After the fall of Muammar el-Qaddafi, who banished the country’s lingering Jews during his reign, a lone Libyan Jew came back to Tripoli and took down a concrete wall sealing the city’s one remaining synagogue. The Libyan city of Tripoli was, astonishingly, one-quarter Jewish in 1941 today the entire country is Jew-free. But when I read about the Last Jew of Afghanistan, a country where Jewish communities thrived for well over a thousand years, it occurred to me that there have been many “Last Jews” stories like this, in many, many places - and that the way we tell these stories is itself part of the problem.ĭozens of countries around the world have had their Last Jews. These stories are used as comic relief, like a Mel Brooks skit injected into the relentless thrum of bad news. Back then, he was one of Two Last Jews of Afghanistan (the other died in 2005), and the story was that the Taliban had imprisoned both of them - until their endless bickering got so annoying that the guards kicked them out of jail. Simentov appeared in the news in the early years of the American occupation nearly 20 years ago. Simentov, whose name incongruously means “good omen,” was primarily presented as a moment of lightness amid the horrors of the Taliban takeover. Simentov’s wife finally received her divorce just this week. He described his experience with the Last Jew as “two weeks of being a shrink.” Mr. Simentov, a “portly man fond of whiskey, who kept a pet partridge” and charged “exorbitant fees for interviews,” was a headache for the Israeli-American businessman who arranged his rescue. He initially declined to leave, he once told reporters, so as to protect the country’s last synagogue - though it seems that he may actually have hoped to avoid his estranged wife in Israel, who had been waiting over 20 years for him to sign off on a religious divorce. Zebulon Simentov, Afghanistan’s only remaining Jew, escaped three weeks ago after refusing early opportunities to flee Kabul amid this summer’s American withdrawal. The Last Jew of Afghanistan is gone, and everyone is glad to be rid of him.
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