New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq
... Sharabani's grandparents immigrated from Iraq in 1951 (communication with the author, October 2019), along with the majority of Iraq's Jewish population-130,000 out of 135,000 Iraqi Jews abandoned their homes and property in the space of six months, fleeing anti-Zionist (which soon tipped into anti-Semitic) harassment. To exacerbate matters, they were compelled to give up their citizenship by a specially legislated Iraqi law (Bashkin 2012). In 1999, Sharabani, like many young Israeli artists, left Israel to study in New York, where his career as a visual artist began. ...
... Sharabani's family, along with most of Iraq's Jewish population, fled Iraq in the wake of anti-Jewish persecution, which peaked in the Farhud pogrom of June 1941 (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2019b). After a decade's tribulation, practically the entire Jewish population left Iraq as one in 1951, shocked by the sudden collapse of their participation in the country's economic and cultural life (Bashkin 2012). Forced to forfeit their citizenship and private property upon leaving, by a specially legislated decree, Jews have been unable to return since, even only to visit (The Museum of the Jewish People 2019). ...
... Sharabani's family, along with most of Iraq's Jewish population, fled Iraq in the wake of anti-Jewish persecution, which peaked in the Farhud pogrom of June 1941 (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2019b). After a decade's tribulation, practically the entire Jewish population left Iraq as one in 1951, shocked by the sudden collapse of their participation in the country's economic and cultural life (Bashkin 2012). Forced to forfeit their Arts 2020, 9, 73 13 of 18 citizenship and private property upon leaving, by a specially legislated decree, Jews have been unable to return since, even only to visit (The Museum of the Jewish People 2019). ...
This paper addresses an intriguing intergenerational encounter between Micha Ullman (b. Tel Aviv 1939), one of Israel’s most prominent senior artists, and Ronen Sharabani (b. Tel Aviv 1974), a young media artist. The two artists’ otherwise divergent practices converge in their use of sand and red earth as their primary media. The paper brings Mieke Bal’s concept of migratory aesthetics and Jill Bennett’s phenomenological approach to trauma-related art to bear on Ullman’s fragile earth installations and perforated sand tables, and on Sharabani’s projections of Virtual Reality onto sand. Also addressed is Sharabani’s series Vitual Territories (2019), in which digitally manipulated views from Google Earth probe geographical sites that resonate with migratory histories. The paper traces two main trajectories upon which the oeuvres of Ullman and Sharabani interface. The first category, “treacherous sands”, relates to installations involving sand tables and other containers of soil. In turn, the category of “fragile traces” addresses installations that feature various architectural ground plans modeled in sand. In these installations, sand is the quintessential terra infirma. At the same time, however, the paper proposes that through the haptic appeal of the medium of sand, these installations counter the pervasive anxiety of shifting ground with an augmented sense of bodily presence.
... The modern state of Iraq, formed in 1921, encompasses much of this area and sought to create a European-style nation-state out of the diverse peoples that resided there (Shohat 2017). Orit Bashkin (2012) argues that this was done in the Jewish case through the Arab-Jew/Iraqi-Jew hyphenated identity, which sought to "forge a relationship with the cultural and historical framework of the Arab majority community by claiming Arab ethnicity as its own." (3) They were received in this context as '"Iraqis,' 'citizens,' 'Iraqis of the Jewish faith,' 'Arab Jews,' 'Zionists,' and 'people of the book,' depending on the socio-political and sociocultural orientation of those that described them" (3). ...
... Therefore, the Iraqi Jewish identity as forged in the modern Iraqi state is understood here as one that is fully politicized; it was something done with the full knowledge of what the "nation" was, in the European sense, and with the intention of joining the emerging Iraqi national-political community as formed post-World War I. This move was initially successful, and Jews rose in political, economic, and social standing as they enthusiastically took part in the making of the new nation-state (Bashkin 2012;Cole 2009). ...
... However, conditions for Jews in Iraq gradually worsened from the late 1920s. Bashkin (2012) places this in the context of the conflict in Palestine: Iraqi Jewish support for the Palestinians, coming from the intelligentsia, journalists, the chief rabbi, and poets, and Prime Minister Nuri Sa'id's promise to protect the Jewish population, ended up not being enough to insulate the Iraqi Jews from growing anti-Semitism and their assumed association with Zionism. In 1941, the Iraqi Jews in Baghdad suffered the Farhud, a pogrom in which some hundreds were killed or injured (Yehuda 2017). ...
