New Babylonians

A History of Jews in Modern Iraq

Orit Bashkin

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780804782012
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Although Iraqi Jews saw themselves as Iraqi patriots, their community—which had existed in Iraq for more than 2, 500 years—was displaced following the establishment of the state of Israel. New Babylonians chronicles the lives of these Jews, their urban Arab culture, and their hopes for a democratic nation-state. It studies their ideas about Judaism, Islam, secularism, modernity, and reform, focusing on Iraqi Jews who internalized narratives of Arab and Iraqi nationalisms and on those who turned to communism in the 1940s. As the book reveals, the ultimate displacement of this community was not the result of a perpetual persecution on the part of their Iraqi compatriots, but rather the outcome of misguided state policies during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Sadly, from a dominant mood of coexistence, friendship, and partnership, the impossibility of Arab-Jewish coexistence became the prevailing narrative in the region—and the dominant narrative we have come to know today.

1

BROTHERS AND OTHERS

Iraqi Identity and Arab Jewishness

Though I take my faith from the religion of Moses,

I live under the protection of Muhammad’s religion,

I take refuge in the tolerance of Islam,

And my inspiration is the sublime language of the Qur’an,

I love of the nation of Muhammad,

Although I worship Moses,

I shall remain as loyal as al-Samaw’al,

Whether miserable or blissful in my beloved Baghdad.¹

This poem, written in Arabic by Jewish Iraqi poet Anwar Sha’ul (b. 1904), references al-Samaw’al ibn ‘Adiya, a celebrated pre-Islamic Jewish poet. The modern Jewish poet evoked the memory of the medieval Arab Jewish bard in order to highlight his own loyalty to Arab culture, his admiration of the Arabic language, and his desire to be part of this culture. This poem, I believe, reflects many of the cultural and political choices adopted by Iraqi Jews in the twentieth century. Following Sha’ul’s contemplations on the nature of Arab, Iraqi, and Jewish identities, I explore the writings of modern Iraqi Jews, including their perceptions of patriotism, secularism, and communism. The story I shall tell ends with the tragic departure of some 100,000 Jews from Iraq in the years 1949–51, a country they had considered a homeland for many years. This story, however, will also focus on Jewish hopes for a democratic Iraqi state and a pluralistic Arab Jewish culture.

. . .

Iraq, the political entity we know today, was officially formed as a state in 1921. Its king, Faysal I, played a dominant role in the formation of a constitutional monarchy, as Great Britain, based on a mandate from the League of Nations, oversaw Iraq’s process toward independence. After gaining official independence in 1932, Iraq witnessed a wave of radicalization, marked by intense anticolonial and nationalist activities in the public sphere, and two military coups, in 1936 and 1941. During the 1940s, a new, radical intelligentsia emerged that was more accepting toward socialist and communist organizations. All these processes—namely, state building, the anticolonial struggle, and the opposition to the state—shaped the ways in which Iraqi Jews defined their identities and their approaches to the Iraqi state and the Arab nation.

During the monarchic period, some Iraqi Jewish intellectuals began calling themselves Arab Jews. This is a rather extraordinary case, as Jews not only considered themselves citizens of the new nation of Iraq, but also adopted a new Arab ethnicity. This term, however, could be employed to describe many Jews who spoke Arabic, lived in an Arab country (Iraq), and saw this country as their homeland. Thus, when using the term Arab Jews in this book I mean not only the writers who referred to themselves as such, but also the Jews who, while not identifying themselves as Arab Jews, practiced what I call Arab Jewishness, in that they wrote in Arabic, read Arabic texts, interacted with fellow Muslim and Christian Arabs, and enjoyed Arab cinema, music, and theater.

