Jury’s surname is itself a common word in the English-speaking Western world and refers to a person or persons assessing and deciding the merits of a legal case in court. It perhaps turned into a proper surname in the past by becoming a nickname for a trustworthy individual. Court jurors have gone through a rigorous selection process ever since meting justice in the English-speaking world became based on trial by a “jury of peers.” The role of the judge in this system is to arbitrate the debate and hand out the details of the sentence.
It looks like Eliahu Jury was a “jury” of another type altogether. I was on one occasion giving a paper at a conference in the United States and Jury was sitting in the front row. He was an elderly man but he waited patiently for over an hour until I and other speakers had finished presenting our contributions.
As soon as I finished, he stepped forward and asked me in Arabic: “Are you from Baghdad?” I said “yes, but I’m studying in London now.” He smiled and said, “I’m Eliahu Jury. I’m an Iraqi Jew from Baghdad. I left Iraq and studied abroad in Beirut, then Palestine, and then the United States at Harvard and Columbia universities.” I jumped in quickly to finish his biography: “And you are now at the University of California – Berkeley and I had once to endure a test about one of your books in a course I took at the University of London.”
Jury was pleased that I knew him, but he was even more pleased that I was Iraqi. I was surprised at myself for failing to see the link between Eliahu Jury’s surname and the name of an authentic Iraqi flower also called “joury” in colloquial Iraqi Arabic. The Iraqi “joury” flower is as fragrant and beautiful as any Western rose.
I chatted pleasantly with the venerable scientist. We reminisced about Iraq when it was under sanctions in the 1990s and he told me that he was very old now and that his last life wish was to visit his parents’ graves in Baghdad. We bid farewell to each other and did not communicate afterwards. A few days ago, I heard that he had passed away last September at the age of 97, after a lifetime of eminent scientific contributions.
Eliahu Jury was part of the first generation of people in the Arab world who were displaced because of politics. It could also be that he chose to leave Iraq voluntarily and build a new life for himself in the West. But our region must be an expulsive force of some sort. First, the region’s Jews fled, followed by the Christians and then the Muslims. And now, of course, we’re witnessing further sectarian divisions, with Shias expelling Sunnis and Sunnis expelling Shias from homes, cities and countries.
I do not wish here to limit the phenomenon of fleeing one’s country to just brain drain of university graduates, as some would like to do. Every cook, painter, mechanic and artisan who migrates is a loss. Every community of the larger society that is forced out of its homeland by choice or by fear is a loss to the country. Some of these losses are irreplaceable. It is a shame that, in one’s lifetime, one can witness the breaking and often violent end of thousands of years of history in just 30 years of political troubles.
They sell their homes, their lives and just leave. Or else, they’d be killed. We end up having fewer colour and fragrances of the “joury” rose and we go on to forget. In a generation or two, the memories will be gone with their owners.
by Haitham El-Zobaidi
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