Jewish Childhood in Ottoman and Independent Iraq

Prof Cindy Fan, VP, UCLA 0:00

Hi. My name is Cindy fan, and I'm Vice Provost for International Studies and global engagement at UCLA. I'm also professor of geography and Asian American Studies, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to the inaugural Averroes lecture. This lecture series has been made possible by generous private donation to the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies. The Center for knee Eastern Studies at UCLA is a hub for academic research, scholarly collaboration and undergraduate and graduate student studies of critical languages of the region. The Center is also a wonderful resource for the UCLA campus and the public that we serve in bringing essential programming about the Middle East to our campus through public lectures, workshops, symposia and conferences, and this lecture series is an excellent example of the work that the center has brought to UCLA and its community as a public university, UCLA serves a multi ethnic and multi religious community of students, and let me say that again, we serve a multi ethnic and multi religious community of students and our faculty has a broad range of expertise and UCLA mission to promote diversity and inclusion while collectively, pursuing academic excellence is critical. There's no better time. There's no more urgent time to promote diversity and inclusion than 2017 and the center is playing a very important role in helping us to do that. And the International Institute, where the Center for New Eastern Studies is located, together with 20 some other research centers and degree programs is testimony to UCLA character as a truly global university. The overall Lecture Series, which is designed to excavate histories of inter communal life and highlight the pluralism of Middle Eastern societies, is a valuable investment. These lectures will enrich our intellectual life on campus and fulfill important aspects of our core mission as both a public and a global university. And I'd like to congratulate the Center for this innovative Lecture Series, and also to congratulate the director, Professor Asla Bali, for her vision and success, and it's now my pleasure to invite Asla Bali, the director of the UCLA Near Eastern Studies Center, to introduce I like our lecturer this evening. Thank you.

Speaker 1 2:55

So before I introduce our lecturer, you're going to hear even more peons to UCLA and to all of that we're trying to do here. I hope that you're happy to bear with me. We're very proud of this moment and the beginning of this lecture series. So thank you so much for joining us this evening for the inaugural averilist lecture. The Center for Near Eastern Studies is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year as an interdisciplinary research center on the Middle East, fostering collaborative scholarship at UCLA and bringing leaders, leading scholars from around the country in the world, to this campus and this lecture series is a particularly wonderful way for us to celebrate this milestone in our own history. We are extremely grateful to the private donor who initiated this series and continues to make it possible for the contribution that it's making to enriching our offerings and also drawing our focus to this important area of scholarly research. The series is named after Averroes, the Latin name of Ibn Rushd, the 12th century, Andalusian Muslim polymath whose philosophical works integrated Islamic traditions with ancient Greek thought over subsequent centuries, his commentaries on Plato Aristotle influenced Jewish and Christian thinkers throughout Europe, including Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas and Baruch Spinoza. The announcement of the lecture series has generated intellectual excitement on our campus and has already fostered new ties between faculty working on Ottoman history, Islamic Studies, Jewish Studies, and the broader history of the Middle East and North Africa in several disciplines across the campus. It has also brought to the Center for Near Eastern Studies an opportunity to partner with several other centers on our campus. This lecture is being co sponsored by UCLA allen d Levy, Center for Jewish Studies and the Center for the Study of Religion. The multi ethnic, multi confessional identity of the Middle East is often obscured when we think of the Middle East in terms of ancient ethnic hatreds, which is far too common in the way it's depicted today, publicly and popularly in the United States. In truth, the region historically, is characterized by ancient ethnic bonds and ties across religions, across tribes, across ethnicities. By revisiting the histories of Jewish Muslim relations, we hope to teach our students and remind ourselves of the resonance between the intellectual dialog and communal exchange. Age that took place across Muslim lands of the past, and our own mission as a university serving a diverse student population, each lecture will feature a distinguished scholar of Middle East Studies who will speak on a facet of Jewish life in the Muslim world from the Middle Ages through the early 20th century. Their presentations will then be published in an occasional paper series devoted to the Averroes lectures. We plan to convene a major conference at the end of the lecture series featuring young scholars engaged in cutting edge research in this field. So with all of that, we are, of course, so honored and delighted to welcome as our inaugural Averroes lecture Professor Orit bashkin of University of Chicago. Dr bashkin's research focuses on the history of Jews in Iraq, and her talk will demonstrate the ways in which Iraqi Jewish children from a variety of class and geographical backgrounds were affected by Iraq's sociopolitical and religious divisions, while experiencing different aspects of Iraq's increasing goal, drive toward modernity. For a more detailed biography of Professor bashkin, please consult the programs that I hope you all received as you entered this room, I am now so happy to invite Professor bashkin to deliver her lecture entitled Jewish childhood in Ottoman, mandatory and independent Iraq. Please join me.

