Kingdom Come

THE NEW CRITERION, November 2025

Kingdom Come

On “To the Holy Sepulcher: Treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum,” at the Frick Collection.

Among the many miracles to come from Jerusalem, “To the Holy Sepulcher: Treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum,” now on view at the Frick Collection, is the latest revelation.1 The wonders of the works on display, with some sixty-eight individual pieces, are only outshone by the tales of their survival and the connections these treasures maintain to that singular place.

Since its rediscovery in the fourth century A.D., the location of Jesus’s tomb—the Holy Sepulcher—has been the most important pilgrimage site in Christendom. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at a time when European monarchs could not visit the Holy Land, then under Ottoman rule, the courts of Europe sent treasures to the church built over the tomb for use in rituals and veneration. “To the Holy Sepulcher” represents the first pilgrimage of these objects stateside. The exhibition is the result of an unprecedented loan from the Custody of the Holy Land, the Franciscan division charged since A.D. 1309 with protecting the Roman Catholic treasures in Jerusalem and beyond. The American tour anticipates the opening of the Terra Sancta Museum, a Franciscan facility now under construction at the Monastery of Saint Saviour, by Jerusalem’s New Gate, designed to safeguard and display these objects back home.

The astonishing history of these treasures is made all the more remarkable by their appearance in New York. As the Holy Land comes to Fifth Avenue, we must thank Xavier F. Salomon, the Frick’s deputy director and chief curator. He organized this exhibition after first learning about the Terra Sancta Museum a few years ago, with the help of Jacques Charles-Gaffiot and Benoît Constensoux of the Terra Sancta Museum’s scientific committee. The exhibition marks this young curator’s final effort at the Frick before his departure for the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, Portugal, where he is the incoming director. For a scholar so invested in both the fine and decorative arts of Europe, “To the Holy Sepulcher,” we might say, is a fitting swan song of Salomon.

The exhibition leads off with the one item here actually created in the Holy Land: a model of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher itself, crafted in the eighteenth century. Be sure not to miss it just outside the gallery entrance; on the day I visited, it was not easy to double back. Carved in Bethlehem of local olive and pistachio wood, mother-of-pearl from the shells of the Red Sea, and camel bone, the dollhouse-like assembly was created to be a gift for Europeans from the Franciscans—a memento from rather than for the Holy Sepulcher. The jeweled model reminds us of all this footprint contains and how this church has come down to us through time.

Look up this church in the index of Jerusalem, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s recent history of the city, and the subcategories give some indication of the site’s vicissitudes:

Church of the Holy Sepulchre: and Arab conquests . . . construction by Empress Helena . . . and Crusades . . . daily rituals . . . and Descent of the Holy Fire . . . destruction by fire . . . Fatimid destruction . . . latrines . . . and Mongol raids . . . and Napoleonic invasion . . . Persian destruction . . . and religious conflict . . . and Tartar conquest . . . and Turkish conquests . . .

The layout of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is far different from the grand vision of the Vatican or what one might expect from this axis mundi of Christianity (there is, in fact, a spot in the church marking the very axis point). A concatenation of surprisingly small Romanesque buildings, all of which were built, burned, and reconstructed over various periods, the church has been a site of veneration, speculation, and contention for two millennia—and is made all the more wondrous in its strangeness. No two of the extant floor plans of this church look exactly alike. It is easy to get turned around among its domes and passages, its priests and pilgrims. Make a left turn at the Chapel of Adam, where the blood of Christ ran through Adam’s skull; go past the Stone of Unction, where the body of Christ was cleaned before burial and which pilgrims now rub down with oil; and you might come across a wall of medieval graffiti carved to collect its holy dust.

Robert Landry, Reliquary of the True Cross, 1628–29, Gilt silver and glass, Terra Sancta Museum, Jerusalem.

