The Last Jews of Baghdad

Abstract

“It is all but impossible to pinpoint a date or an event with which the positionof the Jews of Iraq began to deteriorate and take the course leading finally, inevitably, to the destruction of community,” writes Nissim Rejwan near theend of his memoir The Last Jews of Baghdad (p. 188). Yet their centurieslongpresence was such that, as the author notes, for those Jews who wereborn and grew up in Baghdad before the mass exodus of 1950-51, the presenceof 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 aperiod of Iraqi history that saw the disappearance of a community that hadbeen an integral part of the human map and the city’s history. The author’syouth, 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, integratedcommunity that participated fully in the city’s sociocultural life.Although relations with Muslims and Christians may have been characterizedby a certain aloofness due to the logic of custom and faith, Rejwan’sportrayal of the Baghdad of his childhood is such that the spatial organizationand interpenetration of the communities in the quotidian illustrate a cityof shared economic struggles, neighborhood vernaculars, and an interminglingthat came to life in “[t]he shouts…the endless disputations and argumentsand the extremely juicy curses…[and] the encounters [that] were inthe nature of veritable revelations” for the young author (p. 31). The paramountcyof marriage for his siblings, the negotiated dowries, and the interfamilialpolitics of social position and responsibility translate a world ofintra-communal mores where life’s rhythms were dictated by that which hadcome before ...