Tag: Kurdish Jews

Kurdish Jewish History Arrives In Baltimore

Kurdish-Jewish history preserved by author and son of an immigrant.

Rochelle Eisenberg
Staff Writer

When Ariel Sabar was growing up in Los Angeles, he was embarrassed by the exotic ways of his immigrant Kurdish-Jewish father, Dr. Yona Sabar. Dr. Sabar, a professor of Aramaic at the University of California-Los Angeles, was born and raised in the remote northern Iraqi village of Zakho.

Years later, Mr. Sabar decided to travel to Zakho with his father. The result is “My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search For His Jewish Past In Kurdish Iraq” (Algonquin Books), winner of the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography.

Next Thursday, May 7, at 7 p.m., Mr. Sabar will speak at the Center for Jewish Education, at 5750 Park Heights Ave., about his book as part of CJE’s “On The Same Page” initiative. The program was piloted two years to bring together Jewish adults to discuss books with Jewish themes.

The BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES spoke recently with Mr. Sabar. He worked as a journalist for 15 years, including three years as an investigative reporter at the Baltimore Sun.

Why did you write the book?

I was the consummate 1980s L.A. boy. I bought into the L.A. mythology. I boogie-boarded, bought my clothing at a surf shop. As I saw it through a boy’s eyes, my dad didn’t fit in. He didn’t know how to dress, he cut his own hair. I kept him at arm’s length

The turning point in my life was the birth of my own son, Seth, in 2002. When you have your own kid, it changes your perspective of your relationship with your parents. I felt I was unfair to my own father.

I also was drawn to the story about a forgotten-but-ancient group of Jews who were part of the oldest community of the Diaspora.

What was your biggest surprise in Zakho?

I heard that in Kurdistan (sic), the Jews and Muslims got along. I always was skeptical.

People knew immediately we were Jews. The first thing the hosts said was, “Welcome to your home.” They invited us to drink tea and eat elaborate meals. There were still fond memories of Jewish life.

Saddam Hussein tried to rename the Jewish quarter “the Liberated Quarter.” He didn’t want a trace. [After Saddam’s overthrow], my dad’s hometown went back to calling it “the Jewish Quarter.”

What do you see as disheartening today between Jews and Muslims?

People look at Iraq and read the headlines. There is this assumption that this was always the way, that they hated each other all the time. The story of the Kurdish Jews and the Jews in Iraq was that when the Israelites were exiled, they formed a pretty good pluralistic society. There were problems, but nothing of the scale of what was seen in Europe.

What can American Jews learn from the history of the Kurdish Jews?

What we can take away is the value of reaffirming our ties to our families’ histories. One of the themes of the book is that in the face of so much change, what can we hold on to? Make an effort to talk to grandparents, write down or video their stories and discus what it is about the past you want to preserve.

Any stories from people you met on your book tours?

Once or twice, a father of Mideastern background, in one case an Iraqi and in one case even a Kurdish Jew, said to me, “Now I have something to pass on to my child.”

One son said, “I had no idea I had this history. I didn’t realize we had a rich past.”

What also came out of the book tour were documents and memoirs that were given to me. I’ve became a repository of Kurdish Jews. I hope to maintain the e-mails and documents that people sent to me.

What’s your next project?

It was inspired by the story of how my parents met. My father was in his first year in New York and thinking of going back to Israel. America was not what it seemed. He sees a woman entering Washington Square park, taking photos of people who didn’t succeed in America. It reminded him of the Kurds in Israel. He talked to her and they got married four months later.

I want to find other stories of people with strikingly different backgrounds, who happen to meet by chance in New York iconic public places.

Anything else?

A big Iraqi magazine wrote a four-page spread on the book. I have made friends on Facebook with Kurds in Turkey. An Arab radio station did a piece. The book is being translated into Hebrew, to be published later this year or early next year, and the Dutch have bought the rights to the book. You see the way the book is being received by all three faiths. It’s an affirmation.

Source: www.jewishtimes.com, May 1, 2009

May 3, 2009
A family history on the Jews of Kurdistan (sic)

By SHELDON KIRSHNER, Staff Reporter

Wednesday, 08 April 2009

Walter Fischel, an American academic, visited the Jews of Kurdistan in the 1940s. “Such Jews,” he exclaimed with a sense of wonder. “Men virile and wild-looking. Women wearing embroidered turbans, earrings, bracelets, even ring-noses, and with symbols tattooed into their faces…”

Roughly 25,000 Jews lived in Kurdistan back then, 18,000 in Iraq and the rest in Iran, Syria and Turkey.

