Baghdadi Jews Research Articles

The Jews of Mosul and Ezra Laniado’s memorial

ABSTRACT Iraq's second city Mosul was once home to an ancient Jewish community whose history coincided in part with that of Baghdadis who were the majority of Iraqi Jews, but also differed significantly. This article compares experiences in the first half of the twentieth century, drawing on a key but little-known source, Ezra Laniado's Yehude Mosul (1981) which used extensive oral history interviews conducted in the 1970s with surviving community members, including eyewitness accounts of crucial events. Those narratives are often at variance with those of Baghdadi Jews. Laniado's work can make an essential contribution to re-evaluating the history of Iraqi Jews by integrating that of communities from the north. There are understandable reasons for the relative neglect of Mosul's Jewish community in English language histories of Iraq's Jews, but taking them more into account raises wider questions of representation. Including more marginalized Jews from outside Baghdad who had complex relationships with multiple other groups might require rethinking existing perspectives and adding nuance. A critical discussion of Laniado's memorial to his community explores possible reasons why it has been largely overlooked despite being such a unique source.

The Role of Baghdadi Jews in India's Freedom Movement

The Role of Baghdadi Jews in India's Freedom Movement

The Rubber Stock Boom in Shanghai and the Kadoorie Enterprises, 1910–1949

ABSTRACT Drawing on rarely used primary sources and grounded in a broad historical framework, this article reveals the dynamic history of the Rubber Trust Company Limited in Shanghai and examines how its founders, the Kadoories, used unique colonial spaces to tap and store wealth across political borders. The article thereby not only provides an alternative perspective to the history of the Baghdadi Jews and their extensive networks across Asian port cities, but also reveals how the cross-border Kadoorie enterprises and the colonial tools they used ensured the family’s survival in the face of Shanghai’s political and economic transformation. By filling crucial gaps in scholarly knowledge on the Kadoories and their investments through their Rubber Trust Company Limited, this article advances our understanding of the business world in Shanghai from the 1910s to the 1940s.

On the Names of Livorno in the Hebrew Arabic-Speaking World

Whereas the Tunisian Arabic name for people from Livorno (Leghorn) has received attention in the scholarly literature, the same cannot be said for the Baghdadi Judaeo-Arabic name of Livorno. The latter subject is the original and necessary contribution of this article: the Maghreb is not Western Asia. In order to more fully appreciate how the Baghdadi Jewish name for Livorno came into being, the history of the export of Jewish books from Livorno is central. Jewish devotional literature published in Livorno (sometimes specifically for the Iraqi market) or emulating the model of Jewish books from Livorno had a steady market in Baghdad, it could be said almost up to the traumatic exodus of the Jews of Iraq in 1950‑51. Through Baghdad or London, the outreach of such books from or emulating Livorno for use by Jews of Iraqi origin can be said to have extended to ‘Baghdadi Jews’ commercial colonies in India, and probably Burma, Penang, South East Asia’s islands, and Hong Kong.

Engagement of Contemporary Communities with the Shared Heritage Resources of the Dwindling Minorities of Central Calcutta

The accelerated growth of Calcutta as a trading center under the British between the mid-18th and early 20th centuries brought an influx of diverse trading communities, including Armenians, Baghdadi Jews, Parsis, and Chinese, who settled in the historic bazaar nucleus of the city known today as Central Calcutta. These ethnoreligious communities erected significant heritage buildings reflecting their cultures. But with large-scale emigration and a rapidly dwindling local population, this shared built heritage is in neglect and has little or no relevance for Central Calcutta’s contemporary communities. This paper discusses the issues faced by these heritage resources and offers recommendations for enhancing community engagement, initiating co-management and developing common goals amongst contemporary communities so as to effectively safeguard this built heritage of dwindling minorities.

