The Last Jews in Baghdad: Remembering a Lost Homeland

Chapter 1. In Old Baghdad

Chapter 1 In old baghdad It has often been said that NewYork is a Jewish city. I think one can safely say the same about Baghdad of the first half of the twentieth century. At the time of writing, barely twenty Jews, most of them elderly, live in my hometown. The one monument these Jews have left is a synagoguewhere, as theirancestors did from time immemorial, they keep praying for ‘‘thewelfare of the city,’’ as Jews in the Babylonian diaspora were bidden to do by the Prophet Jeremiah some three millennia ago. For those who, like myself, were born, grew up, and lived in Baghdad in the years preceding the mass exodus of Jews from Iraq in 1950–1951, this state of affairs is extremely hard to imagine. To have an idea of the city’s demography and the position of the Jews thereinthosefivedecades,itisenoughtoglanceatthesefewfactsofstatistics : In 1904, the French vice-consul in Baghdad gave the numberof Jews in the then Ottoman vilayet as forty thousand, out of a total population of sixty thousand. In1910,aBritishconsularreportestimatedthenumberofJewsinBaghdadasrangingfromforty -fivethousandtofiftythousand.InOctober1921, a British publication quoted these population figures for the cityas given in the last official yearbook of the vilayet: Total number of inhabitants, 202,200, of whom 80,000 were Jews; 12,000 Christians; 8,000 Kurds; 800 Persians; and 101,400 Arabs, Turks, and other Muslims. A proclamation issued by the British military governor early in 1919 fixed the number of sheep to be slaughtered daily in Baghdad East (alRisafa , the more populous half of the city) at 220 for Jewish butchers and 160 for Muslim and other butchers. In 1926, the year the Baghdad Chamber of Commerce was founded, five of its Administrative Council’s fourteen members were Jews, four Muslims, three represented British merchants, one represented the banks, and one represented the Persian merchants. ThiswastheBaghdadinwhichIfirstsawthelightofday,andinwhich I spent the first twenty-six years of my life. However, while demographi- 2 the last jews in baghdad cally the picture did not change in any significant sense up to 1951, a numberof basic changes took place in almost all otheraspects of the city’s life throughout those three decades. One such aspect was especially pronounced—the Jewish religious scene.The community, and the family, into which I was born can be described as observant in the strictest sense of the word, though perhaps not ‘‘orthodox’’ in the sense in which European Jews in general and East European Jews in particular use the term. Up to the age of ten I used to takemyfather,whohadlosthissightmanyyearsbefore,tothesynagogue every Saturday morning, on Holy Days, and on the various feasts. On Friday evening, Sabbath candles were lit, the table set, the kiddush recited , and the esheth hayil chanted in unison byall the males of the family. Saturday mornings, after the service, I used to run to the neighborhood Muslim teashop with an empty pot to get, for free, boiling water for the tea that was such an indispensable part of breakfast. No money was seen and no deals struck. As for the socioeconomic status of my family, it all depends on theway one considers the overall economic and social scenes. In the conditions prevalentinIraqinthosedays,economicallytheJewishcommunitywasin theforefront,althoughviewedasawholeitwasnotwealthy.IntheBritish consular report of 1910 cited above, the Jews are classified economically as follows: 1. A rich and well-off class, mainly merchants and bankers, 5 percent. 2. A middle class consisting of petty traders, employees, etc., 30 percent. 3. A poor class, 60 percent. 4. Beggars (hailing mostly from the north), 5 percent. If one follows this somewhat arbitrary classification, my family can safely be said to have belonged somewhere between the 30 percent of the middle class and the 60 percent poor, with periodic shifts between the two, mostly in the latter’s direction. commerce and trade The world outside the home was brought to a virtual standstill on Saturdays and on Jewish holidays.The bazaars were practically empty, and all commercial activity in the city’s main street ceased, with only a few scat- in old baghdad 3 tered shops open. Not only did the Jews, who owned the overwhelming majority of shops and stores, close their business premises and refrain from doing any shopping themselves; non-Jews too followed suit, refusingtomakepurchasesonJewishholidayslesttheownersofthefewshops open take advantage of the situation and overcharge them for the goods they bought. There were also many cases of non-Jewish shop owners closing on these days for lack of customers. This was the position...