Largely illiterate but famous as gifted storytellers and speaking the ancient language of Aramaic, Kurdish Jews were found in some 200 Muslim villages and towns throughout the Middle East on the eve of Israel’s establishment.

Ariel Sabar, an American journalist, has more than a passing knowledge of this exotic Jewish community, most of whose members immigrated to Israel in the early 1950s.

Sabar, in My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq (Algonquin Books), produces a family history and a portrait of Kurdish Jews in this richly documented volume.

As the title suggests, the book turns on his father, Yona, a linguist, researcher and professor of Hebrew at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Born in the northern Iraqi town of Zakho, in the heart of Iraq’s Kurdish region, but raised in Israel, Yona Sabar has published more than 90 monographs and two books on Aramaic – a nearly extinct language today – and the folklore of Kurdish Jews.

Despite his father’s international reputation as a scholar, Sabar did not appreciate his accomplishments and was even ashamed of him.

“I swore horribly in front of him, ridiculed him behind his back and took pains to avoid him, to be nothing like him,” he readily admits.

Sabar, who was born in Los Angeles, wanted to be part of what he describes as “the California mainstream,” and since his father rejected that ethos, father and son, like oil and water, did not mix.

“When we collided, it wasn’t pretty,” he writes in this frank and pungent memoir. “I threw tantrums and unleashed hailstorms of four-letter words. He stewed privately over how any son could behave that way toward his father, then consoled himself with the hypothesis that this was how children were in America.”

The cultural clash he alludes to forms but a segment of the core of My Father’s Paradise. In the final pages, Sabar comes to terms with him as he reclaims his heritage and visits Zakho.

The Jews of Zakho lived among 26,000 Kurdish Muslims and were concentrated in the mahala Juheeya, the oldest district, on an island on the Habur River. “Their mud-brick houses lined narrow alleys that zigzagged down to the river,” Sabar writes.

Since they were so isolated, they spoke Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Middle East until Arab armies from Arabia conquered Mesopotamia in the 17th century.

By all accounts, Jews and Kurds lived in harmony until Israel’s creation in 1948. To the Jews of Zakho, Sabar observes, Zionism represented, among other things, hopes for a better life and unease over the breakdown of Jewish-Muslim relations.

The first Jews to make aliyah were the have-nots – the small peddlers, the porters, the beggars. “Most carried only the rags on their backs and perhaps a single clay bowl,” says Sabar.

Once Sabar’s family was ready to leave in 1951, the Iraqi government passed a law that cancelled the citizenship and froze all the assets and property of departing Jews.

Sabar’s father was 13 years old when he and his parents and siblings left the country of their ancestors.

“The end arrived suddenly,” Sabar writes. “A line of motor coaches rolled into town early one April morning, and word went out that the time had come. Under a sky still full of stars, Jewish families, anxious and bleary, dragged suitcases and children out front doors and into cramped alleys that led to the main street.”

Hundreds of Kurds bid farewell to their Jewish neighbours, but the atmosphere was very different in Baghdad. “At the airport, angry mobs pressed against the barricades, hurling curses.”

Life was hard for Sabar’s family in Jerusalem, particularly for his grandmother: “Her relatives bought her a washing machine and stove, but the controls confounded her… She trudged off to night classes to learn Hebrew, but quit in frustration after two years, scarcely able to distinguish the letters of the alphabet. She had never learned to read or write her mother tongue. Why did people think she could master a second language?”

Sabar’s father, Yona, was more adaptable. A good student, he graduated from the Hebrew University with a BA in Hebrew and Arabic. Nevertheless, he felt that Kurdish Jews were patronized by the Ashkenazi elite, and he wondered whether he could pursue a scholarly career in Israel.

He was thus only too pleased to accept a scholarship from Yale University, where he plumbed the depths of Aramaic and met his wife.

In 1972, a year before Sabar was born, he was offered a position at the University of California. And there he thrived.

“The Promised Land had been a disappointment,” Sabar writes in a reference to Israel. “It had broken his father and his grandfather. It had humiliated and infantilized his mother. A generation of Kurdish Jews had been spit on by a society that should have known better.”