Today the church is located within the Old City, a short walk from the Temple Mount through narrow, winding streets of Jerusalem stone, and is little changed from that eighteenth-century model. In the time of Jesus, the tomb was part of a sloped cemetery that existed just outside the city walls. Following Titus’s destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, Hadrian recast the city as Aelia Capitolina in A.D. 130. Even by then, the tomb had become a site of veneration for the earliest Christians. Hoping to redirect their attention to the Roman gods, Hadrian walled off the tomb, flattened the site, and constructed a temple to Venus in its stead. Nevertheless, the memory of the location endured. Two centuries on, as Rome accepted Christianity with the Edict of Milan, Helena of Constantinople—mother to Emperor Constantine, and Saint Helena to Christians—traveled to Jerusalem and reopened the tomb in 326; her son dedicated the new church on its site in 335. In a nearby well, Helena also discovered pieces of what she believed to be the True Cross. The site of the Crucifixion, known as Calvary Hill or Golgotha, is just 150 feet from the tomb and was soon incorporated in the church grounds.

Regarding the tomb’s history, Evelyn Waugh wrote in his introduction to Helena, his historical novel of 1950, that

if we do accept its authenticity we must, I think, allow an element of the miraculous in its discovery and identification. We do know that most of the relics of the True Cross now venerated in various places have a clear descent from the relic venerated in the first half of the fourth century. It used to be believed by the vulgar that there were enough pieces of this “true cross” to build a battleship.

Much as Waugh encountered them, today the tomb, Calvary Hill, and Helena’s well—in addition to archaeological evidence of Hadrian’s Temple of Venus—are all connected under one roof within the warren of buildings that comprise the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Making this real estate even more complex—and explaining its general appearance of deferred maintenance—the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Coptic, Syrian, and Ethiopian churches all share in the church’s administration under an arrangement reached in 1757, in the days of the sultan, known as the Status Quo.

“To the Holy Sepulcher” is made up of a selection of precious objects used by the Latin church in its annual rituals around the site and in other places under its protection in the Holy Land. Only recently have these objects been, like the tomb itself in Helena’s day, brought to the light—in this case, after the Cuban Italian scholar Alvar González-Palacios began researching them in the 1980s and exposing them to the greater museum world (his fascinating story gets its due in the exhibition’s lavish catalogue, which also features updated photographs of these freshly cleaned treasures).

Before then, as the Franciscan custodians tell it, these treasures were hidden in plain sight—brought out for special ceremonies but otherwise squirreled away in closets and storerooms, miraculously safe from looting, vandalism, and whatever authority was ruling Jerusalem at any given time. In fact, the greatest threat to such treasures has come from intrachurch rivalry. A sanctuary lamp (ca. 1758–59) of gold and gilt silver attributed to Johann Caspar Kriedemann, showing reliefs of episodes from the life of Christ, was most likely created from the gold of earlier Latin treasure that had been destroyed by the Greek clergy in an attack on the eve of Palm Sunday in 1757. The same goes for the pair of torchères from 1762, remade in Venice by the workshop known as al San Lorenzo Giustinian from the 1,304 ounces of silver recovered by the Franciscans from those destroyed and stolen treasures.

Al San Lorenzo Giustinian Workshop, Torchère, 1762, Silver and gilt silver, Terra Sancta Museum, Jerusalem.

Nevertheless, despite the challenges faced by the church and city, the many treasures in Franciscan custody at the Holy Sepulcher have fared far better than their counterparts in Europe. “To the Holy Sepulcher” contains examples of European metalwork that are otherwise no longer extant—melted down long ago for their raw materials. The sections of the exhibition are therefore divided by region of origin, denoting the French, Iberian, and Germanic sources of these gifts given by European monarchs to Franciscan emissaries for delivery to and use in the Holy Land.

It is, after all, the continuous liturgical function of these ritual objects that has defined their design and sustained them. “Their survival over the centuries is a direct result of their continued use,” says Salomon. As the outgoing director of the cultural heritage office at the Custody of the Holy Land, Friar Stéphane Milovitch explained at the Frick opening, “If the Ottomans knew we had all these kinds of things, they would have liked to take it. So during many centuries we use and we hide—but we used.”

To understand such metalwork and textile, it helps to envision it carried, elevated, illuminated, and worn. At the opening, I met one friar looking at the subtle wear on a section of fleurs-de-lys on a crozier (1654–55) created by Nicolas Dolin. He wanted to see just where the bishops grasped this imposing pastoral staff of gilt silver, glass, and semi-precious stones, made in Paris and given to the Franciscans by Louis XIV.