Speaker 2 6:17

So I want to thank you all very much for coming. I want to start actually, by thanking everybody who contributed to this lecture. It's also, I know so many faces in this audience. It's a great, great honor to lecture in the center where, you know Jewish Studies and Jewish and history of Jews in Muslim lands is being studied for so many years. And it's also being a great pleasure being introduced by Asli, who we went to graduate school together, different departments, same school. So this really feels good. So I hope you enjoy the talk. So my talk wants to think about what it means to be a child or a young adult in modern Iraq. And for historians who deal with the history of children, there is always this question of, how can we hear the voice of children through the accounts that are actually written by adults, either either the children themselves in autobiographies or newspaper articles or police records or educators all writing about children, but how can we get the experience of the children themselves, of what it meant to be a child and a teenager in Iraq at this period? So this talk will focus on autobiographies and newspaper articles, police records and especially accounts of schools. But as I'm reading this account, I hope you think about the sources that I'm using as well. And another sort of question that I hope I will sort of, you know, expose in this talk, or exploring this talk, is, what can we learn about Jewish education, modern Jewish education, Iraqi nationalism, a sense of Iraqi community from looking at children. And what I'll propose is that this national idea that you know, all children study together, and all children were part of the same community, was not necessarily an idea that was born in Iraq of the 1920s 30s and 40s. It started in the Ottoman period, but then by the late 1940s as I hope to show you, children went to school to be uneducated. They went to school, they listened to their teachers and their friends, and they thought that their country is in a very bad shape. So I'll take you through this process. So I'll focus mostly in the talk on the upper middle classes, the Jewish upper middle classes in Iraq, a very westernized community that remained in Baghdad as kind of a powerful social class all throughout the 20s, 30s and 40s and but I also like to kind of take into account the groups that actually my talk excludes, which are Iraqi Jews who spoke Aramaic and lived in northern Iraq, in what is known As Iraqi Kurdistan, and also the urban poor. So I'll touch on these groups, but the center is really the Jewish middle classes in Baghdad. I'll be talking also about Basra, other places, but you know, the more rural communities are absent from this talk. Now, when I'm talking about Iraqi youth in sort of the 20th century, in the 19th century, especially in the Ottoman period, we're talking about a Jewish community that grow through a process of Ottoman reforms known as the Tanzimat. It's mid, sort of early, nine. 19th century to mid 19th century, when the empire in which they live goes through processes of modernization and centralization. But for the Jewish community and for Jewish education and Jewish childhood, the connection between Baghdad and India was as important as the connection between Baghdad and Istanbul, because the Jewish community produced merchants, traders who went to India, who studied, who later on established business there, and they supported schools and printing efforts that then were re established in Baghdad. So the Indian connection is quite important. And what we see through the late 1980s until the 19 1010s is the rise of Baghdad as a city where Jews have a very important presence. Now, again, before we talk a little bit about the children themselves, we have to think about what kind of languages they spoke. So all Jews in Iraq spoke a local dialect of Arabic, or at least the Jews in Baghdad, Basra and Mosul, with the Baghdadi dialect having Baghdadi Jewish dialect having particular features, Hebrew and Aramaic were used as liturgical languages. But as people grew older, Hebrew was also used as a global language to interact with the Hebrew press. So a lot of newspapers that were published in Europe in places like Mainz and Berlin actually had agents in Iraq, and people who read these journals in Hebrew also wrote to them since the Ottoman Empire emphasized Turkish and later on, Arabic, these written languages became important, especially after the Constitutional Revolution of 1908 in the Ottoman Empire, Judeo Arabic was also An important language. Judeo Arabic is Hebrew. Is Arabic written in Hebrew, characters and people tend to identify Judea Arabic with the geniza document, with medieval writings. But actually, because of the connection with India, children learned to write, especially in religious schools in Judea Arabic. And also there were newspapers and books in Judea Arabic that were either produced in Baghdad and especially in India, and some of them were about religious texts. But we also have Proverbs in Judea Arabic, stories from the Arabian Nights published in Judea Arabic. So this is a thriving literature at the time, and French and English are becoming important colonial languages as well. So how does it work? I want to show you a slide that actually comes from a Jew who an Iraqi Jew who lived in India and he visited a Jewish school where he saw how they learned the Hebrew alphabet. So if you look, this is the letter Alif. How is it described? Abu arbaras, it has four heads. Why? Because 1234, gimel. Abu Janah, sort of it has wings, because this is like wings. And I won't take you through the whole alphabet, but I think you're seeing here something that is very important to this community. They learn to write in one language, but they think about it in another language. Okay, this is okay. Are we? No, okay. This had getting the Arabic font here was sort of a very important missions, but it created some trouble. So, so, oh, come on. Okay, okay. So what I'll do is I'll just go

Unknown Speaker 13:55

like this, like this, and like this. It's fine, yeah, no, it mistakes. Yeah, it doesn't work. Okay, I'll just stick.

