An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir (21 page)

When I lived in Kabul, I knew nothing about a Jewish history in Afghanistan, nor did I know anything about the intimate relationship between the sudden impoverishment of Jews and Hindus in Afghanistan in the late 1920s and early 1930s and my Afghan family’s equally sudden wealth.

More than fifty years after I left Kabul, I discovered the hidden and somewhat explosive story.

B
ebegul, my mother-in-law, kept telling me how close she had been to the Sharbans, or the Sharbanis, who were her Jewish friends. She kept asking me, rather wistfully, if I knew them.

“Why did they leave?” she would ask sadly, over and over again.

Rosanne Klass, the author of two books about Afghanistan, once celebrated a Jewish holiday in Kabul with Afghan Jews, sometime in the 1950s. She celebrated with a man named Sharban Ibrahim, who “for many years had been the doyen of the Jewish community in [Kabul] Afghanistan.”

I wondered if this was the same Sharban Bebegul kept asking me about.

When Klass met him, Sharban was already on his way out of Afghanistan. His family had already left for Israel. However, Sharban escorted Klass to another Afghan Jewish family that was celebrating Sukkoth—a harvest festival when Jews take their meals in outdoor booths or huts. Klass was taken with the biblical beauty of the young hostess, of whom she writes, “[Her] face was the face of Rebecca at the well, it was Rachel, it was Sarah, it was Ruth gleaning the fields beneath the eyes of Boaz.” The young woman wears a flowing headscarf. Her eyes are “enormous, shining, incredibly dark and liquid, utterly serene.”

I wonder what the hostess’s life was really like. Did she wear a burqa when she went out?
Did
she go out alone—or only in the company of a male relative or male servant? Could she read and write? Had she ever been out of Kabul or out of her own home and courtyard? Did her husband have more than one wife?

Klass does not tell us.

I knew Afghan Jews had settled in Queens, New York, as well as in Israel. I had to meet them. Klass connected me to Roy Abraham, the grandson of prominent Afghan Jews. He and I had an e-mail exchange for a year.

I finally suggested that we both attend a program about Afghan Jews that was to be held at the Center for Jewish History in New York City.

The evening turned out to be a book launch for Sara Y. Aharon’s remarkable book,
From Kabul to Queens: The Jews of Afghanistan and Their Move to the United States.
Aharon is the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Afghan Jews who once lived in Herat.

I recognize Roy the second he enters the building. He has an Israeli Jewish energy that is also somehow Afghan. He is wired, passionate, intense, fast talking but at the same time sweet, funny, easygoing. Roy is definitely a descendant of the biblical Joseph. He also seems to be related to everyone else who has gathered at the center.

Roy is warmly and repeatedly embraced. His many relatives are surprised but delighted to see him, and he introduces me to aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors, and friends. All this happens before we begin to speak.

Roy confirms the obvious, namely, that the “Afghan Jewish community is small but tight-knit, everyone is related, we are very proud and do not want to assimilate.” As he describes their customs, or at least the customs of his parents’ and grandparents’ generations, they sound . . . Muslim, Afghan, Arab, Sephardic. Roy explains, “Traditionally Jewish cousins often married each other in arranged marriages. The women were veiled and sequestered. They did not work or attend synagogue. Children lived with their parents after marriage or very nearby. The family is everything. It is your lifeline, your survival.”

Afghan Jews prayed and wrote in Judeo-Persian and in Rashi script. Rashi, Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, lived in the eleventh century in France and created a kind of shorthand for his brilliant Torah and Talmud commentaries.

Some Afghan Jews were polygamous, and Jewish girls did not attend school; they married at thirteen or fourteen. Boys married when they were eighteen or twenty. If they were wealthy, they could marry earlier.

Afghan Jews and Afghan Hindus exported and imported carpets, textiles, karakuls, furs, hides, machine parts, gold, silver, jewelry—and currency. They had offices and outposts in many places, including
Europe, India, all over Russia, in the Far East, and in all the northern Afghan cities along the Silk Road in Afghanistan. According to Roy, “My grandfather spoke Dari, Hebrew, Russian, Urdu, Japanese, and Thai. My grandfather and great-grandfather were in the import-export business. They bought and sold clothing, textiles, cigarettes, jewelry, diamonds, and money, currency.”

