Jacob H. Schiff and the Beginning of Biblical Archaeology in the United States

Jacob Schiff, the well known banker, Jewish community leader, and philanthropist, has been the subject of scholarly study for the better part of a century.¹ While many of Schiff's contributions have been thoroughly analyzed, however, there is one important aspect of his career that has not received the scholarly attention it deserves: his longstanding involvement with Harvard University's Semitic Museum and his near complete funding of the first American archaeological excavation in Palestine. Indeed, Schiff's influence at Harvard led to a major shift in the direction of biblical archaeology in the United States.

Schiff's financial support of Harvard, its Semitic Museum, and its excavations at the site of biblical Samaria are well documented. In fact, scholars such as Naomi W. Cohen, Paul Ritterband, and Harold Wechsler have pointed to Schiff's Harvard involvements in their works on the American Jewish entry into higher education and the rise of American Jewish philanthropy.² However, what is not well explained in existing scholarly accounts is the fact that Schiff's philanthropic involvement with archaeology in Palestine was unique at the time, and that the excavation he funded was also unique for American archaeologists. First, no other major philanthropist, Jewish or not, had shown interest in excavations in Palestine. Second, and more striking, no American university had ever conducted excavations in Ottoman Palestine, nor did any intend to do so. Schiff's personal and financial contributions to Harvard completely changed how archaeologists perceived both Palestine and the funding of excavations. His working relationship with the Harvard Assyriologist David Gordon Lyon marked the first time an American Near Eastern scholar had seriously engaged either Palestine or Jewish philanthropy. This represented a firm break from previous academic perceptions of ancient Jews as subjects unworthy of study, and modern Jews as outsiders to the elite world of scholarship and its patrons.

Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Late Nineteenth Century America

At the time that Schiff became involved with Harvard, the American academy generally regarded the archaeology of Palestine as an unimportant subfield of Near Eastern studies, a perception that his support would ultimately help challenge. The meagerness of the discipline's acceptance in the American academy was largely due to its associations with Christian theological concerns, since both in America and in Europe, archaeological interest in Palestine had grown out of Christian religious interests and curiosity about the Bible, rather than out of the concerns of the secular academy. The first biblical geographer (often called an archaeologist) was an American, Edward Robinson, who in the 1840s worked to identify biblical sites with extant ruins. Robinson had traveled with the missionary Eli Smith, whose ability to translate Arabic place names and inquire about local traditions led to a geographic compendium that archaeologists still sometimes consult today.³ But Robinson's work did not immediately influence the American academy. In fact, it took thirty years before a protégé of Robinson's at Union Theological Seminary, Roswell D. Hitchcock, founded an archaeological organization, the American Palestine Exploration Society. This society assisted the British in a survey project in Palestine in the 1870s, however, both the society and its project were poorly funded and short-lived.⁴ Because Hitchcock and others involved in Palestine exploration had ties to theological seminaries and missionary institutions, biblical archaeology remained on the margins of American university scholarship.⁵ Instead of moving toward the type of archaeological inquiry that excited the religiously committed and that was then gaining ground in Britain, American interest in biblical studies turned towards the study of ancient Near Eastern languages, a field referred to as Assyriology.

Assyriology was linked to philology, not religious studies and not to spade archaeology. In fact, spade archaeology was only considered intellectually stimulating when its main objective was to unearth tablets that could later be deciphered and analyzed. This text-based approach to antiquity meant that Assyriologists were only interested in participating in excavations if they thought there was a chance of unearthing an archive of tablets. Most groups of tablets that were already known had originated...