Edinburgh Review Issue # 127, October, 2009
Memories of Eden.: A Journey Through Jewish Baghdad
Violette Shamash. Eds. M. and T. Rocca. Forum Books. isbn 9780955709500.
£14.99
Baghdad, Yesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew
Sasson Somekh. Ibis Editions. isbn 9659012586. $16.95
Sixty years ago, more than a third of the population of Baghdad was Jewish,
with a history of over 2,000 years in Mesopotamia. When Violette Shamash
(her married name) begins her story, in the early years of the last century, the
Jewish community was at the heart of Baghdad’s business and cultural life.
Jews spoke the same language as their Muslim and Christian neighbours, and
although religious observances differed, they broadly shared their way of life.
Half a century on, almost nothing remained of that vibrant and integrated
culture. Violette’s family – her parents and six siblings with their spouses and
children – were dispersed in three continents.
Memories of Eden (the Garden of Eden may have been located in the
Tigris and Euphrates valleys) is a beautifully executed and richly textured
account of a family and a community. The Ishayek family were well-to-do
merchants with a fine house on the banks of the Tigris. Violette’s finely
observed documentation of life in Baghdad between the world wars is
compelling, domestic in focus but embracing a much wider context, and
reflecting, directly and indirectly, world events and the manipulations of
European powers.
Sasson Somekh was 17 when he left Baghdad in 1951, ten years after
Violette, her husband David and two infant daughters had hurriedly departed
for India. He was alone – his family remained in Baghdad – and as a nonobservant
Middle Eastern Jew he knew no Hebrew and no Yiddish, a double
disadvantage. Like Violette, he spoke Arabic, and also English (his father
worked in a British-owned bank) and French (he went to a French school).
He wrote poetry in Arabic, and hung out with Arab poets and intellectuals
who encouraged him. He hints at the difficulties of adapting to life in Israel,
alien territory, but his book is about Baghdad and his love of Arabic culture
– he would become a founder of the Department of Arabic Language and
Literature at Tel Aviv University.
The accounts of Violette and Sasson (the same name as Sassoon; the
British Sassoons were related to Violette’s family) inevitably intersect. The
Tigris plays a leading role in both, the same places appear, the same names,
the same ambience of Baghdad sights and sounds and smells, the same warm
response to environment and people. And the same events changed their
lives for ever and destroyed the community that produced them. Although
during World War I, Jews were suspected by the Turks of collaborating with
the British, by the time Iraq was created in 1921 the Jewish community
felt, as Sasson writes, ‘secure and integrated, rooted in the country’. The
British mandate, with a sympathetic King Faisal on the throne, seemed to
bring security. In the 1930s that began to dissipate, and after independence
and Faisal’s death came, in Violette’s words, ‘the first breeze of anti-Semitic
propaganda’ blowing in from Nazi Germany. With the arrival in Iraq of
the virulently anti-Jewish Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the late 1930s and
the seizure of power by Rashid Ali in 1941, life for Baghdad’s Jews became
increasingly difficult.
As the British struggled to maintain a hold on the Middle East, attacks
on the Jewish community intensified, but when British troops advanced on
Baghdad and camped on the opposite bank of the Tigris the tension began
to ease. Baghdad surrendered, and an armistice was negotiated, though the
British were ordered not to enter the city and Iraqi troops were not disarmed.
It was the time of the Jewish festival of Shavuot or ’Iid el-Ziyaaghah, and
Jewish families felt relaxed enough to carry on their celebrations as normal.
But on 2 June 1941 there erupted two days of rioting, looting and murder,
while the British were ordered not to intervene. The seven-year-old Sasson
watched from a window as looters bore off their trophies from Jewish homes
and businesses. Violette, married by this time and imminently expecting her
second child, hid with her family in their darkened and barricaded house.
Both families survived, thanks, in the Ishayeks’ case, to the Muslim cook
convincing the rioters that theirs was a Muslim household. There were many
instances of Muslims risking their own safety to protect Jewish friends and
neighbours.
It has been calculated that at least 130 Jews were killed during the Farhud,
roughly translated as ‘violent dispossession’ or pogrom. The loss of life was
greater than in Germany’s Kristallnacht in November 1938. Yet, according to
Sasson, after the war the Jewish community rallied. His teenage years were
spent in ‘a Baghdad bursting with activity’ where the Jewish community ‘had
regained its full creative drive’. But anti-Semitism surfaced again with the
creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the wave of resentment against the
British who were regarded as complicit in the dispossession of Palestinians.
The trickle of departure that followed the Farhud became a mass exodus in
1950 and ’51.
These books not only chronicle the life of a community, they portray
a city that had a profound personal and cultural impact on both authors.
Sasson Somekh’s gentle, reflective reminiscences are full of insight born of
deep appreciation of the cultural richness that drove his aspirations as a
poet writing within an Arabic tradition. Woven through his account is a
fascination with language echoed in Violette’s writing: Jewish Arabic spoken
at home, Muslim Arabic on the street; French and English; biblical and
modern Hebrew. Violette’s inclusion of a Judaeo–Arabic lexicon is itself a
fascinating testament to integration. Language plays its part in her vividly
recreated tapestry of family life and religious observance. Both writers
illuminate the historical and political context, augmented in Violette’s case
by the very clear explication of the ‘inside story’ of the Farhud, provided by
her son-in-law Tony Rocca. And, for those who want to know more, I can
also recommend Marina Benjamin’s Last Days in Babylon, which recounts
her family’s departure from Baghdad and her own risky visit there in 2004 to
track down the remaining fragments of Jewish life.
Sasson dreams of returning to stroll along the banks of the Tigris, the
river that has never ceased to run through his dreams. But these books are
about loss, not just the demise of a once thriving community but of the
ancient city and culture that nurtured it. They are also about the impact of
power struggles originating in other continents and their continuing terrible
legacy of greed and contempt for peoples and their past. The undercurrent
of these stories is the destruction of human life and of the cultural and social
rhythms that sustain it. The latest chapter in Iraq’s story perpetuates the loss
and the tragedy.
– Jenni Calder