An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir

by Chesler, Phyllis

  Wharton notes that sun itself had been banished from the Jewish ghetto: “We were suddenly led under an arch over which should have been written ‘All light abandon—’ . . . into the Mellah of Sefrou [the sun] never comes, for the streets form a sort of subterranean rabbit-warren . . . [it is] a buried city lit even at midday by oil-lamps hanging in the goldsmiths’ shops and under the archways of the black and reeking staircases.”

  What Wharton discovered about the lives of Jews in Morocco was also true for Jews throughout the Arab Middle East, Central Asia, and elsewhere in North Africa. Maimonides fled Muslim rule in Spain, only to discover that Muslim Morocco and Muslim Jerusalem both remained inhospitable to Jews and that Jews were being persecuted and forcibly converted throughout the Arab Muslim world. Maimonides, himself a skilled physician, was finally given asylum in Muslim Cairo.

  According to scholars such as Rabbi Marc Angel (Foundations of Sephardic Spirituality: The Inner Life of Jews of the Ottoman Empire), Bat Ye’or (The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam), and Andrew G. Bostom (in his massive compendium of original sources, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism), while Maimonides was alive, the Jews of Yemen were required to remove feces and other waste matter from Muslim quarters. In Morocco, as late as the nineteenth century, Jews were required to salt the decapitated heads of executed rebels—even on the Jewish Sabbath—for public viewing.

  According to Sharia law, Jews in the Ottoman Empire had to wear distinctive yellow badges, live apart in crowded ghettos, step off sidewalks when a Muslim approached or where a mosque stood, build houses that were lower than Muslim houses, and maintain a subordinate silence in the presence of Muslims. According to Rabbi Angel, “Jewish evidence was not accepted against the evidence of a Muslim. A Muslim could not be executed for murdering a Jew.” Muslims also systematically taxed Jews and forced them to ransom Jewish hostages for exorbitant sums.

  Although it remains controversial, even dangerous, to say so, the Qur’an views both Jews and Christians as infidels who must be forcibly converted, tithed, or killed. Luckily not every Muslim or Muslim leader obeyed the teachings of the seventh-century Qur’an. But many have, and periodic massacres and expulsions of Jews characterized Muslim, as well as European Christian, society.

  As a child the Moroccan author and feminist Fatima Mernissi could not understand why the Jews left Morocco. In her romantic book, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, she writes, “The Jews had always hung around with the Arabs . . . since the beginning of time.”

  Mernissi seems to know nothing about the poverty or the forced conversions of Jews in her country or about the legendary nineteenth-century Jewish martyr, the Moroccan teenager Sol Hachuel, who was imprisoned, tortured, and beheaded because she refused to convert to Islam.

  Mernissi reminds me of my Afghan mother-in-law who missed the Afghan Jews; they left for reasons that remained unclear to her.

  The gravely beautiful book Reading Lolita in Tehran, by the Iranian American author Azar Nafisi, confirms that even before Khomeini Muslims viewed infidels, including Jews, as repulsive, beyond dirty. Iranians thought that Jews “drank innocent children’s blood.”

  Nafisi understands that Jew hatred had been festering among Persians for a long time. She concludes that “we cannot blame everything on the Islamic Republic, because in some ways it simply brought into the open and magnified a preexisting bigotry.”

  The cyclical local Persian persecution of Jews forced one small group to flee to Afghanistan. According to the Afghan Israeli scholar Reuben Kashani, “In 1839, radical Shiite Muslims in Meshed [Persia] spread the libel that the Jews had insulted one of their saints, Imam Ali Reza. A mad Muslim mob pillaged Jewish homes, burned synagogues, murdered more than 30 Jews, and forcibly converted the rest. . . . Eventually [they] managed to escape to neighboring Afghanistan, particularly Herat.”

  However, Afghan ruler Abdur Rahman, who reigned from 1830 to 1844, ordered his forces to “slaughter 13 Torah scholars from prominent families in Maimanah [in Afghanistan’s north].” Kashani notes that “in many Afghan mahzorim [High Holiday prayer books], it was the custom to mention the Maimanah 13 by name.”

  In 1856–57 the Jews of Herat were then expelled and many went back to Meshed, where they were promptly imprisoned, according to one personal account, “in animal pens.”

