The director of the British Museum has said that cultural institutions are “caught between opposing political pressures”, after a row over the museum’s decision to postpone a Jewish culture month lecture over fears it would be disrupted by protesters.
Nicholas Cullinan defended the decision, saying “freedom of expression does not require institutions to provide a platform for disruption”, in a lengthy statement shared on the British Museum website.
The postponement of the talk on ancient Israel and Judah by Dr Paul Collins, the keeper of the museum’s Middle East department, less than 24 hours before it was due to take place, drew criticism from figures including the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, the shadow attorney general, David Wolfson, and the historians Simon Schama and Simon Sebag Montefiore.
The museum said it received credible information in the days before the event that between 25% and 50% of ticket holders intended to disrupt it.
Cullinan said the museum faced competing obligations, and noted that thousands of visitors, including school groups, would have been in the building at the time.
“Those attending the lecture had a reasonable expectation that they would be able to hear it and not unwittingly made a captive audience for another purpose,” he said. “The curator delivering it had a right to do so without organised attempts to silence them. Balancing those responsibilities is not censorship; it is stewardship.”
He added: “The deeper issue is one that extends far beyond a single lecture. Across Britain, cultural institutions increasingly find themselves caught between opposing political pressures. The temptation is to interpret every operational decision through the lens of ideology. Yet not every decision is political.”
The museum has said the rescheduled lecture will take place this month and will be livestreamed.
Organised as part of the first Jewish culture month in the UK, which runs until 16 June, the event is expected to examine the archaeology and history of the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah through artefacts held by the museum.
Badenoch had called on the government to intervene, arguing that the decision undermined the aims of Jewish culture month. “The government says it wants to combat antisemitism, it needs to tell publicly funded institutions like the British Museum to do what’s necessary to put this event on,” she said.
Cullinan said a public talk that “should have been unremarkable” became “a flashpoint in a wider national argument about protest, intimidation and the limits of free expression.”
“The event was not cancelled. It was postponed. That distinction matters,” he said.
The British Museum, he continued, was accustomed to protest, which is a “healthy feature” of democratic life. “But there is a fundamental difference between protest outside an event and organised disruption within it intended to silence and overwhelm, especially at such an understandably difficult moment for the Jewish community in the UK.”
Earlier this year the museum was also criticised for removing the word “Palestine” from some of the labels in its galleries.
Last week, Jewish Artists for Palestine, a network of UK-based “anti-Zionist Jewish artists, writers, creatives and culture workers”, said it was “entirely legitimate” to expect a publicly funded museum to host conversations reflecting “different points of view” and argued that treating debate as “a security concern points to the event as a pro-Zionist propaganda exercise”.
Cullinan said we live “in uneasy times, when historical subjects are often drawn into contemporary conflicts”. He said the answer “cannot be to abandon difficult conversations. It must be to protect the conditions in which they can take place.”
