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February 14, 2003/Adar 12 5763, Vol. 55, No. 25
Iraq has glorious Jewish past
RACHEL POMERANCE
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
NEW YORK - Joseph Dabby was caught amid the winds of change.
An Iraqi Jew, he was twice tossed into the country's jails on trumped-up charges of spying for Israel after the 1967 Six-Day War. Dabby re-members being blindfolded by Iraqi officials, marched outside and frozen by the sounds of gunfire around him.
While Iraq is a bitter memory for Dabby, he identifies with the Jewish community in his homeland, where only about 50 Jews now remain.
As America prepares for a possible war in the Persian Gulf, Iraqi Jewish expatriates are wary of the repercussions of war in general, and on their former country in particular. Just the same, they largely support it, say Dabby and others interviewed for this article.
As for the few Jews left in Iraq - about half of whom are elderly and said to be seeking haven in the last remaining synagogue in Baghdad - their situation is fragile.
The Jewish presence in what is now Iraq is a tale of one of the longest surviving Jewish communities, dating back to 722 B.C.E, according to Lawrence Schiffman, the Edelman professor of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University.
But most of the Jews came to what is now Iraq in 586 B.C.E., when it was Babylon.
From the seventh century to the 11th century, the region was the center of world Jewry and is credited with some of the greatest advances in Jewish history, like the creation of the Babylonian Talmud, completed between 500 and 700 C.E. It was home to major Jewish institutions and pre-eminent scholars.
At their modern-day height in the 1940s, the Iraqi Jewish community numbered 130,000, flourishing in government, com-merce, medicine and the arts.
Most lived in Baghdad, with the second-largest popu-lation in the port city of Basra.
In the years before World War II, more than half of Iraq's importers and ex-porters were Jewish, according to Itamar Levin, the author of "Locked Doors: The Seizure of Jewish Property in Arab Countries."
Iraq, which became a nation-state in 1932, also boasted four major Jewish schools in Baghdad.
Jews "were the educated, elite group," says Albert Nassim, trustee of the American Sephardi Fed-eration and president of the Babylonian Jewish Center, a synagogue in Great Neck, N.Y.
But life changed for Iraq's Jews around the turn of the century with the rise of Arab nationalism and, with it, anti-Semitism.
With the birth of Israel in 1948 came increased anti-Semitism and Israel's own Zionist promotional cam-paign.
State-sponsored persecution forced all but 7,000 of them to flee. Most went to Israel, and Iraq froze the assets of anyone who went there.
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