Iraq S Last Jews

Iraq's Last Jews is a collection of first-person accounts by Jews about their lives in Iraq's once-vibrant, 2500 year-old Jewish community and about the disappearance of that community in the middle of the 20th century. This book tells the story of this last generation of Iraqi Jews, who both reminisce about their birth country and describe the persecution that drove them out, the result of Nazi influences, growing Arab nationalism, and anger over the creation of the State of Israel.

This memoir of life in the Iraqi capital’s Jewish community is “a rare look—detailed and vivid—into a culture that is no longer extant” (Nancy E. Berg, author of Exile from Exile: Israeli Writers from Iraq). Once upon a time, Baghdad was home to a flourishing Jewish community. More than a third of the city’s people were Jews, and Jewish customs and holidays helped set the pattern of Baghdad’s cultural and commercial life. On the city’s streets and in the bazaars, Jews, Muslims, and Christians—all native-born Iraqis—intermingled, speaking virtually the same colloquial Arabic and sharing a common sense of national identity. And then, almost overnight it seemed, the state of Israel was born, and lines were drawn between Jews and Arabs. Over the next couple of years, nearly the entire Jewish population of Baghdad fled their Iraqi homeland, never to return. In this beautifully written memoir, Nissim Rejwan recalls the lost Jewish community of Baghdad, in which he was a child and young man from the 1920s through 1951. He paints a minutely detailed picture of growing up in a barely middle-class family, dealing with a motley assortment of neighbors and landlords, struggling through the local schools, and finally discovering the pleasures of self-education and sexual awakening. Rejwan intertwines his personal story with the story of the cultural renaissance that was flowering in Baghdad during the years of his young manhood, describing how his work as a bookshop manager and a staff writer for the Iraq Times brought him friendships with many of the country’s leading intellectual and literary figures. He rounds off his story by remembering how the political and cultural upheavals that accompanied the founding of Israel, as well as broad hints sent back by the first arrivals in the new state, left him with a deep ambivalence as he bid a last farewell to a homeland that had become hostile to its native Jews.

Iraq's Last Jews is a collection of first-person accounts by Jews about their lives in Iraq's once-vibrant, 2500 year-old Jewish community and about the disappearance of that community in the middle of the 20th century. This book tells the story of this last generation of Iraqi Jews, who both reminisce about their birth country and describe the persecution that drove them out, the result of Nazi influences, growing Arab nationalism, and anger over the creation of the State of Israel.

This riveting and utterly unique memoir chronicles the coming of age of Cynthia Shamash, an Iraqi Jew born in Baghdad in 1963. When she was eight, her family tried to escape Iraq over the Iranian border, but they were captured and jailed for five weeks. Upon release, they were returned to their home in Baghdad, where most of their belongings had been confiscated and the door of their home sealed with wax. They moved in with friends and applied for passports to spend a ten-day vacation in Istanbul, although they never intended to return. From Turkey, the family fled to Tel Aviv and then to Amsterdam, where Cynthia's father soon died of a heart attack. At the age of twelve, Sanuti (as her mother called her) was sent to London for schooling, where she lived in an Orthodox Jewish enclave with the chief rabbi and his family. At the end of the school year, she returned to Holland to navigate her teen years in a culture that was much more sexually liberal than the one she had been born into, or indeed the one she was experiencing among Orthodox Jews in London. Shortly after finishing her schooling as a dentist, Cynthia moved to the United States in an attempt to start over. This vivid, beautiful, and very funny memoir will appeal to readers intrigued by spirituality, tolerance, the personal ramifications of statelessness and exile, the clashes of cultures, and the future of Iraq and its Jews.

In Baghdad, Iraq, in 1939, nine-year-old Heskel Haddad, then the most fervent of Iraqi nationalists, first heard a fellow Iraqi call him "lousy Jew." Iraq, which for centuries was called Babylon, housed the world's oldest continuing Jewish community, largely concentrated in the capital city of Baghdad. By the late 1930's spurred by pro-Nazi elements, the Arab community had become increasingly anti-Semitic. On the eve of the holy day of Shuvuot, small roving bands of M'silmin killed 900 Jews in Baghdad, among them Heskel Haddad's cousin, his closest friend, who had been stabbed in the back and left to die in slow agony. Heskel Haddad swore the solemn oath to avenge his cousin, and began to organize an underground movement to protect his fellow Jews from further slaughter. As conditions worsened in Iraq, more and more Jews dreamed of escaping to Israel, but attempts to flee through Syria and Trans-Jordan meant death in the desert or at the hands of the Bedouin. The only way out was into neighboring Persia, now called Iran. Between 1948 and 1950, the Underground led 20,000 Jews to safety. An anonymous informer put Haddad on the "wanted list," and eventually Haddad was forced to leave Iraq forever. After a grueling journey through the desert into Iran, Haddad was forced to leave Iraq forever. After a grueling journey through the desert into Iran, Haddad arrived in Israel, where he was reunited with his family, which had left Iraq penniless as a result of the mass expulsion of Jews. Born in Baghdad is a gripping, richly atmospheric book about exotic lands poised between ancient tradition and modern change--and about the human values that must ultimately transcend both.

The fascinating story of the Iraqi Jews told through the life of the author's grandmother 'Last Days in Babylon is a marvel ... An amalgam of political commentary, history and personal memoir, it offers a poignant testimony to an obliterated people' Sunday Times 'This is a history unknown even to most Jews. Benjamin narrates it fluently and passionately' Independent Marina Benjamin grew up in London, feeling estranged from her family's Middle Eastern ways, refusing to speak Arabic or eat their food. But when Benjamin had her own child a few years ago, she realised that she was losing her link to the past, inspiring a journey to Baghdad and into her family's history. Her discoveries will haunt anyone who seeks to understand a country whose ongoing struggles continue to command the world's attention. By turns moving and funny, Last Days in Babylon is an adventure story, a riveting history and a timely reminder that behind today's headlines are real people whose lives are caught in the crossfire of misunderstanding, prejudice and ambition.

This book provides an account of the Jews of Iraq, their history, culture and society. It covers the Iraqi Jewish history in three parts: from the Assyrian Captivity to the Arab Conquest (731 bc–ad 641); the encounter with Islam (641–1850); and the last hundred years (1850–1951).