00:09 - 00:43
Chammah: We were talking about the ambivalence of the pharmacist, and he questioned for example, at a later time in the conversation, he mentioned the problem, he asked: what are these people getting except for certain privileges that aren’t worth very much, maybe instead of taking an hour or a day to get a laissez-passer, this way they can get it much more quickly, or they can get it by telephone. Otherwise, they are not really getting very much out of these.

00:43 - 01:05
Chammah: Anyway, it shows there is ambivalence within the individuals, as well as there are also some people, groups who are for collaborating with the government and letting things, play it very carefully— and others who say no, no cooperation.

01:06 - 01:49
Young: One thing I would say is I think some of this is exemplified in the attitudes of different members of the Damascus community towards Salim Totah, the leader of the community, who seems to have taken a policy of working with various agencies of the government in order to achieve various specific goals and objectives. And though he seems to have had some success, as I understand it, in that policy on different matters, this is — his orientation, his procedure has generated a fair amount of controversy within the community. 

01:49 - 02:31
Young: Again, along similar lines to what we have just been talking about, there are those who feel it is better to proceed this way, since at least he gets some important things accomplished and ameliorates the aspects of the worst aspects of the condition of the community, and at least some members of the community, who feel he is cow-towing too much to the authorities, in some sense he is selling out and becoming a, almost like a puppet, playing the game in some sense, of the government.

02:31 - 02:54
Young: And it seemed to me that there was quite an extensive split in opinion among members of the community concerning whether or not they were generally favorable towards him and what he symbolizes. Or they thought this was an unacceptably high price to pay for such short run achievements.

02:54 - 03:03
Chammah: The younger generation feel very strongly against him, as I gathered.

03:03 - 04:01
Young: My impression is, and we didn’t do a rigorous study, but my impression was there was a considerable split not only in attitudes towards Totah, but on this question in general between the younger people and some of the older people. The younger people in general being somewhat impatient with, or feeling somewhat negative toward a conciliatory policy, playing along with, or appearing to accept or tolerate some of the positions of the government, and the older people, often in any case, being willing to make various kinds of concessions in order to achieve some concrete specific short run gains or advantages which would make life, at least in the short run, somewhat easier.

04:01 - 04:23
Chammah: For example some of the young people feel that if he wanted to he could let people go, he could use some of his influence to let some of the young people go out. But he would not do that because presumably he would be afraid that they might not come back, which would make it difficult for him.

04:23 - 05:17
Young: Allegedly the argument there is that if he used his influence to achieve this objective, some of these people might not come back, and then the Syrian government would perhaps turn on him, holding him responsible for these people not coming back, and then he might argue that if this should happen, his ability to achieve other objectives, to help other people out with specific problems that they’re having would be substantially reduced, and that as the leader of the whole community it is in some sense his obligation not to jeopardize his capabilities to continue to be effective on specific problems that many members of the community are facing. 

05:17 - 05:56
Young: This, it seems to me, exemplifies the difficulty of the position and the ambivalence problem, because on the one hand, many people might want to help certain members of the community get out, but if this can only be done at the cost of making life more difficult for those who remain, it’s almost a moral dilemma in trying to decide which of these objectives to go for or to pursue on a case by case basis.

05:56 - 07:15
Chammah: There was another man, Jajati or some name like this, who has a prominent position in the community and he was on the Mike Wallace show, who gave us a ride, and he was proceeding to tell me about how he helps young people quite a bit. When they get arrested, when they go outside of Damascus, he wakes up at night or he sacrifices his sleep to go and pull them out of difficulty. He was bragging about his ability to bring people out from prison, Jews, if possible. He was one of the people that various members, especially young people in the community, are against because they think he is too much conciliatory and he’s too much with the government and he’s sold out to the government, essentially, for his own benefit.

07:15 - 07:53
Young: I think we can summarize this by saying that within the Jewish community of Damascus itself, there are very substantial differences in viewpoints concerning the appropriate way of dealing with the government, both in terms of what would be most effective in achieving certain goals and objectives, and what is in some sense a morally or ethically acceptable as a posture towards a government which is obviously behaving quite repressively and quite restrictively. 

07:53 - 08:58
Young: I suppose in a sense this is a classic problem of a repressed community— as I was saying before you see this both in groups of people who take one position and groups of people who take another, but even within individual persons, the sense of ambivalence as we were suggesting in the case of the pharmacist. If you listen to him for an hour in conversation, you get this tremendous sense of him being torn in several directions at once. On the one hand feeling a practical need to try to solve certain problems, and on the other hand feeling a distaste for this as a way of orienting oneself toward a government which tries hard at being rather unpleasant, even though by kowtowing to it you might make it slightly less unpleasant on certain specific issues.

08:58 - 09:53
Chammah: One thing maybe should we mention is that the Jewish community in Damascus lives in this one area, which is the Jewish quarter and that they also live in the Jewish quarter itself a number of Palestinians have been brought in, sometime, I’m not quite sure what year. According to one member of the Jewish community, it was one of the older members, one of the leaders of the Jewish community who suggested after there were clashes before with the Palestinians in the Jewish quarter, it was suggested supposedly by leaders of the Jewish community that the government brings Palestinians to the so-called Jewish quarter or the Jewish ghetto, whatever it’s called.

09:57 - 10:33
Young: The nature of the section of Damascus in which the Jewish community is located and the fact that there has in recent years been a significant group of Palestinians living in this quarter as well. I wanted to add another point here, considering a factual matter. There’s some difficult in determining exactly how many members there are in the Damascus Jewish community. The figure that I recall hearing most frequently is in the neighborhood of 3,000.

10:33 - 10:35
Chammah: That's what I heard.

10:35 - 11:04
Young: This question is frequently asked, just how many people are there in the Damascus community, which is to be distinguished from the Aleppo community. It’s not a figure that one can say with absolute certainty is correct. When we asked that question, the most common answer was something in the neighborhood of 3,000 members at this time.

11:04 - 11:11
Chammah: And somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 in Aleppo, that’s what I heard also.

11:11 - 11:27
Young: The ones I heard seemed to range in the 1,000-1,500 vicinity, so that the Damascus community is at least twice the size of the Aleppo community, possibly a bit more.

11:27 - 11:46
Chammah: Supposedly also, we were hearing from people in both Damascus and Aleppo, there were about 500 or so in Qamishli. Although when we were in Aleppo, there seems to be in the old Jewish quarter of Aleppo, a number of Qamashli people are living now.

11:46 - 11:56
Young: So we’re less certain regarding the number of Qamishli families who are still resident in Qamashli.

11:56 - 12:14
Chammah: There’s something about a number of students of medicine coming to see us, but we will cover this kind of later on when we talk about restrictions related to education.

12:14 - 12:34
Chammah: We took the bus then the next day. Friday the 9th of July we took the bus.

12:34 - 12:47
Young: From Damascus. Somewhere around noon, middle of the day, 12:30 maybe. Something like a five hour trip.

12:47 - 12:48
Chammah: It wasn’t with Salim, I’m sorry.

12:48 - 13:01
Young: We arrived in Aleppo somewhere around 5:30, towards the end of the afternoon.

13:01 - 13:12
Chammah: Just in parentheses the American consul was on the bus.

13:15 - 13:40
Young: So we arrived in Aleppo on the afternoon of Friday the 9th of July. We stayed on in Aleppo with sight-seeing side trips, but living in Aleppo until Sunday the 18th of July, so that he had approximately ten days.

13:40 - 13:50
Chammah: Ten days, about, in Aleppo. There was one day that we went to Latakia with my mother and Haim.

13:50 - 14:11
Young: And I think we should say, just to get ourselves oriented, during that whole time we stayed in the apartment, which is occupied by your mother, which is located in a section of Aleppo called Jamaliya.

14:12 - 14:17
Chammah: In front of the new mosque. It’s really Quwatli Street.

14:17 - 14:35
Young: Quwatli Street, yes. And this is a building which had originally belonged to your father, which now legally belonged to you and your sister, which has a number of apartments in it plus, as I recall, there’s two shops?

14:35 - 14:40
Chammah: There’s one shop on street level and two shops in the basement.

14:40 - 15:08
Young: Two shops in the basement. And one of the apartments is occupied now by your mother and step-father and one of your half-brothers, I guess, lives there, in addition your other half-brother Haim is using this apartment as a clinic for his medical practice.

15:08 - 15:54
Young: Then I think perhaps some other background that would be helpful to give now, so that we don’t have to repeat it when we’re talking about other things. For example, we should say that while we did not systematically survey members of the Aleppo Jewish community in a sort of social-science fashion, it’s nevertheless fair to say we talked relatively extensively with a very large number of members of this community. I think we can say a few other things. We talked with most of, I think, the leading members, perhaps all of the leading members of the community.

15:54 - 15:55
Chammah: All.

15:55 - 16:04
Young: All of the leading members of the community. Certainly all of the members who are formally in positions of leadership in the community.

16:04 - 17:18
Young: We talked, I think, with most of these people at sufficient length so that I think one could call most of these extensive discussions, and another I think it’s worth pointing out and will become clear as we go along, is I think it’s fair to say in most of these cases we had relatively frank and candid conversations with these people. There’s always this issue which arises from time to time and will probably come up in the rest of this discussion about the extent to which people are really saying exactly what’s on their mind, or whether they’re creating some kind of impression. Naturally, we have no definite proof about this, but I think it’s fair to say we were acutely aware of this question and also that we came away with the feeling that we had had, in most cases, frank and candid conversations with people, and that we had a relatively accurate sense of what was on their minds, even when they themselves were, in some cases, ambivalent or unclear about things.

17:18 - 17:40
Chammah: Personally, I don’t really have any doubt in my mind that they were talking to me really openly. There was no reason for them to distrust me in any form, given the position my father has in the community originally and so on. I really would be extremely surprised if they are not —

17:40 - 18:21
Young: I agree with that. I think it’s worth pointing that out. Both because some people might possibly raise questions concerning our observations on the grounds that there may have been some dissimulation in what was told to us. And also, because we have reason, from some of our own conversations, to believe that the other principle person who had visited, that is the man Boucai who had been in Damascus, may not have gotten candid and frank expressions of feeling in his own conversations.

18:21 - 18:27
Chammah: I was specifically told that they distrusted him and didn’t want to talk to him, by a number of —

18:27 - 19:31
Young: I think it would be useful for us to find out, not that it proves anything definitively as background before we get into the specific issues, that our best judgment is, on the basis of careful awareness and concern about this question, that we really have received fairly candid and open and accurate expressions from a relatively large number of people that we talked to. What all of this means is that although we cannot claim any sort of definitive social-scientific status for the conclusions and observations that we want to advance, nevertheless approaching it more in the way an anthropologist, or someone who does fieldwork might, we could feel justified in saying that we have made tough, conscious and careful observations, and that we thought about it a considerable length.

19:31 - 20:06
Young: We have reasonably high confidence in both the accuracy of the specific information included and also in cases where we’ve made judgment about proportions of people and numbers of people who feel various ways, that these are fairly well-grounded kinds of estimates. Though one might argue about specific points, we have thought a great deal about this and feel we have confidence in the observations that we’re going to be putting forward in the next section of this tape.

20:06 - 20:10
Chammah: Mhmm

20:11 - 20:40
Young: Now, I wonder how we should proceed at this point. One thing that suggested itself to me when I was thinking about it this morning, is that there are three types of things we might want to talk about at this stage without going on a day to day basis. One is we could start out with some kind of general, overall judgments and statements concerning current conditions.

20:40 - 21:55
Young: Then I thought it might be interesting to run through, at least briefly, a series of specific, concrete, tangible issues about which there is relatively little room for actual disagreement, quite specific problems, shall we say, that members of this community face in their daily lives. And then I thought we would pass on, having established that framework of problems, to some more intangible factors, which although they are difficult to pin down in concrete, factual terms, nevertheless in my judgment color substantially the quality of life in this community, and have a great deal to do with whether or not one feels comfortable and at ease living in this community or whether one feels fearful and vulnerable to a variety of kinds of difficulties that might be raised by the government, particularly agencies of the government. This would be one approach.

21:55 - 23:33
Young: If we do it that way, starting out with a general statement, it seems to me to be important to be extremely careful about this question. I would say something like the following, which you might want to reiterate. I would say while on the one hand it is undoubtedly accurate at some level to say that the condition of the Jewish community of Aleppo is less bad now than it was probably three years ago, nevertheless, it’s equally important if not more important to point out as well that though there has been some relative improvement in the civil rights and general conditions of existence of this community in absolute terms, the situation is still one, or remains one that is extremely difficult, involving a large number of restrictions, limitations on civil rights, limitations on freedom of movement, freedom of activity, which as I say in absolute terms suggests a situation which is still a highly difficult and unfortunate one, and which should not be obscured by some statements concerning relative improvements which appear to have occurred over the last two or three years.

23:33 - 23:48
Chammah: I would put it in the form of, I guess, on a scale from zero to ten, they might have been on point one, and they became point two, or at point two, something along these lines.

23:48 - 24:52
Young: I think it’s important not to deny that there have been some improvement and improvement has occurred, certainly for the better, and let us hope that additional improvements occur as well. The thing that concerns me is there’s some tendency, at least among some commentators observing that there’s been some relative improvement, to forget about the fact that even taking under account the relative improvement, the situation in absolute terms is still very bad indeed. And I think it’s a useful balance, while not denying that there have been some relative gains and some relative easing of certain restrictions, at least in de facto terms, to recall that the situation is still highly substandard with respect to any reasonable formulation concerning what would be an adequate level of —

24:52 - 25:02
Chammah: It’s important to say we’re not just talking by Western standards either, that this is below substandard. It’s substandard by Middle Eastern standards.

25:02 - 26:32
Young: Yes I think that this is important. We should perhaps also say by way of background that we have more systematic observations concerning the conditions of the Jewish community in Syria than we do concerning the conditions of the Islamic and Christian communities, so we have to be a little bit careful about our observations on these terms. Nevertheless, I think we know enough about the conditions of the other communities to substantiate the statement you were just making. Not only by Western standards is the situation a restrictive and difficult one, but also by Middle Eastern standards. Therefore, it’s not possible, I think, to sustain the argument, well, the condition of the Jewish community is bad, but everybody else has an unhappy and difficult situation in Syria too, so relatively speaking they aren’t much worse off. Let me stress I think it is not possible to sustain that line of argument. We know enough of the relative standings of the various communities to be able to say with considerable confidence that in terms of a variety of measures of civil rights, the Jewish community are at the bottom of the heap, and in fact is markedly, or perhaps should we say even qualitatively worse off in these terms than the other communities.

26:32 - 27:18
Young: It might be as a side note interesting to note that there also appear to be substantial differences on some of these questions between the Christian community and Muslim community and we wouldn't for a moment want to deny that there are problems faced by the Christian community in certain areas involving civil rights. Nevertheless, I think that should not obscure the fact that the small Jewish community is at a distinctively worse situation, by a considerable measure, in terms of many different criteria that we’ll be outlining in a few minutes, in terms of its current level of welfare and civil rights.

27:21 - 27:58
Chammah: Just in passing, perhaps, before we enter into different things about the Jewish community, as we were saying before, we don’t know much about the Christian community but we do know from a few Christians we just bumped into, so to speak, there was a question asked of me: What was I doing coming into Aleppo when everybody else — everybody being themselves — was trying to get the hell out of Aleppo, the hell out of Syria?

27:58 - 29:17
Young: Certainly impressionistically, but this gives us some indication that many members of the Christian community feel that their position in the Aleppo society leaves a great deal to be desired. So much so that some of them feel that on balance they’d be better off if they could leave the country and make their way somewhere else. Nevertheless, our belief is, and based on our observation, our judgment is that relatively speaking the members of the Jewish community are substantially worse off than members of the Christian community. So that it’s interesting to note that if the problems of the Christian community are such that many of its members on balance feel that they would be better off if they could leave, the situation of individual members of the Jewish community is — this gives one some relative measure of how relatively restrictive the situation is, if this community which is better off contains many members who would like to leave, the Jewish community is relatively speaking much worse off.

29:17 - 30:31
Young: Perhaps that’s enough initial statements, general overall statements of the current situation. I thought it might be helpful at this time to pass on to the second issue I was suggesting a few moments ago, looking at or identifying or listing out a number of quite specific, concrete, tangible types of restrictions which we can attest from direct and systematic observation are currently in existence and constitute substantial problems for individual members of the Jewish community. I’ve made a few notes here, and we might go through these one by one, possibly coming back to some of them if we think of other things afterwards, to be inclusive, but starting out with the listing of these things. One thing I think we might start out with is the question of identity cards and identification.

30:32 - 31:51
Chammah: Yes. Every member of the community has, on his identity card, across the [unclear] of the identity card, in red ink, "musawi," which means Jewish, or “Jew.” Every member of the community has it. I have seen the one of the head of the Aleppo community. He has it on his too. I’m don’t know, I’m not sure about the head of the community — if Totah in Damascus has it on his or not. This is in complete contradiction to the statements that would have come from the Mike Wallace show, which say that these restrictions, that these identity cards had been changed to eliminate this mention of 'musawi.' Apparently, there was an intention supposedly that there would be a change, but no change has occurred and they don’t expect the change.

31:51 - 32:04
Chammah: Perhaps one thing should be said is also that identity cards to an American or a Frenchman doesn’t really mean very much because —