Baath party documents confiscated by the Americans in 2003 are like the black box after a plane crash. But the Iraq-Jewish archive is more like lost luggage, a reminder of the life Iraqi Jews left behind, writes Cynthia Kaplan Shamash lyrically in the New York Times. A must-read (with thanks to all those who e-mailed me about this article):
(...) Despite instances of sectarian violence, Jews and Arab Muslims managed by and large to cohabit, until anti-Semitism escalated in the 20th century and culminated in a great massacre that Iraqi Jews call the Farhud pogrom, or “the forgotten pogrom of the Holocaust.” It began on June 1, 1941, when pro-Nazi militants executed Jews on buses and sidewalks, killed babies and their grandparents, raped and murdered women and girls. Then they emptied the homes of the dead of everything valuable. When the carnage and looting were over, about 130 Jews had been murdered, many more orphaned and hundreds of others wounded. The dead went into a common grave.
Less than two years after the establishment of Israel in 1948, the Iraqi
government declared that Iraq’s Jews could go to the Promised Land — on
the understanding that they would renounce their Iraqi citizenship and
leave their assets behind. Going to Israel meant never going back. To
return with an Israeli stamp on your travel document would be to ask to
be executed as a spy. Still, within three years, about 120,000 Jews
willingly paid the price for their freedom, leaving just a few thousand
behind.
My family remained, and I was born in Baghdad in 1963. But by the time I
was in kindergarten, Jewish assets were being frozen, Jewish men had
begun to lose their jobs, and universities would not accept Jewish
students. And yet, surreally, it was by then illegal to leave. Finally,
my family and I tried to escape over the border with Iran, but we were
captured and jailed for five weeks. An officer took me alone into an
interrogation room and, looking for a recording device, dismembered the
doll I was carrying. He accused me of being a “jasoosa” — a spy. I was
8. I still have the broken doll.
Upon being released, we found that many of our belongings had been
confiscated. We moved in with a friend and applied for passports for a
10-day vacation in Turkey. We could take just one suitcase and a
pittance in cash, and we knew we’d never return. Even if our suitcase
had been large enough, we could not have taken our photo albums,
diaries, letters or schoolbooks. Nor the elegant dresses our mother had
made for me and my two sisters. Nor the jewelry and scrolls and shawls
and menorahs bequeathed us by our ancestors. Who takes a photo album on a
10-day vacation, the police would have asked.
From Turkey, we fled to Tel Aviv and then Amsterdam, where my father
soon died of a heart attack. I was schooled for a year in England, and
eventually I emigrated to America, where I have lived since 1991 — and
where I now help direct the World Organization of Jews From Iraq.
Through the group, I found a small community with this in common:
leaving Iraq meant leaving virtually everything dear to us in the very
country that had expelled us.
Then, in May 2003, American soldiers searching the flooded basement of
Saddam Hussein’s intelligence headquarters for weapons found instead an
obviously looted trove of more than 2,700 books and tens of thousands of
documents in Hebrew, Arabic, Judeo-Arabic and English. The materials
dated as far back as 1540, and as recently as the 1970s; they included
scroll fragments, a Babylonian Talmud, hand-illustrated prayer books,
Hebrew calendars, school primers, personal and business correspondence,
Kabbalist commentaries and a Bible from 1568. Conservationists from the
National Archives in Washington went to Baghdad to assess the damage and
save the articles. Iraqi representatives agreed that the materials
should be flown to America, where they were nursed back to life:
freeze-dried, cleaned, categorized, photographed and digitized.
On Friday, an exhibition, “Discovery and Recovery: Preserving Iraqi-Jewish Heritage,” opens at the National Archives. A website has given the world access to the archive. But the collection’s future is uncertain because President George W. Bush’s administration promised that the materials would be returned to Iraq after restoration. That promise’s legality has been contested by Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and others.
I can understand American sensitivities to accusations of pillaging.
During the Iraq war, the United States also removed Baath Party
documents, and Iraq is seeking their return, too, on grounds that the
Iraqi public can learn from them about their past leaders’ mistakes. But
there is a difference between the papers of a murderous dictator and
the heritage of an oppressed minority. The Iraqi-Jewish archive never
belonged to the Iraqi government; it belonged to the Jews of Iraq.
On Friday, an exhibition, “Discovery and Recovery: Preserving Iraqi-Jewish Heritage,” opens at the National Archives. A website has given the world access to the archive. But the collection’s future is uncertain because President George W. Bush’s administration promised that the materials would be returned to Iraq after restoration. That promise’s legality has been contested by Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and others.
For me, the Baath Party documents are like the black box from a plane
that has crashed: studying them can avert future calamities. The
Iraqi-Jewish Archive is more like lost luggage — the treasures of a
dispersed people who yearn to reconnect with something, anything, of the
life they left behind.
4 comments:
excellent piece. May it get reposted over and over again in support of the petition.
Yes, I agree : it's an excellent piece.
Then our turn came and we were accused of all the sins of Israel! before being thrown out
sultana
Well said Cynthia, having Iraqi-Jewish forebears myself I found it very evocative. Thank you.
I commend the New York Times for publishing such a powerful topic into the news.
The archive belongs to the jews. I think the analogy makes with the black box of a plane really drives the point home. There may be the digitized copy of the archive online, but that is not the same. I would assume that Picasso's children preferred an original painting, and the same goes for the iraqi archive! I hope Cynthia's bravery can encourage people from around the world seek justice as well!
Great work Cynthia Shamash!
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