In the chaos of the 2003 war, remnants of a once-thriving Jewish past were saved (or stolen?) by America. Where do they belong? (Lisa Leff, Tablet Mgazine).
In this sense, the exhibit sidesteps the question that has made the Iraqi Jewish archive such a hot topic in the Jewish press for the last 10 years: Should the United States honor its agreement to return these things to Iraq, or should they instead be sent to Israel, where most Iraqi Jews fled and many of their descendants still live? While international law may be clear—belligerent troops may not cart away the cultural treasures of a conquered nation—for many Jews, the law doesn’t seem to serve justice in this particular case.As the article makes clear, the Iraqi secret police confiscated the manuscripts after the Jewish owners were driven out of Iraq, which rather reduces the moral urgency of Iraq's claims to them.
On one level, this is a question of access. If these materials return to Iraq, it’s hard to imagine that Israeli scholars will be able to travel to Iraq to consult them. But this is a practical problem, to which American authorities are offering a technical solution. As part of the restoration process, NARA’s staff will be carefully digitizing every book and every document in the collection that cannot be found elsewhere. NARA’s Doris Hamburg promises that the rare materials will be made available for free on NARA’s website, and they will be word-searchable, with annotations by experts. Ironically, the massive digitization project that is intended to accompany the return of Jewish cultural treasures to Iraq will make the archive more widely and easily available to Jewish scholars from around the world than it would have been if NARA had kept the collection in Washington. Astoundingly, much of the Iraqi Jewish archive—once-secret trove hidden away by a police state, unknown and far from the public’s reach—is about to become one of the most easily accessible collections of Jewish materials in the world.
Be that as it may, one question that is not raised in the article (and seems, as far as I can tell, not to be of much concern to international law), is where the archive will be safest and best cared for. I have been belaboring this concern with reference to this and related stories for a long time. It seems a shame that a political tug-of-war over who should get the archive overshadows that concern.
Background on the Iraqi Jewish archive is here with a decade's worth of links.
I am glad to hear about the digitization. For more such digitization projects, see the immediately preceding post and links.