Imperial Remnants--Iraqi Christianity and Judaism

Several years ago the Chaldean Patriarch of Baghdad made a minor stir when he emerged to plead the case of Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi foreign minister under Saddam Hussein who surrendered to US forces after the invasion of Iraq. A familiar name cropping up in an unfamiliar context, Aziz served as a reminder that, amidst all of the talk of sectarian violence between Sunni, Shi’a and Kurds in Iraq, few reports mention the status of Christians there.

Although Chaldean Catholics like Tariq Aziz have downplayed their ancient lineage, other Christians in Iraq trace their roots back many thousands of years to the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires and their religious affiliations back to St. Thomas the Apostle in the first century CE. Ancient Assyria, as a political entity, effectively began in prehistoric times and ended in the seventh century BCE. The Chaldeans, who established the last of the Babylonian empires by breaking away from Assyria and eventually conquering it, were in turn conquered by the Persians in the sixth century BCE. The Chaldeans comprise one of the larger Aramaic-speaking groups. The several thousand-year-old Aramaic language, once the lingua franca of the great Persian Empire, has been rapidly disappearing as a spoken language since the end of the Ottoman Empire.

For those interested in Biblical and Jewish history, the words Chaldean and Aramaic should have strong associations. Abraham is said to have come from Ur of the Chaldees, an anachronism if one accepts the Bronze Age (ca. 3000 to 1000 BCE) origins of the Patriarchs. The Chaldeans were not prominent in Mesopotamia until the sixth century BCE. Large sections of the Bible were written after the Babylonian exile (ca. 586 BCE) in Aramaic and it was also the language that Jesus and the Apostles spoke. Aramaic is still used for various important prayers in the traditional Jewish liturgy.

Chaldean Christians have flooded over the borders and many have fled to Jordan. Their inevitable dispersal poses a threat to a Christian Community that may have been one of the earliest in history. This diaspora was preceded, also regrettably, by that of the Iraqi Jewish community--one that had ostensibly endured for some three thousand years, and which effectively disappeared in the fifties. As easy as it is to blame the inherent instability in the region for this event, there is no doubt that the establishment of the State of Israel was a major contributing factor.

Most Iraqi Jews left to emigrate to Israel under circumstances that have been disputed and debated both in and outside of the community. Many of the Jews who left Iraq were talented artists. One of them, a writer who continued to write in Arabic all of his life, was Samir Naqqash, who sadly died a few years ago. In a film seven years back he poignantly described his exit from Iraq. Sitting down by the Tigris River, he recalled, most assuredly a river of Babylon, he wept ---when he remembered Iraq. No doubt he also wondered how he would sing his songs in a strange land.