Another review of 'Last days in Babylon '

Lyn Julius reviews Last Days in Babylon by Marina Benjamin:

Readers of Last days in Babylon -- be aware that Marina Benjamin risked her life to bring you this book.

In 2004, the young authoress left her husband and baby to embark on a hair-raisingly risky trip to Baghdad, capital of kidnappings and bombings. She quips that she is one of the few Iraqi Jews to have fought her way into the country while everyone else was trying to get out.

It was a necessary trip. As a quest for identity, though, it failed. Strife-torn, dangerous Iraq was not a good place to admit to being Jewish. Marina encountered a city with few reminders of its Jews - once a third of the city’s inhabitants - and one gripped by antisemitism and conspiracy theories. She was too afraid to find the house where her mother was born lest she attract suspicion.

But if Marina had not gone to Baghdad, she could not have brought the city alive in her prologue. The history of the Jews of Iraq is skillfully woven around the life of her uprooted grandmother Regina, which spanned most of the 20^th century. The book comes neatly full circle: offering incongruous packets of kosher meat as her calling card, Marina introduces herself to the 22 Jews still left in Baghdad.

Three years after Marina’s visit, there are eight Jews left. The door has slammed shut on 2,700 years of Jewish presence in the Land of the Two Rivers.

To tackle the history of the Jews of Iraq, from the British occupation at the end of the First Word War to the present day, is to venture into a minefield. Facts have been erased, politicised, and distorted. Arab writers have blamed the Jewish exodus on bombs planted by the Zionists in 1950 -51, suggesting that Jews and Arabs lived in muticultural harmony before Zionism. But Marina Benjamin’s book leaves little doubt that the Jews were subject to a decade of persecution prior to their departure. Today we would call it ‘ethnic cleansing.’

In 1917 cheering Jews lined the streets when General Maude rode into Baghdad (it is an intriguing thought that the Jews could have inadvertently been responsible for his death, having served him cholera-infected milk with his tea). King Faisal tried to forge one nation from a multitude of ethnicities and religions. The Jews dominated trade and became the main allies of the British, effectively running the country for them in the 1920s and 30s.

On the personal level Marina leaves no topic unturned – the food the Jews ate, the houses they lived in, the way they dressed. The Jews were apolitical and socially conservative. Women’s ambitions were limited, their marriages were arranged, their lives devoted to their children and lived to the rhythm of Sabbath and the festivals. Marina’s grandmother had the strength of character, but also the pragmatism and adaptability typical of these Jews to make a life after her husband’s death and the family’s brutal uprooting. What a falling-off she experienced - from a comfortable, sheltered life with servants in the smart, new district of Bataween, to selling Crown wallpapers in Hownslow.

Writing elegantly and eloquently, Marina Benjamin is at her best when she chronicles the persecution closing in on her grandmother’s world: the rising hostility of the 1930s, the Farhoud massacre, the impact of the partition of Palestine and the first Arab-Israeli war. However, the narrative is marred by minor errors: the first minority to be massacred on independence, the Assyrians, were not ‘brought in’ by the British - they were even more indigenous to Iraq than the Jews.

Since the Jews were there before the Muslims, Marina wanted to call her book ‘I am Iraq,’ after the 1957 poem by Mohammed Mahdi al-Jawahiri. Just as well she did not: the phrase has connotations of a blood and soil patriotism that Jews, with rare exceptions, did not feel. As the old saying went,’ the country is for its people and the trade is for the Jews.”

It is a pity that the book ends on a sour note, highlighting, as is fashionable, the social prejudice that the transplanted Iraqi community encountered in the transit camps and development towns of Israel in the 1950s. But in 60 years Israel has become culturally much more of a Levantine state than its Ashkenazi founders had envisaged. As professor Sasson Somekh has observed with pride, the Iraqis were the best educated and most successful of the Jews of the East. And such is the pace of integration that in a generation or two there may be no such thing as an Iraqi Jew.

Other reviews here