Iraqi-Jews

In January 1952, about half a year after the official conclusion of the operation that brought Iraq's Jews to Israel, two Zionist activists, Yosef Basri and Shalom Salah, were hanged in Baghdad. They had been charged with possession of explosive materials and throwing bombs in the city center. According to the account of Shlomo Hillel, a former Israeli cabinet minister and Zionist activist in Iraq, their last words, as they stood on the gallows, were "Long live the State of Israel."' It would have been only natural for Iraqi Jews in Israel to have reacted with outrage to news of the hanging. But on the contrary, the mourning assemblies organized by leaders of the community in various Israeli cities failed to arouse widespread solidarity with the two Iraqi Zionists. Just the opposite: a classified document from Moshe Sasson, of the Foreign Ministry's Middle East Division, to Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett maintained that many Iraqi immigrants, residents of the transit camps, greeted the hanging with the attitude: "That is God's revenge on the movement that brought us to such depths." The bitterness of that reaction attests to an acute degree of discontent among the newly arrived Iraqi Jews. It suggests that a good number of them did not view their immigration as the joyous return to Zion depicted by the community's Zionist activists. Rather, in addition to blaming the Iraqi government, they blamed the Zionist movement for bringing them to Israel for reasons that did not include the best interests of the immigrants themselves.

Iraq was once home to one of the oldest and longest-standing Jewish communities in the Arab world, and the center of Judaism for over a thousand years. Between 1948 and 1951, following the establishment of the State of Israel, around 130,000 Jews fled Iraq and the 2500 year old diasporic Jewish community in the Middle East ceased to exist. The mass displacement is puzzling given the high level of cultural integration, coupled with the traumatic nature of departure, which make Iraqi-Jewish history a contested site of memory that is particularly subject to politicized narratives. While Iraqi Jewish experiences are narrated in terms of coexistence and persecution and used to bolster Zionist and anti-Zionist agendas, Iraqi-born Jews— those who experienced these events firsthand— are often the last to articulate their own stories and views.
My thesis presents oral history interviews of 25 Iraqi-born Jews regarding questions of identity, emigration, and relationship with Zionism. I argue for alternative narratives that acknowledge the dualities in identity and pluralities within communities, and reject simplistic narratives of Iraqi-Jewish experiences. My project aims to preserve the experiences in firsthand form from the last generation of Iraqi-born Jews, by incorporating oral history interviews as a focal point to explain and understand complicated and conflicting identities, address the gap left by existing literature in this area, tell previously untold narratives, and to preserve and give precedence to Iraqi-Jewish voices.

This essay was published in a special issue of ha-Kiṿun Mizraḥ, dedicated to the memory of the Iraqi Jewish author, Shimon Ballas (and edited by Almog Behar and Yuval Evri). The essay examines how Ballas, who was himself in exile from Iraq, relates the experiences of other exiles. Considering Ballas’ oeuvre, I detect his tendency to draw literary portraits—that is, to dedicate each novel to a detailed literary portrait of a single, forgotten historical figure. Unlike Albert Memmi, another Arab Jewish author who was fond of portraits (“portrait of the colonizer,” “portrait of the colonized,” “portrait of a Jew”), Ballas’s portraits were never abstract. They were based rather on true biographies of forgotten historical figures, ones who were never at home in a single nation or culture. The gallery that Ballas forms by amassing together these various portraits allows him to challenge the necessity of the Zionist narrative and to reintroduce other historical possibilities. Focusing on Ballas’ novel Locked Chamber (1980), which sketches a portrait of a Palestinian in Israel, I argue that in trying to convey Palestinian experiences Ballas does not draw on the content of Palestinian literature but rather on its form—particularly as it has been refined by the Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani, whose work Ballas had researched and translated. By reading Edward Said’s thoughts on the episodic form of Kanafani’s writing, I show how Ballas borrows this technique both to convey the rupture introduced by 1948 into Palestinian and Arab time and to insist that he, too, is part of the Arab world.

