Appeared in Encount with the HolyLand: Place, Past, and Future in American Jewish Culture, edited by Jeffrey Shandler and Beth Wenger (Philadelphia: National Museum of American Jewish History, 1997), pp. 60-82. Please see published text for revised version of this essay, illustrations, and notes. ================================================================= Making a Place in the World: Jews and the Holy Land at World's Fairs Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett At world's fairs in the United States during the nineteenth century, Christians cooperated with their American Jewish contemporaries, even as they identified Judaism and the Jewish people with a distant place and time--the Holy Land and the world of the Bible. Christians shared the podium with Jews at religion congresses held at Chicago fair in 1893, praised the contributions of Jews and Judaism to civilization, and collaborated with prominent Jewish citizens on ambitious Holy Land exhibits. Despite their ecumenical spirit, however, Christians represented Jews as an immutable race, stubborn religion, and failed nation, according them a central role within a providential narrative of deicide and restoration. The scene of this story was the Holy Land. Jewish delegates and exhibitors respectfully insisted that they were American by citizenship and Jewish by religion. They protested that Judaism itself had evolved into a modern religion with universal values and that Jews themselves were modern people in a modern world. Those who dissociated Jews and Judaism from the Land of Israel insisted that "the day of national religions is past." It was heresy to characterize Judaism as a "tribal religion" and Jews as a race. Nonetheless, two places--the "Holy Lands" of the Bible and the "Orient" of the Arabian nights--occupied one space in the minds of visitors to the fair and Jews were central to both even if they were only intermittently visible in each. As a cartoon lampooning opportunistic entrepreneurs at the Chicago fair suggests, Holy Land and Orient were interchangeable. Captioned "Human Natur'," this cartoon offers the following scenario. "Life in the Holy Lands! Scenes from Biblical Days!!! The Historic East as It Is and Was!!! A Moral Show!!!." When not a single spectator came to this display, the Turkish proprietor changed the sign to "Life in the Harem!! Dreamy Scenes in the Orient!!! Eastern Dances!!! The Sultan's Diversions." To his delight, Christian preachers and Sunday-school teachers now rushed to buy tickets. While the cartoon identifies "Human Natur'" with pious Christian visitors, it does not reveal that the proprietor in the doorway and belly dancer on the placard were in all likelihood Jewish, for reasons to be discussed. The interchangeability of the infidel's delights and the world of Christ is emblematic of the positional manoeuvres that placed Jews in such displays. World's fairs demanded a logical classification of subjects and their clear arrangement in space. The space of display is never neutral. Where would the Jerusalem Exhibit appear at the St. Louis exposition? On the Pike, the amusement strip, or by itself in the very center of the main fairgrounds? Would the Jewish Palestine Pavilion at the New York World's Fair be on the avenue of national pavilions or in the area dedicated to religious and community groups? While the position of Jews in these displays was flexible, it was almost invariably inferior, thanks to a conceptual separation between religion and race. Whereas Jews shared religion but not race with Christians, they shared race but not religion with Arabs. In displays of "Life in the Holy Land," Christians and Jews shared a religious history (the Judeo- Christian tradition) that set them apart from Islam. Displays of "Life in the Harem" were based on the racial distinction between Aryans (Christians) versus Semites (Jews and Arabs). As the mediating term, Jews were often present but not visible as Jews in the "oriental" displays and they were either absent or an icon of abjection in recreations of "Life in the Holy Land." Though Jews could be found in the Holy Land itself, many had returned from other places in the diaspora. Even those who had been there from time immemorial bore little resemblance to the ancient Israelites imagined by the exhibitors. Though Jews had held steadfast to ancient religious practices and had witnessed the world of Christ, they had scattered to the ends of the earth. Bedouins, not Jews, had preserved the pastoral way of life associated with the Bible and done so in the land of the Bible. Accordingly, Bedouins offered a better basis than Jews for recreating daily life in Bible, particulary since such displays had to mediate between showing what once was and what could be seen visitor today. Bedouins, considered as living archeology, offered both at the same time. Even Jews accepted this idea. At their fund-raising bazaar and fair in New York City in 1916, the People's Relief Committee for the Jewish War Sufferers featured a "Palestine exhibit" in the form of a Bedouin Village, with 150 people in costume--"See and show your children how our ancestors lived in Biblical Times." By 1904 at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, the Holy Land and Oriental village had become one and the same, as five hundred Jerusalem natives recreated daily life in a reconstruction of the old city. Jews could be seen wailing at the Western Wall, an emblematic scene bracketed both by the destruction of the Second Temple and the coming of the Messiah (and restoration of Israel) and by the crucifixion and the second coming of Christ. When they were not caught in the sleep of providential time, they occupied the dreamland of Oriental enchantment in the amusement zone, where Streets of Constantinople and similar exhibits for Egypt and other North African countries had become a fixture. Jews also found occasions to control how they positioned and defined themselves at the fairs. Cyrus Adler created exhibitions that projected a notion of Bible lands and Bible peoples out to the diaspora and up to the present. He and others disentangled religion from race and nationality and insisted that Judaism was a modern and universalistic religion. Exhibits of the history of world religion positioned Judaism at the beginning of a great story. However, not until the Palestine Pavilions during the 1930s would the official Jewish presence at the fair reach out to a world of the future to offer a model for a Jewish homeland rather than a model of a distant place. The project of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine finally placed Jewish presence at the very heart of the fairs' classification, namely with other sovereign states. A Museum of Faiths Recognizing the agency of display, Jews found ways to negotiate the possibilities and dangers of visibility on a world stage. A grant opportunity presented itself at the Chicago world's fair, which featured a monumental Parliament of Religions. This grand gesture of ecumenicism, in the spirit of "universal religion," required not only that representatives of the world's religions be present on the dias and speak on behalf of their own faiths. It was also necessary to persuade representatives of the main denominations in the United States (Protestant, Catholic, Jewish) to join the organizing committee, lend their name, endorse the cause, and rally support from among their own ranks. How did Jews respond? Dr. Emil G. Hirsch, leader of the Jewish contingent at the Parliament of Religion, tried to distance Jews from their association with the Holy Land of antiquity and exotic East of his own time as part of a larger effort to disentangle religion from race and nationality. For the Reform Jews of Chicago, who played such an important role in organizing the denominational congresses at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the cartoon "Human Natur'" exemplified their worst fears. Jews, they insisted, were not relics of Biblical antiquity, but modern exponents of a universal religion and loyal citizens of the countries in which they lived. They were not immobilized witnesses to Christ and his world, but part of an evolving history. Nor, did Jews form "a distinct nationality or race" or show a "desire to return to Palestine and resurrect the ancient nationality." Jews were "merely an independent religious community." This had been the message at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, where the Independent Order B'nai Brith presented an allegorical statue, "Religious Liberty," by Sir Moses Ezekiel, which made no reference whatsoever to Jews. It was in this spirit that Rabbi Hirsch laid out the elements of universal religion: "the day of national religions is past," he declared, adding that "race and nationality cannot circumscribe the fellowship of the faithful." Deliberating on how to participate in the fair, Chicago Jews saw a chance to set the record straight--"no religion has been more thoroughly misunderstood and misinterpreted.... Since the existence of our religion, no such opportunity as this has ever been extended to the Jew to set himself right before the whole world. It would, therefore, be criminal negligence did we not embrace this chance to proclaim broadcast," through the most credible spokespersons, what Judaism is really about, its contributions to humanity, and its attitudes to other religions. At the same time, even the Reform Advocate, which encouraged Jewish involvement in the fair, struck a cautionary note: "We have no doubt, our congresses will be among the best attended by- -non-Jews. For, there is no use denying it, for many thousands and thousands of non-Jews, we are a curiosity, a freak, an archeological specimen." This is one reason (indifference being another), the article continues, that "Our own coreligionists will be less eager to assist," for they have an "aversion against being paraded as a 'dime museum freak.'" The Parliament of Religion was to be a "museum of faiths." Delegates, by their very presence, were to create a massive display of the world's faiths. Each religion would stand alone "in its own perfect integrity, uncompromised, in any degree, by its relation to any other," so as to "unite all Religion against all irreligion," the larger purpose of the Parliament. However, speakers who took it upon themselves to talk about Jews and Judaism, well-intended as they were, revealed to what extent the entire event had been orchestrated to serve the aims of its largely Protestant organizers. They needed to reassure their conservative coreligionists that, in the final analysis, Christianity would not be thought of "as on the same level with other religions" and the whole event itself would exhibit an overtly Christian character--the Lord's Prayer, the only prayer, was recited each day and Jews were claimed as Old Testament Christians by John Henry Barrows, Chairman of the General Committee, in his welcoming remarks. In a spirit of reciprocity, declared his willingness to "call myself a New Testament Jew." Participants in the Parliament of Religions talked at cross- purposes. Professor D.G. Lyon of Harvard University insisted on using "the word 'Jew' not in the religious but in the ethnic sense" and claimed that however much they may be citizens of the lands of their birth, Jews "cannot avoid being known as the scattered fragments of a nation. Most of them are as distinctly marked by mental traits and by physiognomy as is a typical Englishman, German, or Chinaman." Rabbi Joseph Silverman of Temple Emanu-El in New York protested that "Jew is not to be used parallel with German, Englishman, American, but with Christian, Catholic, Protestant" and other faiths, anticipating what would become the interfaith movement several decades later. But to no avail. Religion quickly became a matter of nationality and nationality a question of race. All three were anchored in the Holy Land, home of the Semites. It was the Indian theist P.C. Mozoomar, of Calcutta, however, that most clearly mapped the fateful contrast between Aryan and Semite, thanks to which Christians were identified with Indo-European dynamism and Jews with Oriental immobility. While Christians and Jews were linked historically through religion, the designations Aryan and Semite provided them with separate racial and linguistic genealogies, geographies, and historical capacities. Aryans, who emanated from India, evolved, while Semites, who originated in the Near East, did not: in the words of Mozoomar, "The Hebrews, the chosen of Jehovah, with their long line of law and prophets, how are they? Wanderers on the face of the globe, driven by king and kaiser; the objects of persecution to the cruel or objects of sympathy to the kind. Mount Moriah is in the hands of the Mussulman, Zion is silent, and over the ruins of Solomon's Temple a few men beat their breasts and wet their white beards with their tears." Could today's Jews could live up to the glorious past of "the little nation of Palestine," Professor Lyon asked. No wonder Rabbi Silverman complained that "The evolution which Judaism has undergone in the past two thousand years, seems to be an unknown quantity in the minds of many." Rather than identify Jews with the Holy Land, Rabbi David Philipson associated them with the founding of the United States. Declaring that the Puritans founded America on the basis of the Old Testament and modelled it on the old Jewish state, he appealed to Protestant visions of America as the new Jerusalem. Professor Lyon agreed: "A Jewish empire does not exist, and Jerusalem is not the mistress of the world. And yet the dream of the prophet is true. A home for the oppressed has been found, a home where prosperity and brotherhood dwell together. Substitute America for Jerusalem and a republic for a kingdom, and the correctness of the prophet's dream is realized." It is this identification of America as the new Zion that defined Christian interest in the Holy Land itself, their view of Jews as a Bible people, and the appeal of exhibitions dealing with the lands and peoples of the Bible. An Exhibition of Religion Contrary to the Parliament of Religion, which insisted that believers speak on behalf of their faiths and avoid comparison, Cyrus Adler and Morris Jastrow, who taught Semitics and Assyriology at the University of Pennsylvania, argued that the scientific study of religion required comparative and historical perspectives independent of faith. They upheld three principles: a religion should be presented from the perspective of its adherents, all religions must be treated with respect, and displays should focus on underlying religious ideas, not church history, this being a way to foster religion as a field of scientific study and, through it, promote religious tolerance. Adler encouraged the participants in the Parliament of Religion to attend three religion exhibitions at the fair--his own on the history of religion in the Government Building, a second one on the religion of "primitive" peoples in the Anthropology Building, and the Turkish mosque on the Midway Plaisance. Had they visited the Turkish mosque on September 19 and 20, 1893, they would have heard Kol Nidra recited by Jews "from all parts of the Orient," including not only Constantinople, but also Adrianople, Tunis, Tripoli, Damascus, Smyrna, Bombay, Calcutta, Algeria, and other places, for reasons to be discussed below. Adler's exhibition, which made his programmatic statements concrete, differed in important ways from the other religion exhibitions he listed. He refused to allow Jews as well as Judaism, Christianity, and other world religions to be compared with "primitive" religions. Nor would he allow the adherents of these religions to be incorporated into anthropology's racial typologies and evolutionary sequences and modes of display-- models in plaster of heads, wax mannequins in national dress, and artifacts arranged to show progress from development from simple to complex. Not surprising, Adler's exhibition on the history of religions was located in the Government Building, not in the Anthropology Building, even though the sections that Adler directed at the Smithsonian were part of the Department of Anthropology. Instead, Adler limited his exhibit "to a selection from the religions of the nations inhabiting the Mediterranean basin, with special regard to the ceremonies as forming the starting point for a comparative study of religions. The exhibit comprises the following