  One of King Habibullah’s advisers was Mula Agajan Cohen, the president of the Afghan Jewish community. According to Kashani, “Apparently Muslims resented the close ties that this Jewish leader had to King Habibullah, so they cut off his head and took all of his money.” Nevertheless the Jews from Persia, Bokhara, and Georgia remained in Afghanistan, where they kept to themselves, wore distinctive clothing that set them apart (they were ordered to do so), fit in as best they could—and flourished. Afghanistan allowed them to practice their Judaism openly. These Jews remained in Afghanistan for nearly one hundred years.

  When I lived in Kabul, I knew nothing about a Jewish history in Afghanistan, nor did I know anything about the intimate relationship between the sudden impoverishment of Jews and Hindus in Afghanistan in the late 1920s and early 1930s and my Afghan family’s equally sudden wealth.

  More than fifty years after I left Kabul, I discovered the hidden and somewhat explosive story.

  Bebegul, my mother-in-law, kept telling me how close she had been to the Sharbans, or the Sharbanis, who were her Jewish friends. She kept asking me, rather wistfully, if I knew them.

  “Why did they leave?” she would ask sadly, over and over again.

  Rosanne Klass, the author of two books about Afghanistan, once celebrated a Jewish holiday in Kabul with Afghan Jews, sometime in the 1950s. She celebrated with a man named Sharban Ibrahim, who “for many years had been the doyen of the Jewish community in [Kabul] Afghanistan.”

  I wondered if this was the same Sharban Bebegul kept asking me about.

  When Klass met him, Sharban was already on his way out of Afghanistan. His family had already left for Israel. However, Sharban escorted Klass to another Afghan Jewish family that was celebrating Sukkoth—a harvest festival when Jews take their meals in outdoor booths or huts. Klass was taken with the biblical beauty of the young hostess, of whom she writes, “[Her] face was the face of Rebecca at the well, it was Rachel, it was Sarah, it was Ruth gleaning the fields beneath the eyes of Boaz.” The young woman wears a flowing headscarf. Her eyes are “enormous, shining, incredibly dark and liquid, utterly serene.”

  I wonder what the hostess’s life was really like. Did she wear a burqa when she went out? Did she go out alone—or only in the company of a male relative or male servant? Could she read and write? Had she ever been out of Kabul or out of her own home and courtyard? Did her husband have more than one wife?

  Klass does not tell us.

  I knew Afghan Jews had settled in Queens, New York, as well as in Israel. I had to meet them. Klass connected me to Roy Abraham, the grandson of prominent Afghan Jews. He and I had an e-mail exchange for a year.

  I finally suggested that we both attend a program about Afghan Jews that was to be held at the Center for Jewish History in New York City.

  The evening turned out to be a book launch for Sara Y. Aharon’s remarkable book, From Kabul to Queens: The Jews of Afghanistan and Their Move to the United States. Aharon is the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Afghan Jews who once lived in Herat.

  I recognize Roy the second he enters the building. He has an Israeli Jewish energy that is also somehow Afghan. He is wired, passionate, intense, fast talking but at the same time sweet, funny, easygoing. Roy is definitely a descendant of the biblical Joseph. He also seems to be related to everyone else who has gathered at the center.

  Roy is warmly and repeatedly embraced. His many relatives are surprised but delighted to see him, and he introduces me to aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors, and friends. All this happens before we begi
n to speak.

  Roy confirms the obvious, namely, that the “Afghan Jewish community is small but tight-knit, everyone is related, we are very proud and do not want to assimilate.” As he describes their customs, or at least the customs of his parents’ and grandparents’ generations, they sound . . . Muslim, Afghan, Arab, Sephardic. Roy explains, “Traditionally Jewish cousins often married each other in arranged marriages. The women were veiled and sequestered. They did not work or attend synagogue. Children lived with their parents after marriage or very nearby. The family is everything. It is your lifeline, your survival.”

  Afghan Jews prayed and wrote in Judeo-Persian and in Rashi script. Rashi, Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, lived in the eleventh century in France and created a kind of shorthand for his brilliant Torah and Talmud commentaries.

  Some Afghan Jews were polygamous, and Jewish girls did not attend school; they married at thirteen or fourteen. Boys married when they were eighteen or twenty. If they were wealthy, they could marry earlier.

