Leaving Paradise

Adam Shatz

* BuyMemories of Eden: A Journey through Jewish Baghdad by Violette

Shamash, edited by Mira Rocca and Tona Rocca
Forum, 326 pp, £14.99, February 2008, ISBN 978 0 9557095 0 0
* BuyBaghdad, Yesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew by Sasson
Somekh
Ibis, 186 pp, £9.50, November 2007, ISBN 978 965 90125 8 9

On 27 April 1950 a man whose passport identified him as Richard

Armstrong flew from Amsterdam to Baghdad. He came as a
representative of Near East Air Transport, an American charter company
seeking to win a contract with Iraq’s prime minister, Tawfiq al-Suwaida, to
fly Iraqi Jews to Cyprus. Only six weeks earlier, the Iraqi government had
passed the Denaturalisation Act, which allowed Jews to emigrate provided
they renounced their citizenship, and gave them a year to decide whether
to do so. Al-Suwaida expected that between seven and ten thousand Jews
would leave out of a community of about 125,000, but a mysterious
bombing in Baghdad on the last day of Passover, near a café frequented
by Jews, caused panic, and the numbers registering soon outstripped his
estimate. The position of the Jews in Iraq had been deteriorating with
alarming speed ever since the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli war in 1948:
they were seen as a stalking horse for the Zionists in Palestine, and were
increasingly rewarded for their expressions of loyalty to Iraq with
suspicion, threats and arbitrary physical assaults. By the spring of 1950
the question was when, not whether to leave, and on 9 May NEAT signed
a contract with the Iraqi government to organise their departure.

For Richard Armstrong and NEAT, the uprooting of the Middle East’s most
ancient Jewish community was not a mere business transaction: it was a
mission. Armstrong was really Shlomo (né Selim) Hillel, an Iraqi-born
Mossad agent; NEAT was secretly owned by the Jewish Agency; and Israel,
not Cyprus, was the refugees’ ultimate destination. It’s unlikely that al-
Suwaida and the minister of the interior, Saleh Jabr, were fooled. Hillel
claimed to be the ‘swarthy-skinned son’ of a British colonial official who’d
worked in India, but he didn’t look much like an Armstrong. And he’d been
arrested a few years earlier in Baghdad, where, under the alias Fuad
Salah, he’d been training Zionist militants in attics and cellars. But if the
Iraqis knew who he was, they didn’t call his bluff: they owned shares in
the tourism agency in Baghdad through which NEAT had chosen to
operate, and stood to benefit from the deal. ‘We parted on the most
cordial terms,’ Hillel remembered in his memoir, Operation Babylon. By
the end of 1952, almost all of Iraq’s Jews had fled, in what Mossad called
Operation Ezekiel and Nehemiah.

The exodus of Mesopotamia’s Jews, who traced their origins back to the
destruction of the first temple in 587 BCE, would have seemed
unthinkable at the beginning of the 20th century. As Violette Shamash
writes, Babylon was the home of ‘our patriarch Abraham Abinou’; the
place where the Talmud was written and Jewish law codified. And if distant
memories weren’t enough to bind Jews to their ancestral home, something
more tangible did: security and the promise of a good life. Of all the
Jewish communities in the Middle East, the Mesopotamian Jews were the
most integrated, the most Arabised, the most prosperous. Not only had
they freely practised their faith under the Ottomans, they had become the
country’s most powerful economic group. And there was hardly an area of
Mesopotamian culture on which Jews had not left their imprint, from the
style of music performed in Baghdad’s cafés to the wafting amba, a
mango pickle that Baghdadi Jews working in India brought home with
them.[*]

