Open letter to Colonel Gaddafi
read in New York during the 10 'Intemational Conference of the Jews of Libya
There are countries unloved by history. Unable to offer to their people, against a miserable present, the consolation of a glorious past. Unable even to profit from their misfortunes, to transform the outrages suffered legends exportable. Countries that lack a river to bless their land, a hero to defend, a poet to sing, are suffering from chronic anonymity.
them where I was born in the country is among them. Before his name was propelled into the sky media joint oil and the whims of a tyrant, this immense territory was not, for 2,000 years, a factory of sand dunes. A zero, amnesia, and gutted a lot of sand scattered on 1.759 million km square of lack of inspiration of the Creator, a waiting room where immemorial has never deigned to stop the train for an epic, a void, separating hot and stuffy, as a punishment, Egypt, Tunisia. Even today, although the influx of petrodollars has helped it grow from obscurity to obscurantism, this country remains the world's eyes, the antechamber of the Pyramids, the back room of jasmine. Culturally speaking: the poor relation of Islam.
Colonel lo sa. Anzi ne è così conscio che dopo aver importato i migliori architetti d'Occidente per tracciare audaci prospettive in questo gigantesco piatto di couscous spazzato dai venti e centinaia di artigiani dall'Oriente per ornarne i volumi ancora freschi di bassorilievi, rosoni, mosaici e vetrate - ha tentato di appropriarsi della storia dei suoi vicini, con proposte di matrimonio di un'insistenza patetica, generalmente rifiutate, o seguite da immediati divorzi.
Arrenditi all'evidenza, Colonnello. Né la tua bella faccia da antagonista, né il pennacchio dei tuoi pozzi, né le scie dei tuoi "mirage" in cieli non tuoi, né il tuo vivaio di terroristi riescono a trattenere a lungo l'attenzione del nostro mondo distratto. A centrifugal force is cursed evaporate the benefit of your misdeeds, such as water from your "Ovada", preventing the edge of turning into your heart. Despite your efforts, this country remains without a face, like your assassins, and voiceless, as in the past.
Sometimes when you smile laced surprise me, hanging on a newsstand, I congratulate you, from afar, for having once again rise from the sandy oblivion to which we condemn their fate. And, perhaps to smooth your piercing gaze, or the endless barrage of your teeth, while I buy with 2,000 pounds of your head as an adult, I imagine you baby, yes, m'invento nostalgia by older brother and I can see, the wolf fourteen relaxed in the evening in your room, with his ear to the transistor, which plays the exalted voice of Nasser, whose charisma saturated you came from Cairo, and I feel you cry, between two of the Rais incitement to holy war ", too, one day, like him! "
Your dream: to add a new chapter in your name, in the great book of Islam. But Allah is great, my dear cousin, and in its wisdom must have decided it was best to reserve your country, which once was mine, the exciting role of "frontispiece," that is the blank page preceding the text, and that is, if a dedication is not to live there
The only drawback is that all the peoples who have lived through the centuries have suffered the same fate of "unsubscribe". Starting from ethnic or religious minorities, Berber, Jewish and Christian, who called "dhimmi", ie citizens "protected." Delicate euphemism for hostages waiting to be converted to the oppressed sometimes offers a powerful cultural benefits: gold chains, time to cry, etc. Being an oppressed of the oppressed, no. Jews in a country without light, we were off more Jews in the Mediterranean.
