My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq by Ariel Sabar
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Lost Tribe Loses the Plot

A moving story, as so often the case, of Jews dispossessed and exiled. In this instance from the remote region of Kurdish Iraq. There is no question that this story of personal travail is worth telling and worth reading. Among other things, it is a story which provides essential background for the recent rise of Islamic State and its persecution of Kurdish Christians in a re-play of what the Iraqi government did to the Kurdish Jews almost seven decades ago.

But Sabar’s main theme isn’t personal, despite his use of his own family on which to paint a picture of what he himself refers to as one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. His primary point is a cultural one. The book is a sort of a conciliatory homage to his father who, removed from the ancestral home of the Kurdistan Jews as a child, is one of a disappearing remnant of this ancient fragment of the Jewish Dispersion directed by the Assyrian empire in the 8th century BCE. His father is, understandably, obsessed by his heritage: “My father had staked his life on the notion that the past mattered more than anything.” For him, the lost culture of Kurdistani Judaism has an intensely emotional and sentimental import: “The past felt safe, like a hiding place.” He devotes his life to the documentation of the Neo-Aramaic dialect that was all but lost in the mass emigration. Again, from a personal perspective, this is a not unreasonable response to traumatic dislocation. But the subject of the book isn’t his father, it is the culture in which this arcane dialect persisted and to which his father has devoted his adult life to remembering.

What kind of culture was this? Certainly beyond primitive, beyond simple patriarchy. It was a savage, uneducated, feudal culture of subsistence, not one of arts or technology or social graces or even modest civilisation. It was a culture in which not only was a boy-child valued infinitely over a girl (despite a long-term decline in population), but one in which an infant was given away to a nomadic wet-nurse whom no one knew, and who was not pursued when she didn’t return the child as per agreement merely because her father was not so inclined to postpone pressing business engagements. Subsequently he cavalierly risked his sons in his smuggling operations. This was apparently a culture based not on personal, family, tribal, or religious loyalty, but solely on the prospects for trade, both legal and illegal. Its brutality, necessitated in part by the severe physical environment in which it existed, was made an order of magnitude more brutal by the reduction of human relationships to their functional usefulness in maintaining the dominance of males. Think of the poverty of Dickensian London overlaid with the social barbarity of the barrios of Sao Paulo, and the Maoist destruction of family feeling in the Cultural Revolution. This is the world of Kurdish Jews in the 1930’s and 40’s as portrayed by Sabar - verging itself on tragedy in its very existence.

Why then should one be tempted to mourn the passage of such a culture? Sabar’s sentimental quest for his roots as a mode of reconciliation with his father is understandable. But remarkable as is the survival of a remote Jewish enclave for 2700 years, its voluntary assimilation into the modern world, principally the modern world of Israeli Judaism, is hardly a profound tragedy. The life of a Kurdish Jew was no idyll. Viewed as an historical relic, the loss of this remnant of the Assyrian-ordered diaspora and its oral traditions is perhaps of somewhat less significance than the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddha of Bamiyan. Much of the oral tradition could at least be recorded for posterity unlike the ancient statue which is irrecoverable. Viewed as the rescue of a group of impoverished, disadvantaged, illiterate, and hopelessly dying human beings, this same loss can only be viewed as a successful and fortunate work of mercy.

There was however one major characteristic of this culture worth saving: its religious tolerance. The isolation of the Kurdish region insulated local Jews, Muslims, Christians and others from the religious ideologies promoted elsewhere - from pan Arab Islam to Zionist Judaism to Evangelical Christianity. Whatever the level of patriarchal brutality existing in any of the Kurdish religious groups, they all had a remarkable degree of mutual respect for tradition and custom according to Sabar. Muslims, for example, routinely carried out sabbath-day tasks forbidden to Jews while Jews refrained from smoking during Ramadan. He describes a sort of equivalent to the Iberian Golden Age of tolerance and civil assistance, without of course the intellectual component. This amicability was destroyed not by Dominican religious agitprop of course but simply by improvement in communications with the ideologically enmeshed world. Having been touched by religious and nationalist propaganda and by the increased political interest in that part of the globe, there was no way inter-religious relations could remain stable after the Second World War.

Nevertheless, despite this apparently accidental, and perhaps incidental, religious tolerance, it is difficult to conceive of the conditions in which Kurdish Jews existed to be, as the title suggests, in any way paradise-like. Paradise as a sentimental conceit certainly but not as any ground-truth. No, as a memoir of personal displacement and courageous re-establishment, the book works. As a memorial to a lost culture whose contribution to the world will be missed, it is an inevitable failure.

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