The Jews and Hindus of Herat were the primary traders and bankers for the country. That changed in the late 1920s and early 1930s when King Nadir Shah decided that neither Afghan Jews nor Afghan Hindus would be allowed to continue their usual commercial ventures, including banking. This decision was partly influenced by the king’s ties to Nazi Germany. Three scholars, Erich Brauer (in 1942), Reuben Kashani (in 1975), and Sara Aharon (in 2011), document what happened. According to Brauer, “In 1936, [Jews] were evacuated from Maimane, Shiburgan, Mazar, Tashkurgan and Ankhuy, by order of the powerful minister of finance, Mir Hashim Khan. . . . [By 1942] the Jewish population [was] virtually limited to the three towns of Herat, Kabul . . . and Balkh.”

Government leaders claimed that Russian Jews in flight from the Russian Revolution were entering Afghanistan, and according to Brauer, to prevent this they decided to “exclude Jews from the area bordering on the Soviet Union. The true motive, however, was the regime’s desire to take over the economic positions of the Jews in those towns.”

It may be true that many Afghan Jews lost part of their fortune because of the Soviet revolution; the Jews had vast storehouses, trading posts, and cattle in Russia, all of which had been nationalized. However, as Brauer writes, “If anything more were needed to complete the process [of impoverishing Jews], it was supplied by the radical measures of the [Afghan] regime designed to concentrate the country’s trade wholly in the hands of its rulers.”

Sara Aharon’s book carefully documents the almost overnight impoverishment of Afghan Jews and Afghan Hindus. King Nadir Shah might have been tolerant of non-Muslim “religious expression,” but he prohibited non-Muslims from trading. Aharon writes, “In 1929, a Pashtun banker named Abdul Majid Zabuli described King Nadir Shah’s emphatic belief that ‘our own nationals’ must exercise greater control over the country’s trade. . . . He cited mercantile activities specifically dominated in Afghanistan by local Hindus and Jews. His urgent message to Zabuli in harsh, unequivocal terms to ‘cut off the hands of the foreigner’ thus suggests that he did not consider Hindus, Jews, and other non-Muslims as Afghan nationals.”

As I read this, my heart stops. I recognize Abdul Majid’s name. He brought my father-in-law in as one of the three founders of the country’s modern banking system. I keep reading, but I am in a small state of shock. According to Aharon, by 1932 “a banking system, including Afghanistan’s first joint-stock company was formed. . . . Despite religious concerns, it was dubbed the ‘Bank-i-Milli,’ or the Afghan National Bank.”

I have to stop reading. My heart is racing. I get up and walk around the room.

This national bank became quite powerful. It had a virtual monopoly over commodities and the Afghan export-import trade. According to Aharon, “the Bank-i-Milli’s monopoly would prove to be a main cause of the Jewish community’s impoverishment.”

Bank-i-Milli was my father-in-law’s bank! This is where Abdul-Kareem’s oldest brother, Hassan, worked. Without this kind of financial platform, Abdul-Kareem could never have come to study in America. We would never have met.

When I interviewed him in 1980, Abdul-Kareem told me how his father, Ismail Mohammed, rose from his position as an accountant in the civil service to become the keeper of the treasury in Herat. In 1929, when the people rose up against King Amanullah (whom Ismail Mohammed supported), rioting mobs demanded that Abdul-Kareem’s father turn over the treasury. He refused to do so. Ismail Mohammed was immediately arrested, jailed, and scheduled to hang the next day.

And so this courtly polygamist and father-as-supreme-leader-at-home is also something of a hero on the world stage.

However, according to Abdul-Kareem, his father was so loved by the people of Herat “for his honesty” that they “helped him escape from prison and took him and his family to a holy sanctuary.” From there he and his family fled across the border to Meshed, Iran. They hid their gold beneath the baby in a baby carriage. In Meshed, Ismail Mohammed began studying English and Russian. Abdul-Kareem told me, “A year later my father went on a trip to Germany via Russia by train. While in Berlin he had studied some aspects of banking. In 1930 he then returned to Meshed and his family. In 1930 my parents received word from Kabul that they could come back to Afghanistan. In 1931–32 they returned via Baluchistan and India.”

Because Ismail Mohammed had remained faithful to King Amanullah, the new king, Nadir Shah, did not trust him. Abdul-Kareem explained, “Fortunately, a few business acquaintances asked my father
to assist them in founding a bank. Thus my father became one of the founders of the Afghan National Bank. The founder appointed my father first as chief accountant and a year later as vice president of the bank, a post he held until 1949.”