Lacking the prestige enjoyed by reflex, usually, the servants of the great principles, and which enjoyed, at least once during their exile, all the other communities. Our history was thus denied, buried, for many centuries, that without the book of the historian Renzo De Felice, Jews in an Arab country
, a beautiful book, almost mystical wanted tenaciously by a brother of our community, there would be more of this, today, trace, or, tomorrow, I remember. In fact, after tasting all the sisters as a menu of a variety of exquisite humiliation: the Roman massacre, the Muslims, the English, the segregation of Malta, Ottoman, Nazi-Fascist racial laws, and finally, post-war pogrom , made by our Arab brothers under the watchful eye of our long-awaited British liberators, my community was asked to leave the country the day after the Six Day War, not the dead, detained to bring their contribution to the Revolution, by which bones and stones, duly crushed by bulldozers, were used as a basis for a major highway built to connect the emergency nothing to nothing, and two choices for a giant tourism still exist. So, I no longer Jew or storage roots, I opened the book and I found out:
that our presence in Libya climbed to more than 2,170 years;
that preceded not only the Arab invasion, but also the Roman;
that warlike and faithful to our God and against the Roman army we had raised, had been informed of the fall of the Temple of Jerusalem;
that the riot there was worth tens of thousands of victims, but also a plaque in Latin refers to the fact, and without which we would not know we were such a brave and ancient communities.
But this is history, I said turning the pages, the story that I ground my legitimacy, but not enough, I want more, I ... I did not know what I wanted, but I found it. On page 41.
A census of the Jewish population of Tripoli.
The first of our history. Maintained by Joseph Toledano, head of the community in 1861, and miraculously escaped the fire of Colonel. And they began to march under my eyes, duly numbered 1
Chief Rabbi Rabbis
17 11 Students, and then turners, grocers, tavernieri, sterratori, sarti, macellai, scrivani, chiromanti, levatrici, facchini, donne e bambine, malati e mendicanti, in tutto:
4.500 abitanti.
Che il professar De Felice sia ringraziato per questo documento. Avevo finalmente sotto gli occhi la prova, inconfutabile che gente del mio sangue era effettivamente vissuta, lì, fra le dune e il mare, colmando, di generazione in generazione, la mitica voragine che separava nostro padre Abramo da mio nonno, Abramo anche lui. Certo non erano i poeti matematici filosofi e medici che fiorivano i giardini della Spagna mussulmana, e curavano i mal di testa dei califfi illuminati, ma era pur sempre la mia famiglia, o perlomeno il perimetro sociale entro il quale senza dubbio alcuno, si era mossa. Mi misi dunque a trascrivere questa lista a mano, sicuro che uno dei miei sarebbe passato, presto o tardi, sotto la mia penna. E questo modesto rito bastò a far si che il vapore dei ricordi si condensasse dietro ai miei occhiali, che si mettesse a piovere, a distanza, su quella striscia di asfalto dove i miei morti giacevano prigionieri, che questa scoppiasse, che un albero ne uscisse, coronato di foglie, popolato di uccelli.
Il mio albero genealogico, per approssimazione.
Chi potrà più dire l'odore delle pelli e la loro lucentezza, ai tempi in cui il sapone si chiamava olio di mandorle? La magrezza indiana dei bambini, il carbone dei loro sguardi, quel so to be Arab Jews who were Jews or Trablous Female prosperous frail, dressed in striped silk, shimmering, life belt in silver bricks, their heads wrapped in scarves, which, slipping a hundred times a day on their shoulders, discovered or red hair raven hanna and wavy like the sea seen from the terraces cammun Smell of Felfela, Atar and jasmine flowers and fevers, sweats and spices, currents of hot air or in the courtyards of urine that shabby maze that Hara was, our ghetto And the whirlwinds of flies around the eyes Donkey fatalistic, loukhoum powder on the nose of the good children, and kids hanging on market days, the mountains of purple onions, dates of shiny peppers fluorescent colors, and live chickens were bought, held and taken away from the feet, such as flower bouquets, to be killed in the house, according to the rules, basically miserable at the park - two geraniums, a sprig of mint, an oleander , whose acidic sap, every flower of culture, there was attached to the fingers
