The Rise of Islam

We completed our historical background studies of the Babylonian Jewish edah this morning with a video and multimedia presentations about the rise of Islam in the early 7th century C.E., and its influence on the Jews of Babylonia/Iraq.

Once again, I used the "Heritage: Civilization and the Jews" dvd-rom program to bring the history to life. We viewed the interactive maps beginning in the year 586 B.C.E. when Nebuchadnezzar conquered Judah and exiled about 10,000 of its inhabitants to his capital city of Babylon. From there, we watched, in fast-forward motion, the emergence and disappearance of the Persian, Seleucid, Parthian, Sassanid, Caliphate Arab and Umayyad Arab empires in Mesopotamia. I then showed a segment of a video about Mohammed and Islam (minutes 42:42 - 49:30), followed by two multimedia presentations - the first about Mohammed, and the second about the peaceful co-existence of the Babylonian Jews and their Muslim rulers in the 7th and 8th centuries C.E.. We learned how the Jewish community thrived under the rule of Islam, especially in the new capital city of Baghdad where, for several centuries, close to 50% of its inhabitants were Jews. I then shared with the students how this situation changed in the first half of the 20th century. On June 1-2 1941, there was a terrible massacre of Jews in Baghdad, referred to in Arabic as the Farhud. In 1951, the Jewish Agency of Israel helped to evacuate most of the 130,000 Jews still living in Iraq at that time. Today, there are no people left in Iraq who openly identify themselves as being Jews. Most live in Israel, with a fairly sizable community living in the United States.

Before we left for tefillah in the Sanctuary, I taught the song "Al Naharot Bavel" (see 1/11 post) -  the lyrics of this song are the first two lines of Psalm 137 - "By the Rivers of Babylon":

I should also mention that I finished reading "The Storyteller's Beads" this morning, and then began a second historical novel which I'll be reading to the class this semester - "A Shout in the Sunshine." This novel provides historical background to our third unit of Edot studies this year - the Jews of Spain. The focus of the story is the clashing of two Jewish cultures - the Sephardi (Spanish) and Romaniot (Greek) - and on two boys, one from each culture, who find a way to bring their communities together.