religions: Assyro-Babylonian, Jewish, Mohammedan, Greek, Roman and Oriental Christian," the Official Catalogue, [the] United States Government Building explained. Moreover, he located Judaism not in relation to the Holy Land, but within the much wider Mediterranean basin. Adler removed Judaism from a Christian geography and teleology and placed it strategically within a broader religious arena. At the same time, by treating "religion as a distinct subject" and making each religion the basic unit of exhibition, Adler rejected a geographical or national approach. The integrity of a religion would be lost if exhibits were divided up according to the many countries in which one religion was found. Accordingly, Adler deemphasized the historical and regional particularities of the objects and the communities from which they came in order to pursue a normative treatment of cult and creed. Adler's approach was consistent with a more general policy of the U.S. National Museum, which treated "special subjects independently of areas or national limitations in order to show the history of given ideas or endeavors in the human race treated as an entity." The heterogeneity of the United States as a nation of immigrants may have added to the appeal of such integrative arrangements to the organizers, if not to immigrant visitors. Interestingly, the Yiddish guide to 1893 World's Columbian Exposition mentioned only the treasures sent by the Pope from the Vatican, among which were gold and silver utensils that Titus is alleged to have taken from the Temple in Jerusalem. Instead, the guide directed its immigrant readers to exhibits of the latest goods and machines, of interest to merchants and manufacturers, and to displays that showed how various states treat their citizens, make coins, deal with foreigners, and handle immigrants--"One can see how emigrants are received in America" in the Foreign Ministry display in the United States Government building, the guide noted. But, it did not tell them that in the same building could be found an exhibition on the history of religion with Judaism at its center. Nor did the guide mention Jewish participation in the Parliament of Religion and denominational congresses. Although the exhibit attracted little notice in the press, the New York Evening Post did review it in detail, noting that the collection was paralleled only by the holdings of the Royal Museum in Berlin. Adler succeed in using this exhibition to secure an institutional commitment to the comparative study of religion, establish a new Section of Religious Ceremonials dedicated to this field, and ensure that Judaica would be well represented in the collection. As Grace Grossman notes, "The first major group of objects of Judaica acquired by the Smithsonian were those obtained specifically for the World's Columbian Exposition." People of Bible Lands In Adler's exhibitions, the Holy Land was supplanted not only by the Mediterranean Basin, but also by an even wider concept of "Bible lands." Adler's exhibitions located the origins of Western civilization in this region and positioned Judaism and Jews strategically within that history. In his exhibitions of religious ceremonials, Judaism inaugurated the great Judeo-Christian tradition. In his exhibitions of Biblical antiquities, Jews were a "Bible people." Adler's exhibitions of Biblical antiquities for the U.S. National Museum at world's fairs in Cincinnati (1888), Atlanta (1895), and Tennessee (1897) featured material from what had started out as the Oriental Antiquities section--this section, whose establishment was initiated in 1887, was formed partly at Adler's urging. For practical reasons, the Oriental Antiquities section was dedicated to "Biblical archeology--to the history, archeology, languages, arts and religions of the peoples of Western Asia and Egypt," with an emphasis on illustrating Biblical history. A key to Adler's success was the emerging field of Semitic studies. Adler was the first person to receive a Ph.D. in Semitics from an American university (Johns Hopkins). Semitic studies brought the disciplines of archeology, ethnology, paleography, philology, and the history of religion to bear on the peoples and civilizations of the Mediterranean. This field was particularly congenial to Jewish scholars in America. First, while it included the study of the Bible, it was much broader. Second, Semitic studies offered a relatively safe context for pursuing Bible studies because it required rigorous scholarship unencumbered by sectarian loyalties and theological issues. Third, Semitic studies positioned Jews advantageously in the history of civilization, and by extension, enhanced their standing in Adler's own day. According to Adler, Biblical archeology encompassed the "language, history, social life, arts, and religion of the Biblical nationalities." Through three conceptual leaps, Adler made Biblical science encompass five thousand years of history, and the entire Mediterranean region (Western Asia and Egypt), including not only its ancient inhabitants, but also their modern descendants, among them European Jewry. He argued, first, that "Owing to the intense conservatism of oriental peoples, a careful study of the modern inhabitants of western Asia may exhibit in a new aspect the manners and customs of former times"--living evidence supporting this theory was exhibited in foreign villages on the Midway Plaisance. "Nor is the area covered less extensive than the period of time," he continued. "Roughly speaking, it would require that one point of a compass be placed in Jerusalem, and a radius of a thousand miles be selected to describe a circle which would include all of the people with whom the Israelites came into contact during their national existence." The historical and geographical parameters of Biblical science were thus defined in terms of the ancient Israelites--their center in Jerusalem, their range of contacts, and the persistence of their practices in among other peoples today. Bedouins, for example, were presumed to have preserved a Biblical way of life: many objects currently in use in Palestine and surrounding lands "differ in no wise from those used in ancient times" and are, "it may be assumed, in the 'unchanging East' essentially the same at the present day as in Bible times." Thus, Adler could exhibit for exhibit flutes made by Bedouins a few years before the fair and a "modern Egyptian brick from Thebes." Third, Adler made it possible to include in Biblical science virtually anything from the Jewish diaspora that could be shown to fulfill a Biblical precept. This was the rationale for exhibiting an eighteenth-century German Sabbath lamp. The practical outcome of these conceptual leaps was a more impressive exhibition. Once Adler was able to consolidate collections otherwise divided between religious ceremonials and oriental antiquities, he had more objects to work with. A comprehensive "Biblical Antiquities" exhibition at the 1895 Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta included geology (dust from Jerusalem and water from the Jordan), flora and fauna, birds, reptiles, and insects; Palestinian antiquities (mainly casts); recently made musical instruments; precious stones of Palestine, "with a model illustrating the method in which the gems were placed in the high priest's breastplate"); coins of Bible lands; dress, ornaments, and household utensils; Jewish religious ceremonial; antiquities (Egypt, Assyria and Babylonia, Hittites); a collection of Bibles; ancient versions of the Bible; and modern translations of the Bible. The exhibition also included several models--an Egyptian mummy and a temple tower of Babylon, based on Herodotus and recent reports on the ruin. Jews were not the target audience for this and other exhibits of Biblical archeology or Biblical science, as Adler preferred to call this field, in recognition of the living material it included. The exhibit was a response to "the wide- spread interest in biblical studies" and intended to "enable Bible students (of whom it is estimated that there are already more than four millions in the Sunday-schools of the United States)" to enhance their study of the text by seeing how specialists study "the people of Bible lands" and