2025 marks sixty years since the conclusion of Yigael Yadin’s two extraordinary seasons of digs at Masada. The excavation of this spectacular fortress on the Dead Sea remains the most celebrated archaeological accomplishment of the modern State of Israel. Masada was the last stronghold to fall to the Romans, three or four years after the destruction of Jerusalem and of the Temple, in the summer of 70 CE. Amidst King Herod’s pleasure palaces, storehouses and walls, some 960 rebels and their families held out, apparently killing themselves at the end to avoid capture and enslavement. The story, as dramatized by the historian Josephus, is enshrined in Jewish collective memory, an inspiration (albeit ambiguous) to Jews in desperate situations, from mediaeval martyrs to the Shoah. The excavations revealed both Herod’s brilliant buildings and stirring remnants of the later siege and the defenders. The lecture will draw on personal reminiscences of the dig, as well as highlighting the large British contribution. We shall discover how the unexpected British involvement was created during Yadin’s 1961 stay in London, his connections in the Anglo-Jewish community and his friendship with David Astor, editor of the Observer newspaper. Reflections on the contrast between Israel’s international image then and now will inevitably arise.

Tessa Rajak is Professor of Ancient History Emerita at the University of Reading, Senior Research Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford and Senior Associate of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. She has been a visiting professor at Yale, the Humboldt University, Berlin, and at Macquarie University, Sydney, and she has held research fellowships at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and at Tel Aviv University among others. The books she has authored include Translation and Survival: The Greek Bible of the Ancient Jewish Diaspora; The Jewish Dialogue with Greece and Rome and Josephus: The Historian and His Society. She is now completing a book on the historian Josephus in English culture and an edition of the 4th Book of Maccabees. She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. She has been editor of the Journal of Jewish Studies, and between 2015 and 2021 she chaired the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society.

Reminiscences of the Masada dig, 1963-5