The Bahat Family

Lwów in 1938 is a city of tensions. Still belonging to interwar Poland, it is home to a large and ancient Jewish community, heir to centuries of Ashkenazi life, torn between assimilation, Zionism, Bundism, and a maintained orthodoxy. It is in this context that Dan Bahat is born, son of parents who, as the biographical note preserved on Prabook specifies, were citizens of the British Mandate of Palestine — a biographical detail of considerable significance: his parents had already made the Zionist choice before his birth, and it is by a concurrence of circumstances that he comes into the world in Europe rather than in the land of Israel.

Eastern Poland in those years is a crossroads of languages and belonging: the Polish of administration, the Ukrainian of the countryside, the Yiddish of Jewish streets, and, for those who looked toward Palestine, Hebrew as horizon. The parents of the future archaeologist belonged precisely to this world of transition and project, to that generation for whom Hebrew was no longer merely the lashon ha-kodesh, the sacred language of prayer, but the concrete language of a new life to be built. Jean Baumgarten has described how, in these decades, Yiddish and Hebrew vied for the future of the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe, with Zionists resolutely choosing Hebrew as the vehicle for national revival [Baumgarten, 2002].

The Shoah was to erase the Jewish community of Lwów in near-totality: of approximately one hundred ten thousand Jews present in 1941, only a few thousand would survive. The Bahat family, whose parents had opted for Mandatory Palestine, was spared the worst. This point, which the sources do not detail further, nevertheless outlines the contour of a migratory decision that was, literally, a decision of life. In this sense, the name Bahat is also the name of a survival: that of a family which had, before the catastrophe, laid its stone on the new land.

Dan Bahat arrives in Israel in the early years of the State. He studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he obtains a bachelor's degree in archaeology and Jewish history in 1964, a master's degree in 1978, and defends in 1990 a doctorate devoted to the topography and toponymy of Crusader Jerusalem — a subject of revealing precision: it is one of the least explored periods in the history of the holy city, when the Franks superimposed their own architectural layer over the Byzantine, Arab-Islamic and ancient strata.

Jerusalem is a palimpsest city: each era wrote over the previous one without erasing everything, leaving stratigraphic textures of extreme complexity. The archaeologist who takes it on does not work only on a site — he works on one of the most memory-laden questions of humanity. The stakes go beyond science: each discovery in this city concerns the founding narratives of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In this particular context, scientific rigor and intellectual integrity are cardinal virtues, not merely academic ones.

It is at this demanding post that Bahat trains and establishes himself. From 1963 onwards, he enters the Department of Antiquities and Museums, the ancestor of the Israeli Antiquities Authority. He first builds his career in the Galilee district, where he notably directs excavations at Tel Dan and the synagogue of Beth-Shean, two sites of major importance for understanding ancient Judaism: Tel Dan for its inscriptions and Iron Age structures, Beth-Shean for its Byzantine mosaic synagogue. Then, in 1978, he becomes district archaeologist of Jerusalem, a post he will hold until 1990 — twelve decisive years during which he supervises, coordinates and directs interventions on the most symbolic terrain imaginable.

Dan Bahat's great fieldwork achievement, the work that earned him international recognition, is his direction of excavations and clearances in the Western Wall tunnels — that long underground corridor running, beneath the constructions of the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, along the Herodian retaining wall of the Temple Mount.

The enterprise begins as early as 1967, following the reunification of Jerusalem during the Six-Day War. The Israeli Ministry of Religious Affairs decides to clear the full length of the Western Wall, visible in its southern section from the esplanade, but obstructed to the north by medieval and Ottoman constructions. The initial work is limited to clearance, without rigorous archaeological excavation. It is Bahat who, from the mid-1980s onward, conducts this work with the rigor of archaeological discipline: stratigraphic documentation, architectural surveys, materials analysis.

Bahat was employed by the institution that preceded the Israeli Antiquities Authority from 1963 to 1990, eventually becoming the district archaeologist of Jerusalem. From the mid-1980s onward, he served as the principal archaeologist in charge of the Western Wall tunnel excavations.

What the tunnel reveals is prodigious. The Herodian wall, built under Herod the Great in the 1st century BCE, proves to be of stunning technical magnitude: the most imposing stones, located some twenty meters deep, are among the largest hewn blocks ever put in place by human hands in Antiquity. One of them measures more than thirteen meters long and is estimated to weigh several hundred tons. The discovery of Wilson's Arch, the so-called Warren's Arch, and the uncovering of the paved Herodian street that ran at the foot of the wall, all these elements make it possible to reconstruct the appearance of Jerusalem in the time of the Second Temple with unprecedented precision.

