I am afraid I cannot be proud of being Iraqi as they used to teach us in school, but I must say I am very proud of your family and Violette is one of the people I wish I could have meet in this life.

All the best
Linda

BBC News Online

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13610702

BBC World Service Radio

WITNESS

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gwcw0

The Jewish Chronicle

http://www.thejc.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-features/49485/when-iraq-had-its-kristallnacht

 The Jerusalem Post

http://www.jpost.com/Features/InThespotlight/Article.aspx?id=223975

CBC Radio (Canadian National Radio)

http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2011/06/07/the-farhud/

Haaretz Newspaper

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/remembering-iraq-s-shavuot-massacre-1.366831

Professor Ezekiel Bahar of the University of Nebraska (Lincoln, USA) has written to us to say:

Your story about the expulsion of Babylonian Jewry should receive more prominance especially today when the Arab refugee problem still persists after 63 years. They refer it to as the Nekba, a “catastrophy” that they brought upon themselves when 6 Arab armies attempted to destroy the State of Israel. While every refugee problem was eventually resolved including World War Two DP’s, the Jewish refugees from Arab lands and the Indians who were forcefully expelled from Pakistan, the Arab refugees were used as pawns to attract sympathy from the uninformed and the antisemites who are doing everything to deligitimise Israel. Your recalling of how the British army was prevented from coming to the rescue of Baghdadi Jews also needs to be emphasized in order to remind everyone, especially Jews, that only Jews can be relied on saving Jews.

As a child of Baghdadi Jews born in Bombay I am familiar with your story but it needs to be retold time and time again in view of all the lies that are being spread about how good it was for Jews under Arab rule. Keep up your good work !          .

I wish to thank you so much for our copy of  Memories of Eden. I cannot tell you how moved I was by the story of Baghdad in its day and how significant a history lesson this has been for me. It has given me a greater understanding and sympathy for the struggles in present day Iraq. How sad it has changed so drastically in less than a century.

I fell in love with your Mom! Her stories evoked laughter and sadness, and were full of hope, optimism and determination. She was a remarkable woman. I especially liked her descriptions of the food and markets and found the pictures really brought your Mom’s story to life. How fortunate you are to have such a detailed personal history of your family. This is a true treasure!

Thank you for sharing her story with the world.

– J.M., Boston

May 20th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

AT A Hindu temple in Chicago, hundreds of people of Indian descent, professing many faiths, turned up from across Illinois and farther afield to hear a speaker from back home. But the meeting on May 15th was not the usual style of diaspora politics, in which a nation’s far-flung children are urged to cheer for the homeland.

The man they came to see was Jayaprakash Narayan, head of a movement called Lok Satta which opposes corruption and wants electoral reform. And the aim of his month-long American tour, which includes venues like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Google headquarters in California, is to get support from Indian-Americans for a drive to correct some of India’s failings. That sounds a lot better than passing round the hat for hardline Hindu nationalist causes, something else that occurs in the diaspora.

Bad, sleazy government, Mr Narayan says, is holding India back, crippling the country in its race with China. Having voted with their feet by leaving the country, he adds, Indians abroad should now help make their homeland worth staying in. Independent India’s early rulers had picked up statist ideas when studying in Britain; a new cohort of Indians, having thrived in economies like America’s, are nudging the country towards a freer market. This transmission of ideas, he notes, is easier in an electronic age.

All this is a long way from ethnic lobbying of the old school, in which people from country A are persuaded to use their votes to tilt their new homeland’s policies and make them less favourable to country (or regime) B, their ancient bugbear. Or else they are urged to fight old causes in an even more direct way—by sending money to extremist groups. In almost every democracy that has received migrants from troubled places, the influence (or at least, perceived influence) of groups committed to particular national causes has been a feature of political life, and of foreign-policy debates.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former American national security adviser, has controversially described the Cuban-Americans, the Armenian-Americans and the supporters of Israel as the three most effective groups in Washington, DC—while agreeing that the lobby of his native Poland “was at one time influential”. A landmark in the efforts of ethnic groups to affect American foreign policy was the arms embargo placed on Turkey in the 1970s, under the sway of Greek-Americans angry over the Turkish takeover of northern Cyprus.

