"Religion is for God, the Fatherland is for everyone": Arab-Jewish writers in modern Iraq and the clash of narratives after their immigration to Israel.

• Author: Snir, Reuven
• Position: Report

Jews writing in Arabic have only seldom been able to make a name for themselves in the history of Arabic belles-lettres. There are Jewish poets in the pre-Islamic period, such as al-Samaw'al ibn 'Adiya', (1) but once Islam appeared it is almost only in Muslim Spain (al-Andalus), in the eleventh-thirteenth centuries, that we find Jewish authors so at home in fusha (literary Arabic) that they achieved recognition for their Arabic works. (2) Some became famous in both Hebrew and Arabic; a few wrote only in Arabic. Since the mid-thirteenth century, Jews were not as open to participation in the wider Arabic culture, and as at home in fusha, as they became from the 1920s onward in Iraq. (3) This involvement was encouraged by the process of modernization and secularization of the local Jews beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century. Other Jewish communities in the middle East and North Africa went through a similar process, but only in Egypt can we also find some involvement in Arabic literature, (4) although less intensive than in Iraq.

The present article examines the emergence of the literary writing of the Jews of Iraq in the 1920s and the beginning of its demise after only a few decades, both inside and outside Iraq, and followed by the switch to Hebrew writing in Israel. I will try to show that these processes were due not only to political and national circumstances and motives but also to the aesthetic and cultural norms of both Arabic-Muslim and Hebrew-Jewish cultural and literary systems. Furthermore, the Andalusian vision of cultural cooperation and religious tolerance which emerged in Baghdad in the first half of the twentieth century was the product of a very limited period, a very confined space, and a very singular history.

1. CULTURAL BACKGROUND

   Living in Iraq without interruption for two and a half millennia and tracing their domicile there to the Babylonian exile, during the first half of the twentieth century Iraqi Jews developed a sort of Andalusian vision of integration in the new Iraqi nation-state. This vision had its roots in the previous century, especially during the governorate of Midhat Pasha, the leading advocate of Ottoman tanzimat reforms (1869-72). The foundation in 1864 of the Alliance Israelite Universelle (AIU) School in Baghdad, where education was predominantly secular, played a major role in the modernization of the local community, which gradually became more open to the outside world than did the local Christians and Muslims. (5) Visiting Baghdad in 1878, Grattan Geary, editor of the Times of India, wrote that the instruction of the AIU School was of the best modern kind. "Arabic is the mother tongue of the Baghdad Jews," writes Geary, and "the pupils are taught how to write and speak that language grammatically." Many of them "spoke and read English with wonderful fluency," and "they speak French with singular purity of accent and expression." (6)

   Apart from their exposure to the AIU agents of modernization, Iraqi Jews had close connections with European intellectuals. The fertile ground for them was the atmosphere in the Ottoman Empire whose location between East and West made Baghdad a kind of crossroads of influences between Christian and Muslim countries and between European Jewry and the Arab Jews. Baghdadi Jews functioned as correspondents and representatives for European Hebrew Jewish newspapers such as Ha-Maggid, the first Hebrew newspaper established in Europe. There were family relations as well: for example, the musician Yusuf Huraysh (1889-1975) was an offspring of a European family who immigrated to Basra; (7) the grandfather of Anwar Sha'ul (1904-84) was an immigrant Jew from Austria who arrived in Baghdad in the middle of the nineteenth century. (8) The aforementioned Geary mentioned a girl of eleven, Khatoum Luron, whose father, an Austrian Jew, took part in the establishment of the AIU School and had a hand in its management; she displayed "great intelligence, and prattled her French in the prettiest way." (9) Geary also mentions the director of the school, S. Garat, a native of Baghdad, who was educated in Paris, and the English teacher, a young Baghdadi Jew, Mr. Michael, who had received his education at the Jesuit College in Bombay. (10)

