Passover in Baghdad

Baghdad was not the most obvious place to celebrate Passover. Saddam had fallen barely a week before it began, looters were rampaging through the city, dozens of buildings were on fire and Islamic hardliners were arming militias. What’s more, in a city of almost five million people there were only a handful of Jews left.

Until the Second World War roughly a quarter of Baghdad’s population was Jewish. In June 1941, following a Nazi-inspired coup, 179 Jews died and almost a thousand were wounded in a pogrom while the police and army stood by. Until 1948 there were still 150,000 Jews in Iraq but by 1951, after the Israeli government had organized airlifts, the vast majority of them had left. The government placed severe restrictions on those who stayed. Even so, a community of some six thousand lingered on. But now, according to those that remain, their numbers add up to the grand total of thirty-four people.

While most Iraqi Jews left for Israel after its creation in 1948, significant numbers also made their way to Britain and the US, especially those from the middle classes—the Saatchi family, for example. Some wealthy Iraqi Jews did remain in the country after 1951, knowing that to leave was to lose everything: Jews who emigrated were stripped, not just of their citizenship, but also of all their property and other assets. In the end, however, their wealth could not protect them and indeed often made them targets for murder and blackmail. So they left too, for Israel, Britain, Holland and Canada.

Today it is hard to imagine that so many Jews once lived here. But if you look carefully in parts of town that used to be Jewish, like Bataween, on the east bank of the Tigris, or around Rashid Street, a bustling commercial area, you can still see brickwork patterned into Stars of David. You can also see places where moulded stars have been hacked away. What you can’t see are the stories.

Although the majority of Iraqi Jews left in 1950 and 1951 in fact they had been emigrating for a lot longer than this. In the eighteenth century Baghdadi Jews began to make their way to India and beyond, which is the beginning of my story. My father was born in 1924 in Calcutta and this was his background. He came to Britain when he was four and, except for a single holiday a few years ago, he never went back. When he returned from the holiday he told us a surprising anecdote. Several times he had wanted to ask for something and on each occasion a Hindi word he had no idea that he knew popped out of his mouth. The words had lain dormant, lodged somewhere deep in his mind, for seventy years or so.

When he died in November 2002 he was buried in strict accordance with Sephardi tradition. At the Hoop Lane cemetery in Golders Green in London all the tombstones on one side stand upright, that is, in the Ashkenazi or European way, and all the Sephardi tombs are flat, in the oriental and Middle-Eastern Jewish way. The night before we buried him we wrote some notes for the rabbi to help him in his oration and in them we described how proud my father had been of his Baghdadi Jewish heritage.

My father’s family left Baghdad or Aleppo or all the other Middle Eastern cities they traced their roots to during the late nineteenth century. They left behind the rotting corners of the Ottoman Empire and headed for the great commercial hubs of the British Empire and beyond: Bombay, Calcutta, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Some left even earlier than this. On my grandmother’s side, David Sassoon, founder of a prodigious commercial dynasty, fled Baghdad in about 1829 before eventually settling in Bombay.

When I was growing up, ‘Baghdad’ was a place that lurked like those Hindi words deep in family memory, but it was no more present than this. After all, no one in my family had actually been there. My grandmother herself had been born in Calcutta.

And yet from my childhood I remember what I now realize were echoes, faint ripples of Baghdad, which still survived. My father and grandmother played backgammon and would laugh inshallah—’God willing’—when something was to be wished for. When we break the fast at Yom Kippur we still eat pomegranates. In Baghdad during the war I found myself eating the same food we used to eat, and sometimes still do on high holy days in London, such as chicken with okra or ladies’ fingers. Iraqis would say, ‘Do you know what that is?’ and I would tell them I did—but never why.

I had gone to Baghdad to report the war for the Economist and the New York Review of Books. But of course I also had my own personal reasons for wanting to be there. Before I left, I joked that I was going to be the first Judah—of my family anyway—back in Baghdad for more than a century. But being Jewish, especially in Saddam’s Iraq, was hardly something you wanted to advertise, and from the visa application onwards—which demanded the applicant’s religion—I said nothing about the subject. When my government translator, discussing her views on foreigners, said, ‘of course, we hate the Jews,’ then added generously, ‘you know, I think that even among the Jews there might be some good people,’ I just nodded and kept my mouth shut. It had taken me ten months to get a visa and now, with war about to break out, I had no intention of being expelled.

As a foreign correspondent I spent more than a decade covering the Balkan wars and their aftermath. But after September 11 no one was interested in the Balkans any more. I realized I would have to start working in Arab and Muslim Middle Eastern countries, something I had always shied away from previously. Being Jewish and with an obviously Jewish name meant I was nervous both personally and professionally. Of course there are many Jewish correspondents who cover the Middle East, but how you feel about covering this story and whether your own feelings might somehow cloud your objectivity can only be an individual decision.

But when I got to Afghanistan in October 2001, I was surprised to find I felt quite relaxed. Sometimes I was asked if I was an infidel and once, if I was ‘thinking of Jesus’. To this I replied with a cautious ‘sometimes’, and the man who asked me the question seemed happy to leave it there.

Then I went to Iran and no one asked me anything. When I got back, though, I had lunch with the press attaché at the Iranian Embassy who spent the meal complaining about the pieces I’d written. As we finished eating he said, ‘and, anyway what does
“Judah” mean?’

‘Nothing, it’s just a name,’ I said.

Looking straight at me, he said, ‘Because in Farsi it means “Jewish”.’

Just before going to Baghdad, I went to Jordan and people began to ask questions. ‘Judah? Judah? What sort of a name is that?’ they asked. But every time, before I had a chance to reply, they said, ‘so you must be from here and have Arab family?’ I was startled— ‘Judah’ is, after all, just an anglicization of the Hebrew ‘Yehuda’. But now it turned out that there was a prominent Jordanian–Palestinian family whose name was pronounced, if not transliterated, in exactly the same way as mine. It made me feel less nervous.