Recent polemics – and pro-Israeli websites – have made much of the

indignities of Jewish life under Ottoman rule, seeking to expose the ‘myth’
of Muslim tolerance. This tolerance, it’s argued, is a euphemism for
dependence on the goodwill of capricious, if not cruel Muslim overlords.
The memoirs of Iraqi Jews, however, tell a very different story: Shamash,
who was born in 1912 and spent the last twenty years of her life recording
her memories of ‘my Baghdad, my native land’, is not alone in describing
her family’s life before the arrival of British troops in World War One as
‘paradise’. Memories of Eden provides as sumptuous an account of the
world of the Baghdadi Jewish elite as we’re likely to get. It’s a portrait of
the city as seen from inside a qasr, the palace her merchant father built
on the banks of the Tigris, facing what is now the Green Zone. Shamash’s
extended family lived in the qasr’s separate wings, connected by maslak,
ground-floor corridors. The fragrance of walnut and apricot trees pervaded
the garden; kebabs were grilled in a tanoor, a wood-burning clay oven.
Europe exerted a strong attraction: the family shopped at Orosdi-Beck,
the country’s first Western department store, and Shamash was sent to a
school run by the Alliance Israëlite Universelle, a French network
established throughout the Middle East. But local traditions held their
ground: women wore amulets to protect themselves from the Evil Eye and
Muslim healers were consulted when children fell sick. As in most memoirs
by wealthy exiles, life seems idyllic until things go bad. ‘All the
communities lived together peaceably, teasing each other good-naturedly
and without inhibition about their religion,’ Shamash writes, until ‘the
poison of Arab nationalism and Nazism entered the bloodstream’. Now it
all seems a little unreal, even to her: ‘I feel as if I am telling you a dream
and that it will be very hard for you to join the pieces together.’

Jewish life under the Ottomans wasn’t without its hardships: few Jews lived
in palaces like the Shamash family, and as members of a non-Muslim
‘millet’ community they were obliged to pay a discriminatory tax, but they
were mostly left to look after their own affairs, and further advance
seemed inevitable. The vast majority lived in cities, apart from a handful
of Kurdish Jews. As bankers, traders and money-lenders the wealthier
members of the community had made themselves indispensable: so much
so that Baghdad’s markets shut down on the Jewish Sabbath, rather than
the Muslim day of rest. By the 19th century, Baghdad was famous for its
Jewish dynasties – the Sassoons, the Abrahams, the Ezras, the Kadouries –
with their empires in finance and imports (cotton, tobacco, silk, tea,
opium) that stretched all the way to Manchester, Bombay, Calcutta,
Singapore, Rangoon, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

When Balfour announced Britain’s support for the creation of a Jewish

homeland in Palestine, leaving Mesopotamia for the kibbutz was the
furthest thing from the minds of Baghdad’s Jews. ‘The announcement
aroused no interest in Mesopotamia, nor did it leave a ripple on the
surface of local political thought in Baghdad,’ Arnold Wilson, the civil
commissioner in Baghdad, reported to the Foreign Office after a meeting
with a group of Iraqi Jewish notables. Palestine, they had said, ‘is a poor
country and Jerusalem a bad town to live in’:

Compared with Palestine, Mesopotamia was paradise. This is the

Garden of Eden, said one; it is from this country that Adam was driven
forth – give us a good government and we will make this country flourish.
For us Mesopotamia is a home, a national home to which the Jews of
Bombay and Persia and Turkey will be glad to come.

Baghdad’s Jews failed to grasp that the rules of the Ottoman game, with
its special protections for non-Muslim minorities, no longer applied in the
British-ruled provinces of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul, where a mandate
was established in 1919. Shamash writes that Baghdad’s Jews and the
British felt an ‘instant connection’: ‘the British saw that there was much to
gain from befriending us, with whom they had already had contact during
a century of trade under colonial rule in India.’ True: but the wealthier
members of the community expected more from this friendship than the
British could offer if they hoped to maintain peaceful relations with the
Muslim majority of what, in 1921, would become the Arab kingdom of Iraq.

