Tisha' Be'av with the Jews of Aden
This is an Ashkenazi traveller's account of his visit to the main synagogue in Aden in the 1950s (courtesy of JJAC) during the 9th of Ab, which falls this Saturday ( but is postponed till Sunday). This is the saddest festival in the Jewish calendar, mourning the destruction of the two Jewish temples in Jerusalem and other disasters in Jewish history.
Model of the synagogue in Crater, Aden
"At night, a scene right out of the Arabian Nights meets me in the synagogue for the Tisha B'Av services. The men wear red fezzes, are dressed in white, flowing robes, and are followed by their sons and grandsons. Clusters of these families place themselves comfortably in various spots of the synagogue. The grandfather, patriarchally placed in the middle, sits on a carpet, sometimes barefoot, resting against a high cushion or box; next to him his son, also a little on the heavy side, but without the elder's flowing white beard and side curls.
Around the group are children, usually barefoot, of all ages, of whom the youngest will soon fall asleep while the older ones compete with the grownups in chanting the Kinot. With the synagogue built for a community of thousands, only a few hundred are left; the enormous spaciousness of the basilica-type synagogue leaves room for approximately fifty adults and an equal number of children to disappear into their respective corners.
"For the youngsters, it is like Purim or Simchat Torah. Happy groups of boys in holiday dress, barefoot, with Israeli-made skullcaps on their heads, run back and forth. Then a stern looking young man with a red fez and black beard lets his rod out through the air with a whistling sound, but miraculously misses the children each time he charges into the groups. For a while he gets them to congregate at the foot of the Ark and even gets them to chant a few lines, but soon they are dispersed again in mirth, to the charging of the melamed.
Richly-decorated Torah tik at the Museum of Adeni Jews, Tel Aviv
"Behind the bars along the east wing, women are following the services in a darkened hall. I noticed that their faces are uncovered, although their heads are covered by kerchiefs. Surrounded by Muslims whose married women are literally mummified from head to toe, it must have required enormous strength of character on the part of the Jews not to force their women into adopting similar garb.
"As the reading of the Lamentations proceeds, I am struck by the peculiar Yemenite pronunciation applied. Each komatz is pronounced as an 'o' and eachcholem is pronounced—similar to the Lithuanian manner—as an 'ay.' (A typical Oriental differentiation between the aleph and ayin, between kof and qof, between the 'hard' and 'soft' sounds, is observed. This mixture of Oriental consonants and 'Lithuanian' vowels creates a rather weird-sounding Hebrew.)
"After the services, as a group of worshippers gathers around me for conversation, I query them about this. They reply that their forefathers have lived in Aden for over two thousand years and that they have no other pronunciation.
When I asked them why their cemetery as well as their synagogue faces north and not east, they shake their heads in wonderment, since they have never heard of another direction other than north for praying and burying their dead. After all, Aden is practically due south of Israel. I am informed about their institutions, their yeshivot for boys up to the age of fifteen, their shechitah. I meet their rabbi, Rav Zecharyahu, a venerable sage with a long white beard and wise, knowing eyes. I hear complaints about the unhappy lot of the approximately one thousand Jews still living in neighboring Yemen, whose king refuses them the right to emigrate."
Tunisian memories of the 9th of Av
"At night, a scene right out of the Arabian Nights meets me in the synagogue for the Tisha B'Av services. The men wear red fezzes, are dressed in white, flowing robes, and are followed by their sons and grandsons. Clusters of these families place themselves comfortably in various spots of the synagogue. The grandfather, patriarchally placed in the middle, sits on a carpet, sometimes barefoot, resting against a high cushion or box; next to him his son, also a little on the heavy side, but without the elder's flowing white beard and side curls.
Around the group are children, usually barefoot, of all ages, of whom the youngest will soon fall asleep while the older ones compete with the grownups in chanting the Kinot. With the synagogue built for a community of thousands, only a few hundred are left; the enormous spaciousness of the basilica-type synagogue leaves room for approximately fifty adults and an equal number of children to disappear into their respective corners.
"For the youngsters, it is like Purim or Simchat Torah. Happy groups of boys in holiday dress, barefoot, with Israeli-made skullcaps on their heads, run back and forth. Then a stern looking young man with a red fez and black beard lets his rod out through the air with a whistling sound, but miraculously misses the children each time he charges into the groups. For a while he gets them to congregate at the foot of the Ark and even gets them to chant a few lines, but soon they are dispersed again in mirth, to the charging of the melamed.
"Behind the bars along the east wing, women are following the services in a darkened hall. I noticed that their faces are uncovered, although their heads are covered by kerchiefs. Surrounded by Muslims whose married women are literally mummified from head to toe, it must have required enormous strength of character on the part of the Jews not to force their women into adopting similar garb.
"As the reading of the Lamentations proceeds, I am struck by the peculiar Yemenite pronunciation applied. Each komatz is pronounced as an 'o' and eachcholem is pronounced—similar to the Lithuanian manner—as an 'ay.' (A typical Oriental differentiation between the aleph and ayin, between kof and qof, between the 'hard' and 'soft' sounds, is observed. This mixture of Oriental consonants and 'Lithuanian' vowels creates a rather weird-sounding Hebrew.)
"After the services, as a group of worshippers gathers around me for conversation, I query them about this. They reply that their forefathers have lived in Aden for over two thousand years and that they have no other pronunciation.
When I asked them why their cemetery as well as their synagogue faces north and not east, they shake their heads in wonderment, since they have never heard of another direction other than north for praying and burying their dead. After all, Aden is practically due south of Israel. I am informed about their institutions, their yeshivot for boys up to the age of fifteen, their shechitah. I meet their rabbi, Rav Zecharyahu, a venerable sage with a long white beard and wise, knowing eyes. I hear complaints about the unhappy lot of the approximately one thousand Jews still living in neighboring Yemen, whose king refuses them the right to emigrate."
Tunisian memories of the 9th of Av
Tunisian memories of the 9th of Av
On this Sunday falls the saddest day in the Jewish calendar: the 9th of Ab, also known as Yom Ekha. Sephardi and Mizrahi customs differ slightly for this period of mourning for the two destroyed Jewish temples and other calamities to befall the Jewish people. Only in Tunisia, however, does the 9th of Ab have a special name. Writing inHarissa, Dr Victor Hayoun recalls his childhood memories of how 9th of Ab was marked in Tunis.
In Tunis, the 9th day of Av is Nhar-Ekha, named for the book (of Lamentations by the prophet Jeremiah, about the destruction of the First Temple) which we read on that day in the synagogue.
In Tunisia, and only in Tunisia it seems to me, it is also called Nhar-Eguein. It is not easy to trace the origin of the name and several 'wise men' to whom I posed the question, could not give me a satisfactory answer. The most likely is that the word comes from the Hebrew:Yaguen would be short for "Hashem yaguen a'leinou" (God protect us), in the same way as "shimassilinou"is a distortion of Hashem yatsilénou(God forbid) when one lists the 10 Plagues of Egypt at the Passover seder. Would we be the only Jewish community to wish for protection on that day against all the misfortunes that have befallen the Jewish people? In English we would say: Never Again.
My childhood memories of that fateful day were full of violent scenes and the sufferings of our people throughout its history. The holy texts tell us they all took place on the 9th of Av. All the infamous figures, whose cruelty my father described to me, merged into one: from Amalek, through to Nebuchadnezzar, Torquemada, Titus and others.The Shoah had not yet taken up its place in our collective memory.
In my little world it was hard to rank all these wicked sorcerers according to time and place. My space was my small town, and my protagonists were toy soldiers that I placed on the battlefield, ours against the evil ones.
Our Arab neighbors, whose conduct toward us ranged from sincere fraternity to humiliation and even pogroms (Gabes 1941 was still fresh in my young memory), had sharpened my childish feeling that we were tolerated by the 'masters of the place' and they could get so angry as to make my status precarious. My destiny was not in the hands of my father.
Around the 9th of Av, all the villains inhabited my nightmares. I saw the synagogue square on fire, I saw the Romans who tortured Rabbi Akiva and his disciples, while others killed Hannah and her seven sons.Beside them, I saw our Arab neighbors who had murdered my uncle Azzar and his daughter, while others danced with Torquemada around a bonfire. Above all, you could hear the cries of the Jews who were fleeing in search of refuge.
These images of desolation were accompanied by the daily routine that preceded that fateful day. For three weeks we did not eat meat, my mother no longer washed the couscous, it was coarse and less spicy.The only consolation was the fish which she prepared in different ways.
The meal of the day before the fast was made up of squash with lentils with a boiled egg. My father symbolically sprinkled a few ashes (a sign of mourning), instead of salt.
Later I accompanied him to the synagogue. The floor was covered with mats (h'ssira). All were sitting on the floor. Sometimes we heard someone scold children who had dared climb on the benches. In the evening, my father slept on a mat outside his bedroom. He had a stone for a pillow.
The next day we were not allowed to touch any metallic object, especially not a knife, until after 1 pm, the time of "th'alett essaqina".
All prayers were lamentations whispered in a monotone. I have seen men weeping as they prayed.
I remember that in the synagogue there was a large framed map which included the countries bordering the Mediterranean. My father pointed to me one day, two distant points on the map."On the right", he said, "is Jerusalem, on the top left is Rome whose soldiers burned the Beit Hamikdash and destroyed our holy city." I will never forget what he then said: "Jerusalem will be rebuilt on the day Rome falls. "
I'm sure he knew that ancient Rome no longer existed and that the Jerusalem of the 1940s was taking back its place in the world, but my dear father repeated what preceding generations had told him.Unfortunately, he died a few months after the declaration of the state of Israel, just two days before the 9th of Av.
Revisiting the ghosts of old Baghdad
The Jews were the first to be ripped away from the fabric of Iraqi society by Arab nationalism. In one of history's ironies, the prime victims today are the Sunni Muslims who started the agitation. Jonathan Spyer, on a rare visit to Baghdad, gives us a eloquent glimpse of the old Jewish quarter of Taht el Takia, where no memory of its former inhabitants remains:
Jews used to be the vibrant heart of the market in Baghdad before the mass airlift of 1951
A few hours in the Shorja open market in Baghdad can teach you a lot – about the Middle East’s past, its present and its apparent future. What’s to be found there is informative. What is absent – equally so.
My fixer Yusuf hadn’t wanted to take me to Shorja. I was in Baghdad for a reporting project on the Shia militias. Between heading for Anbar with Kata’ib Hezbollah and up to Baiji with the Badr Corps, we had a few hours of downtime in Baghdad so I suggested we make for the market area that had once formed the hub of the city’s Jewish community.
I am no expert on the Jews of Iraq. But a friend’s Iraqi father back in Jerusalem upon hearing that I was heading for Baghdad had mentioned the Taht el Takia neighborhood in the heart of the market where he had grown up and asked me to take some pictures if I had the chance.