Yona Sabar’s success as an up-and-coming scholar did not spoil him, but his plain, unpretentious mien, his cheap clothes and his malapropisms in English alienated his insecure son.

“I didn’t know it as a boy, but he was almost single-handedly turning the field of Neo-Aramaic from a marginal curiosity to one commanding serious and growing attention at major academic conferences,” Sabar adds.

After Sabar himself became a father, he learned to value his father and his achievements and quit his job so that he could explore the lost world of Iraqi Kurdish Jews on a spiritual journey.

Having convinced his father to accompany him, the pair set off. They arrived in Zakho after Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, was unseated by the United States and its allies.

To Sabar, the purpose of the trip was crystal clear: “We could repair our relationship over cups of cardamom tea at cafés by the Habur River. We could walk together through the streets of the old Jewish neighbourhood, summoning the spirits of our ancestors… He would at last see me for the better son I had become.”

And so, as Sabar relates in this intriguing book, father and son finally bonded.

Source: www.cjnews.com, 08 April 2009

April 24, 2009
Enduring voices [Editor’s Column]

Andrew Silow-Carroll
NJJN Editor-in-Chief
April 9, 2009

I was exchanging e-mails recently with a reader about a column I wrote defending endogamy — that is, marriage between two Jews. “A bigot is one strongly loyal to one’s own social group, yet irrationally and prejudicially intolerant or disdainful of others,” he wrote. “If this paper’s chief editor is not a bigot — as he hopes — after reading this [column], I’m left wondering what he thinks he is.”

I don’t think I am intolerant of anything, unless you count lactose.

But his question continues to nag at me: Why does any culture value its own transmission, and can I justify the Jewish obsession with continuity in an era of multiple identities and, the flip side, violent tribalism?

In my defense, I quoted the work of K. David Harrison, a linguist who studies dying languages. According to his Enduring Voices Project, “Nearly 80 percent of the world’s population speaks only one percent of its languages. When the last speaker of a language dies, the world loses the knowledge that was contained in that language.”

By extension, Judaism is a culture with a rich language — not just Hebrew or Yiddish but a language of ritual, of social norms, of worship, of behaviors that order its practitioners’ world — in short, a rich system of knowledge. To dedicate oneself to preserving that shows no disdain for other cultures. Consider: When colonial powers try to wipe away traces of an indigenous culture, we call it ethnic cleansing. When Jews seek other Jews in order to live as rich a Jewish life as possible, some call it bigotry.

Soon after this exchange I came upon Ariel Sabar’s beautiful new book, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq. Sabar’s father, Yona, is the world’s preeminent expert on Neo-Aramaic, the language he grew up speaking in the Jewish quarter of Zakho, a Kurdish market town in northern Iraq. The book traces Yona’s journey from Kurdistan to Israel to southern California, where he is a professor at UCLA.

The book is an American-born, journalist son’s attempt to reconnect with a father he once dismissed as an awkward, hopelessly uncool immigrant. But it is also a rumination on language and Jewish culture, and the ways, and worth, of trying to preserve both.

For perhaps 1,700 years and until the seventh-century rise of Arabic, Aramaic was to the Levant what English is to the modern world: its lingua franca. The language lives on in the Talmud, the Zohar, the traditional wedding ketuba, and other texts. You hear it in the Mourner’s Kaddish and the Kol Nidrei prayer chanted on Yom Kippur eve.

But “lives” is a relative term — Aramaic began disappearing as a living Jewish language with the immigration of Iraq’s small Kurdish-Jewish community to Israel in the 1950s. Like Yona Sabar, Kurdish Jews made a lightning leap from the 18th century to the 20th, and the language barely made the crossing.

Ariel Sabar recreates the lost Jewish world of Zakho, where his hard-working grandparents thrived as dyers and textile merchants. Israel is a shock, and Yona’s parents and grandfather are adrift in the ramshackle tent cities and slums built to accommodate the flood of new immigrants. As Kurds, they occupy perhaps the lowest rung on Israel’s strict ladder of ethnic hierarchy. (One of the book’s heroes is Itzhak Ben-Zvi, Israel’s second president, an Ashkenazi Jew who championed the study and preservation of “Oriental” Jewish cultures.)

