Hebrew Voices #205 – Safeguarding History: Part 2

Dr. Nehemia Gordon - Bible Scholar at NehemiasWall.com

In this brand new episode of Hebrew Voices #205, Safeguarding History Part 2, Nehemia continues his discussion with collectibles expert Leven Parker about the harsh reality of asset rich but cash poor institutions and the tear-stained letter of one of Judaism’s most famous Rabbis.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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Hebrew Voices #205 – Safeguarding History: Part 2

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Levin: So many people ask me, “Well, you just read letters.” And I’m like, “I don’t think you understand how much knowledge I can gain from holding the piece of paper in my hand and taking a look at the way it’s constructed, the way it’s put together.” I mean, there’s so many things that when you get… and I feel the same way about those interviews. Just having the information isn’t enough. Watching it actually happening and understanding what society was like at that point of time is something that can’t be retrieved once it’s gone.

Nehemia: Shalom and welcome to Hebrew Voices! I’m here with TikTok creator Levin Parker, who makes videos advocating and educating on collecting. And he has a focus on stamps.

This brings up a different point, which is, how do we know what happened in the past? I think the average person thinks, “Okay, I’ll look it up on Wikipedia.” But what’s Wikipedia based on? It’s based on a lot of scholarly… hopefully based on a lot of scholarly work that’s been done.

Levin: Hopefully!

Nehemia: And what’s that work based on? It’s based on all kinds of sources. We think of something like, let’s say, the American Revolution. So, we have diaries, and we have letters that people wrote.

Levin: Yeah.

Nehemia: And then, we have a history book that was written 100 years later that was based on sources maybe that aren’t around anymore.

Levin: Yep.

Nehemia: So, there’s all kinds of different sources. And some of those sources will be propaganda from the British during the Revolution that maybe are lying, and maybe it’s propaganda from the Americans who are lying.

Levin: Yes.

Nehemia: And that’s why it’s all the more important to go back and look at some of these primary sources. And we have primary sources like a letter that somebody is writing, one guy to another, and telling you, “I’m in such and such a city and the British have been here for three months.” Okay, now, maybe he’s wrong.

Levin: Yeah.

Nehemia: Maybe the British are only there for two months, but at least we can combine different sources and get kind of a picture of what was going on. And the farther you go back in history, the more difficult, of course, that is to do.

Levin: Yes. And not only that, but I think that when you get into those primary sources… A lot of history writing is about telling us what the motivations were for things to happen, and I think that’s why I like ephemera so much. Because I think if you’re going to get a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to a close personal friend, talking about why he did something, no matter what it is, it’s going to be a much more honest motivation than something he wrote in his diary. Because, what he wrote in his diary, he knew that was going to be published. He knew that he was trying to fulfill a specific narrative. Whereas when you’re writing a letter to a friend that you expect to be discarded, that’s where you’re actually chopping it out and really showing that depth. And that’s why I’m so attracted to postal history, because I think it’s the most honest way to really understand what it is people are doing, because it is the most raw and unfiltered version.

Nehemia: Yeah. So, guys, you might think, “Nehemia, why are you doing a program about collecting, and postal history, and philatelic matters?”

Levin: Yeah.

Nehemia: Because look, here’s just an application of that. We have Paul’s letter to the Galatians, or the Ephesians. So, this is something historians will talk about. Was that letter intended to be part of the New Testament? Or was Paul writing a letter to a specific community at a specific time?

There’s the passage in the New Testament where the guy says, “I forgot my coat.” Now, a lot of New Testament historians will say that that actually is part of the evidence that it’s a forgery. That that’s the type of thing that you would put in there if you were trying to pretend that your letter was really written by… I think it was Paul, or whoever wrote that letter. But in real letters you write that kind of thing. You’ll talk about things that 1,000 years from now people will say, “What is the reason he’s talking about his coat? Is that a metaphor? An allegory?” No! He left his coat!

