The American Jewish Archives Journal, Volume LXI 2009, Number 1

Left to right: G. Ernest Wright, Nelson
Glueck, Zalman Shazar, William F.Albright,
Jerusalem, 13 March 1969
(Courtesy American Jewish Archives)
I utilized the opportunity to discuss
with President Harman the
possibility of getting 25 double
rooms in the Hebrew University’s
new dormitory building program
on Mt. Scopus for our HUC
students.… There were several
other matters we discussed,
including the possibility of some
interchange of credits between
the Hebrew University and our
Jerusalem School. 301
In reporting on the meeting to HUC-
JIR’s board of governors, Glueck
commented only that Harman had approached him while in Jerusalem:
In Jerusalem, in March, the President of the Hebrew University came to
me and said, ‘We are considering making a number of institutions around
the world depositories for copies of the negatives and prints of all Dead Sea
Scrolls. We would like the Hebrew Union College to be our depository on this
continent [North America]. The total cost of this will be X tens of thousands
of dollars. If you accept this, I think your cost would be about $15,000.’
I said, ‘Well, that sounds too rich for my blood, maybe, how about ten, which
I think maybe I could raise.’ 302
The board of trustees of the Shrine of the Book agreed upon the arrangement
in mid-April. 303 Harman, who represented the board, suggested that a few sets
of high-quality negatives would be produced of the Dead Sea Scrolls. One of
these sets, along with one set of positive prints, would be turned over for care to
HUC-JIR in Cincinnati with the restriction that they could not be used for any
purpose. The agreement further stipulated that eventually the trustees would
grant permission for the positives to be available for academic purposes to faculty
and students on the Cincinnati and New York campuses and for public display
in the College library. No publication of the texts or reproduction would be
permitted. When the trustees would eventually decide that the material could
be completely released, they would grant HUC-JIR a six-month head start in
appreciation of its efforts in securing the negatives. Other institutions would
then be granted access. It was also understood that HUC-JIR ’s position as sole
holder of negatives might not remain a unique situation. (It would prove not to
be in the 1980s and 1990s, when negatives were placed in the holdings of the
Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center in Claremont, California; the Huntington
Library in San Marino, California; and at the Oxford Center for Post-Graduate
Hebrew Studies in England.) In exchange, HUC-JIR promised the sum of
Optimistic, Even with the Negatives: HUC-JIR and the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1948–1993 • 47