Rogers Brubaker, who has studied the processes by which heterogeneous individuals come to think of themselves as ethnic groups and nations, argues that these categories are relational and dynamic. To Brubaker, nation and ethnicity are practical categories, cultural idioms, institutional forms, and political projects which are understood within social, political, cultural, and psychological contexts. He thus suggests that scholars consider the process of ethnicization rather than utilize the fixed category of ethnicity.² In the Jewish Iraqi context, a minority community sought to forge a relationship with the cultural and historical framework of the Arab majority community by claiming Arab ethnicity as its own. In fact, three interrelated processes of ethnicization were at work. The first form took place at the level of the state, as Arab Muslim elites debated the categories of Arabness and Iraqiness; the second involved Iraqi Jews themselves and their conceptualizations of the Arab nation and the Iraqi homeland; and the third was the ethnicization of Iraqi Jews by Iraqi national elites (Sunnis, Shi‘is, and Christians). Iraqi Jews were thus represented as “Iraqis,” “citizens,” “Iraqis of the Jewish faith,” “Arab Jews,” “Zionists,” and “people of the book,” depending on the socio-political and sociocultural orientation of those who described them.

The appropriation of Arab nationalism by Iraqi Jewish intellectuals meant that Jews were orienting themselves to new spatial forms (the nation), and that Iraqi Jews came to think differently about time, since Jewish writers were affected by Arab national periodizations and narratives of decline and revival. They hailed, for example, the religious harmony between Jews and Muslims under the golden ages of the Abbasid and the Ottoman empires, and bemoaned the decline of Iraq after the Mongol conquest (1258). Jewish intellectuals, moreover, were fascinated by Arab history and Arab culture and advanced the thesis that Arab and Islamic history testified to their cultural affiliations with the Arab community. Subsequently, Iraqi Jews sought to affect Arab national discourses from within by accepting certain key components of Arab nationalism, imbuing them with tolerant and inclusive meanings, and working in tandem with other Iraqis who held similar views. Furthermore, when Jewish intellectuals addressed matters such as the status of Jewish women and the need to reform Jewish tradition as well as to alter the structure of the Iraq’s rabbinical leadership, they turned to Arab Muslim reformers who were grappling with similar dilemmas in their own communities. Jewish intellectuals thus stimulated an ongoing dialogue between Muslims and Jews and bolstered the understanding that they had shared concerns in the face of Western modernity, as both Muslims and Jews wondered what it meant to be modern and non-European and tried to come to terms with European Christian dominance.

The Arab component in Iraqi Jewish identity encompassed linguistic and literary elements. In her essay “Nationalism and the Imagination,” literary critic Gayatri Spivak attempts to locate the moment when love of the mother tongue becomes integrated into exclusionist nationalism. She asks:

Why is the first learned language so important? Because it teaches every human infant to negotiate the public and the private outside of the public-private divide as we have inherited it from the legacy of European history. Language has a history; it is public before our births and will continue so after our deaths. Yet every infant invents it and makes it the most private thing, touching the very interiority of the heart. On a more superficial level it is this underived private that nationalism appropriates.³

To Spivak, the promotion of multilingualism (“recognizing that there are many first languages”) democracy, comparative criticism, and pluralism means undoing this nationalist appropriation. Similarly, Iraqi Jews grew up speaking and reading in Arabic. Iraqi Jewish nationalists have certainly appropriated the Arabic language in order to show that they were an integral part of the Arab nation. But their love of Arabic should not be conceptualized only within a historical moment when their Arabic mother tongue became the business of the nation-state; it should be reconstructed in relation to daily speech, reading practices, neighborly relations, and friendships with Arab Muslims and Christians, which have shaped the lives of many of Jews and affected their hopes and dreams.