Nicolas Dolin, Chalice, 1661–63, Gilt silver, glass, and semi-precious stone, Terra Santa Museum, Jerusalem.

A special alchemy takes place when such treasures of sculptural relief, created from metal and stone, are held in the lamplit liturgies of the church. Objects such as Dolin’s chalice and paten (1661–63) and Jean Hubé’s ciborium (1668–69) are so finely detailed, with minuscule images from the life of Christ alongside symbols of the holy ancestors of the French kings, that these messages are more intended to be felt than seen. While European monarchs could not travel to Jerusalem in person, their presence was conveyed to the holy altars through the symbolism preserved in these finely wrought materials.

To encounter such objects in a museum setting is therefore a trade-off. Salomon has done what he can to reproduce an altarlike feel in some of these displays, with vested mannequins arranged among the treasures. Nevertheless, we experience them as never intended, not in candlelit glimpses but in close-up stares. Ornate objects such as a solid-gold Neapolitan monstrance of 1746, Antonio de Laurentiis’s throne of Eucharistic exposition of 1754, and a Neapolitan crucifix of gold and lapis lazuli of 1756 are just about too much to take in under the light of the Frick’s spare new special-exhibition space. The same goes for Robert Landry’s reliquary of the true cross (1628–29), containing at its center a fragment of Helena’s fourth-century find.

As an exhibition of holy objects, “To the Holy Sepulcher” ultimately tells us little about the liturgical role of these materials back in Jerusalem. As a display of European metalwork and textile design, however, the show connects us to relics of the European past as never before. This connection is not lost on the Franciscan custodians of these works, who rightly see American institutions such as the Frick as upholding the legacy of Christian Europe even in a post-Christian, post-European age. Today, these treasures speak to the resurrection of Western culture as much as the Resurrection from that Jerusalem tomb. In either context, they represent singular objects of faith.

  1. “To the Holy Sepulcher: Treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum” opened at the Frick Collection, New York, on October 2, 2025, and remains on view through January 5, 2026. The exhibition will also be seen at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth (March 15–June 28, 2026. 

A Lion in Zion

THE NEW CRITERION, November 2024

A lion in Zion

On “All About Herzl: The Exhibition” at the Temple Emanu-El Bernard Museum of Judaica, New York.

The raid on the town can only be described as an atrocity. Terrorists from across the border descended on the remote village and quickly overran its defenses. Trained and supported by a hostile state, which had planned the attack as part of a larger proxy war, tribal mercenaries went door to door “with horrid shouting and yelling,” according to one eyewitness account, “like a flood upon us.”

Over the course of the day, the attackers brutalized and murdered as many residents as they could find. They bludgeoned and burned the townspeople in their homes. People of all races and backgrounds fell victim to the assault. Anyone the terrorists could not round up to take back across the border as either a hostage or domestic slave was slaughtered. Women and infants, along with the infirm, were specifically targeted.

By the next day, ten men, nine women, and twenty-five children lay dead out of a population of 291, with more than a hundred people taken hostage. Nearly half the town was reduced to ashes as the attackers looted what remained. Even if they survived the initial onslaught, husbands and fathers had to watch as their wives and children were slain for not keeping pace on the forced march back to enemy territory.

Meanwhile, those who survived back home attempted to raise the funds to pay the kidnappers for the return of their kin—often in vain. Negotiations dragged on for years while the participants in the raiding party fought over the booty. Hostages had to renounce their faith as they were forced to live with their attackers. Half the captives never made it home. Eventually, one survivor gave witness to the massacre in a book that galvanized public opinion. Its title was The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion.

The Deerfield Massacre of February 29, 1704, described above, is a reminder of the brutalities Americans endured in the creation of what became the United States. The attack on a remote village in the Connecticut River Valley by Mohawk Indians and their allies, crossing the border from Canada along with their French enablers, was just one episode in what historians know as Queen Anne’s War (1702–13), part of the greater War of the Spanish Succession.

Nation-building is a difficult business. Often the outsize burden of cultivating a wilderness and taming a border can only be endured through faith. America’s early settlers, persecuted across the Atlantic, found power in their belief in the City upon a Hill, in creating the New Jerusalem that would become their Manifest Destiny. Some three centuries on, a similar faith in a Promised Land, a Zion, inspired Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) to envision what became, just a few decades after his death at age forty-four, the modern State of Israel.

A small but potent exhibition now on view at New York’s Temple Emanu-El Bernard Museum of Judaica called “All About Herzl” delivers on its promise to reveal this latter-day nation-builder through primary documents and the iconography that came to surround him.1 Drawing on the Central Zionist Archives of the World Zionist Organization (here mostly in facsimile) and the David Matlow Collection of (original) Herzl memorabilia, the fascinating exhibition curated by Warren Klein presents the Zionist behind Zion and the cultural artifacts he and others deployed to inspire Israel’s creation.

A delegate card from the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, Collection of David Matlow, Toronto. Photo: Kevin Viner.

The exhibition begins on East Sixty-fifth Street, where a banner for the show depicts Herzl in profile, hands clasped together beneath his Assyrian beard, leaning over a railing and gazing out at the Fifth Avenue façade of Temple Emanu-El and the Brooklyn Bridge. As with much Herzl iconography, this image represents a wishful concatenation. Herzl never visited the United States. The picture is rather a combination of Ephraim Moses Lilien’s 1901 photograph of Herzl overlooking the Rhine from his hotel balcony in Basel, Switzerland, taken as he attended the fifth Zionist Congress, with modern images of New York. For the exhibition-goer, a further opportunity to be seen in Herzl’s shadow continues just inside the lobby. Here visitors can stand beside a life-size statue of Herzl, arms folded, positioned in front of a backdrop of a Zionist Congress.

Trigger warning! These early chances to see yourself beside the founding father of the State of Israel, even the option to take a selfie with him, reveal a show that is unabashedly pro-Herzl, pro-Zionist, and upbeat about his nationalist vision. Like the energized state he inspired, Herzl understood the joys that could be released from Jewish sorrow, a fact reflected in the show’s sometimes lighthearted application of Herzl-iana. The mascot for David Matlow’s own “Herzl Project,” for example, based in Toronto, Canada, and established “to inspire people to be a little like Herzl and pursue their dreams,” is a Herzl-faced hockey player. At a moment when Israel’s frontiers are under vicious assault and cosplaying Mohawks are attacking America through its ally, the absence of doubt here for Herzl’s vision is refreshing. For those looking for a counterpoint, there is always Columbia University.

Whatever else you think of him, Theodor Herzl must be the most consequential theater critic in modern history. The Austrian-born playwright went from working as a cultural correspondent in Paris to inspiring what has become a nuclear-armed state. In the final eight years of his life, Herzl foresaw the descent of liberal Western Europe into barbarism as well as his own reburial in his future nation (by design, he was initially interred in Vienna in a transportable metal casket).

Herzl identified the mechanisms to turn his vision into a groundswell and to set its gears in motion. He mapped out a state that would serve as a beacon and bulwark for the region. In his utopian novel of 1902, Altneuland (The Old New Land), he envisioned a desert transformed into a Jewish metropolis. One translation of this book’s title provided the name for the city of Tel Aviv.

Herzl was not your obvious nation-builder. Born into an affluent, assimilated Jewish family in what is now Budapest, he attended a Protestant high school, where he studied German literature and poetry and at first looked down on “shameful Jewish characteristics.” The exhibition includes such artifacts as Herzl’s second-grade report card (in facsimile, ca. 1867) from the Israelitische Hauptschule Pest along with a rare photograph of him clean-shaven (ca. 1880).

When his family relocated to Vienna, Herzl joined a German nationalist fraternity and remained a member despite its growing anti-Semitism. In 1891, he moved to Paris as a correspondent for Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse at a moment of populist turmoil in the French Third Republic. Three years later, anti-Jewish sentiment came to a head in the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer falsely accused of spying for the German Empire. The exhibition contains several illustrations from this trial and the subsequent degradation ceremony that divided French opinion. If liberal Western Europe could turn so fiercely against its Jews, Herzl reasoned, no amount of assimilation would solve what he called the “Jewish problem.” The only solution, he argued, could be found in the title of his 1896 manifesto, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). Several editions, including English, Spanish, Hungarian, Yiddish, Polish, and Arabic translations, are here on display.

A bust of Theodor Herzl, Collection of David Matlow, Toronto. Photo: Kevin Viner.

Calling in his preface for the “restoration of the Jewish State,” Herzl maintains that the “world resounds with outcries against the Jews, and these outcries have awakened the slumbering idea.” The “misery of the Jews,” he continues, can be turned into a new nation’s “propelling force.” History has shown that “the absorption of Jews by means of their prosperity is unlikely to occur,” since the hatred directed at them by their host nations—of “vulgar sport, of common trade jealousy, of inherited prejudice, of religious intolerance, and also of pretended self-defense”—is a “remnant of the Middle Ages, which civilized nations do not even yet seem able to shake off, try as they will.” In fact, the “longer Anti-Semitism lies in abeyance the more fiercely will it break out,” Herzl continues, since the “world is provoked somehow by our prosperity, because it has for many centuries been accustomed to consider us as the most contemptible among the poverty-stricken.” On the question of where this new Jewish state should be established, in one famous passage, Herzl weighs the two areas of recent settlement—“Palestine and Argentine:”

Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home. The very name of Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvelous potency. If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.

Driven by necessity, Herzl concludes that the “Jewish question is no more a social than a religious one, notwithstanding that it sometimes takes these and other forms. It is a national question, which can only be solved by making it a political world-question.”

By expanding Judaism from a shared ancestry and religion into a “political world-question,” Herzl found his earliest critics in assimilated Jews. They saw his Zionist call (a term he did not invent but deployed in a new way) as unnecessarily tendentious. At the same time, many orthodox observers believed that only Hashem, and not man, should aspire to return the Jews to Jerusalem (a handful of their descendants can today be seen joining the campus Hamas-niks). It was in the unreformed East, where Jews lived with no pretense of assimilation, that Herzl found his most fervent believers and the misery to shape his nation’s “propelling force.”

A bas-relief portrait of Theodor Herzl, Collection of David Matlow, Toronto. Photo: Kevin Viner.

As Herzl devotes much of his book to the mechanics of nation-building—the handling and reselling of assets, the corporate and social entities that must be created, the use of negotiorum gestio, that “noble masterpiece . . . the Romans, with their marvelous sense of justice, produced”—The Jewish State can be a dry read. Yet the manifesto’s arid structure proved to be the kindling that ignited the movement.

As Herzl traveled to Constantinople to negotiate (unsuccessfully) for a parcel from the Ottoman sultan, his followers flocked to see him at the rail stops. Zionist chapters formed in cities across Europe and (to a lesser extent, at first) America. With the paintings, posters, photographs, pamphlets, books, medals, and statues that came to represent him, “All About Herzl” picks up with the abundant memorabilia produced around the early meetings of the Zionist Congress, the annual black-tie affairs that Herzl produced with enough pomp and circumstance to make his vision a reality. “If you will it, it is no dream,” he proselytized. The second Zionist Congress created the Jewish Colonial Trust and its Anglo-Palestine Bank, which went on to become Israel’s Bank Leumi. The fifth Zionist Congress created the Jewish National Fund for the purchase of land, with the suggestion (made by a Galician bank clerk) that a collection box be placed in every Jewish home.

Herzl gave his life for his cause, dying from the fevered urgency of his dream. In death he became a political martyr, his image an icon, as represented in the exhibition’s final, salon-style hanging of twentieth-century depictions of him, which are inventively varied. In a Rudi Weissenstein photograph from Tel Aviv in 1949, a year after Israel’s founding, we see Herzl’s casket lying in state before its reinterment in Jerusalem—another redeemed captive returning to Zion.

  1. “All About Herzl: The Exhibition” opened at the Temple Emanu-El Bernard Museum of Judaica, New York, on September 17, 2024, and remains on view through January 23, 2025. ↩