From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

The vesture of the women is even more variegated and costly and resplendent than that of the men. Some are garbed in rich silks of all the tints of the autumn leaf. Some are veiled, others unveiled, according as they come from the Moslem, Jewish, or Christian quarter of the city—but all are gathered around all the booths in which there is a special display of feminine finery. There is no law in Islam to prevent women from visiting the bazaars and whenever they desire to escape the monotony of the harem they start out on a shopping tour in which they take as much delight as do their sisters in the West. Frequently they have no more intention of making purchases than have the habituées of the great department stores of Fifth Avenue or the splendid jewelry shops of La Rue de la Paix.

My attention was directed to the large number of Jews who had shops in the city and stalls in the bazaars. Many of them were specially conspicuous on account of their cheap misfit garments from English and German manufactories, which contrasted sharply with the costly and elegant robes of some of their customers. For headdress most of them wore black skull caps or flaming red fezes made in Vienna. But they all had the same dark, prominent eyes, the same hot and shining looks, like fanned flames, which so characterize the people of their races in other parts of Mesopotamia and the Near East.

When I expressed surprise at the number of the descendants of Abraham that we saw not only in the bazaars but in all parts of the city, one of my companions informed me that they constituted fully one-fourth of the population. The exact number of the inhabitants of Bagdad is not definitely known, but it is variously estimated to be from one hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand. There are, indeed, few, if any, other large cities in the Near East in which the children of Abraham have so great a representation in proportion to that of the adherents of other religious beliefs.

The majority of the Jews in Bagdad are descendants of those who were deported from Judæa to Babylonia by Nebuchadnezzar six centuries before the Christian era. Others, doubtless, are descended from Hebrew captives that were a century and a quarter earlier carried to Assyria by Sargon and Tiglath-pileser III. Still others trace their descent from those who voluntarily sought refuge in Mesopotamia after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans and after the Holy City, many centuries later, fell under the sway of Islam.

The favorable conditions under which the Jews of the Captivity lived during the reign of the Babylonian monarchs, and even during the time of the Abbasside Caliphs, induced many of their brethren to join them in the fertile plains of the Tigris and the Euphrates. So satisfactory, indeed, were the relations of the Jews with their Babylonian rulers, that when, after they had been seventy years in captivity, Cyrus the Great gave them permission to return to their native land, but few of them, comparatively, availed themselves of the proffered opportunity. The unsettled conditions of Palestine and the sad experiences of those of their fellow countrymen who had returned to Jerusalem decided the majority of the Jews to remain in Babylonia where, although nominally captives, they enjoyed more peace, prosperity, and even more freedom than it was possible to find in the ravaged and desolate land of their fathers.

Once fairly settled in Babylonia, where they seem from the first to have enjoyed a great measure of freedom, the mode of life and fortunes of the Jews underwent a complete change. In their fatherland their chief pursuits were pastoral and agricultural. In Mesopotamia also they followed for a time the avocations of their forefathers. Thanks, however, to the greater productivity of the soil in the fertile Babylonian plain, which far surpassed that of the richest fields of Judæa and to their native thrift and industry and keen eye to business opportunities, which permitted no chance to escape them, it was not long before the children of the exiles were living in ease and comfort, while many of them soon found themselves in a position which, as compared with that which they occupied in Palestine afforded them, in Johnsonese phrase, “the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”

From that time most of the Jews of Mesopotamia began to devote themselves to commercial pursuits, which, more than anything else, influenced the subsequent fortunes of their countrymen throughout the world.

But not only did the descendants of the Jews of the Captivity achieve distinction in the commercial world; they also became celebrated for their attainments in science and letters. Under the Caliph Ali, in the middle of the seventh century of our era the Jews of Irak—Southern Babylonia—were able to organize what was almost an independent state. Here flourished the great Talmudic schools of Sara and Pumbeditha and here, in the country of their father Abraham, the Jews loved to fancy the survival of a prince of the Captivity who had recovered the scepter of David.[451] This was a period of notable prosperity for Irak, a period when Bagdad was at the height of its glory; when it was not only preëminent in science, art, and literature but was the religious capital of Jewry as well as Islam.[452]

In conclusion, I may here answer a question which I have been often asked, namely, “What of the future of Bagdad?” “Is there any hope of its return to its former greatness and splendor?”

This is a difficult question to answer. When one remembers that two other great capitals—Seleucia and Ctesiphon—once flourished only a few leagues to the south of the city of the Caliphs and that now but a vestige of them remains; when one remembers that Babylon, a short distance to the southwest, was, for nearly two thousand years, the most magnificent city of the ancient world, but that, under the demolishing action of man and nature, it so completely disappeared that its very site was long a matter of controversy, one will hesitate to make any predictions about anything in a land in which the vicissitudes of fortune have been so extraordinary and in which the conflicts of international interests have been so relentless and so destructive. And yet, when one travels over the matchless alluvial plains on which stood the famous capitals that once controlled the destinies of Western Asia, one cannot but feel that there is a brilliant future in this celebrated region of the two rivers, but only when a stable and enterprising government shall have been established—a government whose purpose will be not to exploit the land and the populace for its own selfish purposes, but a government that shall be willing to guarantee to the people the blessings of peace and at the same time honestly strive to secure for them their position in the family of nations, to which their long and wonderful history gives them so just a title.[453] Then and then only shall we again see the broad desert of Mesopotamia blossoming as of old, and witness once more in the Land of the Two Rivers a metropolis that shall recall the greatness and the splendor of Babylon and Seleucia and Ctesiphon and of Bagdad too,—Medinah-al-Salam—as it was in the golden prime of Al Mamun and Harun-al-Rashid the Great.