Fading Declaration of Independence given Dead Sea Scroll treatment

At almost 67 years old, she didn’t look so bad as the lights flashed and the camera snapped away. But the reason Israel’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, took a rare trip Tuesday to the Israel Antiquities Authority’s labs to undergo multispectral imaging was precisely because flaws had started to appear.

The document, which was hastily drafted and signed on May 14, 1948, is ordinarily stored at the Israel State Archives in Jerusalem, but was brought to the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library to be digitized and photographed by the IAA’s custom-designed hi-tech multispectral imaging technology.

Digitizing the Declaration of Independence is part of an ongoing project by the State Archives to document, monitor and preserve one of the Jewish people’s most significant single documents; appropriately, the government turned to the home of the most important manuscripts in Jewish history, the Dead Sea Scrolls.

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Israel’s Declaration of Independence not only serves as a historical document, but also acts as a keystone in the country’s legal system in lieu of a formal constitution, together with a series of so-called Basic Laws.

It was written on three pages, two of paper and the third of animal parchment, which were sewn together and bound with a white and blue cord. Historians are still uncertain what animal skin was used for the bottom section.

But the final draft wasn’t completed in time for the ceremony on Friday, May 14, 1948, so prime minister David Ben-Gurion read from a typed-up version of the document, and the dignitaries signed the lowermost register, which was later affixed to the rest of the text, Dr. Mordechai Naor, a historian of the state of Israel, said.

Among its many eccentricities, the Declaration of Independence wasn’t written on a uniform medium, which makes its preservation a more complex affair. Not only was it written on both plant and animal surfaces, but the 37 signatories used multiple pens with different inks, and the drafter, Tel Aviv graphic designer Otte Walische, used another ink entirely.

“They asked [the signatories] to sign with the same gold-plated pen,” explained Naor, whose latest book about Israel’s founding document entitled “The Friday that Changed Destiny” was just released. “But several of them did something else.”

David Remez, Israel’s first transportation minister, “apparently brought a chinagraph… because it’s much thicker than the rest, and so that no one would mistake his name, inserted vowels,” Naor said.

Others signed with felt pens. The signature of Felix Rosenblueth, Israel’s first justice minister, has started to vanish, prompting preservationists to seek digital analysis of how the document is aging.

The signatures on the Declaration of Independence (photo credit: Ilan Ben Zion/Times of Israel staff)

The Israel Antiquities Authority’s labs in the labyrinthine bowels of the Israel Museum are home to one of six or seven multispectral imaging arrays in the world capable of capturing and collating photographs taken at a variety of exposures and wavelengths ranging from the visible to the infrared.

Multispectral imaging allows historians to view the document more or less as it was written 67 years ago.

Pnina Shor, head of the IAA’s Dead Sea Scrolls Projects, said the Declaration of Independence will be photographed under seven visible light wavelengths, and five in infrared light.

“The system was developed for the Dead Sea Scrolls and we realized that because the Declaration of Independence is written on parchment, then our system will work with the declaration as well,” she said.

The State Archives approached the IAA and sought their help with creating a digital version of the parchment. By overlapping the infrared and visible light images, however, “we get what the declaration looked like when it was written 67 years ago,” Shor said.

“Because of the excellent optics we have here, and thanks to the digital support we have here, we obtain very high resolutions which allows us to compare to points in time with a very high level of accuracy,” Yair Medina, head of the photography lab, said. The team will photograph and monitor the document over the course of six to eight months and track changes it’s undergoing.

“It’s the beginning of a long journey of preservation and monitoring,” he said.

The opening lines of the Declaration of Independence (photo credit: Ilan Ben Zion/Times of Israel staff)

“We keep saying we’re applying the most advanced technology to save the most ancient manuscripts,” Shor said of the Dead Sea Scrolls digitization project she heads. “Now we can say that we’re applying the most advanced technology not only to save our most precious ancient manuscripts but to save also our most precious cornerstone manuscript.”