Iraq's Last Jews: Stories of Daily Life, Upheaval, and Escape from Modern Babylon (review)

Jews have lived in Mesopotamia for 2,500 years, since being transported there as captives after the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. For centuries, Babylonia was the world center of Jewish culture. While retaining distinctive religious and cultural practices, Jews were in many ways well integrated into Mesopotamian society. Social and political treatment of Jews waxed and waned with political changes in the region, but Jews always constituted a significant minority. By the 1920s, close to 140,000 Jews lived in Iraq, most of them in Baghdad, where they made up about one-third of the city's population. Jews were influential in commerce, in politics, and in Iraqi national culture. Then, between 1939 and 2008, as a result of intense anti-Jewish government policies, the establishment of the state of Israel, and Arab nationalism's response to Zionist action in the region, all but a handful of Iraq's Jews left the country.

Iraq's Last Jews tells the closing chapter of this 2,500-year history. The book presents the voices of three generations who lived through the Babylonian Jews' final exodus. The volume is made up of edited oral histories with nineteen Jews and one Shi'ite Muslim. The Jews are all (except one Israeli intelligence agent) members of families that had lived in Iraq for many generations. This is an excellent example of the use of oral history by a community to tell its own story.

After an introduction offering historical context, the book is divided into four sections representing overlapping periods of the final years of Jewish residence in Iraq: before 1939, when Jews "saw themselves as part of the fiber of Iraqi culture" (xiv); 1941-53, when the rise of Nazi influence and repression of Jews provoked the first large wave of exodus, mostly to Israel; the period leading to and including the rule of the Ba'ath Party, when repression made life in Iraq unsupportable for the remaining Jews; and the view from life in Israel, the U.S., Canada, and Britain.

These narrations give a vivid sense of what life was like for the families of the narrators, with great details of social, political, commercial, and cultural life, as well as descriptions of relationships within the Jewish community, with Muslim and Christian neighbors and colleagues, and with the Iraqi government. The stories focus on the painful experience of being pushed out of a society that truly was their home for generations. The volume also provides a new, personal angle on the history of the region, not only the prominent role of Jews and the Jewish community under Ottoman and British rule but also the on-the-ground effects of the rise of Zionism for Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Moreover, the book puts into perspective what diaspora might mean to other peoples around the globe, looking back on a richly lived history that is disappearing before their eyes, while they struggle to adjust to new, unfamiliar conditions in their new homes.

The editors—a journalist who works in Israel and in the U.S. and two American Iraqi Jewish brothers whose parents' stories are included in the book—do not discuss their methodology. They do not write about their narrator selection process. They do not mention their familial or collegial connections to the narrators. Perhaps, a deeper contemplation of the methodology they employed might have addressed my main criticism of the book.

The Palgrave Oral History Series editors write in their Foreword, "[T]he series encourages the employment of oral history to investigate the memories of ordinary and extraordinary people in order to make sense of the past and present" (x). Nonetheless, all the narrators in this volume are extraordinary people. They represent families that are culturally, financially, and/or politically powerful. The one Communist included, perhaps as a token representative...