Posted on 06/27/2008 11:00:51 AM PDT by Nachum
Some 300 rare and valuable books confiscated from Iraq's Jewish community by Saddam Hussein's regime have been secretly spirited into Israel, an Israeli newspaper reported on Friday. The books include a 1487 commentary on the biblical Book of Job and another volume of biblical prophets printed in Venice in 1617, the Haaretz daily said.
The volumes are part of a massive collection of books confiscated by the secret police of the executed Iraqi dictator and stored in security installations in the Iraqi capital until the US-led invasion of 2003.
Many volumes were damaged during the bombing of government buildings in the opening weeks of the war, and after the fall of Baghdad most of the books were sent off to be temporarily stored at the Library of Congress in Washington.
Others however ended up in the hands of private dealers.
"We bought them from thieves," Mordechai Ben-Porat, an Iraqi-born Jew and the founder of Jerusalem's Babylonian Jewry Heritage centre told the newspaper, adding that the foundation paid some 25,000 dollars (16,000 euros).
In the beginning, Ben-Porat sent an emissary to Baghdad who shipped the books directly to Israel, but once the Americans caught wind of his activities they forbade further shipments, forcing him to smuggle the rest, he said.
Iraq once hosted a thriving 2,600 year-old Jewish community that numbered some 130,000 people at the time Israel was created in 1948.
But after Israel came into being and into conflict with its Arab neighbours, Iraqi Jews began to suffer discrimination and were often accused of being agents of the new Jewish state.
By 1952 more than 123,000 had left the country, and 20 years later there were no more than 500 left.
Many more left the country following the 1991 Gulf War and today, after the chaos unleashed by the US-led invasion and the overthrow of Saddam, only some two dozen are believed to remain.
“but once the Americans caught wind of his activities they forbade further shipments”
As if the proper repository for Jewish books is an Islamic nation which drove its Jews out. . .
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The US didn't try to keep them in Iraq. They had them sent to the Library of Congress for temporary storage. Nothing wrong with trying to keep these rare and valuable tomes in hands that will make them available to scholars and the public, or enable them to be returned to their rightful owners where possible.
Private dealers are often just selling to the highest bidder, and there's no guarantee the books would remain accessible, or even be kept safe from destruction. Ownership of the some of the volumes may be traceable to specific Jewish people who were forced to flee Iraq without most of their possessions, and the books need to be kept safe until it's possible to make reasonably thorough attempts to track down any rightful owners or their still-living heirs. If no owners can be located, then the books should go to a publicly accessible institution, preferably in Israel.
These antiques were apparently nationalised, and as such are the property of the Iraqi state, and it is regrettable that so much has been stolen. Although, for sentiment’s sake, it might seem appropriate that Jewish books be in Israel, if they are part of Iraq’s cultural heritage then the Iraqis did have the right to keep them. I don’t think that the modern state of Greece has the right to rampage over to Iran and appropriate antique statues of Alexander.
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