Out of this world Yona emerges as an unlikely scholar at Hebrew University with a rare distinction: fluency in a language that other scholars know only from the synagogue and dusty manuscripts. He soon lands at Yale and eventually becomes a lionized academic and teacher in Los Angeles. Writes Ariel: “Teaching Aramaic in America, I came to see, was how he sang God’s song in a strange land.”

Ariel, meanwhile, grows up a typical California kid, embarrassed by his father’s eccentricities and distant from his plucked Jewish roots. Ariel marries a non-Jewish woman and, while he pledges to raise their son as a Jew, disappoints the family by refusing to have the boy circumcised.

And here a reader is tempted to cluck his tongue and lament the withering of another branch on the Jewish family tree. But there is something cannier and more surprising going on in My Father’s Paradise. Ariel thinks long and hard about what we owe the past, and the future. He can’t live his father’s life, any more than his father can live in the dusty alleyways of Zakho. But he can tell the story of the Kurdish Jews, of Aramaic, and of his father’s heroic efforts to remember both.

Ariel Sabar made his choices; you and I might make others. His book suggests the various ways we can embrace diversity while adding new chapters to the cultures we inherit.

“Jews had carried a flame into the hills of Kurdistan, and they carried it out, still burning, 2,700 years later,” he writes. “My father touched another candle to it and brought it across continents. I didn’t want it to die with me. If my children ever feel adrift, unsure of who they are, I want that candle to still be burning.”

Comment: comments@njjewishnews.com

Source: www.njjewishnews.com, April 9, 2009

April 24, 2009
DUIN: Jews, Kurds linked

Bu konu aylardır ortalıkta… Ignatius’un Washington Times’ının bu kritik dönemde attığı başlık çok ilginç… Tam bir kaç gün sonraya denk geliyor. Makale ile başlık birbirine uymuyor sanki. Zorlama var. Ateist Yahudilerle Marksist Kürtler arasındaki genetik bağ safsatasını eklemeyi unutmuş… Ya da Kral Süleymanın 400-500 adamının Avrupadan kaçırıp getirdiği Avrupalı bakire kızlara zorla sahip çıkmaları sonucu bu zorla elde etmeden üreyen çocuklara “Kurd” denildiği gibi folklorik detayları da unutmuş…*

Haluk Demirbag

—

Julia Duin
Thursday, February 5, 2009

Much has been written over the ages as to what happened to the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.

The answer is simple, says Ariel Sabar, author of the recent book “My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq.”

“The Bible tells you where they were deposited,” he says. “If you map those places, they are basically Kurdistan.”

The exiles merged with the local culture, took on Kurdish dress and customs while retaining their Aramaic language, the lingua franca of the known world. Beginning in 722 B.C., Aramaic was the English of its day and the language spoken by Jesus Christ. The Assyrians, then the Babylonians, then the Persians embraced it as their official language.

Despite the Islamic conquest in the seventh century, the Jews and the Christians of Iraq retained Aramaic. By the time the 20th century rolled around, 25,000 Jews still lived in the mountainous regions overlapping Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. Many more lived in Baghdad, near ancient Babylon.

Today, only eight Jews remain in Iraq. In 1951 alone, 120,000 left.

What caused this exodus? The Muslim world, furious at the founding of Israel in 1948, turned on its Jews. Mr. Sabar writes through the eyes of his father, Yona Sabar, who was born in 1938 in Zakho, a city on the Harbur River, a few miles from Turkey and Syria.

At the time, “Jews lived peaceably among Muslims and Christians,” his son told me. “It was a place that when people did try to stir hatred between religions, the Kurds would not stand for it.”

I was in Zakho in 2004, so I remembered the extremely dry, mountainous terrain of the area, the blazing summer temperatures and the five-mile-long line of truckers waiting days to get through the Turkish border crossing.

Yona Sabar was ripped from this life at the age of 13, when his family fled to Israel. He became a linguist skilled in teaching Aramaic, ending up as a professor at the University of Southern California. His facility aroused the attention of movie producers, who have asked him to dub in Aramaic everything from Jesus’ words “Lazarus come forth!” to the voice of the Almighty in the movie “Oh, God!”

His son, now 37, was disinterested in his father’s unusual career until 2002, when he realized that most Aramaic-speaking Jews, now in their 70s and 80s, were dying off.

If their story were to be told, it had to be now. He went to Zakho in 2005 and 2006, meeting people his father knew and trying to find a long-lost aunt who was kidnapped by Bedouins back in the 1930s.

