by Bruce Feiler
“And do you feel confident that you will be able to practice your religion openly in the future?”
“For twenty centuries we have lived together in this country,” he said. “I don’t think we will have problems. I have Muslim neighbors, Shias and Sunnis. We go to their houses, they come to our houses, we dine together, like good Iraqi friends. All my staff are Muslims. They love me, I love them. We don’t have this kind of separation.”
“So you believe the culture of Mesopotamia will continue to be available to everyone, not just one party, or one religion?”
“Of course. People make history, not leaders. People produce artists, people produce historians, people produce songs.”
“So now the leader is gone.”
“Exactly. But the people continue, and they are looking for a better future now.”
He calls himself the last rabbi of Baghdad.
On a bright sunny morning, Hikmat and I were driving for the fifth time around Al Wahad circle looking for what Emad Levy, in an e-mail, had assured me was known by everyone as the “Jewish church.” But no one seemed to know the Jewish church, or the Jewish synagogue, or the Jewish rabbi. Al Wahad circle is fairly typical; it has a hotel, which was bombed after the war because it housed foreign aid workers; a shop run by Christians that sells beer and wine, which was also bombed because alcohol is forbidden by Islam; and a working flower shop. It also has impenetrable traffic. By informal estimates, the number of cars doubled in the months after the war, as junk models flooded in from neighboring countries. The traffic cops were helpless: poorly trained men in brand-new uniforms who stared a lot at the sky. On our final trudge, a teenage boy jumped from his car and began to direct traffic. At that instant, he could have been elected councilman.
In time we found the proper address, a single-story brick home with an overgrown garden and a swing on the front porch. I rang the bell alongside the white metal fence. No answer. I rang again. A man came hurrying from the front door, tucking on slippers. He was dressed in the same polyester brown slacks that many Iraqis seem to wear, a dark shirt, and a tie. He had a thinning widow’s peak, was several days unshaven, and wore a thick, Saddam-style mustache that I was beginning to think had been requisite for survival in the old regime. In his late thirties and almost handsome, Emad was agitated. “You’re an hour late,” he said.
Scolded for being tardy in a war. I knew I must be in the right place.
Emad invited us into his home, which was dark because of the lack of electricity. Photographs of his family lined the walls, along with faded prints of Moses and embroideries of Hebrew prayers. Several carpets lay rolled up on the floor; he was hoping to sell them to raise enough money to emigrate. Iraq has had a continual presence of Jews since the birth of Judaism here almost 2,600 years ago. But the Jewish population, which was almost 150,000 at the end of World War II, was now down to 22. Emad hoped to shrink the number even further.
“People are crazy here,” he said. “Last month someone poisoned my dog, and it died. Maybe they try to intimidate me. But I am not shamed. I am proud to be Jewish.”
Emad spoke quickly, in slightly crazed but still impressive English. He sat down next to me but did not stop moving. He acted as if he was being watched.
“For ten years Saddam sent intelligence to follow me,” he said. “They listen to my phone. They do everything. Believe me, they send lots of girls to sleep with me.”
“They sent girls?” I said. “I don’t understand.”
“They make love with you and then get you to talk.”
My eyes widened. “So what did you do?” I asked.
He looked at me as if I would not survive one week in a dictatorship. “I made love with them and kept my mouth shut.”
Once the Israelites established themselves in Babylon during the Exile and became Jews, they never really left. As power shifted across the Fertile Crescent from the Babylonians to the Persians to the Greeks to the Romans, some Jews returned to the Promised Land and attempted to reestablish their lives, but an even larger number of them chose not to. These Jews became less and less dependent on their physical connection to Jerusalem and more and more attached to a series of laws that allowed them to function in what amounted to permanent exile. Babylon, for all its natural amenities, proved particularly attractive to these Jews, especially after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. In the centuries that followed, Jewish learning thrived in Mesopotamia and gave birth to a book that in many ways would overshadow the Torah as the core text of Judaism.
