Last year, I translated into Italian a book I came to love, Elie Kedourie’s Nationalism, and I’m now working on an Introduction. This forced me to learn more about the other works by Kedourie, most of which are about Middle Eastern politics, and about his life. Kedourie was a “Jew of Baghdad” and this fact is paramount to appreciate his profound dismay at the simplistic and one dimensional understanding of identity that nationalism promotes.
About the Jews of Baghdad, I’d like to point the following in your attention, from a splendid essay by Joel Beinin (“Jews as Native Iraqis: An Introduction”):
In the early nineteenth century there were about 10,000 Jews in Baghdad and less than 1,500 in Basra. By 1908 Jews constituted 53,000 of Baghdad’s 150,000 inhabitants. The last Ottoman yearbook for Baghdad enumerated 80,000 Jews among the city’s 202,200 residents in 1917.
Journalist Nissim Rejwan noted “it has often been said that New York is a Jewish city. I think one can safely say the same about Baghdad of the first half of the twentieth century”.
The Jews of Baghdad were probably doomed as soon as the English moulded Iraq out of three Ottoman provinces and put it in the hands of a small Sunni minority. I think however that even just these two bits of information are instructive. How often we speak of states and nations as if identities were carved in marble and never changing – or never swept away. How wrong we are.
READER COMMENTS
OneEyedMan
Aug 20 2021 at 11:55am
There is some great science fiction exploring alternative histories where the Jewish life in the middle east worked out very different.
Ruff’s The Mirage
Grimwood’s Arabesk trilogy
Chabon’s Yiddish Policeman’s Union
Alan Goldhammer
Aug 20 2021 at 2:12pm
There were also large populations of Jews in Yemen and Morocco. Most emigrated to Israel where they were treated as second class citizens by the ruling Euro-Jewish settlers for a lot of years.
Michael S
Aug 21 2021 at 6:06am
this is a strange choice of putting it. The Jews in Arab lands were treated as second (or third) class citizens (even when they were not massacred). Yes, Morocco was an exception in terms of persecution, but would you claim full equality? That would be against islamic law, no?
The cultural (and even genetic) difference between Ashkenazim ans Sephardim is vast. Israel was a project of educated (mostly secular) Western idealists, who nevertheless embraced Arabic-speaking, thoroughly oriental Mizrahi. Was there a cultural divide? Still is. Had European settlers superior training in many ways? I’m afraid yes. Still, they managed to create a nation.
The internal inequality is really the least relevant aspect of the great Jewish exodus. Only a hypertrophic — and decidedly selective — sense of “equity” sees it otherwise
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Aug 20 2021 at 8:15pm
Jews in Bagdad (Babylon) go back a long way. The Babylonian Talmud, for example.
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