Journal of the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center
No.16, Spring  2008


 

  Rachel Silko:

THE DATE AS A LINK BETWEEN THE JEWS OF IRAQ AND PALESTINE

 

General view of Keren Hayesod date farm in Basra, 1927. Photo: a. Hurwitz.

At the beginning of the twentieth century there was increasing contact between the Jews of Iraq and the Jewish community in Palestine, due to a number of factors, including the emergence of Zionism and increased commercial ties. Since the 1920s the date palm, cultivated mainly in central and southern Iraq, became yet another binding element in these relations.

At a study evening held at the Center on January 2, 2005 on “The Date in the Lives of Iraqi Jews and in Their Ties to Palestine” I lectured on the activities of two delegates from Palestine whose activities in Iraq can shed light on these ties. One of the delegates was Ben-Zion Israeli, a founder of the kibbutz of Kinneret and a major figure in getting date farming reestablished in Palestine. The second was Amnon Hurwitz, who came to Iraq before Israeli, specifically for looking into the possibilities of date farming. His name is mentioned in letters and memos of Keren Hayesod, the organization which sent him there. Additional information about Hurwitz’s activities was given to us by his family.

Amnon Hurwitz was the son of two BILU pioneers, Zvi Hurwitz and his wife Leah Hurwitz, née Beninson. He was born in 1886 in Rishon LeZion and grew up in Gedera. Hurwitz became an expert in several fields of agriculture, including date farming. His agricultural expertise and fluency in the Arabic language were the reason why Keren Hayesod asked him to go on a fact-finding trip to two date farms which Gurji Shem-Tov had established on its behalf in Iraq. Hurwitz agreed to carry out the two-fold mission of inquiring into the farms’ agricultural state and finding out the legal status of the local religious endowments (waqf).

On his first visit to one of the farms in the Basra area in 1927 Hurwitz was pleased with what he saw, but noted some problems as well, due to the fact that the laborers on the farm were tenants, and the prevalence of thefts despite the guards who were employed there. Hurwitz also tried to find time to meet with members of the Jewish community in Iraq. He was invited to the Zionist Literary Club in Baghdad where members told him about the way the authorities treated them. Hurwitz told them about his own parents who had to get used to doing agricultural work in Palestine although they had never done so in the past. He urged them to settle in Palestine.

In 1937 he visited Iraq for a second time. He noted a change in attitude towards the Jews and reported to Keren Hayesod that Iraqi national fanaticism had penetrated into the date farms as well, resulting in a reduction of profits for Keren Hayesod.

Six years after Hurwitz’s first visit another person interested in dates, agriculture and Zionism in Iraq came for a visit. This was Ben-Zion Israeli, a founding member of kibbutz Kinneret. At the time there were few dates in Palestine, but their presence caused the Zionist institutions to attempt to revive date farming in the country. At Kinneret a number of date shoots from Egypt were planted at the end of the 1920s. This local success aroused a desire to expand the experiment.

In 1931, about two months after the death of the poetess Rachel, Ben-Zion Israel proposed planting a date orchard in her memory. Such a project would combine the reintroduction of date farming to Palestine with the desire to find an appropriate way to express mourning over the loss of the poetess. The orchard’s planners wanted it to be the first of many date plantations in the country, which would also spur the local economy. In the winter of 1932 a committee was appointed, which decided to bring date shoots from Iraq and Persia and acclimatize them in Palestine.

The committee collected contributions from its members and managed to get funding from the Jewish National Fund as well. In 1933 Israeli began his journeys. He made eight trips in all to find dates, including four to Mesopotamia. On his first trip he came to Baghdad where the local Jews took him to the markets. He studied cultivation methods and learned about the various types of dates. When he returned to Palestine the shoots he brought with him became the nucleus of the Rachel Garden.

His journeys to find dates turned Israeli into an enthusiastic supporter of palm cultivation and Iraqi Jewry, whom he wanted to encourage to immigrate to Palestine. As he left Iraq on his way back to Palestine in a car full of date shoots he noted in his diary that he felt as if he were taking the pride of Iraq back to Palestine. But he also felt sorrow, for, as he put it, “it is sad that with the pioneering dates I did not have in the car also some pioneers from the land of dates. I feel as if Rachel is carrying the dates”. He tried to help Aliyah from Iraq, and for this purpose maintained contact with Ahiever, the Zionist youth organization in Baghdad. On his second trip to Iraq in 1934 Israeli visited Kurdistan and there, too, tried to convince the Jews to come on Aliyah. He believed that they could succeed as agriculturists in Palestine. But his efforts were not as successful as he had hoped.

From Ben-Zion Israeli’s and Amnon Hurwitz’s journeys, their experiences and their encounters with the Iraqi Jewish community we can learn much about date farming and marketing in Iraq and Palestine, about the Jews of Iraq and Zionist activity there, and about the spiritual and political situation of the Jewish community in the Iraqi part of Kurdistan.