IRAQI JEWS

Iraqi Jews (Contentions)
Readers may recall a Time magazine article from July, “The Last Jews of Baghdad,” reporting that, in the Iraqi capital, only eight Jews remain of a population that numbered around 150,000 in the 1940’s, before decades of anti-Semitic persecution forced them to flee. This Diaspora is the subject of a moving, deftly written 1975 memoir Farewell Babylon: Coming of Age in Jewish Baghdad by the Baghdad-born Canadian author Naïm Kattan (born 1928). The book is newly reprinted by David Godine Publishers.

In his book, Kattan describes the culture of Baghdad’s ancient Jewish community, which produced the Babylonian Talmud. By the modern era it was a teeming, multi-lingual society that was doubtless inspiring to a young writer. One of Kattan’s boyhood friends, described in Farewell, Babylon, was Elie Kedourie (1926-1992), the distinguished anti-Marxist historian (who memorably asserted that Marxism turned the Middle East into a “wilderness of tigers”).

Kattan poignantly offers an eyewitness account of the 1941 anti-Jewish pogroms, which incited a mass exile of Jews from Iraq. During the so-called Farhud or “violent dispossession” of June 1 and 2, 1941, hundreds of Iraqi Jews were murdered. As Kattan related at a 2004 Jewish Book Week event in London, he was twelve years old at the time and

suddenly felt that I was going to be killed. We were sitting on the roof and then we tried to hide and listening to firearms coming closer and closer…. And all that my father could do to protect us, the only thing that he had to protect us, was to recite the psalms. He spent all the night praying and reciting psalms. Fortunately he knew a lot of psalms by heart.

Before this savage violence, despite ambient anti-Semitism, Kattan and his fellow Jews felt at home in Baghdad. An avid filmgoer, Kattan explains that he never went to the movies alone: “As I was a Jew, the young boys of my age, Christians or Muslims, would have attacked me with kicks and slaps.” Still, he recalls exulting in the Arabic films of the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum (1898-1975) who made audiences “throb with joy.”

I myself met Naïm Kattan, a diminutive, mustachioed gentleman, at a 2003 Quebec writer’s conference at the time of the invasion of Iraq and toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime. I recall that Kattan kept silent as other Canadian writers around him expressed their outrage with anti-American tirades. Despite its context of grief and exile, Farewell Babylon has a tone of secure survival, inspired by the faith expressed by Kattan at London’s Jewish Book Week: “The Jews have this kind of difference: it is that they have a Book. Wherever they go they can refer to a Book…. They live by that Book and I hope they will continue to do so.”