Sunday, June 10, 2018
Elder of Ziyon
The New York Times had an article on Friday by Michael David Lukas, a writer who spent a lot of time looking at ancient Jewish cemeteries mostly in Muslim countries like Tunisia and Egypt.
He ends off the article this way:
It might be difficult to find the traces of Jewish history in Kolkata or Cairo or Baghdad or Fez. And it might be difficult to imagine that now-vanished world in which Jewish bakers lived side by side with Muslim doctors, Armenian tailors and Zoroastrian jewelers.Not once in the article is the reader given any context as to why the Jews who had lived in these places for so long suddenly disappeared.
But that’s all the more reason to search out those places. In visiting these semi-abandoned cemeteries and synagogues, in seeking out the remnants of this mostly forgotten past, I’ve tried, in my own small way, to pay my respects to the dead and to remember that lost world in which they lived.
The taboo of mentioning the obvious fact of Muslim antisemitism - especially after Israel was reborn, but also throughout history - is simply too strong.
Instead of being ethnically cleansed, the Jews who attended these synagogues just magically disappeared.