Speaker 2 14:16

Okay. So how are children educated in in Baghdad. So before the 1860s they would used to go to a religious instruction school called Ustaz for children in primary school age, where they would study the Hebrew alphabet, some reading and writing in Judea, Arabic and biblical exegesis known as the Shah in 1861 a group of Jews started to establish a branch of the French Jewish education system called the Alliance Israelite all Israel brothers, Daud, Sumer, Yusuf, Shem Tov, but also to Ashkenazi Jews who resided in Baghdad, Isaac, Luria and Herrmann. Rosenfeld, and in 1864 Dalian school is open. Now. This was a very important school. It met with initial resistance by rabbis, but very from very early on, it became a very popular school in Baghdad. Two things are important to remember here when we're talking about missionary education in the Ottoman Empire, especially in places like Beirut, Ottoman Palestine cities like Alexandria port cities, we find a lot of missionary schools run by Christians, both Protestants and Catholics. However, Iraq was a little bit different, so you had less of missionary less of a missionary activity there. Most of the missionary activity was actually of the Dominicans in Mosul. Later on, they expand to Baghdad, but the alliance was the first foreign school that was open in Baghdad, and that kind of pushed young Jews into this school, but it also brought to them Christians and Muslims. So it's a Jewish school. It's a tool for social mobility, but it also becomes a kind of a hub where the Muslim elites and the Christian elites are interested in, are interested at. The other important thing is that, because of the connections to India, English was taught in this French school. So the mission was, you know, to spread French education to Jewish children, but the local needs actually required that they know English as well. So in that sense, the school was unique. But in terms of, again, young adults, it gave these children kind of tools for social mobility that didn't exist in the past. Now, if you look at the autobiographies of students, you see this kind of narrative that starts in the 19th century but becomes very dominant in this 20 in the 20th century that the Allianz and schools like the Alliance gave children a sense with these schools were established later, gave children a sense of pride, and what they do is they also describe their old schools, the USTA school, in a very negative way. So this is a an older an account from the 20th century, but this is what he writes in the first class. This is about his religious school. In the first class, the teacher taught us about the Torah. He continued doing so in the next classes, I thought to myself, learning Torah all day. What about the other profession about which I heard from the children of the neighborhood, like math, geography, Bible and history. And you have a lot of descriptions of like these old teachers who beat the students up and they don't know what they're doing. But in a way, it's kind of a discourse that the children produce, especially in their autobiographies as grown ups, of an educational discourse that criticize the religious schools for emphasizing Muslim, Jewish and Christian, for emphasizing memorization, for being too conservative, for not preparing children to the modern world. So these schools are important, and again, other join in. So this is an account by Yusuf risk, who later on wrote a book called Nuzhat al Mushtaq with the Iraq so he wrote a book about the history of Iraqi Jews, and he explained, in this part, why he liked or why he was interested in the Allianz, these the Israelite Alliance. Israelitalians open its door to non Jews and some Christians and Muslims study. There I was amongst the Christians who studied in the school for five years. It is necessary to set the record straight and thank the principals of the school for the ways in which they were presented themselves and the dedication of the teachers, whom I remembered for the love that they showed me and my fellow students. Now, with respect to the you know, if we're thinking about young adults here, it's important because a, they befriend each other, but B, their teachers were not necessarily folks coming from France. They were also kind of Francophile Jews from other parts of the Ottoman Empire, from Syria, from Istanbul, from Thessaloniki, and they become figures of importance in in this community. And the school spread 1893 a school for growth is being open. And they spread to Basra, to Hela to Amara to Mosul to Kirkuk to hanakin. Not all survive World War One, but they're definitely there. And one other thing that is important to remember is that while we have perhaps influenced by Europe, this notion that, you know, these schools represent modernity, Baghdadi rabbis represents conservativism, and there is a clash. You actually see that there isn't much of a clash, that even rabbis, even educated people, especially Rabbi Abdullah Sumer, who was the important rabbinical authority in the 19th century, recognize that this is an important school. Recognize that this is a place where they want to send. And their children too. And there's a very important account by the progressive Governor Wali, or vale of of Baghdad midhat Pasha, who visits the school. So this is 8060 at the 8060s and he you have a quote here. He told them how pleased he was from the pupils of the Allianz school, and how pleasant and satisfying it was. It would be if they studied the language of the government, the language of Turkey. And he tells them, You need to understand the decrease of the government. You need to know these things. So the Ottoman government itself kind of wants to to promote this school, but also pressures to have Turkish being taught there. Now this school, and this is important for the children's life, also engages in plays and dramas and shows. They invite dignitaries there, and that's an important moment in the life of the community, because from this moment on, parents come to see their children, not only in synagogue for the males, for Bar Mitzvah, but there is also another form of entertainment. Important people are being invited, and you see your children perform in French or in Hebrew. That's important in the 19th century. It becomes extremely important in the 20th century. Having said that Jews also attend Ottoman schools as well the some even attend schools in Istanbul after 1908 there is, again, there's a Constitutional Revolution, and seven Jews even initiate the establishment of a school makda, but the Dawan, or town makdebi, which actually pushes Jews to be educated in a way that would allow them to enlist to The military, now being a part of the Ottoman military was no picnic, from what we know, but at the same time, it was also a tool for social mobility, but that shows you how they're slowly integrated into the state, and they're thinking, these young adults, these high school students, would actually be the basis for our integration into society. Now, when we're talking about children and young adults, it's very interesting to see how it's also connected to gender roles. So 1893 there's a school for girls that is being open. There's a very famous instance, the Agassi instance, where a rabbi says, you know, all the troubles that befell on the Jewish community had to do with the fact that the School for Girls was being open at the same time his own daughter sends his granddaughter to the school. So it's important, but not that important in terms of like, how people define their social mobility in these upper and middle classes. But you also see, especially in relation to gender the and I'm referring here to the literature of Rabbi Yosef Chaim, that individuals start thinking, okay, so women are now getting education. Who is more important or who is considered more adult or more responsible, a woman or her 12 year old child who should supervise, or 13 year old child who should supervise. What can women go along in the street? Can men go along in the street? What is the age of marriage? So questions that position young adults vis a vis gender issue are very significant. But again, our perception, that