Bahat publishes his findings in The Jerusalem Western Wall Tunnel (Carta Jerusalem), a reference work that accompanies the scientific discovery with an accessible exposition. The approach is characteristic of his commitment: to make archaeological science reach a broader public, to let underground Jerusalem speak not only to specialists but to all those whom the memory of this city concerns. There is in this will to share something that touches upon one of the great virtues of Jewish learning: the fact that knowledge — Torah, in the extended sense of teaching — is transmitted, opens up, circulates rather than withdrawing into itself.

If excavations constitute Dan Bahat's fieldwork, his atlases constitute his work of transmission. Two works stand out here as landmarks in the archaeological literature on Jerusalem: The Illustrated Atlas of Jerusalem (Carta, 1990, reissued in 2011) and The Atlas of Biblical Jerusalem (Carta).

The Illustrated Atlas of Jerusalem — also found under the title Carta's Historical Atlas of Jerusalem in certain editions — constitutes a remarkable synthesis of all archaeological and historical knowledge about the holy city, from its origins to the modern era. Presented through maps, plans, sections and photographs, it offers a visual reading of Jerusalem's urban evolution through its major phases: Canaanite and Jebusite Jerusalem, the City of David, Jerusalem under Solomon and the kings of Judah, the Persian period, the Hasmonean city, Herodian Jerusalem in its splendor, the destruction of 70, the late Roman and Byzantine periods, the Arab conquest, the Crusaders, the Mamluks, the Ottomans, and finally the contemporary city. The atlas was revised and updated to include the results of all the most recent excavations and research, presented in a highly visual manner through maps, diagrams, plans and photographs.

The Atlas of Biblical Jerusalem responds to a different, more focused ambition, centered on the Old and New Testament periods. From the First Temple to the time of Jesus, this atlas graphically illustrates the colorful history of the city through maps, drawings and photographs. It is based on the results of the latest archaeological excavations. The work implicitly responds to a talmudic requirement that its foreword evokes: the Talmud says that Jerusalem had taken nine measures of beauty out of the ten with which the world was endowed, leaving only one to the rest of the world. To restore this beauty through archaeological mapping is to extend, by means of modern scientific methods, a tradition of celebration of Jerusalem that goes back to the rabbinic texts themselves.

The production of these atlases is not an insignificant gesture in the intellectual history of Judaism. There is in the cartographer of Jerusalem something of the scribe who copies in order to transmit: Bahat takes upon himself the task of making readable for his contemporaries and for future generations a city that stratigraphy had rendered mute. Dan Bahat is one of Israel's leading archaeologists, an expert on the Temple Mount, Herod's Palace and the 500-meter tunnel that runs beneath the western retaining wall of the Temple Mount. These atlases are the literary and cartographic extension of this field expertise.

After leaving the Antiquities Authority, Bahat served as a member of the faculty at Bar-Ilan University (in Land of Israel studies) and as associate professor at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, living and teaching between Canada and Israel. This dual affiliation — Israel and Canada, Hebrew university and Catholic university of Toronto — says something about the reach of his work: the archaeology of Jerusalem interests the entire world, across all faiths, and Bahat has been one of its leading transmitters.

There is a less frequently highlighted aspect of Dan Bahat's career that nonetheless deserves to be noted: the precise nature of his doctorate, defended in 1990 at the Hebrew University. The thesis addresses the topography and toponymy of Crusader Jerusalem — that is, the city as it was reconfigured, named, and inhabited by the Franks between 1099 and 1187, and again during their second passage in the thirteenth century.

This choice of subject is intellectually courageous. The Crusader period is, in the Israeli context, sensitive terrain: it evokes a Western, Christian, and conquering presence in a city that Zionism sought to reclaim as the heart of Jewish memory. To study Frankish Jerusalem with rigor is to acknowledge that the city bore other names, other cartographies, other memories — that the stones one excavates carry layers of superimposed and non-exclusive identities. This approach, which proceeds from a deep intellectual honesty, touches upon a conception of History and Jewish Law that does not shrink from complexity: truth is not harvested by choosing the strata it is convenient to see, but by reading all the inscriptions that time has deposited.