The Talmud, or “learning,” is an authoritative record of rabbinic discussion about Jewish law, ethics, rituals, customs, and history. The Talmud comprises two main parts: the Mishnah, a compilation of Jewish law that dates from 200 C.E., and the Gemara, which are commentaries on those laws. There is only one Mishnah, but there are two Gemaras. The first was compiled near the Sea of Galilee around 400 C.E. and is known as the Palestinian (or Jerusalem) Talmud; the second was compiled in Babylon around 550 C.E. The Babylonian Talmud, which totals 2.5 million words and covers 5,894 folio pages, is longer than the Palestinian Talmud, easier to read, and was studied more widely across Europe, making it the more influential text. When people today say “the Talmud,” they are referring to the Babylonian Talmud.
Unlike the Torah, which offers general rules for how to live, the Talmud is filled with minute detail on how to apply those rules, covering everything from how to light candles on Shabbat to how to conduct a funeral. Beginning in Babylon and continuing through the Middle Ages, study of the Talmud superseded study of the Torah in Jewish life. The Hebrew Bible continued to be the soul of the Jewish people, but the Talmud became their bible. As Avner put it, if Jews are “People of the Book,” that book is the Talmud.
In recent centuries, more liberal Jews, including Reform and some Conservative Jews, have begun to rely less heavily on the fine points of Jewish law debated in the Talmud and see it more as a source of inspiration and moral guidance. The Torah, by contrast, has gained in importance because it’s more accessible. I, like many American Jews, learned about the Talmud when I was a teenager but never saw a page of its formatted text until I was an adult, and then found it antiquated and arcane. Later I recoiled when I understood how it had supplanted the Bible for many Jews. One of the most inviting parts of religion, its historical narrative, had been overtaken by one of the harshest, its legalism. Now, learning more about the Israelite experience in Babylon and the importance of law as a surrogate for living on the land, I began to appreciate the Talmud as contributing to the survival of Judaism during its many years in exile.
In Babylon, meanwhile, the arrival of Islam in the seventh century did not initially hamper Jewish life. As People of the Book, Jews were considered dhimmi, or protected minorities, with higher taxes, restricted clothing, and limits to the types of buildings they could construct. But Jews were allowed to observe their own laws. A Jewish traveler in the twelfth century reported that Baghdad had forty thousand Jews and twenty-eight synagogues.
As elsewhere, in Iraq Muslim attitudes toward Jews did not sour fully until the twentieth century, with the rise of Zionism. In 1941 radical Muslims funded by the German embassy tried to establish a pro-Nazi regime, and a resulting pogrom killed at least 180 Iraqi Jews; more outbreaks followed the founding of Israel in 1948. In 1950 Iraqi Jews were permitted to leave the country. Israel openly encouraged the emigration: “O Zion, flee,” came the cry. “Israel is calling you—come out of Babylon!” Within six months more than 100,000 Jews were airlifted to Israel under a program called Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, a reference to two prominent Babylonian Jews who returned to Jerusalem at the conclusion of the Exile. Both have biblical books named after them. Twenty thousand more Jews were smuggled through Iran.
For the 6,000 or so Jews who opted to stay in Iraq, life darkened. Following the Baath party takeover in 1963, Jews were forced to carry yellow identity cards, and they had property and bank accounts seized after the Si
x-Day War. In 1968 scores were arrested in an alleged spy ring; eleven were sentenced to be hanged in public squares in Baghdad. On January 27, 1969, Baghdad Radio called on all Iraqis to “come and enjoy the feast”; fifty thousand visitors attended public spectacles in front of the scaffolding holding the dead bodies. In response to an international outcry, official radio declared, “We hanged spies, but the Jews crucified Christ.” In subsequent months most remaining Jews were allowed to emigrate, leaving about 150 when Saddam took power.
Though Emad Levy was born in 1965, he has memories of the day all Baghdad showed up to watch the Jews being hanged. “They invited all Muslims and Christians to come and eat lunch,” he said. “Believe me, they were jealous of the Jews.”
