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Last Days in Babylon History records that the Chaldean king, Nebuchadnezzar, after conquering Jerusalem in 597 BCE, deported 100,000 Jews to his capital, Babylon. Frenziedly soul-searching, the Jews attributed their "exile" to Yahweh’s anger at their iniquity. Desperate to regain divine favour, they modified their religion from one centred on judgement to one centred on salvation. "Absolution" arrived in 538 BCE when Cyrus II of Persia conquered Babylon and allowed the Jews to return home. But the majority chose not to leave. By then, the new generation had assimilated; and, since the concept of a salvific religion sanctioned worship anywhere, it declined to uproot itself. The Jewish presence in Mesopotamia continued for two and a half millennia until its final expulsion in the 1950s. Marina Benjamin, a granddaughter of one of these last Iraqi Jews, and haunted by her people’s history, visited war-ravaged Baghdad in 2004 in search of her roots. Last Days in Babylon is a reconstruction of the life of Benjamin’s grandmother, Regina, who, valiant, far-sighted and conscious of the spread of anti-Semitism in her country, abandoned homeland and her privileged life to ensure the survival of her family. But this book is much more than a biography. Benjamin provides an impassioned account of a multi-ethnic society in which the mores— particularly the restraints on women—were homogeneous, despite each community’s elected insularity. She also presents an incisive expos`E9 of the 20th-century political vicissitudes which transformed the Middle East from a Pandora’s box kept somewhat shut by the Ottomans to the present amphitheatre of unrelenting religious, nationalistic and xenophobic conflicts. Unlike those Jews of Europe who, after the French revolution, gradually attained equality and a begrudged acceptance, the Jews of Mesopotamia enjoyed a comparatively clement life. They survived, despite instances of turbulence, Roman and Hellenic times and the various Islamic epochs from the Abbasids to the Ottomans. But the modern era brought modern ills. With the demise of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the then superpowers, France and Britain, divided the Middle East, arbitrarily creating new countries. As ever, colonisation and the pursuit of spheres of influence took no account of people’s aspirations. Under the aegis of a Britain quite impervious to burgeoning Arab nationalism, the present-day Iraq came into being. At first, the Iraqi Jews, better educated and proficient in languages, prospered; they were needed for administrative duties by the ubiquitous British "advisers" to King Faisal. Though this enhancement consolidated the Jews’ patriotic feelings for an independent Iraq, it created resentment among the Muslim population. World War II, accentuating the flow of Nazi propaganda and the vociferous call of Zionism from Palestine, fuelled this resentment. Much as the Jews proclaimed themselves citizens of a nation where what mattered was being Iraqi, not Jewish, Christian or Muslim, much as many repudiated Zionism as another colonial scheme and embraced communism as the only system that would grant full equality, animosity escalated to violence. For two days in June 1941, while British and Transjordan troops approached Baghdad, a farhud ("total breakdown of order") killed some 200 Jews and injured several hundred. The Allies’ victory and the creation of Israel in 1948, following the partitioning of Palestine, further fomented Arab nationalism. Iraq, joining other Arab armies, went to war against Israel. Defeat sealed the fate of the Iraqi Jews; labelled wholesale as Zionist agents, they were soon disenfranchised. Some Western countries coerced the Iraqi government into allowing the Jews to leave. Today only 12 remain of a people that had formed the largest ethnic group in Baghdad in 1932. Some went to Iran, India and Western countries; most ended up in Israeli absorption camps. Israel did not receive their fellow-Jews with open arms. Refugees from a Muslim country, they were seen, despite their rich culture, as inferior to Israelis of European origin. This is a history unknown even to most Jews. Benjamin narrates it fluently and passionately. Naim Kattan, one of those Iraqi Jews, now lives in Canada. Farewell, Babylon (Souvenir, A 312.99) tells of the last years in Baghdad, when Jews awaited the possibility - and the permits - to leave Iraq. His reissued memoir, while evoking the fear and confusion, also gives a poignant account of a young man seeking insight into the mysteries—and joys — of life in an inhibitory society. — By arrangement with The Independent
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