The Last Jews of Baghdad

Abstract

“It is all but impossible to pinpoint a date or an event with which the position of the Jews of Iraq began to deteriorate and take the course leading finally, inevitably, to the destruction of community,” writes Nissim Rejwan near the end of his memoir The Last Jews of Baghdad (p. 188). Yet their centurieslong presence was such that, as the author notes, for those Jews who were born and grew up in Baghdad before the mass exodus of 1950-51, the presence of a mere handful of elderly Jews in the city today is “a state of affairs [that] is hard to imagine” (p. 1). Rejwan’s endearing memoir traces out a period of Iraqi history that saw the disappearance of a community that had been an integral part of the human map and the city’s history. The author’s youth, from his birth in 1926 to his irrevocable departure in 1952 for Israel, condemns him to what he refers to as a state of permanent unbelonging. Rejwan was born in a Baghdad, where Jews were an indigenous, integrated community that participated fully in the city’s sociocultural life. Although relations with Muslims and Christians may have been characterized by a certain aloofness due to the logic of custom and faith, Rejwan’s portrayal of the Baghdad of his childhood is such that the spatial organization and interpenetration of the communities in the quotidian illustrate a city of shared economic struggles, neighborhood vernaculars, and an intermingling that came to life in “[t]he shouts…the endless disputations and arguments and the extremely juicy curses…[and] the encounters [that] were in the nature of veritable revelations” for the young author (p. 31). The paramountcy of marriage for his siblings, the negotiated dowries, and the interfamilial politics of social position and responsibility translate a world of intra-communal mores where life’s rhythms were dictated by that which had come before ...