans, with the ambition of bridging the 2500-year divide between the two groups.Footnote 55 The most pragmatic of the ASC’s programs were initiatives designed to secure the Samaritans some financial independence. Warren commissioned a series of photographs of the sacred Abishua scroll, imagining that selling the images might net a profit that could enrich the community’s coffers. Another initiative was the purchase of a significant number of Samaritan artifacts and manuscripts. Cognizant that the Samaritans were known to sell artifacts to Westerners who offered an enticing sum, Warren authorized John Whiting to purchase artifacts on his behalf and ensure that they remained in Palestine. He was advised by William E. Barton, a Congregationalist minister from Illinois, regarding the theological and historical significance of the various scrolls and writings offered by the community for sale. Warren hoped that the Samaritans would ultimately be able to secure sufficient financial capital to build a museum in Nablus and develop a local tourist industry, at which point they would reacquire the objects to establish them as part of their collection.
For a variety of reasons, not least of which was the financial and social devastation of World War I, none of Warren’s plans ultimately came to fruition. When he died in 1919, there was no museum for the artifacts to be returned to, and the Samaritan community had scant funds to reacquire them.Footnote 56 Legally part of Warren’s estate, they were packaged for shipping and began their journey to Michigan.Footnote 57
Academic Ambition
Warren’s and Barton’s interest in this collection of Samaritan artifacts was not solely philanthropic. Beginning in January 1906, they exchanged a flurry of excited letters discussing a recent assertion by Jacob that an ancient genealogical document held by the community might independently corroborate the life of Jesus and select passages of the New Testament. While Warren’s letters to Barton speculated on the “duty” that Christians would owe to the Samaritans if the assertion was correct, Barton’s responses centered on the import of the manuscript for academic biblical research. “If it is true,” Barton wrote to his friend, “it is one of the most important finds of modern times … I believe there has been a providential purpose in the preservation of this old sect. It is almost a deserted field in American scholarship, and not much has been done in Europe for a good while. If we find something of real significance it will be a priceless blessing.”Footnote 58
Barton had long cultivated an interest in establishing a reputation as an academic. A graduate of Oberlin Theological Seminary, his main source of income derived from his work as a Congregationalist minister. In addition, however, he wrote voluminously on a variety of topics, amassing a wealth of research on Abraham Lincoln and making a foray into biblical scholarship.Footnote 59 He served as Associate Editor of the theological journal Bibliotheca Sacra, and was active in the Chicago Society of Biblical Research. He enjoyed momentary notoriety when The Chicago Tribune printed a short article based on a telegram he sent to the paper in which he claimed that, during a 1902 trip to Nablus, he had secured a Samaritan Pentateuch “far older than any of the Hebrew Biblical manuscripts in the libraries of Europe or America.”Footnote 60 Following this 1902 trip, he maintained an extensive correspondence with Jacob, sending him various trinkets in exchange for information about manuscripts held in the community’s collections. Barton also persuaded the high priest to send him manuscripts of various books about the community which Barton committed to publish. He contracted a linguist, Dr. Abdullah Ben Kori, to translate the texts from Arabic into English. Barton added editorial introductions and published the volumes in the United States, sending copies to Nablus for the Samaritans to sell to tourists.Footnote 61 Barton’s most enthusiastic letters to Jacob concerned his interest in serving as a broker between the Samaritans and major academic institutions for the sale of Samaritan manuscripts. Yet his attempts to establish himself as an antiquities dealer were singularly unsuccessful. In 1906, for example, he attempted to petition the Newberry Library to purchase a Samaritan Torah he had acquired from a dealer in Syria, declaring the manuscript to be 1200 years old and asserting his scholarly bona fides by citing various articles he had published in Bibliotheca Sacra and other Christian publications.Footnote 62 The Newberry Library sent a polite refusal. Indeed, while Barton did not hesitate to laud his expertise as a scholar of Samaritan and other ancient manuscripts, his claims were unquestionably dubious.
As Barton’s various attempts to establish a reputation as a scholar ran aground, his ardor with the Samaritans began to cool. A decisive blow to his ambitions came with a letter in February 1906 confirming that the genealogy in the Samaritans’ possession that Warren and Barton had been so thrilled to discover was, in fact, dependent on Christian manuscripts and thus could not independently corroborate anything in the New Testament. A few months later came a report from a missionary doctor stationed in Nablus that the Samaritans had sold most of their ancient manuscripts to “Abraham the Jew from Russia about 35 years ago.”Footnote 63 In 1913, another missionary wrote a letter to Barton sharing his judgment that the Abishua scroll was not written by the son of Aaron, brother of Moses, as the Samaritans claimed, but was likely written in the twelfth century.Footnote 64 Barton’s inability to capitalize on the academic prospects he had envisioned from his relationship with the Samaritans was facilitated by interlocutors in America too, as a steady stream of rejection letters from book publishers, scholarly journals, and popular publications stymied his attempts to establish a reputation as a Samaritan scholar.Footnote 65 His most successful venture was the translation and publication of the books by Jacob, yet by the eve of World War I he was clearly irritated by the high priest’s many demands for aid and requests for an assortment of trinkets from abroad, including glasses, a music box, and a stereopticon slide projector.Footnote 66 When in the aftermath of World War I, and the death of Warren, it became apparent that the ASC’s philanthropic venture of a museum in Nablus would not be actualized, Barton used the Samaritans’ growing rift with the ASC’s Jerusalem agent, John Whiting, as impetus to initiate transport of Warren’s collection to Michigan.
Deception
A well-trodden Orientalist trope among travel accounts authored by Holy Land pilgrims who visited the Samaritan community in Nablus portrayed Samaritans as willfully attempting to deceive Western visitors who wished to see or acquire Samaritan ritual objects. Authors offered these tales as cautions to other visitors: to warn them, for example, that, if they paid a few coins to see the Abishua scroll the Samaritans would attempt to deceive them by showing a much newer artifact in place of their most precious commodity.Footnote 67 Anna Robinson Black complained that her guide had to navigate “a great deal of red tape before we were permitted to see it, the real one [sic]”; Charles Trumbull recounted that his guide would only pay if the priest promised to show the group two scrolls—ensuring that at least one would be the genuine article.Footnote 68 Another vein in this narrative genre described covertly transacted purchases of Samaritan goods. When Barton first visited the Samaritan community in 1902, facilitated by a letter of introduction from Warren, he wrote a lengthy description of his purportedly clandestine acquisition of a set of Samaritan scrolls.Footnote 69 Barton’s version of events is highly dubious, especially given the cultural stereotyping employed within it, yet such tales adroitly illustrate the ambiguity of relationships between the Samaritans and their American visitors. While these engagements could be financially beneficial for the Samaritan community, hostility could quickly emerge when Westerners were confronted by locals who sought to exercise their own agency in the conduct of financial transactions.
Given this popular set of narrative accounts, it is hardly surprising that accusations of deceit and duplicity were also invoked amid the removal of the objects purchased by Warren. It could almost be described as an initiation into a collectors’ club, of sorts. John Whiting, an American diplomat in Palestine and a member of the utopian American Colony, was commissioned by the ASC in 1913 to oversee their philanthropic projects in Nablus. Letters from Whiting were, however, abruptly halted in 1914 due to the disruptions of World War I. When communication resumed shortly after the war, it was discovered that the ASC school had been closed for two years and that the Samaritans were incensed over Whiting’s conduct. They accused him of closing the school, of not distributing funds sent by Warren, of having photographed the Abishua scroll at Warren’s request without offering renumeration to the community, and of purchasing Samaritan manuscripts without providing full payment.Footnote 70
The major breakdown in relations that ensued between the community and the ASC was exacerbated by the deaths of the two charismatic leaders whose personal relationship had initially driven the work—Jacob in 1916, and Warren in 1919. Jacob’s son and brother, who were engaged in a protracted struggle for leadership of the Samaritan community, directed correspondence after Warren’s death to Barton and to Warren’s son-in-law, Frederick Warren Chamberlain. They wrote extensive letters demanding to see the ASC’s financial records and requesting explanations of why no revenue to sustain the community had been forthcoming. They claimed that Whiting had taken advantage of the community during the war and had requisitioned manuscripts and objects from them without compensation. They demanded to see revenue which they believed the sale of the photographs of the Abishua scroll should have secured.
Further frustrating Barton’s good will toward the Samaritan community, his cherished hope that the ASC’s efforts to photograph the Abishua scroll might earn him accolades among the scholarly community were abruptly dashed in 1920. When the ASC finally received the photographs taken of the scroll by Whiting and the American Colony photographic studios, a total of forty-three images of the complete unscrolled manuscript, Barton presented them at the 1920 Chicago Society of Biblical Research meeting.Footnote 71 His excitement was quashed by the biblical scholar Paul Kahle, who pronounced (wrongly, as it turned out) that the scroll in the photograph was not the Abishua scroll at all but, rather, a much newer manuscript.Footnote 72 Consequently, the photographs never achieved the commercial success that Warren, Barton, and others had desired, and they netted the committee little to no revenue with which to reimburse the Samaritans for the reproduction of their most sacred object.
The situation reached a breaking point in 1921, when Whiting allegedly foreclosed on a mortgaged Samaritan Pentateuch. Seeking to extract himself from a situation which had begun to claim too much of his time and energy, Barton likely used Whiting’s purportedly deceitful conduct as a convenient ruse to extract himself from the Samaritan cause. Indeed, it was not difficult for Barton and his fellow ASC committee members to portray Whiting as untrustworthy. As attested in a 1919 letter from Paul Warren of the American Red Cross to Barton in 1919, Whiting was an eclectic character: during the course of his career he was a photographer with the American Colony, an antiquities dealer, deputy American consul for Jerusalem, and, from 1918, an intelligence officer with the British Army.Footnote 73 By the very nature of his wartime appointment, then, Whiting necessarily had to be evasive about his travels, his communication, and his interpersonal relationships. Barton cited his distrust of Whiting as the rationale for initiating the transport of the artifacts purchased by Warren to Michigan rather than retaining them in Nablus, as Warren had stipulated.Footnote 74 Yet, by emphasizing the role of Whiting in the breakdown of relations between the ASC and the Samaritan community of Nablus, Barton also evaded more personal reasons for his increasing lack of interest in the Samaritan community of Nablus: namely, that he had ceased to see them as significant.Footnote 75 He bypassed the wishes of the Samaritans too, who wrote repeatedly to Barton to ask for these materials to be returned to them. In vain, Samaritan community leaders continued to write to Barton until 1926, when, frustrated with the entire enterprise, the ASC officially disbanded. For the last time, Barton traveled to Nablus to disperse the remainder of the ASC’s meager funds among the community that they had once promised to lift out of poverty.
The Changing State of Significance
The ASC initially hoped that Warren’s collection, especially the biblical manuscripts, could be sold to major universities when they arrived in the United States. Seemingly, however, no academic institutions expressed interest. For the next thirty years, the collection was maintained in a museum that Warren had established in his hometown of Three Oaks, Michigan.Footnote 76 This small town close to the Illinois border, was, to say the least, an unlikely destination for this array of sacred and communal artifacts. Three Oaks attracted few visitors and there was little in the way of curatorial expertise to tend to the display of the collection. The artifacts remained there until 1950, when Warren’s descendants tired of the upkeep of the museum and decided to close it, sending their collections on a 150-mile journey to the Michigan State College of Agriculture and Natural Science.Footnote 77 There, too, curators struggled to comprehend the significance of their new acquisition. In 1950, MSU was a land grant agricultural college, not yet designated as a university. The holdings of the Three Oaks Museum totaled some 11,000 objects, including the Samaritan collection, but also agricultural tools and a grand collection of clocks. While the clocks and agricultural paraphernalia found a ready home in the agricultural college museum, the Samaritan items were less relevant, at the time, to the institution’s teaching and research mission. Joseph Stack, the college’s museum director, endeavored to relocate them, offering the collection to the Hebrew Union College, The University of Chicago, the British Museum, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the University of Pennsylvania.Footnote 78 None showed interest in taking on responsibility for the items, writing that they had no faculty members with linguistic expertise in Samaritan. In vain, Stack seems to have corresponded in search of scholars who could help him understand his new collection, sending out photographs of the marble inscription for translation, and, in a particularly desperate move, writing to Dr. Willard Libby of the University of Chicago to inquire whether the manuscripts could be dated using a carbon dating method he had recently learned about in the Reader’s Digest. Footnote 79 With no expertise in house to curate and use these objects, they were placed into three boxes affixed with the label “Palestine” and placed into storage under the east side bleachers of the football stadium.