Jewish fear of majority rule led, early on, to fateful miscalculations. When
the British conquered Baghdad in 1918, the president of the Jewish lay
council and the acting chief rabbi appealed for direct British rule, on the
grounds that their Muslim neighbours weren’t ready ‘to undertake with
success the management of their own affairs’. After this was rejected, a
group of Jewish notables petitioned for British citizenship, giving the
distinct impression that they regarded themselves as separate from and
superior to the emerging national community. The British, seeking to
harness – and neutralise – the energies of Arab nationalism, were in no
position to grant this request. ‘The Jews of Baghdad were defeated from
the start,’ Elie Kedourie, a British historian of Baghdadi Jewish origin,
concluded in 1970 in The Chatham House Version. ‘The situation was
completely beyond their understanding.’

Mesopotamia’s Jews resigned themselves to becoming Iraqis only when it

was made plain to them that the alternative was not to become British
subjects but to remain Ottomans and be treated as foreigners in their own
country. For the first decade of Iraq’s existence, they fared well under the
protection of the country’s new king, Faisal, the former ruler of Syria and
son of Hussein, the sharif of Mecca. Shortly after being installed by the
British, the king met a group of Jewish leaders at the chief rabbi’s home.
‘There is no meaning in the words Jews, Muslims and Christians in the
terminology of patriotism,’ he assured his audience, ‘there is simply a
country called Iraq and all are Iraqis.’ Another powerful ally of the Jewish
community was Nuri al-Said, Britain’s man in Baghdad, who served as
Iraq’s prime minister a total of 14 times, until the overthrow of the
monarchy – and his assassination – in 1958.

Urbane, Western-educated, often fluent in both Arabic and English, Jews

staffed the civil service, ran the economy and helped lay the foundations
of the modern Iraqi state. Yet they were to suffer increasingly from their
association with Faisal and al-Said. As Kedourie noted, the Iraqi political
class disdained the monarchy as ‘a make-believe kingdom, built on false
pretences and kept going by a British design and for a British purpose’.
That design and that purpose found expression in a series of humiliating
‘agreements’ in which the country’s sovereignty was signed away, and
British dominance guaranteed, before the mandate came to an end. The
Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930, for example, concluded three years after oil
was discovered in Kirkuk, allowed the British to keep control of Iraqi
foreign policy, itself partly directed by British advisers who stayed on after
independence, notably Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, a severe Arabist who had
attracted T.E. Lawrence’s awe and Gertrude Bell’s unrequited love.

As friends of the British, Iraq’s Jews were an easy scapegoat for anti-
colonial fury. As if one mandate weren’t enough of a burden, they were
identified with the British mandate – and with Jewish colonisation – in
Palestine. In fact, they were indifferent, and often hostile, to Zionism:
whatever pride some took in the creation of a Jewish ‘national home’ was
more than offset by the worry that it would endanger them in Iraq. But the
Zionists in Palestine claimed to speak in the name of the Jewish people,
and thus in their name as well. Already resented for their enormous
economic power – 2 per cent of the population, Jews handled 75 per cent
of imports – they were twice guilty by association. Nothing they said or did
to oppose Zionism – even donations to Palestinian fighters – protected
them from being portrayed in the Iraqi press and radio as a fifth column,
especially after the death of King Faisal in 1933. Faisal’s son and
successor, King Ghazi, who styled himself a Pan-Arabist and dabbled in
Nazi doctrine, imposed a tax on Jews whenever they left the country, and
befriended Hitler’s assiduous ambassador to Baghdad, Fritz Grobba. The
Germans had their eyes on the country’s oil, and shrewdly cultivated Arab
nationalists in the Iraqi army by playing on anti-British and anti-Zionist
sentiments, as they were also doing in Jerusalem and Cairo. The Futuwaa,
a paramilitary brigade modelled on the Hitler Youth, began to threaten
Jews in the streets. As Shamash recalls, ‘our men started coming home
early, worried about staying too long in the city.’
Jewish nerves were calmed somewhat when, in 1939, Ghazi was killed in a
car accident – possibly an assassination engineered by Nuri al-Said and
the British – and replaced by his pro-British uncle, Emir Abd al-Ilah.
(Ghazi’s four-year-old son was too young to serve as king.) That same
year, however, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, took refuge in
Baghdad after the defeat of the Arab revolt in Palestine. The mufti
launched a campaign of incitement against the Jews, and became a key
adviser to the Golden Square, a group of pro-German, pan-Arab colonels
led by Rashid Ali al-Gailani. For the Golden Square, Iraq was part of a
larger Arab nation, in which Jews were an irremediably foreign element. In
April 1941, the Golden Square overthrew the regent and concluded a
secret treaty with the Axis that would have allowed them oil and pipeline
concessions, the lease of ports, and the right to build naval and military
bases. In May the British invaded to restore the regent. Had they not done
so, Iraqi oil might have fuelled Operation Barbarossa.