  Afghan Jews and Afghan Hindus exported and imported carpets, textiles, karakuls, furs, hides, machine parts, gold, silver, jewelry—and currency. They had offices and outposts in many places, including Europe, India, all over Russia, in the Far East, and in all the northern Afghan cities along the Silk Road in Afghanistan. According to Roy, “My grandfather spoke Dari, Hebrew, Russian, Urdu, Japanese, and Thai. My grandfather and great-grandfather were in the import-export business. They bought and sold clothing, textiles, cigarettes, jewelry, diamonds, and money, currency.”

  The Jews and Hindus of Herat were the primary traders and bankers for the country. That changed in the late 1920s and early 1930s when King Nadir Shah decided that neither Afghan Jews nor Afghan Hindus would be allowed to continue their usual commercial ventures, including banking. This decision was partly influenced by the king’s ties to Nazi Germany. Three scholars, Erich Brauer (in 1942), Reuben Kashani (in 1975), and Sara Aharon (in 2011), document what happened. According to Brauer, “In 1936, [Jews] were evacuated from Maimane, Shiburgan, Mazar, Tashkurgan and Ankhuy, by order of the powerful minister of finance, Mir Hashim Khan. . . . [By 1942] the Jewish population [was] virtually limited to the three towns of Herat, Kabul . . . and Balkh.”

  Government leaders claimed that Russian Jews in flight from the Russian Revolution were entering Afghanistan, and according to Brauer, to prevent this they decided to “exclude Jews from the area bordering on the Soviet Union. The true motive, however, was the regime’s desire to take over the economic positions of the Jews in those towns.”

  It may be true that many Afghan Jews lost part of their fortune because of the Soviet revolution; the Jews had vast storehouses, trading posts, and cattle in Russia, all of which had been nationalized. However, as Brauer writes, “If anything more were needed to complete the process [of impoverishing Jews], it was supplied by the radical measures of the [Afghan] regime designed to concentrate the country’s trade wholly in the hands of its rulers.”

  Sara Aharon’s book carefully documents the almost overnight impoverishment of Afghan Jews and Afghan Hindus. King Nadir Shah might have been tolerant of non-Muslim “religious expression,” but he prohibited non-Muslims from trading. Aharon writes, “In 1929, a Pashtun banker named Abdul Majid Zabuli described King Nadir Shah’s emphatic belief that ‘our own nationals’ must exercise greater control over the country’s trade. . . . He cited mercantile activities specifically dominated in Afghanistan by local Hindus and Jews. His urgent message to Zabuli in harsh, unequivocal terms to ‘cut off the hands of the foreigner’ thus suggests that he did not consider Hindus, Jews, and other non-Muslims as Afghan nationals.”

  As I read this, my heart stops. I recognize Abdul Majid’s name. He brought my father-in-law in as one of the three founders of the country’s modern banking system. I keep reading, but I am in a small state of shock. According to Aharon, by 1932 “a banking system, including Afghanistan’s first joint-stock company was formed. . . . Despite religious concerns, it was dubbed the ‘Bank-i-Milli,’ or the Afghan National Bank.”

  I have to stop reading. My heart is racing. I get up and walk around the room.

  This national bank became quite powerful. It had a virtual monopoly over commodities and the Afghan export-import trade. According to Aharon, “the Bank-i-Milli’s monopoly would prove to be a main cause of the Jewish community’s impoverishment.”

  Bank-i-Milli was my father-in-law’s bank! This is where Abdul-Kareem’s oldest brother, Hassan, worked. Without this kind of financial platform, Abdul-Kareem could never have come to study in America. We would never have met.

  When I interviewed him in 1980, Abdul-Kareem told me how his father, Ismail Mohammed, rose from his position as an accountant in the civil service to become the keeper of the treasury in Herat. In 1929, when the people rose up against King Amanullah (whom Ismail Mohammed supported), rioting mobs demanded that Abdul-Kareem’s father turn over the treasury. He refused to do so. Ismail Mohammed was immediately arrested, jailed, and scheduled to hang the next day.

  And so this courtly polygamist and father-as-supreme-leader-at-home is also something of a hero on the world stage.

  However, according to Abdul-Kareem, his father was so loved by the people of Herat “for his honesty” that they “helped him escape from prison and took him and his family to a holy sanctuary.” From there he and his family fled across the border to Meshed, Iran. They hid their gold beneath the baby in a baby carriage. In Meshed, Ismail Mohammed began studying English and Russian. Abdul-Kareem told me, “A year later my father went on a trip to Germany via Russia by train. While in Berlin he had studied some aspects of banking. In 1930 he then returned to Meshed and his family. In 1930 my parents received word from Kabul that they could come back to Afghanistan. In 1931–32 they returned via Baluchistan and India.”

  Because Ismail Mohammed had remained faithful to King Amanullah, the new king, Nadir Shah, did not trust him. Abdul-Kareem explained, “Fortunately, a few business acquaintances asked my father to assist them in founding a bank. Thus my father became one of the founders of the Afghan National Bank. The founder appointed my father first as chief accountant and a year later as vice president of the bank, a post he held until 1949.”

  Most of my Jewish friends thought that my marriage to a Muslim was fashionable, exotic, politically correct, and desirable. Like me, no one had any clear understanding of the history of Jews in Afghanistan or in Muslim countries.

  But now I feel a little sick. I had lived in a country and with a family whose fortune had been built on the systematic impoverishment of Jews and Hindus. At the time I did not know this. Back then I was the kind of Jew who believed that Jews could fit in everywhere, anywhere, as universal citizens. Since then my understanding of Muslim-Jewish history, and of Judaism, has deepened.

  Perhaps this chapter is a form of atonement, written with considerable anguish, by a Jew who was once forced to convert to Islam, and who lived among Muslims in Afghanistan in captivity but also in splendor. It is for having coveted that splendor that I must atone.

  Abdul-Kareem adored his father and his father’s rise to power and glory. He talked about it a lot. He told me, “Following the assassination of King Nadir Shah in 1933 and the succession of his eighteen-year-old son, King Zahir Shah, the Afghan National Bank was asked to serve as the central bank. My father was sent to India to buy gold for the government treasury. Furthermore the bank was making necessary investments and bringing industry to the country. In the 1930s and ’40s they helped build two textile, one sugar, and one nuclear factory.”

  Thus my Afghan family’s considerable wealth, their palatial homes, summer and winter chalets and villas, and properties in Herat, Jalalabad, Paghman, and Kabul; their many servants, thick carpets, European furniture, and fashionable clothing; their ability to study and travel abroad and to consult European and American doctors was at least indirectly related to th
e impoverishment of the Afghan Jews and Hindus.

  Making this connection stuns me.

  I have to walk around the room a few times again.

  I am certainly not saying that Abdul-Kareem’s family stole their wealth from the Jews (or from the Hindus), because that is not accurate. What was stolen was the Jewish and Hindu ability to take their considerable banking and commercial skills to another level in Afghanistan. The Afghan king Nadir Shah was the thief. His accomplices were Nazis.

  The Abdul-Kareem I knew was never a Jew hater. He is not responsible for what an Afghan king did before he was born. A woman we both know described meeting Abdul-Kareem in Kabul in the mid-1960s: “He had a crew cut and was sitting quietly in the corner. All of a sudden, he began telling Jewish jokes. We hit it right off. He was then heading the Kabul theater, and we started knocking around Kabul together. He wanted to do a revision of Our Town set in Kabul. I remember that his family’s living room was huge, maybe forty feet long. I remember marble floors and beautiful carpets. We listened to Ella Fitzgerald together.”

  Ah—that was the home in which I had been held captive. And there was Abdul-Kareem, missing Jewish New York, perhaps missing me.

  When I ask Abdul-Kareem about Afghan Jews, he tells me that he still remembers with excitement his visits to Kabul’s large covered bazaar: “The Hindus and the Jews were selling things. They had skins, furs, jewels, textiles. It was a wonderful place to visit. It was huge.”

  This must have been in the 1940s. Thus some Jews and Hindus were still conducting commerce.

  “I remember visiting the synagogue in Herat. You had to bend to go through a small door. There were holes for shoes and a place where the Torah was stored.”

  The last time Abdul-Kareem visited Herat was in 1997. He remembers, “There was a young rabbi who dressed just like all Heratis do. And he had two pigeons under his long coat. He must have been about thirty-five years old.”