Letter to Colonel Gaddafi
On 30 November, Israel and the Jewish world remember the fate of more than 850,000 Jews forced out of Arab countries and Iran in the 20th century. They left the Countries where they have lived for millennia. Many lost their belongings and suffered from violence and persecution. One of them was Herbert Pagani, artist and musician. In 1969, the day after Colonel Muammar Gaddafi coup d’état, the Libyan police broke into Pagani’s family’s house in Tripoli, and destroyed a hundred and fifty canvases and drawings.
In 1987, Pagani wrote a very famous letter to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi that he read at the opening of the Convention of the International Association of Jewish Libyan Refugees. The Italian text can be found here. I have translated it into English the concluding part, to honour the memory of this tragic page of Jewish history, too often ignored.
“…So, what are you complaining about?” the Colonel would say, in his tent. “You wanted to leave, and we let you leave.” Yes, of course, you even encouraged us to go, stripping of their rights and properties the few crazy ones who were still attached to the land. Don’t worry, though; I’m not writing to you out of homesickness. I write to you to say to you that this community of ours is very much alive. It is growing and prospering. It has made a new life for itself, ‘hamdullah’, praised be God, because after we lost everything, we had no choice but to move ahead.
We’re like bees, Colonel. If the owner of the farm steals our honey in September, we make more of it, before winter comes. We continue stinging you with our requests for reparations, more out of dignity than out of interest. To remind you of your debts, and above all, of your loss. We are producers of goods, materials and morals, and we always have been. You know that, because we’re not afraid of work, because, for us, work has never been a punishment, but creativity, and a blessing.
The proof: after just a month in refugee camps in Latina and Capua, our people left the hovels and set off in search of work. Italy, who sheltered us, believed she was giving us alms, but soon realised that she had invested, and successfully.
But you, like all the governors of the new Arab world, wanted to wash out the Jews from the social fabric. In so doing, you’ve ruined its fibres: trade, craft, professions, everything has been lost and has been swept away, like sand in the desert. And all the expertise you purchase from the Soviets will never replace the ancient wisdom and knowledge of us, whose vocation has always been communication: between human beings, groups, disciplines, kings, States, civilisations.
That same vocation of ours had been indispensable for the grandeur of Islam, of the Russian Empire, of the Ottoman Empire, of pre-Nazi Germany. You could have made it yours if you had just wanted to.
Think about it, dear cousin. I am a songwriter, I was born in that slice of hell in the middle of nowhere that you govern. With the inexplicable love, almost perverse, that Jews have for the stepmother-land that adopts them, I could have made wings for your kings, for your heroes, for your saints and martyrs. I could have sung the praises of that desert of yours, with words that would have made blossom that sand rose you have instead decided to turn into a desert.
But Allah, who is great, and sees everywhere in space and time, had chosen for me to depart, by your hand, so that I could go elsewhere and sing my songs under other skies. So that your nation could continue to fulfil the mission it has pursued for centuries: to be the empty blank page in the Great Book of Islam.
Shalom ve Salaam.
Herbert Avraham Hagigah Pagani