The British invasion, however, led to the worst assault on Jewish life and
property in the history of Iraq, the farhud (‘breakdown of law and order’)
of June 1941. Despite threats from al-Gailani’s supporters that the Jews
would be punished for ‘treason’, the British refused to secure the capital.
‘There will be many people killed if our troops do not enter,’ one
intelligence officer warned, but Cornwallis ordered British soldiers to
remain on the outskirts of Baghdad when the regent returned. The
presence of British bayonets, he argued, would be ‘lowering to the dignity
of our ally’. To preserve the fiction that Britain had not so much occupied
Iraq as restored its legitimate government, defeated but fully armed
Golden Square soldiers were permitted to enter Baghdad, singly rather
than in formation. It was 1 June, the Jewish holiday of Shavuot.

As these soldiers crossed the Khir Bridge to the western side of Baghdad
that morning, they passed small groups of Jews walking in the opposite
direction after prayer services to welcome the regent. They were furious
to see the Jews in all their finery, and since it was Sunday, not the Jewish
Sabbath, they assumed they had dressed up for the regent. The Jews were
set upon, first with fists, then knives. The farhud continued for two days,
an orgy of murder, rape and arson that left two hundred Jews and a
number of Muslims dead. Most Jews hid in their basements; some, like
Shamash’s family, were given shelter by Muslim neighbours. No help
came from the British, who remained on the right bank of the Tigris, out of
respect for Iraqi sovereignty.

After the farhud wealthy Jews began to leave Iraq; some, like Shamash
and her family, joined relatives in India, where there were entire
communities of Baghdadi Jews. Yet Sasson Somekh insists that the farhud
was not ‘the beginning of the end’. Indeed, he claims it was soon ‘almost
erased from the collective Jewish memory’, washed away by ‘the
prosperity experienced by the entire city from 1941 to 1948’. Somekh,
who was born in 1933, remembers the 1940s as a ‘golden age’ of
‘security’, ‘recovery’ and ‘consolidation’, in which the ‘Jewish community
had regained its full creative drive’. Jews built new homes, schools and
hospitals, showing every sign of wanting to stay. They took part in politics
as never before; at Bretton Woods, Iraq was represented by Ibrahim al-
Kabir, the Jewish finance minister. Some joined the Zionist underground,
but many more waved the red flag. Liberal nationalists and Communists
rallied people behind a conception of national identity far more inclusive
than the Golden Square’s Pan-Arabism, allowing Jews to join ranks with
other Iraqis – even in opposition to the British and Nuri al-Said, who did
not take their ingratitude lightly.

Somekh grew up in a mixed neighbourhood of Baghdad known as the

Lettuce Beds. He studied Arabic under a Shia cleric from the al-Sadr
dynasty and began writing Arabic poetry in his teens; his literary mentors,
to whom he pays tribute, were also Arabs. His subtitle is ‘The Making of an
Arab Jew’, and though he doesn’t shy away from the strains of Arab-Jewish
relations in Iraq, his wry, wistful memoir is an elegy for an experiment in
coexistence, rather than a Zionist parable about its impossibility.
Baghdad, Yesterday evokes a world in which Arab and Jewish writers met
in cafés on al-Rashid Street, browsed in the same bookshops and dreamed
of an independent, secular, modern state; a world in which it would be
possible for a young man like Somekh to consider himself both a Jew and
an Arab. He has written a gentle book about one of the least gentle of
historical relationships.

Many of the writers Somekh knew in Iraq were in the orbit of the
Communist Party, which became the most powerful opposition force in the
1940s, leading protests against the British and strikes in the oil industry,
and developing an Iraqi civic identity that transcended sect. Until 1948,
according to Somekh, the Communists succeeded in ‘channelling popular
anger against “imperialism” and “Zionism” rather than specifically
towards the Jews’. In 1946, a group of Jewish Communists formed the
League for Fighting Zionism, which braved threats from the Zionist
underground and would later, absurdly, be accused of being a Zionist
front itself by Nuri al-Said, who felt betrayed by Jewish involvement in the
Communist opposition. The league published a newspaper that had a
readership of six thousand, larger than the entire Zionist movement in
Iraq. And Jews marched in the demonstrations of February 1948 known as
the Wathba, or ‘leap forward’, in which Iraqis of all sects protested against
the Portsmouth Treaty, which ensured Britain’s dominance over Iraq’s
economy and foreign policy for the next 25 years.

Jewish integration was doomed by the war in Palestine. On 15 May 1948,

three months after the Wathba, the state of Israel was proclaimed, the
Arab armies invaded, and al-Said imposed martial law. A week later,
newspapers in Iraq were calling for a boycott of Jewish shops, to ‘liberate’
Iraqis from the ‘economic slavery and domination imposed by the Jewish
minority’. This suspicion of Jews was encouraged by a weak and reviled
government for whom Arab nationalism was a crude but effective weapon,
distracting attention from its colonial docility, and from its poor military
performance in Palestine.

The freezing of Palestinian assets by the Israeli government and the

arrival in Iraq of eight thousand Palestinian refugees in the summer of
1948 did nothing to calm things. Responding to a wave of popular anger,
the Iraqi government declared Zionism a capital offence, fired Jews in
government positions and, invoking Stalin’s support of partition, found
another pretext to round up Communists of all sects. Among the Jewish
victims of anti-Communist repression was the brother of one of Somekh’s
friends, who was hanged in Baghdad’s main square. Somekh remembers
his terror when, after answering an exam question about Iraq’s recent
history with a Marxist analysis of the country’s subordination to British
interests, he found ‘three official-looking men’ waiting for him outside the
classroom. They praised his essay, but the next day the principal warned
him to ‘avoid such opinionated displays because they put both you and
the school at risk’.

The event that shook Iraq’s Jews most profoundly was the show trial and
execution in 1948 of a businessman with strong connections to the
monarchy, on charges of supplying British army scrap to Israel. Shafiq
Adas, who was hanged outside his Basra mansion before cheering crowds,
was by all accounts an apolitical man: if he wasn’t safe, no one was. The
Jewish population grew more receptive to the overtures of Mossad, which
had become increasingly active in Iraq since the Golden Square took
power, some agents entering the country as volunteers with the British
army during the 1941 invasion. Mossad’s objective was not to improve the
position of the Jews in Iraq, but to hasten their departure. Pamphlets
appeared discouraging Jews from mixing with Arabs, and arguing that any
attempt to do so ‘leads to butchery’.

The Israeli government circulated stories about Iraqi ‘pogroms’ and

‘concentration camps’ and denounced the hanging of seven Jews charged
with Zionist activism in March 1949 – executions that Mossad’s own
agents in Baghdad insisted had never occurred. Unless Iraqi Jews were
allowed to emigrate, Israel warned, it would back armed resistance to al-
Said’s government, or find itself unable to prevent Iraqi Jews already in
Israel from killing Palestinians in revenge. The Israelis also began to
promote the idea of a ‘sorting out’ of populations, involving a swap of Iraqi
Jews for an equal number of Palestinian refugees, an idea quietly
encouraged by the Foreign Office: ‘National exuberance is a phenomenon
which is going to last a long time in the Middle East. On the whole,
elimination of awkward minorities is likely to cool rather than fan the
flames.’ If Israel was a sanctuary for Iraq’s Jews, it was also among the
reasons they were in such desperate need of one.