As a child, Emad observed Jewish holidays, and he became a Bar Mitzvah in 1979. He learned Hebrew and fasted on the Day of Atonement. “When I was nine years old I started fasting,” he said. “Believe me, I try to fast for three days, not one day.” Why? “That’s the religion, if you love it.” His mother died in 1981, and his father began working as a caretaker in the synagogue. Emad got a job selling cars. When the last rabbi left the country in 1999, Emad became acting head of the community. So was he happy when the Americans invaded? “Happy for what?” he said. “Because the rockets can hit us?”
“You weren’t happy when Saddam fell?”
“I was very happy about that, because now I am free. Believe me, during the regime of Saddam Hussein I could not meet you. Now you are my brother.”
In the first weeks after the fall of Baghdad, Jewish aid workers made a secret mission to Iraq and identified six elderly Jews who wanted to leave. One of them was eighty-two-year-old Ezra Levy, Emad’s father. A charter plane was sent from Tel Aviv. A front-page picture in Israel’s leading daily showed Levy, a thin-cheeked man with white stubble, arriving at the airport and kissing his sister, whom he had not seen in more than fifty years. “I am a Jew,” he said in halting Hebrew. “I feel very happy and privileged that I am in this place.” He then recited part of Hayim Bialik’s poem “The Bird,” which he had learned in Hebrew as a boy.
Do you bring me friendly greetings
From my brothers there in Zion,
Brothers far yet near?
O the happy! O the blessed!
Do they guess what heavy sorrows
I must suffer here?
I asked Emad whether he was happy or sad the day his father left. “I was very happy,” he said. “Now he will get fat.”
But to me the story held sadness, too. After twenty-six centuries, the Jewish population in Mesopotamia was fading to black. Jews have roots in this soil going back to Abraham, but those roots will almost surely never again bear fruit. Worse, one dream of both supporters and opponents of invading Iraq was that the fall of Saddam might help transform the country into a much-needed bulwark of religious tolerance in the Arab world. Of the country’s 23 million people, roughly two-thirds are Shia Muslims, a quarter are Sunnis, and five percent are Christians, mostly Chaldean Catholics and Assyrian Christians. I certainly wouldn’t wish for Emad Levy or anyone else to remain in a country where they feel threatened. Still, the absence of Jews from a pluralist conversation in Iraq would make that conversation less rich, and maybe less successful. Jews, as a minority with centuries of experience surviving alongside often intolerant majorities, could set a powerful example for Christians and Sunnis in particular, both minorities in Iraq.
Emad, for all his Borscht Belt theatrics, embodied the self-respect that comes from perseverance through hardship. I asked him what lessons he drew from the exiled Israelites who lived in Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar II. “You must keep your religion,” he said. “Even though we are now twenty-two and cannot use the synagogue because it’s too dangerous, we still say our prayers in my house.”
“But isn’t it easier to convert?”
“If you believe in God, it is not easy to convert.”
“When you don’t have electricity, when the police are chasing you, when your family is gone and your friends are dead, aren’t you angry at God?”
“Of course not. Believe me, I have a lot of problems in my life because God exacts hardships from my people, but you must be patient. I learned that lesson long ago.”
I pulled out my Bible. “I would like to read you something from Jeremiah 50,” I said. “In it, God promises to overthrow the Babylonians and send Israel back to its home. ‘Flee from Babylon,’ God says.
Leave the land of the Chaldeans,
And be like he-goats that flee the flock!
For see, I am rousing and leading
An assemblage of great nations against Babylon
From the lands of the north.
I looked at him. “Do you feel God has set you free?”
“Yes,” Emad Levy said. “God helps us in everything we do. Believe me, the most important thing right now is for me to get a better life. I have no future here. There are no women here. I must get a wife.”
“You’re attractive,” I said. “You speak English. You like women. I’ll make you a promise. If you come to New York, I’ll find you a wife in three months.”
“But that will be one of those American wives,” he said. “I’m afraid I need an Iraqi wife, someone who will do what I say.”
“In that case,” I said, “it will take me four months.”
He laughed and held my hand. For a second we sat quietly, brothers. I gestured toward the bundles in the corner.
