The Israel Museum

The Israel Museum opened in 1965, considerably later than many national museums elsewhere in this atlas, and its founding was directly shaped by the Dead Sea Scrolls discoveries of the preceding two decades. The museum's Shrine of the Book, a building whose distinctive white dome was designed to evoke the lids of the clay jars in which some scrolls were found, was constructed specifically to display the scrolls and opened alongside the wider museum, giving the institution an architectural centerpiece built around a single set of texts rather than added to an existing general collection.

Unlike several national institutions covered in this atlas, the Israel Museum is legally an independent nonprofit foundation rather than a government department, funded through a combination of state support, philanthropic donation and its own revenue, a structure common among major museums outside directly state-run systems. Its broader collections, covering archaeology, Jewish ceremonial art, and international fine art, developed around the Shrine of the Book core over the following decades, making the scrolls display the founding nucleus of what later grew into a full national museum rather than one gallery within an older institution.

The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Aleppo Codex reached Jerusalem institutions by very different routes even though both are displayed to the public in the city. The scrolls, found from 1947 onward in the Qumran caves, passed through antiquities dealers and international purchase before major portions were secured for Israeli and Jordanian institutions in the years after their discovery, with the Shrine of the Book built specifically to house Israel's share once it was assembled.

The Aleppo Codex followed a different and more contested path: smuggled out of Syria after anti-Jewish riots damaged the Aleppo synagogue that had guarded it for centuries, reaching Jerusalem only in 1958 with a number of its pages already missing, a loss never satisfactorily explained. Its ownership and physical custody today rest with the Ben-Zvi Institute and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem rather than with the Israel Museum itself, though the museum has at times exhibited pages or facsimiles from the codex alongside its Dead Sea Scrolls displays, a curatorial connection that should not be mistaken for the museum holding legal custody of the codex. The atlas notes this distinction explicitly because the two objects' custodial histories, one a purchase and preservation story, the other a story of communal loss and disputed missing pages, are genuinely different and should not be flattened into a single account.