I called the author, happy to find someone who was as entranced with that mysterious area of the world as I was.

“I show up at book talks, and someone in the audience, about my age, says, ‘My father was an Iraqi Jew, or my father was a Kurdish Jew, and I had no idea we had this rich heritage,’ ” Mr. Sabar says. “It’s cool to see people gain access to a culture they’ve cut themselves off from or there hasn’t been a whole lot written about.”

He didn’t want his biography “to be just a Jewish book,” he adds. “I thought parts of it would appeal to evangelical Christians and people who care about the Middle East and the Kurds. Many Muslim Kurds have e-mailed me to say, ‘Thank you for appreciating our culture. No one in America understands us.’ ”

• Contact Julia Duin at jduin@washingtontimes.com.

– Julia Duin is the Times’ religion editor. She has a master’s degree in religion from Trinity School for Ministry (an Episcopal seminary) and has covered the beat for three decades. Before coming to The Washington Times, she worked for five newspapers, including a stint as a religion writer for the Houston Chronicle and a year as city editor at the Daily Times in Farmington, N.M. She has published four books. The latest, “Quitting Church: Why the Faithful Are Fleeing and What to Do about it,” was released Sept. 1. She has won many regional and national awards for her writing and has been nominated twice by the Times for a Pulitzer. She has covered events ranging from the election of Pope Benedict XVI in Rome and sex-selective abortions in India to the huge popularity of Christian colleges in the United States and a “new sanctuary” movement in mainline Protestant churches involving aid to illegal immigrants. She has learned seven foreign languages to aid in researching her stories.

Source: washingtontimes.com, February 5, 2009

*

“Another legend in Middle Eastern Folklore … relates how King Solomon reigned over a supernatural world of demons and Djinns. He sent 500 of his most faithful subjects to Europe to abduct the 500 most beautiful young women they could find. On their return they found that the king had died, and so they kept the women for themselves; The product of this forced union was the Kurds. A similar account is to be found in Jewish Folklore in which, the Kurds are said to be the descendants of devils who raped 400 virgins.”

Source: “No Friends But The Mountains: The Tragic History Of The Kurds”, by John Bulloch & Harvey Morris, 1992 [Viking]

February 16, 2009
The Man From Zakho

Ariel Sabor’s ‘My Father’s Paradise’ paints a portrait of one man and the vanished Kurdish ‘Jerusalem’ from which he came.

by Sandee Brawarsky
Jewish Week Book Critic

There are no more Jews in Zakho. Once the center of Jewish activity in Kurdish Iraq, the isolated town, a dusty vision of biblical landscape, was known as the “Jerusalem of Kurdistan.” Residents spoke the ancient Aramaic language, which they kept alive, along with their faith and distinctive culture, for almost 3,000 years. In the 1950s, after the Iraqi government turned against the Jews, the entire community moved to Israel, as part of Operations Ezra and Nehemiah. More than 120,000 Jews were airlifted from Iraq, including 18,000 Kurdish Jews; other Kurdish Jews arrived from Syria and Iran.

Yona Sabar was born in Zakho, and was the last boy to have his bar mitzvah there. He lived in a mud home, whose roof his family sometimes slept on in the heat, and he enjoyed meeting his grandfather in shul, where the old man sat up every night, conversing with the angels. In Israel, his once-successful merchant family was impoverished; while the Muslims and Christians in Zakho had respected them, the Kurds were looked down on as the very lowest class in the new State of Israel. Sabar, unlike most of his fellow villagers, graduated from high school in Israel (while working full-time to help support his family) and Hebrew University where he studied language with a special interest in Aramaic. He received his doctorate in Near East Languages and Literature from Yale, and now is a distinguished professor at University of California Los Angeles. His ranch-style house in Los Angeles bears no resemblance to his childhood home, where hens and customers crisscrossed the dirt floor at all hours.

The remarkable arc of Sabar’s life is at the center of his son Ariel Sabar’s outstanding book, “My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq”(Algonquin). In telling his father’s story intertwined with the family’s tales, journalist Sabar reconstructs the little-known history of the Kurdish Jews, who lived in harmony with their non-Jewish neighbors. In Zakho, Muslims would bring tea to their Jewish neighbors on Shabbat, when the Jews weren’t able to cook. Jewish men wore the same baggy trousers and embroidered shirts as Muslims, “even if a few strands of tzitzit poked out from beneath their shirts.”

