(Telegraph-UK) Adrian Blomfield - The Stars of David carved into the stonework of the low-slung buildings that line the alleyways of Abu Nuwas Street in Baghdad are little more than a curiosity these days - a memento of a civilization lost to the pages of history. Judaism has a connection to Iraq that no other faith can match. The patriarch Abraham may well have been born there; the prophet Jonah reluctantly returned to foretell the destruction of Nineveh. Centuries later, the Bible tells us that the exiled Jewish people sat down by Babylon's rivers and wept for their homeland. Yet Jewish links to Iraq are far from ancient history. In the 1920s, there were 130,000 Jews in Baghdad, 40% of the population. Today, after decades of persecution before and immediately after the creation of the State of Israel, there are no more than 8. The Iraqi Christian community is one of the oldest on earth. Yet after a series of attacks in the past month by Islamist extremists, fears are mounting that Christianity in Iraq is doomed to follow Judaism into oblivion. Earlier this week, Athanasius Dawood, the exiled archbishop of the Syriac Orthodox Church, gave a warning that the minority was facing extinction at the hands of a campaign of "pre-meditated ethnic cleansing."
2010-11-12 08:37:35Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive