Now Divisive, Iraq’s Jewish Archives Speak of More Tolerant Past

By Falih Hasan Fezaa

A call by Iraqi authorities for the return of the country’s Jewish archives has triggered an active intellectual debate within Jewish circles, saying the collection must go to the Iraqi Jewish community living abroad.

But Iraq’s own intellectuals seem far less interested in speaking openly and consistently about the issue, compared to their Jewish counterparts.  

This may be because the presence of the once flourishing Iraqi Jewish community now lies in the distant memories of Iraq’s oldest generations and their historical accounts. But it is also a result of long decades of viciously organized anti-Israeli propaganda, which in the popular imagination confused Israeli politics with the existence of the Jewish community.

This does not mean that Iraqi intellectuals as a whole do not care about the fate of the historical treasures that symbolize the multicultural aspect of their ancient society.

In spite of all the pain, one can confidently say that the 2003 US-led Iraq war that toppled one of the world’s most detestable dictatorships publicly invigorated more openness in Arab societies.

Therefore, I owe to the Americans the opportunity to now freely share my thoughts with my former Jewish compatriots, as well as with others.  In the same way, the Iraqi Jewish archives can be a courageous event for restoring multiculturalism and tolerance in Middle Eastern societies.

If the war in Iraq was a sweeping political earthquake for the regimes of the Middle East, putting Iraqi Jewish archives under the custody and responsibility of Iraqi Jews in Baghdad must have the same social leverage.

In preparing to write this comment I concluded that we -- intellectual Jews and me -- are dealing with archives that are also symbols of a unifying past.

There is a saying that we all belong to the same Iraqi past. But we are thinking differently. We can, however, profit from this past and seize this opportunity of displaying the archives in New York to revitalize our past, and use it to build a better present.

The archives should be used as a symbol of coexistence and mutual understanding among the new generations. Handing over the Iraqi Jewish archives to the Jewish community outside Iraq would certainly freeze once and for all the archives in their historical moments. It could even force them to be a deliberate vehicle for a decisive “break with the mother country,” in the words of Mr. Ben Cohen, who questions whether “Iraq deserves the return of its Jewish archives.”

I think a new Iraq is still in the making. The Iraqi Jewish community can take its share of responsibility in building Iraq into a modern nation state by demanding to hold the archives under their auspices and custody inside Iraq, so that we can use these “books, photographs, scrolls, writings and communal documents” of the past as a vehicle for building a great present, not only in Iraq but in all Middle Eastern societies.

I guess the issue has little to do with who is the “rightful owner,” since the archives belong to the collective memory of a nation. Rather, their existence in Baghdad would be a great opportunity to trigger frank and public debate about the necessity of restoring multicultural life in a Middle East heading towards a more brutal and exclusionary environment.

With the archives in Baghdad, we can all -- Ben Cohen, Michele Alperin and others who want Iraqi hands not to touch the archives -- seize a historic moment to restore the once tolerant multiculturalism in this region. We could start with the rehabilitation of the synagogue of Ezra Dawud in Bataween, the shrine of Ezekiel in Babel or of Ezra in Maysan.

*The author is an independent Iraqi researcher and former editor-in-chief of the Foreign Culture Magazine in Baghdad.

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