   Wealthy Jews also used to send their sons to be educated in European institutions, where they were influenced by the atmosphere of the Enlightenment, especially with regard to the benefit from the advantages which participation in the cultural and social activities of the wider society could offer them. Sasun Hiskil (Sassoon Yehezkel) (1860-1932), for example, did Oriental studies at Vienna, where many Jews spoke high German, adopted German names, and dressed and acted like Austrians and Germans. (11) In an interview in 1909 with a correspondent of the Hebrew newspaper Ha-Olam (The World), published in Vilna, Sassoon Afandi, at the time one of the representatives of Baghdad in the Ottoman parliament, expressed views inspired by ideas prevalent among European Jews. "Mr. Sassoon wants to be assimilated," writes Ha-Olam's correspondent, "and since he does not see any positive aspect which would unite the Jews, besides religion, he would agree to be assimilated even with the Arabs." (12) Written in indirect speech--no one would suspect that Sassoon Afandi had used the words "even with the Arabs"--it is an indication that the Ashkenazi-Zionist outlook toward the Arab Jews was not a phenomenon which developed following the establishment of the state of Israel; it was part of the very essence of Zionism as a national movement inspired by European colonialism. A Jew that was also an Arab did not fit the Zionist venture from its inception--it was guided by what Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), the founder of modern Zionism, wrote in the late nineteenth century: "We should there form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism." (13)

   Also significant were Jewish European immigrants who arrived in Baghdad, bringing to the Jews the conception of Enlightenment and pushing them toward westernization and secularization. For example, the Austrian Jacob Obermeyer (1845-1935), who lived in Baghdad from 1869 to 1880, tried through his reformist conceptions to modernize the religious framework of the local community and introduce some leniencies into Jewish law; his reports were published in Hebrew periodicals and read by hundreds of local Jews. The strong opposition he faced from the leaders of the local community testified to the revolutionary nature of his conceptions; in his reformist eagerness he even challenged the Baghdadi religious leader Chacham Yoseif Chaim (1832-1909), who forcefully condemned Obermeyer's innovations. The communal leaders also united in putting him into cherem (exclusion from communal participation) and the proclamation was read aloud in every synagogue in Baghdad. (14) Although Obermeyer retracted his criticism and begged for forgiveness, it seems that he, together with other Jewish immigrants, were accelerating a process which would encourage Iraqi Jews to behave in many ways like middle-class Jews in Europe, who felt more German or European than Jewish. The reality in which Jews lived and worked in Baghdad during the first half of the twentieth century was one of a close symbiotic contact with the wider Arab-Muslim culture, and for most of them their Arab identity was uppermost--they were "Arab Jews" or "Arabs of the Jewish faith." (15)

   The Assyrian Christian writer Yusuf Rizq Allah Ghunayma (1885-1950), who was educated in the AIU School in Baghdad (1898-1902), (16) and later became Minister of Finance in several of the Iraqi cabinets, wrote in 1924 that the Jews of Iraq "considered the country as their homeland and the Arab Iraqi government as the government which they must support." (17) The government was very responsive to the patriotic sentiments of Jews and to their desire to be an active component of Iraqi society and Arab-Muslim culture. "Every person who speaks Arabic is an Arab," (18) said Sati' al-Husri (1880-1968), Director General of Education in Iraq (1923-27) and Arab nationalism's first true ideologue. With the aim of making the very mixed population of the new nation-state homogeneous and cohesive, he looked upon schools as the means by which to indoctrinate the young in the tenets of Pan-Arabism, seeking the "assimilation of diverse elements of the population into a homogeneous whole tied by the bonds of language, history, and culture to a comprehensive but still exclusive ideology of Arabism." (19) On 18 July 1921, one month before his coronation as King of Iraq, Amir Faysal (1883-1933) declared before Jewish community leaders that "in the vocabulary of patriotism, there is no such thing as Jew, Muslim, or Christian. There is simply one thing called Iraq [...] all of us related to the Semitic root, which makes no distinction between Muslim, Christian or Jew." (20)

   The organized governmental educational efforts to create a specific Iraqi-Arab national community for all religious and ethnic groups (21) fostered national and patriotic awareness among the Jews. Toward the middle of the 1920s, Jewish educational institutions put heavy emphasis on teaching Arabic; Salman Darwish (1910-82) wrote that Arabic language and literature had "penetrated our very bloodstream." (22) Arabic became, according to Ishaq (Isaac) Bar-Moshe (1927-2003), a "decisive fact of life." (23) The fluent Arabic style of the Jews was more than once judged superior to that of their non-Jewish counterparts. The Syrian 'Ali al-Tantawi (1906-99) even noted that after the excellence of Jews in Arabic studies disturbed one school administration it was decided to combine instruction in Arabic literature with instruction in Muslim studies. Still, this did not prevent Jewish students from excelling in the new curriculum. (24)

   By the 1930s most of the Jewish...