The problem, for the various curators and caretakers of these artifacts, as well as for the scholars whom Stack engaged in a network of correspondence, was that none invested stakes in their significance. They maintained no scholarly investments in the historical import of the Samaritans and their textual and artifact traditions, nor did they possess the linguistic expertise that might cultivate any such investments. Equally, they did not share the theological significance that Warren had attributed to the Samaritans, which had invested their manuscripts and objects with scriptural and eschatological import.
When the objects were rediscovered under the bleachers in 1968, however, the stakes had shifted. Samaritan Studies had begun to develop as a field.Footnote 80 Michigan State had become a university and joined the Big Ten, creating an institutional investment in cultivating significant scholarly archival holdings. As part of the effort to become a research institution, the university had begun to recruit scholars with national reputations, including Robert T. Anderson, a Bible scholar who came to MSU as the institution’s first full-time Religious Studies professor. The significance of the collection was not lost on Anderson. He immediately intervened to ensure the transfer of the collection to the university archives, though not without suggesting that “the most valuable items” be given on permeant loan to the Religious Studies department “for teaching purposes.”Footnote 81 He also ensured that a letter was included in the collection affirming that he was the only researcher permitted to use it.Footnote 82 Recognizing that the items were significant for scholarship, he clearly wished to preserve the discovery to advance his personal scholarly reputation. Later, he would write to various university officials to encourage the university to host visiting Samaritan community leaders and put the items on display, intimating that both might encourage Warren’s descendants to make investments in the university. The stakes of the collection were now manifold and multiple.
The stakes had also shifted for the Samaritans. In the 1920s, community leaders had written repeatedly and in earnest to Barton requesting the repatriation of their artifacts, yet beginning in 1982 Samaritan community member Benjamin Tzedaka, a historian and self-described representative of the community, made a series of visits to MSU, conducting research on the collection and speaking before the University Board of Trustees to ask the university to keep and use the objects to promote Samaritan Studies abroad.Footnote 83 In 2005, he embarked upon a campaign to establish centers of Samaritan Studies at select international universities that had collections of Samaritan manuscripts, including MSU. Joseph Stack had struggled to engage scholars with expertise in the Samaritans in 1955. Tzedaka’s 2005 entreaty, however, was accompanied by three letters from scholars attesting to the importance of Samaritan Studies for knowledge of the ancient Near East and for theological and biblical studies.
The growth of Samaritan Studies as an international scholarly field has vested significance in the Chamberlain Warren Collection for Samaritan community members who hope that the objects will once again raise awareness of their community and their various needs among an international audience. Another community member, Abood Cohen, now joins classes of MSU students via Zoom to talk to them about the community and their life in Nablus. The collection retains the significance invested in it by the Samaritan community prior to its expatriation: the artifacts remain objects of communal history, copies of sacred scriptures, and archaeological evidence of the community’s long and storied past. Yet, layered into these attributions of significance are also hopes that these objects will continue to alert Westerners to the economic and cultural challenges faced by this minority community in Palestine.
For MSU, the significance of the collection, proudly housed within the library’s special collections, is palpable. The university can bolster its reputation as a major research institution by declaring that it holds the “largest collection of Samaritan materials in the Western Hemisphere.”Footnote 84 MSU-affiliated scholars, meanwhile, have derived personal benefit from developing research projects centered on the collection. One initiative used the collection as a protype for digitally engaged humanities scholarship. Jim Ridolfo and Bill Hart-Davidson, scholars of Digital Humanities at MSU, received multiple financial and career development awards to support the digitization and translation of twenty pages of one of the Pentateuchs in the collection, describing the project as a pioneering use of digital tools to expand access to historic collections and forge connections across a “textual diaspora.”Footnote 85 In writing this article as an MSU faculty member, I am similarly benefiting from making claims about the significance of this collection. I am part of a chain of vested interest, choosing to research and write about these artifacts because they serve my broader scholarly interests in religious material culture and in more deeply emmeshing the topic of religious education within the history of American religions. Indeed, as long as the collection is made accessible to a broad audience, these objects will continue to be redefined and re-narrated according to their utility to new ideological projects. As Ahmad Greene-Hayes powerfully observes, public access and the interpretations that flow from it may thus perennially expose objects and the communities that produced them to epistemic violence, as authors make new claims for historical significance constructed in relation to how collections can advance their personal and particular goals.Footnote 86
The Opportunities of Acquisition History
The fluctuating stakes invested in the Chamberlain Warren Samaritan Collection by its different owners, curators, and scholars illuminate how historical significance has functioned as a contextually contingent rather than empirical category of analysis in the study of religion. Whether a community or its objects have been considered historically significant has been contingent on their relevance to the conversations that scholars of religion have deemed to be most important for understanding the religious systems that they are most concerned about. Put bluntly, for this collection to matter to scholars of religion, the Samaritans had to matter to scholars of religion. The identification of the Chamberlain Warren Collection as historically significant for scholarship was dependent on the growth of a broader network of scholarly investments in Samaritan Studies and on the presence of scholars who could appropriately recognize what this collection signified in relation to the past. For MSU to invest its institutional resources in maintaining and preserving these objects depended on cultivating institutional investments correlated to becoming a research university and on seeing a utility for collections that could be narrated as having historic significance for its developing scholarly concerns.
Western acquisitions of artifacts from the Holy Land, archaeologist Morag Kessel writes, serve as “powerful signifiers of ideological meanings and reflections of political and social relationships.”Footnote 87 Yet, signifiers are only meaningful within contexts that deem what they signify to be important. The case study of the Chamberlain Warren Samaritan Collection lays bare that the stakes of significance for the material cultures of the study of religion are always stakes that are constructed, and that these constructions fluctuate according to the interests of different interlocutors. During the “Cruise of the 800,” delegates to the WSSA’s Convention were actively encouraged to interpret the people and places of the “Holy Land” as evidence for the life of Jesus. The Samaritans became significant because delegates were conditioned to interpret the community, and especially High Priest Jacob, within the nexus of these evidentiary claims. The waxing and waning interests of scholars in the collection once it arrived in the United States, on the other hand, illustrate how the significance of objects can dissipate in the absence of a context to inform their relevance, as scholars and curators outwardly dismissed the collection as uninteresting to purchase for their own collections, misunderstood it, or, understanding little about its provenance, tossed it into storage.
In recent years, the field of museum studies has seen increased efforts to develop accountability of the modern museum’s emergence within a historical period of colonialism, concerned with collecting, classifying, and exhibiting objects acquired from communities, often without consent. American religion, as a field, has not paid nearly so much attention to the history of the objects that it relies on for its scholarly knowledge production.Footnote 88 Such hesitancy may be understandable. Attention to acquisition histories reveals how classification and power intersect, assigning significance to objects when they are assumed to have the capacity to tell certain desirable stories.Footnote 89 It reveals that the vested interests that have driven acquisitions of sacred artifacts are not the sole preserve of religiously motivated dilletantes but, rather, are processes that academics have been deeply entangled in. It also evidences that scholars can get it wrong. In the acquisition history of the Chamberlain Warren Collection, the scholarly community repeatedly made critical errors, from Paul Kahle’s failure to recognize that the photographs of the Abishua scroll were genuine, to the failure of archivists and librarians to properly account for the historical significance of the collection once it arrived on US soil. Scholars of American religion have good reasons to not pay attention to acquisition history, then. Not only does it implicate us in the extraction of objects from communities of origin, but it also risks exposing our own deficiencies, and our history as a field of study that has always maintained a complicated relationship to the religious people and practices that we research.
Objects constitute disciplines. Material culture has long been used to authenticate the claims that the academic field of Religious Studies advances, as well as claims made by institutions that own these artifacts to be an appropriate home for such scholarship. Archaeological finds and newly discovered manuscripts continue to be coveted not only by Religious Studies scholars eager for career success but also by universities and colleges seeking to assert their research prowess. At the same time, what scholars have presumed to be true about the broader chronologies of religious history has invested more significance in some communities and the objects that they produce than others.Footnote 90 Tracing the acquisition histories of archival collections thus has much to offer to scholars of American religion who seek to understand how some religious objects are seen as performing chronological accounts of religious life, while others can just as easily be relegated to storage under the bleachers as the stakes in their significance shift.