By 1950, thousands of Jews had fled; many crossed into Iran on horseback
with the help of Arab and Kurdish smugglers. Embarrassed by this ‘wildcat
immigration’, the Iraqi Chamber of Deputies decided to take matters into
its own hands with the Denaturalisation Law of 4 March 1950. The US
Embassy in Baghdad agreed with Tawfiq al-Suwaida that mass emigration
was unlikely, so long as Israel ‘pursues a policy of moderation and agrees
to a peace settlement considered not too unreasonable by the Arabs’. But
the ‘ingathering of the exiles’, not a peace settlement, was Israel’s goal,
for strategic as much as sentimental reasons. Israel had conquered 20 per
cent more territory than it had been allotted under the partition
agreement, and it needed more Jews to settle the land, particularly along
the border. As Kedourie bitterly remarked, Israel ‘set out to help the Iraqi
government to achieve its national unity; it was one of these tacit,
monstrous complicities not entirely unknown to history.’ The Foreign
Office learned of the agreement between al-Suwaida and ‘Richard
Armstrong’ of Near East Air Transport through its channels in Tel Aviv, not
Baghdad.

‘Why didn’t someone come to see us instead of negotiating with Israel to

take in Iraqi Jews?’ the chief rabbi of Baghdad, Sasson Khedourie,
wondered. ‘Why didn’t someone point out that the solid, responsible
leadership of Iraqi Jews believed this to be their country – in good times
and bad – and we were convinced the trouble would pass?’ Iraq’s Jews,
who had tended to wait for trouble to pass, had to be pushed into leaving.
And pushed they were, in a series of attacks which began with the Abu
Nawas bombing in April 1950 and resumed in 1951, as the deadline to
register to leave Iraq approached. It’s long been rumoured – and many
Iraqi Jews fiercely believe it – that Israeli agents orchestrated these
bombings in order to drive the Jews to emigrate, though there is no proof
of Mossad’s responsibility, or of anyone else’s.

By 8 March, when the deadline was due to expire, more than one hundred
thousand Jews had registered. The next day the Iraqi Chamber of Deputies
froze Jewish assets, fearing that neither the economy nor the state itself
could survive the transfer of capital to a country that had expelled most of
its Arab population. Jews would be allowed to leave with only 50 dinars.
The British and the Americans weren’t pleased about this decision, but
saw no way of protesting the Jews’ expropriation when Israel had refused
to compensate Palestinian refugees.

About six thousand Jews chose to remain in Iraq. Their lot improved
fleetingly in the late 1950s under the revolutionary government of
General Abdel Karim Qassem, who abolished the monarchy and espoused
a cosmopolitan vision of Iraqi identity. But soon after the Baath Party
seized power in 1963, in a CIA-backed coup, Jews were forced to carry
yellow identity cards. The Arab defeat in 1967 led to an ‘anti-Zionist’
campaign that culminated in the 1969 hanging of eight Jewish ‘spies’ in
Liberation Square. Saddam Hussein urged listeners to Baghdad Radio to
‘come and enjoy the feast’, and hundreds of thousands duly turned out.
About a dozen Jews remain in Iraq today.

Somekh flew to Israel on 21 March 1951 with two hundred other Jews.
Their ‘exile’ had ended, but he ‘saw no one kneeling down to kiss the
sacred ground’. Before they could leave the plane, passengers were told
to remain seated while a man sprayed them with DDT – a greeting none of
them forgot. They landed in Lydda, where, on 13 July 1948, Israeli forces
led by Yitzhak Rabin had driven more than thirty thousand Palestinians
from their homes in one of the largest, most brutal expulsions of the war.
Scores of refugees from Lydda and the neighbouring town of Ramleh died
of hunger and thirst on the forced march eastwards to Ramallah. The
towns were looted afterwards, their homes occupied: scenes with which
the Jews who remembered the farhud were all too familiar.

