Rare Iraqi Jewish books – who is the rightful owner?
This entry is cross-posted at the JPS Blog.
I’ve always had this nerdy thing for antiquarian books – I even once spent a summer working at a rare books and manuscripts library. So naturally I got pretty excited when I stumbled across this article earlier today. The article was published a little over a year ago, on June 27 – I’d be curious to know what kind of progress has been made in the smuggling operation since then.
The Agence France-Presse reported from Jerusalem:
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.
I think this article poses an interesting question: who is the rightful owner of these cultural artifacts? Of course, it’s a little difficult to side with a repressive dictatorship, but still – are these Iraqi rare books, or Jewish rare books? I think you can easily argue either side. After all, Iraqi history isn’t just Arab, it’s also Jewish, Kurdish, Armenian, and even Christian. (Sidepoint: this definitely brings to mind the Elgin Marbles debate, and the sticky issue of art and cultural repatriation in general.)
And to add another layer of difficulty to the debate – the article says that these books were purchased from theives, who stole them from private dealers. Is this ethical? Of course, we don’t know how those private dealers got their hands on the books. But the question of rightful ownership is still very unclear. What are your thoughts on the issue?
-Naomi