A CHRONICLE OF CALCUTTA JEWRY

Studies conducted into minorities like the Jews serves the purpose of sensitizing one about the existence of communities other than one’s own one, thereby promoting harmony and better understanding of other cultures. The Paper is titled ‘A Chronicle of Calcutta Jewry’. It lays stress on the beginning of the Jewish community in Calcutta with reference to the prominent Jewish families from the city. Most of the Jews in Calcutta were from the middle-east and came to be called as Baghdadi Jews. Initially they were influenced by Arabic culture, language and customs, but later they became Anglicized with English replacing Judeo-Arabic (Arabic written in Hebrew script) as their language. A few social evils residing among the Jews briefly discussed. Although, the Jews of our city never experienced direct consequences of the Holocaust, they contributed wholeheartedly to the Jewish Relief Fund that was set up by the Jewish Relief Association (JRA) to help the victims of the Shoah. The experience of a Jewish girl amidst the violence during the partition of India has been briefly touched upon. The reason for the exodus of Jews from Calcutta after Independence of India and the establishment of the State of Israel has also been discussed. The contribution of the Jews to the lifestyle of the city is described with case study on ‘Nahoums’, the famous Jewish bakery of the city. A brief discussion on an eminent Jew from Calcutta who distinguished himself in service to the nation – J.F.R. Jacob, popularly known as Jack by his fellow soldiers has been given. The amicable relations between the Jews and Muslims in Calcutta have also been briefly portrayed. The research concludes with the prospect of the Jews becoming a part of the City’s history, peacefully resting in their cemeteries. Keywords: Jews, Calcutta, India, Baghdadi, Holocaust

Jonathan Sciarcon. Educational Oases in the Desert: The Alliance Israélite Universelle's Girls’ Schools in Ottoman Iraq, 1895–1915. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017. 226 pp.

Reviewed by: Educational Oases in the Desert: The Alliance Israélite Universelle's Girls' Schools in Ottoman Iraq, 1895–1915 by Jonathan Sciarcon Isabelle Headrick Jonathan Sciarcon. Educational Oases in the Desert: The Alliance Israélite Universelle's Girls' Schools in Ottoman Iraq, 1895–1915. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017. 226 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000291 In Educational Oases in the Desert, Jonathan Sciarcon provides an engaging microhistorical treatment of the establishment and twenty-year operation of a school for Jewish girls in Ottoman Baghdad at the turn of the twentieth century. In doing so, he adds depth and texture to our understanding of the modernizing transformation in education that took place on a global scale between 1890 and 1930. This movement was intimately connected to state modernization, and it involved many actors, including local government officials; states engaged in building their administrative infrastructure; Christian missionaries; and transnational organizations, such as the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), that supported communities of religious minorities. The education of girls was one of the critical components of this modernizing project. It was also, particularly in the case of the AIU, deeply connected to the processes of the professionalization of women and integration of minorities. Founded in 1860 by French Jews in response to concerns about antisemitism in Muslim-majority and eastern European countries, the Alliance Israélite [End Page 239] Universelle was also an expression of a new and growing feeling of solidarité with Jews outside of western Europe. Its mission was to improve the economic situation of Jews through education, specifically secularized education that included academic subjects such as mathematics, history, and language (usually French and the local language, such as Arabic or Turkish), as well as vocational training. Sciarcon argues that educating girls was seen as a critical step in molding the modern woman, who would in turn socialize her own husband and children. In this the Alliance resembled Protestant missionary organizations that "viewed women as key agents in the quest to transform indigenous societies" (xx). Sciarcon organizes Educational Oases in the Desert chronologically around the tenure of each of the female school directors. This approach serves well, particularly over such a short time span, to underscore the connection between the directors' personal experiences and different phases of institution building. The introduction and first chapter situate the 1895 establishment of the first girls' school in the debates concerning female education over the previous thirty years. Baghdad provides an interesting case study. In contrast to many other predominantly Muslim cities, Jews were far from a small minority—in fact they constituted one-third of the city's population. (There were far more Jews in Baghdad than in all of Iran, for example.) Baghdadi Jews, particularly among the upper classes, had generated their own homegrown interest in Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, and therefore eagerly embraced secularized education. Additionally, the Ottoman Empire provided a friendly environment for such endeavors. Having begun its own modernizing secular education project in the 1820s, it was generally extremely receptive to the establishment of Alliance schools, which were viewed as providing a high-quality education not just to Jews but to Muslims as well, without proselytizing. In the first chapter, Sciarcon introduces the reader to the AIU's Baghdad girls' school's first director, Rachel Danon, whose husband Joseph served as the boys' school director at the time. Inexperienced, young, and French—in this way representative of both male and female directors—Danon nonetheless undertook the difficult tasks of locating a suitable physical space, hiring teachers, ordering teaching materials, and establishing policies concerning tuition payments. Here, as in other chapters, Sciarcon's microhistorical approach and detailed attention to Danon's letters to the AIU's Paris headquarters pay off. The struggles of each AIU school director, whether female or male, were both unique to the specific landscape and shared commonalities with their colleagues' experiences. Therefore, the work of recuperating individual narratives provides a vibrant illustration of the local social and communal landscapes. Sciarcon emphasizes the self-appointed modernizing role that turn-of-the-century Alliance female school directors played vis-à-vis their female students. Like her female Christian missionary counterparts, Danon sought to model a new...

