Cantor's Corner by Eric Miller

With all the attention being paid right now to Iraq, and how we as Americans should respond to the dangers posed by their leader, I thought it might be interesting to examine the long and intimate history that the Jewish people have had with this ancient land. While the cognizance of close historical ties to Iraq certainly would not influence any decisions about future military action in that region, it will hopefully provide an educational counterpoint to enrich further debate on our relationship, as Jews and Americans, with Iraq.

In some way, all Jews are actually Iraqis. What I mean by this is that according to the book of Genesis, the first Jews, Abraham and Sarah, hailed from a minor power center in Iraq (called Babylonia at the time) named Ur (present day Tell al-Muqayyar). This was a city located along the Euphrates river about 200 miles southeast of Baghdad and very close to the modern-day Iraqi city of Basra at the base of the fertile crescent. Of course, we know that the beginnings of the Jewish people lay with Abraham’s seminal journey from his homeland to the promised land of Canaan, where the first Jewish family lay down its roots. In fact, Abraham’s biblical designation as “Hebrew” may stem from the meaning of the term ivri, or, “crosser,” as in one who came from across the Great River. Abraham’s journey could be symbolic for a large group of semitic nomads who migrated westward during the time of Abraham(c. 1700 BCE), following the reign of the Babylonian emperor Hammurabi – a ruler whose famous law codes our Torah probably drew upon for inspiration.

Flash forward one thousand years, and we enter an era of Jewish history that is fully documented and corroborated by outside sources. In the first half of the 6^th century BCE, Abraham’s Babylonian kinsmen were responsible for the worst catastrophe in Jewish history up until the Spanish Inquisition. The Babylonians, under the leadership of Nebuchadnezzar, destroyed the city of Jerusalem and its Temple, and decimated the indigenous Jewish population by exiling thousands of the elite (including their king, priests, the prophet Ezekiel and leading craftsmen, teachers, etc) to Babylon and leaving only the poorest remnants behind. Ironically, this large group of exiles did what countless other Jewish communities would do in the millennia to come: form a successful, organized community in the first ever diaspora, in a region near present-day

Baghdad. According to biblical and Babylonian sources, after 50 years in exile, the Jewish community was relatively well-off, serving as soldiers, merchants, and farmers as well holding prominent positions in the king’s court, serving as royal officials, and even the king’s bird-keeper! After 70 years, a segment of the population did return to Jerusalem to rebuild the community (and Temple) – following nearly the same route as their ancestor Abraham 1,000 years earlier - yet even after the conquest of the Babylonian empire by the Persians, and official permission to return to Zion and rebuild the Temple, a larger number of Jews remained in Iraq and continued to live a contented life in the diaspora. In fact, our current calendar and Hebrew alphabet are both ancient Babylonian in origin!

Flash forward another 500 years, and the Jews of Babylonia once again enter the forefront of Jewish history. Rabbi Hillel, one of the most influential rabbis of the early rabbinic period, was actually an Iraqi convert who made his way to Palestine around the year 0. And although the earliest compendium of Jewish law, the Mishnah, was compiled in Palestine, we read in the Talmud that, “When Rav came to Babylon, we became there like the Land of Israel.” In other words, after the defeat by the Romans in the 2^nd century CE, Rav, a leading rabbinic authority, made his way to Babylonia, and for the next one thousand years Jewish life was centered around the academies of Sura and Pumbedita located near modern-day Baghdad. The amoraim, the rabbis who composed the Babylonian Talmud, and then the geonim, the heads of the Babylonian Jewish academies, set the norms for every facet of our modern Jewish lives: our holidays, life-cycle events, home observances, prayers, dietary habits, business law – were all either created or took their current form under the heavy influence of a millenia’s worth of Iraqi rabbis. By the year 1000 CE, the Babylonian Jews had also enjoyed 250 years of artistic, scientific and scholarly advances while living under the relatively tolerant Abbasid dynasty, during which time the capital of the Muslim (and therefore Jewish) world was in Baghdad. The last great Jewish scholar to rule from Baghdad was Saadia Gaon (10^th century CE), whose knowledge and legal power were acclaimed throughout the Jewish world.

Of course, Jewish life in Iraq was not always so rosy during the next thousand years. Although often tolerable under the Ottomans, there was tremendous persecution of the Jewish community during the 20th century, which led to the mass immigration of 250,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel in 1950-1 (code-named “Operation Ezra and Nehemia.”). And certainly, Iraq’s present regime is a self-described enemy of Jews everywhere. Yet when looking back over the past 4,000 years, I find it very interesting to see what a long, strange road the Jews of Iraq have taken.