Until recently at least, it seemed that the influence of ethnic constituencies was doomed to fade. For one thing, the communities on which they were based are blurring into wider societies. Gone are the days when Irish-Americans looked mainly to fellow Hibernians to socialise with; today’s Lebanese-Australian teenager is as likely to hang out with youngsters from Vietnam as with other Levantines. In America, meanwhile, support for Israel is no longer an especially Jewish cause; the largest body of pro-Israel hawks are evangelical Christians, while many Jews are critical of Israeli policies,

True, groups can hold together as long as there is one big woe to be redressed. For Armenians, the big cause is recognition that the mass killings of 1915 were genocide. Yet the power of a single issue cuts both ways: once the great cause is achieved (as with Baltic independence in 1991) or lost (as with Sri Lanka’s Tamils), the reason for hanging together can fade away.

Life in the old dog

Despite all this, the latest signs are that diasporas have life in them yet. As Mr Narayan shows, they are interacting with their homelands in more creative ways. The American Ireland Fund has raised over $250m, mainly from rich Irish-Americans, to promote charitable causes, and above all inter-community relations; a lot better than giving money for guns. A new breed of wealthy Greek-Americans is doing more interesting things than counting congressional votes: funding libraries, scholarships and university chairs in Hellenic studies in the United States, for example. And this week George Papandreou, the Greek prime minister, met successful businessmen of Hellenic origin from five countries (such as Andrew Liveris, chief executive of America’s Dow Chemical company), in the hope that they could lend their struggling homeland some badly needed pizzazz.

But perhaps the main reason why diasporas are perking up is simply the new ease of communications. With the internet and social networks, people with a common origin or concern can stay in touch and pool their efforts—with a flexibility and spontaneity that would amaze old-time lobbyists, reliant on faxes, phones and foreign-ministry briefings.

Take a diaspora as obscure as the Indians are visible. The Circassians descend from a Caucasus nation obliterated by Russia’s tsar in the mid-19th century, losing around half its 2m population. Nine out of ten Circassians now live in diaspora: survivors fled to all corners of the Ottoman empire and beyond. Only 20 years ago, they were dwindling, with moribund diaspora bodies under Soviet tutelage. The internet is rekindling the cause. Facebook and Twitter link thousands of Circassians, helping them raise the national profile. Facebook groups and Twitter feeds enabled Circassians to co-ordinate the protests held on May 21st in Berlin, Istanbul, New York, The Hague and Washington, DC, to mark the 146th anniversary of what they term a genocide. They plan to make their feelings known at Sochi—the site of the killings—during the 2014 Olympics.

Politics is just one part of the diaspora’s e-revival. Reassembling fragmented cultures is another. Circassians can find their long-lost music and dance on YouTube. Information about history and culture that was once obscure or falsified is now a click away. Online Circassian dictionaries and language courses are emerging. Internet forums can facilitate the search for a spouse.

For some diasporas, any alternative to politics is welcome. In Ukraine the diaspora is the biggest donor for the Ukrainian Catholic University, the country’s main independent provider of higher learning. Rigorous education is less glamorous than getting Ukraine into NATO or keeping the Russian bear at bay. But the gains are palpable, in contrast to the chaos and corruption of Kiev politics which faze many émigrés.

Such stories mark a big turnaround for diasporas, which over the last century have often had to wage an uphill struggle against time and geography. “One by one, all remaining links to our old life are vanishing […] Our Baghdad, my Baghdad is gone for ever.” So concludes “Memories of Eden”, Violette Shamash’s reflections on Jewish life in that city. A community which a century ago made up almost 40% of the city’s population now lives chiefly in fading memories. But the people to whom memories are dear (if only because of things heard from grandparents) can now cultivate and share them more easily.

