Iraq demands return of its Jewish archive

Source: WP

The soldiers came looking for weapons of mass destruction. What they found in the flooded basement of Saddam Hussein's secret police headquarters was a legacy of destruction -- the demise of one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world.

There was a treasure trove of Torahs and Haggadas, centuries old. And there were marriage records, university applications, financial documents -- the living record of a community, seized by the Mukhabarat from the homes of Jews as they fled Iraq under pressure and amid persecution, with only a handful remaining.

Now comes the historical conundrum: Who owns these materials?

In the chaotic aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion of 2003, the thousands of sodden documents were spirited out of the country with an assist from then-Vice President Richard B. Cheney's office and a vague promise of their return once they had been restored. With the materials still sitting in a College Park office building, stabilized but with mold on them, the Iraqi government is demanding that they be shipped back, saying they are the property of the Iraqi people.

"They represent part of our history and part of our identity. There was a Jewish community in Iraq for 2,500 years," said Samir Sumaidaie, the Iraqi ambassador to the United States. "It is time for our property to be repatriated."

...

Dov. S. Zakheim, a senior Pentagon official in the George W. Bush administration, is opposed to sending the materials back to Iraq. "I have no sympathy for a government which stole it from the rightful owners and then a successor government saying it belongs to them," he said.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/29/AR2010042904584.html

Give it back to Iraq, then let the parties involved solve it.

own them or their heirs. I don't see how the gov't of Iraq has rightful claim to any of that stuff.

Sure, that makes a heck of a lot of sense. That shit-head should be fired for his inability to grasp simple logical inconsistencies, no matter what else they do on their job.

This material ought to be in a museum. It could be in Israel, or Baghdad. Legally, though, the Iraqi government is right: art and artifacts are not to be plundered during war. It should go back to Iraq, but Iraq should also hold negotiations with Iraqi Jews in Isreal regarding the return of their cultural patrimony.

If these materials were indeed stolen from individuals or from Synagogues, why shouldn't they go back to the rightful owners or their heirs?

When the congregation gets to small to support a synagogue they will often be given into the care of individuals or sent to other synagogues, but when the congregation crashes abruptly they wind up stored away, misplaced - orphaned.

Nobody really knows who the rightful owners would be. There is no reason for them not to be in a museum.

Generally, if items like these are stolen from individuals or from synagogues, they wind up destroyed, not in a government warehouse. Iraq has a long multi-cultural history. There is no reason to assume that this is stolen loot. If the government wants it returned, I think it should be returned.

how you know where these items came from- and the article indicates that it's not just Torahs. And where is your evidence that items like these that are stolen, end up destroyed? that's actually not the record.

What is wrong with returning these items to the people that they were stolen from? I think it's very unlikely that people just abandoned this stuff- and if they did it was likely under duress. Most of Iraq's Jews fled- and they weren't allowed to take property. It's more than likely that much of this property is from that period and was indeed, essentially stolen.

from wiki:

Like most Arab League states, Iraq initially forbade the emigration of its Jews after the 1948 war on the grounds that allowing them to go to Israel would strengthen that state. However, by 1949 Jews were escaping Iraq at about a rate of 1,000 a month (Simon, Reguer, and Laskier, p 365).

Hoping to stem the flow of assets from the country, in March 1950 Iraq passed a law of one year duration allowing Jews to emigrate on condition of relinquishing their Iraqi citizenship. They were motivated, according to Ian Black, by "economic considerations, chief of which was that almost all the property of departing Jews reverted to the state treasury"

Having this material in Baghdad might pose some sort of security problem, but Iraq is the context of these materials. I quite agree that, for those items that have a clear owner, an effort ought to be made to locate them. But for many items, this is unlikely to be the case. We don't know that Iraqi Jews will never return. I grew up in Berlin: having some Jewish cultural institutions preserved in that city was seen by all to be appropriate, though, again, Baghdad might be a little different in this regard. I'm not a Jew, though I knew a few Jews in Berlin who thought that it was important to return, not to Israel, but to where their parents and grandparents had actually lived. Today, Germany has a Jewish population of 120,000.

http://static.guim.co.uk/Guardian/news/gallery/2007/aug/31/internationalnews.architecture/GD4481504@Members-of-Berlin%27s-J-109.jpg

The Synagogue on Rykestrasse in Berlin

The best place for these materials would be Baghdad or Israel. Bilateral negotiations between the Iraqi government and the community of Iraqi Jews in Israel would probably be the best way to determine their disposition, not an act of fiat by the Bush regime.

their property. It was confiscated by the state. The state should NOT benefit. The rightful owners or their heirs should have their property returned.

They should be placed in a museum in Israel. This is why Israel exists, why it must exist -- because Jews are a minority wherever they go and are, again and again, whenever times get tough, scapegoated and chased away by majorities.

But the letter of the law is sometimes idiotic.

Take American Indian "finds" (for want of a good generic term). If they're sufficiently old, it's likely that the people living where they were found are no closer relatives to any remains or the producers of any artifacts than are any randomly Chumash or Penobscot are. Yet they're considered to be that tribe's "cultural patrimony", even if utterly foreign.

The claim can only really stand at times because nobody has any better claim, whatever the Indians themselves say. Sometimes they're no better than flat-earthers.

We have the same sort of business going on with a lot of historic African-American sites, where regardless of who owns them now they're still considered part of black "heritage", and they should be preserved for the sake not of recent Latino or S. Asian immigrants but for the sake of the "community."

In this case the artifacts aren't part of the patrimony of the Iraqi people. The thing is, we're used to thinking of a nation as a state, to the point that we've changed the meaning of "nation" to mean "state". Our framework just fails.

In fact, it becomes equivalent to saying that all Indian artifacts are actually US property, for the US to do with as it wants. Now, the law may say that, but we tend to react rather viscerally at the idea. And we'd react even more viscerally if we were talking about a trove of abused and abandoned O'odham artifacts put into storage after, say, we had forced nearly all the O'odham to move to Mexico.

the bushco war criminals and this is only one of them. All this stuff should be returned to them and right now. Best I remember after the invasion we pretty much looted the whole country. Crimes, its all been criminal

it doesn't belong to the state. It belongs to individuals or their heirs.

I cry when I think of all that the Iraq people have lost and all for a lie.