The exhibit will be accompanied by six months of special programs and lectures.
"They are foundation documents in the Jewish tradition, in the Christian tradition and they are seen as divinely inspired in the Islamic tradition," ROM chief executive William Thorsell said. "So this really gives us an opportunity in Ontario, where we have a lot of diverse people, to sit down and have some actual public debates about who wrote this material, how it's united but also divided people over the years, what the ideas are in them and how some of those ideas have changed. "
Is Dead Sea Scrolls controversy coming to Toronto?
It should be pointed out that, according to various news items, the Royal Ontario Museum has hired, as curator for the planned exhibit, Dr. Risa Levitt Kohn, who curated the San Diego Natural History scrolls exhibit last year.
These items, however, have failed to mention that there was a good deal of controversy over Dr. Kohn's performance and qualifications in San Diego. For example, University of Chicago historian Norman Golb published a detailed review of the San Diego museum "catalog," whose author is none other than Dr. Kohn. According to Golb, the catalog is riddled with false and erroneous statements. See http://oi.uchicago.edu/pdf/dss_review_sandiego_catalogue_2007.pdf
Moreover, Dr. Kohn was subjected to extremely harsh criticism in a series of articles on the NowPublic site for having stated, in published interviews and articles, that the scrolls are not really "Jewish" texts and that the public must not be "confused" with an accurate account of the competing theories of scroll origins. See these items:
http://www.nowpublic.com/culture/dead-sea-scrolls-exhibit-misleads-publi...
http://www.nowpublic.com/dead-sea-scrolls-san-diego-natural-history-muse...
http://www.nowpublic.com/culture/did-christian-agenda-lead-biased-dead-s...
According to these articles -- in which an abundant number of sources are linked -- Dr. Kohn also presented herself in published correspondence as a "Dead Sea Scrolls scholar," and then admitted in an interview that she was "far from an expert" and had only a "tangential" knowledge of the area. In light of such documented statements, one is surely entitled to ask exactly what are Dr. Kohn's qualifications as a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar.
All of this, at any rate, leads me to ask -- has the Royal Ontario Museum taken measures to ensure the scientific integrity of this exhibit? Have they made an appropriate choice for a curator? If Dr. Kohn's statements became the subject of controversy in San Diego, what leads one to think she will do a better job here than she did there?