This article looks at the case of Ezekiel’s shrine in Kifl, Iraq. The shrine houses the grave of the Jewish prophet Ezekiel and originally consisted of a synagogue and associated buildings. Shiʽa Muslims claim it is a holy site for Muslims. Since Iraq’s Jews largely left Iraq after 1950 as a result of government repression, it is now controlled by the Iraqi Shiʽa Waqf. It has been largely changed into a mosque, with many Jewish elements having been removed. Too few Jews are left in Iraq to challenge this. This article asks how changes to this site play into notions of belonging and identity for Iraqi Jews today, as well as how the effects of pressure from dominant Jewish identities and a general ignorance of Arab Jewish identity interacts with this important site of memory. An analysis of the relationship between the site and Iraqi Jewish identity is conducted via on-site work and thirteen interviews with Iraqi Jews from around the world. It argues for the importance of the site and that heritage sites such as Ezekiel’s shrine are powerful sites for anchoring diasporic identities mnemonically. In the case where those identities are under strain, these sites serve a role to further strengthen and provide historical weight to claims of belonging. However, this relationship changes through generations because of internal and external identity and political pressures. Unchallengeable pressures increase the likelihood that memories are not passed on. The article argues for a dynamic understanding between site, politics, and identity.
... Criticizing the Zionist metanarrative of Jewish homecoming, or unidirectional repatriation, and Jews' "natural" attachment to Israel, many scholars have emphasized opposing tendencies toward integration in the MENA countries of origin and, specifically, the development of Arab national identities among MENA Jews. While this may have been the case among groups of national elites in some Arab countries, the reactions of the Turkish-Jewish elite to rising Turkish nationalism were markedly different [42,43]. As an aside, it's worth mentioning the intriguing parallels between Iran and Turkey concerning their Jewish communities' relationship with Israel. ...
The methods that communities exploit to cope with national hegemonies that dispossess and exclude them have attracted the interest of migration scholars who emphasize the development of transnational strategies as community-building vehicles. Some scholars focus on migrant communities, whereas other studies analyze the “stayers”—those who remain in the countries of origin—in their analyses of the impacts of transnational trends on these groups. Yet how such transnational dynamics influence the “stayers” among ethnonational communities whose members rapidly “repatriate” en masse to their perceived nation-state, such as the migration of Middle Eastern Jews to Israel in the era of regional decolonization and nationalization, remain understudied. This article focuses on the community of “stayers” among Turkish Jews, whose leaders sought methods to cope with the effects of rising nationalism on their community structure and the intensity of an emigration crisis that engulfed them due to the vacuum they faced after losing 40 percent of their members in 1948–1949 to Israel. We analyze Şalom, the most important newspaper that Turkish Jewry continued to publish well after 1948. To escape marginalization and to re-establish their base in Turkey, one of Şalom’s main strategies, we find, is conveying to its readership in Turkey the advantage of connecting and twinning the two national centers that had become the focal points of most of the community by 1950—the Turkish Republic and the State of Israel.
... Iraqi Jews, who mostly lived as an urban and educated community in Iraq, found themselves poor, voiceless, and disrespected. Orit Bashkin (2017) argues that the Iraqi Jews' experiences in Israel were similar to the experiences of Palestinian refugees and Palestinians who became Israeli citizens in that all these groups suffered displacement and experienced poverty and loss of status. Moreover, these groups became third-class citizens; while the Palestinians lived under a military regime, Iraqi Jews confronted state neglect and police brutality (7). ...
This article examines the politics and practices of citizenship among Iraqi Jews, using one woman's life history to explore the dynamics of exile and belonging. In 1950–1951, the Iraqi government issued a law that stripped Iraqi Jews who had migrated to Israel of their citizenship. Iraqi citizenship laws and directives did not only define citizens and noncitizens but also emerged as a venue of internal differentiation. Ruling elites facilitated political closures and constructed internal others within the very category of the Iraqi citizen, whereby practices of denaturalization and deportation of citizens became forms of state and colonial governmentality. In Israel, Iraqi Jews faced systems of racialization since their Arabness was associated with the enemy and racial inferiority. Iraqi Jews found themselves entangled in structures of power that rendered their Arab Jewishness an unintelligible category. However, Iraqi Jews resisted these conditions of dispossession and exclusion, and asserted a notion of Iraqi citizenship based on political activism with the aim of writing themselves onto the Iraqi social and political landscapes. Their political activism—whether in Iraq, Israel, or the diaspora—became sites of resistance that carved new ideas about community and undermined formal and legal definitions of citizenship. [citizenship laws, exclusion, legal violence, exile]
... Drawing on Swislocki's concept of culinary nostalgia, defi ned as 'the recollection or purposive evocation of another time and place through food' ( 2008 : 1), we explore how amba takes on a sensory form of memory that connects body to place in the diaspora. After an agreement between the Israeli and Iraqi government in 1951, the overwhelming majority of the historic Iraqi-Jewish community, which numbered 135,000, relocated to Israel ( Bashkin 2012 ). This abrupt turn of events was the product of a confl uence of factors that included increased Arab nationalist activity after the 1948 Israeli-Arab War, anti-Communist measures by the Iraqi government targeting Jewish communists, and Zionist underground activity in Baghdad. ...