examining the archeological material, photographs, casts, inscriptions, and artifacts on display. Given the debates over whether Jews were a people, nation, race, or religion, Adler had found an ingenious way to present Judaism as a unified religion, and by implication, Jews as a unified religious community, while 'denationalizing' religion. Drawing on Semitic studies as a framework, Adler could stress commonalities among the peoples of Bible lands and avoid exclusivity in the treatment of Judaism. Moreover, as Adler made explicit in his speech at the formal opening of the Semitic Museum of Harvard University in 1903, "It is coming to be more and more recognized that in everything which makes for the higher life the modern man derived directly from a few groups of people that lived about the Mediterranean, and that knowledge of their civilization is essential to an understanding of the higher history of human thought." The slightly defensive tone of this affirmation indexes current debates over whether Western civilization derived from Semitic or Aryan sources. "Life in the Harem" That debate informed the live displays in foreign villages and souvenir portrait albums based on them. The original plan was to arrange the villages to show the evolution of mankind from Africa (as represented by the Dahomeans) to Europe (as represented by the Irish, Germans, Austrians, and Dutch), with the Near East (Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia) and Far East (Java, Japan) arranged between them. Practical considerations precluded so tidy an arrangement. Needless to say there was no "Jewish village." What would it have been? Yet, Jews were ubiquitous, if invisible, on the Midway, telling exceptions: About four-fifths of the inhabitants of the Turkish village on the Midway Plaisance at the Chicago Exposition were Jews. Merchants, clerks, actors, servants, musicians, and even the dancing girld, were of the Mosaic faith, though their looks and garb would lead one to believe them Mohammedans. That their Judaism was not of the passive character was demonstrated by the closed booths, shops, and curio places, by the silence in the otherwise noisy theaters and the general Sabbath day air which pervaded the "Streets of Constantinople" on Yom Kippur--the Day of Atonement. In other words, they were conspicuous by their absence. While the cartoon "Human Natur'" establishes the interchangeability of the Holy Land and Oriental Village, it does not indicate the centrality of Jews to each type of display at the fair. In the cartoon, the proprietor and belly dancer are Turkish and presumed to be Moslem, while the visitors they attract are Christian preachers and Sunday-school teachers. As it turns out, however, Jews not only managed particular concessions, but also the Midway as a whole. Frederic Ward Putnam, a Harvard anthropologist, was originally put in charge of the Midway, but was replaced by Sol Bloom, as it became clear that the Midway was more show business than ethnology. Born in the Midwest of Polish-Jewish parents and raised in San Francisco, Bloom had been so impressed with the Algerian village at the Paris world's fair in 1889, that at the end of that fair he arranged to have exclusive rights to presenting this village in the United States and found the perfect opportunity to do so at the Chicago fair. The Turkish Village the largest one on the Midway, were Jewish, some eighty percent of the hundreds of people working there were Jewish, and some of the most celebrated "Oriental dancers" on the Midway were Jewish--among them Nazha Kassik, "a native of Beyrouth, Syria," and Rahlo Jammele, "a native of Jerusalem," both of whom performed in the Moorish palace. In a word, many of the "Sultan's Diversions" announced in the cartoon were performed by Jews--in their capacity as "orientals." The large number of Jews working on the Midway was due in no small measure to Cyrus Adler, who was appointed Commissioner of the World's Columbian Exposition to Turkey, Palestine, Persia, Egypt, Tunis, and Morocco. Palestine was under the control of the Sultan in Constantinople, who did not accord it much political importance. However, Jerusalem was a large and important administrative unit extending well beyond the city itself and Jews were the largest population within the city proper during mid-nineteenth century. While performers from Palestine did appear at the Chicago fair, it was not in a Palestine village but on a recreated street of Constantinople. Palestine was subsumed under Turkey. Everywhere he went Adler visited the local Jewish community and activated a Jewish network. While he made a point of attending synagogue services, weddings, and other festivities, in which he evinced an ethnographic interest, he did not propose a "Jewish village" for the Midway Plaisance. He did however give concessions to Jewish dragomans (translators and guides), who were experienced at explaining their region to strangers. In the case of the Turkish display, "A Constantinople Street Scene," Adler gave the concession to Souhami, Sadhullah and Co., whom he characterized as "the largest merchants in the Constantinople bazaar." Robert Levy, one of the partners in this company, was married to an American woman who was related to a family that Adler knew in Baltimore. Levy became the manager and chief proprietor of the Turkish Village, as well as manager of the personnel in the Near East exhibits on the Midway. Levy brought more than two hundred people--estimates vary-- to live and work in the Turkish village and the preponderance of Jews among them would seem to be supported by complaints from visitors. According to Denton J. Snider, who was there, "Some have said that all this does not represent Turkey, and that the Turkish village is purely a speculative enterprise of some Oriental Jews," though he did concede that "the originators, whoever they may be, are seeking to represent Turkey...and have given the village a distinctive Turkish meaning." Levy supplemented his Turkish contingent with "young American men and women to perform diverse chores within the Turkish village...as maids and cashiers in the soft-drink pavilion." A controversy erupted when they refused to wear "Oriental costumes...including gorgeous bloomers." They objected to "bifurcated garments," even in the interest of "realism," an objection that was part of a larger debate at the fair over dress reform. There was at least one point, however, where it was deemed important to distinguish them as Jews and that was in the photographic portraits of "individual types of various nations from all parts of the world who represented, in the Department of Ethnology, the manners, customs, dress, religions, music and other distinctive traits and peculiarities of their Race." Here, in book form, Putnam finally succeeded in creating the panorama of the world's races that he had hoped to realize on the Midway. It is here that Jews, and in particular Jews in the Turkish and Egyptian villages, appeared as a racial type and specifically as Semites. These portraits are an extension of the photo-identifications that controlled the entry of thousands of fair workers and officials. Indeed, they were made by the same photographer. The three most accepted ways to represent racial types were first, to select a person considered typical of the race, and to photograph the head, which was considered the most important indicator of racial type. This method was considered the least scientific. Second, anthropologists such as Franz Boas applied the methods of Alphonse Bertillon, who used measurements, standardized images, and a special filing system to facilitate identification of particular criminals (and victims) as well as social and criminal types. Third, Francis Galton in London and Dr. Dudley Sargent in the United States used the composite method. Galton superimposed images of members of a race to establish the type, while Sargent worked from photographs of naked freshman at Harvard and Radcliffe--and measurement statistics--to arrive at the body form of "the typical college male and female" as shown in "anthropometric statues." Deviations from the norm were to be corrected by appropriate training and exercise These materials were on view in the most popular section of the Anthropology Building, where Boas and psychologist Joseph Jastrow (1863-1944), both of them Jews, assisted Frederic Ward Putnam, the director of anthropological exhibits for the entire fair. For a small fee, visitors could be examined, measured, and compared to standard types. Bertillon's systematic filing system for hundreds of thousands of photographs put the body in the archive, while the composite portraits made by Galton and Sargent put the archive in the body, to invoke Alan Sekula's distinction. The corporal archive offered yet another basis for identifying Jews with the Holy Land long after their dispersal. As the caption for "Rebecca Meise Alithensii. (Jewess.)" explains: Though the Jews are no longer a nation and properly claim citizenship in all countries, there is no racial type that has been so persistent through many centuries and amid such varied environment. Whether in Palestine or America, in the Tenth Century before or the Nineteenth Century after Christ, the Jew shows the same physical characteristics, slightly modified by his surroundings, and the same intellectual acumen and business capacity that have made him the most successful financier in the world. This handsome oriental lady was born of Jewish parents in Constantinople twenty- seven years ago; and, while retaining evidences of her blood, she is in general appearance a fair type of Turkish beauty, and her dress gives an exact idea of the picturesque and gorgeous costume of that nation.... The racial type had to be derived from an individual portrait and it was the burden of the captions to make a persuasive case for the attribution. The assumption, certainly on the part of visitors, was that pure racial types would be found in foreign villages devoted exclusively to a single type and that Jews were the purest race of all. However, as the caption for a group portrait of Monahan Levi, Isaac Cohn, and H. Hondon explained, no such perfect fit between type and scene had been achieved: The Turkish village, like many another village on the Midway which was primarily intended to depict certain national characteristics and peculiarities, contained within its walls a good many things which were by not means Turkish, and which are seldom if ever, found in a genuine Turkish village but may be seen in Constantinople, which is one of the most cosmopolitan cities of the world. Here might be found at times Egyptians, Turks, Jews, Greeks, Syrians, Armenians and representatives of nearly all the nations bordering on the Mediterranean and the countries east thereof. On the Midway, Rachel Meise Alithensii and the three men in the group portrait, signified Turkey. In the souvenir album, they were marked as Jews. Yet, Adler himself had been unable to tell who was Jewish when was in Turkey: "When I first began to walk around Constantinople and the villages I could not distinguish the populations at all....The Jews did not have any distinguishing characteristics." This difficulty in no way restrained the claims made for Jewish racial purity and for "Oriental" Jews as the purest examples of the Jewish racial type. Consider the caption for Far-Away-Moses: The Jews are the most remarkable of all races. No other people can boast a lineage so ancient and so unbroken. The historian Freeman says: "They are very nearly, if not absolutely, a pure race in a sense in which no other race is pure." Their early history constitutes body of sacred writings which, considered as literature alone, stands unequalled.... The above portrait is another illustration of the persistence of the Jewish type. This man, who rejoices in the expressive sobriquet of Far-Away-Moses, is the descendant of Jews who were driven from Spain by Queen Isabella. He is fifty-five years old and resides in Constantinople. He speaks many languages and is a noted dragoman. He has been immortalized by Mark Twain, whom he had the honor of conducting through the Holy Land. Far-Away-Moses, as it turns out, was one of the partners in the company that held the concession for the Turkish village--he was none other than Harry R. Mandil, one of the two American partners. He was also the model for Semite head in the ethnological series of thirty-three races that adorn the keystones above the windows on the first floor of the Library of Congress. Had Mandil appeared clean shaven in a business suit as an American citizen would he have been chosen as the model for the Semite head? On the Midway, Jews came into focus as Jews only when the camera attempted to fix and arrange racial types in the abstract space of the album. On the ground, they were proxies for others, including Turks, Algerians, and Egyptians. As for the foreign villages themselves, they were not only cosmopolitan but also porous, like the Ottoman Empire itself. Performers moved around the Midway from the Moorish village to the Turkish, Egyptian, and Algerian villages, and back. Captions in various albums identify the same people as Algerians or Turks. Some visitors to the fair expressed anxiety about the "truth" of what they saw, not only at the Chicago fair, but also at earlier European ones. Not only were immigrants recruited to work in the villages, but also American college students dressed up as natives. As becomes clear from Far-Away-Moses, even those who had come from abroad might not be what they seemed. Paradoxically, the purest race of all was the least visible on the Midway, where they performed the "Sultan's Diversions." "Life in the Holy Lands" At the Chicago fair, "Life in the Harem" had won out over "Life in the Holy Lands." At the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis (1904), organizers hope to combine the best of both types of exhibitions in a grand reconstruction of the old city of Jerusalem. They would create an immersive environment where tourist-pilgrims could identify with what they saw. However fascinating the streets of Cairo and Constantinople or the Dahomean and Javanese villages, visitors approached them with a mixture of fascination and disdain, prurient interest and distanced observation. The "ethnographic" character of such displays was often a pretext for licentious performances. On the Midway Plaisance at the Chicago fair, the Persian theatre was almost closed down because the dances were so sexually explicit. The Moorish Palace, one of several contexts in which Jewish dancers performed, was more funhouse than museum. The Jerusalem Exhibit would combine the appeal of such immersive environments with the protocols of pilgrimage and religiously motivated tourism in a largely Protestant mode. However inclusive their claims, the organizers of the Jerusalem Exhibit operated in Christian terms: the Holy Land was associated first and foremost with the life of Christ and not with Adler's Bible lands, which extended out from Jerusalem a thousand miles in all directions and through more than 5000 years of history. Just as tours of the Holy Land were organized to retrace the steps of Christ, so too was the Jerusalem Exhibit at the St. Louis fair. Indeed, the Souvenir Album reproduced images not of the exhibit but of photographs made in the Old City itself, juxtaposed with line drawings of scenes from Christ's Passion thought to have occurred in the locations shown. The images themselves were arranged for the most part in the order of the Stations of the Cross and matched with the relevant Biblical passages. The Souvenir Album was thus like other commemorative volumes that arranged photographic images according to the chronology of Christ's life, whether as a memento of a pilgrimage taken or substitute for it. One of the most extensive such volumes was Earthly Steps of the Man of Galilee, a collection of 400 photographs. See also, Yeshayahu Nir, The Bible and the Image: The History of Photography in the Holy Land 1839-1899 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). Those visiting the St. Louis fair and reading the Souvenir Album were "tourist pilgrims" on a sacred itinerary. The mode of pilgrimage was distinctly Protestant. Catholics, who visited shrines dating from at least the Middle Ages, associated pilgrimage with indulgences and pardons and looked to Rome as their headquarters. The Stations of the Cross