E-communications provide some hope of keeping at bay all the forces which threaten the existence of diasporas, especially small ones: assimilation (seen in the decline of once-mighty tongues like Yiddish and Latino) and the danger of irrelevance as the world moves on. But that will only work if the will to keep old languages and cultures alive really exists. In the easy-come, easy-go ethos of the electronic age, virtual communities die as well as live.

The streets of the Jewish quarter where rioting took place over two days

WELL IN advance of the Islamic revolution in Iran, Kedourie had begin to think about political Islam and about the increasingly religious turn taken by Israeli politics – not as marginal but as central to the politics of the Middle East. There is, I think, one telltale revelation about why Kedourie came to brood on the awakening of these old demons and the list of places where nationalism had been marched out to silence democratic dissent. He drops the case of Iraq.

It was a place he never stopped thinking about because of course it was a country and culture that had made him. In a book of essays published in the 1970s called Arabic Political Memoirs, Kedourie included one essay that was as yet unpublished, perhaps because it meant more to him personally than some of the other learned investigations of policy, diplomacy and literature. It was about something in the late spring and summer of 1941 that he went through, an extraordinarily important and tragic event at the age of 15: the Baghdad Farhud of Shavuot, June 1st and 2nd, in which we’re pretty clear from later British diplomatic reports 600 Jews including small children and infants were slaughtered in cold blood in the streets of the city and in their own houses and schools and hospitals by a rioting mob. The official Iraqi government estimate was 130 to 200, but as I say, later British diplomatic reports – when it came clean about a moment in which their own hands had been dirty (or at best Pilatically clean) – reported that much higher number. We’ll never know exactly, because permission to bury the remains according to Jewish rites was denied and the bodies dumped in a mass grave. Another thousand at least were wounded in violent attacks with axes, cudgels and knives. Schools, shops and synagogues were burned.

Many escaped by fleeing over the rooftops

That was Elie Kedourie’s childhood world: the oldest, culturally richest, Jewish community in the Middle East – 140,000 in 1940.  Poor shopkeepers and artisans, traders in hides, rugs, textiles, sugar, spices; the wealthy elite and the Sassoons, Daniels and indeed Kedouries; francophone education at the lycée Alliance Israélite, anglophone in the Shamash college; 90 per cent of the Baghdad Symphony were Jews. But also of course fluently, often poetically Arabic, a world in which its social and cultural symbiosis with Arab culture was itself a denial of the obligations of nationalism, even or perhaps especially Jewish nationalism. There was Baghdad and Zionism but within the political class allegiance was divided between socialists, Zionists and Iraqi Jewish – I suppose one would say – loyalists or traditionalists. This culturally elastic community was snapped by the Farhud, itself the product of the poisonous confluence of religious fanaticism and wounded nationalism.

The ground had been prepared by the active mutual collaboration of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and the Third Reich at its triumphant apogee in 1940-41. Arabic editions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kampf had been published and circulated widely. And at the point where the British Empire at home and abroad seemed to be on its knees, a strategic design had been made: as recent books have made clear, not just for a marriage of convenience between Iraqi nationalists and Berlin foreign policy, but for a Middle Eastern final solution. Had El Alamein gone the other way, Jewish communities not just in Palestine but from the Maghreb to the Gulf would have met the same fate as their European brethren and sisters.

Hitler Youth-style paramilitia, the Mufti and Rashid Ali

In April 1941 a coup d’état overthrew the British-protected Hashemite regent and brought Rashid Ali to power as the direct ally of the Reich. Following the template of 1933, Nazi paramilitia were quickly established as organs of state. A reign of intimidation shading into outright terror was unfolding. What thwarted it was the landing of a British-Indian force at Basra and a bombing campaign which broke the seige of an RAF base at Habbaniya, defeating the Iraqi army and sending Rashid Ali fleeing to Iran.  Mysteriously though, much of the pro-Nazi Iraq regime was left in place in Baghdad itself. This was at the doing of the British ambassador, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, who thought it best to hedge bets between the remnant of Rashid Ali’s people and the returning Hashemite regent, and he was very exercised about refraining from any action that could be read as British interference with the internal workings of Iraqi politics.

