Iraq’s Last Jews

Iraq’s Last Jews PDF Author: T. Morad
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230616232
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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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.

Iraq’s Last Jews

Iraq’s Last Jews PDF Author: T. Morad
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230616232
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

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.

The Last Jews in Baghdad

The Last Jews in Baghdad PDF Author: Nissim Rejwan
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292774427
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.

The Strangers We Became

The Strangers We Became PDF Author: Cynthia Kaplan Shamash
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 161168806X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
This riveting and utterly unique memoir chronicles the coming of age of Cynthia Shamash, an Iraqi Jew born in Baghdad in 1963. When she was eight, her family tried to escape Iraq over the Iranian border, but they were captured and jailed for five weeks. Upon release, they were returned to their home in Baghdad, where most of their belongings had been confiscated and the door of their home sealed with wax. They moved in with friends and applied for passports to spend a ten-day vacation in Istanbul, although they never intended to return. From Turkey, the family fled to Tel Aviv and then to Amsterdam, where Cynthia's father soon died of a heart attack. At the age of twelve, Sanuti (as her mother called her) was sent to London for schooling, where she lived in an Orthodox Jewish enclave with the chief rabbi and his family. At the end of the school year, she returned to Holland to navigate her teen years in a culture that was much more sexually liberal than the one she had been born into, or indeed the one she was experiencing among Orthodox Jews in London. Shortly after finishing her schooling as a dentist, Cynthia moved to the United States in an attempt to start over. This vivid, beautiful, and very funny memoir will appeal to readers intrigued by spirituality, tolerance, the personal ramifications of statelessness and exile, the clashes of cultures, and the future of Iraq and its Jews.

The Jews Of Iraq

The Jews Of Iraq PDF 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).

Memories of Eden

Memories of Eden PDF 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.

New Babylonians

New Babylonians PDF 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.

The History of the Jews in Baghdad

The History of the Jews in Baghdad PDF 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.

Last Days in Babylon

Last Days in Babylon PDF Author: Marina Benjamin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 141657204X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Acclaimed author Marina Benjamin explores through a personal narrative of her own family the odyssey--and ultimate exile--of the Jews in Iraq. 16 pp. of photos. Family tree. Map. Notes.

The Wolf of Baghdad

The Wolf of Baghdad PDF Author: Carol Isaacs
Publisher: Myriad Editions
ISBN: 1912408716
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
'Enthralling and moving. It is magical.'— Claudia Roden In the 1940s a third of Baghdad's population was Jewish. Within a decade nearly all 150,000 had been expelled, killed or had escaped. This graphic memoir of a lost homeland is a wordless narrative by an author homesick for a home she has never visited. Transported by the power of music to her ancestral home in the old Jewish quarter of Baghdad, the author encounters its ghost-like inhabitants who are revealed as long-gone family members. As she explores the city, journeying through their memories and her imagination, she at first sees successful integration, and cultural and social cohesion. Then the mood turns darker with the fading of this ancient community's fortunes. This beautiful wordless narrative is illuminated by the words and portraits of her family, a brief history of Baghdadi Jews and of the making of this work. Says Isaacs: 'The Finns have a word, kaukokaipuu, which means a feeling of homesickness for a place you've never been to. I've been living in two places all my life; the England I was born in, and the lost world of my Iraqi-Jewish family's roots.'

Last Days in Babylon

Last Days in Babylon PDF Author: Marina Benjamin
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408854120
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
The fascinating story of the Iraqi Jews told through the life of the author's grandmother 'Last Days in Babylon is a marvel ... An amalgam of political commentary, history and personal memoir, it offers a poignant testimony to an obliterated people' Sunday Times 'This is a history unknown even to most Jews. Benjamin narrates it fluently and passionately' Independent Marina Benjamin grew up in London, feeling estranged from her family's Middle Eastern ways, refusing to speak Arabic or eat their food. But when Benjamin had her own child a few years ago, she realised that she was losing her link to the past, inspiring a journey to Baghdad and into her family's history. Her discoveries will haunt anyone who seeks to understand a country whose ongoing struggles continue to command the world's attention. By turns moving and funny, Last Days in Babylon is an adventure story, a riveting history and a timely reminder that behind today's headlines are real people whose lives are caught in the crossfire of misunderstanding, prejudice and ambition.