“Old Baghdad isn’t really safe anymore. We won’t be able to walk around,” Yusuf told me as we debated the issue. “After the Jews were kicked out in the ’50s, a load of poor Shi’a moved in and they have been running it ever since.”
I tried to ascertain what exactly the danger was. But, like much else in Baghdad, it wasn’t clear – just a general sense of foreboding, and maybe justified paranoia, of a kind that seemed pervasive in the city.
Baghdad carried with it a tense and febrile atmosphere. Roadblocks everywhere. Muscular, armed men and light armored vehicles outside the hotels. Logos and pictures of armed Shi’a irregulars on every street corner. These latter were the forces defending the city against the Sunni fighters of the Islamic State.
ISIS was just 60 km. away, its black clad fighters waiting behind their positions. Amid the dust and the summer heat and the collapsed buildings.
So I understood Yusuf’s reluctance. His driver, an older man and recent refugee from Anbar, was tired, too, and clearly had no special desire to head out into the 40 degree heat of the afternoon – still less if the destination was a poverty stricken Shi’a section of the city.
All the same, I was paying them and didn’t feel like spending the whole afternoon sitting around drinking tea and smoking, so I persisted and finally Yusuf agreed. “Taht el Takia? Well, we’ll go there and see what’s there. But if I say it isn’t safe, we don’t even get out of the car.”
We set off back into the heat of the afternoon and began the drive to Old Baghdad. After a while, we reached al-Rasheed Street and began the search for the neighborhood. The market and area surrounding it were ramshackle and neglected, looking like they’d last been renovated sometime in the 1970s.
Yusuf began to ask passersby about Taht el Takia. Everyone seemed to have heard of it, but no one quite knew where it was. “The problem is,” Yusuf said, “that most of the people here belong to families that came in from the countryside when Baghdad expanded in the 1960s so they don’t really know all the names of these old neighborhoods.”
Finally, from al-Rasheed Street, we reached a warren of small alleyways and Yusuf declared that this, as far as he could ascertain, was Taht el Takia. The market had closed for the day; it was late afternoon and I made to enter the alley.
This had once been the vibrant heart of Baghdad’s Jewish community though not the slightest memory or indication of that was to be found. We wandered the deserted, silent alleyways filled with garbage from the market.
After a few minutes, a plump security man wearing a tatty army uniform with a maroon airborne-style beret on the back of his head, appeared and began to shout and gesticulate in guttural Baghdadi Arabic. “No pictures,” Yusuf told me.
Having established his authority with this arbitrary order, the guard then became friendly and inquisitive. I told him I had come to look at the area for the father of a friend of mine who had left in 1951 and hadn’t seen it since.
“Oh, a Jew , yes?” he said. I decided to answer in the affirmative, feeling vaguely that to have denied this would have been a sort of betrayal. “From Israel?” the guard persisted. This was going too far, and I replied that I had arrived from England.
The guard was amused by this, and with a show of magnanimity said we could photograph the adjacent mosque and the outside areas, but that he didn’t recommend going too far into the warren of alleyways, since it was getting dark.
“Anyone could see that you’re a foreigner and just produce a weapon and say ‘come with us,” he suggested, grinning broadly. “I don’t even go in there myself after dark.”
He brought us some bottled water by way of a consolation prize. “By the way,” he said as we parted, “ask your friend’s dad if he can get me asylum in Israel.”
There has been a market at Shorja since the Abbasid period in the 8thcentury. But for some time in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Jews dominated trade in the area. It was the hub of a flourishing community.
In 1951-1952, the long story of Iraqi Jewry came to an end with the Arab nationalist agitation; the commencement of anti-Jewish laws from the mid-1930s; growing violence; the Farhud massacres in 1941; and the subsequent persecution and expulsions.
Almost the entire community was airlifted or smuggled out of the country from 1949 to 1951; Operation Ezra and Nehemiah brought around 130,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel from May 1951 and early 1952.
Some 60 years on, in Baghdad the Jews are a ghostly memory. The poor Sh’ia who moved into their vacated houses and the mass of the population that came later are neither moved by nor curious about their buried stories. There are, it is said, seven Jews remaining in the city.
The old synagogues are long since demolished or boarded up. The mezuzas long prised from the doorways. The Laura Kaddoorie Alliance Girls’ School, the Jewish Institute for the Blind, the shops of Yehezkel Abu al-Anba and Fattal. All gone.
As it turns out, the expulsion of Baghdad’s Jews was a portent of what was to come. The Jews were the first minority to be ripped from the fabric of Iraqi society. For a long, subsequent period, stagnation followed and dictatorships of unfathomable brutality imposed their will on the country. These ensured the dominance of the Sunni Arab minority while other communities lived an uneasy, truncated existence, visited by intermittent catastrophe.
That period ended in 2003 with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Today, in Iraq, similar forces of tribalism and sectarian hatred to those that ended Baghdad Jewry’s long and illustrious history are tearing the whole country to pieces.
Nowadays, these forces no longer seek to cloak and disguise themselves in finery borrowed from the West. There are no claims to secularism, socialism or whatever. They come as they are ‒ sectarian, religious and set on revenge.
And with the irony that history favors, the primary victims of today’s sectarian agitation in Baghdad are the formerly ascendant Sunni Arabs ‒ the same dominant population for whom Arab nationalism was the chosen banner in the 20th century. That is to say, the population that produced those responsible for the expulsion of the Jews in the 1950s is today suffering a similar fate to their former victims.