Arab Jewishness was not the only relevant form of identity for Iraqi Jews. During the nineteenth century, they had come to identify themselves as Ottoman subjects; their elites were eager to learn Turkish, and some Iraqi Jews were tapped for high-ranking posts created in the new imperial order.⁴ With the establishment of the state, many Jewish writers identified themselves as Iraqi patriots, underlining the fact that Iraq, and not the entire Arab nation, was their homeland. Iraq, a land whose history dated back to the glorious days of ancient Babylon, and whose unique culture and geography molded a specific form of nationalism, was therefore at the core of many Jewish national narratives. The recognition that Iraqi Jewry belonged to the East was likewise of extreme importance. On the one hand, the tensions that Iraqi Jewish intellectuals grappled with regarding the need to modernize the community within the framework of the nation-state, the genres with which they expressed their concerns (the newspaper article, the short story, the modernist poem), and the places in which they discussed such concerns (the café, the literary salon, the communist cell, and the school), all constitute profound parallels between European Jews and Iraqi Jews.⁵ The Jews of Iraq themselves attempted to accommodate their histories, and their ideas about nationhood, subjectivity, and selfhood, into a universal narrative that evoked the concepts of civilization, progress, and sovereignty, modeled after European ideals. On the other hand, Iraqi Jewish intellectuals emphasized the differences between themselves and Western Jewry. They contended that Iraqi Jews and Iraqi Muslims and Christians shared an internal domain of Eastern authenticity which included motifs from Semitic, Islamic, and Arab cultures.⁶ This shared Eastern domain was located outside, and often constructed in opposition to, European colonialism.

Iraqi Jews debated not only their identities as Iraqis and Arabs, but also the very meaning of being Jewish within an increasingly secularizing milieu. They saw the shift from a religious to a nonreligious society as a step toward the goal of achieving modernity, which Talal Asad defined as the undertaking of projects aimed at institutionalizing several principles (constitutionalism, democracy, human rights, and civil equality), and the employing of technologies of production, warfare, travel, entertainment, and medicine to generate new experiences of space and time.⁷ Partha Chatterjee has shown that secularization was not simply the onward march of rationality, untainted of coercion and power struggles, but rather an effort carried out unilaterally by national elites in order to define and classify the identity of religious minorities.⁸ Similarly, in Iraq, secularism was often seen by the state’s Arab Sunni elites as a means to combat sectarianism. Secularism was tied to political stability, national unity, and Westernization, although the very same elites that promoted secularization took great care not to upend the political hegemony of the Arab Sunnis and their supporters (landed and tribal elites in particular).In Iraq, then, liberty was practiced without equality, as the state permitted freedom of consciousness and religious practice (the idea of liberty), yet rejected the idea of equality in that it privileged one ethno-religious group over all others. For Jewish intellectuals, moreover, the discussions about secularism related not only to a vision of a secular democratic state but to the community’s internal concerns regarding gender and family relationships, communal worship, morality, and privacy.

Zionism did not play a major role in the debates about Iraqi Jewish identity before 1947. What determined the differences between the many kinds of Arab Jews who lived in Iraq was not how they felt about Zionism—most rejected it—but rather how they defined their relationship to the Iraqi state. In the early 1920s a generation of educated Jews hoped that the newly established Iraqi state would materialize their hopes for integration and citizenship rights. Because of their excellent bilingual education, Jewish urban elites were able to gain employment in the bureaucracy, while others benefited from the economy that emerged in the interwar period, working as lawyers, administrators, bankers, and merchants. These Jews very much supported the state, and felt that citizenship and democratic rights could, and should, be achieved by working within the state apparatus. In the 1940s, with the radicalization of the entire Iraqi public sphere, many young Jews turned toward the left. They critiqued the state for failing to provide social justice to most of its subjects and championed socialist, Marxist, and communist visions. They were also willing to take risks that the previous generation had shunned, namely, to join prohibited radical cells and engage in illegal activities. Significantly, liberal and capitalist Iraqi Jews, as well as radical Jewish leftists, all employed the term Arab Jew in their writings, yet each group excoriated the actions of the other faction as detrimental to the Iraqi Jewish community and the possibility of its integration into Iraqi Arab society. To understand these Jewish groups and the historical narratives they proposed, we should, to paraphrase Dipesh Chakrabarty’s famous title, provincialize Zionism, and look into the many meanings the term Arab Jew entailed.⁹

The central approach accorded to Zionism in Jewish Iraqi history, however, colored much of its historiography. Some Arab nationalist historians identified Jewish cultural phenomena such as educational activities in Jewish schools and synagogues as a mere veneer for Zionist propaganda. Zionist historians, for their part, underlined the longing of Iraqi Jews to return to their Jewish homeland and dwelt on the violence perpetrated against the Jews, and on the subsequent activities of the Iraqi Zionist underground in the 1940s. Both types of analysis, however, decontextualized the realities of the Jewish community by projecting the realities created during and after 1948 onto the previous years.¹⁰ Historian Nissim Kazzaz advanced the discussion of Arab Jewish relations in Iraq, arguing that Iraqi Jews had indeed desired to be fully integrated into Iraqi society, and yet the Arab nationalism of the 1930s, which integrated chauvinist and militant elements, could not countenance their vision of Iraq. The combination of support for totalitarian European regimes, sympathy for the Palestinian cause, and a nationalist discourse that privileged Arab ethnicity over a shared Arab culture, fanned the flames of anti-Jewish sentiments. In June 1941 a wave of urban riots against Baghdadi Jews, known as the Farhud, left over 170 Jews dead and turned the attention of young Iraqi Jews to Zionism. Kazzaz thus labeled the attempts at creating new modes of Iraqi Jewish nationalism as “the failure of the Iraqi orientation.”¹¹ Nonetheless, in recent years, historians, sociologists, and literary critics have highlighted the degree of acceptance of Iraqi Jews in Iraqi society, as evidenced by their involvement in the political, cultural, and economic life of modern Iraq, and rejected the notion of “failure,” which was central to Kazzaz’s analysis.¹² Reuven Snir in particular has perceptively illustrated the degree to which Iraqi Jewish culture shaped, and was shaped by, literary and cultural discourses current in the Arab public sphere.¹³

New scholarly evaluation of Iraqi Arab nationalism has likewise affected the ways in which Arab Jewish nationalism is conceptualized. Iraqi Arab nationalism was typically described as being Pan-Arab and Sunni-centered, and aimed at stifling Shi‘i and Kurdish protests of the political hegemony of the Sunni Arab elites (although the participation of Shi‘is in Arab nationalist discourses was also recognized).¹⁴ More recent scholarship on Iraqi nationalism, however, while acknowledging militaristic and ultranationalist elements in Iraqi political culture, has argued that liberal, democratic, and leftist voices were not drowned out. Intellectuals in the monarchic period included actors who collaborated with the state as well as artists, writers, poets, and painters who worked more independently in what was a lively public realm. Most significantly, as established by Sami Zubaida and Eric Davis, at any given moment of the period, there was not a single national narrative or a single memory of the nation, but rather competing visions advanced by the state and opposition forces. Furthermore, despite Iraq’s sectarian and ethnically diverse makeup, a unique Iraqi, nonsectarian nationalism marked a sense of nationalism that differentiated the denizens of Iraq from their Arab brethren.¹⁵ Finally, scholars of the Levant, Syria in particular, have noted the function of the urban middle classes, the effendia, in transmitting and popularizing national ideology. These Western-educated middle-class professionals have not only defined the nature of the national discourse and the anticolonial struggle, but also, and more crucially, they have delineated the meaning of Middle Eastern modernity itself.¹⁶ However, the creation of this national civil order was not simply the outcome of their efforts; it also originated from the endeavors of subaltern and semi-subaltern groups, such as women and popular nationalists, to appropriate the national discourse and to alter its exclusionist nature.¹⁷ In Iraq, the effendia negotiated the significations of nationalism, urbanism, and modernity and shaped the nation’s historical memory by the development of memory sites and commemoration ceremonies.¹⁸

This new historiography on Iraqi state and society bears immense relevance to Iraqi Jewish history. While ultranationalist Iraqi elements identified Judaism with Zionism, or evoked antidemocratic and exclusionary views, the democratic elements in Iraqi society were receptive to a public Jewish presence. The vision of Iraq as a territorial unit whose history, geography, and ...