Hakham sasson in 1949

Abstract

The article which follows was found among the papers of the late Emile Marmorstein. It was published in The Jewish Chronicle on 30 December 1949 as 'By a Correspondent' under the title 'Baghdad Jewry's Leader Resigns'. It is reprinted here by kind permission of The Jewish Chronicle and of Mrs J. Marmorstein. The article deals with a critical point in the history of Baghdad Jewry, when Hakham Sasson Khadouri, the head of the Baghdad Jewish Community, resigned his position in December 1949 following a demonstration against him by members of the community the previous October. Marmorstein's article describes this event, but what is more important also discusses the little-known history of the Iraqi Jewish communal organization and politics in the preceding decades and offers a portrait of Hakham Sasson as valuable as his discussion of the communal scene. The article is a good example of Marmorstein's detailed and exact knowledge of the Baghdadi scene exemplified in the portrait of Dr Fritz Grobba printed in Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.23 No.3 (1987). The demonstration which led to Hakham Sasson's resignation was in protest against the indiscriminate and arbitrary arrests of Iraqi Jews, through which the authorities hoped to discover and break an underground Zionist network directed from Israel. A former network participant arrested in another connection led them to discover other group members. Marmorstein writes in the penultimate paragraph of his article that the Jews of Baghdad 'are attached to their homes, traditions, and the shrines of their prophets, and would not like to leave them in order to begin life once more in an immigrants' camp in Israel, where they believe, people are not particularly friendly to Oriental Jews'. These would certainly have been Hakham Sasson's sentiments, and the opposition to such views by a small, secret group of Zionist activists may have led to his downfall. There is little doubt that the views outlined by Marmorstein were prevalent at the time. However this did not prevent the swift dissolution of the community which began a few months after the publication of this article in response to a variety of powerful pressures from both Iraq and Israel pressures which the Iraqi Jews could by no means comprehend, let alone withstand, and which irresistibly led them by a snowball effect to abandon a land in which they had dwelt for two and a half millennia. Hakham Sasson was succeeded in his office by a notable, Heskel Shemtob, who served until 1953. During his tenure the ancient Baghdadi community was all but completely liquidated. Hakham Sasson thereafter resumed his post, remaining the official head of a now insignificant group until his death in 1971. Marmorstein's article was noticed in the Foreign Office in London, where a minute described it as 'singularly frank and well-founded'. The Baghdad