Educational Oases in the Desert: The Alliance Israélite Universelle's Girls' Schools in Ottoman Iraq, 1895–1915 by Jonathan Sciarcon

Reviewed by: Educational Oases in the Desert: The Alliance Israélite Universelle's Girls' Schools in Ottoman Iraq, 1895–1915 by Jonathan Sciarcon Isabelle Headrick Jonathan Sciarcon. Educational Oases in the Desert: The Alliance Israélite Universelle's Girls' Schools in Ottoman Iraq, 1895–1915. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017. 226 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000291 In Educational Oases in the Desert, Jonathan Sciarcon provides an engaging microhistorical treatment of the establishment and twenty-year operation of a school for Jewish girls in Ottoman Baghdad at the turn of the twentieth century. In doing so, he adds depth and texture to our understanding of the modernizing transformation in education that took place on a global scale between 1890 and 1930. This movement was intimately connected to state modernization, and it involved many actors, including local government officials; states engaged in building their administrative infrastructure; Christian missionaries; and transnational organizations, such as the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), that supported communities of religious minorities. The education of girls was one of the critical components of this modernizing project. It was also, particularly in the case of the AIU, deeply connected to the processes of the professionalization of women and integration of minorities. Founded in 1860 by French Jews in response to concerns about antisemitism in Muslim-majority and eastern European countries, the Alliance Israélite [End Page 239] Universelle was also an expression of a new and growing feeling of solidarité with Jews outside of western Europe. Its mission was to improve the economic situation of Jews through education, specifically secularized education that included academic subjects such as mathematics, history, and language (usually French and the local language, such as Arabic or Turkish), as well as vocational training. Sciarcon argues that educating girls was seen as a critical step in molding the modern woman, who would in turn socialize her own husband and children. In this the Alliance resembled Protestant missionary organizations that "viewed women as key agents in the quest to transform indigenous societies" (xx). Sciarcon organizes Educational Oases in the Desert chronologically around the tenure of each of the female school directors. This approach serves well, particularly over such a short time span, to underscore the connection between the directors' personal experiences and different phases of institution building. The introduction and first chapter situate the 1895 establishment of the first girls' school in the debates concerning female education over the previous thirty years. Baghdad provides an interesting case study. In contrast to many other predominantly Muslim cities, Jews were far from a small minority—in fact they constituted one-third of the city's population. (There were far more Jews in Baghdad than in all of Iran, for example.) Baghdadi Jews, particularly among the upper classes, had generated their own homegrown interest in Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, and therefore eagerly embraced secularized education. Additionally, the Ottoman Empire provided a friendly environment for such endeavors. Having begun its own modernizing secular education project in the 1820s, it was generally extremely receptive to the establishment of Alliance schools, which were viewed as providing a high-quality education not just to Jews but to Muslims as well, without proselytizing. In the first chapter, Sciarcon introduces the reader to the AIU's Baghdad girls' school's first director, Rachel Danon, whose husband Joseph served as the boys' school director at the time. Inexperienced, young, and French—in this way representative of both male and female directors—Danon nonetheless undertook the difficult tasks of locating a suitable physical space, hiring teachers, ordering teaching materials, and establishing policies concerning tuition payments. Here, as in other chapters, Sciarcon's microhistorical approach and detailed attention to Danon's letters to the AIU's Paris headquarters pay off. The struggles of each AIU school director, whether female or male, were both unique to the specific landscape and shared commonalities with their colleagues' experiences. Therefore, the work of recuperating individual narratives provides a vibrant illustration of the local social and communal landscapes. Sciarcon emphasizes the self-appointed modernizing role that turn-of-the-century Alliance female school directors played vis-à-vis their female students. Like her female Christian missionary counterparts, Danon sought to model a new...

