Exile sage

An exhibition at Jerusalem’s Bible Lands Museum reveals a story never told before of 100 years of the Babylonian exile.

By JUDITH SUDILOVSKY
An exhibition at Jerusalem’s Bible Lands Museum. (photo credit: REUTERS)
An exhibition at Jerusalem’s Bible Lands Museum.
(photo credit: REUTERS)
SOMETIME BETWEEN 592 and 591 BCE an exiled Judean of some importance named Samak-Yama was among a number of high-ranking individuals who received a monthly food ration from the stocks of Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king, who from 606 to 582 BCE exiled the ancient Judeans.
The exact rations Samak-Yama received – and many other minutiae of everyday life of the first generations of the Judean Babylonian exile – have been remarkably preserved in more than 100 matchbox-sized cuneiform tablets on which scribes of the Babylonian kingdom noted and dated in the tiny wedged-shaped signs of the Akkadian language – with sporadic writing in Aramaic and Paleo-Hebrew – the daily financial exchanges, rental agreements and agricultural and other transactions undertaken by the population.
Cuneiform is the oldest form of writing known to scholars.
These 100 tablets – known as the Al- Yahudu Tablets – are administrative legal texts through which the lives of the exiled Judeans in Babylon in the 6th-5th centuries BCE can be documented and are part of a large archive of more than 200 tablets that surfaced in the antiquities market in the 1970s. They are now owned by two private collectors.
In February, the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem opened the “By the Rivers of Babylon” exhibit with what they say is the most important part of the collection, depicting the lives of Judean exiles, on loan to them from London-based Israeli collectors Cindy and David Sofer. Other pieces for the exhibit were loaned by the Israel Antiquities Authority, several family and private collections, the Israel Museum, the Museum of the Bible in Oklahoma City and the Museum of the Diaspora.
The ancient Babylonians were known for being very meticulous in keeping administrative records, so while there are hundreds of thousands of such cuneiform tablets in museums, archives and private collections today, this is the first time scholars have been able to take a glimpse into the everyday lives of the exiled Judeans who lived in a number of cities in Babylonia, the most important of them being Al-Yahudu (“the City of Judah”).
“We have the incredible opportunity to reveal a story never told before of a period of 100 years of the Babylonian exile, especially the second half of the story following the deportation to Babylon, because of the cuneiform tablets,” Dr. Filip Vukosavović the curator of the exhibition, enthusiastically tells The Jerusalem Report.
While putting together the exhibit, he was able to handle slingshots and arrowheads used in the battle for Jerusalem and Judah during the Babylonian onslaught, and it was “like going back through 2,500 years of history,” he says. “We now know so much based on these archives about these people. They were considered state dependents, paid taxes and followed Babylonian law. Some of them worked in the Babylonian administration and bureaucracy.
It was a multicultural society, since there were also groups exiled from other nations in addition to the Judeans. Finally, we can know about this history on a level we never knew before.”
Residents of Gaza and Ashkelon were among the multicultural exiles along with the Judeans, and the king used these exiles to rebuild his economy and much-needed agricultural base to maintain his imperial dynasty, notes Vukosavović. Toward this end many of the exiles were taken from the rich, educated and professional classes, who could contribute to the Babylonian economy. The Judeans, like other exiles, integrated into Babylonian society until the empire was conquered in 539 BCE by Persian King Cyrus who allowed all the exiles to return to their lands of origin.
YET MOST of the tablets in the Al-Yahudu collection date after the Persian conquest of Babylon, with the latest dating to 477 BCE – 60 years after the release of all the exiles – indicating that a number of Judean families, who likely had succeeded and flourished in their new home, remained in Babylonia.
There, they eventually wrote the Babylonian Talmud, becoming the largest and longest-lasting Jewish community until the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, when most were expelled between 1950-1952 from what is now Iraq. Those who remained were subjected to harassment, threats and accusations and, in 1968, 11 Jews were publicly hanged as alleged spies for Israel, as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis cheered and celebrated.
For Imad Levi, 49, who arrived in Israel in 2010, one of the last Iraqi Jews to leave that country, attending the opening of the Bible Lands Museum exhibit in February was a moving reminder of his family’s long history in Iraq.
“It starts 2,500 years ago and this exhibit tells it all. Of all the history we learned in Iraq, they never taught us about how the Jews were taken prisoner. But this is a story we all know. They brought us to Babylon as their hostages,” he tells The Report.
“We lived there using our brains, thinking how to manage with people. Giving everyone what they needed could save your life. That is how I was taught,” relates Levi, who served the remnant of the Baghdad Jewish community as rabbi and ritual slaughterer until he left. An avid swimmer, he recounted how many Muslims wanted to race against him. “I would let them win, let them feel like they beat a Jew. For them it was a big deal to beat a Jew, but for me I was saving my life.”
There are five Jews left now in Baghdad, he says, mostly men ranging in age between 54 and 86, two of whom are doctors. The last Jewish wedding in Baghdad was held in 1978, the last circumcision ceremony in 1983.
