Preserving History

January 1, 2014 – Preserving History

The National Archives is currently exhibiting a collection of artifacts (books, scrolls, photographs and documents) that shed light on the long history of the Iraqi Jewish community.  The items were found quite by chance.  In May of 2003, American soldiers were searching Baghdad for Saddam Hussein’s supposed cache of weapons of mass destruction.  In the building that housed the headquarters of the regime’s military intelligence service, they searched a flooded basement and discovered the treasures.  It’s not clear exactly why Saddam’s government had seized the more than 2700 books and tens of thousands of documents from Iraq’s synagogues and Jewish community organizations.  Some of the items found dated back to the mid-16^th century, while others were as recent as the 1970s. 

Since the basement storage area was flooded by four feet of water, the artifacts were in terrible condition.  Many were fused together.  In an attempt to prevent the further damage, preservation experts immediately froze the items and packed them up for shipment.  With the cooperation of governments and organizations from several countries, efforts got underway to clean, preserve, catalogue, and digitize the artifacts that told the history of the Iraqi Jewish community.  While only a small number of actual items are on display at the Archives in Washington, the entire collection will soon be available for viewing online.  The originals will be returned to Iraq later this year. 

It was fascinating to see these items, all of which still show signs of damage.  There was a large Hebrew Bible printed in late-Renaissance era Verona, Italy, and a Babylonian Talmud printed in 18^th century Vienna, also in Hebrew.  Other interesting books included a hand-lettered and hand-decorated Hagaddah (the story of the Exodus from Egypt) from 1902 and an 1815 copy of the Zohar, the mystical Kabalistic text, with fanciful drawings of animals.  In addition, there was a cylindrical wooden Torah case, covered in velvet and shaped like a minaret.  This type of Torah container was commonly used by Middle Eastern Jews.  A selection of letters, school records, calendars and other written documents was also on display. 

It was a fragment of a Torah scroll, one of 48 recovered, that moved me the most.  Seeing the beautifully handwritten Hebrew letters, which I could read so clearly, made me reflect upon history, continuity and survival of the Jewish people over the centuries.  It looked identical to the one I will chant from next Saturday, and identical the ones Jews have treasured for thousands of years.  I could easily imagine an ancestor of mine standing before such a Torah scroll, chanting these same words. 

The textual commentary accompanying the artifacts gave an overview of the history of the Jews in Iraq.  The Iraqi Jewish community dates back a couple of millennia, to the time when the area was known as Mesopotamia and, later, Assyria.  After the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE, a large numbers of Jews went into exile in the city of Babylon.  Centers of scholarship were established and the Jewish community became an integral part of the population.  However, in the 1930s, a pro-Nazi government came to power in Iraq and attacks on Jews began.  The turning point for many Iraqi Jews came in 1941, when an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence left over 180 killed and hundreds injured.  This violence increased in 1948 when Iraq went to war against the newly created state of Israel.  As a result, most of Iraq’s Jews fled their homeland although they were forced to forfeit their assets and their citizenship.  Those who remained faced ongoing persecution, along with other minority groups.  Today, only a small number of Jews still live in the land where their community had flourished for centuries.  

I wish I could include pictures, but unfortunately, no photography was allowed.  But you can visit the special section of the National Archives website to see several examples.  If you're in the DC area, you can see the exhibit through January 5.