Days after the recent Paris atrocity, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said: "There's something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo … [Then] There was a sort of particularized focus and … a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they're really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate.” I’m sure that many felt the same following the terror attacks in San Bernadino. In commenting today about the threats facing Christianity, I wish to argue that such thinking is dangerous. As certain as day follows night, after Saturday comes Sunday. We must step forward.
During the past few years, I have been among the organizers of a joint Muslim-Protestant-Catholic-Jewish study mission to the Holy Land. Participants in the Path of Abraham, in addition to seeking to understand the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, visited sites sacred to the monotheistic traditions that regard Abraham as the founder of their faith.
When we brought Jews into Jenin, we expected discomfort. When niqab garbed women entered yeshivot in Jewish settlements, we anticipated stares. When we ascended to the Haram al-Sharif, we knew that only Muslims would be allowed entry to the mosques. When we visited the Tomb of the Patriarchs, we knew that Christians would have to go in either the Jewish or the Muslim entrance.
But we were not prepared for Nazareth, the city regarded in Christian tradition as the site of the annunciation to Mary of the future birth of Jesus. As we entered the central neighbourhood of Nazareth, we saw a large billboard in Arabic and English highlighting a verse from the Qur’an (4:171) cautioning Christians: "O people of the Scripture (Christians)! Do not exceed the limits of your religion. Say nothing but the truth about Allah (The One True God). The Christ Jesus, Son of Mary, was only a Messenger of God and His word conveyed to Mary and a spirit created by Him. So believe in God and His messengers and do not say: 'Three gods (trinity)'. Cease! It will be better for you. Indeed, Allah is the One and the Only God. His Holiness is far above having a son."
Christianity began in the Middle East. From Jerusalem it spread rapidly in all directions, south into Egypt and North Africa, east into Syria, north into Asia Minor, and west into Cyprus, Greece, Italy and Southern Europe. Christianity has been one of the major religions of the region from the 4th century. Without Christianity, the Middle East would not be the same.
Yet Middle Eastern Christians are dwindling in number due to low birth rates, high emigration rates and ethnic and religious persecution. Political turmoil presses indigenous Middle Eastern Christians to seek security and stability outside their homelands. Along with a reaction to Western political influence, the spread of Jihadist and Salafist ideology has unsettled Christian co-existence with the Muslim majority. Christians now make up 5 percent of the Middle Eastern population, down from 20 percent in the early 20th century. It has been estimated that at the present rate, the Middle East's 12 million Christians might decline to 6 million by the year 2020.
In recent years, we note that
- in
Egypt, Muslim extremists have subjected Coptic Christians to beatings and
massacres, resulting in the exodus of 200,000 Copts from their homes;
- in
Iraq, 1,000 Christians were killed in Baghdad between the years 2003 and 2012
and 70 churches in the country were burned;
- in
Iran, converts to Christianity face the death penalty;
- in
Saudi Arabia, private Christian prayer is against the law;
- in the
Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, half of the Palestinian Christian population has fled
since in 2007 and public displays of crucifixes is prohibited:
- ISIS labels Christian homes and properties with the Arabic letter nun (N), for Nazarene, just as Jews were once labeled with yellow stars.
Rabbi David Rosen of the American Jewish Committee notes that Jewish responsibility to ensure that Christian communities flourish in Israel is based on “respecting the very fact that the Holy Land is the land of Christianity's birth and holy places” and is strengthened by our post-Vatican II “fraternity”. In addition, “Christians, as a minority in both Jewish and Muslim contexts, play a very special role, for the situation of minorities is always a profound reflection of the social and moral condition of a society as a whole. The wellbeing of Christian communities in the Middle East is nothing less than a kind of barometer of the moral condition of our countries. The degree to which Christians enjoy civil and religious rights and liberties, testifies to the health or infirmity of the respective societies in the Middle East.” That is why Israel seeks to protect and provide access to all holy sites.
