“My Adherence to the Creed of Moses Has Not Diminished My Love for Muhammad's Nation”: The Emergence and Demise of Iraqi Jewish Literary Modern Culture

Abstract

In modern times, nowhere were Jews as open to involvement in wider Arab culture or more at home in standard literary Arabic than in Iraq during the first half of the twentieth century. Among the newly emerging Iraqi intelligentsia of the time were young secular Jews who saw themselves as Arab citizens loyal to the country of their birth. The reality in which they lived and worked was one of close symbiotic contact with the wider Arab-Muslim culture. For most of them their Arab identity was uppermost they were Arabs of the Mosaic faith. Their presence was felt in almost all branches of Iraqi culture but especially in the literary domain. From the 1920s, Iraqi-Jewish writers and poets produced works secular in essence that immediately entered the main stream of Arabic literature. However, with a change in the external political circumstances, Arab-Jewish culture underwent a process of marginalization and negligence and gradually dropped into utter oblivion. The Muslim-Arab and the Jewish-Zionist canonical cultural and national systems, each from their own narrowed visions and particularist considerations, have refused to accept the legitimacy of Arab-Jewish cultural hybridity. We are currently witnessing the demise of Arab-Jewish culture. A tradition that started more than fifteen hundred years ago is vanishing before our eyes and Arabic is gradually disappearing as a language mastered by Jews.