Walk into my grandmother’s living room in north-west London, and you could be forgiven for thinking you had suddenly stepped into the Middle East. The coffee table is laden with treats, from homemade date-filled flatbreads to baklawa and nuts. Al Jazeera plays on the flatscreen, reeling off the latest news about the Israel-Palestinian conflict. In the corner of the room is a darbuka drum and my late grandpa’s backgammon set for anyone who fancies a game. In the kitchen there are two pots brewing: one making slow-steamed tea laced with cardamon, the other Arabic coffee ready to be poured into miniature cups. Unsurprisingly, my family are often here – along with the rest of Iraq’s displaced Jewish community.
At my grandmother’s home, different generations gather to share memories, sing songs, and discuss politics. People who were once neighbours in Baghdad – but who are now scattered across the world from New York to Tel Aviv – catch up, before going on to celebrate a wedding, bar or bat mitzvah in London. Arabic, spoken with an Iraqi Jewish inflection, is the main language – though English and Hebrew are also spoken. Growing up in a flat above my dad’s shop on Edgware Road, known as London’s Little Beirut, my family were often mistaken for Christians because of their different dialect.
Today, there are just three Jews living in the entire country
As the daughter of Iraqi Jewish refugees who fled Baghdad in the 1970s, I have always been aware of my family’s history. But as time passes, I am more conscious of how unaware people are of the plight of Jewish communities across the Arab world – who were dispersed within a generation after living in countries like Iraq, Egypt, and Syria for thousands of years.
As a new book, reviewed last week in The Spectator, attempts to cast doubt on the reasons Jews were forced to leave Iraq, perhaps it is now time to talk about what happened to these Arab Jewish communities – why they left and why Israel is so key to their story.
Born in Baghdad in 1927, my grandma remembers life before and after the establishment of Israel in 1948. For her, life was good growing up in her home overlooking the Tigris river. Jews were free to work, practise their faith and in the main lived harmoniously alongside their Muslim and Christian neighbours. They were represented in government and flourished in the arts and music scene. In 1947, Miss Iraq was even a Jewish beauty queen, Renée Dangoor. But there was also always an undercurrent of antisemitism that made Iraq’s Jews feel the need to tread carefully. Sometimes this antisemitism spilled over into something far more deadly.
In 1938 (before the establishment of Israel), there were bombings against Jews in Baghdad. In 1941, a two-day pogrom in Baghdad led to the murder of Jews, the rape of women, looting of businesses and destruction of homes. In 1947, a Jew was lynched and the city’s Jewish quarter was ransacked.
My grandma remembers how grateful she was that her own grandma, whose home was set on fire during the attack, had by chance decided to spend the night with them during the pogrom. She mentions these events almost in passing – saying that there might have been an occasional attack, but overall life was good. It was all they knew.
But after the establishment of Israel, things began to get worse for Jews, as Arab regimes retaliated by persecuting their own Jewish communities. Arab neighbours suddenly stopped talking to their Jewish ‘friends’, except to make snide remarks about the new state. Synagogues were bombed. Jews were killed.
And so Iraq’s Jewish community started to flee their homes. In 1948, there were 150,000 Jews living in Iraq; by 1952, 95 per cent of the community had left. Today, there are just three Jews living in the entire country.
Some of those who left were motivated by the promise of the Zionist dream, with the Jewish people finally having a homeland of their own free from persecution. Others left feeling that they were no longer welcome in the place of their birth.
My grandma’s teenage brothers felt a combination of both, leaving in the middle of the night with their friends to build a new life in Israel. ‘My father cried,’ recalls my grandma. ‘He told us we were Iraqi and we had to stay. He said things would get better and we had businesses and houses in Iraq, it was not easy to just go and start again.’
Her brothers were not welcomed in Israel with open arms. They went from a comfortable home in Baghdad to living in tents, where one of the brothers was bitten by a snake. The European-born Ashkenazi Jews who were building Israel’s society also took a superior attitude to their Arab-born Mizrahi counterparts, discriminating against them when it came to education or applying for jobs.
