Fleeing Arab Lands

The story of Jews forced to flee Arab lands is not widely known. Before the State of Israel was declared, and especially afterward, with each succeeding war, life became increasingly unbearable for Jews in Arab lands where they had lived for centuries and even millennia.

The story of one of them, Naim Kattan of Iraq, is emblematic. His memoir, “Adieu Babylone” (translated as “Farewell Babylon”), is more revealing than any historical account or recitation of numbers.

Kattan was born in Baghdad in 1928 and spent his formative years in Iraq. He left Iraq for Paris in 1947 and later Montreal in 1954, where he established himself as a writer and worked for the Canada Council for the Arts. He died in 2021 at the age of 92 and is buried in Montreal.

The main character in the memoir is never named, to illustrate that all of the things that Kattan observed and suffered were not just about himself but about a whole generation of Jews. The narrative is personal and detailed, but serves as an example beyond his own experience.

It is important to understand that Kattan never sees himself as anything but an Iraqi nationalist. He is proud of the Arabic language and Iraqi culture. That makes his story all the more tragic because he is rejected by the nation that he loves.

It is important to understand that Kattan never sees himself as anything but an Iraqi nationalist. He is proud of the Arabic language and Iraqi culture.

He chooses to tell the story about the time when he is an adolescent on the threshold of adulthood, just as his nation is at a critical point in its history, transitioning from a colony to an independent state. Both he and his country will be changed forever.

The central event and focus of the memoir is the Farhoud (pogrom). After the Second World War, there was a brief vacuum of power as the Germans left and before the British arrived. It lasted two days and gave proof to the Jews that, after two thousand years in Babylon/Iraq, they were strangers in their own land.

The poignancy of the memoir lies in the details of the Farhoud. It has an eerie resemblance to what we know of pogroms in eastern Europe. The fear, sense of loss, and pain are palpable.

Jews in Iraq had understood and accepted their status as second-class citizens—Jews had access to jobs only when there were no qualified Muslims. The word “frontière” (border) appears repeatedly to indicate the invisible line between Jews and Muslims, the separation and subservience of Iraq’s Jewish citizens. However, nothing could have prepared them for the ferocity of the Farhoud.

The memoir is most effective in conveying a sense of betrayal. As a young man, Kattan believed that the end of the German occupation and the struggle for independence from the new ruler, the British, would bring about a period when Jews and Muslims would be partners in building a new society. That illusion was dashed. He felt not only robbed of his homeland, his language and his culture, but also of his youthful enthusiasm and idealism. His dream of a new social order in which all faiths would live in harmony ended in a nightmare:

“All it took was one night for thirteen centuries of lives lived together as good neighbours to crumble like scaffolding of mud and sand.” The looting, rape and murder were savage.

He recalls the effect it had on the Jewish community: “For centuries and centuries, their feelings remained buried in the infinity of their desert, but from the depths they arose and overwhelmed us. It had only been a long truce that had reached its end. Nothing would ever belong to us anymore, including our lives” (my translations).

Kattan devotes a portion of the memoir to the status of women as a parallel to the Jews, in order to illustrate that power, other than in the hands of the male, Muslim elites, was an illusion. The point Kattan makes is that the integrity of society is undermined not just by its treatment of Jews, but also by its treatment of women. The greater fundamental issue of social justice is at the heart of Kattan’s critique of his country.

Although the memoir was published in 1975, it is an important reminder for Jews, Christians and Muslims today that dislocation and suffering were not only an eastern European or a Palestinian experience, but directly impacted Sephardim. According to the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 850,000 Jews were forced out of Arab nations and Iran. Jews in the West were unaware of this disaster but, as Aldous Huxley wrote, “facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” We have a duty to include them in the historical account and never to abandon them again.

Dr. Paul Socken is Distinguished Professor Emeritus and founder of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Waterloo.