procession, which can be conducted anywhere, is a medieval innovation brought back to Europe by pilgrims who had visited the Holy Land. Protestants, who arrived relatively late to the Holy Land, treated the entire landscape as both shrine and text-- it was literally a fifth Gospel. The Bible was their guide book and Christ (rather than Mary and the saints) their focus. Literal connections between text and place informed not only their travels to the Holy Land, but also their meticulous models, panoramas, and recreations of it. Indeed, many Protestant travellers to the Holy Land complained that what they saw was not the place as it was during Christ's life, but the shrines, churches, and mosques built by Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, and Islamic groups long before Protestants arrived on the scene. The challenge for Protestant visitors was to not see what was before them (among other things a spectacular religious style antithetical to Protestant austerity). Their strategies were to stand in a place and imagine in their mind's eye what they could not see in actuality; to find landscapes that had not yet been touched, as far as they could tell; and to discover through archeology what the ancient world really looked like. They were particularly drawn to models that made palpable what was known from Biblical texts, archeological actualities from excavated sites and reconstructions based on them, and photographs of landscapes devoid of any trace of contemporary life. For these reasons, exhibits of the Holy Land had a distinct advantage over visiting the actual place. The exhibit could achieve a better fit between expectation (and for that matter textual and archeological knowledge) and experience. Distracting and irrelevant elements, particular those from later periods, could be eliminated. The goals was to make the Biblical text more "real" and the experience of it as vivid and immediate as possible. For Jews, in contrast, the attachment to the Land of Israel was covenantal, the determining factor in identifying holy places, the Wailing Wall chief among them, and creating models, most often of the Tabernacle and the Temple. While indebted to the foreign villages in the commercial amusement zone of world's fairs, the Jerusalem Exhibit was located at the center of the fair grounds proper, allotted about ten acres, and committed to raising one million dollars. The managers went so far as to declare that "The display will, in short, be Jerusalem itself," if not better: visitors would learn more with less hassle and actually see and understand things inaccessible in Jerusalem itself, where ignorant guides repeat apocryphal tales. Judging by his disappointment with Jerusalem when he was there in 1867--"Jerusalem is mournful, and dreary, and lifeless."--Mark Twain might well have agreed, though he would no doubt have found plenty to satirize in the Jerusalem Exhibit. While aiming to combine the enlightenment and uplift of sacred pilgrimage with the amusement of commercial entertainment, the prospectus cautioned that "There is one feature of this display which will be insisted upon by the management, and that is, that it shall be free from anything which will in the least detract from its dignity and solemnity. The features which have been so prominent in so-called Oriental displays exhibited in late years will be conspicuous by their absence. Everything possible will be done to give an educational value to the exhibit." Unlike the Streets of Cairo and Constantinople, Jerusalem "is an unwordly city; it is without a theater, or a barroom or a dance house." Accordingly, Jews would wail at the Wall rather than dance in the caf‚. Madame Lydia M. von Finkelstein Mountford was to deliver "her wonderful lectures on picturesque Palestine and its people" each day--she was a well-known speaker and frequently conducted tours of models of Jerusalem. She claimed to have been born and raised in Jerusalem and would dress up in local costume to give her lectures, common practice even among lecturers reporting on their travels to Jerusalem on their return home. At Palestine Park, an extensive model of the Holy Land created for the Chautauqua Assembly in Western New York in the 1870s, Protestant visitors dressed up in "oriental" dress. Having recreated the landscape and emptied it of people, they now projected themselves into it. If they could not inhabit the Holy Land itself, they could inhabit the model. While the organizers of the Jerusalem Exhibit assured prospective investors of a good profit on what they expected to be the most popular attraction at the fair, they made no effort to adjust their appeal to Jews for money and endorsements. A form letter simply stated, "It is our intention to present the greatest religious exhibit of modern times, and we are sure that, as a minister of the Gospel, you will be interested in this great enterprise" and continued, "in assisting us you will be furthering the cause of Christianity" and making a good financial investment. Jews did sign on to the project. Three rabbis, Leon Harrison (Temple Israel, Samuel Sale (Shaare Emeth Congregation), and J.H. Messing (United Hebrew Congregation) were members of the Advisory Board. This was not the only aspect of the fair that the Jews of St. Louis supported. Five prominent St. Louis Jews were appointed to the directorate of the fair, one of whom, Hon. Nathan Frank, was a congressman and used his influence not only to make St. Louis the site of the fair, but also to secure appropriations for the enterprise. Other Jews also raised large sums of money for the fair and served on important committees. Anticipating that Jews would come to St. Louis to visit the fair, including distinguished scholars from Europe, an article devoted to "The Jews of the World's Fair City. The Part Which They Have Taken in the Upbuilding of St. Louis and the Exposition" promoted both the fair and the "renaissance of Judaism...accompanying the rejuvenescence of St. Louis." It pointed out sites connected with the Jewish community and its institutions. While the prominence of Jews in the organization of the fair was taken as a sign that they were "no longer one of the Children of the Ghetto," the author hastened to add that "the Jews is more or less separate and distinct in his social as in his religious life," the reason for the Columbian Club headed by J.D. Goldman. With respect to the fair, the only exhibit this article singled out for description was the one devoted to Jerusalem. Readers were told that the reconstruction of Jerusalem was "an object-lesson for the Biblical student." As for sites within Jerusalem associated with Jews, the highlight was to be "The Jews' Wailing Place," which the fundraising prospectus had described as follows: This remarkable spot, which on every Friday afternoon or Saturday morning is frequented by a number of Jews, men and women of all ages and from all countries, pale, deformed and sad, will be reproduced in all its picturesqueness. To the thoughtful, the sight of the Jews who are found there weeping, chanting between penitential sobs portions of the prophetic writings, is a touching and prophetic one; with tears running down their cheeks, kissing the stones, thrusting their faces into the chinks of the wall and fondly resting their heads against it, they acknowledge their sins and the sins of their nation, and beseech the Almighty for pardon and ask that their once holy and beloved House, of which this Wailing Place is part of the western wall, may be quickly rebuilt. Paradoxically, Jews were not even at home in what was once their homeland. Those at the Wailing Wall were seen as the most abject of all, a shadow of the formal glory of ancient Israel. Though all Jews were cursed to wander as a punishment for deicide and their refusal to convert to Christianity, those who stayed in the diaspora were considered better off than those who remained or returned to the Holy Land. As Herman Melville, a Catholic, wrote, in 1856, upon visiting the Holy Land, "In the emptiness of the lifeless antiquity of Jerusalem the emigrant Jews are like flies that have taken up their abode in a skull." While American Protestants visiting the Holy Land attributed what they saw to "providential