The Last Jews in Baghdad: Remembering a Lost Homeland

Nissim Rejwan

Published by University of Texas Press 2004

The Last Jews in Baghdad

Remembering a Lost Homeland

Nissim Rejwan
With contributions by: Joel Beinin

https://doi.org/10.7560/702936

Overview
Contents

About this book

Once upon a time, Baghdad was home to a flourishing Jewish community. More than a third of the city's people were Jews, and Jewish customs and holidays helped set the pattern of Baghdad's cultural and commercial life. On the city's streets and in the bazaars, Jews, Muslims, and Christians—all native-born Iraqis—intermingled, speaking virtually the same colloquial Arabic and sharing a common sense of national identity. And then, almost overnight it seemed, the state of Israel was born, and lines were drawn between Jews and Arabs. Over the next couple of years, nearly the entire Jewish population of Baghdad fled their Iraqi homeland, never to return. In this beautifully written memoir, Nissim Rejwan recalls the lost Jewish community of Baghdad, in which he was a child and young man from the 1920s through 1951. He paints a minutely detailed picture of growing up in a barely middle-class family, dealing with a motley assortment of neighbors and landlords, struggling through the local schools, and finally discovering the pleasures of self-education and sexual awakening. Rejwan intertwines his personal story with the story of the cultural renaissance that was flowering in Baghdad during the years of his young manhood, describing how his work as a bookshop manager and a staff writer for the Iraq Times brought him friendships with many of the country's leading intellectual and literary figures. He rounds off his story by remembering how the political and cultural upheavals that accompanied the founding of Israel, as well as broad hints sent back by the first arrivals in the new state, left him with a deep ambivalence as he bid a last farewell to a homeland that had become hostile to its native Jews.

Author / Editor information

Nissim Rejwan is currently a Research Fellow at the Harry S Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Over a distinguished, six-decade career as a historian and journalist, he has published a dozen books, including The Jews of Iraq: 3000 Years of History and Culture and Israel's Place in the Middle East: A Pluralist Perspective, for which he won the 1998 National Jewish Book Award for Israel Studies.

Reviews

Ammiel Alcalay, Queens College, CUNY Graduate Center, author of After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture:
"The Last Jews in Baghdad is the real deal--it is a breath of pure spirit, oxygen, and reality in a realm of depictions and representations that rely on half-truths, false expertise, ideological axe-grinding, and a whole plethora of other ills. The book is crucial; there is nothing at all out there nearly like it."

Nancy E. Berg, Washington University, author of Exile from Exile: Israeli Writers from Iraq:
"This book offers a rare look--detailed and vivid--into a culture that is no longer extant. An autobiography of place, it is a portrait of the making of a young intellectual and of Iraqi society in the thirties and forties. It tells the story of the end of the once rooted and vibrant Jewish community and serves as a wonderful resource for both the scholarly historian and the casual reader."

"This is a book to be enjoyed by the general reader interested in a productive Jewish community that has completely disappeared, and by scholars, who will consider it a valuable source for their studies."

"The Last Jews in Baghdad is a brilliantly written précis of interlinked miniatures that serves as a metonymy of life in the Middle East in the twentieth century. It tells the tale of a young man who struggled along with his family to survive materially and developed socially into a luminous intellectual homme de lettres in a world that was being shaken to its very core."

Topics

General Interest

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Foreword. Jews as Native Iraqis: An Introduction Joel Beinin Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Preface. On Taking Stock Publicly Available Download PDF	xxiii
Chapter 1 In old Baghdad Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter 2 The Rejwan tribe Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	9
Chapter 3 Mother and the placebo effect Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	17
Chapter 4 Na‘ima Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	26
Chapter 5 Early initiations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	38
Chapter 6 Schooling Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	52
Chapter 7 The great crash and us Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	62
Chapter 8 Hesqail Abul ‘Alwa hires a helper Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	74
Chapter 9 Living in sexual deprivation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	85
Chapter 10 Idle days Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	97
Chapter 11 Distorted visions Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	111
Chapter 12 Rashid ‘Ali’s coup and its aftermath Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	126
Chapter 13 Bookshop days Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	139
Chapter 14 A deepening friendship Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	150
Chapter 15 The start: movies, book reviews Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	159
Chapter 16 Out in the cold Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	169
Chapter 17 Disposing of a library Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	180
Chapter 18 End of a community Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	188
Chapter 19 Farewells and reunions Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	198
Appendix A The Jews of Iraq: a brief historical sketch Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	209
Appendix B A selection of book reviews from the Iraq times Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	218
Index of names of persons Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	239

Language: English
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 268

eBook

Published: January 1, 2010
ISBN: 9780292797475