“My father had staked his life on the notion that the past mattered more than anything,” the younger Sabar writes, adding, “He sublimated homesickness into a career.”

“My Father’s Paradise” is also a deeply personal story of a distant father and son who were ultimately reconciled. Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1980s, Ariel Sabar found his father embarrassing, regarding him as the uncoolest person he knew, with his unstylish clothing and beat-up car, and his passion for ancient languages rather than popular culture.

But, after moving across the country to attend college, falling in love with and marrying a non-Jewish woman and working hard in his first reporting jobs, Sabar was drawn to write about his father after the scholar was called to consult on the television series “The X-Files,” about the language Jesus might have used. For the first time, Sabar asked his father, as he might have questioned any source, about his life in Zakho. His story in the Providence Journal, “Scholar Dad Goes Showbiz: ‘I Am the Walrus’ in Aramaic” brought him a greater response than all of his previous articles combined. He then thought that he had said everything he had to say about his father.

Several years later, after he and his wife had their first child, a son, Sabar began seriously thinking about “fathers and sons, and what is it we inherit,” he tells The Jewish Week in an interview. “Would [his son] feel the way I did about my father? That this guy had nothing to teach me, that I didn’t care where he came from, that I was my own person? It took me back to some long-neglected questions.” Now, looking back, he’s not proud of the way he treated his father.

Aware that his potential sources — Kurdish Jews like his father who remembered life in Iraq — were aging, Sabar felt a sense of duty to preserve their past. And, as a journalist, he sensed he was onto a great story. He quit his newspaper job and moved to Maine, where his wife returned to work as a physician; he began researching and traveling, tracking down relatives and family friends. His father still had the Kurdish sensibility, where people survived by keeping their heads down, so he wasn’t altogether comfortable about being the subject of a book.

Collecting an impressive amount of detail, Sabar creates a compelling narrative. The Jews of Zakho had little in common with the Jews of Baghdad, who spoke Arabic, built huge synagogues and yeshivas, ran large businesses and held government jobs. In the 1940s, the remote Jews of Zakho had no idea of what was happening to the Jews of Europe; nor did they know of a deadly pogrom in Baghdad in 1941.

Sabar conveys the life of Zakho, with its storytellers, beggars, traders, smugglers, loggers, Arab tribesmen, cheese makers, and the one dyer of fabrics, his great-grandfather the mystic. Girls didn’t go to school, but instead learned to do heavy chores and to cook specialties whose descriptions may send readers in search of a Kurdish kosher cookbook. His grandmother Miryam’s life was full of loss, including having her firstborn, a daughter, never returned by a tribeswoman who agreed to be her nursemaid when Miryam was ill. She had lost her own mother at a young age, and was married at 13 to a cousin, who proved to be kind.

In Israel, Miryam was lost, never learning Hebrew, and even though her neighbors would sit around and speak of children, she wouldn’t mention that two of her sons were university professors, her two daughters teachers, another son a vice principal of a school and another a bank officer, for fear that boasting tempts the evil eye. The author knew her as the grandmother who coaxed him in Aramaic, “you didn’t eat anything” and ate only after everyone else finished. He learned the full and vivid story of her life there through transcribed and translated interviews he did with her as a student, while studying her language.

In 2005, father and son traveled to Zakho together — a dangerous time for Americans and Jews in Iraq — and were greeted with kindness; many people remembered Sabar’s grandfather and could tick off the names of the Jewish families they did business with, and some spoke of missing the Jewish presence. The Jewish neighborhood was now the poorest section of town, and the shuls had become private homes. The Sabars realized that the generation that recalled Jews fondly, remembering the brotherhood they experienced, wouldn’t be around much longer.

“Journalism can be pretty cynical. But to cross the border and see the sign, ‘Welcome to Kurdistan of Iraq” — I was euphoric” the author says. Zakho is grittier than he expected, and it’s also fast-growing, with traffic, construction and Internet cafés, not like the sleepy mountain town his father left. While there, they attempted to track down Yona’s long-lost sister.