This justifies nothing, of course. It is merely notable that the inexorable ethnic and sectarian hatreds that made Israel a desperate necessity for Jews and which have formed the basis of Arab opposition to it ever since are now, more and more, openly visible across the region. Few (outside of university departments, at least) bother to claim otherwise anymore. Populations are seeking shelter among their own kind. The splitting of states is the consequence.
A few hours in the Shorja open market in Baghdad can teach you a lot – about the Middle East’s past, its present and its apparent future. What’s to be found there is informative. What is absent – equally so.
My fixer Yusuf hadn’t wanted to take me to Shorja. I was in Baghdad for a reporting project on the Shia militias. Between heading for Anbar with Kata’ib Hezbollah and up to Baiji with the Badr Corps, we had a few hours of downtime in Baghdad so I suggested we make for the market area that had once formed the hub of the city’s Jewish community.
I am no expert on the Jews of Iraq. But a friend’s Iraqi father back in Jerusalem upon hearing that I was heading for Baghdad had mentioned the Taht el Takia neighborhood in the heart of the market where he had grown up and asked me to take some pictures if I had the chance.
“Old Baghdad isn’t really safe anymore. We won’t be able to walk around,” Yusuf told me as we debated the issue. “After the Jews were kicked out in the ’50s, a load of poor Shi’a moved in and they have been running it ever since.”
I tried to ascertain what exactly the danger was. But, like much else in Baghdad, it wasn’t clear – just a general sense of foreboding, and maybe justified paranoia, of a kind that seemed pervasive in the city.
Baghdad carried with it a tense and febrile atmosphere. Roadblocks everywhere. Muscular, armed men and light armored vehicles outside the hotels. Logos and pictures of armed Shi’a irregulars on every street corner. These latter were the forces defending the city against the Sunni fighters of the Islamic State.
ISIS was just 60 km. away, its black clad fighters waiting behind their positions. Amid the dust and the summer heat and the collapsed buildings.
So I understood Yusuf’s reluctance. His driver, an older man and recent refugee from Anbar, was tired, too, and clearly had no special desire to head out into the 40 degree heat of the afternoon – still less if the destination was a poverty stricken Shi’a section of the city.
All the same, I was paying them and didn’t feel like spending the whole afternoon sitting around drinking tea and smoking, so I persisted and finally Yusuf agreed. “Taht el Takia? Well, we’ll go there and see what’s there. But if I say it isn’t safe, we don’t even get out of the car.”
We set off back into the heat of the afternoon and began the drive to Old Baghdad. After a while, we reached al-Rasheed Street and began the search for the neighborhood. The market and area surrounding it were ramshackle and neglected, looking like they’d last been renovated sometime in the 1970s.
Yusuf began to ask passersby about Taht el Takia. Everyone seemed to have heard of it, but no one quite knew where it was. “The problem is,” Yusuf said, “that most of the people here belong to families that came in from the countryside when Baghdad expanded in the 1960s so they don’t really know all the names of these old neighborhoods.”
Finally, from al-Rasheed Street, we reached a warren of small alleyways and Yusuf declared that this, as far as he could ascertain, was Taht el Takia. The market had closed for the day; it was late afternoon and I made to enter the alley.
This had once been the vibrant heart of Baghdad’s Jewish community though not the slightest memory or indication of that was to be found. We wandered the deserted, silent alleyways filled with garbage from the market.
After a few minutes, a plump security man wearing a tatty army uniform with a maroon airborne-style beret on the back of his head, appeared and began to shout and gesticulate in guttural Baghdadi Arabic. “No pictures,” Yusuf told me.
Having established his authority with this arbitrary order, the guard then became friendly and inquisitive. I told him I had come to look at the area for the father of a friend of mine who had left in 1951 and hadn’t seen it since.
“Oh, a Jew , yes?” he said. I decided to answer in the affirmative, feeling vaguely that to have denied this would have been a sort of betrayal. “From Israel?” the guard persisted. This was going too far, and I replied that I had arrived from England.
The guard was amused by this, and with a show of magnanimity said we could photograph the adjacent mosque and the outside areas, but that he didn’t recommend going too far into the warren of alleyways, since it was getting dark.
“Anyone could see that you’re a foreigner and just produce a weapon and say ‘come with us,” he suggested, grinning broadly. “I don’t even go in there myself after dark.”
He brought us some bottled water by way of a consolation prize. “By the way,” he said as we parted, “ask your friend’s dad if he can get me asylum in Israel.”
There has been a market at Shorja since the Abbasid period in the 8thcentury. But for some time in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Jews dominated trade in the area. It was the hub of a flourishing community.
In 1951-1952, the long story of Iraqi Jewry came to an end with the Arab nationalist agitation; the commencement of anti-Jewish laws from the mid-1930s; growing violence; the Farhud massacres in 1941; and the subsequent persecution and expulsions.
Almost the entire community was airlifted or smuggled out of the country from 1949 to 1951; Operation Ezra and Nehemiah brought around 130,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel from May 1951 and early 1952.
Some 60 years on, in Baghdad the Jews are a ghostly memory. The poor Sh’ia who moved into their vacated houses and the mass of the population that came later are neither moved by nor curious about their buried stories. There are, it is said, seven Jews remaining in the city.
The old synagogues are long since demolished or boarded up. The mezuzas long prised from the doorways. The Laura Kaddoorie Alliance Girls’ School, the Jewish Institute for the Blind, the shops of Yehezkel Abu al-Anba and Fattal. All gone.
As it turns out, the expulsion of Baghdad’s Jews was a portent of what was to come. The Jews were the first minority to be ripped from the fabric of Iraqi society. For a long, subsequent period, stagnation followed and dictatorships of unfathomable brutality imposed their will on the country. These ensured the dominance of the Sunni Arab minority while other communities lived an uneasy, truncated existence, visited by intermittent catastrophe.
That period ended in 2003 with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Today, in Iraq, similar forces of tribalism and sectarian hatred to those that ended Baghdad Jewry’s long and illustrious history are tearing the whole country to pieces.
Nowadays, these forces no longer seek to cloak and disguise themselves in finery borrowed from the West. There are no claims to secularism, socialism or whatever. They come as they are ‒ sectarian, religious and set on revenge.
And with the irony that history favors, the primary victims of today’s sectarian agitation in Baghdad are the formerly ascendant Sunni Arabs ‒ the same dominant population for whom Arab nationalism was the chosen banner in the 20th century. That is to say, the population that produced those responsible for the expulsion of the Jews in the 1950s is today suffering a similar fate to their former victims.
This justifies nothing, of course. It is merely notable that the inexorable ethnic and sectarian hatreds that made Israel a desperate necessity for Jews and which have formed the basis of Arab opposition to it ever since are now, more and more, openly visible across the region. Few (outside of university departments, at least) bother to claim otherwise anymore. Populations are seeking shelter among their own kind. The splitting of states is the consequence.
The Ghosts of Old Baghdad
Jerusalem Report, 8/7
A few hours in the Shorja open market in Baghdad can teach you a lot – about the Middle East’s past, its present and its apparent future. What’s to be found there is informative. What is absent – equally so.
My fixer Yusuf hadn’t wanted to take me to Shorja. I was in Baghdad for a reporting project on the Shia militias. Between heading for Anbar with Kata’ib Hezbollah and up to Baiji with the Badr Corps, we had a few hours of downtime in Baghdad so I suggested we make for the market area that had once formed the hub of the city’s Jewish community.
I am no expert on the Jews of Iraq. But a friend’s Iraqi father back in Jerusalem upon hearing that I was heading for Baghdad had mentioned the Taht el Takia neighborhood in the heart of the market where he had grown up and asked me to take some pictures if I had the chance.
“Old Baghdad isn’t really safe anymore. We won’t be able to walk around,” Yusuf told me as we debated the issue. “After the Jews were kicked out in the ’50s, a load of poor Shi’a moved in and they have been running it ever since.”
I tried to ascertain what exactly the danger was. But, like much else in Baghdad, it wasn’t clear – just a general sense of foreboding, and maybe justified paranoia, of a kind that seemed pervasive in the city.
Baghdad carried with it a tense and febrile atmosphere. Roadblocks everywhere. Muscular, armed men and light armored vehicles outside the hotels. Logos and pictures of armed Shi’a irregulars on every street corner. These latter were the forces defending the city against the Sunni fighters of the Islamic State.
ISIS was just 60 km. away, its black clad fighters waiting behind their positions. Amid the dust and the summer heat and the collapsed buildings.
So I understood Yusuf’s reluctance. His driver, an older man and recent refugee from Anbar, was tired, too, and clearly had no special desire to head out into the 40 degree heat of the afternoon – still less if the destination was a poverty stricken Shi’a section of the city.
All the same, I was paying them and didn’t feel like spending the whole afternoon sitting around drinking tea and smoking, so I persisted and finally Yusuf agreed. “Taht el Takia? Well, we’ll go there and see what’s there. But if I say it isn’t safe, we don’t even get out of the car.”
We set off back into the heat of the afternoon and began the drive to Old Baghdad. After a while, we reached al-Rasheed Street and began the search for the neighborhood. The market and area surrounding it were ramshackle and neglected, looking like they’d last been renovated sometime in the 1970s.
Yusuf began to ask passersby about Taht el Takia. Everyone seemed to have heard of it, but no one quite knew where it was. “The problem is,” Yusuf said, “that most of the people here belong to families that came in from the countryside when Baghdad expanded in the 1960s so they don’t really know all the names of these old neighborhoods.”
Finally, from al-Rasheed Street, we reached a warren of small alleyways and Yusuf declared that this, as far as he could ascertain, was Taht el Takia. The market had closed for the day; it was late afternoon and I made to enter the alley.
This had once been the vibrant heart of Baghdad’s Jewish community though not the slightest memory or indication of that was to be found. We wandered the deserted, silent alleyways filled with garbage from the market.
After a few minutes, a plump security man wearing a tatty army uniform with a maroon airborne-style beret on the back of his head, appeared and began to shout and gesticulate in guttural Baghdadi Arabic. “No pictures,” Yusuf told me.
Having established his authority with this arbitrary order, the guard then became friendly and inquisitive. I told him I had come to look at the area for the father of a friend of mine who had left in 1951 and hadn’t seen it since.
“Oh, a Jew , yes?” he said. I decided to answer in the affirmative, feeling vaguely that to have denied this would have been a sort of betrayal. “From Israel?” the guard persisted. This was going too far, and I replied that I had arrived from England.
The guard was amused by this, and with a show of magnanimity said we could photograph the adjacent mosque and the outside areas, but that he didn’t recommend going too far into the warren of alleyways, since it was getting dark.
“Anyone could see that you’re a foreigner and just produce a weapon and say ‘come with us,” he suggested, grinning broadly. “I don’t even go in there myself after dark.”
He brought us some bottled water by way of a consolation prize. “By the way,” he said as we parted, “ask your friend’s dad if he can get me asylum in Israel.”
There has been a market at Shorja since the Abbasid period in the 8th century. But for some time in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Jews dominated trade in the area. It was the hub of a flourishing community.