Somekh was temporarily held at an absorption camp on the coast near

Haifa, while immigration officials decided which transit camp he would be
sent to – a process known as siddur. He hated the word, since it ‘sounded
very much like the Arabic tasdir, which means “the exporting of goods”.
We angrily protested the fact that overnight we had been transformed
from people into goods, imported and exported by Yiddish-speaking
clerks.’ The transit camps were open-air holding centres with tents made
of corrugated tin: ‘We lived in palaces and they put us in tents,’ the
novelist Samir Nakkash recalls in Forget Baghdad, an arresting
documentary about Iraqi-Jewish writers in Israel. But it wasn’t the
conditions that caused the Iraqi Jews to despair so much as the
denigration of their culture in Ashkenazi-dominated Israel. That Abraham
and Jonah had lived in Mesopotamia was irrelevant to Ben-Gurion: ‘we
don’t want Israelis to become Arabs,’ he said with his usual bluntness, and
the Iraqi Jews were dangerously close to being Arabs in Israel. An elite in
their own country, they were now cast as a ‘primitive’, inferior people,
requiring tutelage from Ashkenazi Jews, descendants of the despised
Ostjuden, who were now determined to erase any trace of the East. And
though many Iraqi Jews, bitter at their treatment at the hands of Arabs,
became supporters of the political right in Israel, the racism they
encountered made it impossible for them to identify fully with the
movement that brought them ‘home’.

In the early 1990s, Somekh tried to establish a solidarity association with

the Iraqi people with the aim of documenting ‘the co-operation and good
neighbourliness between the Jews and other Iraqis, so that the coming
generations would know about this wonderful connection that had
characterised Jewish life in the Arab world for 1500 years.’ His application
was rejected by the Registrar of Non-Profit Associations in Jerusalem,
which thought it unwise to revive such memories, a potential ‘source of
Saddamist subversion’.

[*] The contribution of Iraqi Jews to Arabic and Kurdish music is surveyed
in a startling new anthology of archival recordings, Give Me Love: Songs of
the Brokenhearted – Baghdad, 1925-29 (Honest Jon’s Records).

*********
Letters
Vol. 30 No. 23 · 4 December 2008

From Lyn Julius

Adam Shatz casts a spotlight on the destruction of one of the oldest

Jewish diasporas, but his article contains errors and subtle distortions
whose effect is to minimise the proximate cause of the Jewish exodus
from Iraq: anti-semitism (LRB, 6 November). The rich man’s paradise
Shatz evokes only really existed towards the end of the 19th century.
Before the Ottomans were forced by the Western powers to emancipate
their Jews and Christians, the Jews were despised, persecuted and never
really secure; the Sassoons, Ezras and Kedouries fled the tyrannical rule of
Daoud Pasha to make their fortunes outside Meso-potamia in India and
the Far East. The Jews of Iraq petitioned for British citizenship not out of
an ‘instant connection’ with Britain, but out of fear that Arab rule would be
‘politically irresponsible … fanatic and intolerant’, to quote Elie Kedourie.
And so it proved.

The Jews did not leave because they were pushed by Zionist rumours or
bombs. Bombs and murders in 1936 had not led to a mass exodus, and
sixty thousand Jews had registered to leave before the only fatal bombing
in January 1951. Until Iraq permitted legal emigration, Jews were being
smuggled out at a rate of a thousand a month – because they were
banned from higher education, could not travel abroad, were denied work
and suffered restrictions in business. ‘But for these severe handicaps,
Iraqi Jews would not have gone so far as to attempt large-scale flight from
the country,’ the Jewish senator Ezra Daniel said, making his last futile
appeal against the Denaturalisation Bill in March 1950.

Shatz implies that Israel encouraged the Jewish exodus, but already in
1949 the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Said, had floated the idea of a
population exchange and threatened to expel the Jews as revenge for the
Iraqi army’s defeat in Palestine. He schemed to bring Israel to its knees by
dumping thousands of stateless and destitute Jews on Israel’s borders.
The Jewish Agency could not cope with the influx and told the Zionist
movement in Baghdad not to rush. It was only when Iraq passed a law in
March 1951 freezing Jewish assets that Israel said it would be forced to
confiscate the property of Palestinian refugees. Iraq reneged on its part of
the exchange, accepting only fourteen thousand Palestinian Arabs, while
Israel took in 120,000 Iraqi Jews.

The Iraqi Jews had every right to be bitter when they arrived in Israel,
having lost everything. They were housed in dusty refugee camps for up
to 12 years. At the time, they did experience prejudice, but so did
Holocaust survivors, taunted on arrival as ‘sabon’ (soap). Today the Iraqi
community is one of the most successfully integrated in Israel. Iraq-born
Palestinians, meanwhile, have been denied citizenship and expelled from
Iraq.
Incidentally, the airlift to Israel was named Operation Ezra (not Ezekiel)
and Nehemiah. It ended in 1951, not 1952.

Lyn Julius
London SW5

Adam Shatz writes: The evocation of Mesopotamia as a lost paradise can

be found not only in Violette Shamash’s book but in countless memoirs by
Iraqi Jews. Like all non-Muslim minorities, Jews experienced periods of
difficulty and injustice, but if they had been persecuted to the degree Lyn
Julius suggests, it’s not likely so many would have continued to describe
themselves as ‘Ottomans’ long after the empire’s collapse. It was
Shamash who said that Iraq’s Jews petitioned for British citizenship out of
an ‘instant connection’ with their new rulers. And while Elie Kedourie cited
the concern of Jewish notables that the Arabs would be fanatical and
intolerant, he went on to deride the petition for British citizenship for its
‘pathetic caution’ and ‘anxiety to pay lip-service to the shibboleths of the
age’.

Julius cites Ezra Daniel’s protest against the Denaturalisation Bill, but she
doesn’t quote his plea to ‘restore to Iraqi Jews their sense of security,
confidence and stability’, and while Daniel was speaking out against the
bill, the Israeli government and Mossad were doing everything in their
power to speed its passage. Shlomo Hillel, Mossad’s man in Baghdad,
makes no secret of the fact that in setting up Zionist cells, he had only
one objective: to promote mass emigration. He collaborated covertly with
the Iraqi government to co-ordinate Operation Ezra and Nehemiah (as
Julius rightly calls it). ‘We are carrying on our usual activity in order to
push the law through faster and faster,’ the Mossad office in Baghdad
reported to Tel Aviv before the Denaturalisation Act was passed,
according to Tom Segev in 1949: The First Israelis. Israel wanted to
populate the land with Jews, and their emigration from Arab countries had
the advantage of supplying a further alibi for denying Palestinians their
right of return.

Writers often contrast Israel’s generous absorption of more than a

hundred thousand Iraqi Jewish refugees with Iraq’s paltry acceptance of
‘only’ fourteen thousand Palestinian Arabs. But the situations are not
symmetrical: Israel was determined to settle the Iraqi Jews in the Jewish
state, while Iraq had no interest in settling Palestinian refugees (who for
their part wanted to return home). And though Nuri al-Said flirted in 1949
with the idea of a population exchange, an idea that had been circulating
in Zionist circles for two decades, the Iraqi government’s position was that
Palestinians should return home or be compensated by Israel. It could not
‘renege’ on an agreement it had never reached with Israel.

Restrictions on movement and employment, and the rise in anti-Jewish

incitement and violence, certainly encouraged Jews to emigrate. But these
developments were not unrelated to the British presence and the war in
Palestine – or to the pressures exerted by Israel and its intelligence
services. We may never know whether the bombs were laid by Zionist
agents, but we do know that Mossad’s responsibility is taken for granted
by many Iraqi Jews: Morad Qazzaz, a leader of the Iraqi-Jewish
underground, was known as Morad Abu al-Knabel, or ‘Morad, Father of the
Bombs’. Folklore or not, it’s an indication that Iraq’s Jews have long
believed that Israel had a hand in their exodus.