By Vered Lee,
A violin wailed in one of the auditoriums on the Tel Aviv University campus. Violinist Yair Dalal was demonstrating the creative powers of Salah and Daoud al-Kuwaiti, two brothers considered to be among Iraq’s greatest musicians. With immense skill and delicacy, Dalal mastered the notes, careful not to bring the emotional audience to tears.
His appearance was part of a conference on Iraqi Jews at Tel Aviv University this month. “This is a community that immigrated to Israel in the 1950s, which then numbered 130,000 people. The time has come to study how the members of that community have integrated into Israeli society and to look at their cultural roots and their identity,” says Dr. Uri Cohen of Tel Aviv University’s Chaim Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism and Israel.
Scholars from a variety of fields – including sociology, history and literature – were invited to attend.
“Undoubtedly, this is the first time that academe is looking at the works of Iraqi Jews written in Arabic and Hebrew with the same kind of serious interest and depth it displays toward, for instance, something written by Amos Oz,” says Prof. Sasson Somekh.
The conference sessions were well-attended by people whose Iraqi Arabic was peppered with Hebrew words and who very much enjoyed the lectures. It was obvious that most of the audience, like most of the lecturers, were themselves Iraqi Jews.
One of the participants was Nurit Tzadok, 65, who came with her husband, 75, who immigrated to Israel from Yemen. “Like all the children of Iraqi immigrants, I went through the stage of silencing the radio when my father tried to hear Arabic music at home. Like them, I also felt ashamed for a long while of being Iraqi. But today, I am happy to report that I am proud of my Iraqi heritage.”
The stormiest debate arose when most of the lecturers objected to the definition “Arab Jew.” This term, commonly used by the members of the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition and Sephardi Jewish intellectuals, angered many of the conference participants.
“Those who proclaim themselves ‘Arab Jews’ rather than Jews with an Arab background are doing so to be fashionable and to express a political stance,” says Prof. Somekh. “I believe that there is a tendency to use the term ‘Arab Jew’ without thinking deeply enough about what it really means. For me, an Arab Jew is someone who was born into an Arabic-speaking Jewish family, who is a member of an Arabic-speaking Jewish community, who lives in an Arab-Muslim society and who is familiar with literary Arabic, which is the basis of Arab culture. By such criteria, everyone using the term ‘Arab Jew’ is doing so incorrectly, because they never learned Arabic, never spoke Arabic and cannot read Arabic.”
Is there an Iraqi-Israeli identity? Author Sami Michael says that 99 percent of the identities on the face of this planet are imposed identities.
Michael says it is regrettable that Israeli society has turned the Iraqi Jewish collective memory into a sweet, sticky bit of nostalgia, and failed to adopt the unique wisdom that characterised the Jewish community in Iraq: The community transformed itself into an aristocracy in Iraq by virtue of its ability to negotiate with the Arab society in which it resided.
“That is the way to achieve stunning results. Results that are achieved not with a gun or with warfare, but rather through negotiations with the Arabs,” he says.
University of Haifa sociology professor Sammy Smooha said, “There is an Iraqi Israeli identity, but that is not the important point. The principal identity competing with our country of origin is still the Sephardi Jewish identity. And what determines the kind of life you lead and your fate is still the division of Israeli Jewish society into Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, or Sephardim.
“The social rift will only grow deeper and more severe,” he said. “In Israel, when people make it in society, they lose their identity, which is what happened to the Iraqi Jews.”
Prof. Haviva Pedaya is a poet who teaches Judaism and culture in the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s Department of Jewish History. She made the following point: “The first thing that happens in a situation of oppression is that you declare that everyone is the same, in other words, that everyone is a Mizrahi or Sephardi Jew. The original approach of the Iraqi Jewish identity, as we see it expressed on this podium, is that it expressed several very different voices and channels. And it is impossible to say which is more Iraqi than the other.”
The Israeli-born children of the Iraqi Jewish immigrants naturally have no memory of Baghdad, but instead create an imaginary Baghdad from the fragments of memory that they have gleaned from their parents. These fragments are, in turn, based on the literary works written by immigrant authors who have shaped our identity.
Like these children of immigrants, I swam with the immigrant authors in the Tigris River whose sources are literary, wandered through Baghdad’s alleyways, drank coffee in the coffee shops along the river’s banks, and saw the city from the roofs of Baghdad’s houses. For a brief moment, in the lively discourse at the conference, a discourse that was so full of love and longing, I caught glimpses of the house of my childhood, the home that disintegrated with the death of my parents, who had immigrated to Israel from Iraq.
For a few seconds, its walls once more joined together and my parents again hugged me. The Iraqi Arabic, which they used whenever they spoke to me (while I always replied in Hebrew), echoed from that house once more. How could I explain all this to the woman who asked me how I was connected to this conference and why I was covering it for Ha’aretz? She gave me an embarrassed smile as she apologised for not recognising that I myself was also an Iraqi and she asked me why my surname was Lee and why I was crying.
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Vered Lee is a contributor to Ha’aretz. This abridged article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org. The full article can be found at: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/984385.html.