In 1951-1952, the long story of Iraqi Jewry came to an end with the Arab nationalist agitation; the commencement of anti-Jewish laws from the mid-1930s; growing violence; the Farhud massacres in 1941; and the subsequent persecution and expulsions.
Almost the entire community was airlifted or smuggled out of the country from 1949 to 1951; Operation Ezra and Nehemiah brought around 130,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel from May 1951 and early 1952.
Some 60 years on, in Baghdad the Jews are a ghostly memory. The poor Sh’ia who moved into their vacated houses and the mass of the population that came later are neither moved by nor curious about their buried stories. There are, it is said, seven Jews remaining in the city.
The old synagogues are long since demolished or boarded up. The mezuzas long prised from the doorways. The Laura Kaddoorie Alliance Girls’ School, the Jewish Institute for the Blind, the shops of Yehezkel Abu al-Anba and Fattal. All gone.
As it turns out, the expulsion of Baghdad’s Jews was a portent of what was to come. The Jews were the first minority to be ripped from the fabric of Iraqi society. For a long, subsequent period, stagnation followed and dictatorships of unfathomable brutality imposed their will on the country. These ensured the dominance of the Sunni Arab minority while other communities lived an uneasy, truncated existence, visited by intermittent catastrophe.
That period ended in 2003 with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Today, in Iraq, similar forces of tribalism and sectarian hatred to those that ended Baghdad Jewry’s long and illustrious history are tearing the whole country to pieces.
Nowadays, these forces no longer seek to cloak and disguise themselves in finery borrowed from the West. There are no claims to secularism, socialism or whatever. They come as they are ‒ sectarian, religious and set on revenge.
And with the irony that history favors, the primary victims of today’s sectarian agitation in Baghdad are the formerly ascendant Sunni Arabs ‒ the same dominant population for whom Arab nationalism was the chosen banner in the 20th century. That is to say, the population that produced those responsible for the expulsion of the Jews in the 1950s is today suffering a similar fate to their former victims.
This justifies nothing, of course. It is merely notable that the inexorable ethnic and sectarian hatreds that made Israel a desperate necessity for Jews and which have formed the basis of Arab opposition to it ever since are now, more and more, openly visible across the region. Few (outside of university departments, at least) bother to claim otherwise anymore. Populations are seeking shelter among their own kind. The splitting of states is the consequence.
“The government doesn’t trust Sunnis,” Hikmat Guwood of the Albu Nimr tribe tells me,“They only trust the Shi’a militias, who are armed by Iran.”
We are meeting with Guwood in a Baghdad hotel. It is our last chance because he is leaving the city.
Guwood is a leader of the Albu Nimr tribe of Anbar, who worked closely with the Americans during the “Anbar Awakening” of 2006-2007. This has made him a marked man for the Shi’a militias of Baghdad, who suspect that he is still operating for the US. A few days before our interview, he was attacked in his home by Shi’a militants. By Kata’ib Hezbollah he tells us, naming one of the most powerful and feared of the militia groups.
So he is going to Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. Guwood isn’t a Kurd, of course. But in Kurdistan, at least, there is something approaching a government, he says. In Baghdad, by contrast, “The government controls nothing. [Prime Minister] Abadi has no power. The real power in Iraq today is the militias, he says.
What of the future? In an opinion one hears a lot from Iraqi Sunnis, Guwood no longer wants the strong, unitary (Sunni-dominated) state that existed until the 1990s. Rather, he is calling for a “Sunni federation” in the majority Sunni areas to exist alongside the Kurdish area and the Shi’a-dominated south and Baghdad. The latter, he considers, has effectively become the capital of an emergent Shi’a state.
The problem for Iraqi Sunni Arabs, of course, is that the area of their own majority in the center of the country is currently under control of ISIS. As Hamed al-Mutlaq, an MP and former general in Saddam Hussein’s army puts it: “Iraq is now divided. In fact, worse than divided. The Kurds and Shi’a are safe in their areas, but the Sunni component of the society has no existence and is displaced. Those who remain are under the sword either of ISIS or of the Shi’a militias.”
As for the new and future masters of Baghdad, they too have a very clear plan for the direction of events. The Shi’a militias facing ISIS in Anbar Province west of the city, and in Baiji to its north sense the wind of history at their backs.
The men of the Kata’ib Hezbollah militia are open in their allegiances and their intentions. “We rely on God and the family of Muhammad,” one bearded, red-eyed fighter declares to me, at a frontline position 10 kilometers from Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, which fell to ISIS in May. Or, more prosaically, as Abu Mahdi al Mohandis puts it at a meeting of commanders near Baiji city, “We rely on capacity and capabilities provided by the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Abu Mahdi is reputed to be the key figure alongside the Quds Force’s Qassem Suleimani in coordinating Iranian aid to and supervision of the militias. So he knows what he’s talking about.
The Shi’a militiamen I interviewed view themselves as the nucleus of a new, Iraqi version of the Revolutionary Guards, guarding the piety and Shi’a nature of their Iraq. As one Badr Corps commander expressed it: “In the future, our militias will form something like the Basij militias in Iran – under the control of the “Marjiya” (Shi’a religious leadership) alongside the army.”
This is what is in the ascendant in Baghdad right now. It is not surprising that Sunni Arab Iraqis find it hard to locate much place for themselves in it.
In the West, there is concern about the Islamic State and expansionist Iran. Rightly so. But what is underway is deeper than the ambitions of this or that player.
It is a fundamental, long awaited shifting in the basic contours of power across a large swathe of the Middle East (the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Iraq-Iran border). A mighty, long suppressed ferment of religious and sectarian fervor. It was a long time coming and now it’s here.
