There are few places across history where Jewish life has flourished as intensely and as consistently as it did in Iraq, which makes its abrupt dissolution all the more tragic. After the establishment of the State of Israel transformed Jews from a religious minority into a potential proxy of an enemy state, the Iraqi government passed a spate of anti-Jewish legislation. When Iraq’s government temporarily lifted its ban on Jewish emigration—an ultimatum that would force them to relinquish their citizenship—the vast majority of the country’s 2,500-year-old community streamed out in airlifts sent by Israel in just over six months between 1951 and 1952. The approximately 120,000 who ended up in the new state had to start from scratch: They were not only forced by the Iraqi government to leave their property and wealth behind and dumped by Israeli officials in shabby absorption camps, but they also had to remake their entire identity, as the country in which they arrived had a deep aversion to the Arab language and culture they brought with them.
This formative trauma is where Avi Shlaim—who arrived in Israel from Iraq as a child and who went one to become one of the country’s most preeminent of Israel’s “New Historians,” challenging the traditional Zionist historiography—begins his first personal work, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew. In his interview with scholar Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Shlaim recounts his acute sense of embarrassment at his father’s sartorial and linguistic incongruity with his new surroundings. But rather than accelerating his integration into Israeliness, Shlaim questions the political forces behind this sense of shame in his typical revisionist vein, as he weaves together his own journey from Iraq to Israel to the UK with a wider historical analysis…..more