Arab Christians are among the most educated groups in Israel, with a high rates of success in matriculation exams, in comparison to Jews, Muslims and Druze. Although there has been an exodus of historic Arab Christian communities, Israel remains the only Middle Eastern country where the number of Christians has grown. The Christian community that numbered 34,000 people in 1949 is now 163,000-strong, and will reach 187,000 in 2020.
In addition to the historic Christian community, there are two new groups of Christians in Israel. Almost 50,000 practicing Christians were part of the immigration from the former Soviet Union. There are also many thousands of Christian migrant workers from the Philippines, Eastern Europe, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Although these three groups do not generally mix, the Christian presence in Israel has increased and includes all three elements.
How then should we understand the decline in Christian population in Muslim lands? It is a parallel phenomenon to the population transfer of Jews from those countries throughout the 20th century. Immediately following the UN vote to partition Mandate Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, Jews residing in Arab nations felt increased pressure and persecution that led to flight or expulsion from their homes, often leaving their property behind. The Jewish population of the Middle East (excluding Israel) and North Africa shrank from 856,000 to just 4,400 today.
Jews constituted one of the oldest communities in Egypt. They lived in Aswan, in Fostat, in Alexandria, and in Cairo, from well before the birth of Jesus. The research of Shlomo Dov Goitein, a German-born historian of Arabic culture, led to his six-volume series A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza. Goitein described “in fine and often intimate detail the economic activities, communal organization, family life, material civilization, and mentalité of the Arabic-speaking Jews of medieval Islam during the 11th to 13th centuries…. The Jews were thoroughly integrated into the commercial life of the Mediterranean in the 11th to 13th centuries. Goitein showed that information about commercial arrangements, the world of finance, and the industrial sector—to name just a few walks of life in which Jews were active—could be applied to the general population.”
Jews were intimately part of Egypt. In modern times, many came to the country after opening of Suez Canal in 1869 when immigrants came from all over the Ottoman Empire. In the late 1930s, when local militant nationalistic societies like Young Egypt and the Society of Muslim Brothers became increasingly antagonistic to Jews, they circulated reports in mosques and factories that Jews and the British were destroying holy places in Jerusalem. Sporadic pogroms took place in 1942; in 1945, the Jewish Quarter of Cairo was severely damaged.
As the Partition of Palestine and the founding of Israel drew closer, the head of the Egyptian delegation to the UN General Assembly, Muhammad Hussein Heykal Pasha, said that "if the UN decide to amputate a part of Palestine in order to establish a Jewish state, …Jewish blood will necessarily be shed elsewhere in the Arab world… [placing] in certain and serious danger a million Jews.” In the late 1950s, Egypt expelled its Jewish population and sequestered Jewish-owned property. As of 2014, the Jewish population of Egypt was estimated at less than 100, down from between 75,000 and 80,000 in 1948.
In Out of Egypt, André Aciman, currently distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of City University of New York, chronicles his family—with Italian and Turkish roots—that tied its future to Egypt and made its home in cosmopolitan Alexandria. Aciman's secularized family had flourished there in the fields of business and finance, and most of its members lived in a soon-to-be-erased world of luxury and leisure. As anti-Semitic incidents in Egypt accelerated, as more and more businesses were nationalized by the Government, members of the Aciman clan slowly begin to departing the early '60s, some of them expelled from the country, others electing to leave.
Lucette Lagnado, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, born to a Jewish family in Cairo, wrote a prize-winning memoir, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, about her youth in Brooklyn. “Mine was a neighborhood of Jewish exiles thrown out or pressured out of Arab countries in the 1950s and 1960s—in my family's case, Egypt. We were victims of the Middle East conflict who were barely mentioned in the history books. Though we had been mistreated and denied our homelands, we suffered alone and in silence. … Our values were God, faith, family and Israel. We were passionate about the Jewish state, a country that took so many Middle Eastern Jews in when, one after another, Arab countries had forced or pressured us out.”
For 28 years, one of the best-kept secrets in the Jewish world was based in a family home in Toronto. After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Syria prohibited Jews from leaving the country. Restrictions on Jews prevented then from travelling from city to city without a permit. Residence was limited to specific neighbourhoods. Business and educational opportunities for Jews were strictly limited. Those who tried to escape were often tortured or killed.