... It was becoming apparent that the Iraqi refugee crisis was the biggest urban refugee crisis the world had ever witnessed in contemporary history. Since then there has been a growing bulk of literature dealing with a variety of themes including the causes of displacement (e.g., Ahmed & Gunter, 2002;Chatelard, 2009b;Fattah 2007); migration trajectories (e.g., Bashkin, 2012;Romano, 2005;Shoeb, Weinstein, & Halpern, 2007); resettlement and integration (e.g. Johnston, Vasey, & Markovic, 2009); and return and remigration (Chatty and Mansour 2011;Iaraia, 2011). ...
"Often Iraqis in the diaspora are portrayed as fragmented along ethnic and religious lines. Overall, the findings of this research do not contradict this perception. Rather they problematize it. What the
researcher has found is that ethnic identity and religious identity are more salient among migrants who come from a poorer background or who have experienced downward social mobility. In such instances, ethnic or religious solidarity becomes an important source of social capital, and closer affiliation to the church or the mosque or primordial loyalty is born out of many factors, undoubtedly, one of which is sheer necessity." Based on a small-scale qualitative research project with Iraqis living in Jordan, this paper aims to shed light on how ethnic identity and social class intersect to shape Iraqi experience of displacement. It focuses on two major themes. First, it discusses the relationship between the shifting social and political landscape in Iraq and ethnoreligious identity of Iraqis in Jordan. Second, it explores the ways in which ethnicity and class intersect to affect the dynamics of Iraqis’ integration into their host society.
... No mental boundary separated the Muslim and the Jewish areas. The barriers of language and culture posed few impediments, and whoever ventured into the physical sphere of the "other" felt quite at home there (Shohat 2006;Shenhav 2006;Stillman 1998;Jacobson 2011b;Shabi 2009;Baskin 2012;T. Levi 2012. ...
Whereas the conflict over Palestine’s’ holy places and their role in forming Israeli or Palestinian national identity is well studied, this article brings to the fore an absent perspective. It shows that in the first half of the 20th century Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem shared holy sites, religious beliefs and feasts. Jewish–Muslim encounters of that period went much beyond pre-modern practices of cohabitation, to the extent of developing joint local patriotism. On the other hand, religious and other holy sites were instrumental in the Jewish and Palestinian exclusive nation building process rather than an inclusive one, thus contributing to escalate the national conflict.
In The Tobacco Keeper, Ali Bader delves into the harrowing experiences of Iraqi Jews during the Farhud, a violent pogrom that took place in Baghdad in 1941. The story not only chronicles the immediate physical and emotional toll of the violence but also examines the long-lasting psychological effects that such an experience has on the Jewish community in Iraq. The aim of this article is to examine the literary representation of psychic trauma which is provoked by exposure to a traumatic event in Ali Bader’s The Tobacco Keeper and explore the post-traumatic stress disorders that the traumatized character suffers. The article, through close reading of the novel, attempts to trace and elucidate the myriad emotional, behavioral and psychological predicaments that the protagonist exhibits and experiences after being exposed to the Farhud. The study deploys trauma theory and post-traumatic stress disorders theory to examine the protagonist’s altered perception of reality and the self and the mechanisms he employs to cope with the traumatic event and the extent to which he is able to overcome the impacts of those traumatic experiences.
In this paper, I explore the history of the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) campaign, which aims to extract Southwest Asian and North Africa populations from the white legal category on the US Census. I use Bourdieu’s classification struggles and theory of field to make sense of different approaches to this campaign. The data presented in the paper are gathered from 65 qualitative interviews with activists and citizens with Southwest Asian and North African backgrounds. The data manifest that although all participants unanimously reject the relevance of their current legal white racial category, they have divergent reasons for their support, or lack thereof, for the campaign, all of which are different from the advocacy organizations’ framing of it. I draw on these variant perspectives to investigate the classification struggles between different actors at different levels and examine how these actors meet in the field and pursue their goals.
What does it mean for Jewish Israelis to engage in Palestinian solidarity? How do they navigate their positions of privilege in their activism? To explore these questions, I begin with a historical trajectory of the rise and fall of leftist Jewish Israeli activist organizations in response to global and local developments. I focus on two periods and their organizations: The Israeli Socialist Organization in the 1960’s and 1970’s and Ta’ayush and Physicians for Human Rights Israel in the 2010’s. In both cases the individuals in question are a very small minority of Israelis. From there I analyze these organizations and activists’ struggles to escape dominant Zionist and Israeli state narratives and the continual shortcomings in their attempts to center Palestinians in their activism. Despite radical positions, activists from both eras remain trapped in existing systems of power.