As for the buried, submerged history of the Jews of Taht el Takia, history will record that their expulsion was the first tug on a complex fabric that later unraveled in its entirety. They and their descendants shall live, nevertheless. But not here. In Baghdad, only the ghosts remain.
3 comments:
- Sammish said...
- "The ghosts of old Baghadad" article piece is a testament of the inability of Arabs to create a stable and fair (if not to say democratic) society, since democracy seems to be incompatible with the muslim creed and beliefs.
One does not have to go that far to understand this great calamity. One has to look at the present Arab states to get the picture. Under the seemingly stable corrupt goverments, the seed of destruction lay in wait to wreck havoc on the land (i.e., Tunisia, Algeria, Libya and future Morocco). This process has already began in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Egypt and Gaza.
The famous 13th century berber sociologist Ibn Khaldoun describes in greater detail the hordes of Bedouin Arab tribes that devastate to any territory that lay their feet on. Sometimes these tribes were used as mercenaries by feuding Arab rulers in North Africa to undermine to the contending rulers.
Here is one of Khaldoun famous quote in French: "Tout pays conquis par les Arabes est bientôt ruiné..." which translates: "Any country conquered by the Arabes is soon laid to waste (ruined)". In Arabic, the saying is short and it is very telling because it rhymes.
If "something" is Arabized, it is "traumatized". The latter should be "ruined" because ruined in Arabic rhymes with "Arabized". I couldn't find an adjective that means ruined but also rhymes with "Arabized".
The literal saying in Arabic goes like: "If it is Arabized, it is ruined"
Traumatized seems closer.
His famous quotes, social commentaries and analyses of Arab societies in his magnus opus book "Muqqadima" are many, and are always brushed off the side by contemporary Arab scolars as minor and time specific. Yet, they not only describe the state of anarchy and devastation of the 14th and 15th century Arab and Muslim cultures, they are still relevant even today due to the inability of the Arab and Muslim States to be politically stable and live in peace and build solid institutions that accomodate rapid change. - Eliyahu m'Tsiyon said...
- Ibn Khaldun had interesting things to say about the Jews. He recognized that the ancient Jews controlled a great kingdom.
http://ziontruth.blogspot.co.il/2005/12/ibn-khaldun-refutes-some-anti-israel.html - Sammish said...
- Ibn Khaldun's analyses of 14th century Arab-muslim societies have proven to be valuable. I have not found any anti-jewish writing in Ibn Khaldun work. None. Yes, he describes the semi-autonomous Jewish kingdom of Yemen very well for its economic strength and social organization in Southern Arabia. Ibn Khaldoun's family was originally from Haudraumat Yemen. I believe Ibn Khaldun was an objective social scientist, he described and explained social processes and events as they occurred and consulted other work of other social scientists that preceded him to explain social change.
He was far more critical (and justly so) of the Arabs for their war-mongering, corruption, arrogance and the LACK OF RESPECT FOR THE RULE OF LAW.
As for his refutation of some anti-jewish claims advanced by some Arabs, you are right, once does not have to dwell on Khaldoun's work, one can count several references in the Koran that amply indicate that the land of Cannan is destined for the gathering of Israelites (Benu Israel in Arabic). Whether the Koran is the word of God or not, it is clearly for a Jewish self-determination and therefore Zionist in nature.
When the Iranians came to Jerusalem
The first wave of Jewish immigrants arrived in 1886. Penniless and pious, they built tin homes for themselves and prioritized their synagogues
July 11, 2015, 8:24 am 13
- aditionally, Iranian Jews auction off the rights to synagogue honors, and the highest bidder wins. But at Ohavei Zion synagogue in Jerusalem’s Neve Shalom neighborhood there was one exception: When worshippers began sparring for the right to open the ark during Yom Kippur’s Kol Nidre service, the auctioneer would pound his gavel and yell “sold” as soon as Meir Banai offered 50 liras.No one minded, even though the honor was worth a lot more than 50 liras. They knew that Banai, a fruit and vegetable vender, was not a rich man, and that this particular honor was his. For during the War of Independence, when his son Avraham was wounded and captured by the Jordanians, Banai had made a vow. Should Avraham come back to him, he had sworn, he would buy this particular honor every year as long as he lived. Six months later, his son returned home.Not long ago, we joined a tour entitled: Parsim in Jerusalem, with “Parsim” the Israeli name for Jews of Iranian (Persian) descent. Leading us through the earliest Iranian neighborhoods in Jerusalem was the multi-faceted Tal Chenya: lecturer, tour guide and master storyteller.During our jaunt he regaled us with fascinating stories about Parsim who made the difficult trip to the Holy Land in the late 19th century. We learned that they came here with little but the shirts on their backs, but with an immense love for Israel in their hearts.
The Torah Ark at Ohavei Zion synagogue (Shmuel Bar-Am)The first wave of Iranian immigrants to reach Jerusalem arrived in 1886, inspired by the revered Rabbi Aharon HaCohen. Most of them came from the city of Shiraz, and had made the month-long journey to the port at Bushar by foot, on camels and atop donkeys, women and children riding in pack saddles on either sides of the same beast. Once they arrived, they waited for a ship that would take them to their yearned-for destination.After disembarking in Jaffa, and kissing its “holy” ground with gusto, they traveled to Jerusalem. The city’s two established communities – Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim from Eastern Europe and Ladino-speaking Sefaradim from Spain and Portugal – had a hard time believing that the newcomers, with their strange language, exotic customs and dark skins, were actually Jewish. Unfortunately, while Ashkenazis and Sephardis had already set up bustling neighborhoods for other immigrants, they felt no obligation towards these newcomers from the east.