Speaker 2 23:42

conservativism, gender and this has to do with the Iraqi province in particular, play a major role in Iraqi discussions. Is not always true. There was a short experience in hanakin up in the north of an alian school when the school opened, all the community members sent their children to the school that later on, grew in number. And in fact, the directors of the school had to send the girls home because there were too many women there, and they didn't have enough room for there. And there's a complaint, I forget, if it's from Mosul or Kirkuk, that there are no shoe shiners anymore, no Jewish shoe shiners, because they all go to these schools. And again, also in the north, powerful Muslims, whether it's the Persian consul AGAS officials, send their children to these schools. So again, already in the Ottoman period, you see expansion of education, tools of social mobility and interactions with Muslims, both in local schools, in Jewish schools and also in Ottoman state schools, the shift to a modern Iraqi society was hard, especially the disastrous years of World War One. Men were drafted. Men tried. Had tried to avoid military conscription, especially in the north. Family starved from family starved, and it was difficult to survive this era. Those who survived went to the era of Arab nationalism. So in the 1920s Iraq is not independent. It's developing its tools for independent independence under a man under British control, by Amanda from the League of nation and 31 onwards, Iraq is independent. And in these years, ideas about Arab unity, secularizing the Islamic past emerge as kind of the leading principles of Arab nationalism at the time, and the Jewish education system, which expands at this time, is part of this. Arab teachers are sent to Jewish school to instruct students in geography and civics, and both private Jewish schools and and state school engage in this project of nationalism. This is also a period where the Jewish community expands in Baghdad in not only numerically, Jews leave the sort of traditional Jewish neighborhoods and move to mixed neighborhoods. So I'll skip that slide, but or I'll talk briefly about this slide. In Iraq, there are two kinds of nationalism. One is kind of a local patriotism that emphasizes sort of the Iraqi nation that goes back to the days of Assyria, and it's called watanian. There's also a pan Arab version that is called Kamiya, that emphasizes more the Islamic past and the Iraq's contribution to Arab history. Jews play a part in this role. So they emphasize their contribution to Iraq. Abraham, the first Iraqi, their Jewish prophets in Iraq, Nahum, Ezekiel, Jonah, the Talmud, is seen as an Iraqi creation. So their pride, they're proud of this. They're proud of being a part of Iraq, and it's reflected also in the Jewish education system. So there is, here is David mo allem. David mo Allen. He's a Jewish student in a in who lived in a neighborhood called Bab shack, and he talks about his Bible teacher, you know how, in addition to talking about Bible, he also talked about the Arab commanders and the wars of the Arab enemies. Amal Saleh, who attended the Frank ainis school, talk about how excited she was when the flag was raised in her school, and how she, you know, participated in these ceremonies. So this kind of nationalist celebrations and performances affect the Jewish schools more generally, with kind of turning to modernity, 20, 3040s, in this kind of new urban culture, the youth, the leisure practices of the youth change, and all these processes actually started in the late Ottoman period, but they expand in the 20s, 30s, 40s. Young adults go to coffee shops, to cinemas, and the cinema was a Jewish business in Baghdad, five out of six cinemas were controlled by Jews. They go to casinos sometimes, and casinos were also kind of nightclubs. There's a an article from 1924 where the journalists are shocked. It's a Jewish newspaper called Al Miss Vahan, the Jew and the and they're shocked that some teenagers established a club, and the title of the club is like, la Hayata bedoon, el billiard or billyard. There is no life without billiard. And they're like, this is what they're thinking about. They're also at the same time when they're interested in like beer and coffee and stuff like that. They're