Bahat directed excavations at Tel Dan, at the synagogue of Beth-Shean, and at Herod's palace in Jerusalem. To these excavation sites are added the excavations of Tel Yavné — a site of extraordinary symbolic import for Judaism, since it was at Yavné that Yohanan ben Zakkaï reconstituted the rabbinic Sanhedrin after 70, thereby founding the Judaism of the Mishna and Talmud — and the excavations of Ibelin Castle, a Crusader fortress whose archaeological exploration Bahat led.

Through this trajectory, a profound coherence emerges: Bahat is the man of ruptures and reconstructions. He excavated the synagogue of the Byzantine period at Beth-Shean, explored the Herodian foundations beneath Jerusalem, studied the Frankish toponymy of the holy city, and brought to light the traces of rabbinic Yavné. Each excavation site is a chapter in the long history of the Jewish people, of its continuity through political discontinuities. This stratigraphic vision of History — which reads destructions as well as constructions — is perhaps this archaeologist's most profound contribution to the understanding of his own people.

Before becoming the name of this archaeologist, bahat is a word. Its sole biblical occurrence is found in the Book of Esther (1, 6), in the description of the sumptuous pavement of the court of the palace of Susa: bahat appears alongside other precious materials to evoke the splendor of the royal residence of Ahasuerus. Translators and lexicographers hesitate between "porphyry," "veined marble," "alabaster," and "precious stone"—a sign that the term designated a prestigious mineral material rather than a strictly identified species. This very indeterminacy has contributed to the evocative power of the word: it connotes splendor, solidity, polished brilliance.

Classical Hebrew onomastic repertories classify this type of term among the privileged sources of modern Israeli patronymics. According to The Book of Names (Ariel, 1997) and Family Names in Israel (Eshel, 1967), a substantial portion of names adopted in the twentieth century proceeded from a deliberate lexical choice, drawn from the biblical and Mishnaic treasury, in rupture with diasporic surnames perceived as marked by exile. Origins of Jewish Names (Stahl, 2005) emphasizes that these names carry a program: to speak daily of beauty, permanence, or light.

We must pause here on the literary context of this word in the Bible. The Book of Esther is precisely the book of Jewish survival in diaspora: the story of Mordecai and Esther is a story of resistance, of the turning of fate, of the salvation of a community threatened with extermination. That the word bahat belongs to this book—and not to the Torah or the Prophets—may not be fortuitous in the memory of those who chose it as a patronym. To bear the name of a stone from the royal palace of Susa is subtly to evoke a memory of resilience, of brilliance preserved under trial.

This resonance takes on particular savor when brought close to the destiny of Dan Bahat. A man born in Poland in 1938—on the eve of catastrophe—who spent his life revealing the stones of Jerusalem: the word and the life seem to have chosen each other mutually.

Dan Bahat's trajectory is intelligible only if we situate it within the double horizon of the renaissance of the Hebrew language and the birth of the State of Israel. Delphine Bechtel has described this cultural renaissance as a vast undertaking where language, literature, and national construction become tightly interwoven [Bechtel, 2002]. In this undertaking, the choice of Hebrew names was a political act as much as an identity statement: to name oneself in Hebrew was to declare oneself contemporary with a project.

Family Names in Israel (Eshel, 1967) documents how, in the Yichouv and then in the young State, many families abandoned a diaspora patronym in favor of a Hebrew name. The shift to a name like Bahat could respond to several motivations: expressing an assumed Hebrew identity, phonetically translating a previous patronym, or simply adopting a noble biblical word. The family of the future archaeologist, whose parents were already citizens of the Mandate before 1938, belonged precisely to that pioneering generation for whom Hebrew was not merely a language of prayer but of life.

Modern Jewish emancipation, as analyzed by Dominique Bourel through the figure of Mendelssohn, had opened the question of Jewish identity to a new reflexivity [Bourel, 2004]. But it was in Zionism that this reflexivity took the form of a program of integral reconstruction, where the proper name was one of the most visible signs of transformation. Catherine Chalier has shown how deeply the return to Hebrew was, for a generation, an act of fidelity and refoundation [Chalier, 2002]. The patronym Bahat participates, on its own scale, in this movement: it does not say where one comes from, it says what one has chosen to be.