Burying a Rabbi in Baghdad: The Limits of Ottomanism for Ottoman-Iraqi Jews in the Late Nineteenth Century

Burying a Rabbi in Baghdad: The Limits of Ottomanism for Ottoman-Iraqi Jews in the Late Nineteenth Century Annie Greene (bio) In mid-September 1889, several Ottoman-Baghdadi Jewish leaders were arrested following an incident of intercommunal violence that had been sparked by the burial of Rabbi ‘Abdullah Somekh (1813–1889) at a shrine compound venerated by both Muslims and Jews outside the city center. A cholera epidemic and state-imposed quarantine had prevented his burial in the Jewish cemetery within the city limits. When the Jewish funeral procession reached the shrine, its members began burying the body, but the Jews were met by a crowd from Karkh, a Muslim neighborhood on the west bank of the Tigris, who attacked them in order to prevent the burial.1 To regain public order, the vali (provincial governor) arrested several of the Muslim men who attacked the Jewish community, but he also arrested twenty-five Jewish leaders the day after the burial. Waves of arrests continued during September and October; in total, sixty-three members of the Jewish community were detained. Jewish leaders were arrested on the bases of rumors and false charges. For example, there were vague claims from the vali’s office that the Jewish community had not received permission to bury Rabbi Somekh and refused an order to disinter him.2 ‘Abdullah Zibaq, the mayor of Karkh, claimed that 5,000 Jews armed with revolvers and martini rifles marched through Karkh to bury “one of their own in a mosque.”3 Baghdadi Jews also faced mob violence from rioters in town, who attacked their homes and businesses. Furthermore, the arrests continued when members of the Jewish community attempted to seek help and justice within the Ottoman Empire’s petitioning system, and outside of the Ottoman Empire, through a press campaign of support within the Jewish diaspora network.4 The outcome of this scandal was mixed. Over a dozen Jews remained in jail until January 1890, by which time the cholera epidemic had subsided, and Somekh had been forcibly disinterred and reburied in the Jewish cemetery in town. Yet, the gains—the dismissal of the vali and the freeing of most of the jailed community members—were the results of the activities of the Baghdadi Jews and their supporters in Istanbul and among European Jewry. [End Page 97] This series of events involving the burial of a major rabbi during a cholera epidemic should be examined by considering the Ottoman-Baghdadi Jewish community’s mobilization of support, both within the Ottoman government and within its confessional diasporic network. The Ottoman-Baghdadi Jewish community petitioned first the Ottoman authorities in Istanbul and then members of their own confessional diasporic network when the Ottoman petition channels yielded no results. While it was within Ottoman state protocol to handle regional crises, the authorities were displeased with foreign intervention and negative press abroad, especially after the Tanzimat (reordering) reforms had been implemented and Ottomanism as a civic ideology and national identity had spread and strengthened.5 The Ottoman-Baghdadi Jewish community identified and acted as both Ottoman imperial citizens and Jews during a moment of intense local crisis in 1889, and it expected protection and justice from the Ottoman sultan while it also used the Jewish press network to broadcast for assistance. I argue that the burial of this important rabbi and the subsequent communications about the violence and the terror from continued arrests demonstrates a non-dominant community navigating the limits of Ottomanism, and how, when this community felt threatened, it claimed entitlement to justice, as Ottoman, on an imperial level and as Jews on a diasporic level. What began as an intercommunal conflict over a burial amidst a cholera epidemic transformed into a protracted conflict: the Jewish community sought justice, while the local Ottoman government proclaimed justice had been meted out. The sources agree on the main narrative—that violence occurred during the burial and Ottoman authorities arrested leaders from the Jewish community on the grounds of disturbing the public order—but they disagree on the details, or they focus on different actors altogether. Avraham Ben-Yaakov describes the narrative of events in his biography of Somekh, which is based on contemporary...

A Late Imperial Elite Jewish Politics: Baghdadi Jews in British India and the Political Horizons of Empire and Nation

A Late Imperial Elite Jewish Politics: Baghdadi Jews in British India and the Political Horizons of Empire and Nation

The Calcutta Jewish Community and the Jewish Diaspora during the Inter-war Years

The city of Calcutta (now Kolkata) is home to a tiny community, namely, Baghdadi Jews from the Middle East. The Jewish community contributed extensively toward building and consolidating the rich socio-cultural heritage through the creation of social and cultural infrastructures like schools, hospitals, baby clinics, women and youth organizations. Breaking social taboos, they were stimulated by the attractions of Western education and took up modern professions. Their contributions were keenly appreciated both in pre- and post-independent India. Apart from their domiciled status, the Jews of Calcutta were not indifferent to the events affecting their brethren in the international arena, and in the process began to take keen interest in the fate of worldwide Jewry. This article traces the connection of the Baghdadi Jewish community of Calcutta with diaspora Jewry in the following areas, namely, the inter-war period, wartime contribution and the Zionist movement, and tries to explore the concept of diaspora with regard to the Calcutta Jews and how it affected their identity during the colonial and the post-colonial era.

New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq by Orit Bashkin (review)

Reviewed by: New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq by Orit Bashkin Kathrin Haurand Orit Bashkin , New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2012. 310 pages. Paperback, $24.95. ISBN-10: 0-8047-7875-2. Looking at Jewish lives in Iraq during the first half of the twentieth century provides seminal insights into how European and Middle Eastern societies have historically influenced each other. Orit Bashkin's New Babylonians: The History of Jews in Modern Iraq focuses on the crossroads of Jewish, Iraqi, and European cultures. Bashkin, a historian at the University of Chicago, investigates the role of secular Jewish intellectuals in the Nahda (renaissance), the Arab nationalistic literary and cultural renewal movement, starting in the second half of the nineteenth century in Iraq. Her study sheds new light on how the secular Arab national movement influenced the self-understanding and identity of Jewish intellectuals in Iraq under Hashemite rule between 1921 and 1958. Like The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Syracuse University Press, 2009), Bashkin's earlier book on Iraq's political culture under Hashemite rule, New Babylonians challenges orientalist approaches to Middle Eastern and European history which often treat them as two discrete fields [End Page 102] of historical study. Bashkin sees herself as avoiding two traditional pitfalls of narrating Middle East Jewish history: presenting it either as a tale of peaceful, harmonious coexistence or as a story of perpetual persecution. Nonetheless New Babylonians does sketch a vision of peaceful coexistence between Muslims and Jews in Arab lands, even as it also details how that harmonious relationship was destroyed in the maelstrom of a modern Iraqi history ineludibly impacted by the political vicissitudes, sociocultural displacements, and violence of twentieth-century European history. Baskin tells how Jews were in the vanguard of modernization under the British-installed monarchy after World War I. By focusing on the experience of the Iraqi Jewish intellectual elite, she portrays a complex and vibrant "ethno-religious composition of Iraqi society that created a unique Jewish Iraqi experience, which was nonetheless intertwined with global and Western discourses." Arab language became the vernacular of social transformation, and "the educational system was key to the reconceptualization of Arab and secular identity." Transcending social barriers came at the price of disowning one's cultural and religious distinctiveness, such as abandoning certain Judeo-Arab dialects or religious observances. The "new effendia," as Bashkin terms the secular Iraqi Jewish intellectuals, moved into Baghdad's formerly Muslim, middle-class neighborhoods and became prominent in trade, politics, and Arabic literature. Less fortunate Muslims and Christians looked for answers to socio-economic inequalities in the emerging communist movement of the 1930s. The Iraqi Communist Party became a platform for poor Jewish students to raise their voices against social inequality by claiming a share in a national future and "employing the term Arab Jew." Despite the newfound status of secular Iraqi Jewish intellectuals and the vocal anti-Zionism of some prominent Jewish members in Baghdad's literary and political scene, Iraqi nationalists began to attack Jews as traitors in the 1930s. Nazi Germany's shortwave Arabic broadcasting Voice of Free Arabism began in October 1939 and continued broadcasting in Iraq daily until March 1945. The propaganda contributed significantly to a spread of anti-Semitic ideas by consolidating anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist resentment with Arab nationalism. Upon being exiled from Palestine by the British in 1937, Hajj Ammin al-Husseini, the pro-Nazi leader of the Palestinian national movement, found refuge in Baghdad, where he helped German and Arab nationalists to foment anti-Semitic violence. In the months leading up to the Farhud, the pogrom in Baghdad on June 1 and 2, 1941, most Jews placed their hope in British military intervention. Bashkin reveals that Baghdadi Jews were not just forsaken by leading Arab nationalists but also by the British, who stood by and watched the violence unfold. Bashkin contends that historians have overemphasized the larger significance of the 1941 riots. This has contributed, she asserts, to a "Farhudization" of Jewish Iraqi history, in which the Farhud is cast as typifying the overall experience of the otherwise harmonious relationship between Jews and...

Mumbai Fables: A History of an Enchanted City by Gyan Prakash (review)

Reviewed by: Mumbai Fables: A History of an Enchanted City by Gyan Prakash Sheetal Chhabria Mumbai Fables: A History of an Enchanted City. By Gyan Prakash. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010. 424 pp. $29.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper and e-book). Less than a decade ago, Gyan Prakash coined the phrase “urban turn” to signal a new orientation among scholars of South Asia. The study of urban India, he argued, could overcome the limitations of Indian nationalism’s spatial imagination, best exemplified by the ideas of Gandhi and Nehru, who made village India the subject of anticolonial projects.1 Prakash’s Mumbai Fables follows that reorientation by placing the city of Mumbai at the center of his analysis. In this widely accessible monograph, Prakash provides a splendid tour of the city through the many stories, legends, and myths that have operated among its inhabitants as the city propelled through time. He focuses on [End Page 973] the narratives told about and within Bombay, the conditions that produced such narratives, and the textures of people’s negotiations as the city transformed both its name and character from “Bombay” to “Mumbai.” Each chapter is populated with personalities who Prakash brings to life colorfully, so much so that it can be easy to forget one is reading a book that is also staking ground in the historiographical debates over the colonial urban form. Assessments on the impact of colonialism, nationalism, and the rise of identity politics in postcolonial Bombay/Mumbai frame the book’s parts. Beginning with a chapter aptly titled “The Mythic City,” Prakash introduces us to the concern that forms the methodology for the book: namely, that official sources, demographic statistics, maps, and other such containers of “hard facts” conceal as much as they reveal. Prakash’s main goal is to interrogate the “fable” of Bombay’s transition to Mumbai, that is, the story of Bombay’s transitioning from modernity to postmodernity, cosmopolitanism to communalism, industrial capitalism to globalization, or its change from the “tropical Camelot” to a dystopic city of slums. That story of Bombay to Mumbai, according to Prakash, is itself a fable cast by the “spell of history” that depends on an ideal embedded in the modernist assumptions about the city which were, in reality, never actualized anywhere, in any city in the world.2 His goal is to “reveal the historical circumstances portrayed and hidden by the stories and images produced in the past and present,” so that we may know why certain stories are told and others untold (pp. 21–23). This strategy opens up a large and commendable archive of movies, films, songs, comic books, short stories, novels, and oral sources, the latter collected through valuable interviews Prakash conducted with important figures in Mumbai’s contemporary social landscape. The second through fourth chapters focus on Bombay during the colonial and nationalist periods. In these chapters, the city becomes an arena in which European conquest achieves a particularly colonial modernity and subsequent Indian nationalists contest colonial authority. Prakash informs us that while the Portuguese came to Bombay in search of Christians and spices in the sixteenth century, the British used Bombay as an entrepôt for commercial aims in the eighteenth and [End Page 974] nineteenth centuries. The opium and cotton trades connected Bombay to its rural hinterlands and provided paths for merchant mobility. Parsis, Englishmen, Baghdadi Jews, Jains, Marwaris, Bohras, Memons, and Khojas, among others, were bankers and traders each pursuing their own wealth. Throughout this period, the seven islands were merged into one modern city through reclamations of the sea and other feats of infrastructure development, which Prakash calls “Mumbai’s doubly colonial history,” that is, the seizure of land from the seas for the growing urban society itself initiated by European conquest (p. 27). The growth of mills by the end of the nineteenth century signaled a particularly colonial industrialization, where cheap labor funded the conquest of space, leaving behind poor tenements and the devastating plague in 1896–1897. Nationalist agitation against such conditions was fueled by the infamous Back Bay reclamation project, which Prakash follows from 1918 onward as it purportedly attempted to solve the city’s housing shortage...