Ariel Sabar explains that for his father, the idea of Paradise is not only Zakho, but also the Israel he had dreamed of, and even California, where he finds much tolerance of difference and is able to preserve his mother tongue. In the unlikely setting of an upscale L.A. mall, drinking iced coffee under the palm trees, he also experiences a kind of paradise, where he’s able to negotiate past and present.

Today, the younger Sabar, 37, is covering the presidential elections for The Christian Science Monitor. He and his wife raise their two children as Jews, playing Kurdish music at home, teaching them the Hebrew alphabet and prayers.

When asked how his father feels about the book, Sabar says, “He saw that I had gone on a journey not unlike his own, to preserve those parts of the past we can take with us. He has a measure of pride that his son, in his own way, would follow in his footsteps.”

Source: TheJewishWeek.com

September 8, 2008
The Road Not Taken

Decades before Herzl, Benjamin Disraeli wrote a novel that grappled with Zionism

by Adam Kirsch

An undated portrait of Disraeli

By the beginning of 1830, when he was twenty-five, Benjamin Disraeli was tired of England. For three years, he had been suffering from acute depression, brought on by the triple fiasco that marked his entrance into public life. Before he turned twenty-two, Disraeli had lost thousands of pounds in stock-market speculations; alienated the publisher John Murray after their plan to launch a newspaper ended in failure; and caused a scandal with his first novel, Vivian Gray, a satirical roman à clef about high society. For the young Disraeli, already supremely ambitious, these reverses had come as a terrible shock, and it took him years to recover his nerve.

Now, with his second novel completed and the advance in his pocket, Disraeli was set on traveling. But he did not want to follow the usual itinerary of the Grand Tour, which took rich young Englishmen to the churches of Rome and the salons of Paris. Instead, he set his sights on the East—Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and Palestine. In part, he was following the example of his beloved Byron, who had created a vogue for the East in his highly colored poems. But for Disraeli, a journey to Jerusalem had more than literary significance. Although he had been baptized at the age of twelve into the Church of England, Disraeli’s very name made clear that he was a Jew, and the experience of visiting the Jewish homeland was to transform the way he thought about himself, his ancestors, and politics in general. Almost fifty years later, when he was Prime Minister of England, it would be his destiny to redraw the maps of the countries he visited as a young man.

The first fruit of Disraeli’s pilgrimage, however, was a novel—The Wondrous Tale of Alroy, published in 1833. Disraeli wrote that he had been “attracted” to the “marvellous career” of David Alroy even as a child. But Disraeli’s Alroy bears little resemblance to the minor figure mentioned by Benjamin of Tudela, the Spanish Jew whose Travels are a classic of medieval Hebrew literature. According to Benjamin, Alroy, a Kurdish Jew, raised a revolt against the Seljuk Turks in Azerbaijan around 1160 AD. He was credited with magic powers by his followers, who proclaimed him the Messiah, but this pretension won him the hostility of Jewish leaders in Baghdad, who begged him not to antagonize the Turks. Finally he was betrayed by his father-in-law and killed, probably without winning a single battle.

Disraeli’s Alroy is a much grander figure, a kind of Jewish Alexander the Great. In his novel, Alroy wins victory after victory, conquers Baghdad, and comes close to establishing a new empire in the Middle East. Disraeli also provides his hero with a loyal sister, Miriam, and a lover, the Princess Schirene. There is also a good deal of what Disraeli called “supernatural machinery” in the novel, including a magic ring, a secret underground temple, and the Scepter of Solomon, which Alroy must claim if he is to conquer Jerusalem.

Disraeli writes that all this is based on Jewish tradition—“Cabalistical and correct,” he puts it—but it is clear that the real sources of the novel’s mysticism lie in The Thousand and One Nights, the Eastern tales of Byron, and the quest poems of Shelley. In general, Alroy is better understood as high Orientalist fantasy than historical fiction. Even Disraeli’s prose, the emphatic rhythms and repetitions of which suggest that some sections started out as verse, is kitschily intoxicated: “‘Ah! bright gazelle! Ah! bright gazelle!’ the princess cried, the princess cried; ‘thy lips are softer than the swan, thy lips are softer than the swan; but his breathed passion when they pressed, my bright gazelle! my bright gazelle!’”

But if Alroy seems impossibly overripe today, its psychological core remains entirely serious. Disraeli said that he began to write the novel in Jerusalem in 1831, at a moment when he was pondering the role Jewishness might play in his own life and career. And in his hands, the story of David Alroy becomes a veiled meditation on the state of the Jews in Europe, and a parable of his own possible future.