The Jewish community in Baghdad used to speak its own dialect of Arabic, which was distinct from the one spoken by its Muslim and Christian neighbors. This dialect served as their mother tongue for centuries, up until the massive immigration of Iraqi Jews to Israel following its establishment. Today, a few thousand native speakers of the dialect are still alive, but, unfortunately, in the next few decades this ancient dialect will evidently become extinct.
To commemorate this historical community, this volume glances into its language and culture. It provides the reader with a firsthand opportunity to read transcriptions and translations of original oral texts by native speakers. The texts cover different aspects of the community’s lives, including its history, traditions, cuisine, folk stories, personal stories of immigration, absorption difficulties in Israel, and even a collection of small talks. The volume opens with a grammatical sketch of the phonological and morphological system of the dialect. It focuses on the most important features to enable readers a fluent reading.

The Talmud, a massive Jewish work completed in Persia approximately 1500 years ago, contains references to a fish named the shibuta. Various previous attempts to identify it over the last several centuries took place in lands other than Iraq and consequently the true identity seems to have escaped those Jewish scholars. In this paper we summarize the previous work and present evidence to support the identification of the talmudic shibuta with Barbus grypus.

This article analyzes Jewish and Arab national formations by exploring dynamics surrounding their border-zone community of Arabized-Jews during the first half of the 20th century. As the internal composition of the Arab and Zionist-Jewish collectivities was not pre-ordained, their sociopolitical demarcations fluctuated as a consequence of domestic, regional and international developments. The Jewish and Arab national movements sometimes included Arabized-Jews in—and at other times excluded them from—their ranks. From the late 1930s, actions by Zionist and Arab forces vis- a-vis Arabized-Jews converged, producing their dispersal. The events surrounding Arabized-Jews impacted considerably the  post-1948 direction that the phenomenon of nationalism in the Middle East has followed and the imbalance of power between Israel and the Arab states.

The Legacy of Iraq critically reflects on the abject failure of the 2003 intervention to turn Iraq into a liberal democracy, underpinned by free-market capitalism, its citizens free to live in peace and prosperity. It argues that mistakes made by the coalition and the Iraqi political elite set a sequence of events in motion that have had devastating consequences for Iraq, the Middle East and for the rest of the world.

Today, as the nation faces perhaps its greatest challenge in the wake of the devastating advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and another US-led coalition undertakes renewed military action in Iraq, understanding the complex and difficult legacies of the 2003 war could not be more urgent. Ignoring the legacies of the Iraq war and denying their connection to contemporary events could means that vital lessons are ignored and the same mistakes made again.

The Legacy of Iraq critically reflects on the abject failure of the 2003 intervention to turn Iraq into a liberal democracy, underpinned by free-market capitalism, its citizens free to live in peace and prosperity. It argues that mistakes made by the coalition and the Iraqi political elite set a sequence of events in motion that have had devastating consequences for Iraq, the Middle East and for the rest of the world. Today, as the nation faces perhaps its greatest challenge in the wake of the devastating advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and another US-led coalition undertakes renewed military action in Iraq, understanding the complex and difficult legacies of the 2003 war could not be more urgent. Ignoring the legacies of the Iraq war and denying their connection to contemporary events could means that vital lessons are ignored and the same mistakes made again.

The essay discusses the work of the British photographer Anna Sherbany through the work of the French philosophers Deleuze and Felix Guattari using their text ‘Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature’ (1986), to discuss the concepts of 'deterrotialisation'. Sherbany is located at the margins of many discourses, as an Iraqi Jew living in a Britain within a European Jewish diaspora, a minority within contemporary Britain. These varying displacements and multiple diasporic experiences have formed part of the raw materials of her practice and have been transformed into visual acts of deterritorialisation of dominant languages. Her work references and challenges these multiple perspectives and like Deleuze and Guattari's notion of a minor literature, this deterroritalisation of dominant modes of visuality is not a mode of practice concerned with personal quest for cultural or political identity. Rather Sherbany articulates the interconnections between the social, aesthetic and the discursive.
Key Words: Anna Sherbany; Philosophy, Vision and Visuality Research; Iraqi-Jewish Diaspora; Art Theory; Photography; British Photographers, Diaspora