Disrupted identity: Naim Kattan’s Farewell Babylon and the exile narrative of Baghdadi Jews

In his multi-genre writings, the Québécois-Canadian author Naim Kattan often refers nostalgically to his early years as an Iraqi Jew growing up in the 1940s’ Baghdad. His autobiographical novel Farewell Babylon (1975) represents an important historical document about the complex reality of the life of Iraqi Jews, often referred to as the Babylonian Jews. Part of the novel’s historicity is the dramatization of the Farhud (violent looting) of 1941, which took place in Baghdad and to which the author was a witness as a young boy. The novel traces the trajectory of the coming of age of an aspiring intellectual, facing challenging personal, social and political obstacles in a fraught, alienating and bigoted environment, with exiting the country being the only possible salvation. This article argues that both minority persecution and exile create identitarian havoc for those subjected to them, especially when evoking the vexed, often misunderstood, issue of the Arab Jew. Kattan’s novel, as well as those of the other forcibly exiled Iraqi-Jewish writers, illustrates nevertheless the notion that while uprootedness is painfully destabilizing, it carries with it a potential for rebirth, the reinvention of self and the accretion of layered identities. Moreover, the article foregrounds Kattan’s skilful deployment of the autobiographical novel as a genre to convey complex intellectual and political issues while maintaining his reader’s sympathy and interest. Finally, the article aims to pay tribute to Naim Kattan, an often-overlooked writer by both Iraqi and Canadian critics, and highlight his touching, lyricized narrative of nostalgia about his birthplace, Baghdad.

Baghdadi Jews in Hong Kong: converting cultural, social and economic capital among three transregional networks

AbstractThis article is an analysis of the attempts of Baghdadi Jewish traders in Hong Kong in the second half of the nineteenth century to construct and convert cultural, social and economic capital within and between the transregional networks of the Baghdadi diaspora, the Jewish diaspora and the British colonial elite. The analysis of the multiple and multi‐directional intersections between the cultural, social and economic characteristics of the three networks shows that Baghdadi social capital accounted for significant ruptures and disjunctures between the increasing cosmopolitanization, deterritorialization and hybridization of the Baghdadi traders' cultural identities and the definition of Baghdadi cultural capital. An understanding of the role of Baghdadi social capital in accounting for the construction and convertibility of cultural, social and economic capital among these three transregional networks helps to explain the reproduction of social inequalities under increasing conditions of globalization, that is, under conditions that potentially augmented the number of sources defining cultural capital.

Unfulfilled promises: Ottomanism, the 1908 revolution and Baghdadi Jews

This article explores the ways in which the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 influenced Baghdadi-Jewish political identity in late Ottoman Iraq. The main argument put forth is that Baghdadi-Jews' positive attitudes towards the British conquerors in 1917, whose victory marked the end of Ottoman rule over Baghdad, can be attributed to unmet political expectations dating back to the 1908 revolution and not to the economic motives of the relatively tiny business elite. Jewish cooperation with the British caused resentment among non-Jews, especially Sunni Muslims, leading to an eventual deterioration of Muslim-Jewish relations in Iraq as the Arab-Zionist conflict played out in Palestine. Thus, the ideas and events that immediately followed the Young Turk Revolution profoundly affected the Jewish community well into the 1940s and, one could argue, continue to haunt the community's now displaced, aging members.

Almost Englishmen: Baghdadi Jews in British Burma (review)

Almost Englishmen: Baghdadi Jews in British Burma (review)

Rethinking “Sephardic”: Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur Observances among the Jews of Bombay

This study explores the ritual enactments of the Bene Israel and Baghdadi Jewish communities in Bombay, India during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. By comparing and contrasting the ritual enactments of the two communities against each other, the Sephardic norm, and various faiths in India, their acculturation and hybridization in India is displayed and expressed as “Eastern Sephardic” Jewry. The results demonstrate that the religious life of the Bene Israel and Baghdadi Jews resembles that of other Mizrachi or “Eastern” Sephardic Jews, that is, “traditional” Sephardic rites were superimposed on older, ancestral Jewish customs, with additional contributions from their respective locales. The study argues that the Bene Israel and Baghdadi Jews have not lost their Jewish identity by adapting to their host country and culture; rather, they have developed and nurtured a finely balanced and unique Indo-Judaic identity through a demonstrative cultural and religious inclusion of their Indian neighbors.

Almost Englishmen: Baghdadi Jews in British Burma (review)

Englishmen: Baghdadi Jews in British Burma, by Ruth Fredman Cernea. Lanham MD: Lexington Boob, 2007. 173 pp. $24.95. The widely scattered Baghdadi Jews of the Far East in the 19th century constitute an interesting case of vigorous Jewish society. The Baghdadi Far Easterners were instrumental in creating and funding Jewish institutions in Baghdad. Their role was very different from that of their Ashkenazi peers who migrated to the West from Eastern Europe at about the same time. The Baghdadi migrants included members of the social elite of the community. They commanded the respect of those who remained, and soon the migrants who did well economically became munificent benefactors of the home community. They played an important role in the revitalization of religious and cultural life in the mother community of Baghdad, causing it to fill prominent role in 19th-century Sephardi Jewry. The Ashkenazi situation was very different. From the outset the emigrants from Eastern Europe were looked at askance by the leading lights of their home communities. The latter considered America a treifene medine, an ungodly land, where the emigrants might go astray. Moreover, the emigrants included numerous rebellious socialists, whereas members of the old elite were not prominent among them. It took longer for the Ashkenazi migrants in the West to begin to play positive role in their mother communities then it did for the Baghdadis. This is the context of the particular community described in this book. Rangoon was one of the less prominent, and more recently established, of the Far Eastern Baghdadi communities. Calcutta, the capital of British India in the 19th century, was home to larger, wealthier, and culturally richer community. A Judaeo-Arabic weekly newspaper was even published there for several years. The Rangoon community, established in the 1850s, was part of the Calcutta orbit, distance of three days by sea. But Rangoon itself was the focus for dozen small communities of Jewish Baghdadi traders who lived in inland Burmese localities. These people gathered in Rangoon for the major festivals and family events. The Far Eastern Baghdadi system as whole was tapestry of family, religious, and business ties, with the elite business people of the major centers, Calcutta, Bombay, and Shanghai, connecting the system by marital matches and business dealings. Anthropologist Ruth Fredman Cernea has reconstructed some of the history of the Rangoon community by interviewing descendants of local people currently dispersed in the Western world and in Israel, by studying archives and gravestones, and by consulting with the few Baghdadi individuals still living in Rangoon. Three main topics run through the book. One is the subject of social and cultural identity, well-captured by the title Almost Englishmen. Another, is the nature of community life and the interplay of elements of identity (Jewish-Baghdadi, English, Burmese) in the lives of people. The third main topic is the virtual destruction of the community in the course of World War II, not as an outcome of antisemitism, but as corollary of the Japanese invasion and of Burmese post-colonialism. The Baghdadi-Jewish presence throughout the Far East was linked to the British colonial presence, and expressed in trading. The Baghdadis brought with them their hybrid Judaeo-Arab identity, exemplified in particular by their languages, liturgical Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic speech. The political loyalty and cultural preference of the Baghdadis were directed toward the British overlords of the localities in which they based themselves. …

Almost Englishmen: Baghdadi Jews in British Burma

Almost Englishmen: Baghdadi Jews in British Burma