Iraqi Jewish documents remain in limboAs always, I think the decision should be made on the basis of what is best for the ancient artifacts, not on any nationalist considerations.
Damaged during the U.S. invasion and shipped from Baghdad to Washington for preservation, a collection of antique Torahs and other material faces an uncertain future. Back to Iraq? Or to Israel?
By Alice Fordham, Los Angeles Times
October 31, 2010
[...]
Saad Eskander, the director of Iraq's National Library and Archive, says the collection belongs in Iraq. He said he was negotiating with the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, but if those talks failed, he would probably work with international organizations to take the case to U.S. courts.
"Jews are Iraq's oldest community. They are a significant part of the history of establishing Iraq," said Eskander, who helped rebuild the National Library after it was reduced to rubble by fighting and looting.
Jewish groups in America and Israel, however, have raised concerns about the safety of the collection if it were returned to Iraq.
"We fear the documents might be lost forever to Iraqi Jews," said Eric Fusfield of the B'nai B'rith international Jewish organization, which wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton this year calling for an immediate bar on the return of the documents.
"The Iraqi government should be commended for trying to preserve the Jewish legacy … but these are Jewish communal properties first and foremost."
State Department officials in Baghdad declined to comment beyond saying that negotiations were ongoing and that they hoped for resolution soon.
[...]
Shmuel Moreh, a professor of Arabic literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, left Iraq in 1951, along with hundreds of thousands of Jews who were victimized in the wake of the creation of Israel. He believes that all Jewish documents from Iraq are vital, and would like to see them in Israel.
"We need the documents to learn about history," he said. "We couldn't take any documents from Iraq when we left."
Although he felt that the Iraqi government had every right to claim the documents as their own and said he would be happy to work with good copies of the documents, he expressed doubt that Iraq had the skills to read the rare Judeo-Arabic scripts or the facilities to conserve the archive.
The collection, now kept in cold storage, would be subject to Iraq's flickering electricity supplies and to the still-considerable risk of bombs, thieves and institutional disarray.
A trip to the Babylonian section of a museum in Berlin, filled with archaeological treasures taken in the 19th century from what is now Iraq, had made Moreh believe the documents would be safer elsewhere.
He was accompanied by a group of Iraqi academics who admired the magnificent winged bull sculptures of the early Assyrian civilization displayed in the museum. Had they remained in Iraq, they would probably have been pocked with bullets or stolen, he said.
Moreh said: "Even these educated people said, 'What luck that the Germans took all this and kept it in such a way. They saved my civilization.'"
Background here, where I make the same point at greater length, and here.