So you can see why many families – like both my parents’ – decided to stay in Iraq, in the hope that things would get better.
But they did not. The rise of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party increased the persecution. Jews were issued with yellow identity cards to mark them out. Their phone lines were cut, and they were no longer allowed to attend university or sell their assets. Even attending the local leisure centre for a swim was prohibited. This was the environment my parents grew up in.
My grandfather, a non-political businessman who I affectionately remember as Baba Naji, was twice imprisoned for months around the Six Day War. Like the other Jewish men he shared a cell with, he had been accused of being a ‘Zionist spy’.
My mum remembers visiting him in prison as a child and wondering why he was ‘so white’. It was only later she realised that it was because he had been deprived of sunlight for so long.
Born in 1960, my mum’s memories of Baghdad are not positive. She recalls the way neighbours sporadically disappeared, and the fear that came with a late-night knock on the door. She remembers the 1969 hangings in Baghdad’s Liberation Square, when 14 people (nine Jews, three Muslims and two Christians) accused of spying for Israel were executed as the jubilant crowd of tens of thousands danced, sang, and dished out sweets.
The country’s remaining Jews, like my family’s, held out for as long as they could until a life anywhere else – even if it meant giving up their assets, learning a new language and entering the unknown – had to be better.
With my grandfather under watch, my grandparents made the decision to keep their three youngest children with them but send the three eldest (my mum was just 13 at the time) to Israel via Turkey in 1973. For the next five years, my mum lived in a boarding school in Jerusalem, with many other children from the Middle East and north Africa. On weekends, she would visit her uncles who fled Iraq as teenagers, but now had families and jobs as businessmen, lawyers, and judges in Israel. She remembers struggling with the new language and seeing snow for the first time, all the while wondering what had happened to her parents and siblings back in Iraq.
When Holland granted Iraqi Jews refugee status, my grandparents made their way to Amsterdam with just a small suitcase. My mother moved there to be with them just before her 18th birthday, though her elder two sisters decided to stay in Israel – where they still live with my cousins, and their young Israeli families.
Similarly, my father and his family also found refuge in Holland – though some of his elder siblings had already moved to Israel. My dad fled Iraq on his 15th birthday to Iran. It was from Tehran that he found refuge in Amsterdam.
My parents had grown up together as children in Baghdad, attending the Frank Iny Jewish school in the capital. But it was in London – where both families later relocated – that they married in 1988, having me one year later.
It is impossible to separate the story of Arab Jews from the story of Israel. Where they were once discriminated against, they now thrive in Israeli society. Today, more than half of Israel’s population is made up of people of Arab Jewish descent. Yet there are those that are trying to rewrite that history. In a new book, Three Worlds: Memoir of an Arab Jew, the academic Avi Shlaim, an Iraqi-born critic of Israel, claims to have uncovered evidence that Zionist groups were responsible for bombings of Jewish sites around 1950-1. It’s widely documented that Iraqi nationalist groups carried out these attacks – but either way, I have never heard anyone in the Iraqi Jewish community say it was because of these attacks they left. Instead it was the pogrom, executions, lootings and discriminatory laws that led them to believe they had to flee.
For me, the connection to Israel is strong. I have travelled there regularly since I was a child, often staying with family in the Ramat Gan (affectionately known as ‘Ramat Iraqi’) near Tel Aviv. On both sides, I have aunts, uncles and cousins who studied in Israel, raised their families, served in the Israel Defense Forces, and lost loved ones in wars and terror attacks. Their success and their pain are shared by many in the Jewish diaspora, because had our parents left at a different time or sought refuge in Israel rather than Europe or America, we would have also been ‘Israeli’.
Despite being a British Jew with a very Arab identity (especially when it comes to food, music, and my eyebrows), I am heavily invested in the future of Israel. Like my parents, who crave the protection and security it offers its Jewish people, I know that should our community ever again be threatened, there is always somewhere safe to go: a Jewish homeland.
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