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Chapter 6 Schooling ANew York friend of mine, a writer notorious for her outspokenness, once wrote in a letter in the courseofoneof herperiodicreprimands:‘‘Why,Goddamnit,didn’tyour fatherandmothersendyoutotheBaghdadianequivalentofcheder?Ideas of human values did begin, you know, before the Voltairian Enlightenment , and even the Enlightenment’s ideas are Isaiah’s.’’ Buttheydidsendmetoone—well,towhatwastheBaghdadianequivalentoftheEastEuropeancheder (whichmustmean‘‘room’’).Itwascalled l’estadh(themaster)andwhatthatmastertaughtusbratstherewastoread the Torah. To be sure, we all sat in a room, usually in the house, usually ‘‘the master’s’’ own, and the solitary teacher simply made us repeat what he read. But I hardly remember having ever heard him or us recite any farther than the first few pages of Bereshith (Genesis). Either I didn’t stay there long enough or therewas something radically wrong with the teacher.The fact remains that we never managed to go far beyond these first passages.The idea, I suspect, was just to keep us boys busy and out of the way, rather than to teach us the elements of Hebrew or reading the Bible. But if l’estadh was not enough—and it certainly wasn’t—I was also senttothemidrash,thenearestthingBaghdadJewshadtocomparetothe EastEuropeanyeshivah.Themidrashperhapsdifferedfromtheyeshivah only in that it embraced all ages and all levels of Torah studies, so that a boy could simply take there his very first steps in Hebrew and religious studies. But—need I say it—I managed to spend little if any time there. Thecrowdedness,thestench,theincredibleregimentation,thesheercultural poverty of both the place and the crowd—these simply made me hasten to leave the place like a man running for his life. I don’t know at what age exactly I was then—nor would I be surprised had the official reason for my leaving the midrash been my own insufficient level of Hebrew and/or Torah study—or something to do with my own lack of discipline. What I do know is that my reaction was one of sheer revul- schooling 53 sion—and that under no circumstances was I able to stay there even one more day. To my ever-angry friend—who also happens to be a radical Jewish ethnic-nationalist and something of a fanatical anti-Arab—I wrote: No, then; that was simply not the point—going or not going to the Baghdadian equivalent of cheder. Obviously it was something in the ‘‘culture’’ of the place and of the people. And what did the cheder teach those who did attend it anyway? Modern political Pan-Jewish nationalism —the mirror image of an ethnic-racial concept of nationality that was to be borrowed lock, stock, and barrel by the disillusioned assimilationistJewsofCentralandEasternEuropeandlatterlypracticedwith a vengeance by their followers in Palestine? And you have the heart— and the incredible intellectual carelessness—to call me ‘‘a son of the Enlightenment’’? Who the deuce is who anyway? You know—or at least ought to know—who the ‘‘neglected and discarded sons of the Enlightenment’’ in Jewry are! Don’t count me among them, thank you very much! I would rather be called—as I’ve indeed been called, and by a university professor to boot—a bloody ‘‘medievalist.’’ And you think you are clever.You think you have finished me off by merely paraphrasing my remark about German Jews. (And how about thanking you for ‘‘not exactly calling [me] a ‘complete idiot’’’ and for being content with implying that I was a somewhat ordinary, harmless sort of idiot?) Wrong again—and doubly so! In the article you quote I wrote: ‘‘German Jews were complete idiots to have imagined—knowing any history—that theycould be absorbed, assimilated oraccepted as ‘Germans first and followers of the Mosaic faith second!’’’ And you offer the facile counter-formulation: ‘‘Iraqi Jews were complete idiots to imagine—knowing any history—that they could be absorbed.’’ Andsoon.Butdear,angry,impatient,andimpulsiveChava,tostart with,Iraq’sJewsnever,everevenwanted—letalonebegged—tobeabsorbed or assimilated by or into the predominantly Muslim society in which they lived. I know that it is difficult for you and for people raised in a European Jewish surrounding to believe it, yet the fact remains that as far as the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa were concerned this whole question of acceptance, absorption, or assimilation simplydidn’t arise. Nor is there anything strange or remarkable in this: The fact was that, since the idea of ethnic-racial nationalism had no foundation in Arab history or Muslim thought in the first place, there was no need for people to go to any...

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