There is a growing literature on gender and feminist theory in the Middle East now. However, there has been little work on Kurdish diasporas and gender in the United States. This article examines how US diasporic Kurdish performances of gender and narrations of gender work to create the figure of the “Kurdish woman.” Instead of falling into the trap of Orientalist constructions of womanhood, Kurdish diasporas imagine “Kurdish woman” as a way to challenge nation-state assimilation projects and erasure by practicing identity at the intersections of ethnicity, religion, gender, and race. The category of “woman” becomes an important venue to manage statelessness, create an important archive for Kurds, challenge ongoing colonialism in Kurdistan, and challenge US imperialism. Therefore “Kurdish woman” constitutes an important spatial and historical terrain for Kurdish women and Kurdish men to manage their racialization across national contexts and partake in the racialization of “others.” “Woman” is activated in the service of difference as a means to showcase the heterogeneity within Kurdish communities and expound on the relations Kurds in the US diaspora have with nation, religion, history, and resistance.
This article examines nuclear imaginaries in the Arabic-speaking Middle East. It situates people from the Arab world into nuclear thought, looking at how the atomic age rapidly became part of everyday lives. Embracing the idea that reality and fiction are not only deeply intertwined but also co-constitutive, it analyses everyday engagements with the nuclear condition in the aftermath of the bombing of Japan, across a wide range of sources. The article argues that these semi-fictional historical sources—memoirs, pseudo-scientific predictions, speculative reports published in newspapers, popular science books and even rumours—capture an affective moment at the beginning of the atomic age, which was marked by hysteria, widespread speculation and exaggeration. Discussions on nuclear weapons, precisely because the extent of their destruction seems unimaginable, blur the boundaries between ‘real’ and ‘fictional’, offering a unique opportunity to reflect on stories of world politics and on the tensions within historical International Relations.
Through stunning images, maps and insightful commentary, this book offers a glimpse into the diversity, historical legacy, and rich culture of Jewish communities within the Muslim world. From the growing Jewish community of Dubai to ancient synagogues and shrines, these photographs capture the beauty and complexity of Jewish life around North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Above all, this photographic book serves as a reminder of the enduring spirit of the Jewish people and the diversity of lived experiences within Islamic societies. This volume presents thematically organized contemporary images of both Jewish life and Jewish heritage from across the Middle Eastern and North Africa. Interspersed throughout the images are an assortment of short essays written by scholars and University of Groningen students to contextualize the presented images.
The history of Iraqi Jewry dates back more than 2600 years. Iraq’s Jews are one of the world’s oldest and most storied Jewish communities. A century ago, Iraqi Jews were nearly a third of Baghdad’s population. They enjoyed a dominant position in the commercial affairs of the city and were active in its cultural, political, and social affairs. However, following the independence of the Kingdom of Iraq in 1932, Jews were subjected to a rising number of legal restrictions. The ascent of Arab nationalist forces in Iraqi politics, combined with the victory of Israel over the Arab armies in 1948, led to a new, fiercer wave of policies persecuting Iraq’s Jews as an alleged fifth column. Culminating in the denationalization law in 1951, 120,000–130,000 Jews, the overwhelming majority, fled Iraq for Israel between 1951 and 1952. Approximately 6000 remained in Iraq. While a growing field of scholarship has illuminated the history of Iraqi Jewry until this point, very little has been written about those who remained in Iraq over the subsequent decades, especially from the 1970s up to the present day. Iraq’s Jewish community currently counts no more than three individuals. As they are older and without children, these individuals will be the last members of a community that traces its history back to the Babylonian captivity, several hundred years prior to birth of Christianity and well over a millennium before the advent of Islam. Drawing on news articles, Western diplomatic documents, and the records of Saddam Hussein’s Baʿth Party, this chapter pieces together and outlines the last half-century in the history of Iraq’s Jewish community.
Since the 1979 revolution, Iranian Jews have faced two powerful and inherently contradictory calls to compromise their voice and identity. From one side, Israel has consistently held the opinion that as an at-risk community they should be evacuated and resettled. On the other, Iran's revolutionary regime has made “Islamic” a centerpiece of Iranian identity, placing Jewish identity directly at odds with what it means to be an Iranian. For decades, foreign opposition groups have spread baseless and unsubstantiated claims suggesting that Iranian Jews are to be placed in concentration camps or forced to wear yellow stars. At the same time, Iran's top politicians repeatedly peddle anti-Semitic innuendo and promote Holocaust denial conspiracies. Yet such narratives miss the central fact rarely acknowledged in Israel or Western academic and public spheres: Iranian Jews have continued to maintain ownership of their story and narrative as both Iranian and Jewish. This article seeks to analyze the navigation of Iranian Jews between their struggle as a religious minority in the Islamic Republic and maintenance of their autonomous voice as represented outside Iran.
