Ezra's Tomb

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ezra's Tomb by British war artist Donald Maxwell, c.1918
Ezra's Tomb by British war artist Donald Maxwell, c.1918

Ezra's Tomb or the Tomb of Ezra (Arabic: اعزير‎ Al-'Uzair, Al-'Uzayr, Al-Azair) is a location in Iraq on the western shore of the Tigris that was popularly believed to be the burial place of the biblical figure Ezra. Al-'Uzair is the present name of the settlement that has grown up around the tomb.

Contents

[edit] Legend of discovery

The poet Yehuda Alharizi, who visited the tomb in the 12th century, related that some 160 years earlier a local shepherd had a recurring dream that a holy man was buried nearby. On digging at the indicated spot, an iron coffin was found, marked with characters that were interpreted to read "Ezra the priest"; the remains were reburied at the current site of the shrine.[1] A similar legend is given by Petachiah of Ratisbon.[2]

The tomb became a place of pilgrimage for Jews and was respected and venerated by Muslims; it was reputed that on certain nights an "illumination" would go up from it.[3] Alharizi, after stating that he initially considered the accounts "fictitious", claimed that he saw a light "clear like the sun [...] illuminating the darkness, skipping to the right and left [...] visibly arising, moving from the west to the east on the face of heaven, as far as the grave of Ezra".[4]

[edit] The shrine

Photograph of Ezra's Tomb, early 20th century. The dome is hidden by date palms.
Photograph of Ezra's Tomb, early 20th century. The dome is hidden by date palms.

The present buildings, which unusually comprised a joint Muslim and Jewish shrine, are possibly around 250 years old; there is an enclosing wall and a blue-tiled dome, and a separate synagogue, which though now disused has been kept in good repair in recent times. [5]

Claudius James Rich noted the tomb in 1820; a local Arab told him that "a Jew, by name Koph Yakoob, erected the present building over it about thirty years ago". [6] Rich stated the shrine had a battlemented wall and a green dome (later accounts describe it as blue), and contained a tiled room in which the tomb was situated. The shrine and its associated settlement seem to have been used as a regular staging post on journeys upriver during the Mesopotamian Campaign and British Mandate of Mesopotamia, so is mentioned in several travelogues and British military memoirs of the time.[7] T. E. Lawrence, visiting in 1916, described the buildings as "a domed mosque and courtyard of yellow brick, with some simple but beautiful glazed brick of a dark green colour built into the walls in bands and splashes [...] the most elaborate building between Basra and Ctesiphon".[8]

The shrine is now a place of pilgrimage for the Shi'a of southern Iraq.[9]

[edit] Al-Uzair town

Al-Uzair is one of the two sub-districts of Qalat Saleh district, Maysan Governorate, Iraq. The town itself now has a population of some 14,000 people.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Ezra's Tomb at Al-Azair
  2. ^ Benisch, A. (transl.) Travels of Rabbi Petachia of Ratisbon, Trubner, London, 1856, p. 38
  3. ^ Sirriyeh, E. Sufi Visionary of Ottoman Damascus, Routledge, 2005, p.122
  4. ^ Alharizi, transl. in Benisch, A. Travels of Rabbi Petachia of Ratisbon, pp. 92-93
  5. ^ Yigal Schleifer, Where Judaism Began
  6. ^ Rich, C. J. Narrative of a residence in Koordistan, J. Duncan, 1836, p.391
  7. ^ An example is in the memoirs of Sir Ronald Storrs, who states: "That entertaining writer's mausoleum is in my opinion a seventeenth-century structure" (The Memoirs of Sir Ronald Storrs, Ayer, 1972, p.230)
  8. ^ T. E. Lawrence, Letter of 18/05/1916, telawrence.net
  9. ^ Raphaeli, N. The Destruction of Iraqi Marshes and Their Revival, memri.org

[edit] See also