Levin: Yeah! And well you know, again, it’s about understanding that 100 years ago even, every communication that you had with every other human being that wasn’t immediately within your own vicinity, you would send something out and wait days or even months in order to receive a reply. And that was your reality of human connections. And that lack of immediacy… just understanding how much that changes your viewpoint, of like you said, with a letter… like, every letter I read, it’s a description of “Here are the nine different conversation threads that we have going on and you’re addressing all the things from the previous letter that you got, unless it’s a business deal.”

And I don’t know the passage; I’m not a New Testament scholar. But yeah, “I left my coat” to me would lend credibility to it because that’s how people write letters. You’re not going to send a one-topic letter. Usually, it’s going to be multiple topics.

Nehemia: Yeah. So, when historians come to study the early 21st century, they’re going to come head-to-head with the issue of… I mean, talk about ephemeral! You have something like Snapchat…

Levin: Yeah.

Nehemia: Which I’m not sure I’ve ever used in my life. But isn’t there something on Snapchat where you send a message, and it immediately disappears after a certain number of seconds, or something?

Levin: I have daughters, and I use Snapchat with them, so… it does. But I think the bottom line is that unless that data is saved… because there are things there that you can’t get. But there’s so many things even from the early parts of the internet that are now gone. There was just a story about a major media company that took all of their…

Nehemia: MTV, I saw that!

Levin: MTV, yeah. They just took all of those past archives… and it’s just insanity that they would just shut that down from a historical point of view. But I agree with you; it’s going to be a really interesting way that future historians delve into it.

Nehemia: Yeah. So, MTV had this website with decades of all kinds of stuff…

Levin: Interviews and everything.

Nehemia: …including music history, and they just deleted it. Because they were like… I don’t know why, but I assume they said, “We don’t want to pay for this bandwidth. Nobody comes and looks at these archives.”

Levin: Yeah.

Nehemia: And like you said, interviews. So, you might have had an interview with, I don’t know, I’m just making something up; Elton John the day after Princess Diana died. Imagine if you had that interview. He wrote that famous song about Princess Diana, Elton John… but maybe the day she died he’s doing an interview where he says, “I don’t really like her that much. She’s kind of annoying.” And I’m making this up. He didn’t say that.

Levin: Yeah.

Nehemia: But you’ve now lost things like that. And then a week later he’s like, “Oh my gosh, she was such an amazing person.” Because there’s kind of that nostalgia that sets in almost immediately in a case like that, when someone passes away. But that’s all gone now; they erased the archives.

So, this is a beautiful thing. Somebody could have gone… and you have the internet archive; they could have gone and archived that. I don’t know if they did, and preserved that, and they’re considered kind of like pirates doing that. But these pirates could be preserving history.

Levin: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s true. I mean, there’s a huge collecting market for bootleg recordings of old TV commercials, programs, local news stations, all of that stuff, because oftentimes the masters have been discarded. These small news stations and stuff like that, they get rid of that. And so, there is a huge market for exactly that kind of media capture.

And I think that it’s just like you were talking about those statues, where you wanted to get in there and get some modern pictures and look at that transcription. So many people ask me, “Well, you just read letters.” And I’m like, “I don’t think you understand how much knowledge I can gain from holding the piece of paper in my hand and taking a look at the way it’s constructed, the way it’s put together.” I mean, there’s so many things that when you get… And I feel the same way about those interviews, that just having the information isn’t enough. Watching it actually happening and understanding what society was like at that point in time is something that can’t be retrieved once it’s gone.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Levin: And it’s funny, because you’re absolutely right. Piracy collections are definitely highly collectable because oftentimes they’re the only examples of those recordings.

Nehemia: I just saw a thing about… there was an audiobook of… I don’t even remember what it was. Like, some movie that started out as a book, and they did an audiobook. And then when the movie came out, it got really popular, and they said, “Well, we want to redo this audiobook.” So, they hired another actor, and they redid the audiobook, and the previous audiobook is now gone.

Levin: Yeah.

Nehemia: There’s no copies of it. People were like, “That was an amazing… There was actually original acting in that earlier version of the audiobook. And we can’t access it anywhere and nobody has a copy of it.”

