The Making of Arab Jew

8/8/2019 The Making of Arab Jew

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S A S S O N S O M E K H

128

from Baghdad, Yesterday:

The Making of an Arab Jew

Preface

In 1951, at the age of seventeen, I left my native Baghdad and immi-

grated to Israel. I moved with my family and the bulk of the ancient Jewish

community of Mesopotamia—a community that’s thought to have comeinto being upon the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem in 587

b.c.e. Over the course of millennia it experienced various transformations

as the country came under the rule of a parade of imperial powers, includ-

ing the Babylonians, Persians, Arabs, Turks, and British.

My years in Baghdad were, I admit, fairly uneventful. To my good for-

tune, my life as a whole hasn’t been shaped by any particular hardships or

by persecution. (In this respect, it differs markedly from the lives of some

of my Baghdadi friends who suffered because of their membership in the

Zionist or Communist underground movements.) What spurred me to

write these memoirs is the fact that—while it has been estimated that by the early twentieth century nearly a third of Baghdad’s population was

Jewish—there is no longer any sort of Jewish presence to speak of either in

Baghdad or in Iraq. I belong, that is, to the last generation of Iraqi Jews

who lived side by side with Iraqis of other religions, speaking a common

language and participating actively in Iraqi culture.

The Lettuce Beds

In 1939, my family moved to a new house in a neighbor-

hood called the Lettuce Beds (in Arabic, Bustan al-khass). The house wascozy and surrounded by a narrow garden. My father invested most of his

savings and energy in its construction. This house was located not far from

our previous home, where I was born, and which was but a short walk

from the Tigris. Our old neighborhood was called the Eastern Gate, and it

was outside the bounds of the traditional Jewish quarters. Our new neigh-

borhood was mostly middle class and mixed, with Jews, Christians, and

Muslims living alongside one another.

I was about five years old when we moved, and I remember neither the

house being built nor moving into it. I have a picture that my father took

around the time the construction was completed. The house was fully mod-



ern (in other words, European) and in the photo it stands alone, girded by

a wall. The interior—and this I remember well, since we lived there until we

left Iraq—consisted of two floors and six rooms, one of which was particu-

larly spacious and served as a reception room.

Over the course of the months and years that followed our move, housesof similar size, sometimes larger, became popular, and more and more

homes like ours were built in this area, which eventually filled six or seven

streets that burst with people and greenery. The land itself belonged to the

state and was divided into 1,600-foot plots, which were leased for ninety-

nine years at a scant price to whoever wanted to build their own house and

live there. The neighborhood, true to its name, was the area where the fra-

grant lettuce of Baghdad was grown. (Several years ago, I read a novel by an

Iraqi writer who remained in Baghdad until after the 1991 Gulf War. The

book’s main characters reminisce about the “good old days” before Sad-

dam Hussein, nostalgically recalling the beloved and refreshing lettuce,which was, says the novel, no longer available to the residents of the city.)

Who lived in these houses? Many of the residents were Jewish, the major-

ity of them clerks and professionals: they were doctors, lawyers, teachers,

and small-time merchants. Very rich Jews (and non-Jews) lived far from this

area, in vast, luxurious villas. Among them were many of the nouveaux

riches who had profited from World War ii and the ensuing years and had

built themselves small palaces.

Most of our immediate neighbors were Jewish, including—as I was to

learn only years later—the family of the now well-known Israeli novelist

Sami Michael. They lived on an adjacent street, but in those days I had notyet met Sami, who was to become one of my dearest friends. Our neigh-

bors to the right were well-to-do Christians originally from the Tel Kef

region in northern Iraq. My mother and the women of that house—two

sisters married to two brothers—enjoyed good neighborly relations. They

would talk over the low wall that separated their garden from ours. For

some reason, I didn’t befriend the sons of these neighbors, though they

were around my age. I did, however, become friends with the Armenian

family that lived across the street. Their family name was Tajirian (from

the Arabic word tajir, meaning merchant). I became very attached to theirson Azad, who was a few years older. Every so often after school, I would

drop by their house. I’d accompany Azad to the nearby café where he and

his friends studied for their school exams. There I got to know several

Muslim book-lovers from whom I borrowed reading material, including

some that was considered dangerous, such as books by the Coptic Egypt-

ian writer Salama Musa, an important intellectual who spread his liberal

socialist ideas in the 1920s and ’30s.

The Tajirian family didn’t like to discuss their past, but hints of it were

displayed in the photographs that hung on their walls and were taken in

their native Armenia. A photo of a radiant-faced Armenian priest and his

Somekh ■ Baghdad, Yesterday 129



130 Mänoa ■ Gates of Reconciliation

wife stood out especially, and I guessed that they were relatives who were

no longer among the living. Azad eventually told me about the tragedy

that befell the Armenian people at the hands of the Turks during World

War i. He told me about the massacres in which many members of his

family were slaughtered and about how his older sister Zanun witnessedone, which she miraculously survived but which subsequently drove her

insane. She lived at home with them in our neighborhood but never learned

Arabic like her brothers. She was introverted and could handle only a little

social contact. The children had immigrated to Baghdad after the Armenian

holocaust. One of the sons was an engineer and the other worked for an

import-export company, the same professions to which their Jewish neigh-

bors gravitated. They mastered both spoken and literary Arabic, but among

themselves they continued to speak Armenian, and most of the older broth-

ers’ friends belonged to the sizable community of Armenians in Baghdad.

My relationship with this family was cut off abruptly around 1947 whenthey immigrated to the United States. After they left, I found myself miss-

ing Azad’s friendship and his older brothers’ warmth. For months after-

ward, when I passed by their house on my way to school, I would try to

peek through the windows to check if any of them had somehow stayed

behind. When I was in the States in the 1990s, I met an Iraqi-born Armen-

ian of my generation who had later settled in Princeton. He attended a lec-

ture I gave there, after which he told me that he had come because my

name had reminded him of his Baghdadi childhood and that one of his

friends from there was a Somekh. I was reminded of the Tajirian family,

and I asked this man if he knew them or what had become of them. Heanswered that he had in fact known one of them in the distant past, but

that they had disappeared somewhere into the vast expanses of the United

States. I looked up their name in the phone book and on the Internet, and

I even found one Tajirian, living in New York. But when I spoke with him

on the phone, it turned out he had never even been to Baghdad and that

he had no connection to “my” Tajirians.

Another Armenian resident of Baghdad was Elias, the neighborhood

mailman. His mustache made me think of Stalin. I sought out every

opportunity to chat with Elias, who also happened to be a walking neigh-borhood newspaper. Through him one could find out all the local gossip.

During one of our conversations, Elias fished a photo from his bag. It was

a group portrait of men, women, and children, all of whom were Armen-

ian. In the photo, they were standing close together, wearing neat but not

particularly fancy clothes, and they seemed troubled: the whole picture

carried an aura of consternation and worry. Elias explained that these were

his cousins in the Soviet Republic of Armenia. Why did they look so mis-

erable? I asked him. “Ahhh,” Elias answered. “You haven’t heard that the

Soviet Republic called for all Armenians in exile to return to their home-

land? The Armenians here in Baghdad tried to get a sense of the situation




there, whether it was good or bad and whether it was wise to return. But

Soviet censorship made it hard to consult directly with our cousins in

Armenia. We were confused, and got all sorts of contradictory advice

about the state of things there. Finally, some family members decided to

take a chance and return to Armenia. When they left, we asked them tosend us a picture of them together with the other cousins, with the under-

standing that if they recommended that we join them there, they would

smile from ear to ear in the photograph, and if not—they would look

dour. And this is the picture we got.”

In the mid-1940s, Jews—mostly the well-to-do—started to emigrate

from Iraq to the United States and Europe. There was also a steady flow of

less wealthy Jews to Palestine. The Jewish family to our left, good friends of

ours, sold their house to a Muslim police officer, and his family became our

first Muslim neighbors. The man was polite but sullen, and was married to

two women, both of whom lived with him under the same roof. He taughtat the police academy at the end of our street. He was nice to us, and when

he came home after work, we knew we could look forward to peace and

quiet, for the moment he stepped into his house, the hubbub of women’s

and children’s screaming instantly died away and quiet reigned until the

following morning. Whenever my father, my younger brother, or I passed

by his house, we would wave or say hello, and he would reply with the typi-

cal Iraqi greeting, Allah bi’l-kheir. Only once did I have a real conversation

with him; it was short but dramatic, and I remember its every detail. Even

today, sixty years later, the memory of this conversation arouses a mixture

of feelings within me.This is what happened. Around the end of 1947 or early in 1948, I was a

student at Shammash, the Jewish high school. I wasn’t interested in ideo-

logical issues, in contrast to some of the boys in my class who were already

involved in political activities at the age of fourteen or fifteen. Some were

active in the underground Zionist movement and some in illegal Commu-

nist activities. The Communists had a strong influence on the Iraqi intelli-

gentsia even though the party and its leaders were persecuted. After the un

decision to partition Palestine, the Communists, at Stalin’s behest, pub-

lished a statement in favor of the establishment of a Jewish state. One of my good friends from class was displeased by my passive stance and saw a

chance to shake me from my lack of involvement once and for all. He

stuffed into my pocket a copy of a proclamation that had been printed on

an underground press. It contained a text of the Communist decision to

support partition. The whole way home from school I thought about

nothing but the proclamation, which burned in my pocket like a hot coal.

It was dangerous, and I knew that if I were caught with such a document, I

would be sentenced to at least one year in prison. What was I to do? I was

stuck. I couldn’t throw it away for fear that I would be caught in the act.

When I finally reached my street, I saw our neighbor, the police officer,




drinking tea on his front porch. I edged over to the farthest point of the

sidewalk from where he was sitting so that I wouldn’t have to greet him

with an Allah bi’l-kheir. And yet, as luck would have it, the man called me

from afar in a threateningly thunderous voice that filled me with terror. I

assumed that he was going to ask me about the illegal proclamation, theexistence of which he could not possibly have guessed; I was sure that my

days of living the good life were numbered. I was already envisioning

myself in the police torture chambers I had heard so much about.

“Come here, young man,” he commanded. “I can’t accept this kind of

behavior. Your brother rode his bike over my lawn. See, look—here are

the tracks he left. See to it that this does not happen again.”

My panic gave way to relief. His booming voice sounded suddenly

human and his grave, mustachioed countenance (à la Saddam) was sud-

denly only that of a landlord concerned about his property’s upkeep.

Walking the few steps remaining before the threshold of my house, I sup-pressed the laughter that was welling up, lest the man think I was laughing

at him. But the fear was still in my heart. Once I was safely behind the

door, I ripped the Communist proclamation to shreds. Later that evening,

when I sat down to do my homework, I discovered that I had to write an

essay about a medieval text that belonged to the Arabic-Islamic genre

called al-faraj ba‘d al-shiddah, relief after distress. Such literature depicts

the stories of God-fearing people miraculously saved from danger. As I

read it, I laughed until my eyes filled with tears.

The SermonTwo or three evenings before my turn came to report to the

Mas‘uda Shem-Tov Synagogue prior to leaving for Israel, I went to one of

the cafés where young writers would gather. I wanted to tell those who had

become my friends over the past two years that I would be leaving soon,

and to say goodbye.

The café was even more crowded than usual, too crowded for a proper

farewell. Around the table sat not only my close friends, but two or three

other young men I did not know well—and as a result I didn’t dare speak

of my imminent departure. The strangers might turn hostile, going so faras to declare that they would not sit at the same table with one who had

turned his back on their country.

I had no such concerns regarding my close friends; they all knew that I

had registered for “divestment” and that I was waiting my turn. I had

talked to some of them about it, and they had expressed their regret, but,

all in all, they respected my decision.

At the end of the evening, after most of those around the table had gone

their way, two of my closest friends remained: the poets Rashid Yassin and

‘Abdul-Razzaq ‘Abdul-Wahad. I had already spoken to both of them a

number of times about my approaching emigration. All that was left to do



that evening was to say goodbye, to promise that we would never forget

our friendship, and for me to swear that I would remain loyal to Arabic lit-

erature. I took that oath, and I believe have remained true to it.

The next day I went to the home of another poet and close friend,

Akram al-Witri, to say goodbye. Al-Witri was about twenty, three yearsolder than me. His family was well-off, though hardly rich, as was clear

from their modest house, which wasn’t far from my own. I had met al-

Witri, through my teacher Muhammad Sharara, at the Bureau of Import

Supervision, a government office where al-Witri worked as a junior clerk.

We became friends right away, even though Akram was never the one to

initiate our meetings or visits. He was an introvert who avoided the cafés

where his literary colleagues would gather each evening. From time to

time I would surprise him with a visit to his office or home, and he would

welcome me warmly. He had become something of a mentor.

Akram’s poetry was distinctive both in content and language. Asopposed to the free verse of many of the young poets of that generation,

Akram al-Witri’s work remained within the boundaries of strophic poetry,

which most pre-modern poets employed. Akram was, it might be said, a

minor poet—though only in terms of quantity, not quality. All of his work

fit into one slim volume, The String That Rebuffed the Musician, which

came out around 1949 and garnered a great deal of interest, not only in

Iraq but also in Cairo and Beirut. The String was, incidentally, one of the

three books of Arabic poetry that I took with me to Israel. I still have it,

though the first and last pages have flown far from the rest.

My final meeting with al-Witri was difficult. I told him of my impendingtrip, and he was quiet for a long time. Then, when he finally spoke, he did

not say the words I wanted to hear (and that I had heard from my other lit-

erary friends): “What a shame” or “Can’t you put off your trip a little?” or

“It must be hard for you to say goodbye to this good country.” Instead, he

delivered a kind of sermon, or better to call it a gentle reproof—gentle in its

tone, though not in its message.

Akram said he was aware of the widespread emigration of the Baghdadi

Jews. Many homes in his area had been sold by Jews who had gone to

Israel. These emigrants, he said, had bought items to take to Israel whichwere “heavy in value and light in weight,” as A Thousand and One Nightsputs it. However, Akram added, he could not imagine that a person such

as I, so bound to the Arabic language and close to its culture and literature,

would decide to abandon his homeland, the homeland of his ancestors,

for a territory of strangeness and mystery, war and insecurity.

I tried to explain to him that the situation in Iraq had become unbear-

able, and that, merely because I was Jewish, I had no chance of being

accepted into an institution of higher learning. Above all, I explained that

there was no democracy in Iraq through which I could work for the country

and its citizens. Akram stopped me gently, then continued to admonish me:




How will you manage in a country whose citizens are a mixture of every

community and language, he asked, the future of which is not at all certain?

We heard, Akram stressed, that in Israel an attempt is being made to con-

duct a communal-socialist lifestyle on the kibbutzim. Can any one of us live

communally, if it means the denial of individual freedom—we, the childrenof the Arab East, individualists within whom contempt for the “general will”

is so deeply ingrained?

I did not want to—and could not—argue with him, since in any case

my picture of Israel and its inhabitants was far from clear. Still, when he

stopped talking for a moment I said, “Akram, I came to you in the hope

that you would comfort me at this difficult juncture in my life, and that

you would offer words of friendship that would warm my heart. But here

you are burdening me even more. In any case, I promise you that the

moment I learn Hebrew I will translate a selection of your poetry, so that

readers in Israel will get the right impression of Arab civilization in themaking.” (I used the word hadara, which means “civilization,” rather than

thaqafa, meaning “culture.”)

My response stemmed Akram’s flow of rebuke, which had lasted for

fifteen minutes or more. For the rest of our meeting we spoke calmly about

literature and writers, and then we parted. On my way home I mulled over

what I had just heard. Although my friend’s words contained some logical

elements, they were generally unfriendly, and to some degree nationalistic.

They certainly didn’t take into account the distress the Jews of Iraq were

experiencing at that time.

It was only years later, when I recalled my talk with al-Witri, that I beganto see his castigation in a different light. What I had understood in 1951 as

an expression of nationalism I was eventually able to reinterpret as words

of true friendship that derived—as I now believe—from concern for my

personal fate and for my cultural orientation. Akram’s basic assumption

was that a man, even one as young as I, who had been torn from his culture

could not immerse himself in a new culture or produce literary works in a

new language. During our conversation, Akram repeatedly reminded me of

my “cultural roots,” and from time to time even hinted that young people

like me were needed by Iraq and its culture. I came to realize that his some-what angry tone was not directed against me personally, but rather sprang

from his anger at an entire, successful community that resolved one day to

abandon its past and its future and to exile itself (as he put it at one point)

to an unknown place.

When I think back to that conversation today, I’m surprised at myself

for not recognizing at the time what was not contained in his remonstra-

tions: There wasn’t a single word against the State of Israel or the Jews in

general. But this should have come as no surprise. In early 1951, my Mus-

lim friends, liberals or leftists, were far from anti-Semitism. On the con-

trary, they saw the Jews as a constructive and progressive element, and





they did everything they could to distance themselves from the usual

rhetoric of the nationalist right (such as the Iraqi Istiqlal party and its daily,

al-Yaqdha) and its anti-Jewish incitement. The tragedy that had befallen

the Palestinian people with the establishment of Israel had not escaped

their notice; it did trouble them. However, they consciously avoided attack-ing Israel, lest they be seen as being influenced by right-wing rhetoric.

The Iraqi Communist party—to which only a small number of the intel-

lectuals I knew belonged—spoke at that time of the “Israeli proletariat,”

which according to them would surely join forces with the anti-imperialist

“Arab proletariat.” The Communist rhetoric of those days was unaccept-

able even among most leftists, but the very fact that an active public ele-

ment of Arab society was expressing itself at all positively with regard to the

Jews of Israel was something of a conceptual revolution.

The liberal party active in Iraq at that time, Kamil Chadarchi’s National

Democratic Party, was fiercely antagonistic to Zionism and the Jews, but inmy personal conversations with some of the party’s supporters, I heard

things such as, “We should learn from the Zionists how to have a democ-

racy,” or “The level of education and science in Israel is worthy of respect.”

Although it was hard for me to single out an Iraqi Muslim who viewed the

establishment of Israel favorably, many of them were proud liberals who

did not want to join the chorus of pan-Arab hatred and incitement against

the Jews and Israel. However, the takeover by the Ba‘th party in the 1960s

led to the cruel persecution of the remaining Jews of Iraq.

Akram al-Witri did not, of course, express such thoughts on the eve of

my departure. His concern was that I might lose my culture and my mother tongue and, with them, my very identity. I do not know if his con-

cerns were justified in my case, as I believe I have preserved close ties to

Arab culture. But life in Israel could be cruel as well, and many of my gen-

eration, who were scalded in the melting pot of the fifties and sixties, were

distanced from their native culture because of the continuous conflict with

the Arab world. Some, especially graduates of the Alliance and the Sham-

mash schools, managed to pave their way to successful careers in Israel,

but most cut themselves off for a long time from their Arab backgrounds.

In the 1990s, some of my Iraqi friends in Israel, on the cusp of old age,

began to realize that they were the last generation of Jewish Arabs. We

therefore attempted to establish a solidarity association with the Iraqi peo-

ple. Oddly enough, the Registrar of Non-Profit Associations in Jerusalem

refused to register the group, claiming that it could become a source of

Saddamist subversion—a notion both amusing and preposterous.

Less amusing was the unsympathetic attitude of many of my generation

in Israel whom we approached about taking part in the association. One of

them, a Tel Aviv scientist, reprimanded me severely even before hearing

what the goals of the association were—to document the cooperation and

good neighborliness between the Jews and other Iraqis, so that the coming




generations would know about this wonderful connection that had char-

acterized Jewish life in the Arab world for 1,500 years.

Obviously, anyone can focus on the unpleasant moments in the rela-

tionship between Jews and Arabs, especially in the last generation. I prefer

to quote the great Egyptian novelist and Nobel Prize–winner, NaghuibMahfouz, who wrote me in a 1979 letter:

Our two peoples knew extraordinary partnership for many years—in ancient

days, in the Middle Ages, and in the modern era, with times of quarrels and

disputes few and far between. Unfortunately, we have documented the disputes

one hundred times more than the periods of friendship and cooperation. I

dream of the day when, thanks to the cooperation between us, this region will

become a home overflowing with the light of science, blessed by the highest

principles of heaven.

Translation from Hebrew by Ibis Editions

The Making of Arab Jew

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