Review Last Days in Babylon, The Exile of Iraq’s Jews, the Story of My Family

Benjamin, Marina, Last Days in Babylon, The Exile of Iraq’s Jews, the Story of My Family, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney: Free Press, 2006

 

Last Days in Babylon, The Exile of Iraq’s Jews, the Story of My Family by Marina Benjamin is part history and part personal narrative. The author’s family was one of thousands of Iraqi Jews who left their country in the 1950s due to growing anti-semitism. Benjamin goes through the overall history of Iraq’s Jews and draws comparisons with her own family’s experiences.

 

The reason why the author wrote her book was because of her grandmother Regina who was the matriarch of her family. She was born in Baghdad in 1905 during Ottoman times to a wealthy merchant family. They embraced Iraq when it was created by the British in 1920 as they were many Jews in the bureaucracy and a Jewish minister. It was that history which made her grandmother always tell Benjamin to be an Iraqi when she was growing up. She tried to ignore that because she felt English but when she grew older she embraced her history leading her back to Iraq after the 2003 invasion to try to find her roots.

 

There are many interesting stories and anecdotes to Benjamin’s family such as how Regina couldn’t get her family to Israel when anti-Jewish laws were passed and violence started in Iraq so they went to India instead. That was only a steppingstone to England which the grandmother believed would offer more opportunities because she had grown up in Iraq when Britain was the dominant power in the country. These recollections give Last Days in Babylon a human face to the research the author did into Iraq’s Jews.

 

The historical sections of the book are broken up into two parts. First is how Iraqi Jews became part of Iraq. Benjamin goes through how Jews were one of the earliest inhabitants of Mesopotamia. Abraham was from Ur, and Ezekiel, Ezra and Daniel resided in Babylon. The Talmud was written by Babylonians and the royal line of King David survived in Mesopotamia until the Middle Ages. By the Ottoman times Jewish businessmen had emerged as merchants trading products between Persia, India, China, Japan and Europe. They spoke Arabic at home and when they went out women would where abayas like others. There were reservations about an Arab government ruling Iraq but the fact that Jews were recruited into the bureaucracy and there was a Jewish minister ended up leading the community to embrace the new state. Benjamin believed that because their position was secured by the Iraqi government they gave it loyalty in return.

 

The book belies that the arrival of Zionism completely changed the situation of Iraq’s Jews. Merchants and rabbis initially rejected the new idea but when violence started in Palestine and then Israel was created in 1948 attacks upon Jews began. Baghdad not only failed at protecting the country’s Jews but targeted them for discrimination. This led almost the entire community to leave in the 1950s when a law that allowed them to immigrant to Israel. More left in the 1970s due to Baathist rule and by 1990 there were only an estimated 150 Jews left in the country. When Benjamin went to Baghdad in 2004 she only found 22. This history is very readable and a good summary of events without getting academic. Iraq has plenty of minorities but outside of the Kurds they are rarely covered in English let alone in books. Last Days in Babylon helps fill in some of those gaps and her family’s own history parallels much of what happened to the larger community.

 

It should also be noted that Benjamin wrote about how Israel did not turn out to be the dream Iraqi Jews thought it would be. Having left Iraq with hardly any money because of a law the new immigrants became the working class and soldiers of Israel. They faced widespread discrimination for not being Europeans like the founders of the state. Prime Minister Ben Gurion in 1960 said that Eastern Jews were backwards, corrupt and uneducated and would have to be assimilated into European norms otherwise Israel might turn into an Arab state. This was a far cry from the propaganda Zionists spread in Iraq which told people Israel would be a country which would embrace them and allow them to live freely. Instead they lived in ghettos and greatly resented their treatment. The book wouldn’t be a full story if it hadn’t included this part of the journey that Iraqi Jews went through. It’s very ironic because Zionist agents told Iraqis they couldn’t stay in their country because it was too oppressive but then they got treated as second class citizens in Israel because they came from Arab nations.

 

There are a few other books about Iraq’s Jews but Last Days in Babylon might be the place to start. It’s not a scholarly book and covers many main events in the community’s history. The fact that it includes the author’s own family makes it that much more readable as well.

 

Link to all of Musings On Iraq’s book reviews listed by topic