Jews of Babylon

Jews have lived in Baghdad for thousands of years. Less than a century ago, fully one quarter of the city's entire population was Jewish and there can be no question but that Jews have played an important roles in the city's economic and cultural development. That, however, may be coming to an end. There are only about two dozen Jews in the community now and they will probably leave soon.

MSNBC reports:

In the harsh reality of today’s Iraq, those Jews who remain are much freer than they were under Saddam, who watched them all as potential spies. But they say the remnants of their culture are in greater danger now, and so are their lives. Baghdad’s last open synagogue, behind a high wall in the district of Bataween, was locked and shuttered about two weeks before the American invasion began, and has not been used for regular services since. “We cannot let anybody enter the synagogue,” Levy explains, “because the neighbors see people and say, ‘They are Zionists.’ And, then, it is so easy to throw a bomb over the wall.”

The community has lived through millennia of persecutions and prosperity, panic, hope and despair. “We have been here for 2,600 years, from the time of Nebuchadnezzar,” says Levy, when the Babylonian tyrant carried thousands of Jews from Jerusalem into exile. (“By the rivers of Babylon,” says the psalm, “there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.”) But they could not survive the frightening tumult of an Arab world inflamed for more than 60 years by anger against modern Zionism. And it’s that deeply cultivated hatred, now stoked again by television images of Israeli-Palestinian warfare, that makes high-minded plans to transform the region seem so remote from the reality on the ground.

It would be a shame if fear and hatred completely eliminated the Jewish community of Baghdad, but at this point it doesn't look like anything will save it. Even if the situation made a dramatic change, the only way to salvage things would be a large influx of Jews, perhaps the descendants of those who fled in decades past. That, however, is unlikely - and if it did occur, it might only serve to resurrection conspiracy fears of a Zionist takeover.

Read More:

• Antisemitism
• Recent Books on Islam
• Islam
• Religion in Iraq