purpose yet to be accomplished," the Jews on whom they projected the trajectory of Christian destiny bore a very different relationship to the Land of Israel, the Jewish community there, and to world Jewry. Consistent with the plan to exhibit natives in their native surroundings, the prospectus promised to provide a "Jewish rabbi conducting the ceremonials of his religion in a synagogue which will be a reproduction of the one in which he conducts the worship at Jerusalem." Whether in a synagogue or a mosque, these activities were no mere "imitation ceremony," but "the actual ceremony with their own people in attendance." About 500 such natives would march daily in a grand procession and "take a part in the illustrations of Bible life, scenes and customs of the Holy Land for thousands of years." Moreover, the editor's note on the title page explains: "There are eight Jerusalems lying one upon another. First--City of Jebusites; Second--City of Solomon; Third--City of Nehemia; Fourth--City of Herod destroyed by Titus; Fifth--Emperor Hadrian began to rebuild in the year A.D. 130; Sixth--City of the Early Moslems; Seventh--City of the Crusaders; Eighth--City of the Later Moslems. In A.D. 1244, Jerusalem was besieged for the last time. B.C. 1400, 'Uru Salim,' Jerusalem was prominent among the Cities of Palestine, and subject to Egypt." The history of Jerusalem stops in 1244 and acknowledgement of Jewish presence there even earlier, though the captions to the images do refer to more recent events. One would never know from this account that the white and blue Zionist flag was flying at the St. Louis fair. Anticipating a Jewish State Meyer Weisgal's Zionist pageant The Romance of a People at the 1933 Chicago Fair and the Jewish Palestine Pavilion he organized at the 1939 New York World's Fair were radical departures from earlier displays dedicated to the Holy Land or Bible lands at earlier fairs. They were, however, linked to them as well as to Palestine exhibits in British colonial expositions, trade fairs in Palestine, and Palestine pavilions at world's fairs in Paris in the thirties. After World War I, the Ottoman Empire fell and in 1920, Palestine came under the British Mandate, after some 400 years of Turkish occupation. Restrictive legislation brought immigration to America to a trickle in 1921 and by 1924, the period of mass migration was over. With the World Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe and anti-Semitism in the United States, relief efforts and pressures to form a Jewish state intensified. During the thirties in America, Zionism was on the rise across the Jewish spectrum. It is in this context that Weisgal organized his extravagant pageants and ambitious pavilion, ventures that were national and international in scope and explicit in their fundraising, relief, and political goals. Weisgal made brilliant use of performance and exhibition for "propaganda" purposes, the term he used, and political mobilization. Whereas earlier exhibits were models of something that already or once existed, Weisgal's efforts were dedicated primarily to creating models for what was to come. Weisgal was not the first to create models for a future homeland, but he was the most successful in using pageants and pavilions to mobilize American grass roots support for the Zionist cause. Zionist displays looked to the future. They used the past, understood as deep Jewish roots in the land of the Bible and a subsequent history of persecution, to add weight to the legitimacy of a future state in Palestine and its practical necessity. Exhibitions demonstrating the potential an success of agricultural and industrial development there attested to the feasibility of such a state. Palestine exhibits intended to spur trade and investment, as well as Jewish colonization, had been appearing since the 1890s, often in connection with Zionist Congresses in Europe and with British imperial displays. Standard features of the first such displays were exhibits devoted to the work of the Bezalel School, models of the Tabernacle and Temple, sometimes with guides in costume to explain their features, and stalls showing the success of Jewish efforts in agriculture, manufacture and trade, industry and commerce. An exhibit dedicated to Palestine at the 1934 Chicago World's Fair is a case in point: it encourages tourism and trade. The quality of the exhibits themselves became more professional with the advent of the Levant Fairs in Tel Aviv in the twenties and their blossoming in the thirties. The Levant Fairs not only promoted trade and industry but also showcased the talents of the Levant Fair Studios in the design and fabrication of exhibits. Recognizing the power of display to encourage economic development, the Levant Fair Studios circulated exhibitions promoting Palestine trade and industry through Central and Eastern Europe. By the thirties, the Levant Fair Studios were producing exhibits for Palestine pavilions at fairs in Paris (1931, 1937) and other European cities, as well as in New York (1939-1940). These exhibits were to be about Palestine right down to their very fabrication, a point that was stressed both in official fair publications and by exhibiting a glass model of the Levant Fair itself within the Jewish Palestine Pavilion at the New York World's Fair. During the early thirties, when he was looking for a powerful way to mobilize support for the Zionist cause, Meyer Weisgal rejected the idea of a building or exhibit. The child of East European Jewish parents--his father was a cantor and he described his mother as a revolutionary--and an ardent Zionist, Weisgal capitalized instead on the ability of pageants to mobilize vast numbers of people in a single spectacle, first at the 1932 Hanukkah Festival with Israel Reborn and again in 1933 with The Romance of a People for the Century of Progress Exposition, both in Chicago. In his memoir, published some forty years later, Weisgal described the situation he faced at the time: The Zionist field in Chicago was strewn with dry bones and a thousand speeches were not going to revive them. The leadership was confined to two or three men, and they were powerless against the inertia of the community. I realized at once that in these circumstances pedestrian Zionist propaganda and routine education, however well intentioned, would produce no effect. There had to be, first, a reawakening, and I turned to the performing arts--music, drama, spectacle. The pageant would tell the story of the ancient struggle of the Jews, using the machinery and properties of the Chicago Opera House, which had recently produced Aida. According to Weisgal, "the highlight of the evening was to be: no speeches! The spectacle would deliver its own message. This was an unheard of proposal: a great Zionist affair at which the local Zionist orators would keep their mouths shut." The timing of the preparations for the Hanukkah Festival coincided with the organization of the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago: "The Jews of Chicago had been asked to participate, and negotiations and confused discussion went on for months as to whether the Jews were a race, a religion, or a nation, and whichever they were, could they appropriately be represented by a building." Weisgal's response was "not a building, not an exhibit, but a spectacle, portraying four thousand years of Jewish history; it would have everything, religion, history, the longing for Zion, the return to Zion, and it would be called The Romance of a People. It would have something for everybody, Zionists, non-Zionists, the religious, the nationalists, everybody." Weisgal had three goals: to further the Zionist cause by gathering support and raising funds; to amplify the voice of protest against Hitler and raise money to help Jews leave Germany; and, at the same time and through these efforts, to stage a strong show of American Jewish solidarity. To galvanize Jewish interest on a national scale, Weisgal invited Chaim Weizmann to make an opening speech, promising him $100,000 for his Zionist Central Refugee Fund. Weisgal made the proviso, however, "that he was to make one speech. If two, the fee would go down to $50,000; if three, to $25,000." Weizmann at the time was specially concerned