also on the bright side, they are opening book clubs. They attend bookstores. The libraries of the schools like Allianz and others become important centers. And so you have this discussion in the Jewish press that, on the one hand, there is a lot of grumbling that is also current in the Iraqi setting as well, that our young people are just going to coffee shops and casinos and other questionable institutions, by which I mean brothels. And this is very bad. But at the same time, there's also pride in like their book clubs and their performances. And this is very dominant in the coverage of plays that are performed in Jewish schools, which I've mentioned before, and the plays that are performed there. I mean, the repertoire is crazy. It can be majnun Laila, which is a very famous play by Ahmed choky. It could be Judah the Maccabee. They liked Longfellow for some reason. Hamlet was performed in the alliance. And the report about Hamlet is kind of funny, because it's an old boys school, so they're doing like only boys are performing. And then there's a report, again, in the Jewish Journal called El hased, where. They're saying, you know, kind of Ophelia was kind of Butch, and she was kind of over towering, poor Hamlet, so it wasn't such a great performance. But again, think about what it projects to the population. Now, again, this, this kind of thinking about education and what people do in the afternoon and what do they do in schools? Is part of a larger conversation in Iraq about the significance of education as creating a new man, as creating a modern man, a modern woman. And also and that education doesn't really end in school, and that and the topics are diversified. So they studied sports, they studied home act. This was part and again, this is not something that is just discussed in a Jewish context. Now, the education in general is part of a broader urban culture, where children and their parents adjust to life in Iraq. So here is an account by Shoshana Levy. She talks about her travel in Baghdad with her father. We're talking about the 1940s and they're talking she's talking about how they used to go to the cinema and to the hotels in Baghdad on the Sabbath. And so she says, since my father was religion, he didn't carry money in his pocket on the Sabbath. And therefore, when leaving the cinema, he would go to the liquor store owned by a Jew and borrow money from him for the bus fare back home. So they're watching the film, which is kosher, which is fine, they're taking the bus back home, but he is not paying because that's not fine. So people come up with their own idea of what's secular what's not secular. And parents and children spend time together in the cinema, in the hotel which she describes, which is not necessarily, which, again, is connected to the urban fabric of Baghdad in the summers, the tours would continue on the banks of the river. Along the banks were fishermen who lit fire. It was a splendid sight. The meddling smell up in the air in the background, the quiet sound of the wide river was heard. And then she says, When I learned to read Arabic, my father would stop by the signs and ask me to read them. This way, my reading of Arabic improved, so now Arabic is being taught in the schools. That's part of integration into society. And the Iraqi Jewish community was one of the most Arabized communities in the Middle East, with graduates of both Jewish schools and public schools knowing Arabic quite well, but you see or how, kind of walking around the city, reading the signs, figuring what they say is part of her education that is being done outside of the school, other means to kind of create a sense of a community where trips all over Iraq that school sponsored, and children were excited about this, especially children from the provinces. And so here is an account by Jonah Cohen, who lived in Hela. Great joy seized all the students. Going on a trip is no simple matter. Some students have never left our hometown. Cars were not yet a common sight, and much money was needed in order to leave the city and see other places, whilst poor means of most of the denizens didn't allow them to spend so much, and he, later on, talks about like how these trips divided the school because the poor kids couldn't go to Baghdad, the rich kids could.

