Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew

Avi Shlaim is an Israeli of Iraqi descent who became a British historian. His book is an autobiography focusing on the history of his family in Iraq, their immigration to Israel along with most of Iraq’s Jews, and the miracle that he experienced when his mother sent him to study in Britain following his academic failure in Israel. It describes how a dreamy and melancholic boy became a successful young man who made his way to higher education and a teaching position at a British university. The book begins at the start of the twentieth century and ends with Avi’s graduation and his acceptance to Cambridge University. The introduction and epilogue deal with the Arab-Jewish identity he has adopted. He is harshly critical of the State of Israel, which he accuses of destroying the lives of Mizrahi Jews, just as the establishment of the Jewish state destroyed the coexistence between Jews and Arabs. I will return to this issue towards the end of the review.The most interesting part of the book is the first section which describes the life of a wealthy Jewish family in Iraq during the period of indirect British rule of the country, from 1920 until the end of World War II. The main source is the stories told by Avi’s mother who married his father in 1942 when she was 17 and he was 38. The marriage was forced upon the young woman by her parents who saw an older man with wealth who had fallen in love with their beautiful daughter. For them, he was financially ideal and would serve as protection against undesirable suitors, both in terms of class and Jewish identity. It is important to remember that in the 1930s Avi’s mother was still a child or at best a young woman, and her memories—which are particularly detailed—reflect a reality as she perceived it, rather than the memory and impressions of an adult. The life of wealth, in a villa with ten rooms and three bathrooms, lasted from 1942 until 1950, when she left Iraq with her children—first arriving in Cyprus and later, in 1951 or 1952, arriving in Israel. The Farhud, an anti-Jewish pogrom in 1940, is described in the book based on historical sources, not from his mother’s memories. As a young girl at the time, she found refuge in the American embassy and flirted with one of the employees there, who she recounts offered her a passport and the chance to immigrate to America. She understood from the man that she would not have servants, drivers, caregivers, and other service staff in America and therefore she refused.Shlaim describes at length the high status of his family, which was manifested in a life of endless luxury, without having to work and without any real purpose in life. The various servants they had were Jews from less affluent families. The sense of class was very important to Avi’s mother. For example, Armenian caregivers were considered superior to Jewish ones, and only her husband’s insistence on Jewish caregivers prevented her from having this coveted status symbol. When his mother describes the early days of the Zionist movement in Iraq—of which she apparently knew little—she links the movement to the lower classes, which were the source of both communists and Zionists. The branch of the family that chose to immigrate to Israel was, of course, portrayed by her as being the lower-class part of the family. As an adult and a distinguished academic in Britain, Shlaim first learned about the lives of lower-class Jews in Iraq, which contrasted with his family’s situation, when he read the works of Sami Michael: Equal and More Equal and Victoria. Avi Shlaim also enjoys associating with the upper class. When he first meets a girl who opens the door for him to upper-class British-Jewish society, he makes sure to emphasize that she is a member of the upper class.One of Avi Shlaim’s main critiques of Zionism is that it sought to establish a society in Israel based on European culture. In his view, this is tantamount to the erasure of Mizrahi Jews’ identity and their rich culture. He recounts that in elementary school in Israel, history lessons focused solely on the lachrymose history of European Jewry and the history of Zionism—a European movement—while ignoring the Jews of the Near East. Avi Shlaim is only five years younger than me, and I too studied history in elementary school during those years. Most of the curriculum was devoted to the history of Greece and Rome, and we learned very little Jewish history. It feels as if Shlaim is echoing the later complaints of members of the Mizrahi Rainbow Coalition on this issue and did not experience this insult firsthand.His criticism goes beyond simply the curriculum of the education system to touch on a broader question: Why did the Zionists want to establish a European-style state rather than an Eastern one? But then, one can ask, why did he choose to live in a European country rather than a Middle Eastern one? Why was his mother so insistent on keeping her British passport and registering her