THIS COURSE WAS OFFER VIRTUALLY AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY IN SPRING 2021, COURSE DESCRIPTION In the media we read about conflict in Iraq between Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds; strife between Muslims and Copts in Egypt; rebellion in Syria against the ruling Alawite minority; and violence between Israelis and Palestinians; and the list goes on. This course aims to enrich students' understanding of the diversity of the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa), exploring histories of inter-communal contact and conflict. We explore the legacy of the Ottoman Empire and the impact of its dissolution. We will focus our attention on urban centers that fostered inter-communal relations, as well as investigating sites of strife and cases of minority repression. We will read histories, memoirs, and fiction, and view films that help us better understand inter-communal relations, tensions, and conflict. We will also interrogate the terms for exploring a range of distinctions among majority and minority populations including: religious difference (Muslims, Christians, and Jews); divisions of religious rite (Sunni and Shi c a); entho-linguistic minorities (Armenians, Kurds, and Nubians); national identities (Israelis and Palestinians); cultures of origin (Mizrahi, Sephardi, and Ashkenazi Jews). We will also examine how race, racism, and the history of slavery factor into modern discourses of identity in the MENA region. COURSE OBJECTIVES • Identify some minority populations in the MENA region, including minority groups distinguished by: religion; sect; ethno-linguistic identity; national identity; and cultures of origin. • Analyze the concept of "minority." • Understand the 20 th century origins of conflicts between and among majority and minority groups in MENA. • Examine memoir and testimony by witnesses of traumatic experiences • Interpret and analyze film and literary representations of inter-communal relations, tensions, and conflict.

عن الكتاب:
يتناول هذا الكتاب ثلاثيّة روائيّة للكاتب "شمعون بلاص"، وهو روائي يهودي عراقي، هاجر إلى إسرائيل عام 1951م، ومرّ بتجربة الاستيعاب في مخيمات المهاجرين الجدد. كتب "بلاص" في ثلاثية "تل أبيب شرق-2003م" عن مجموعة من اليهود العراقيين، الذين هاجروا إلى إسرائيل عام 1951م، ثم خاضوا تجربة الاستيعاب القاسية في مخيّمٍ للمهاجرين الجدد، وانتقلوا بعد ذلك للعيش في حي "هَــتِــكـْـــفــا" (الأمل)، ثم أخيراً استقرّ بعضهم في مدينة "تل أبيب". تناقش أحداث الثلاثية الكثير من القضايا الاجتماعية والاقتصادية لكلٍّ من الآباء والأبناء من اليهود العراقيّين، فضلاً عن إشكاليّة الهويّة الشرقيّة بينهما، وتمتدّ أحداثها على مدار أربعة وأربعين عاماً.
يسهم هذا الكتاب في معرفة طبيعة العلاقة بين الطوائف اليهوديّة المختلفة داخل إسرائيل بشكل عام، ويلقى الضوء على أهم الاختلافات بين الجيلين الأول والثاني من اليهود العراقيين بشكل خاص. كما تنبع أهمية الكتاب من الحاجة لمعرفة المزيد عن موقف الجيل الثاني من اليهود العراقيين ـــ وعموم اليهود الشرقيين ـــ من الهويّة الشرقيّة، ومن المجتمع الإسرائيلي. بالإضافة إلى ذلك، تتناول الدراسة مدى إمكانيّة تحقيق التوافق الاجتماعي بين الطوائف المختلفة في إسرائيل، من خلال تجربة اليهود الشرقيّين عامّة، والعراقيّين خاصة. ويقارن الكتاب، بشكل رئيسي، بين الواقع التاريخي المعيش لحياة جيلين من اليهود العراقيين بعد الهجرة إلى إسرائيل من ناحية، وبين رؤية الكاتب شمعون بلاص الأدبية لهم في عمله الأدبي "تل أبيب شرق" من ناحية أخرى.