Sir Kinahan Cornwallis

Cornwallis had been the director of Mark Sykes’s Arab Bureau and had a hand with Lawrence and Gertrude Bell in the making of the Iraqi constitution and the Anglo-Iraq Treaty of 1922. Gertrude Bell had become besotted with him, and his eventual failure to reciprocate is said by her biographers to be a primary reason for her suicide in 1926. ‘Hands off’ seemed to be Cornwallis’s style, for at a critical moment, in contradiction to instructions from Churchill’s government in London, Cornwallis decided to keep British troops out of Baghdad.  His fastidiousness was, as he well knew, a green light for massacre: there would be nothing between demobilised but still-armed Iraqi soliders and militia streaming back to Baghdad and the defenceless Jewish community that was suddenly ordered by one of the holdovers from the pro-Nazi regime to remain in their houses until further notice. There they were trapped as sitting ducks, sacrificed for the appearance of British neutrality.

As the enemies of the defeated Rashid Ali, the Jews were targeted for two days of bloody mayhem. Visitors to the embassy, who drank port in Cornwallis’s mahogany-panelled, air-conditioned library, heard him allude euphemistically to a couple of days of trouble in which some Jews had been set upon.  In two dilatory dispatches to Whitehall a month and a half after the murders he made similarly vague remarks. Despite a shocking account forwarded to London by the Jewish Agency, no investigation of the perpetrators was ever called for by the British, so none was carried out, nor anyone ever prosecuted or punished. The ambassador claimed Jews were reluctant to come forward as witnesses – this supposition, Kedourie says bluntly, ‘was quite false’.  Shmuel Moreh has written that the memory of the Farhud forever haunted Kedourie and his generation of Iraqi Jews.

Elie Kedourie and Naim Kattan were the first to do careful scholarly work on the slaughter, as far as I can see. But of course it was the unconscionable betrayal by the British that made the most indelible impression. In his most acid shorthand, Kedourie writes incredulously that Cornwallis put the blame on what happened to the Jews to the provocation of the Balfour Declaration. On Cornwallis’s failure to give anything but the most cursory reference to the Farhud in his dispatches, Kedourie wrote witheringly that, ‘after all, even in the bloodstained history of Iraq, a few hundred murders in the capital city still constituted in those days a noteworthy happening. But readers of dispatches, particularly in wartime, no doubt are busy men.’

Tony Rocca, in an appendix to Violette Shamash’s memoir of Jewish Baghdad, says that the Jews of Baghdad were mostly anti- or at least non-Zionists before the Farhud and that afterwards they were pretty much all Zionists. Both statements, I think, may be over-simplifications. But the butchery was certainly the beginning of the end of  Baghdad Jewry in its ancient form. Under pressure of intimidation and the threat of repetitions at the time and after the foundation of Israel, indicated by exemplary hangings, 104,000 left in 1950, mostly for Israel but also for the Netherlands and Britain. Yellow identity cards for the remainder followed, and with the advent of the Ba’ath party, torture and public hanging of 14 Jews accused of being spies occurred, with half a million parading past the swinging corpses shouting, of course, ‘Death to the Jews’.

The disruption of Kedourie’s community and the disingenuous diplomatic policy in the hands of Cornwallis ­– not in the hands of Wavell or Churchill  ­–  made the case for Israel as the asylum of last resort. Kedourie understood Zionism and accepted, though never warmly, the necessity of Israel, but the Farhud memory and its aftermath never diluted his pessimism about nationalist solutions. Even less, I think, did he subscribe to the grand master narrative of Jewish history in which a Jewish state was the logical consumation of an unbroken national religious story, returned to the place where a collective identity had been formed, and most unanswerably in the view of that narrative the only response to an interminable non-stop story of pain and persecution. Kedourie stayed a pragmatist: whatever enormity had been comitted in the Farhud – Nazi plot, British expediency or Arab brutality – had been, he thought, the product of specific circumstances of time and place.

Kedourie, a little in the manner of AJP Taylor (one would not normally bracket those two names together) did specialise in the analysis of unintended consequences, especially those generated by nationalist simplicities that, through the victims of their displacements, sowed the dragon’s teeth of further, if not perpetual, conflict.

The artist Lorna Selim painted this picture of a typical Baghdadi qasr — “castle” or “palace” — from sketches she made in the late Sixties when the Iraqis were busy tearing down their architectural heritage and beautiful old homes such as this were coming under the wrecker’s ball.

Lorna contacted us after  reading “Memories” and said, from Violette’s description of her old family home and the map we produced, she was sure that this was indeed the building in question. We were so excited by her  news we tried very hard to discover if it was the actual qasr. Sadly, of course, Violette is no longer with us but we have shown it around to the very few remaining members of the Shamash family who might be able to recognize it.

Well, the jury’s still out. We have had two negative replies and a few “don’t knows”; but so far not one positive ID.  We very much wanted to include it in the new American edition of “Memories” which is being published in the United States this month (see previous post), but because of the uncertainty had to leave it out.

It’s too good not to share, though, so here it is. Let’s settle for calling it “a typical qasr of the day.”

If anyone can help identify it PLEASE let us know!

Mira and I are proud to announce the publication of a new edition of “Memories of Eden” for the US market, later this month, by Northwestern University Press. We have been collaborating with the Press, based in Evanston, Illinois, for nearly two years and are pleased to say this new version contains several new photographs as well as enhancements to those in our first edition. Some readers have added to our knowledge of the period and we have profited from their input by including the points they have raised.

The new cover is very different from our first effort, and the Press has done a great job of the entire jacket design. It is available for pre-order from Amazon.com now; please watch out for it in a bookstore near you in the States very soon.

Cover notes

According to legend, the Garden of Eden was located in Mesopotamia, today’s Iraq, and for millennia the Jews resided peacefully there.  Memories of Eden: A Journey Through Jewish Baghdad reconstructs the final years of the oldest Jewish community in the world, using the letters and other writings that Violette Shamash (1912-2006) sent to her daughter Mira Rocca and son-in-law, the British journalist Tony Rocca, over a period of twenty years.  Collected and edited by the Roccas, the writings compose a deeply textured memoir—personal, yet revealing of the complex dynamics of the Middle East.

Shamash creates an exquisitely detailed portrait of like in the City of Caliphs, beginning near the end of Ottoman rule in 1917 and running through the British Mandate, the emergence of an independent Iraq in 1932, and the start of dictatorial government.  Shamash clearly loved the world in which she grew up but is altogether honest in her depiction of the problems facing Baghdad’s diverse population.  That world was shattered by the Farhud, a brutal massacre of hundreds of Iraqi Jews over two days in 1941, which Shamash witnessed firsthand.  An event that has received very slight historical coverage, the Farhud is further described and placed in context by Tony Rocca in his afterword.

VIOLETTE SHAMASH (1912-2006) was born in Baghdad. In 1941, following the Farhud, she and her husband and their two children fled Iraq for India. They subsequently lived in Palestine, Cyprus, and Israel before settling in London in 1964. Violette began writing what would become her memoir in the 1980s.

MIRA ROCCA, Violette’s daughter, worked in the U.S. Embassy in London and Tel Aviv, and in the travel industry before she and her husband, Tony, became hoteliers and winemakers in Tuscany.

TONY ROCCA, a journalist, spent much of his career in London writing for the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times, and in New York as U.S. correspondent for the Mail. His freelance work has appeared in a variety of U.K. and U.S. publications, and he is the author of a memoir, Catching Fireflies.

For readers outside the United States the original edition is still available from all good book retailers throughout the United Kingdom, price £14.99, and online at www.amazon.co.uk

READ Amazon’s customer reviews of the book HERE.

Our visit to the UK coincided with the reopening of the Jewish Museum in London after major refurbishment. We’re currently in discussion with the museum’s directors about holding a similar event there later this year, possibly in the autumn. Which leads us to say: if any other university, college, club, group, in Britain or elsewhere* would like us to give a talk on the same basis, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

*We are hoping to spend several weeks in the USA in the Fall, most likely from mid-October to late November.

Thanks so much for your beautiful book,
Take care,
Oury Marciano

http://www.kitabat.com/i57185.htm

Baghdad: Oranges, Lemons, Almonds and an Apple Poisoned by Oil

By Hussein Abdul Zahra Majeed*

Iraqi Violette Shamash shows us in her marvellous book ‘Memories of Eden’ how people and their lives disappear like traces of chalk wiped off a blackboard.

Life in a rich secure country like Iraq does not allow us to feel the way history disappears in another country. Violette here speaks of her family, Iraq’s Jews and of the way in which they lived in the 40’s during the last century.

But past and future are present everywhere on this earth, wherever people eat, drink and sleep and demand freedom! That is the calamity to which history has no solution. Wherever we go, climbing mountains, passing through valleys or deserts, there is bound to be a trace that says: yesterday they were here, but today nothing but the wind.  Here, we require a live eyewitness who says I lived and saw. The witness here is Mrs Violette Shamash who wrote this marvellous book before passing away three years ago.

Her daughter Mira says that in her last days, under the influence of anaesthetic, she repeated the name of Baghdad on her death bed, and referred to the house there in Karrada: the Castle! the Castle! A castle in the Karrada and the Sind, of which nothing remains now but the gates of the concrete Green Zone. The daughter adds that immediately after the fall [of Baghdad] in 2003, her mother told her that it was time to go there, to Baghdad, home! She wanted to go to Baghdad despite being an old lady of 94, to return to tell her daughter about the traces of what she found there, of what remains of the good people of Agd Al Nasarah who are now in a state of poverty.

In 1998, the Americans wanted to give us some manners in their Hollywood style, so they poured tons of bombs on Baghdad. We all witnessed this spectacle. But we were surprised by Mr Nasir Shama on the air dedicating his musical composition to the children of Palestine. The false myth of Arab glory.

Man is amazing, a creature unknown before today. While Mrs Shamash watches Saddam Hussain’s statue collapsing in Ferdows Square initially, all she says to her daughter is that she was born 25 years before him, before the Iraqi state was created, before the arrival of the first king Ghazi, the British army with its victorious parade in what was then the main square, Agd Al Yahood, then referred to as Piccadilly, and that in the name of democracy as well. History repeats itself. As for people, Baghdad’s roofs, sunrise discourse, all that is lost, and will not be resurrected for us other than through the pen of the late Violette Shamash, that is what has happened.

Let names live, let us call you the Mother of Baghdad, of castles, of sunrises, of crowns and witnesses. The eternal daughter of Baghdad.

In 1941, the population of Baghdad was one million, of which 300, 000 were jews, 40% of the population. It is the year of the Farhud, the year in which the English Sir Kinahan Cornwallis refused to intervene to bring order to the stricken city, and allowed people to be murdered in the street. Shamash heard the wailing of the widows at night, while her house was guarded by a group of Baghdad’s principled and upright young men.

After exactly half a century, in 1991, the American General Schwartzcoff  refuses to intervene to bring security to wounded Iraq. It is no more than 12 years before he enters again in the name of democracy.

Thank you for the marvellous book.

*Professor, College of Arts, University of Basra, Iraq.