A Jew in Beirut

The metal-can shakes and the taxi driver wipes tiny beads of sweat from his brow. I ash on the floor. Inside this traffic clogged box, reeking of smoke and sweat, the driver suddenly spits out the window and slams his horn, accompanied by a fast paced diatribe. I’m too tired, de-hydrated and irritated to try and understand. The vegetation is crawling up the concrete slab apartment blocks from the 60s, scarred by bullet marks and mortar shell blasts. As if it is being gnawed away at by an urban concrete devouring leprosy. A pretty girl passes by the on the pavement, unveiled and in Milanese fashion, she’s trendy, almost too trendy. Why does it always seem to be the same one I see when I’m blocked stuck in this bottle-neck?

‘Habibi’ The driver pokes me; he’s reclining back now, having switched on the Egyptian pop-songs. My eyes swirl from the girl and land smack on the posters and the flags dangling above the streets. Always the same unflinching faces of the politicians, that same smart blue suit, the identical black-turban-beard combo. On the street corners the same tags mark off turf, that green fist holding the Kalashnikov or the blood red cross. ‘Habibi’ – It’s a macho thing to do here to call someone ‘darling,’ it’s like your manliness if measured by the amount of people you can call ‘darling.’ ‘Habibi – what religion are you?’ There is sweat on my forehead; a poster of Hassan Nasrallah is looking straight at me, an armed policeman is flirting with the pretty girl on the sidewalk, a designer’s glass shop front is exhibiting those exquisite handbags. This is Beirut. ‘Habibi – what is you religion?’ Chemicals surge up my spine, fear yes, but almost a terrible desire to tell him, ‘yes-deal with it,’ but then I’m paranoid, a Hezbollah flag is dangling from the building opposite, and a video I saw online of a beheaded Jewish journalist is swirling in my dehydration. ‘I’m Catholic.’ Damn, I should have told him. Stop scaring yourself. He’s not gonna tie you up and throw you in the back of the truck. He hasn’t got the time. Would he?

*

Elias arrives late, but that only adds to his image of quintessential Beirut man-about-town. Those are pretty expensive shades, at least three clearly visible designer labels, and a command of French that would put Sarkozy to shame. You know he went to all the best schools, a gold-rapper like cross dangles around his neck. He strokes it constantly; he is a proud Lebanese Christian. And quite brusquely he pulls up next to me, and states matter of factly.

‘So you’re looking for Jews?’ Elias is not someone to be afraid of but, I’m in enemy territory. Well kind of. ‘So you’re looking for Jews?’ He’s not smiling; this is clearly a serious matter. The waiter delivers his Mojito. It’s hard to grasp but just one mile from this uber-cool rooftop bar, themed in white and straight out of a cosmopolitan millionaire’s manual to the world, are the Hezbollah. The view over the bay, the spires of the cathedrals and the domes of the mosques, have almost deluded me I’m in a dream Lebanon where everyone is happy and totally cool with just about anything. Well there not. Well some of them are. I just don’t know.

‘I heard from Anne-Marie you where looking for Jews. So are you?’ I hesitate; I really should, shouldn’t I? It’s like who goes looking for Jews?

‘Yeah.’

He draws closer, strikes a match that briefly illuminates his face and looks me straight in the eye. ‘I know about them.’ With these words my heart suddenly sinks, flashing recollections of the casual anti-Semitism of taxi drivers across the Middle East. He knows I’m up to something. And this is Beirut. ‘I know your one of them.’ He smiles, yet that’s nothing you say in passing in Lebanon. I sip my drink and grin inanely. ‘Don’t worry. My closest friend as a young man was from your people.’ Elias is at most 23. ‘It was a secret. We never asked, they never said. Lebanon is not a place where you ask directly someone’s blood type – like your Israel. It’s a game of guesses. We were young. But one night we spoke of it. He told me his family where Jewish, that he had been to Israel and that that was that. We never spoke of it again. He disappeared. I think he is there now, but I can’t be sure. That’s all.’ Elias moves away to chat about the upcoming elections with a friend, rumours of a war drift over the table as I sit there, glued like an idiot to the spot. There are Jews over the frontlines. I try and imagine my family living through the Civil War and the Israeli bombardment in this city. I can’t. But damn, somebody did.

*

Over the next few days I started to try and track down these hidden Jews. It wasn’t always like this in the Arab world, I tell myself as I send of emails to no reply, try to track down friends of friends of friends, wait for people who never arrive and keep my Jew-dar for a familiar face. That tactic is profoundly unhelpful because it seems, one in three Beirutis has a brother or sister in Tel Aviv. There used to be loads of Jews here.

The first Jews arrived in Lebanon in and around 132 A.D, disposed and cut-up refugees from the destruction of the first Israel. Jews lived in a few of the villages of the Chouf Mountains, alongside the Christian warrior-peasants and in the Muslim port cities of Tripoli and Sidon. At the end of the nineteenth century, as Lebanon came under the protection of the French as the Ottoman Empire rotted around it a small community began to be built up in the sleepy seaside village of Beirut. Traders and adventurers began to be drawn in from Aleppo, Alexandria, Baghdad and Istanbul as this small village soon began to develop into a trading hub. By 1911 there where 5,000 Jews in Lebanon. In 1948 there where 24,000 living, working and holding Shabbat dinners mostly in a new thriving Beirut. For twenty-five years, Jews formed a key part of the rich mosaic. Protected by law, recognised as a sect in the constitution and even guaranteed a seat in parliament under the sectarian system, life was good. Testament to this was the population increased after the birth of Israel. But now there seemed to be nothing left. Another twenty-five years of war, murders, emigration and fear. Now there are just a handful of Jews left in Beirut.

