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Changing the Program: The AIU Girls' School in Baghdad After WWI
Abstract
The Alliance Israelite Universelle (AIU), a French-Jewish philanthropic organization founded in 1860 and dedicated to spreading secular education to Jews around the world and especially the Middle East, opened its first school for girls, which later came to be known as the Laura Kadoorie School, in Baghdad in 1895. Although the school thrived over the next two decades it was forced to close shortly after the outbreak of World War I and was not to re-open until the British occupied Baghdad toward the end of the war. This paper seeks to analyze how the school’s headmistresses, teachers, and students adapted to the shift from Ottoman to British rule and then to quasi-independent Hashemite rule during the inter-war period in Iraq. The main question this paper aims to answer is, how did a school/organization with the initial goal of helping Baghdadi Jews better integrate into and contribute to Ottoman society adapt to the changes brought about by British colonialism in the late 1910s and early 1920s and the rise of Iraqi Arab nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s? This paper is based almost solely on the letters of the female headmistresses and teachers of the Laura Kadoorie School from 1918-1939. Although there has been a good amount of research in recent years on the history and writings of Iraqi Jews in Hashemite Iraq, this paper is the first to both utilize the writings of the female teachers of the Laura Kadoorie School and to analyze the school’s activities during the inter-war period. Thus, this paper makes original contributions to the fields of Iraqi history, Iraqi-Jewish history, and both Jewish women’s history and Middle East women’s history.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Iraq
Sub Area
Gender/Women's Studies