JLS 3.2_Rev_Orit Bashkin (1) - The Arab

Journal of Levantine Studies Vol. 3, No. 2, Winter 2013, pp. 191-195
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Orit Bashkin
New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. 328 pp.
Reviews
It took almost three decades following the mass exodus of the Iraqi Jewish community
to Israel (1950–1951) for writing to appear about this deep-rooted Mesopotamian
community. The explanation for this most probably lies in the trauma experienced
by Iraqi Jews following their mass exodus and dispersal. A variety of publications
have appeared recently, mainly in the form of memoirs by the community’s older
generation but also by younger academics, as if the community began to discover
itself after decades of absence. Orit Bashkin’s new book penetrates the fog of
demonization and distortion that surrounded the troubled and complex history of
this community.
Bashkin is critical of current discourse that, as she writes, “dehistoricizes” what
Jews and Muslims shared through centuries of coexistence and common culture, as
well as their shared vision of their country, Iraq. Bashkin, as she herself states, has
no time for nostalgia or the construction of a “false paradise”; she simply wishes to
document and study periods in which Jews and Arabs did not look at each other
as enemies and to investigate the extent to which cultural elements and the ethnoreligious composition of Iraqi society created “a unique Jewish-Iraqi experience”
(237).
Bashkin takes a long journey through the writings of prominent Iraqi Jewish
intellectuals such as Anwar Shaʾul, Meir Basri, Suleiman Darwish, and Nissim
Rejwan, who considered themselves Iraqi nationalists. In her view Arab nationalism
and Iraqi patriotism coexisted, and Iraqi Jewish writers considered Arab-Islamic
history and Arabic literature their own. Members of the younger generation of Iraqi
intellectuals such as Sasson Somekh, Shimon Balas, and Sami Michael began to
write in Hebrew in Israel, but they never disconnected from Arab culture, and they
saw themselves as Arab Jews.
As demonstrated in the book, Iraqi Jews—before the 1951 exodus—kept away
from politics and felt comfortable with their economic dominance and the close
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relationship the established, traditional community leadership had with the British
and with people in power under the monarchy. However, their lack of interest in
politics started to change with the domestic and global events of World War II.
Jewish intellectuals and the new generation felt then that they needed to be more
engaged. As Bashkin says, this gave them a sense of “belonging.” Young, educated
Iraqi Jews gradually joined the banned Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) and its shortlived affiliated organization, the League of Combating Zionism (LCZ), in 1946.
Bashkin appreciates the good, pioneering work by Hana Batatu on the
communist movement in Iraq and agrees with him that Jews were not among the
members of the politburo, nor did they have a significant part in the leadership
until the arrest of the ICP founder and secretary general Yusuf Salman Yusuf
(“Comrade Fahd”). However, Bashkin criticizes Batatu, maintaining that it was
incorrect for him to suggest that Jewish membership in the ICP was “unimportant
and to insinuate a possible connection between Iraqi Jewish communists and
Zionism” (180). This was prompted by the controversy surrounding Sasson Dallal,
who became the de facto leader of the ICP at a time when almost all members of
the leadership were in prison. At the same time, Jewish members of the LCZ were
also politically active, their primary aim being to highlight the colonialist nature
of Zionism and to argue “that the Jewish religion could not form the basis for a
national community” (162).
Other young Jewish Iraqis—most of them from poor and less educated groups—
were attracted to the Zionist movement, which renewed its activities in Iraq with the
help of the British, who had reoccupied Iraq during the war. Zionist activists tried
to exploit the Farhud violence that erupted during the power vacuum that lasted for
several days following the downfall of Rashid Ali’s government and his pan–Arab
nationalist colleagues in June 1941. Different views have been offered regarding the
Farhud, and Bashkin is cautious not to impose her own views, choosing instead to
present original insights by letting her interviewees, Iraqi Jews who had experienced
the Farhud, speak about their own experiences.
In doing so, Bashkin refutes attempts made by Zionist leaders to exploit the
Farhud for political needs (138), and she points out that with the restoration of
the pro-British monarchy, the economic prosperity that the Jewish community
enjoyed during and after the war seemed to make them forget their losses and
the psychological scars of the Farhud. This conclusion was actually supported by
reports prepared by Zionist emissaries at the time.1
In her analyses of interviews she conducted with young Israelis of Iraqi origin
and of writings of current Zionist thinkers, Bashkin noticed that they have a totally
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193
Reviews
different perception of history, one that is detached from the reality of Jewish life in
Iraq or their parents’ relationship with their Muslim neighbors or friends. Another
theme that this young generation of Israelis of Iraqi background has developed is the
linking of Iraqi Jewish history to European Jewish history and the “universalization”
of Jewish history. Thus, according to this framework, the “Farhud in particular had
shown that Jews and Iraqi Muslims, just like Jews and gentiles in Europe, could not
live side by side” (211). Bashkin noticed that these youngsters have developed a new
vocabulary that originated in the writing of European Zionists; words such as “antiSemite,” “Nazis,” and “ghetto” were now applied in a totally different context.
The distinction between Zionism and Judaism might also have been blurred
among the ultra-pan-Arab nationalists, mainly because of the conflict in Palestine.
Anti-Jewish sentiment has no deep-rooted ideological basis in Arab lands but
it surfaced in the colonial era when, in the words of veteran British journalist
David Hirst, Britain and France “offered various degrees of favour to the Jewish
communities as well as to other minorities.”2 This was, however, felt less in Iraq
than in other countries where Jews were granted European citizenship, as in most
Maghreb countries, or where large European Jewish communities lived, as in Egypt.
To her credit Bashkin tries to avoid these clichés.