Initially working alone and later with the assistance of the Israeli Mossad and the Canadian Foreign Service, Judy Feld Carr, a Canadian mother of six, is credited with forging an underground network, of which only she knew the details. Funding for the rescue missions came by word-of-mouth through Beth Tzedec Congregation and covered the expenses of purchasing the liberation of 3,228 Syrian Jews. Ransoms and escapes were planned. The last rescue took place an hour before the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
In Memories of Eden: A Journey Through Jewish Baghdad, Violette Shamash reconstructs the last years of the oldest Jewish Diaspora community in the world. Born in Baghdad in 1912, the year the Titanic sank, she wrote letters and essays for her children in Britain. She begins near the end of Ottoman rule, runs through the British Mandate, the emergence of an independent Iraq, and the start of dictatorial government.
Shamash clearly loved the world in which she grew up, but depicts the transformation of attitudes toward Baghdad’s Jewish population, her world finally shattered by the Farhud, the name given to the massacre of hundreds of Iraqi Jews over three days in 1941.
Hebrew University emeritus professor of Arabic literature, Shmuel Moreh, recollects his childhood and reveals his love for Baghdad, for the Tigris and Euphrates, in the on-line magazine Elaph ("Coming together" in Arabic). His motivation for writing the memoirs?
… to remind the world of the persecution of Iraqi Jews. … We were called names, harassed on a daily basis, and I lived through this hell during all of my childhood. The second goal was to preserve the Jewish Iraqi dialect. Nowadays when I talk to Iraqis or write to them, many of them are astonished to be reminded of forgotten words their grandfathers once used. … And, of course …I wanted to perpetuate the memory of the Farhud and the tragedy that we lived through.… Ever since the Farhud—the horrible Iraqi pogrom that took place in 1941 when angry crowds lashed out at the Jewish community, robbing, raping and killing thousands—we were always afraid that something like this might happen again. But even before that, the Iraqi Jews were always subjected to humiliations and threats ….
Yona Sabar was born 1938 in Zakho, Iraq, far from cosmopolitan Baghdad. Currently a professor at UCLA, he has published many articles about the Aramaic language and folklore of the Kurdish Jews. Sabar was born in the poverty-stricken hills of the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. His family emigrated-escaped to Israel in 1951. His journey is the subject of an award-winning memoir by his son. My Father's Paradise tells of this enclave of Kurdish Jews, mostly illiterate, who lived with Muslim and Christian neighbours in the mountains of northern Iraq until the tide turned against them.
Mordekhai Zaken has compared the Assyrian Christian experience with the experience of the Jews who lived in Kurdistan for 2,000s or so, but were forced to migrate in the early 1950s. At the end, the Jews of Kurdistan left en masse for Israel as a result of increased hostility and acts of violence, when relative tolerance came to an end. Assyrian Christians came to similar conclusions but migrated in stages following each and every eruption of a political crisis with the regime in which boundaries they lived or following each conflict with their Muslim, Turkish, Arabs or Kurdish neighbours, or following the departure or expulsion of their patriarch Mar Shimon in 1933. While there is still a small and fragile community of Assyrians in Iraq, most Assyrian Christians now live in Western countries.
For Jews, the large-scale exodus from Iraq, Libya and Yemen took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Over 90 percent of the Jewish population migrated, leaving their property behind. The exodus from the other North African Arab countries peaked in the 1960s. Six hundred thousand Jews from Arab and Muslim countries reached Israel by 1972. Another 300,000 immigrated to France, Canada and the United States. Reasons for the exodus included push factors, such as persecution, antisemitism, political instability, poverty and expulsion, along with pull factors, such as the desire to fulfill historic yearnings for the Land of Israel or to find a better economic status and a secure home.
Why discuss the emptying out of Jews from Muslim lands when thinking about the minority religions of the Middle East? Consider this Arab proverb: min sallaf es-sabt lāqā el-ḥadd qiddāmūh, “When Saturday is gone, you will find Sunday.” The proverb suggests that one's actions have future ramifications, the way that Sunday inevitably follows Saturday.