İnsanlık tarihinin en kadim yerlerinden olan Irak tarihsel süreçte her zaman önemini korumuştur. Jeostratejik ve jeopolitik açıdan oldukça mühim bir konum işgal eden bu coğrafya devletlerin mücadelelerinin ana gerekçelerinden olmuştur. Ticaret yollarının kavşak noktası olmasının önemini arttırdığı muhakkak olmakla beraber burasını kritik hale getiren bir başka tarihi kıymeti vardır. O da Irak’ı elinde tutmayan devlet ya da imparatorluğun Ortaşark’ta hakimiyetini tam olarak tesis edememesidir. Bu özelliğine binaen bölge pek çok kanlı mücadelenin meydanı olmuş ve pek çok hükümdarlık ya da devlet burada hüküm sürmüştür. Bunlardan biri de tarihte önemli izler bırakan II. Babil Hükümdarlığıdır. Bu hükümdarlık M.Ö 602 ve 586’da sınırlarını arz-ı Filistin’e kadar genişletince buradaki Yahudileri günümüz Bağdat şehri yakınlarındaki Babil’e getirdi. İlk sürgünlerini yiyen Yahudiler vatanlarına dönmek için Pers Hükümdarlığının Babil’i istilasını beklemek zorunda kaldılar.
Bu istiladan sonra ise büyük çoğunluğu Kudüs’e dönmektense Ninova’da kalmayı tercih etti. Bundan sonra peyderpey bölgeye yayıldılar ve Irak’ın asli unsuru haline geldiler. Zaman içinde Basra, Bağdat ve Musul şehirleri ortaya çıktı. Bu şehirler ve bunlara bağlı olan bölgelerde Yahudi nüfus artarak devam etti. Ticaret, sanat, eğitim, ekonomi alanlarında Yahudiler hep ön planda yer aldılar. Bu durum modern dönemlere gelindiğinde kendisini ziyadesiyle hissettirdi. Britanya İmparatorluğu bölgede Osmanlı hakimiyetini nihayete erdirince işgal, manda ve monarşi döneminde yukarıda bahsedilen alanlara ilaveten Yahudiler yönetimde de önemli makamlara getirildiler. Lakin değişen dünya düzeni, Siyonistlerin çalışmaları, Arap coğrafyasında kurulan Yahudi devleti, Irak Yahudilerinin Irak’tan çıkarılmasına zemin hazırladı.
Yukarıdaki paragraflarda hülasa edilen konunun hazırlanmasında Yahudilerin daha çok batı kaynaklarında yer alan Yahudiler üzerine yapılan çalışmalardan istifade edildi. Bunun gerekçesi ise Osmanlı ve Cumhuriyet dönemleri arşiv vesikalarında konu ile alakalı yeteri kadar belge olmamasıdır. İstifade edilen eserler dışında mevcut başkaca kaynaklar elbette bulunmaktadır. Lakin hepsinden yararlanılması imkan dahilinde olmamakla birlikte pek çoğu hemen aynı bilgileri ihtiva etmekteydi.
Buna ilaveten bu hususla ilgili İbranice kaleme alınmış pek çok eser olduğu muhakkaktır fakat adı geçen dili bilmediğimiz için maalesef bu eserlerden de istifade etmek mümkün olmadı. Yukarıda bahsedilen kaynaklardan istifade edildiği takdirde Irak Yahudileri hakkında kıymetli eserler meydana getirilebilir.

The most extensive participation of Jews in the literary Arabic revival (The Nahda) was in monarchial Iraq. Jewish Intellectuals had contributed to the development of national Iraqi culture. These intellectuals have been studied in the context of the non-Jewish Iraqi intellectuals, focusing on their national and cultural integration in the new Iraqi state. This article observes the participation of those intellectuals in two non-Iraqi Jewish journals which were published in literary Arabic, Israʾil, published in Cairo, and al-ʿAlam al-Israʾili, published in Beirut. By changing the point of view from Iraqi Jews in the non-Jewish Iraqi cultural sphere to Iraqi Jews in a non-Iraqi Jewish cultural sphere, the article examines their relation between Iraqi identity and the national Jewish identity.

This book provides a modern historical study of the Chaldean Catholic Church in Iraq from 2003 to 2013, against a background analysis of the origins and ecclesiological development of the Chaldean community from the sixteenth century onwards.

The book offers an insight into the formation of Chaldean ecclesiological identity and organisation in the context of the Chaldeans as a community originating from the ecclesial traditions of the Church of the East and as an Eastern Catholic Church in union with the Holy See. The book argues for the gradual and consistent development of a Chaldean identity grounded and incarnated in the Mesopotamian-Iraqi environment, yet open to engaging with cultures throughout the Middle East and West Asia and, especially since 2003, to Europe, North America and Australasia. It also examines the effects of religious and administrative policies of the governors of Mesopotamia-Iraq on the Chaldeans, from their formation in the sixteenth century until the installation of the new Chaldean patriarch, Louis Raphael I Sako, in March 2013. Furthermore, the book provides a unique analysis of the history of Iraq, by placing the Chaldeans fully into that narrative for the first time.

Providing a thorough overview of the history of the Chaldeans and an in-depth assessment of how the 2003 invasion has affected them, this book will be a key resource for students and scholars of Middle East Studies, Modern History, History of Christianity, as well as for anyone seeking to understand the modern status of Christians in Iraq and the wider Middle East.