“So soon you’re going to sell your carpets,” I said. “You’re going to sell your house. And you’re going to get on an airplane.”
“And I will fly first to Jerusalem,” he said. “I want to see the Western Wall. Then maybe I will go visit my brother in Holland.”
“And after 2,600 years—”
“I will be the last Jew,” he said.
“And how will you feel when that plane takes off?”
“I will feel happy,” he said, “because I’m leaving Iraq. Believe me.”
About six months after the war began, I received an e-mail. “Hello,” it began.
I’m an Army Chaplain stationed in Baghdad, and I have just completed your book about Abraham. This is really encouraging, and I am hoping to obtain access to this book in bulk in order to accomplish the following missions:
1. Make this book available to our soldiers here in Baghdad.
2. Have a keepsake gift to give to the local religious leaders, interpreters, and other significant members of the Baghdad community as a parting gift of thanks when we finally leave.
The writer went on to discuss how learning about Abraham had deepened his faith and informed his mission in Iraq, then signed his name, Chaplain Lew Messenger, Battalion Chaplain, Task Force 1-36 IN, 1st Armored Division. Within several weeks, working with my publisher and an old friend, Congressman Jack Kingston of Georgia, I shipped several cases of books to Chaplain Messenger. And on a Saturday morning, two days after meeting Emad Levy, I went to visit Chaplain Messenger at Firebase Melody in the Rusafa district in northern Baghdad, not far from the museum.
One of over 150 Coalition bases in Iraq, Firebase Melody, “Home of the Toughest Infantry in the World,” was built on the grounds of a dormitory at Mustansiriya University. The Army surrounded the facility with a ten-foot-high brick wall, installed a retractable steel gate, and painted the entire complex the color of pale bananas. A metal sign welcomed visitors to the “Winter Home of the New York Yankees.” A homemade sign invited soldiers to an interfaith conversation that afternoon with a local imam and a visitor from the United States.
Chaplain Messenger looked like Radar from M*A*S*H. He wore a floppy desert camouflage hat with a brown cross insignia, had large, clear-rimmed glasses, and rarely managed more than a flat grin. He was soft-spoken and serious. He showed me around the facility, with green military vehicles that had been shipped from Germany before even being repainted. Some soldiers were working on the engines; others were reading Stars & Stripes and drinking
Coca-Cola. The Army had managed to ship in American soft drinks, though most of their food was locally bought. The soggy bologna and canned baked beans in the mess had none of the opulence of Camp Doha.
Chaplain Messenger was thirty-five years old and had been born, raised, educated, ordained, married, and assigned to serve a Lutheran church in the state of Pennsylvania. Yet since he was a boy, he was drawn to the military. “From a Christian perspective, military personnel seem to have a more mature sense of duty,” he said. “They honor obligations. On the civilian side, people seem to pick and choose what aspects of religion they like. If they don’t like certain things, they can always go to Jim Bob’s church down the street that’s tailor-made to their needs.”
Assigned to the 1st Armored Division in 2003, he swept into Baghdad soon after Saddam’s fall and settled in for what proved to be a brutal summer, with a wave of unexpected casualties. I asked what was his toughest moment. “The hardest time for me was standing over this fellow, who was my age, from my state, who was hit by an IED,” he said, using military lingo for improvised explosive device, or roadside bomb. “He came in and half his arm was gone, one side was all laid open. I didn’t recognize him at first. He looked up and said, ‘Hi, sir.’ The medics tried to stabilize him, and in those couple of minutes I was telling him I would take him to a Phillies game after the deployment and so forth. And just like that, he went under.”
“How did you feel?”
“Maybe I was detached from my feelings. Your primary effort at that moment is to help prepare that person for dying, for embracing their savior. I assumed he could hear me, because supposedly hearing is one of the last faculties to leave a person. So I read him a psalm.”
“Twenty-three?” I said.
“No, ninety.” We pulled out our Bibles. “You see that line about being angry at the Lord?” Chaplain Messenger asked. “I skipped over that. I began with verse 13:
