Growing up in Interwar Iraq: The Memoirs of Naim Kattan and Heskel Haddad

In recent years, the historical Jewish presence in Arab lands has become a contested site of memory, with contemporary disagreements over the merits of the Zionist project, the continuing Arab–Israeli conflict, and the legacy of European colonialism informing the ways in which different groups reconstruct their collective past. Among the Jews of Arab lands, Iraqi Jews were distinguished both by their high level of cultural integration into Iraqi society, as well as the abrupt and traumatic nature of their departure from the country after 1948. These dramatic extremes have made Iraqi-Jewish history particularly subject to politicized narratives. Some point to the history of Muslim anti-Judaism and relegation of Jews to second-class dhimmi status as paving the way for the rise of an Iraqi nationalism that was both sympathetic to Nazi Germany and virulently anti-Zionist. For others, both European colonialists and Zionists share much of the blame for the Jewish exodus, as they created rifts between Jews and Muslims who had traditionally enjoyed harmonious relations.

Memoir literature written by the last generation of Iraqi Jews enables us to flesh out our understanding of how the social fabric of Jewish life in Iraq actually functioned in the interwar years. In so doing, these memoirs can also play an important role in mitigating contemporary polemics around the telling of the Iraqi-Jewish past. After a brief overview of the history of the Jews of Iraq and the historiographical issues that surround it, this article will focus on two memoirs—those of Naim Kattan and Heskel Haddad—both of which provide nuanced evidence of the multifaceted identity of the last generation of Iraqi Jews. Born only two years apart, both Kattan and Haddad grew up in Baghdad in the 1930s and 1940s and, unlike the vast majority of Iraqi Jews who lived in Israel after 1951, had resettled in North America by the early 1950s. As we shall see, despite the many differences in the sensibilities, career paths, and political orientations of Kattan and Haddad, there are a number of similarities in their memoirs that testify to the rupture with traditional modes of identification and ways of relating to the surrounding society that were taking place in Iraq of their day. These memoirs convey the painful reality of Iraqi Jews coming of age in the interwar years, who were both fully embedded in Arab Iraqi society, and increasingly faced with the impossibility of carving out a future for themselves within it.

The Distinctive History of the Jews of Iraq

In order to understand the particularities of the Jews of Iraq, we must turn briefly to the larger social, political, and cultural context in which that community evolved in the modern era. Whereas patterns of acculturation differed widely across class and geographic boundaries, for most Jews in the Middle East and North Africa in the colonial era, modernization became synonymous with Westernization. The Jews of Iraq offer a notable exception: although a part of the Ottoman Empire since the early sixteenth century, the Turkish administration had little influence over the region until the Tanzimat reforms. Intended to modernize the empire along Western lines, these mid-nineteenth-century reforms strengthened the powers of Turkish administrators and guaranteed all religious communities equal protection under the law.¹ These changes paved the way for the entry of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU or Alliance) into Iraq, providing educational opportunities to Jews that, as elsewhere in the Arab world, gave them an advantage over their Muslim brethren in terms of the acquisition of European languages and familiarity with European cultural mores.² By the late nineteenth century, a number of Jews had obtained positions in the Ottoman administration, and increasing British influence in the region brought opportunities for Jews to become major players in the burgeoning world of banking and commerce.³ Importantly, however, for the Jews of Iraq, these economic and political changes were not accompanied by the kind of cultural transformation that we saw elsewhere in the Arab world. While distinguished from non-Jews by their dialect, their dress, their religious observance...