Speaker 2 33:42

But at the same time, there was also when now Jews traveled in Baghdad, especially to Chifa, where the shrine of prophet Ezekiel was so there were religious pilgrim sites. But here they're doing something different. It's part of a national project to sort of know your country. And at the same time, these accounts of trips that you find in Jewish newspapers like Shamash and others also show class differences. So this is a Baghdadi student complaining about his trip to Kut and they're going there to play volleyball. And he's absolutely upset about that, because he thinks all these people there have diseases. How stupid we came here to play and we will return with malaria. We are so stupid. Why haven't we invited the coup team to Baghdad? How could we have not taken into account the danger of malaria? So this is not and he's actually part of a Muslim school. Now, the interest in the body, the interest in, you know, in kind of developing the body, but especially the connection to paramilitary organization, extreme loyalty to the motherland, takes a darker turn in the late 1930s and early. The 1940s where people who are influenced by fascist theories, by Nazi theories, want to implement a more tougher, militaristic, fascist inspired model that is very obvious in the in the in a movement called El Futura, which was a paramilitary organization, and Jews actually joined these movements. But the kind of darker side of all these sort of pro German sentiments, nationalist sentiments, coming to horrible expression in the first days of the month of June. In 1941 there was a there's a coup, an anti British coup that has a strong German undertones. It starts in April. It's defeated in May. But before the British actually enter Baghdad, soldiers who returned from the battlefield, their urban poor incited mobs actually attack Jewish houses, and about 180 Jews are killed. Now we have accounts from from high school students who actually attended the atmosphere of the before the foothold. So this is when the children were physically in school, but there was not any learning of any essence, a wave of nationalism took over all reason. The radio declared the victories against the British using wild exaggerations in the fourth and fifth classes in high school, students demanded to be enlisted to the army and fight the colonizers, the Blackboard were filled with letters dispatched to the authorities from the students, written in passionate style for full of revolutionary citations of national poets. And here there's something different, because here the nationalism being part of the community, playing a role in in this community is all of a sudden being perceived as something that Jewish students have no part in. Now during the Ford actually young adults. So kids in their 14, 1516, who are 14, 1617, years old actually play a very important role. They jump from roof to roof. They call on their Muslim neighbors to help them out. They wear military uniform, so they show a lot of courage. And in these events, which are horrible and devastating, we also see that actually friendships that are formed in schools, and also friendships that are formed by neighbors actually help the Jews. Because during the for who, there was a lot of Muslims that save their lives and risk their lives to save their Jewish neighbors. And so just to give you one example, there's a case, a famous case, of a family in Baghdad, where you had a Jewish household, and they were attacked. So then their Muslim neighbors call them up and they say, you know, jump to our roof, from roof to roof to roof. People could do it that time and come to our house. So the family does that, and then in the in the run, a girl breaks her leg, the mother helps her, and they leave a baby up on in their house. They found refuge in the house of their Jewish of their Muslim neighbors, and they figured, and they realized that the baby is gone. So then it's the teenagers, a Jewish kid and a Muslim kid who go, who dress up in some uniform and go to the old house and find the baby and save him. So there are a lot of stories like that, but again, these kind of kids assuming control is significant. So this is actually a part of a memoir that is not about the farud, but it gives you a sense of this kind of shared relationship. When I visited them, meaning the Muslims in their homes, they knew full well that I was proud of being Jewish and didn't touch their food. They respected this, although they would always tell me come convert, be a Muslim like us. When they came to my home, they enjoyed my mother. Name is kosher food, and I think that this kind of captures the life I'm talking about. So they're not thinking that they're all equal. I eat your food, you eat your food. The Muslim kids are thinking it's better to be Muslim. The Jewish kid is thinking it's better to be a Jew. But somehow they live together. So the fact that they recognize that it's different, that they're different from one to one another, doesn't tear them apart. Now, at the same time, the for hood and this kind of nationalism of the state turns children against against. State. They're seeing the farud. They're seeing social economic gaps, and again, the friendship with other Muslim students actually helped them out. So here is a case of a Jewish student who attends a school in the late 1930s and his teacher is kind of this fervent nationalist. His name is Akram Zweiter. The student's name is George, G or gurji, so he can figure out if he's Jewish or Christian. And then the teacher wants to figure out what he is. So he says he enters the class, this is from an autobiography, and began discussing some historical matter. Later, he asked me directly, Are you Jewish? I replied, Yes, I'm Jewish. To my surprise, a Muslim student sitting next to me stood up and says, Ustaz makohn farak been Yehudi. Were Muslim, sir. There is no different here between a Jew and the Muslim. And you find this account. So this also was kind of a slogan by the state, we're all brothers. It doesn't matter if you're Sunni or Shia or Jewish or Christian. And of course it mattered. It was a sectarian state, but here you see that it's coming from the students, and it's actually useful to protect this Jewish student, to protect Georgie from the teacher who wants to figure out who's Jewish and who's not. Now the critique of the state, the for hood, actually turned the kids to be much more radicalized. And in the 40s, you have two movements that are becoming quite strong, a minority movement, which is the Zionist movement, illegal, mostly teens joined this underground, which is about Zionist youth movements, and the movement that is becoming popular all over Iraq illegal is the Iraqi Communist Party. Now one of the interesting things about Iraq is that while it had many faults in the 1940s and in the 1950s it had excellent security services, muhabbat in Arabic. And in fact, they were so generous that they gathered all their reports about the communist in encyclopedia. So today you can sort of flip and read that confession, this confession. So for historians, it's great. It wasn't great at the time for the folks that were being spied on, obviously. And you see, there are a lot of Jewish teenagers, either people who are actually members of cells, or people who just, you know, buy the illegal newspaper of the Communist Party. So why are they joining? This is illegal. This is dangerous. Here is one explanation. Growing up, I believe, in all honesty, that I was a model Iraqi citizen and at Baghdad, the city of my birth, was my fortress. My ancestors were part of this landscape. They were born in it. They were lived in it, and they were buried for centuries. They came to the city years before the Muslims arrived and presented the city with spiritual and material assets. So this is very national, right? We were here even before the Muslims, which is a very common narrative. And there I was in the very same land, the son of the same old dynasty, trying to integrate into the new Iraqi society as any other human being. Nevertheless, my passionate desire was rejected with much contempt. I discovered that I didn't belong, my family didn't belong. My tribe that lost some of his sons in Iraq's war, which means that they served with the Ottomans, right? And they died. Did not belong. My uncle was murdered in the 1941 pogrom the forhoot, and his body was thrown into one of the pits in the neighborhood of baby Sheik. He certainly didn't belong.