From the beginning of the novel, Alroy, a scion of the house of David, rages against the degradation of the Jews under Muslim rule. But as Disraeli makes clear, the condition of the Jews is hardly unbearable. On the contrary, Alroy’s uncle, Bostenay, is a rich man, and enjoys the honorary title of Prince of the Captivity. “The age of power has passed; it is by prudence now that we must flourish,” he declares. He is, perhaps, Disraeli’s critical portrait of the wealthy English Jews of his own day—men like the Rothschilds and Montefiores, who had all the advantages of wealth, but none of the dignity of power.

Alroy, like Disraeli himself, cannot be satisfied with making money. He is an ardent patriot, disgusted by the state into which his people have fallen: “I am ashamed, uncle, ashamed, ashamed,” he tells Bostenay. When he sees a Turkish official accost his sister, Alroy impetuously kills him and flees into the desert. He is about to die of thirst when he is rescued by Jabaster, a magician and fanatical Jewish patriot. When Alroy has a dream of being acclaimed by a vast army as “the great Messiah of our ancient hopes,” Jabaster decides that the young man represents his long-awaited chance to reestablish the kingdom of David. After a series of romantic adventures, Alroy begins to put Jabaster’s plan into action, scattering the Turks and conquering Baghdad.

But in the meantime, Alroy acquires another advisor—Jabaster’s brother and mirror image, Honain. Honain represents the tempting path of Jewish assimilation: He has achieved wealth and honor, but only at the price of “passing” as a Muslim. In his own view, however, he has not betrayed his people, but simply effected his own liberation. “I too would be free and honoured,” he tells Alroy. “Freedom and honour are mine, but I was my own messiah.” Honain introduces Alroy to the beautiful Princess Schirene, the daughter of the Caliph, and though she is a Muslim he falls in love with her. (“The daughters of my tribe, they please me not, though they are passing fair,” Alroy admits—a sentiment Disraeli himself shared.)

But now, at the height of his fortune, with an empire in his grasp and a princess for his wife, Alroy begins to succumb to Honain’s worldly counsel. Why, he asks, should he exchange rich Baghdad for poor Jerusalem? Why not rule over a cosmopolitan empire, rather than a single small nation? “The world is mine: and shall I yield the prize, the universal and heroic prize, to realise the dull tradition of some dreaming priest, and consecrate a legend?” Alroy asks. “Is the Lord of Hosts so slight a God that we must place a barrier to His sovereignty, and fix the boundaries of Omnipotence between the Jordan and the Lebanon?” Mischievously, Disraeli even makes Alroy begin to speak in the stock phrases of modern English liberalism: “Universal empire must not be founded on sectarian prejudices and exclusive rights.”

From a portrait by Count D’Orsay, 1834

Jabaster tries to recall his king to the righteous, Jewish path, but to no avail. At last he attempts a coup against Alroy, but he is defeated and sentenced to death. From that moment, however, God’s favor deserts Alroy. In his next battle he is defeated, and a Muslim king, Alp Arslan, takes him prisoner. Now Honain reappears with one last, Satanic temptation: If Alroy converts to Islam, his life will be spared. But the scion of the house of David has learned his lesson. His strength is not his own but his nation’s, and individual glory means nothing next to the redemption of the Jews. He taunts Alp Arslan with his refusal, and the king, in a rage, cuts off his head.

For Disraeli, writing at the very beginning of his own career as an English politician, the moral of Alroy was deeply ambiguous. After all, David Alroy is a gifted youth like himself, but one who sacrifices worldly ambitions for love of the Jewish people, and is exalted by that love. The novel does not endorse the Jewish sectarianism of Jabaster—Disraeli expresses a Voltairean hatred of priestcraft—but it clearly repudiates the plausible assimilationism of Honain, which leads only to dishonor and disaster. Indeed, it is Disraeli’s distinction between Jewish belief and Jewish solidarity, and his insistence that it is possible to have the latter without the former, that makes Alroy a significant proto-Zionist text. If Disraeli had obeyed the novel’s logic in his own life, if he had tried to translate Alroy’s vision to the nineteenth century, he might have become a real-life Daniel Deronda.

Source: www.nextbook.org, 08.26.08

“The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.”

–Benjamin Disraeli

August 30, 2008