M
ost of my Jewish friends thought that my marriage to a Muslim was fashionable, exotic, politically correct, and desirable. Like me, no one had any clear understanding of the history of Jews in Afghanistan or in Muslim countries.

But now I feel a little sick. I had lived in a country and with a family whose fortune had been built on the systematic impoverishment of Jews and Hindus. At the time I did not know this. Back then I was the kind of Jew who believed that Jews could fit in everywhere, anywhere, as universal citizens. Since then my understanding of Muslim-Jewish history, and of Judaism, has deepened.

Perhaps this chapter is a form of atonement, written with considerable anguish, by a Jew who was once forced to convert to Islam, and who lived among Muslims in Afghanistan in captivity but also in splendor. It is for having coveted that splendor that I must atone.

Abdul-Kareem adored his father and his father’s rise to power and glory. He talked about it a lot. He told me, “Following the assassination of King Nadir Shah in 1933 and the succession of his eighteen-year-old son, King Zahir Shah, the Afghan National Bank was asked to serve as the central bank. My father was sent to India to buy gold for the government treasury. Furthermore the bank was making necessary investments and bringing industry to the country. In the 1930s and ’40s they helped build two textile, one sugar, and one nuclear factory.”

Thus my Afghan family’s considerable wealth, their palatial homes, summer and winter chalets and villas, and properties in Herat, Jalalabad, Paghman, and Kabul; their many servants, thick carpets, European furniture, and fashionable clothing; their ability to study and travel abroad and to consult European and American doctors was at least indirectly related to the impoverishment of the Afghan Jews and Hindus.

Making this connection stuns me.

I have to walk around the room a few times again.

I am certainly not saying that Abdul-Kareem’s family stole their wealth from the Jews (or from the Hindus), because that is not accurate. What was stolen was the Jewish and Hindu ability to take their considerable banking and commercial skills to another level in Afghanistan. The Afghan king Nadir Shah was the thief. His accomplices were Nazis.

The Abdul-Kareem I knew was never a Jew hater. He is not responsible for what an Afghan king did before he was born. A woman we both know described meeting Abdul-Kareem in Kabul in the mid-1960s: “He had a crew cut and was sitting quietly in the corner. All of a sudden, he began telling Jewish jokes. We hit it right off. He was then heading the Kabul theater, and we started knocking around Kabul together. He wanted to do a revision of
Our Town
set in Kabul. I remember that his family’s living room was huge, maybe forty feet long. I remember marble floors and beautiful carpets. We listened to Ella Fitzgerald together.”

Ah—that was the home in which I had been held captive. And there was Abdul-Kareem, missing Jewish New York, perhaps missing me.

When I ask Abdul-Kareem about Afghan Jews, he tells me that he still remembers with excitement his visits to Kabul’s large covered bazaar: “The Hindus and the Jews were selling things. They had skins, furs, jewels, textiles. It was a wonderful place to visit. It was huge.”

This must have been in the 1940s. Thus some Jews and Hindus were still conducting commerce.

“I remember visiting the synagogue in Herat. You had to bend to go through a small door. There were holes for shoes and a place where the Torah was stored.”

The last time Abdul-Kareem visited Herat was in 1997. He remembers, “There was a young rabbi who dressed just like all Heratis do. And he had two pigeons under his long coat. He must have been about thirty-five years old.”

I wonder who he was and where that rabbi is now.

T
he Afghan-German alliance actually began before the Nazi rise to power. I had no idea that after the first European tour of my hero, King Amanullah, Germany—not Britain (which crowded Afghanistan’s border in India)—became the country Afghanistan would favor. In 1923, according to the
New York Times,
the German “Lens and Co. had obtained an option for installing all the proposed railroads in Afghanistan. . . . German engineers are already en route to Amanullah’s country to make the necessary surveys.”

In the 1930s Afghanistan began making deals with the Nazis. Understandings were reached, promises were made. Bank-i-Milli opened a branch in Berlin (!) that encouraged Afghan-German transactions. Trade increased between Nazi Germany and Afghanistan. Recall that initially the Soviets and the Nazis were allies; this meant that in accordance with
their various trade agreements, all goods being transported overland to and from East and Central Asia would pass through Afghanistan.