This article examines two documentaries on Iraqi Jews, Forget Baghdad and Remember Baghdad, that focus on the expulsion of Iraqi Jews from Iraq and their lives in Israel and Britain. The exile of Jews from Iraq heralded the end of a vibrant social and political space that Iraqi Jews shared with fellow Iraqis. This article argues that by focusing on questions of forgetting and remembering, the two documentaries foreground memory and nostalgia as sites to explore issues related to home, dislocation, and subjectivity at physical and symbolic levels. Moreover, the acts of remembrance in the films emerge as a dynamic terrain upon which political, generational, and class differences were inscribed and invoked. Iraqi Jews found themselves trapped within a binary framework of Arab nationalistic and Zionist discourses whereby Arabness and Jewishness emerged as an antithesis and denoted otherness, and their position within nation-states became unintelligible. The films, however, reconstruct, in different ways, the possibilities where Arabness, Jewishness, and Iraqiness could overlap, live side by side, and challenge national narratives. Reading the films alongside each other challenges any monolithic or essentialist narratives about an Iraqi Jewish experience by shedding light on the diversity of political projects among Iraqi Jews.
Examining the relationship between a strengthened Iraqi state under the Baʿth regime and the Assyrians, a Christian ethno-religious group, Alda Benjamen studies the role of minorities in twentieth-century Iraqi political and cultural history. Relying on extensive research in Iraq, including sources uncovered at the Iraqi National Archives in Baghdad, as well as in libraries and private collections in Erbil, Duhok, and Mosul, in Arabic and modern Aramaic, Benjamen foregrounds the Iraqi periphery as well as the history of bilingualism to challenge the monolingual narrative of the state. By exploring the role of Assyrians in Iraq's leftist and oppositional movements, including gendered representations of women, she demonstrates how, within newly politicized urban spaces, minorities became attracted to intellectual and political movements that allowed them to advance their own concerns while engaging with other Iraqis of their socio-economic background and relying on transnational community networks. Assyrian intellectuals not only negotiated but also resisted government policies through their cultural production, thereby achieving a softening of Baʿthist policies towards the Assyrians that differed markedly from those of later repressive eras.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, there was significant migration of Arabs from the Ottoman Empire to the Americas, and such migrants often originated in the communities that had been subject to Protestant missionary programs. This article uses a micro-history of a single family to assess the relationship between missionary activity and emigration. The article concludes that Arabs deployed both involvement with missions (employment, conversion, and education) and temporary economic migration as strategies to join a transnational middle class.
One of the most Arabized Jewish communities in the Middle East, the Jews of Iraq emigrated virtually en masse from the country they had called home for millennia. Jews benefitted from the political emancipation, educational opportunities, and prospects for economic expansion offered by the Ottoman and Young Turk regimes, and, initially, by the post-World War I state of Iraq. Gradually, they were marginalized as a consequence of those same liberal reforms.
The conflating of the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) region with Arabs is a common trope that also governs how we study West Asia and West Asian diasporas in the United States. I ethnographically highlight the lives of Kurds in mainly Nashville, Tennessee, and the northeastern United States while foregrounding their racial aspirations that disrupt essentialized depictions of the SWANA region and challenge the nation‐state's racial ascriptions. The use of the “Indo‐European” language family as racial classification in opposition to Arabs, the quotidian practices of racializing Kurds through the “Muslim‐looking” racial formation, and the everyday forms of solidarity with Arab Americans during this period of the global war on terror provide traction on the ways the ascriptions of race and aspirations to race influence Kurdish identity formation. Through evocations of “Indo‐European‐ness,” Kurdish Americans conceptualize transnational and transhistorical forms of whiteness/Europeanness/Aryan‐ness and racialized difference from Arabs, offer critiques of nation‐states, and accentuate dynamic forms of racial consciousness. Kurds simultaneously engage with ethnological understandings that are naturalized as racial difference at the very moment they must also manage the racial hysteria post‐9/11. With increased xenophobia and Islamophobia, Kurds challenge their racializations by embracing nonwhiteness that opens possibilities for coalition‐building with Arab Americans and various racial “Others.”
In their conversation about music, Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim discuss a process of seeking home in music and literature. For Moroccan-Jewish superstar Samy Elmaghribi (Solomon Amzallag), who migrated to France and Israel and then settled for most of his life in Montreal, Canada, the reference to Al-Andalus through the sound of the nouba became his home. Beginning his career in his native country of Morocco as a singer and composer of modern Moroccan music, in Montreal, Samy Elmaghribi became the cantor in the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, the oldest Jewish congregation in Canada. Based on ethnographic research and investigation within the archives of the artist, the authors suggest that Samy Elmaghribi created a sense of home in music, a homeness, one that transcends our present understanding of Arabness and Jewishness, religiosity and secularism, tradition and creativity. Focus on Samy Elmaghribi, an artistic persona emblematic of his generation, demonstrates how the contemporary reassessment of renowned Jewish artists’ North African heritage is often misread in light of the political present. This example encourages us to rethink the musical legacy to which these North African Jews contributed beyond what is labelled Judeo-Arabic, traditional, religious, or secular.