Who can tell the most severe, mercy, our old bearded, turbaned, Fez, Bertil Arrakyia or, depending on the time, teachers of the law from the gnarled hands, nails and horn, skin carved by time, strains of the Jewish faith is anchored in spite of themselves, in this land all the more loved and more esiliante that looked too close to the lost homeland: as a tear on a raindrop
Divine monotony of blue sky; same triumphal palms laden with munitions of gold, the same rapid decline, which bloodied the dying sun talleth of our fathers, assembled in ten for the evening prayer, on balconies; same nights riddled with stars, stars so close that the song of the crickets seemed to be their voice; nights with dew, which were inflated in steps watermelons, imitating the croaking of frogs; dawns of pearl that saw them on his feet, our old with raisin eyes, sometimes green grapes, faces up to Jerusalem to give thanks to God for this new day, which allowed them to hope for another and another until the day of the long-awaited return the Promised Land; married, judging, blessing and dying in that waiting - but never completely, because their children, put the world in prodigious amounts (if not me, they will, if they are many, one will live, if it survives have children and the eyes of one of them, finally, behold the wall Paradoxically, this breed of individualists is not considered as trees of a forest, but as the leaves of the same tree, and, specifically, the palm tree: each leaf is the daughter and mother of the trunk, and it is thanks to those who die that the tree grows) because their children, I said, put the world in prodigious quantities, gave them the change, that took the shawl and the Book and they began to live, pray, procreate and die in their time waiting for the departure. But what it claims? Tell the Colonel in his tent. He wanted to leave, we left off. Sure, there have even encouraged to do so, stripping the few fools still cling to their land, their property and their rights. But do not worry, it is not nostalgia that I write. I'm not part of those poor unfortunates who relive their childhood in Tripoli should spend their holidays in Tunisia. Because if there is something that I refuse to take responsibility, it is the catastrophic illusion of similarity, namely, that distance, tiny yet dizzying, which separates from the tear drops of rain, exactly how, when, perduto in un souk, cerchi tua madre, la vedi, urli il suo nome, si gira e non è lei. lo, quando la chiamo, si gira ed è sempre lei: Gerusalemme, e quando voglio, ci vado.
Se ti scrivo, è per dirti che la nostra comunità è viva, che cresce e prospera, che si è rifatta, hamdullah. Perché avendo perso tutto non aveva altra scelta se non avanzare. Noi siamo come le api, Colonnello, se il padrone del campo ci ruba il miele a Settembre, lo rifacciamo in fretta, prima dell'inverno, e se continuiamo a punzecchiarti con le nostre richieste di risarcimenti è meno per interesse che per dignità, per ricordarti il tuo debito ma soprattutto la tua perdita. Siamo produttori di beni, materiali e morali, lo siamo sempre stati e tu lo sai, perché il lavoro non ci fa paura, perché il lavoro per noi non è mai stato punizione, bensì espressione, anzi, benedizione. La prova, dopo un mese nei campi-profughi di Latina e Capua, i nostri hanno abbandonato le baracche e sono partiti in cerca di lavoro, e l'Italia, che dandoci rifugio e cittadinanza ha creduto di farci la carità, si è ben presto accorta di aver fatto un investimento. Tu invece, come tutti i governanti del nuovo mondo arabo, hai voluto lavar via gli ebrei dal tuo tessuto sociale. Ne hai corroso le fibre: commercio, artigianato, agricoltura, professioni liberali, tutto si è dissolto, è volato via come sabbia nel Ghibli e tutta l'esperienza che comprate all'Occidente no substitute for experience ancient as we are of you, we, whose vocation was, as always, the communication between beings, groups, ethnicities, disciplines, principles, states and civilizations. Vocation that was essential to the greatness of Islam, the Russian Empire, one of the Ottoman Empire, the pre-Nazi Germany, and he could do yours, if you had wanted. Think, cousin, even a troubadour was born on this piece of hell governments. With love, inexplicable, almost wicked stepmothers of Jews to the lands that have adopted them, he could make wings to your king, your heroes, your saints and martyrs, to be sent out to tell the world that your country is. He could sing, your desert, with words that would fall into this rose petals instead of sand you have the heart.
But Allah is great and sees far, wanted, by your hand, let us go, so I went to sing my songs under other skies, and that your nation might continue, as before, its exciting task : to be the blank page of the Great Book of Islam.
ve Salam Shalom Avraham Haggiag Herbert Pagani
