Aliyah Diary 77: Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center

Where has this museum been all my life?

This museum is about a continuous 3,000+ year old Jewish community referenced in the Bible – which is, in turn, referenced in Babylonian artifacts, and which ended only about 70 years ago. King Jehoiachin surrendered to Nebuchadnezzar in about 500 BCE and Talmud that we study was written there (there’s another from Jerusalem) and it was the center of Jewish life and thought until about 1000 years ago when Spain took over, followed by Poland (see section 02D).

This a rather important Jewish community to discuss though not so relatable when living in the United States where the Jews today are almost all from Eastern Europe with many post-holocaust. Hence, our US Jewish museums tend to be about exactly that. (There’s only on holocaust museum in Israel that I know of – Israel likes to focus on strengths.)

By the 1950s approximately 110,000 Jews moved from Iraq to Israel with their suitcases alone. When considering that the 1948 population of Israel was about 600,000, that’s quite a large percentage! These are people that I call “my neighbors”. I mean … the people living in the houses to the left, right, and across from me.

In a fit of post WWI nationalism, which brought us the breakup of empires and the creation of new ethnocentric states, Iraqis excluded their Jewish neighbors of 2000+ years (with plenty of other times in there that they did so too) and Jews has a new ethnocentric state.

When the world tells you about the “Palestinian refugees” (when six countries started a war with Israel and created the refugees rather than accept a Jewish ethnocentric region), tell them about the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees. The picture above – those people are Jewish.

You can’t have it both ways. We just don’t hear about the Jewish refugees because we were integrated into the new location after some time – days or years – in tents. Maybe don’t kick hundreds of thousands of Jews out of your countries if you don’t want them to form a state in Israel? <shrug>

Times of the Talmud Until !950

When we learn the Talmud it’s without pictures. What did it actually look like? We have some descriptions … and hey, here’s a model:

Those centers of Torah learning where the Talmud was written? Pumedisa and Suria … we hear the names all the time and don’t see them. Hey, here they are on a map:

. . . and here’s all the Jewish stuff in Baghdad, 1950, just before the Iraqis let the Jews leave with a suitcase each:

Well, thanks for letting us in forcing us in and thanks for … forcing us out, I guess?

Jewish Life in Babylon

A lot is familiar to my Ashkenazi brain, some different. The clothing is especially different, and the museum likes to highlight how the Jews and Muslims more-or-less looked the same, were in the same musical groups, and so on.

Some pictures . . .

This next one has nothing to do with the museum … it’s just nearby … “in the merit of lottery”. Nice.