Cultural Imperialism Washington-Style: "Keep the Iraqi Jews’ Legacy Safe — in America"

Cynthia Kaplan Shamash, a dentist in Flushing, Queens, writes: "Keep the Iraqi Jews’ Legacy Safe — in America" (New York Times November 7, 2013). [One almost feels the urge to put an exclamation mark at the end of the article's title]:

Honoring the Bush administration’s pledge, and returning the materials would dishonor every one of the Jews who were cruelly driven from their homeland. The United States should make sure this trove of memory remains safely in America for the world to share.

The United States Ms Shamash is not "the whole world", any more than Baghdad is. The article presents a rather simplistic view of events, the peopling of the new state of Israel and its relations with the Moslem world is more than the story of 120 000 Iraqi Jews, no matter in what tragic colours of "cruelty" they are painted. Linking the Farhud with the events consequent to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War may be effective literature, but telescopes two separate phenomena into one process. Other views are possible. From the perspective of what she wrote she presents the materials, left behind by migrants and stored in an official building, as "an obviously looted trove". I'd like to ask the  "member of the board of the World Organization of Jews From Iraq" for her legal definition of that term. By what Iraqi law in force at the time of the removal of those documents by the US occupier or by which internationally-recognized (and ratified by the US) international convention is the status of those objects defined as "looted"? Actually, as far as I can see, none. But there ARE conventions, and among their signatories is the United States of America, which deal with the treatment of cultural property in occupied countries and times of war, and removing these materials by any occupier is a flagrant violation of the terms of those Conventions. Like it or not, it is as simple as that.

Of course if America was still a UNESCO Member state, it could attempt to influence that body to create other conventions to give a third party the right to step in and save whatever cultural property it wants (perhaps of a self-defined "oppressed minority") from under the nose of another sovereign state. But it is not. America at the moment has no say in such matters.

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This of course is by no means a problem restricted to Jews. It is not by any means a problem restricted to Iraqi Jews. During and after the First World War state borders were redrawn, new states were created, old ones dismantled. Cultural property and personal belongings of individuals and groups found themselves overnight in a foreign country. There were population movements, but the whole process intensified in and after the Second World War. There was colonization of newly-won territories, then withdrawal during the War. The Nazi defeat and Soviet victory were followed all over central and eastern Europe by expulsions and migrations (exactly the same as the contemporary population movements in Iraq). Germans were thrown out of ancestral homelands in what became western and northeastern Poland. I'd say - reading the contemporary accounts - one could use exactly the same adjectives for them. They too were allowed to take only a small portion of their belongings, the rest was left behind.   The same goes for Poles living in what then became part of the Soviet Union, Ukranians and Belarussians too. Do we now propose that any German material falling into US occupiers' hands from Silesia should go to Washington for safe-keeping? Here's a Spritzdekor teapot, a bit worse for wear but almost certainly looted from an abandoned German home 1945-1953. Now on sale on eBay. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people were "cruelly forced to leave their homeland" and abandon property even though they were not Nazis, had no part in the War or anything else. They had to go because Stalin said so. That's millions of abandoned objects and properties. In what way (substantially) does one group of abandoned-under-duress differ from any other? Should we be buying up all the chipped Silesian teapots without lids  left behind by the Vertreibung and shipping them all off to Washington for "safe keeping" on behalf of an oppressed minority?  

This is in no way intended to dismiss or diminish the suffering and hardships of Iraqi Jews (or any other minority group persecuted there in the twentieth century), but I would suggest that interest groups such as Ms  Shamash's recognize that theirs is not the only, and isolated, instance of such events. The twentieth century was brutal for very many people and communities, and a lot of that brutality was due to their perceived "Otherness". The recognition by us all of the importance of this cultural variety is why states are encouraged to respect and preserve the cultural property of various groups, living or vanished, within their borders.