A shocking claim about the Baghdad bombings of 1950 and 1951

Avi Shlaim’s family led the good life in Baghdad. Prosperous and distinguished members of Iraq’s Jewish minority, a community which could trace its presence in Babylon back more than 2,500 years, they had a large house with servants and nannies, went to the best schools, rubbed shoulders with the great and the good and sashayed elegantly from one glittering party to the next. Shlaim’s father was a successful businessman who counted ministers as friends. His much younger mother was a socially ambitious beauty who attracted admirers, from Egypt’s King Farouk to a Mossad recruiter. For this privileged section of Iraqi society, it was a rich, cosmopolitan and generally harmonious milieu. And for the young Shlaim, born in Baghdad in 1945, these were halcyon days.

They were not to last. In 1950, during a series of bombings targeting the Jewish population in the Iraqi capital, he and his family fled their ancient homeland to begin new lives in the fledgling state of Israel. His father, by then in his fifties, could not speak Hebrew and was completely undone by the move. After a couple of failed attempts to start a business, he never worked again. Shlaim’s vivacious mother was forced to take up the slack, exchanging the gilded life of a society hostess in Baghdad for a mundane job as a telephonist in Ramat Gan, east of Tel Aviv, where they lived in much diminished circumstances. The couple drifted apart and divorced, and Shlaim’s father died in 1970.

Disinterring his turbulent childhood more than 70 years later, Shlaim, a retired Oxford professor and distinguished historian of the Arab-Israeli conflict, comes to understand that his earliest relationship with Israel was defined by an inferiority complex. The Sephardim, Jews from Arab lands, were looked down upon by the Ashkenazim, their European counterparts.