Zablon Simintov

Perhaps I am rehashing last week’s content on Zionism, and perhaps I am trying too hard to make a post out of the irrelevant.  Still, I do believe this presentation offers a new perspective on anti-Semitism, mainly through acknowledging the forces that hinder its spread.

This post summarizes the life of Zablon Simintov, a middle-aged Afghan carpet trader who also happens to be, as of 2010, the last Jew within the country’s borders.  What was in times past a Jewish Kabul-based community of around 5,000 was dramatically reduced in 1948, in the creation of the state of Israel, as well the late 1970s, in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  Eventually it came to a point where only two remained: the aforementioned Simintov and a fortune teller named Ishaq Levin.  These two lived together through the Taliban’s reign, which for them meant a certain amount of harassment.  This amount I unfortunately cannot specify, mainly because of the lack of clarity in the available sources.  The Washington Post, for one, reported in 2005 that, “On many occasions, [Simintov and Levin] were beaten with electric cables and rifle butts for days” in the Taliban’s prisons, only to realize after finally being released that “the Taliban had ransacked [their] synagogue”.  However, CNN’s report, released in 2010, portrayed the Taliban’s treatment as much less severe.  They reported that Simintov was merely “arrested four times under Taliban rule and… beaten while in custody.”  

Regardless of how much the Taliban harassed them, it seemed they were too preoccupied in hating each other to appropriately respond.  The two bickered over Levin’s business of fortune telling and selling amulets, something Simintov claimed strictly forbidden by their religion, as well caretaking of their synagogue’s sole Torah.  After Simintov tried to move it to Israel, Levin actually went to the Taliban to have them arrest Simintov (apparently on the grounds that he was somehow a spy).  Ultimately the Taliban just arrested both men and confiscated the Torah, something Simintov held against Levin until Levin’s death in 2005.  Simintov has spent time since trying to relocate that Torah, as well “bemoan[ing] the loss of his carpet business—the Taliban had apparently stolen his collection of rugs.”

Anyhow, I find this whole story to really capture the power of the indomitable factor of a human face.  Simintov insisted that his Muslim neighbors never harassed him, and rather said that they treated him like a brother.  Even the Taliban’s treatment Simintov downplayed.  In one interview he recalled how some Taliban officials offered him “$20,000 to convert to Islam.”, to whom Simintov jokingly “offered them $80,000 to become Jews.”  Let us keep in mind that this playful banter Simintov kept up was with the group behind an ethnic cleansing campaign against the predominantly Shia Hazaras of central Afghanistan, as well continual feuds with the fellow-Sunni Tajiks and Uzbeks of the north (see source 1).  While I have yet to find anything cementing the Taliban to, say, the Protocols, I do not think it is rash of me to assume that this same Taliban had some anti-Semitic sentiments.  So then, why did the Taliban fail to express them against the single Jew in the entire area, living literally down the street from them?  Well, perhaps the answer is quite simple: in Simintov giving Judaism a human face, some of the anti-Semitic myth held by the Taliban, and the rest of the Afghan peoples was lost.  In other words, to the people of Afghanistan, ‘the Jew’ hasn’t been an evil, reptilian money-grubber conspiring to take over the world, but instead just that silly old man on the corner.  And because of that, they are that much more willing to live side by side with him. 

Sources:
1) http://www.history-map.com/picture/000/pictures/Afghanistan-groups-Ethnic-in.jpg
2) http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/132099/a-congregation-of-one/2
3) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39702-2005Jan26.html
4) http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/05/09/afghanistan.last.jew/ 
5) http://www.hewad.com/news2.htm