As Chanukah, the festival of lights, approaches, I have been thinking about an ancient oil lamp found in the Holy land that I once saw in Tel-Aviv in Yael Dayan's apartment. Yael, who has since passed, was the daughter of the one eyed famous general General Moshe Dayan and Ruth Dayan. Moshe Dayan, the war hero of the 1956 Sinai Campaign and the 1967 Six Day War, was Menachem Begin’s Foreign Minister who negotiated Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt, which has lasted to this day. Dayan was also an amateur archaeologist who amassed a vast collection of antiquities.

This collection was controversial as Dayan never had a licence from the Israeli Antiquities Authority to dig, but since he was a war hero, no one in Israel ever stopped him from pursuing his archaeological passions, figuring he would be needed in the event of war ever breaking out.

The little oil lamp I saw was chipped, and was not at all valuable in monetary terms but the story surrounding it is. Yael herself was not really interested in archaeology, but Moshe had given her some other oil lamps, including a Hasmonean one from the time of the Macabees. Yael, a former member of Knesset for the Labour Party, who passed away last year,  tried to find the missing pieces to the oil lamp so he could glue it together but ultimately wasn’t successful. 

To  Moshe Dayan, the land of Israel was pregnant with evidence of  Israel’s greatest glories—the patriarchs, the 12 tribes, the judges and the kings.  Discovering an object miraculously preserved from those periods reaffirmed his connection between past and present. Dayan understood that Jews were indigenous to the land of Israel, and archaeological evidence was proof of it.

“I was not content only with the Israel I could see and touch,” Moshe Dayan wrote. “I also longed for the Israel of antiquity, the Israel of the ‘timeless verses’ and the ‘Biblical names’ and I wanted to give tangibility to that, too. I sought to … bring to life the strata of the past which lay beneath the desolate ruins and archaeological mounds.”
 

Udi Dayan, Yael’s brother, a sculptor, who has since passed away, told me he remembered his father Moshe always “had glue on his fingers”. Moshe, who wore his trademark black patch over his left eye  after being injured while in Lebanon fighting for the British during World War 1,  would apply glue to restore items, but trained archaeologists noted he often made mistakes in his restoration. Dayan would also sign archaeological items he dug or restored, much to the chagrin of professional archaeologists.

Udi told me that on Shabbat Moshe would take him and his younger brother Assi to excavate ancient pottery when they  were young and Udi’s job was to carry the ancient pottery Moshe unearthed to the army Jeep under the hot sun. Udi had no interest in archaeology but “I went along because if I helped him (Moshe)he would let me drive the army jeep to the nearby makolet (store)  to buy an artik(popsicle). Udi also said while his father dug for archaeology, it would give him necessary time to reflect and think.

I met Arieh Rosenbaum, who at the age of 13 befriended Moshe Dayan when he saw him unearthing archaeology near Aryeh’s home in Holon. Aryeh was interested in archaeology and would spend time with Dayan digging at archaeological sites around the country. Aryeh felt close to Dayan, almost like a son, and was in tears remembering Moshe Dayan when I spoke to him.Dayan’s youngest son, Assi, who became a famous actor and filmmaker in Israel, was the same age as Aryeh but was not at all interested in archeology. When I spoke to Assi, I got the sense he was jealous of Aryeh’s close relationship with his father, a closeness he never shared. Aryeh took me to an area in the industrial part of Holon where Dayan had once gone probing into a cave, which collapsed and Dayan had barely escaped alive, after Aryeh found him. Aryeh saved his life.

Ruth Dayan, Moshe’s first wife and the mother of his three children told me Moshe loved to go into the Old City of Jerusalem and purchase items from a network of Arab traders. Many of these dealers had themselves obtained the items objects under questionable, if not illegal, circumstances.

I also spoke with a woman who was Dayan’s mistress (he had many), and she told me that Dayan liked to own and possess things, and he collected archeological items because he had grown up poor, and this hobby enabled him to amass great wealth. She also was of the view that if Dayan had not collected these items, many of them would have been destroyed, as tractors and bulldozers would have run over them. “He saved these items,” she said

I visited the home of  woman formerly employed in Moshe Dayan’s office, who had archaeological items proudly displayed on her mantel piece, which Dayan had given to her on her wedding..” We knew he was digging illegally but no-one had the heart to stop him,” she told me.

An owner of a Tel-Aviv gallery told me that she believed Dayan never left his antiquities collection to his children, as none of them had ever expressed an interest in archaeology during his life time. ( Dayan left his three children out of his will).

Dayan left his archaeological collection to his second wife Rachel, when he died of cancer in 1981, and she was selling it, which offended professional archaeologists and many in Israel who believed the collection properly belonged to the nation. Uri Avinery, a former member of Knesset and fierce critic of Dayan, whom I interviewed in his Tel-Aviv apartment when he was in his nineties, told me he had tried to ensure Dayan could not “rob” antiquities sites, but no one was interested in stopping him.

Ya’acov Meshorer, the chief curator of archaeology  at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem has said, “My feeling is that Dayan really intended to give the museum his collection after his death, expecting to live to a ripe old age with no family obligations. But, when he realized he was going to leave a young widow, he knew he had to see to it she had enough money. This was the reason he changed his mind.” https://library.biblicalarchaeology.org/article/the-dayan-saga-the-man-and-his-archaeological-collection/

The Tisch family and two others paid $1 million for Dayan’s collection, (much of which Dayan had bought, although not necessarily at fair market value).

Meshorer disapproved of Dayan’s excesses in collecting antiquities but, like many Israelis at the time, he forgave Dayan. “He was in a way a child,” said Meshorer. “A brilliant mind, a great personality, but in some ways a child….”

“He was a very passionate man and he did things without considering the feelings of archaeologists or other people. We didn’t totally agree, but as a museum man it was my task to see to it that our relationship would end by getting the entire collection into the museum. In doing so, I feel I have accomplished a national mission.”