Robert Eisenman (born 1937) is an American biblical scholar. He is currently professor of Middle East religions, archaeology, and Islamic law and director of the Institute for the Study of Judaeo-Christian Origins at California State University Long Beach.
Eisenman led the campaign to free up access to the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1980s and 90s, and, as a result of this campaign, is associated with the theory that combines Essenes with Palestinian messianism (or what some refer to as "Palestinian Christianity") – a theory opposed to establishment or consensus scholarship.
Before this, Eisenman spent five years travelling in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East as far as India, encapsulating all these things in his poetic travel Diario (1959–62), published in 2007 by North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California and called The New Jerusalem, in which he describes the San Francisco "Beat" scene in 1958–59, Paris when still a "moveable feast", working on kibbutzim in Israel, the Peace Corps, and several voyages on the overland route to India.
Life and career Robert Eisenman is from New Jersey. He was born to assimilated Jewish parents.Eran Neuman, Longing for the Impossible, Haaretz, 12 May 2010. Quote (referring to his brother, Peter Eisenman): "I didn't know I was Jewish until I encountered anti-Semitism at the age of 10..." Even though he grew up in a non-Zionist and assimilated family where his father held radical leftist views.... His brother is deconstructionist architect Peter Eisenman – who designed the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the Visitor Center at Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and the Arizona Cardinal Football Stadium.
Education Eisenman majored for two and a half years in Engineering Physics (a course which was intended to prepare students to enter nuclear physics), graduated B.A. from Cornell University in Physics and Philosophy in 1958. He received an M.A. Degree in Hebrew and Near Eastern Studies with Abraham I. Katsh from New York University in 1966.California State University Website http://www.csulb.edu/centers/sjco/aboutpre.html He received a PhD Degree from Columbia University in Middle East languages and cultures in 1971 with a minor in Jewish Studies and a major in Islamic law, where he studied with Joseph Schacht.
He was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the American Schools of Oriental Research, Jerusalem, Israel, 1985–86 and, in 1986–87, he was a senior research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Oxford, England.
Current position He is professor of Middle East religions, archaeology, and Islamic law and the director of the Institute for the Study of Judeo-Christian and Islamic Origins at California State University Long Beach. He is also a visiting senior member of Linacre College, Oxford University, and was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research (American Schools of Oriental Research) in Jerusalem.
Early life Eisenman grew up in South Orange, New Jersey and went to Columbia High School in Maplewood, but skipped his senior year to take up an acceptance in the Engineering Physics Department at Cornell University. In his junior year Eisenman moved, first to Philosophy to study with Max Black, then on to Comparative Literature with John Senior, and then back to Philosophy to graduate in 1958 with a major in Aesthetics and a minor in Physics.
On the road internationally (1958–63)
Eisenman left college and immediately took to the road (it was the time of Jack Kerouac's On the Road published the previous year, 1957), but now not nationally, internationally. People who knew him then say he was the first to introduce American tennis shoes – substitutes for his college "white bucks" – as white walking shoes to Europe (see the picture at right)Eisenman sitting before the Parthenon, December, 1958. Statement is from Dieter Buhl, former Political Editor of Die Zeit. See also The New Jerusalem back cover and p. 242. and the first American "backpacker" they ever saw (Australians, New Zealanders, and assorted Europeans had been doing it earlier).See The New Jerusalem, pp. 138, 399, and variously
Stopping in Paris, he spent the fall in Alt-Aussee in Austria; and from there to Vienna and down to Greece, to Athens and ultimately Hydra Island, where he was entertained by the Norwegian writer and poet Axel Jensen and his wife Marianne (later immortalized by Leonard Cohen in his song “So Long, Marianne”).
Having been accepted for graduate study in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, Eisenman returned to the U.S. via Paris and Cape Cod and ultimately went across the country by Greyhound Bus to San Francisco where he found a room on Russian Hill and tested the scene at North Beach. When he finally went across the Bay to register at UC Berkeley, what he saw reminded him so much of Cornell (Bermuda shorts, bobby socks, fraternities/sororities, etc. – this was a decade before the Free Speech Movement there) that he ripped up his computer punch cards right on the Registration line in the Armory and tossed them into a wastepaper basket.The New Jerusalem, p. xi.
He then hitchhiked back across the countrySee The New Jerusalem, pp. 4–5 and returned to Paris. From 1959 to 1960, Eisenman stayed at "the Beat Hotel” where he encountered the likes of William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, et al.,See The New Jerusalem, pictures, pp. 242ff. but he was not really interested in these sorts of persons or their scene. All this he documents in The New Jerusalem: A Millennium Poetic/Prophetic Travel Diario, 1959–62,See The New Jerusalem, pp. 7–17, 70–81, 294, etc. published in 2007 and taken directly from the free verse notebooks he kept during this period, which he in his "Introduction" and his publishers on the back cover both call "an Anti-Beat Manifesto".See The New Jerusalem, pp. xi–xiii and back cover description. For his anti-Beat sentiments and statements generally, see pp. 129, 321, 452, etc.
He then went on to Israel and Jerusalem, where he had the epiphany of encountering members of his family of whom he had previously never heard (his great grandfather had gone to Jerusalem at the time of the Turks and was one of the founders of the Bikur Holim Hospital there, while his two oldest sons left him in Istanbul and came directly to AmericaSee The New Jerusalem, p. 67; also see pp. 41–44, 112–16, etc. and obituary for Morris Eisenman, The New York Times, 1/20/1948, who came to U.S. in 1888, age 14, along with his older brother, Eisenman's grandfather, and was President and co-founder with David Sarnoff in 1897 of The Metropolitan News Company, an early Zionist, great philanthropist, patron of the arts, and close personal friend of Chaim Weizmann (cf. letter dated 7/10/1942, C.W. to M.E., St. Regis Hotel, NYC), helped found the Abendblatt Yiddish Newspaper, The Jewish Forward, and Chaim Nahman Bialik and Shmaryahu Levin's Dvir Publishing Company in then Tel Aviv, Palestine, friend of Shalom Asch, and funded childhood "newsie" friend Samuel Roth's first U.S. publication attempt of James Joyce's Ulysses in 1927 and, through the Morris Eisenman Literary Fund, Yiddush writer Osip Dymow in 1942, the Second Avenue Yiddish Theater, etc.), worked on Kibbutzim in the Galilee (1960–61 – he had previously worked on John F. Kennedy's 1960 Campaign,See "America, I Call upon You", The New Jerusalem, pp. 49, 52–59, 63–68) and finally went back to join the first Peace Corps Group to go into the field. This trained at the International House at UC Berkeley, so he was back to where he had started out; but while they went on to meet Kennedy on the White House lawn and to Ghana, he was flown back to New York City because, as he saw it, he was on his way to India and the East not Africa.See The New Jerusalem, pp. 98–104. This poem, "America, I Call upon You", became something of "an anthem" for this group, ibid., pp. xi–xii
Resuming his "Passage to India", he returned to Paris, and then on to kibbutzim in Galilee again.See The New Jerusalem, pp. 107–32 The next Spring, after staying in monasteries throughout Israel, and a climactic fight with the future Israeli "Peace Pilot" at the California Café in Tel Aviv;See The New Jerusalem, pp. 224–59 Eisenman made the last overland run from Cyprus, across Turkey, Iran, Beluchistan, and Pakistan by bus, train, and boat to India, where he ended his journey as a guest of, and sleeping in, the Jewish Synagogue of New Delhi,See The New Jerusalem, pp. 344–446 most of whose members were up in the Simla Hill States because it was high summer and monsoon. He returned to Paris over the Indian Ocean, up the Red Sea, and across the Mediterranean.See The New Jerusalem, pp. 446–53
Release of the Dead Sea Scrolls From about 1986 onwards, Eisenman became the leading figure in the struggle to release and free the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Scrolls had been discovered from 1948 to 1956 in several waves, but after a suggestive article by literary critic Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker magazine,"The Scrolls from the Dead Sea", The New Yorker, 5/14/55. editing more or less ground to a halt from about 1959 onwards.Baigent and Leigh, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, London and New York, 1991, pp. 26–66; Eisenman, "The Desecration of the Scrolls," Midstream, December, 1991, pp. 13–17.
This is not to say the Scrolls were not out. The Israelis had been very forthcoming with the first Scrolls that came into their possession from Cave I.Neil Asher Silberman, The Hidden Scrolls, New York, 1994, pp. 39–67. It was the Scrolls from later caves discovered like III–XI, which came in after 1948 and Partition and on-site excavations by persons like Dominican Father Roland de Vaux, which were the problem. In 1985–86, Eisenman, who had written his first book presenting, as he called it, "A New Theory of Qumran Origins" in 1983See Maccabees, Zadokites, Christians and Qumran, Leiden, 1983. and a follow-up on James as Righteous Teacher in 1985,James the Just in the Habakkuk Pesher, Leiden, 1986. received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem (also known as "the American School") where Cave I Scrolls had first come in and been photographed in 1947–48.See J. C. Trever, Scrolls from Qumran Cave 1, Jerusalem, 1974.
Ostensibly he was to work on a project comparing the Jerusalem Community of James the Just to the Community at Qumran, but while at the American Schools of Oriental Research (then the Albright Institute) he found that there was nothing he could do – all paths being barred to him. Notwithstanding, he and a colleague, Philip Davies of Sheffield University, England, went in to see one of the curators of the Shrine of the Book and were told categorically, "You will not see the Scrolls in your lifetime".Eisenman, The Desecration of the Scrolls, Midstream, December, 1991, p.13. Subsequently, he came into possession of the complete computer print-out of all the Scrolls in possession of the Israel Antiquities Authority, both those before 1967 and those afterwards at the Rockefeller Museum and, not three years later, a complete photographic archive of all previously unpublished materials from Cave IV all the way up to Cave XI.
He sent a copy of this computer-generated print-out to the editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, Hershel Shanks, which created a huge stir in the office and the campaign to free the Scrolls really began in earnest.The Dead Seas Scrolls Deception, pp. 73–83.