Bashkin does however say that some Palestinians who found refuge in Iraq
“projected their animosity towards Zionism onto Iraqi-Jews” (104). Her statement
is based on an article by Akram Zuaʿiter, the Palestinian intellectual who fled the
heavy hand of the British during the anti-British uprising of 1936–1939. She goes
on to say that Palestinians were also “hostile toward Iraqis who opposed the PanArab ideology, in particular, the social democrats and the communists” (104).
These comments, I believe, need to be put in context. Zuaʿiter was responding,
as he himself explained, to a series of articles in a new Iraqi newspaper that attacked
him and other Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian pan-Arab nationalists as “outsiders”
and “mercenaries . . . who are taking Iraqi jobs.”3 The late 1930s and the war that
followed brought global tension and polarization between the two camps of the
conflict. These developments perhaps reflected themselves more strongly in Iraq
than in any other Arab country. Iraq became the hub for pan-Arab nationalism
as activists from Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt, wanted by the two colonial
powers, found refuge in Iraq.
The pan-Arab nationalists, like members of liberation movements in Latin
America and Asia, refused to join their colonial masters, and some thought of
seeking assistance from Germany. Rightly or wrongly, this was motivated merely
by self-interest and not by an ideological bond with Nazism. The communists and
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social democrats (al-Ahali) aligned themselves with the Allies. As differences between
the two political factions widened, a war of words and propaganda—encouraged
and financed by the great powers involved in the conflict—broke out between the
two. Zuaʿiter mentioned that the articles written against him and other pan-Arab
nationalists appeared to be the result of “factional division and foreign hands” and
were financed by a secret fund held by the minister of the interior.4
The question of the reasons behind the mass exodus of the Iraqi Jews is also
raised in the book. Bashkin argues that this mass exodus was not sudden but, rather,
was a “process.” Archival materials in Israel and other countries show that plans to
transfer Iraqi Jews to Israel had been in progress for some time.5 These plans were
prepared and put into action without consulting the Jewish community in Iraq,
which hoped that a political settlement in Palestine was possible and that they could
go on with their lives in the country in which they had lived for centuries. Even
after the denaturalization law of March 1950, the community and Iraqi officials
estimated that no more than 10,000 would leave the country.
The question then is why almost the entire community of more than 135,000
left in such a short period of time. Bashkin avoids going into detail about who was
behind the bombings in Baghdad targeting the Jews or the impact that such acts
of violence had on triggering a mass exodus within the short period of time during
1950–1951.6 On the other hand, she does not rule out responsibility of the Zionist
underground movement (which was the most well-known secret group spoken
about privately among Iraqi Jews) for the bombings and, as a result, for the mass
exodus in general.7 Indeed, the advancement of the Zionist project in Palestine led
to the creation of a new “Jewish question” in the Orient, a question that one might
argue was aimed less at the project of establishing a homeland for the Jews than at
the colonial practices of an ongoing Israeli expansionism.8
Bashkin steers away from Zionist historical discourse by highlighting the depth
of both the interaction between and the culture held in common by one of the
most deeply rooted Oriental Jewish communities in any Arab Islamic society and
other Iraqi communities. In the imposition of the Zionist version of anti-Jewish
discrimination and oppression in Europe upon the younger members of Oriental
Jewish communities in Israel, Bashkin foresees the risk of confused Israeli identities
in a society very much tied to its surrounding Arab and Muslim region, yet made to
be hostile to it—a view presented in other work being done on this issue.9
Altogether, Bashkin’s book greatly enhances our understanding of the history
of this vibrant and deep-rooted community, which flourished in a multi-ethnic and
multi-religious society for centuries: its contribution to modern Iraq, its cultural and
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intellectual achievements, and its global economic and trade exposure and success
in Iraq and elsewhere in the diaspora. Her book is honest, well balanced and well
documented, and she approaches her subject with an open, sympathetic mind.
Abbas Shiblak
University of Oxford
Notes
That the Iraqi Jewish community had no interest in leaving their country or endorsing the Zionist
call that was alien to their history and culture was best expressed by the prominent figures of the
community at the time. These figures include Ezra Daniel, Ibrahim al-Kabeer, and the Chief
Rabbi Sasun Khaduri (185–186).
2
David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East (London:
Faber and Faber, 1977), 73.
3
Akram Zuaʿiter, Bawakir al-nidal: Min mudhakirat Akram Zuaʿiter, 1909–1935 [My struggle:
The memoirs of Akram Zuaʿiter, 1909–1935] (Beirut: al-Muʾassasa al-ʿArabiyya li’l-Dirasat wa’l
nashr, 1994), 616–618.
4
Ibid., 134.
5
Yehouda Shenhav, “The Phenomenology of Colonialism and the Politics of ‘Difference’: European
Zionist Emissaries and Arab-Jews in Colonial Abadan,” Social Identities 8, no. 4 (2002): 521–
544.
6
7
Abbas Shiblak, Iraqi Jews: A History of Mass Exodus (London: Saqi, 2005), 159–163.
Rachel Shabi, Not the Enemy: Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2009), 91–94.
8
Unlike the case of the Iraqi Jews, the Jews in Egypt and Syria (under pan-Arab nationalist
governments) and Libya and Tunisia were able to stay in these countries up to the two major
wars that Israel started in 1956 and in 1967. See ibid. See also Joel Beinin, Shatat Yahud Misr: al-
Jawanib al-Thaqafiyya waʾil-Siyasiyya li-Takwin Shatat Hadith [The dispersion of Egyptian Jewry:
Culture, politics and the formation of a modern diaspora] (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruk, 2009).
9
See the work of journalist Rachel Shabi, Not the Enemy: Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands, her recent
publication on Jews from Arab lands (note 7 above).
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