In 1876 the Bavarian Jewish orientalist, Jacob Obermeyer, that stayed those days in Baghdad, published a series of articles in Hamagid newspaper, in which he sharply criticized R. Yosef Hayyim of Baghdad ('Ben Ish Hay'), whom he depicted as one that endangers the traditional existence of the Jewish community of Baghdad, and whose writings and practices had similar characteristics to those of both Hasidim and reformers—two groups Obermeyer thought to be outcast. In this article I will examine the discourse that was crystallized by Obermeyer in these articles, that demonstrates the reproducing of the discourse of the Hasidim's opponents as was constructed n Europe, and its implementation in the discussion of the character of RYH, that did not fit the categorical distinctions of this discourse—a character within which 'the characteristics of Geiger' and those of 'the Polish Rabbis' were integrated. However, Obermeyer's illustration of the affinity between Hayyim and Hasidim will also serve as a basis for a comparison between the two, that alongside with deep typological affinities will reveal important dofferences as well. This comparison will focus on two central aspects—the question of hermeneutics and the question of the relation between the religious/spiritual leader and his community. Based on this comparison I claim that the character of the RYH reflects the crystallization of a model of traditional Ottoman Jewish modernity which is different from the one that was shaped in the Hasidic context—a model that did not directly continue existing Baghdadi traditions and at the same time did not lead the shifts and changes he promoted according to fix frameworks that are considered as a necessary manifestation of modernity.

This article uses the racial divisions encouraged by European Zionism in early-state Israel among European and Middle Eastern Jews as a point of departure to explore racialization and gendering among Iraqi Jewish women during the years 1941–51 from a sociopolitical standpoint. Restricting itself to politics given this standpoint, a study of Jewish women’s participation in the illegal Zionist and Communist movements of Iraq reveals that raciali- zations, rather than a single racialization, occurred—a racial reality no other scholarship pro- vides for Iraq’s Jewish community. Because Jewish women participating in these movements contended with patriarchal organizing structures, it is necessary to set apart the racial logics palpable in their articulations. This argument rests on primary sources in the form of three memoirs from the Iraqi Jewish women Tikva Agassi, Shoshana Levy, and Shoshana Almoslino, as well as Zionist women’s letters, a biographical dictionary of Communist participation, and British Foreign Office documents.

In the late 1950s, Iraqi Jews were either forced or chose to leave Iraq for Israel. Most Iraqi Jewish authors found it impossible to continue writing in Arabic in Israel and so faced the literary challenge of switching to Hebrew. As bilinguals, Iraqi Jewish novelists have employed Arabic in some of their Hebrew literary works, including strategies of code-switching. Conversational code-switching is traditionally divided into three types: intersentential code-switching, intrasentential code-switching, and tag-switching. Although code-switching in literary texts has its distinct features, research on written code-switching generally follows the typology applied to conversational code-switching. This article focuses on the typology of code-switching in literary texts. It investigates Arabic codes used in three Hebrew novels written by Iraqi Jewish novelists. The article suggests three main types of literary code-switching in view of the mutual relationship between author, text, and reader: Hard-Access, Easy-Access, and Ambiguous Access code-switching.

In the late 19th century the French-Jewish Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) established and administered primary schools for Jewish communities throughout the Muslim world, with a focus on North Africa and the Ottoman Empire.  The AIU’s actions in the territories that later became Iraq have been seldom studied compared to the schools in other geographic areas and have been almost totally ignored with regard to Basra.  This article utilizes the letters of the Archives of the Alliance Israelite Universelle (AAIU) and other select primary sources to explore the AIU’s relationship, and to a lesser extent its sister organization’s, the Anglo-Jewish Association (AJA), relationship with the Jewish community in Basra in the 1890s and early 1900s leading to the AIU takeover the Basra Jewish School in 1903.  In doing so it provides a foundation for future scholars to more fully examine both the AIU’s subsequent work in the city and also the history of Basra’s Jewish community in the first half of the twentieth century.

In this article I analyze the structure and significance of the miracle story presented in the interpretive literature of R. Joseph Hayim of Baghdad (1835-1909), and offer an understanding of it by deciphering the cultural contexts in which it is planted and through its genaristic characteristics.