“I have no future here to stay.”
Written in broken English but with perfect clarity, the message is a stark and plaintive assessment from one of the last Jews of Babylon.
The community of Jews in Baghdad is now all but vanished in a land where their heritage recedes back to Abraham of Ur, to Jonah’s prophesying to Nineveh, and to Nebuchadnezzar’s sending Jews into exile here more than 2,500 years ago.
Just over half a century ago, Iraq’s Jews numbered more than 130,000. But now, in the city that was once the community’s heart, they cannot muster even a minyan, the 10 Jewish men required to perform some of the most important rituals of their faith. They are scared even to publicize their exact number, which was recently estimated at seven by the Jewish Agency for Israel, and at eight by one Christian cleric. That is not enough to read the Torah in public, if there were anywhere in public they would dare to read it, and too few to recite a proper Kaddish for the dead.
Read it all from the front page of this morning’s New York Times.
Most people are aware of the 750,000 or so Palestinians who fled Israel at its founding, but very few people know that following ’47-’48 a somewhat larger number of Jews were pushed out of the Arab League countries, most of them having had their property confiscated. In Old Cairo there is a beautiful historic synagogue, now a museum with no worshippers. These Jewish refugees don’t get any press because they settled into new locations, either Israel, Europe, or the U.S. The Arab refugees, on the other hand, have been kept penned up in “camps,” really squalid villages. The surrounding Arab countries have refused them entry, refused them new identity cards or passports, and refused resettlement aid. They are being used by Arab League (and the U.N.) as political pawns and have been for the past sixty years.
Katherine,
The same is happening to many Christians as well. In 1970, there were almost 3 million Christians in Iraq, now the number is well below one million. In Egypt the population used to be 15% Coptic Christian; it is now below 10%. My brother-in-law was a surgeon in Cairo and a leading member of the Coptic Church there. His brother was murdered by the Muslim Brotherhood while the police looked away. He was told to leave with his family or face a similar fate.
Yes, RevK, a Coptic woman friend tells me that she is sometimes harassed by taxi drivers. That’s not like being threatened with murder, of course, but life for Copts can be difficult. I have an Egyptian Muslim friend, not a practicing Muslim, who calls radical Islam “the Mania” and predicts it will take over in Egypt. He has seen his country decline in culture and economics and dates the beginning to Nasser. I’m not sure the battle is lost, but my friend is surely right to be very concerned.