Speaker 2 43:41

So these accounts show you why they are attracted to communism. Now, some of these folks actually, these teenagers learn to be communist in their own families. Some actually did, especially kids in 1718, they did crazy stuff. They were members of cell they organized workers. It's astonishing what they did in such a young age. This is a confession of Doris Shaul, who's a Jewish communist, and she's talking to the police about what happens to her. Why? Why she's a member of the Communist Party. So she says the following, I like the Communist Party, said my niece used to tell me about communism. I participated in the last demonstrations. I read about the execution of Fahad. So that's 1949 the leader of the Communist Party in Iraq I used to talk to, said at home, because my sister didn't allow me to go outside the house. So she's a communist, she's a radical, but she's most afraid of her sister. She taught me and my nephew, Fouad, who's now arrested. When talking about communism, Saeeda used to tell me about that the class of workers and peasants do much for the country, and therefore we should help them. I didn't read any books because I do not read well. Now this is a police account. She actually read well. She went to a middle school in a. Very posh neighborhood called beta win. But you know, the significant thing here is there's a bunch of kids here, teenagers, and they all teach each other about communism, and they drag each other to the movement. So a lot of times, these family patterns were quite important. Now, the other thing that happens is that schools themselves, because both in Jewish schools and in public schools, because in 1940 567, there's an upheaval in Iraq. There are major demonstrations in 1948 calling for social justice in Iraq and against British intervention in their lives. So now kids go to school and in the schools themselves, they become radicalized. So they're not learning how to be, you know, loyal citizens and whatever. No, they're learning for their classmates how to be a radical. So this is Carmel kahila, who was a student in a Jewish school, and he talks about the Jewish Communist Youth and how they pushed, I won't read the citation, but how they pushed everybody to go to these demonstrations. The principal said no, but they were all out demonstrating in the streets. Now, the most interesting thing that happens is that even their teachers sometimes incite against the state. So the teachers themselves go and sort of tell students, you know, go demonstrate. This is fine. The state is wrong, but we are together with the workers, with the peasants and so forth. So this is an account by David negal who is attending a public school in in Babi Sheik, in a neighborhood with other children, mostly Shia, and they have a teacher who comes from the North. His name is dunun Ayub, who was a communist and a short story writer. And I worked on dunun Ayub in other contexts. So he's a very interesting guy. He He's married, but he has main lovers, and he is, or at least he writes such stories that suggest this. He writes against the directors of the Ministry of Education. He is very critical of them. He calls up a bunch of fascists. So spends his time in questionable institutions, very leftist. So kind of, you know, Betsy DeVos, worst nightmare is their math teacher. And this is what his Jewish student, how he describes his teaching techniques we learn so how do they become Anti Fascist? We learned this from a series of booklets he would occasionally publish. In these books, he would criticize the Ministry of Education for allowing high schools to introduce a paramilitary education wreaking of Nazism under the influence of racist and extremist nationalist the teacher would always preach against the discrimination between the citizens, and here he is describing his teacher. Ayub was red, headed tall and towering. Sometimes he would physically confront his violent adversaries, and occasionally we would see the effects of such encounters, like a shiny eye or a swollen leap. When we saw him this way, our esteemed of him grew considerably. So, you know, if in the 1930s and in the 1920s you know, and it still continues, like in the 1940s and the 1950s sports was very important in the Jewish schools for both boys and girls, volleyball and soccer and and jumping on things and jumping so it's important. But here it's actually the destroyed body, the fact that he is, you know that he's wrestling the fact that something happened to his body that corrupted him, that makes them admire him more. And again, there's