Israel had long planned to take part in a major exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Frankfurt. This would be no ordinary event: Nearly all the Dead Sea Scrolls known to exist are housed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The September 2019 show in Germany represented an uncommon—though not unprecedented—opportunity to display them outside the Middle East. But it wasn’t meant to be.

Earlier this month the German government declined to guarantee it would return the scrolls to Israel if Jordan or the Palestinians claimed them….