This proverb has come to mean, “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.” Folklorist Shimon Khayyat writes that the phrase expresses Christian concern that they might share the fate that befell Jews during the Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries. It means "since the Jews are now persecuted, it is as inevitable that the Christians' turn will come next as it is that Sunday will follow Saturday." The historian, Benny Morris reports that around 1947-8 in Palestine, “all (Christians) were aware of the saying: 'After Saturday, Sunday.” It was a “popular mob chant” meaning “after we take care of the Jews it will be the Christians’ turn”.
Bernard Lewis, the grand scholar of Islam, wrote that preceding the outbreak of the Six-Day War in 1967, the phrase “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people” was heard. And Paul Merely, of Carleton University, cites reports from 1993 that the slogan was seen on walls in Gaza and the West Bank, and in Muslim-Arab sections of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Andre Aciman mentions sighting it as graffiti in the early 1990s in Beit Sahur. Donna Rosenthal cites a Greek Orthodox woman from Bethlehem, using the proverb to explain the reasons why she chose to live in Israel. More recently, when a Coptic church in Zagazig was burnt down, and in anti-Christian demonstrations in Upper Egypt, the slogan appeared again: “Today it is Zionism’s turn, tomorrow it will be Christianity’s; today is Saturday, tomorrow will be Sunday”!
We are all aware of the threat of radical Islam and the accelerated use of bywords, beheadings, and bombings to frighten and terrorize. We know that Christians in the Mosul region—who have lived in Iraq practically since the time of Jesus—were given the choice of converting to Islam, death or expulsion. We cannot ignore the Yazidis, an ancient religion with elements of Zoroastrianism, who have lived in the Kurdish area of Iraq for centuries. They too were given the ultimatum by ISIS, but because the Sunni extremists consider Yazidis “heretics,” many were immediately killed, with reports of women and girls forcibly converted and made slaves.
After the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in 2011, Egypt's Coptic Christians were the target of increasing opposition and discrimination. There were church burnings and deadly confrontations. On television, Christians were referred to as heretics. The threat was raised of resuming the jizya tax—applied to Jews and Christians as a requisite of residence for dcimmi, tolerated religions. Although the situation has improved under the current government, at least 10,000 Christians have fled the country.
Shmuel Moreh composed the poem “Departure” in February 2007, in memory of journalist Daniel Pearl, one of the first to be beaded by Islamic terrorists. Using canonical, classical and modern Arabic, mixed with proverbs in Muslim Iraqi Arabic dialect, he writes:
Last night, my mother visited me in my dream!
Asking anxiously: “Haven’t you visited Iraq yet?
Have you forgotten
to kiss the mezuzot?
To visit the tombs
of our prophets?”
I replied: “Mommy! Surely I miss Babylon!
But our home in
Baghdad has been destroyed!
And the way back
is so dangerous and far beyond!
Everything there
is in ruins,
Even the glory of
the exilarchs,
The sanctity of
our prophets’ tombs
And the glory of
Haroun al-Rashid the great!
Today, on every
inch in Iraq there are graves,
The waters of the
Tigris and the Euphrates
As in the time of
the Tatars,
Are flowing with
blood and tears!
The masts are
destroyed and the sails are torn,
So how it is
possible to set sail and return?
For Jews, our conscience and our history compel us to pay attention and to act when extremists target a minority, driving them from their homes and forcing them to either convert or be killed. The moral imperative should be clear for all of us. In the face of this threat to Christianity—as Jews, as Canadians and as human beings—we must not be silent. We know that after Saturday comes Sunday.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/magazine/is-this-the-end-of-christianity-in-the-middle-east.html
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390443537404577579473069060742
http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/religiousfreedom/index.htm#wrapper
http://middleeaststudio.com/first-comes-saturday-then-comes-sunday/
http://princearthurherald.com/en/uncategorized/it-s-sunday-in-egypt
http://www.catholicvote.org/after-saturday-comes-sunday/
http://www.jpost.com/Features/In-Thespotlight/Baghdad-revisited