like children looking at the teacher and saying, Oh, he's been in a fight. What a great guy he is. This is another account from hella. We had a math teacher from a respected family who belonged with his brother to the communist movement. In the middle of class, students would drag him into talking about politics, and he would start lecturing to us about freedom, equality and women's liberation, until the ball, the bell finally rang. So again, you don't want to learn math. What do you do? You ask your teacher to talk about the class struggle, and you're having a nice time, but I have to say that the police was very concerned about this. This is not just fun and games. These students are also spied on. And at the same time, the a lot of teachers, a lot of schools principals, were fearful of these movements. They gave names of students to the police. So we have teachers who are radicalizing the youth. You have teachers who are very much afraid of this. You have youth radicalizing each other, and this is happening all over now. Some some Jewish children also joined the Zionist underground, which, at least in its initial stages, was more like a youth movement. And I won't get too much into the. A designist underground. But the same thing that the communists criticized, you know, the fact that women are not liberated, the fact that there is a class struggle, the fact that the Jewish society after the far hood was too timid. The it, the communists are saying this, but also the Zionist, but they're offering two different solutions. The communists are saying, you know, let's battle with the Iraqis. The Zionists are saying, This is hopeless. We have to go away. We have to leave and here is one citation. I thought that all the Jews in the world are like Baghdadi Jews, egoist and weak. I'm certain that not only I felt this way, but all baghdadi's Jews whose self honor didn't had not died yet. Then came her brethren from the land of Israel to save us from slavery and explain to us the Zionist ideal and the differences between the Jew in exile and the Jew in the land of Israel. So here you see that she's critical of her parents generation, but now she's talking about it in different terms, slavery, redemption in Israel, which you know, after 1948 will become much more important, but this is a topic for a different conversation. So just in terms of some concluding thoughts about this, you saw how, you know, processes that started in the Ottoman Empire actually created a new Jewish subject that is more interested in the Iraqi community, that has better relationship with this Christian and Muslim neighborhood. And you see that, you know, there are engaged in new politics, whether it's nationalism being part of the state teacher, the Bible teacher, telling his students about Harun Al Rashid and the great Muslim empires, but also in radical politics. And you see again, the shifting boundaries between old and young children at the age of high school in the Ottoman period, getting tools of social mobility that their parents could only dream of young adults saving their their neighbors in the for hood, or people joining the communist movement. So the fact that they were young actually didn't mean that they didn't do great things. And also they thought about their age in different ways, in in different periods. Now I also wanted to mention, and this is, again, just as an afterthought, that this story actually had a horrible ending, in the sense that between 48 and 51 the community is kind of caught between radical pan Arab nationalism and right wing chauvinism. That's probably the right aspect within Iraq and also Israel that really wants them to get to Israel, so

Speaker 2 52:46

the community becomes is forced to leave. They're displaced. They arrive to Israel without, you know, any means of support. They have to live in shacks and intense and and really, a whole generation of these children and young adults, and I won't get into it, has to now endure other lives and other experiences. But what my my talk actually thinking about this context, is that you know these kids, before they arrived to Israel, these young adults, before they lived in these tents and these shacks, had a history. So you know, when Today we look at refugees, we see them in the most horrible situation, but we don't think about their pre history, which is as important. So you know today, if you're looking at Syrian migrants or other refugees, Think also about the Jewish children of Baghdad. Thank you very much. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai