ANU: the Museum of the Jewish People

Most museums organise around a place or a period: this city, this dynasty, this century of pots. ANU - the Museum of the Jewish People, on the Tel Aviv University campus in Ramat Aviv - organises around a people instead, spread across roughly two and a half thousand years and every continent they settled on. The building holds no single ancient find of the kind that anchors most evidence pieces on this site. What it holds is the record of a diaspora's own record-keeping: model synagogues built to the proportions of buildings destroyed or abandoned, and walls of names, family trees and community histories assembled from the archives of communities that mostly no longer exist as living congregations. The museum itself is the artefact under discussion here - what it chose to preserve, and why choosing to preserve it at all was a claim worth making.

Founded to answer a specific absence

The museum opened in 1978 under the name Beit Hatfutsot, the House of the Diaspora, conceived in the years after the Second World War and Israel's founding as a deliberate answer to a gap in how Jewish history was being told. Archaeology and biblical scholarship already had their institutions in Israel; what had no comparable home was the record of the two thousand years in between - the long diaspora chapters in Babylon, Spain, Poland, Yemen, Morocco, Germany, and everywhere else Jewish communities had built lives, most of which had since been destroyed, expelled, or simply dispersed further by emigration. A museum with no single geographic centre was built to hold a history with no single geographic centre.

In 2021, after a multi-year renovation and expansion, the museum reopened under its current name, ANU - Hebrew for "we" - with the same founding logic carried into a larger building and a wider brief: not only the diaspora but the whole span of Jewish peoplehood, ancient to contemporary, told through objects, film, genealogy and reconstruction rather than through a single chronological corridor of finds.

What a model of a lost building can prove

A scale model is not primary evidence in the way a seal impression or an inscribed stone is - it is a reconstruction, built after the fact from whatever documentation survived. That is precisely why the collection is worth taking seriously as evidence of a different kind: it demonstrates, building by building, that these synagogues existed, where they stood, and roughly what they looked like, at a scale and breadth no single excavation or single surviving structure could match. A visitor moving through the gallery sees, in quick succession, the same basic religious institution - a room built for public prayer, a Torah ark, a place set aside for study - taking on the local architectural vocabulary of Renaissance Italy, Habsburg Central Europe, Mughal-influenced India and the Ottoman Balkans. The pattern is the point: one continuous religious practice, expressed in as many local idioms as there were places to express it in.

The community walls and genealogical archives that grew alongside the model collection do a related but different job. Where the models document buildings, the community databases document people - names, family lines and congregational records gathered from communities that in many cases no longer function as organised bodies at all. Taken together, the two collections work as a kind of census of a scattered people: not a single site that proves the diaspora happened, but an accumulation of thousands of small, checkable records that make the scale of it impossible to argue away.