A tin house in Shevet Tzedek (Shmuel Bar-Am)Too poor to buy property or to build homes, the Parsim squatted on an empty plot next to Mishkenot Sha’anamim (the first Jewish neighborhood outside the Old City walls). But their shacks and tents created such an eyesore that they were soon evicted and they ended up in a make-shift transit camp. Lacking building materials, penniless, they took enormous, empty tin gasoline cans, separated the sides, smoothed them out and stood them up to form walls. That’s why their earliest neighborhood, officially called Shevet Tzedek, is known far and wide as the Tin Neighborhood.
The Shevet Tzedek neighborhood of Jerusalem (Shmuel Bar-Am)If you lived in Shevet Tzedek, you walked on dirt floors and slept in beds made of wooden crates pushed together. Your mattress would consist of rags and tattered clothes, which you would also use as bedcovers when it got cold. Yet this was a vibrant, crowded quarter teeming with life – and a characteristic eastern aura.And, poverty-stricken or not, the Iranians were deeply religious. They needed a synagogue where they could pray in their own special style and hear sermons in Persian. So they erected P’tachiya, the first Iranian synagogue in Jerusalem.
Street art in the Shevet Tzedek neighborhood of Jerusalem (Shmuel Bar-Am)P’tachiya was built in 1894 as a simple hut whose permanent walls were added one by one whenever the destitute residents were able to come up with a donation. There was no money for a floor, and they stood on a layer of dirt – but they did get their hands on a 400-year-old Torah. And after finding a box with a velvet interior and cloth on the outside, they had an ark.One caretaker (gabai) of this synagogue was Moshe Mizrahi. Known to Jerusalemites as “the legendary Moishele,” he was obsessed with making sure there were always ten men available for morning worship. Moishele regularly woke people up at three or four in the morning; when the police were around, he borrowed their bullhorns to do the job.
The Neve Shalom neighborhood of Jerusalem (Shmuel Bar-Am)The first permanent neighborhood, built by Parsim for Parsim, was established in 1900, and called Neve Shalom. Although it consists of only a few streets and a couple of alleys it contains half a dozen different Iranian synagogues – evidence of the new immigrants’ immense spiritual needs.The Beit Yitzhak Synagogue was named for a rabbi who left Shiraz with his family but never made it to Israel. That’s because, two nights after they set sail, Rabbi Yitzhak Kalifa was killed on the deck of the ship during a terrible storm.
The Beit Yitzhak Synagogue in Neve Shalom (Shmuel Bar-Am)Neve Shalom residents were very poor, so everyone had to contribute towards building the Beit Yitzhak synagogue. Indeed, the walls and even the light fixtures are covered with their names and the sums they donated. One of them, Agababa Ben Yitzhak Ben Raful Shemesh, dug a cistern and sold water to the Arabs; for every tin of water he got a chiseled stone in return.As the 19th century came to an end, more and more Parsim flocked to Jerusalem. And while girls stayed home and learned how to become good housewives, boys ran ragged in the streets, getting into all sorts of trouble. Worried that ignorance would be the downfall of the Iranian community, an organization called Ohavei Zion determined to deal with the problem. In 1906 a combination synagogue, absorption center and school appeared here, with Rabbi Yaakov Melamed – son of Rahamim Melamed, who was the Parsi community’s spiritual head and rabbi of the Shaarei Rahamim Synagogue – in charge of education.Knowing that each family had only one multi-purpose basin for washing clothes, dishes, teeth and people, Yaakov Melamed added a shower to the school, complete with soap and towels. He provided to fill his pupils’ stomachs and even built a platform for drama classes and performances. It was here, in 1937, that famous entertainer Yossi Banai sang his first solo.
Tal Chenya stands outside Shaare Rahamim Bana Hai Synagogue, home of the mystics (Shmuel Bar-Am))Shaare Rahamim Bana Hai Synagogue is home to Jerusalem’s mekubalim (mystics). The structure was originally built as a vineyard by a supremely successful Parsi in 1903 who lost his vast wealth during the First World War. In 1934 it was purchased by Rahamim Aharoni, who turned it into a synagogue popular with mystics like Mordecai Sha’arabi, famous for cursing the financially luckless Einee building only a few meters away.Nearby, the Shauli and Kashi Synagogue, like other Iranian synagogues, holds more than one Holy Ark. The explanation is simple: Iranian law decreed that if you have an ark in your synagogue, it must hold the Quran. So Iranian Jews built at least two arks in each house of worship – one to hold the Torah, and another for the Quran.
Detail from the entrance to the Shauli and Kashi Synagogue (Shmuel Bar-Am)The Shaar Harahamim Synagogue is located inside a yard which housed half a dozen large families from Shiraz, including that of its rabbi, Rahamim Melamed, and his amazing wife Esther.Among other pursuits, Esther manufactured rose water, removed the guts from koshered cows, and opened a women’s prayer shawl-knitting factory. Yearning to study Talmud, a practice frowned upon for women, she managed on her own – and by standing in the women’s gallery upstairs while listening to the men studying below. After her husband died, and when she felt the men were spewing nonsense, she would call down and scold them.———-Many thanks to guide Tal Chenya. Chenya guides in Hebrew and English? Read more about him on his website.Aviva Bar-Am is the author of seven English-language guides to Israel.Shmuel Bar-Am is a licensed, tour guide who provides private, customized tours in Israel for individuals, families and small groups.
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