Author: David Sassoon
Publisher: Simon Wallenburg Press
ISBN: 9781843560029
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
The book deals with the history of the Jews in Baghdad, from the first mention of the place in the Talmud until recent times, and contains additional chapters on customs and usages, superstitions and proverbs, and also chapters on the settlement of Bagdad Jews in India and the Far East. The work describes the internal history of the Jews in Baghdad their communal, social and intellectual life. The work bases itself almost exclusively on Jewish sources these include many manuscripts from the Sassoon collection used here for the first time. The author an eminent scholar, who worked with untiring zeal collecting documents on Jewish history and building up the famous Sassoon collection of manuscripts at Oxford University. We are fortunate to have a short history of the Jews in Baghdad from his pen, a milestone book which laid the foundation stone for future writers on the subject.
Author: Orit Bashkin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804782016
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
Although Iraqi Jews saw themselves as Iraqi patriots, their community—which had existed in Iraq for more than 2,500 years—was displaced following the establishment of the state of Israel. New Babylonians chronicles the lives of these Jews, their urban Arab culture, and their hopes for a democratic nation-state. It studies their ideas about Judaism, Islam, secularism, modernity, and reform, focusing on Iraqi Jews who internalized narratives of Arab and Iraqi nationalisms and on those who turned to communism in the 1940s. As the book reveals, the ultimate displacement of this community was not the result of a perpetual persecution on the part of their Iraqi compatriots, but rather the outcome of misguided state policies during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Sadly, from a dominant mood of coexistence, friendship, and partnership, the impossibility of Arab-Jewish coexistence became the prevailing narrative in the region—and the dominant narrative we have come to know today.
Author: Nissim Rejwan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000302792
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
This book provides an account of the Jews of Iraq, their history, culture and society. It covers the Iraqi Jewish history in three parts: from the Assyrian Captivity to the Arab Conquest (731 bc–ad 641); the encounter with Islam (641–1850); and the last hundred years (1850–1951).
Author: Jacob B. Shammash
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1532046413
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 153
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Book Description
Most people have heard of Kristallnacht, Night of the Broken Glass in Hitlers Germany. Very few have heard of the Farhud in Baghdad, Iraq. The authors memoir begins in a world that no longer exists
Author: Violette Shamash
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810164086
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
According to legend, the Garden of Eden was located in Iraq, and for millennia, Jews resided peacefully in metropolitan Baghdad. Memories of Eden: A Journey Through Jewish Baghdad reconstructs the last years of the oldest Jewish Diaspora community in the world through the recollections of Violette Shamash, a Jewish woman who was born in Baghdad in 1912, sent to her daughter Mira Rocca and son-in-law, the British journalist Tony Rocca. The result is a deeply textured memoir—an intimate portrait of an individual life, yet revealing of the complex dynamics of the Middle East in the twentieth century. Toward the end of her long life, Violette Shamash began writing letters, notes, and essays and sending them to the Roccas. The resulting book begins near the end of Ottoman rule and runs through the British Mandate, the emergence of an independent Iraq, and the start of dictatorial government. Shamash clearly loved the world in which she grew up but is altogether honest in her depiction of the transformation of attitudes toward Baghdad’s Jewish population. Shamash’s world is finally shattered by the Farhud, the name given to the massacre of hundreds of Iraqi Jews over three days in 1941. An event that has received very slight historical coverage, the Farhud is further described and placed in context in a concluding essay by Tony Rocca.
Author: David Solomon Sassoon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Baghdad (Iraq)
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Author: T. Morad
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230616232
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
Iraq's Last Jews is a collection of first-person accounts by Jews about their lives in Iraq's once-vibrant, 2500 year-old Jewish community and about the disappearance of that community in the middle of the 20th century. This book tells the story of this last generation of Iraqi Jews, who both reminisce about their birth country and describe the persecution that drove them out, the result of Nazi influences, growing Arab nationalism, and anger over the creation of the State of Israel.
Author: Nissim Rejwan
Publisher: Univ of TX + ORM
ISBN: 0292797478
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
This memoir of life in the Iraqi capital’s Jewish community is “a rare look—detailed and vivid—into a culture that is no longer extant” (Nancy E. Berg, author of Exile from Exile: Israeli Writers from Iraq). 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: Abbas Shiblak
Publisher: Saqi Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
The Jews of Iraq constituted one of the oldest and most deeply rooted Jewish communities in the world. But in the early 1950s most of them left for Israel, under circumstances that remain the subject of heated controversy. Iraqi Jews: A History examines the role of this community, highlighting the critical years of the late 1940s - after the establishment of the state of Israel - when deep rifts began to appear in Iraqi society. The sad sequence of events that finally led to the mass exodus of Jews in the 1950s was marked by dishonesty on all sides. An impartial and well-documented account of a formerly well-integrated and vibrant community, Iraqi Jews: A History is a landmark in the political and social history of the Middle East.
Author: Heskel M Haddad
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595327087
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 480
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Book Description
In Baghdad, Iraq, in 1939, nine-year-old Heskel Haddad, then the most fervent of Iraqi nationalists, first heard a fellow Iraqi call him "lousy Jew." Iraq, which for centuries was called Babylon, housed the world's oldest continuing Jewish community, largely concentrated in the capital city of Baghdad. By the late 1930's spurred by pro-Nazi elements, the Arab community had become increasingly anti-Semitic. On the eve of the holy day of Shuvuot, small roving bands of M'silmin killed 900 Jews in Baghdad, among them Heskel Haddad's cousin, his closest friend, who had been stabbed in the back and left to die in slow agony. Heskel Haddad swore the solemn oath to avenge his cousin, and began to organize an underground movement to protect his fellow Jews from further slaughter. As conditions worsened in Iraq, more and more Jews dreamed of escaping to Israel, but attempts to flee through Syria and Trans-Jordan meant death in the desert or at the hands of the Bedouin. The only way out was into neighboring Persia, now called Iran. Between 1948 and 1950, the Underground led 20,000 Jews to safety. An anonymous informer put Haddad on the "wanted list," and eventually Haddad was forced to leave Iraq forever. After a grueling journey through the desert into Iran, Haddad was forced to leave Iraq forever. After a grueling journey through the desert into Iran, Haddad arrived in Israel, where he was reunited with his family, which had left Iraq penniless as a result of the mass expulsion of Jews. Born in Baghdad is a gripping, richly atmospheric book about exotic lands poised between ancient tradition and modern change--and about the human values that must ultimately transcend both.
