Ouster of an "Anti-Judaist"

Should a vocal opponent of the Jewish religion be in charge of the most important documents of ancient Judaism to be discovered in modern times? Curiously, not a word about that ugly issue was uttered last week, when the Israel Antiquities Authority fired Harvard Divinity School professor John Strugnell as chief editor of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Ostensibly, the Roman Catholic layman was removed for "health reasons." Nonetheless, Strugnell's distasteful views -- and his propounding of them -- was a major reason behind his sudden departure.

Strugnell's tenure was jeopardized by a November interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, in which the scholar, calling himself an "anti-Judaist," declared that Judaism is a "horrible" religion with "racist" origins that in principle should not exist at all. "The correct answer of Jews to Christianity is to become Christian," said Strugnell, who denies he is an anti-Semite.

Harvard Divinity School's acting dean, Mark Edwards, declared those opinions to be "personally repugnant." Scholars had gossiped about Strugnell's views long before the Ha'aretz incident. As Washington's Biblical Archaeology Review released English excerpts from the interview, Strugnell's five colleagues on the scrolls team said they had already called for their boss's removal, citing his health problems -- among other things, he was known to be a heavy drinker -- and unspecified "complications."

Strugnell won the top editorship in 1987 owing to his long involvement with the scrolls. He then faced growing scholarly anger because, 43 years after the first documents were discovered, one-fifth or more of the scrolls are still unpublished and unavailable to academe. His five colleagues on the scrolls team cited the delays as a reason to remove Strugnell, but other experts contend that he has worked to end the logjam.

Despite last week's firing, Strugnell retains scholarly rights to many important scrolls. The project is now under a three-man directorship led by Emanuel Tov of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, who says the new arrangement should "speed things up." But a speedup is not enough for Biblical Archaeology Review, which contends that only full access to photographs of unpublished texts will end the "scandal" of neglect.