*

The Armenian Taxi driver coughs violently and insists on letting me know that he is without a shadow of a doubt – an Armenian. I’m indifferent, he’s driven me way out of where I wanted to go, right into a dilapidated and run down district that slides steeply down a hill. Flags of the Lebanese Forces Militia dangle from balconies, children are running around in little packs through the street, old men and sitting on plastic chairs outside their apartment blocs in silence watching the day go by. Small shrines to the Virgin Mary mark out which sect’s territory this is. ‘There’s your Net-Café Habibi.’ A small grey and dimly-lit hole crammed full of kids and six computers from the early nineties. ‘Thanks.’ Achrafiye and those nice bars in East Beirut may not look like misery, but you only have to turn round the corner to find it right there waiting for you. The photographer I’m travelling with lights up, as a car blaring out the speeches of the Christian war-lord Bashir Gemayel swerves round the corner. The recordings echo through the roads that cut through the concrete towers, but there’s only grey sky above. The kids start to mob my friend, asking him repeatedly. ‘You Lebaneeeese – Lebaneeeese?’ He nods, explains he works from London and that he’s keen to move back to Beirut. Then one of the bigger boys comes up to him, at most he’s 14, and says very seriously to him. ‘Take your family to London. There is war here.’ Inside the dial-up connection hisses and when my email finally opens. A single sentence from a source inside the Jewish community is in my inbox.

‘The Jews are in hiding until after the Elections. There are plans to rebuild the synagogue but nothing can go ahead until the tensions are over.’

*

Over the next few days politics became tenser in Beirut as it started to become clear that the country was in for a rough ride as the Government and the Opposition’s vision for the country clashed. Another figure from the Jewish community currently travelling in the US for a significant period of time again stressed that there where plans to rebuild the synagogue, but that things had to be kept very quiet in the run-up to the Presidential Election due to the extreme sensitivity of the situation. The whole future of this hidden community hangs in the balance along with the destiny of the country in the coming weeks and months. And nobody seemed keen to risk their life talking to a teenage journalist with a hardcore Jewish name. It was then I decided to go to the ruins of the Synagogue myself. After all, I had my own personal reasons for being in Beirut all along.

*

My family left Baghdad and the other rotting corners of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the nineteenth century to the trading centres flourishing under British rule in the Far East. Settling in Singapore, Bombay, Shanghai and Calcutta where my grandfather was born. He would always tell me that the Judah family had come to Iraq, to Babylon as slaves when the Temple of Solomon was razed by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC. Yet he would always repeat our Middle Eastern roots came from numerous other cities in the region. One of those places was Beirut.

Abraham Sassoon, it is presumed, was born in Aleppo, though my great-aunt insists her grandfather’s father’s father was born in the mid nineteenth century in Alexandria. All that is certain is that my forefather Abraham was buried in 1898 in Beirut. Ninety years, a lifetime before I was born. In remembrance his son constructed the Maghen Abraham Synagogue, the oldest in the city, that was finished in 1925. I tried to imagine the funeral in the small costal village, the crying of the women, the laments for the sons far away in India. I tried to imagine the proud Sassoon family opening the new synagogue in the rising city of the new French mandate, bustling with migrants from the mountains and officers from aboard. But I couldn’t. The area around the synagogue had once been the Jewish quarter of Wadi Abu Jamil, with kosher butchers, schools from the Alliance Israelite, Talmudic schools and closely knit fabric of community life. Now there was nothing. Just flat black tarmac providing open air parking, two construction sites with modern Beirut surrounding the spots. Skyscrapers behind me, the Moorish style Grand Serail sticking out above where the seat of the Government is. The silence fizzed ominously as I walked through the tarmac towards the synagogue, the tent city of Hezbollah protestors rings the Serail and the Parisian style downtown has ceased to function as a result. Soldiers’ chewing gum and roadblocks have replaced French and Saudi tourists.

The gates where half-heartedly padlocked and the inner courtyard, was bursting with vegetation, whole bushes and trees had erupted from the near-ruin, covering the yellowed stone. I rattled the gate; there was just enough room to squeeze myself through. Pausing I went to investigate the two little annexes built out of the sides of the courtyard whose windows opened onto the road now car park in front. The pungent smell of decay hit me as I managed to pull ajar one of the widows, but what I saw inside was not what I was expecting. The room seemed to have been frozen in time during the Lebanese Civil War. Small capsules of iodine for treating wounds where on the window-sill, a stretcher was thrown across the room, dust hung in the air and litter from an encampment was strewn across the floor. On the facing wall was a graffiti symbol of the Amal Militia, a Shia movement now closely linked to Hezbollah. The walls of the Synagogue had stencilled graphs of the face of their leader the Iman Musa Sadr, distantly related to Moqtada Sadr in Iraq. The roof was ripped off, but the irony was it wasn’t by them. An Israeli shell had fallen on it during the war, and Amal had moved it to ‘defend’ the building. I had hoped to look in to find a glimpse of my ancestors and the deep past; instead I was staring straight into a time capsule of the Lebanese Civil War and at a monument to a community victim to the Jewish-Arab wars. I had gone in search of Abraham my forefather, but he was faceless amongst the dead, in a city where the ghosts outnumber the living. I stepped back, and wished at that instance I knew the words of some kind of Hebrew prayer, some kind of holy words for what was lost and those few who remain. But nothing came to mind but a swelling feeling of emptiness.