The Maccabean Menorah: Spiritual Lights in the Smoke of War

“Our students are now all serving their country, but when that sad duty is passed, they will again turn to the school . . .”

This striking sentence, which captures the sentiments of countless educators at Israeli universities and yeshivas, was written in 1917 by Flinders Petrie, in the introduction to his book Tools and Weapons. An English archaeologist, Petrie was one of the founders of modern Egyptology, but carried out excavations in the Land of Israel as well. He also supported Zionism and was the first to uncover an Egyptian inscription mentioning the name “Israel.”

The book includes hundreds of drawings of weapons and tools from the collections of the British School of Archaeology in Egypt, and was published to raise funds for a field hospital. Though he was sixty-one when World War I broke out, he submitted several applications to leave his academic post to join the war effort, but was turned down. Petrie felt the need to justify continuing his academic pursuits while so many of his countrymen were sacrificing life and limb on the Western Front and elsewhere. I imagine that working on this volume only deepened his frustration: while his students were fighting the Germans, he was surrounded by weapons he could only look at, not use.