The Jews Of Iraq

The Jews Of Iraq PDF

Author: Nissim Rejwan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-07-11

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1000302792

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This book provides an account of the Jews of Iraq, their history, culture and society. It covers the Iraqi Jewish history in three parts: from the Assyrian Captivity to the Arab Conquest (731 bc–ad 641); the encounter with Islam (641–1850); and the last hundred years (1850–1951).

New Babylonians

New Babylonians PDF

Author: Orit Bashkin

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2012-09-12

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0804782016

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Although Iraqi Jews saw themselves as Iraqi patriots, their community—which had existed in Iraq for more than 2,500 years—was displaced following the establishment of the state of Israel. New Babylonians chronicles the lives of these Jews, their urban Arab culture, and their hopes for a democratic nation-state. It studies their ideas about Judaism, Islam, secularism, modernity, and reform, focusing on Iraqi Jews who internalized narratives of Arab and Iraqi nationalisms and on those who turned to communism in the 1940s. As the book reveals, the ultimate displacement of this community was not the result of a perpetual persecution on the part of their Iraqi compatriots, but rather the outcome of misguided state policies during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Sadly, from a dominant mood of coexistence, friendship, and partnership, the impossibility of Arab-Jewish coexistence became the prevailing narrative in the region—and the dominant narrative we have come to know today.

Iraqi Jews

Iraqi Jews PDF

Author: Abbas Shiblak

Publisher: Saqi Books

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13:

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The Jews of Iraq constituted one of the oldest and most deeply rooted Jewish communities in the world. But in the early 1950s most of them left for Israel, under circumstances that remain the subject of heated controversy. Iraqi Jews: A History examines the role of this community, highlighting the critical years of the late 1940s - after the establishment of the state of Israel - when deep rifts began to appear in Iraqi society. The sad sequence of events that finally led to the mass exodus of Jews in the 1950s was marked by dishonesty on all sides. An impartial and well-documented account of a formerly well-integrated and vibrant community, Iraqi Jews: A History is a landmark in the political and social history of the Middle East.

Iraq’s Last Jews

Iraq’s Last Jews PDF

Author: T. Morad

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2008-10-27

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 0230616232

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Iraq's Last Jews is a collection of first-person accounts by Jews about their lives in Iraq's once-vibrant, 2500 year-old Jewish community and about the disappearance of that community in the middle of the 20th century. This book tells the story of this last generation of Iraqi Jews, who both reminisce about their birth country and describe the persecution that drove them out, the result of Nazi influences, growing Arab nationalism, and anger over the creation of the State of Israel.

Zionism in an Arab Country

Zionism in an Arab Country PDF

Author: Esther Meir-Glitzenstein

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2004-08-02

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1135768625

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This book explores the relations between the Zionist establishment in Israel, and the Jewish community in Iraq.

The Jewish Exodus from Iraq, 1948-1951

The Jewish Exodus from Iraq, 1948-1951 PDF

Author: Moshe Gat

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-07-04

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1135246548

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In this study, Moshe Gat details how the immigration of the Jews from Iraq in effect marked the eradication of one of the oldest and most deeply-rooted Diaspora communities. He provides a background to these events and argues that both Iraqi discrimination and the actions of the Zionist underground in previous years played a part in the flight. The Denaturalization law of 1950 saw tens of thousands of Jews registering for emigration, and a bomb thrown at a synagogue in 1951 accelerated the exodus.

Impossible Exodus

Impossible Exodus PDF

Author: Orit Bashkin

Publisher: Stanford Studies in Middle Eas

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781503602656

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Between 1949 and 1951, 123,000 Iraqi Jews immigrated to the newly established Israeli state. Lacking the resources to absorb them all, the Israeli government resettled them in maabarot, or transit camps, relegating them to poverty. In the tents and shacks of the camps, their living conditions were squalid and unsanitary. Basic necessities like water were in short supply, when they were available at all. Rather than returning to a homeland as native sons, Iraqi Jews were newcomers in a foreign place. Impossible Exodus tells the story of these Iraqi Jews' first decades in Israel. Faced with ill treatment and discrimination from state officials, Iraqi Jews resisted: they joined Israeli political parties, demonstrated in the streets, and fought for the education of their children, leading a civil rights struggle whose legacy continues to influence contemporary debates in Israel. Orit Bashkin sheds light on their everyday lives and their determination in a new country, uncovering their long, painful transformation from Iraqi to Israeli. In doing so, she shares the resilience and humanity of a community whose story has yet to be told.

Unwitting Zionists

Unwitting Zionists PDF

Author: Haya Gavish

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 9780814333662

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A study of the Iraqi Jewish community of Zakho that investigates the community's attachment to the Land of Israel, the effects of Zionist activity, and immigration to Palestine and Israel. Unwitting Zionists examines the Jewish community in the northern Kurdistan town of Zakho from the end of the Ottoman period until the disappearance of the community through aliyah by 1951. Because of its remote location, Zakho was far removed from the influence of the Jewish religious leadership in Iraq and preserved many of its religious traditions independently, becoming the most important Jewish community in the region and known as "Jerusalem of Kurdistan." Author Haya Gavish argues, therefore, that when the community was exposed to Zionism, it began to open up to external influences and activity. Originally published in Hebrew, Unwitting Zionists uses personal memoirs, historical records, and interviews to investigate the duality between Jewish tradition and Zionism among Zakho's Jews. Gavish consults a variety of sources to examine the changes undergone by the Jewish community as a result of its religious affiliation with Eretz-Israel, its exposure to Zionist efforts, and its eventual immigration to Israel. Because relatively little written documentation about Zakho exists, Gavish relies heavily on folkloristic sources like personal recollections and traditional stories, including extensive material from her own fieldwork with an economically and demographically diverse group of men and women from Zakho. She analyzes this firsthand information within a historical framework to reconstruct a communal reality and lifestyle that was virtually unknown to anyone outside of the community. Appendixes contain biographical details of the interviewees for additional background. Gavish also addresses the relative merits of personal memoirs, optimal interviewer-interviewee relationships, and the problem of relying on the interviewees' memories in her study. Folklore, oral history, anthropology, and Israeli studies scholars, as well as anyone wanting to learn more about religion, commuity, and nationality in the Middle East will appreciate Unwitting Zionists.

The Strangers We Became

The Strangers We Became PDF

Author: Cynthia Kaplan Shamash

Publisher: Brandeis University Press

Published: 2015-09-22

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 161168806X

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This riveting and utterly unique memoir chronicles the coming of age of Cynthia Shamash, an Iraqi Jew born in Baghdad in 1963. When she was eight, her family tried to escape Iraq over the Iranian border, but they were captured and jailed for five weeks. Upon release, they were returned to their home in Baghdad, where most of their belongings had been confiscated and the door of their home sealed with wax. They moved in with friends and applied for passports to spend a ten-day vacation in Istanbul, although they never intended to return. From Turkey, the family fled to Tel Aviv and then to Amsterdam, where Cynthia's father soon died of a heart attack. At the age of twelve, Sanuti (as her mother called her) was sent to London for schooling, where she lived in an Orthodox Jewish enclave with the chief rabbi and his family. At the end of the school year, she returned to Holland to navigate her teen years in a culture that was much more sexually liberal than the one she had been born into, or indeed the one she was experiencing among Orthodox Jews in London. Shortly after finishing her schooling as a dentist, Cynthia moved to the United States in an attempt to start over. This vivid, beautiful, and very funny memoir will appeal to readers intrigued by spirituality, tolerance, the personal ramifications of statelessness and exile, the clashes of cultures, and the future of Iraq and its Jews.

The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times

The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times PDF

Author: Reeva Spector Simon

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2003-04-30

Total Pages: 577

ISBN-13: 0231507593

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Despite considerable research on the Jewish diaspora in the Middle East and North Africa since 1800, there has until now been no comprehensive synthesis that illuminates both the differences and commonalities in Jewish experience across a range of countries and cultures. This lacuna in both Jewish and Middle Eastern studies is due partly to the fact that in general histories of the region, Jews have been omitted from the standard narrative. As part of the religious and ethnic mosaic that was traditional Islamic society, Jews were but one among numerous minorities and so have lacked a systematic treatment. Addressing this important oversight, this volume documents the variety and diversity of Jewish life in the region over the last two hundred years. It explains the changes that affected the communities under Islamic rule during its "golden age" and describes the processes of modernization that enabled the Jews to play a pivotal role in their respective countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first half of the book is thematic, covering topics ranging from languages to economic life and from religion and music to the world of women. The second half is a country-by-country survey that covers Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Yemen, Egypt, the Sudan, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco.