Book Review

In search of a lost Iraqi tribe

Last Days in Babylon: the story of the Jews of Baghdad

Since 2003, over a million and a half Iraqi Christians have left their homes. Many settled in Baghdad; others went abroad where they now form a large diaspora. Tens of thousands are refugees in the region. The Christians of Iraq have experienced displacement in every generation;  a line of continuity from the Ottoman Muslim genocide to today. Some see this as the end of Christianity in Iraq and the heirs of the apostolic tradition in the East for nearly two millennia. The twentieth century has also witnessed, however, the end of the Jewish presence in Iraq, a community that had roots more ancient than Christianity.

Two new books record that end from two different perspectives. For Naim Kattan's Farewell, Babylon, translated for the first time into English, it is a personal account of the life and times of the Jews of Baghdad in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, and the beginning of a new life as immigrants in Canada.

Marina Benjamin, on the other hand, recounts a journey of going back to find her roots and her ancestors in the Jewish community of Iraq, a quest which was itself born with the birth of her own daughter; a moment when she "realised that she was losing her link to the past".

Iraqi Jews constitute one of the world's oldest and most historically significant Jewish communities. It was to Babylon that the Jews were exiled by their Babylonian conquerors in around 600 BC. The descendants of these exiles ensured that Babylonia became the most important Jewish community after the Romans had destroyed Jerusalem. The community was the centre of Jewish learning until the Middle Ages, when the Mongol invasion and subsequent persecutions by Islamic rulers significantly reduced its importance.

Under the rule of the Ottomans, the life of Iraqi Jews improved although the community never regained its former importance. They played an important role in the early days of the country's independence, but the community, numbered at around 150,000 in 1948, was almost entirely driven out of the country by increasing persecution from the 1940s onwards.

Marina Benjamin hints at the controversy surrounding the emigration of the Jews of Iraq to the new state of Israel. She quotes the leading British historian of the Middle East, Elie Kedourie, of Iraqi Jewish background himself: "The Zionist emissaries and the Baghdadi Jews faced one another across multiple barriers of mutual incomprehension. The emissaries argued the Zionist thesis: that Jewish life in the Diaspora was poisonous and impossible and that the only salvation was to become pioneers on the land in the collective of Eretz Israel. This doctrine was frowned upon by Eastern Jews who had not experienced any crisis of identity and to whom collectivism as a political aspiration was wholly alien."

The remainder of Iraq's Jews departed over the next few decades and, by 1970, most of them had gone. Today, fewer than 100 Jews remain. The end of Saddam Hussein's regime created hopes of an improvement in the living conditions of those Jews and even the return of some of the émigrés. Some hope also existed for rapprochement with Israel. But in reality, the instability and sectarian killings in Iraq have made that tiny community the most vulnerable and terrified group in the country. Most Jews barely leave their homes at all for fear of being kidnapped or executed, and some now look for an opportunity to leave the country. The photographs illustrating Marina Benjamin's book evoke the last remaining moments of contemporary Jewry in Iraq: the Meir Tweg Synagogue in Baghdad, "the building is maintained in pristine condition by Muslim caretakers"; and Tawfiq Sofaer, an old man sitting on his bed in pyjamas and woolly hat, "one of the community's oldest survivors".

Benjamin's book was written in response to her own lost roots. She grew up in London,  estranged from her Iraqi-Jewish family's Middle Eastern ways, refusing to speak the Arabic her mother and grandmother spoke at home and rejecting the food they served. In 2004, she visited Baghdad and began to reconstruct her origins and the recent history of Iraqi Jews.

Naim Kattan evokes a forgotten age. He was born in 1920s Baghdad during a period when Iraq was being reconstructed from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire under the authority of the British mandate. Baghdad was a cosmopolitan city of Jews, Sunni and Shia Muslims, Christians, British colonials and military, and traders. It was also a time when new and old ideas clashed - emerging Iraqi-Arab nationalism, anti-Semitism, the breaking of communal solidarity and identity and the rediscovery of religion.

Kattan's is a vividly personal account of life as a Jew growing up in Baghdad. He records, for example, that when at the height of summer, a small island appeared in the middle of the low river water, chardaghs (little huts made of braided rushes) were built on it:

All summer we would light fires for cooking fish on this ephemeral island. At the sound of the oud and the singing, boats would draw up around the island. Jews and Christians would bring their wives, sisters, and sometimes their mothers and aunts, but the Muslim men came alone.

While Benjamin constructs for us the context within which this small world was held and understood, both accounts present an Iraq that no longer exists. Both her book and Kattan's, with their depiction of the uneasy conviviality of a former age, are nostalgic; but they also vividly demonstrate the sad contemporary reality that this is the end of that political space in which those diverse peoples and religions that have made the Middle East were able to live side by side. It has taken only two or three generations for that world to be dismantled: in Farewell, Babylon, Kattan recalls experiencing anti-Semitism in the 1930s, when  the Iraqi Government sought an alliance with Nazi Germany, raising the horrible possibility of the Shoah being visited upon the Jewish communities of the Middle East.

Over the last century, genocide, war, ideology and emigration have made it apparently impossible for different peoples to live together. The Middle East today is fast becoming a region of many small statelets - all of which are resistant to the possibility of ethnic or religious diversity.

This is the experience of both Jews and Christians in the area; and we are now seeing that historical reality taking its toll on Iraqi Muslims. The beginning of the modern era of Europe is considered by many historians to have been constructed from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, by which ruling princes could choose the religion of their subjects. What followed that treaty was centuries of religious strife which ended in secular conflict.

In these two striking accounts of Jewish life in the old communities of Baghdad we can hear echoes of this drama played out in the Middle East.

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