with raising money for the Central Refugee Fund, which he was launching to help Jews who were fleeing Germany to settle in Palestine. By Weisgal's account, 131,000 people attended the pageant, thousands were turned away, and the pageant broke all attendance records at the fair. A second opportunity to orchestrate Jewish participation at a world's fair arose when Henry Montor, chief fundraiser for the United Palestine Appeal, approached Weisgal about Jewish participation in the New York World's Fair of 1939. Again, Weisgal succeeded in attracting record-breaking crowds, this time to the Jewish Palestine Pavilion, which he claimed was "the first Palestine exhibit at an international exposition in the United States." The presence of Albert Einstein at the opening helped produce the largest single day's attendance in the history of the fair, according to Weisgal, who estimated that more than two million people visited the pavilion in all. The crowds were in no small measure a result of the massive, and relentless, public relations, fundraising, and publicity campaign that Weisgal mounted through the American Jewish community. The Pavilion was a vehicle for mobilizing American Jewry in support of the larger Zionist cause. In a chapter of his autobiography entitled "A Jewish State in Flushing Meadows," Weisgal characterized the Palestine Pavilion as "showmanship of another kind." The major bone of contention was its location on the Flushing Meadows fairgrounds: One section had been set aside for the national pavilions, and that is where I wanted us to be. There was of course no Jewish State as yet, but I believed in its impending arrival on the scene of history, and I wanted the idea of Jewish sovereignty to be anticipated there, in Flushing Meadows. The design of the Jewish Palestine Pavilion and its contents was in accord with Weisgal's desires, which was "something authentically Palestinian" to show that "in 1938 Jewish Palestine was a reality; its towns, villages, schools, hospitals and cultural institutions had risen in a land that until our coming had been derelict and waste....I wanted a miniature Palestine in Flushing Meadows." Not until complaints that Arabs were not represented did Weisgal change the name to Jewish Palestine Pavilion. Insisting--with no trace of irony--that the pavilion should steer clear of politics, Weisgal applied himself to the "construction of the Jewish State under the shadow of the Trylon and Perisphere, or, as the Jews were fond of calling it, the Lulav and Esrog." Winning the battle over location at the fair was critical to the success of Weisgal's construction: "Located as we were on the borderline of the National Pavilions, there was always some question as to whether or not we really 'belonged.'" The exhibits in the Jewish Palestine Pavilion, by following the model of national buildings, simulated the state before it was legally formed. Indeed, as Weisgal pointed out, "In one particular respect, the Palestine Pavilion is unique: It is a national exhibit not sponsored by a government." Interestingly, there was no room for ceremonial art created in the Diaspora, in striking contrast with the earlier exhibitions of Biblical antiquities and religion organized by Cyrus Adler. During the late thirties, Benjamin and Rose Mintz, "ardent Zionists and devout Jews," attempted to leave Poland. They had applied for a visa to visit America and had been refused. Benjamin was an antique dealer and collector who had amassed a fine collection of Judaica. Max M. Korshak had the idea that if the collection could be exhibited at the New York World's Fair, the Mintz's might get temporary visas to accompany the objects. Their intention was to settle permanently in Palestine, using money gained from the sale of the collection in America, a possibility they could not realize because the market was depressed at the time. Korshak proposed the inclusion of the Mintz collection in the Palestine Pavilion, which Weisgal rejected: according to Korshak, "Mr. Weisgal felt, for some reason that I never understood, that the collection was not suitable as a Palestinian Exhibit since the articles were not products of Palestine, although he did admit that it was a product of the Jewish heritage." The collection and the Mintz's were allowed out of Poland in anticipation of the exhibit, but they were never shown at the fair. The objects were stored in a warehouse and later purchased for the Jewish Museum. The Jewish Palestine Pavilion was in keeping with the World of the Future theme of the New York World's Fair, a factor in its acceptance by fair organizers. At the same time, fixtures of earlier fairs were either eliminated or reconceived--Weisgal also proposed a pageant, which was not accepted. Located right next to the Jewish Palestine Pavilion, the Temple of Religion was to embody the general theme of religion, rather than feature ongoing exhibitions of particular denominations. In this way, New York's Temple of Religion distinguished itself from the Hall of Religions at the 1933 Century of Progress fair in Chicago and the Temple of Religion at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco in 1939, both of which featured exhibits of specific religions. At the New York World's Fair, the Women's League of the United Synagogue of America, representing Conservative Judaism, presented a pageant entitled The Jewish Home Beautiful and explicitly distinguished their presentation from a "museum piece," which is just "something to admire and then to forget, or merely to recall in conversation." For them, as for Weisgal, the fair offered a platform for advocacy: they urged Jewish women to "create new glory and new beauty for the Jewish home," thereby transforming the "humblest surroundings into a sanctuary more holy and beautiful than the house decorated elaborately, but without love and intelligence and religious warmth." The world of tomorrow would include not only a Jewish homeland in Palestine, but also a Jewish home right in the heart of suburban America. To be seen or not to be seen. This was the question for Jews participating in world's fairs, from their inception at London's Crystal Palace in 1851 to the establishment of the State of Israel. There were dangers in being shown and risks in being seen. Fairs were organized along national, imperial, and colonial lines, an arrangement that provided no formal rubric for a diaspora to represent itself as such. Jews turned up just about everywhere at the fairs, just as they did in the world, though in the nineteenth-century fairs, they were generally not visible as Jews, except where religion and race was concerned. Whatever the dangers of being shown and seen, there were also opportunities. Jews used the fairs to set the record straight. They also used the occasion to model themselves, even as they were modelled by others. Whether they provided models of an ancient past or models for a future Jewish state, Jews first had to negotiate the space of display. The geography of the fair, on the ground and in the imagination of fairgoers, was highly charged. One space was several places, nowhere more vividly than in the Holy Land, Bible lands, Eretz Israel, Zion, Filastin, Palestine, and the State of Israel. In the spaces of display and their uneasy alignment with the geopiety and geopolitics of the Holy Land, Jews were a Bible people, witnesses to the world of Christ, performers of the sultan's delights, and prototype of the Semitic race. They were also modern Americans professing a universalistic religion and ardent Zionists committed to the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. By the eve of World War II, they had learned how to use the medium of a world's fair to make a place for themselves in the world. Note I would like to thank Grace Cohen Grossman for so generously sharing her expertise, Peter Cherches for his expert research assistance, Andrew Davis for the gift of Portrait Types of the Midway Plaisance, and Zachary Baker for pointing out useful sources. Research for this essay was conducted while I was a Winston Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1996 and part of a research group, Visual Culture and Modern Jewish Society, convened by Richard Cohen and Ezra Mendelson.