three children on it? Shlaim’s idealized portrayal of Jewish-Mizrahi culture does not appear to be based on an intimate knowledge of that culture, and certainly not on any understanding of it during his family’s time in Iraq. Although the family was wealthy and pampered, their home does not appear to have contained a single book. As Shlaim himself admits in the book, he didn’t grow up in a family that valued intellectual pursuits.Despite their immense wealth, his father did not know any language other than Arabic, began working at the age of 14, and never received an education. His mother, who was apparently more talented, knew both French and English in addition to Arabic, but it is doubtful whether she ever read a book in her life. The daughters were not considered worthy of an education beyond elementary school, and only Avi, who was the family’s only son and its pride and joy, enjoyed such privileges. This included the extended family’s efforts to send him from Israel to Britain to study, just as other prominent families in Iraq, both Jewish and Arab, sent their children abroad to absorb European culture and worldly knowledge.The name 'Shlaim' is not a Mizrahi name. Later on, someone contacted him who had found German Jews in genetic databases with the surname 'Shlaim,' and indeed the name has a German ring to it. He visited the cemetery of the German branch of the Shlaim family and found that some family members had perished in the Holocaust. This was the first time he experienced the Holocaust as something personal, rather than just a sad event that happened to Ashkenazi Jews. It made him better understand the urgency felt by Jews after World War II to establish a state. But for him, it did not justify the Nakba.1Avi Shlaim was five years old when his family left Iraq. His memories of childhood are vague, as are the memories of any five-year-old. His family did not belong to the majority of Iraqi families who landed in Lod in three-piece suits, were placed in transit camps, and were forced to work in makeshift jobs. His family arrived in Israel with money, diamonds, and Persian carpets, which his mother and father managed to smuggle out of Iraq by bribing the right people. The Zionist branch of the family welcomed them, and they joined many other Iraqi immigrants living in Ramat Gan. Soon enough, they bought an apartment. Though not as luxurious as the one in Baghdad, it was better than most Israeli homes at the time.The shock of immigration mainly affected his father. He was completely disoriented within the new society. Over 50 years old, he spoke only Arabic and had no particular skills. He struggled to start a business and was effectively unemployed for the rest of his life. As is often the case in immigrant communities, it was the mother who adjusted with greater success. She found a job as a telephone operator at the Ramat Gan municipality, showed excellent social skills, and developed connections with the daughter of Mayor Karinezi, who helped her in difficult times.Avi went to kindergarten, but during the first year, he refused to speak until he was confident in the new language. I’m not sure how accurate this story is, but it’s reasonable to assume that his first exposure to a group of children—and Israeli children aren’t exactly gentle and sensitive—made him feel insecure and as a result he didn’t speak much. In elementary school, he was completely unmotivated in his studies, sitting in class and daydreaming most of the time. His academic achievements were borderline at best and poor at worst. Somehow, he completed elementary school and passed the placement exam used to assess students for high school. His resourceful mother went to the mayor, and he managed to get the boy—a potential genius—into the prestigious Dvir High School. He didn’t study there either, and at the end of the year, he was required to take additional exams as a condition for moving up to Grade 12.Why was Avi Shlaim such a daydreamer who didn’t make much effort in his studies? According to him, as an Iraqi child and a new immigrant, he felt inferior. The contrast between Ashkenazi and Iraqi paralyzed him and stunted his intellectual development. But is that really the case? It turns out that he made Ashkenazi friends in high school without any problem. In the neighborhood, he rode a new bicycle he received for his Bar Mitzvah from his uncle in England and proudly shared it with other children. Indeed, every new immigrant feels foreign and disconnected. But in Ramat Gan, there were many Iraqi children, and the sense of inferiority that he claims caused his laziness throughout his school years in Israel doesn’t seem very likely, given the supportive environment at home and elsewhere.The Iraqi community in Israel is considered to be a success story: its sons and daughters integrated into academia, the economy, and commerce, and they also established moshavim and kibbutzim. They were hardworking and talented and, on average, more successful than members of other