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After the Exodus: The History of Iraq's Last Jews
Abstract
In summer 2001, Saddam Hussein ordered the Baʿth regime’s security services to identify all Jews remaining in Iraq, along with those born Jewish who converted to Islam and Christianity. The National Security Council, in conjunction with the Presidential Diwan, formed a committee with representatives from the Baʿth Party and all of the major security services in order to coordinate the nation-wide effort. The subsequent investigation documented 39 Jews, 36 of whom lived in Baghdad. The other three lived in Basra, Wasit, and Dohuk. The final report also identified nearly 220 individuals who were born Jewish but converted to Islam, along with three converts to Christianity. Most concerning for the regime were the roughly 140 converts living in northern Iraq, de facto independent since the end of the 1990-1991 Gulf War. The security services reported that converts were “apostatizing” from Islam and reverting to Judaism. Furthermore, some were traveling between northern Iraq and Israel. The situation highlighted the regime’s loss of control over northern Iraq, security concerns with Iraq’s Kurdish rebel groups and Iranian ties, along with longstanding Baʿthist suspicion toward Israeli convert intervention and Zionist conspiracies in Iraq. The fact that the converts in question were Kurds only added to the regime’s fear and paranoia. This paper uses the aforementioned episode and the detailed documentation produced by it as the point of departure in studying the last members of Iraq’s historic Jewish community, a topic that received little attention beyond the 1970s and resurfaced briefly in the context of the 2003 War. Despite Iraqi Jews comprising a quarter of Baghdad’s population only half a century earlier, the majority of whom then fled due to persecution between the early 1950s and early 1970s, the Baʿth regime continued to be concerned with Iraq’s 39 remaining Jews and 220 converts from Judaism at the turn of the millennium. In addition to the Baʿth’s internal records captured as a result of the 2003 Iraq War, this paper draws on news articles, documentaries, British government documents, United States government documents—some officially declassified and others obtained by Wikileaks—and memoirs by Iraqi Jews. It will shed light on one of the final chapters in the history of one of the world’s oldest Jewish communities. The paper draws on a number of collections of Baʿth regime documents, although it will be the first work to extensively utilize the Iraq Memory Foundation’s Jewish Presence in Iraq Dataset.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Iraq
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries