Chronicle of a lost community

Memoir: The great and enduring city of Baghdad has many faces

Memoir:The great and enduring city of Baghdad has many faces. When I first visited it, one month after 9/11, people there were ill and exhausted after 11 years of UN sanctions. Most were fearful of what was coming next.

By the time Marina Benjamin arrived, in 2004, US tanks had rolled through the historic streets, Saddam Hussein had been captured and, we were told, a new dawn was breaking - but not for the people Benjamin had come to find.

Her book, Last Days in Babylon, is the story of the Jews of Baghdad and how they were marched in chains 900km across the desert from Judah to be used by Nebuchadnezzar as craftsmen and artists in the building of that other great city Babylon. Over the centuries, some of them drifted northwards to Baghdad to make their home there.

Benjamin takes as her starting point her indomitable grandmother, Regina, who came from a well-established Jewish-Baghdadi family, the Sehayeks. Ezra Sehayek, Regina's father, was a money changer and like many traders, in goods as well as money, he had an important network of contacts stretching from Manchester to Calcutta, the modern incarnation of the old Silk Road with Baghdad straddling one of its liveliest, most commercial intersections.

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By the turn of the last century, there were 40,000 Jews in Baghdad making up one-third of the city's population. Though a minority group, they were an important part of Baghdad life: " . . . Jews were so thoroughly integrated into Baghdadi society," writes Benjamin, "eating the same food, wearing the same clothes and cherishing the same local customs as their Muslim peers that often the only way to tell the Jews apart was their headgear: they wore the red fez, while Muslims favoured the turban".

THE OTTOMANS RULED by nepotism and from a distance, using the powerful Sunni minority to hold the fort in Baghdad. Thus it was on the second rung of the ladder that tensions arose when Jews found themselves competing commercially with the marginalised Shia majority. The latter were no match, however, for the Jews with their overseas connections and their fluency in French and English. The final humiliation for the Shia was that shops and businesses closed down on Saturdays and not on Fridays, the Muslim day of rest.

There were some rules in place underlining the idea that Jews were not full citizens - the wearing of the fez was a legal requirement - and it wasn't until 1908 when the modernising Young Turks swept to power that Jewish people were finally rated on a par with Muslims and six of their group were elected to represent Baghdad at the Istanbul parliament.

Meanwhile, Regina attended a good school that provided her with an excellent secular education. There were parties on the banks of the Tigris, her mother got out the best china for tea parties and when Regina was 23, a sensible marriage was arranged for her.

In the middle of this ordered existence, a strange thing happened: large rafts, made of rushes and inflated goatskins which previously had brought grain downriver to the city now carried arms and ammunition: the 1914-1918 war had arrived, to be followed by the British Mandate, coups and counter coups, political assassinations and reprisals. And all the time, the Jewish community was faced with the same imponderable question: where did their loyalties lie? Were they Iraqis first or Jews first? To what extent did they have to support these wars not of their making?

CLEARLY, IRAQ WAS home and Baghdad its beating heart but though few Jewish people wanted to leave, leave they did, in their thousands, when attitudes hardened following the setting up of the state of Israel and Iraqi Arab and Iraqi Jew became polarised. Regina left with her family in 1950 and made her way to England via Calcutta. By the time Benjamin visited Baghdad just over 50 years later, there were only 14 Jews left.

Last Days in Babylon is the story of a family but it is also Iraq's story, a book to be read by anyone wanting to piece together the splintered and complex history of that part of the world.

London is now Benjamin's home and though she underlines the disruptive and avaricious nature of Britain's presence in Iraq, she is perhaps a little too kind to people such as Gertrude Bell, who worked for British intelligence behind the screen of her archaeological work and whose country pillaged the treasures of Babylon with the best of them.

But above all, this is a lament not only for the Jews of Baghdad but also for their one-time Arab friends and neighbours, who are still paying the price, for it was here, by the waters of Babylon, that the exiled Jews wept and here that the prophetic curse laid on the land has taken root with a terrible vengeance: "Fair Babylon, you destroyer," reads Psalm 137, "happy those who pay us back the evil you have done us".

Mary Russell is a writer with a special interest in west Asia

Last Days in Babylon: The Story of the Jews of Baghdad By Marina Benjamin Bloomsbury, 324pp. £14.99