Some sources report of the presence of Jewish communities in ethnic Kurdistan as early as in the Middle Ages. These communities had been interacting with the neighboring ethnic groups of the region in social and economic spheres until their emigration in the middle of the twentieth century. The division of Kurdistan itself and the internal division of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria resulted not only in the ensuing differences among the Jewish communities, but also in a difference between the Kurdistani Jews (the Lakhlukh) and their co-religionists in other provinces of these countries. One of the most striking manifestations of the identity of Kurdistani Jews was the Seharane holiday, which had emerged under the influence of Kurdish culture and entered the traditional Jewish calendar in the Middle East. The division of Kurdistan has affected the fates of Jews in the twentieth century in different ways. The case of the Jews of Iraqi Kurdistan perfectly illustrates this point. Being the largest and best organized religious community in the region, they were targeted by the Israeli migration program more than other Jewish groups. In Israel, they continue to live as a somewhat separate group cultivating their historic roots and preserving their cultural identity. Studies on this topic and preservation of cultural and material heritage are carried out by the Society of Kurdistani Jews, the Museum of the Jewish People at Beit Hatfutsot and other organizations. The paper aims to analyze relevant research data on Kurdistani Jews and introduce it for scholarly use.
This article uses the racial divisions encouraged by European Zionism in early-state Israel among European and Middle Eastern Jews as a point of departure to explore racialization and gendering among Iraqi Jewish women during the years 1941–51 from a sociopolitical standpoint. Restricting itself to politics given this standpoint, a study of Jewish women’s participation in the illegal Zionist and Communist movements of Iraq reveals that racializations, rather than a single racialization, occurred—a racial reality no other scholarship provides for Iraq’s Jewish community. Because Jewish women participating in these movements contended with patriarchal organizing structures, it is necessary to set apart the racial logics palpable in their articulations. This argument rests on primary sources in the form of three memoirs from the Iraqi Jewish women Tikva Agassi, Shoshana Levy, and Shoshana Almoslino, as well as Zionist women’s letters, a biographical dictionary of Communist participation, and British Foreign Office documents.
Samy Elmaghribi was a mid-twentieth century Moroccan superstar. From his debut in 1948 through his professional zenith in 1956, the Jewish musician was a ubiquitous presence on radio and in concert. His popularity owed to his pioneering of modern Moroccan music and to his performance of Moroccan nationalism through song and on stage. Elmaghribi's brand of anti-colonial nationalism, however, was not that of any particular political party. Instead, he espoused what might be termed, “Moroccanism,” a territorial nationalism that placed Sultan Mohamed ben Youssef at its center. Like Elmaghribi, it enjoyed widespread support. This study demonstrates that a focus on musical culture gives voice to mainstream forms of Moroccan nationalism that have received little scholarly attention to date. It also points to the active participation of Jews in postwar MENA societies. Finally, this article reconsiders the dynamics of decolonization through study of Elmaghribi's career, which spanned colony and independent nation.
This article discusses the campaign by the International League for the Rescue of the Jews in the Arab Countries (1948- 1950), formed by organisations representing Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews in Israel and the Herut party and aimed at preventing damage to the status of the Jews in the Arab states and promoting their emigration to Israel. The article will review the characteristics of the campaign, focusing on the public discourse it sparked in Israel around the idea of a population exchange between the Jews of the Arab states and the Palestinian refugees. This campaign, in which the memory of the Holocaust and the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide were employed, created a linkage between these two populations and expressed the political and social changes of this transitional period.
Israeli society in the first decades of statehood is thought of as a dichotomous one, with middle and upper class Ashkenazi Jews on one hand and on the other, lower class immigrants from Muslim countries. Though the emergence of a Mizrahi middle class is associated with the 1970s and 1980s, a deeper look into early-statehood Israel indicates that the ethnic/class dichotomy was already more nuanced in the 1950s. In fact, the social landscape of this period included a group of new Middle Eastern and North African immigrants of urban middle and upper classes, who managed to integrate into Israel's urban middle class. Most of them had come from Iraq. Scholarly discussion on this urban group presents methodological challenges, as documentation regarding it is scant and even rare. The current article concerns a particular sub-group of young middle-class immigrants from Iraq who published a journal documenting their world-view and activities. The article examines the characteristics of this group's integration process, its social and cultural perceptions, guiding aspirations, and dilemmas, placing particular emphasis on the identity and self-representation of these young people.
The analysis of the following two Israeli plays is the focus of this article: Ghosts in the Cellar (Haifa Theatre, 1983) by Sami Michael, and The Father's Daughters (Hashahar Theatre, 2015) by Gilit Itzhaki. These plays deal with the Farhud – a pogrom which took place in Iraq in 1941, in which two hundred Iraqi Jews were massacred by an Iraqi nationalist mob. The Farhud has become a traumatic event in the memory of this Jewish community. Using the concept of ‘performing history’ as advanced by Freddie Rokem, I observe how these plays, as theatre of a marginalized group, engage in the production of memory and history as well as in the processing of grief. These plays present the Farhud and correspond with the Zionist narrative in two respects: (1) they present the traumatic historical event of these Middle Eastern Jews in the light of its disappearance in Zionist history, and (2) their performance includes Arab cultural and language elements of Iraqi-Jewish identity, and thus implicitly points out the complex situation of the Arab–Israeli conflict.
Kurdistan and Kurdish diasporas are often conceptualized in singular, essentialized, and monolithic terms. Instead of working through essentializing terms, this article intervenes to insert difference within the category of Kurdish diasporas. By engaging with Lisa Lowe's (1996) conceptualization of "heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity," the article looks at the ways through which Kurdish diasporas differ both in relation to other diasporas and within itself. Instead of foregrounding the dominant and growing literature on Kurdish diasporas in Europe, this article introduces new destination sites for Kurdish diasporas that force us to engage with new epistemologies of difference operating within diasporic communities. In the process, this article challenges the ideas of Kurdish diasporas as a coherent, knoweable object of study and stressed the need to engage with the fluidity of Kurdish diasporas. Finally, this article introduces the articles for this special issue on Kurdish diasporas.
The goal of this paper is to study Jewish participation in intercommunal – Muslim, Jewish, Christian – Moroccan women’s organizations that promoted national Moroccan socio-political aims, and to analyze their origins, effects, demise and memory. The paper focuses on a unique organization - Union des Femmes marocaines (Union of Moroccan Women) – which, for almost ten years during the colonial period, had carried out intercommunal work for shared Moroccan causes. The study reveals that during the period that intercommunal women’s associations operated (1943–1952), they were first French-oriented and dealt with issues considered, from a gendered perspective, to be within women’s domain (i.e. helping the poor and needy, doing charity, fighting for women’s education), but from 1947, they “Moroccanized” and worked towards general political Moroccan aims. The paper refers to a relatively unknown chapter in Moroccan history, and opens a new perspective of the Moroccan identity of Jews before their massive emigration from the country.
Two Arabic-speaking Jewish guards worked in the European Jewish agricultural colony of Petah Tikva soon after its founding, northeast of Jaffa, in 1878: Daud abu Yusuf from Baghdad and Yaʿqub bin Maymun Zirmati, a Maghribi Jew from Jaffa. The two men, who worked as traders among Bedouin but were recruited for a short time by the colony, offer a rare glimpse of contacts between Ashkenazi and Middle Eastern Jews in rural Jewish colonies established in the last quarter of the 19th century, colonies that are often regarded as detached from their local and Ottoman landscape. The article first argues that Zionist sources constructed these two men as bridges to the East in their roles as teachers of Arabic and perceived sources of legitimization for the European Jewish settlement project. It then reads beyond the sparse details offered in Ashkenazi Zionist sources to resituate these men in their broad imperial and regional context and argue that, contrary to the local Zionist accounts, the colony was in fact likely to have been marginal to these men's commercial and personal lives.
Defining Minorities: Mission Impossible? The Case of Hashemite Iraq - Volume 50 Issue 4 - Aline Schlaepfer
The eighth and final volume of The Cambridge History of Judaism covers the period from roughly 1815–2000. Exploring the breadth and depth of Jewish societies and their manifold engagements with aspects of the modern world, it offers overviews of modern Jewish history, as well as more focused essays on political, social, economic, intellectual and cultural developments. The first part presents a series of interlocking surveys that address the history of diverse areas of Jewish settlement. The second part is organized around the emancipation. Here, chapter themes are grouped around the challenges posed by and to this elemental feature of Jewish life in the modern period. The third part adopts a thematic approach organized around the category 'culture', with the goal of casting a wide net in terms of perspectives, concepts and topics. The final part then focuses on the twentieth century, offering readers a sense of the dynamic nature of Judaism and Jewish identities and affiliations.
Among scholars seeking a framework for analysing post‐2003 intercommunal strife in Iraq, a sectarian master narrative gained dominance. It portrayed Iraq as an artificial creation of imperial powers, lacking a national identity. Scholarly challenge, however, has been gaining momentum. The study of postage stamp iconography presents a novel venue with which to contribute to this debate. Indeed, researchers of nations and nationalism emphasis the role stamps play in the visual construction and reproduction of national narratives and identities. The postage stamp imagery surveyed in post‐Saddam Iraq (2003–2011) is incompatible with the sectarian narrative. Rather, it reflects symbols that are consistent with territorial‐patriotic nationalism. Some evidence supports the notion that those in power used stamp iconography as a means of nationalist indoctrination; other evidence suggests that the government sought to enhance its legitimacy by embracing popular values. Either or both motivations lend credence to nationalism having considerable purchase in post‐Saddam Iraq.
The protest movements that the Arab world has witnessed since 2010 from Mauretania to Iraq are an indicator of rapid social and political transformation in the region – even if the reasons and the direction of this change may be at least partially unclear or controversial. One way of discussing the reasons and factors for the transformation lies at the ideological level. Since before2011, studies had argued that the Arab world was undergoing a process of ideological change, especially regarding Islamism. However, the new interest in ideologies also expresses a change in the concept of ideology itself. The term no longer stands for a closed belief system, but for a relatively flexible frame of perception and interpretation. New studies are not only interested in exchanges and relations between different ideologies, but they also challenge the dominant narrative that the modern Arab political landscape emerged from a struggle between (secular) nationalism(s) and (anti-secular) Islamism(s). To expose the one-sidedness and incompleteness of this narrative, the new studies focus on other carriers of political ideas. This literature report tries, first of all, to sum up similarities in the concept of ideology in different studies. Secondly, it summarizes the main studies dealing with attempts to understand cross-ideological co-operations as well as the changing relations between different ideologies. Thirdly, it gives an overview of the ways in which the narratives of nationalism(s) have been de-constructed. Finally, the report turns to theoretical approaches in which ideologies play next to no role in explaining social change and it asks what this means for the study on ideologies.
On 26 February 1922, the Palestinian newspaper Al Sabah published Jamal al-Husseini's call to local Jews under the unexpected title "Come to Us." The call, written by the secretary of the Arab Executive Committee and nephew of the newly installed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was quoted in the Hebrew newspaper Ha'aretz two days later.
In uncovering marginalized and silenced voices of the past, feminist oral historians and ethnographers emphasize the ways that oral history subjects use their conversations with researchers to define and make meaningful their own personal and communal histories. This article explores how Iraqi diasporic women of diverse ethno-religious background use the formal ritual of coffee in oral history interviews to designate formal and informal spaces within these conversations. As I began to notice, the way in which coffee was served, and importantly when it was served, was often a silent signal that the formal interview was over and that women wanted to transition into a more intimate and informal sharing of memories – in most cases over coffee and sweets (or qahwa and kleiche, in Arabic). In tracing the historical and contemporary cultural importance of coffee, and the formal ritual of serving coffee to guests, I examine the many ways in which Iraqi women used the senses to invoke and initiate memories that are threaded with subjective and difficult pasts. Highlighting the contradictions between what is told on and off “the record,” the article contributes to feminist methods of knowledge-production that push the boundaries of “sharing authority,” and allow vulnerable migrant women to shape the interview space in order to designate “safe spaces” where they can share subjective lives.
JUSTICIA PARA LOS JUDÍOS DE LOS PAÍSES ÁRABES Y EL NUEVO CONCEPTO DE REFUGIADO JUDÍO
Desde su fundación en 2002, el grupo Justicia para los Judíos de Países Árabes (JJAC, por sus siglas en inglés), ha reclamado a gobiernos, organizaciones internacionales y comunidades judías de todo el mundo que se reconozca como refugiados a los emigrantes judíos de países Árabes con posterioridad a 1948. No obstante, intelectuales importantes, funcionarios del gobierno israelí y activistas políticos judíos en Israel y los Estados Unidos tradicionalmente se han opuesto a esta denominación. Entonces, ¿por qué ha tenido éxito el esfuerzo del JJAC? Este artículo se basa en las experiencias del JJAC y su predecesor, la Organización Mundial de Judíos de Países Árabes, y en las objeciones de sus críticos, para plantear que los logros del JJAC se deben a la habilidad de esta organización de desligar el término “refugiado” de un contexto discursivo sionista y de aplicarlo dentro del marco de la legislación internacional y de los derechos humanos.
An analysis of Arab liberal thought, with its core values of rationalism, freedom, civic rights, constitutionalism, and cultural ecumenism, involves several methodological and historical difficulties. Arab liberals in the twentieth century, especially since 1967, have constituted a heterogeneous and poorly organized group. They have lacked a coherent school of thought, divided as they were by religious creed, professional training, and attitudes toward Islam, the West, and Israel. Their language was too rational and remote for the general public, and they offered no attractive solutions to socioeconomic ills beyond calling for gradual educational and political reform. Moreover, they lacked an effective network of civil associations, not to mention political parties, that could back their cause. Many liberals were identified with centers of Western civilization, whose colonial history in the region was such that anyone who empathized with a Western political or cultural agenda was accused of seeking to destroy their society’s indigenous identity, and in fact of constituting a fifth column.
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