communities. And intermarriage was fairly common between Iraqis and Ashkenazim. The image of a miserable child, disconnected from his surroundings due to feelings of inferiority because he was Iraqi, is unconvincing. It’s possible that the cramped living conditions, the lack of personal space, and the constant noise at home led him to seek tranquility at school. In any case, as a student in Israel, he was a failure.His mother did not give up: she sent him to study in Britain. His uncle, who lived in Scotland and owed money to his grandmother, would cover the costs of the boy’s education. Avi’s journey from Haifa to Britain is a story of resourcefulness for a 16-year-old boy who manages to navigate the entire trip on his own, thus demonstrating practical wisdom and intelligence. He moves in with a Jewish family as a paying lodger. The head of the family is the principal of a Jewish school who accepts him into the twelfth grade. For the first time in his life, he has his own room. Over the next three years, he dedicates most of his time to studying and achieves what he couldn’t in Israel. His crowning achievement: he is accepted to Cambridge University and meets a charming girl who introduces him to British-Jewish society. From there, his path is laid out before him.Why in Britain, where he arrived with minimal knowledge of English, did he not suffer from feelings of inferiority, even though his surroundings are entirely Ashkenazi? When he completes his studies, he returns to Israel to serve in the IDF, and on the eve of the Six-Day War, he registers at the embassy as a candidate to return to the country. At this stage of his life, his identity is Israeli.We don’t know what led him to adopt a new identity, which he calls Arab-Jewish. Perhaps he read the works of Yehuda Shenhav or Ella Shohat. Perhaps the settlements, the prolonged occupation of the West Bank, and the overall treatment of the Palestinians caused him to distance himself from his Israeli identity, which is not without its flaws. However, a person doesn’t change his identity like he changes his clothes. His current identity, to which he dedicates significant space in the book, defines him as an Arab Jew—not an Iraqi Jew and not a Jewish Arab. Rather, his national identity is Arab while his religious identity is Jewish. He is not the first to come up with this identity, which denies the idea of Jews as a nation and endows them with only a religious identity. In fact, this is the definition adopted by all Jews who seek to assimilate and to adopt the identity of the people among whom they live. According to Shlaim, the definition of Jews as a nation striving for national-territorial self-fulfillment is the source of the disaster that befell Mizrahi Jews, whom he portrays as victims of Zionism along with the Palestinians. But is this a genuine identity or merely an intellectual construct?Shlaim is not fluent in Arabic. When he would meet with his father who, as mentioned, only spoke Arabic, they had difficulty communicating. His acquaintance with Iraqi Jews from lower socioeconomic backgrounds only took place in Israel. The literature he read about Iraqi Jews was Hebrew literature. How, then, does his Arab-Jewish identity manifest itself, other than in solidarity with the Palestinians?Shlaim dreams of Jewish-Arab coexistence, similar to what existed in Iraq before the arrival of the Zionists who he claims ruined everything. This is nostalgia for an invented past. Relations between Jews and Muslims in Muslim-ruled countries were never truly equal. The Jews were a tolerated minority, known as “dhimmi” who paid a tax and were granted protection, as long as there was stable imperial rule—though not when there was Arab rule. The Ottoman Empire was tolerant of Iraqi Jews who filled its treasury with money earned in international commerce. The British were more liberal, and under their rule of Iraq, the Jews flourished, especially the wealthy ones. Jewish elites have always benefited from the protection of the regime. The problem was the attitude of the local masses toward the Jews. The “Farhud,” a pogrom against Baghdad’s Jews in 1940, erupted the moment the British relinquished control of the country.Assume for a moment that Iraqi Jews had chosen not to leave Iraq in 1950, despite the propaganda of the awful Zionists. What would have happened to them after the British had left? How would they have lived under the shadow of the military coup in the 1950s? What would have happened to them after Saddam Hussein rose to power? Even the pro-British Nuri al-Said did not hesitate to hang a respected Jew in the city square though he had committed no crime but only because the masses needed a sacrifice. The longing for the theoretically idyllic coexistence between Jews and Arabs that Zionism disrupted constitutes nostalgia for a past that probably never existed. It is reminiscent of Stefan Zweig’s image in his book The World of Yesterday: an idyll swept away by history’s tides, never to be restored.