Jewish group condemns ROM's use of 'Palestine' label while museum says revisions already underway
A Jewish advocacy group is condemning the use of the “Palestine” label for certain ancient artifacts at the Royal Ontario Museum.
“We were made aware that the label had been in place for some time,” said Tafsik CEO Amir Epstein in a statement to National Post. “This does not excuse the responsibility to correct errors. While we are willing to give the benefit of the doubt that this was an unintentional mistake, we simply ask that the information be corrected to reflect archaeological and historical facts.”
The artifacts in question have been on display at the ROM since 2012. The museum says revisions have already been underway for several months, which is prior to the online discourse that began when Tafsik posted about it on X in late December. The museum did not immediately respond to National Post’s request about what the new labels would be after its revision.
“The @ROMtoronto (Royal Ontario Museum) is rewriting history. Welcome to Canada 2025,” Tafsik posted on X last month. The group also shared a photo of a swirled marble mosaic bottle that is located in the museum’s Joey and Toby Tanenbaum Gallery of Rome and the Near East.
It is dated 25 to 50 AD. It is labelled as being from Syria or Palestine.
The @ROMtoronto (Royal Ontario Museum) is rewriting history. Welcome to Canada 2025.
— Tafsik Organization (@Tafsikorg) December 30, 2025
During 25AD - 50AD the land of Israel was called “Judea” by the colonizing Romans and “Eretz Yisrael” (Nation/Land of Israel) by the Jews. 100 years later, the Romans colonized the entire land… pic.twitter.com/NAc3eZsFkP
“From approximately 25–50 AD, the land was known as Judea by the Roman authorities and as Eretz Yisrael by the Jewish people. After the colonizing Romans killed and expelled much of the indigenous Jewish population, they imposed the colonial name ‘Palestine’ with the explicit intent of erasing Jewish history and connection to the land,” Epstein said.
“Historical revisionism is not new to the Jewish people. The Nazis used it to justify the genocide of Jews in Germany, and more recently, Palestinian religious and political leaders have employed similar tactics to justify the genocide committed against our people on October 7, 2023.”
He said that, throughout history, the erasure of Jewish identity has led to violence and genocide, driving the Jewish people to “meticulously” document its history “for thousands of years” — “documentation that has been corroborated through archaeology and, more recently, through recorded testimony.”
Tafsik has been in touch with the ROM and it is optimistic that the museum is taking the matter seriously, he said.
Another example from the ROM, as reported by the Free Press , shows blue glass pieces, including a jug, flask, bowl, aryballos (small, spherical flask) and flagon (large drinking container) in the same gallery of the museum.
The items are dated AD 25 to 125. They are labelled as being from Syria or Palestine.
In an emailed statement to National Post, the ROM said its curator has identified displays within the gallery “as requiring several label revisions.” The gallery was originally installed between 2011 and 2012.
“This work has been in process for several months, and related label updates (including for the swirled marbled mosaic bottle) are underway,” the statement said.
“Any changes to labels at ROM are informed by dialogue between curators, interpretive planners, and sectoral peers. Labels use the date of the object as the fixed starting point and, where known, indicate the location as it was named at the time of production. Contemporary place names are also included to aid visitor understanding. The location often includes multiple current place names if the exact area of production within a geographic region is not known, as is common curatorial practice for centuries-old objects.”
Carl Ehrlich, a York University professor of history and humanities, told National Post that labelling artifacts is “very, very complicated,” especially when words take on different meaning in the modern era.
“Until very recently — when Palestine and Palestinian became both the name of a country in preparation, as it were, and of a new ethnic group — Palestine was viewed as a very neutral geographic term, an amorphous term, for the area we could call the southern Levant or southern Canaan,” he said.
“That’s the reason why Palestine is, at least in the scholarly world, a designation that is used for a general geographic territory without necessarily being specific about ancient borders, territories or ethnicities, because there were a number of different ethnicities and a number of different peoples living in that territory.”
Judea was a “relatively small area and kingdom,” he said. “Under Herod the Great, for instance, who ruled in the last few decades BCE, it managed to expand its borders a bit…It moved out of the area of modern-day Israel into the territory of what is now Jordan, the West Bank, etc. It was a little bit larger at that time.”
Christian scholars started archeological investigations into the ancient Near East mostly in an attempt to establish a foothold in the region and look into “the biblical roots of Christianity.”
“They continued using this terminology of Palestine for the southern area, Syria for the northern area,” he said.
Over the course of time, the terms have become more complex.
“Nowadays, the term Palestine and Palestinian is loaded with political implications, and therefore the modern day Palestinians, the ethnicity, has been essentially piggybacking on that term in order to establish an ancient historical tradition leading up to the modern people, that essentially also involves the erasure of the Jewish history and the Jewish connection to the land,” he said.
“So, it’s not a neutral term anymore.”
The entire labelling system could use an overhaul when it comes to presenting ancient artifacts to a modern audience, he said, as the “old scholarly labels” have not “kept up with the changing meaning of the words involved.”
As for the artifacts at the ROM pointed out by Tafsik and mentioned in the Free Press, they don’t include a specific geography in their online profiles that would definitively determine that they came from Judea, Ehrlich said.
“(The curators) don’t know exactly where, so they use the old scholarly designations,” he said.
It only becomes problematic if objects from the territory of modern-day Israel or ancient Judea are referred to as Palestinian “because that then is an erasure of Jewish history.” He said there is an ongoing battle between “modern day labels and imposing them anachronistically on ancient times to fight modern wars of legitimacy.”
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