And look, when I was a kid, I was a Doctor Who fan. And one of the famous things about Doctor Who is the BBC, not some small television station, threw out the originals. They literally threw them in the garbage, the originals of years and years of episodes. And now, every once in a while, a reel, a physical reel, will show up.

Levin: Yes.

Nehemia: I think there was one recently found in Ethiopia from some local station that was broadcasting it!

Levin: Yeah!

Nehemia: And they’re like, “Oh! Does anybody want this before we throw it away?” “Yes! That’s a lost episode that can’t be recreated!” And there’s one that showed up in Australia.

So, there’s an example of how collecting can be really valuable. And then, sometimes public institutions maybe don’t have the resources. Maybe they think, “Yeah, this is important, but we can’t keep everything,” which I kind of understand. They’re asset rich but cash poor, like we said.

Levin: Yes.

Nehemia: And then, the private market can do that, or the private collector. It’s really interesting stuff. What’s the most interesting thing you’ve ever collected, or been involved in collecting, or held in your hands? I don’t know.

Levin: My favorite item in my collection, definitely not my most expensive or my most historical item, is actually the very first cover I spent serious money on. I spent about 300 bucks on it. It was written to a gentleman that was involved in the wars against the Plains Indians in northern Wyoming in the 1870’s. And the reason I love it so much, and I won’t go into too much detail, but through the years… I’ve owned it about 15 years. And I found, not just where he was stationed, who he was fighting, what that fighting impact had on everything that was going on, I also found he had a diary that existed. And so, I know what was going on in his life during that point in time. And he actually had a son die just as he was receiving that letter, that he just heard about. And he left the war to ride 90 miles overnight to go and visit his wife and console her on the death of their child for 24 or 48 hours, and then rode back to join back up with the campaign and continue to fight.

Nehemia: Wow.

Levin: That ability to delve into somebody’s life and understand that he’s not just a soldier, he’s also a father and a husband. And to show that sign of humanity and to have that kind of experience, it’s something that, to me, shows how I can have one item, and over the course of years I learn more and more and more and more. And that’s true for many of the items that I have. I have so many items that I’ve bought for a specific reason, and then I look at it down the road and I’m like, “Oh wow, I didn’t even realize that this had implications here,” or “this explains this.” And I think that that’s what really gets me going. It’s not just the value or the historicality, but the ability to really step into somebody else’s shoes and understand what their life was like.

Nehemia: Wow. Alright, so, I’ll share this with you because it’s a philatelic… well, not about stamps per se, but… The most famous rabbi in history, or one of the most famous, was Moses Maimonides, who was actually a refugee from Spain and ended up settling in Egypt, where he was the sultan’s, or whatever the guy’s title was, the ruler’s personal doctor. And Maimonides’ brother was a merchant who went on trips to India to trade spices or whatever he traded, I don’t know. And he died on a voyage to India, his brother. Maimonides tells the story of how he would hold the last letter that he received from his brother, and he would cry over it because it was so precious to him.

Levin: Yeah.

Nehemia: Well, there was a synagogue in Cairo called the Ben Ezra Synagogue. And there was a little broom closet type thing in the front of the synagogue where, when they had an old book or anything written with Hebrew letters, they would toss in there because there was this idea that you can’t destroy God’s name. And if God’s name was written on a document, whether it was a Bible or any document, you had to preserve it, not destroy it. Let nature consume it over time. So, they would throw it into this chamber, called the Genizah, called the Cairo Genizah. In 1896, this professor comes from Cambridge, Solomon Schechter, and he says to the synagogue, “Hey, you guys probably don’t want this. Let me clear up some space for you.” And he purchases the full contents of the Genizah.

Levin: Wow!

Nehemia: And they found the letter that Maimonides talked about, the letter from his brother.

Levin: Wow!

Nehemia: Which is amazing!

Levin: That’s so cool!

Nehemia: It wasn’t meant to be preserved, and…

Levin: Yeah. And I can tell you that one of the other items that I really love is… I have about a dozen items from the actual Oregon Trail that were sent home by folks that were on the trail. And one of my favorites is the absolutely most bedraggled… I mean, it looks terrible. It looks like a piece of garbage. It’s definitely the least valuable one I have. But you can see the care, and the trail dust, and the dirt, and you can see that somebody deeply, deeply cherished this item. And there’s something very special about owning something that has private information that was so special to them, because I think it gives you a deeper connection with them.

It’s just like when I did a video about my daughter’s phone charms, and it’s something she’s done since she very first had a phone. And it seems stupid, but it’s such a big part of something she carried around and is part of her persona her whole life. I consider it collectible, because it highlights who she was at a certain point, and it’s something understandable of a young girl. I mean, the wad is ridiculous.

Nehemia: It’s bigger than the phone. I’ve seen that video!

Levin: It is! You have? Yeah. But I think that’s the thing that really drives me with collecting is that it gives you an insight into somebody else’s life.

Nehemia: Yeah, wow. So, this has been a fascinating conversation. Let me ask you one last thing. When I was a kid, I had a friend, one of my closest friends. He and his family were moving, and they had to get rid of a bunch of stuff, and he gave me this index card box full of stamps. I wish I had saved it, but I didn’t, and it was Hitler stamps.

Levin: Yeah.

Nehemia: From World War II.

Levin: Yeah.

Nehemia: Or maybe from before World War II in some cases, I don’t remember. What was that worth? Was that necessarily worth a lot? Or maybe not?

Levin: No. They produced… I mean, obviously they were very aggressive about producing stamps with his image on them. There are a couple of special Hitler stamps that are worth money, but the vast, vast majority, they sell at a very minor premium over every other stamp, because people like the taboo aspect of having something from Nazi Germany that has his image on it. But they’re not necessarily valuable by any means. You didn’t throw away anything…

Nehemia: You’re making me feel a little bit better. I don’t know if I threw them away. What happened was, my family moved. My mother moved to Israel in 1990, and while I was away at summer camp, she got rid of pretty much all my stuff. And I came back… it’s a long story, but I came back from being away for like six weeks, or eight weeks, and I’m like, “Where’s all…” I actually had library books that I had borrowed, and I’m like, “Where are my library books?”

Levin: Oh, no.

Nehemia: She’s like, “Oh, I sold all of that in bulk by the pound.” And I had a coin collection. It wasn’t really valuable… it was valuable to me. It had a few Morgan dollars that were worth like $20 or something, which was a lot of money when I was a little kid.

Levin: Yeah.

Nehemia: But it was valuable to me. And most of that was sold off in bulk, including those Hitler stamps. And I always wondered, “Oh, what was that worth?” And it was interesting, because my friend was Jewish too, and he obviously got this from a grandfather or somebody who must have collected these. Probably at the time they were issued, I would imagine. Or maybe it was people who were coming as refugees and were sending letters.

And by the way, this is a really interesting thing; Hitler was a very wealthy man, because he charged a royalty on every use of his image.

Levin: I believe that!

Nehemia: Including those stamps. Which is crazy!

Levin: You know, I might steal that for a TikTok. And I’ll tell you, I know we’re done here, but actually, during World War II there’s numerous stories of people putting large amounts of cash into truly rare stamps because they were so incredibly portable. You could sew them into the lining of a jacket, and then when you did that you couldn’t… well, you wouldn’t feel it like you would a diamond or just a piece of paper. And it’s so small that you could get away with it. And there are numerous stories of folks that were fleeing Europe during wartime that put enormous amounts of money into philatelic items and stamps because they were such a good hedge against the authorities.

Nehemia: Wow. I didn’t know that. That’s fascinating!

Levin: Yeah.

Nehemia: Well, thank you so much for joining me, this has been a fascinating discussion. It’s a little bit off-topic of what we usually do, but I learned a lot. This has been really fun.

Levin: Well, thank you. I had a great time!

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VERSES MENTIONED
2 Timothy 4:13

BOOKS MENTIONED
1984
by George Orwell

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Revolutionary War Blockade Run Mail
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MTV deletes news archives from internet, erasing over two decades of articles
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