It should be noted that Hebraization was not a uniform phenomenon. It touched Ashkenazi families from Europe as well as Sephardic and Oriental families, each bringing its own sensibilities. The patronym Bahat, by its purely lexical nature, does not in itself betray a regional origin. The documented lineage is of Ashkenazi origin—born in Poland, trained at the Hebrew University—but the name itself is neutral: its biblical stone could have been chosen by a family originating from the Maghreb, the Balkans, or Central Europe. This is one of the characteristics of names of the renaissance: they carry a common meaning that transcends regional particularisms, bearing within them the promise of a new and shared identity.

The twentieth century, which witnessed the flourishing of these new names, was also that of catastrophe. The memory of destruction—of which Charlotte Delbo delivered one of the most stripped-down testimonies [Delbo, 1970]—weighs on all reflection concerning contemporary Jewish names. Many modern Hebrew patronyms were adopted by survivors or their descendants, as the resumption of an identity after erasure. Shmuel Trigano has shown how, in Jewish tradition, the name inscribes the individual in a community and in a normative order: to adopt a Hebrew patronym is therefore also to reinscribe the person in a continuity—no longer through immemorial transmission, but through a choice that seeks to be faithful to the source [Trigano, 1991].

Dan Bahat (born in 1938) — in Hebrew דן בהט

Born in Lwów (Lviv, in present-day Ukraine) to parents who were already citizens of the British Mandate of Palestine, Dan Bahat is one of the major figures of Israeli archaeology. An Israeli archaeologist particularly known for his excavations in Jerusalem, notably at the Western Wall tunnels, he obtained a degree in archaeology and Jewish history from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1964, a master's degree in 1978, and defended a doctorate in 1990 on the topography and toponymy of Crusader Jerusalem. He served as district archaeologist of Jerusalem from 1978 to 1990; for about a dozen years previously, he was district archaeologist for Galilee. From the mid-1980s, he directed archaeological excavations of the Western Wall tunnels, revealing the colossal Herodian ashlars of the 1st century before the common era. He also conducted excavations at Tel Dan, at the synagogue of Beth-Shean, at the palace of Herod, at Tel Yavné and at the Crusader castle of Ibelin. Author of two foundational atlases on Jerusalem — The Illustrated Atlas of Jerusalem (Carta, 1990, reprint 2011) and The Atlas of Biblical Jerusalem (Carta) —, he also taught at Bar-Ilan University and the University of Toronto (St. Michael's College), bringing knowledge of Jerusalem well beyond the borders of Israel.

The surname Bahat reads like a condensed page from modern Jewish history — yet this Great Book has shown that it is far more than that: it is the name of a man who spent his life proving, stone by stone, that memory can be excavated, mapped, and transmitted.

Lexically, bahat is firmly established: precious stone or marble of the royal pavement in the Book of Esther, a word from a book that tells of Jewish survival in diaspora. Onomastically, it fits within the great wave of Hebraization of names described by Origins of Jewish Names (Stahl, 2005), Family Names in Israel (Eshel, 1967), and The Book of Names (Ariel, 1997), and confirmed as a modern Hebrew surname by Wikidata [Q51582150].

Historically, it must be placed within the triple horizon of emancipation and the birth of modern Judaism [Bourel, 2004; Kriegel, 1977], the revival of Hebrew language and culture [Bechtel, 2002; Baumgarten, 2002], and the reflexive return to the Hebrew source as the foundation of identity [Chalier, 2002; Trigano, 1991]. Its documented lineage is Ashkenazi, born in Poland at the edge of catastrophe, transplanted to Israel by parents who had already chosen Zionism before 1938.

The virtue that this lineage expressed above all others is not an abstract virtue: it is knowledge as service rendered to collective memory. Dan Bahat did not excavate Jerusalem for himself alone, nor for the scientific community alone: he excavated so that stones would speak to all — Jews, Christians, Muslims, to anyone seeking to understand where the most meaning-laden city in human history comes from. His atlases, translated and distributed internationally, thus extend the great Jewish tradition of talmud Torah in its broadest sense — not learning turned inward upon itself, but knowledge opened, transmitted, held in common.

A name of the present as much as the memory of an ancient word, Bahat illustrates this truth that modern Jewry made its own: one can choose a name from the treasure of one's language, lay a biblical stone as the foundation of a living identity — and then spend one's entire life revealing, beneath cities and centuries, all the others.