In Israel, Levi has not been able to keep in touch with those left behind, but they communicate with family members in England so news reaches him occasionally. His mother died after the first Gulf War, and his brother immigrated to Holland years before. His father came to Israel in 2003 and lives in Ramat Gan, where Levi also lives. Though he had wanted to leave earlier, the Iraqi government prevented him from doing so. He was finally able to emigrate thanks to the help of some Muslim friends and made his way to Israel via Jordan.
“It is difficult living there. They live just like robots, going from work and back home and then to work again,” he says of the remaining Iraqi Jews.
When he left Iraq, Levi was forced to leave behind all his savings, property and belongings, but his life in Israel has provided opportunities unimaginable in Baghdad. Two years ago, he married a Sabra whose parents had come from Iraq and he is now the father of a one-and-a-half-year-old son.
“This is our rightful place. They took us from here. I feel like I have returned to my origins,” he says. “There we lived without hope, we couldn’t think about the future.”
Still, Levi laments having to leave behind Jewish artifacts, valuable reminders of the rich Jewish heritage that thrived in Iraq for thousands of years.
“It is sad seeing people playing with our heritage, trying to sell it and we are not allowed to take it with us. Very sad. But when I saw the exhibit I thanked God they found similar things here,” he says.
Unlike the thousands of documents and books of the Iraqi Jewish Archives that were discovered by US forces in the flooded basement of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence headquarters in 2003 and brought to the US for restoration, there is no dispute as to whom the tablets belong to, says Amanda Weiss, director of the Bible Lands Museum, and so they are in no danger of having their provenance questioned.
“THESE TABLETS were legally purchased in the antiquities market so repatriation is not an issue here,” she tells The Report.
Still, she joins other Jewish groups such as the ADL and Justice for Jews from Arab countries in expressing concern about what will happen to the Iraqi Jewish Archives if the thousands of documents are sent back to Iraq this summer in accordance with the agreement between the US National Archives, which restored and digitalized the documents, and the Iraqi provisional government. Some two dozen documents from the archives, which date from 1540 to 1970, were on display for three months from November 8, 2013 at the US Archives. They are now being exhibited at the New York Museum of Jewish Heritage from February 4 to May 18, before they are scheduled to be returned to Iraq.
Especially in light of the recent destruction Islamic State forces have wrought on various archaeological sites and artifacts in Iraq, Weiss says, “This material [from the Iraqi Jewish Archives] does not belong in Iraq. It belongs in a museum. They are certainly important historical evidence and documents of the proud Jewish Iraqi culture. What is going on in Mosul and ancient sites in the cradle of civilization is absolutely horrifying. Fanatic Islamic forces are destroying anything which does not fit in with their religious perspective.”
As for the tablets, two scholars have been working on the texts for almost 15 years and all this archival information has been published for the first time in English and Hebrew. An English translation of the other half of the archive, which is in the hands of a European collector, is expected this year.
Scholars of biblical history use a triangle of sources including biblical, extra biblical written sources and archaeological finds to tell the story of the Babylonian exile from its beginning in Jerusalem. And now, asserts Vukosavović, the tablets further strengthen the story.
“The texts are packed with personal names of first, second, third, fourth and fifth generations of the exiled Judeans,” says Vukosavović. “It becomes very personal.”
Using a number of the tablets, Vukosavović was able to reconstruct the probable family tree of a certain exile, Samak-Yama, who may or may not be the same Samak-Yama mentioned earlier as receiving rations from the king.
Thanks to the tablets, says Vukosavović, scholars know a great deal about Samak-Yama, his family, his children, his great-grandchildren, as well as details about the family inheritance allocated to five great-grandchildren and two slaves. In addition, the scholars were able to find many other Judeans with names still in use in modern Hebrew, such as Nadab (Nadav), Matania, Hanan, Tub-Ya (Tuvia), Shabbataia, and Nahhum.
A day after the opening of the exhibit, the museum together with the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center in Or Yehuda hosted the 18th annual Conference of the Israel Society for Assyriology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies, where Israeli and international scholars presented research on the tablets on subjects ranging from the “Geopolitical and ethno-linguistic aspects of the documentation on the Judean exiles” to using the Judean community of Al-Yahudu as an example of how marriages were negotiated in multicultural Babylonia.
In all of the world, there are but a few dozen people who can read and decipher what is written on the tablets. One of them is Dr. Irving Finkel of the British Museum, who spoke at the 12th annual Elie Borowski Memorial Lecture, who also accompanied the opening of the exhibit.
“For Jews and anybody else… this is a remarkable thing, a remarkable collection… which gives out information in a totally independent account,” he noted, remarking that, indeed, in the end only about one-third of the Judean families chose to return to Judea when given the chance, with the greater majority choosing to remain in their adopted country.
“In a few generations they would have disappeared into the mass of people in Babylonia as happened to the other peoples, but whatever they did and adapted to Babylon, nevertheless, they preserved their cultural identity… their sense of identity was so strong, so they did not disappear,” he concluded.