Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 41

2/2/2016

Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

Life after Baghdad: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew in Israel, 1950-2000
By: Sasson Somekh
Life after Baghdad: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew in Israel, 1950-2000. East Sussex, UK:Sussex Academic Press, 2012. 168 pp.
$22.50. ISBN: 978-184519021.
Volume: 1 Issue: 1
April 2013
Review by
Seth J. Frantzman, PhD
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Israel
In 1985 Sasson Somekh attended a conference of the Society of Judeo Arabic Studies in Tel Aviv. Somekh, an expert on Arabic and Hebrew
language, presented on the subject of the Cairo Geniza, a group of ancient documents relating to the Jewish community of Cairo. The writer of one
document “notes the presence of Jews, both Rabbinic and Karaite, as a routine matter at the majlis; the anonymous Jewish writer also (subtly)
scolds the vizier for making and allowing the attending scholars to make offensive remarks about Jews and the Jewish liturgy” (p. 112). This
document presented evidence that Jews had participated, and had their voices heard under the Muslim government of Egypt in the 10th century.
However Somekh’s presentation was met with indignation. “Instead of a sympathetic response came shouts of skepticism from two of the most
distinguished Geniza scholars, attacking us furiously about the translation and our conclusions” (p. 112). This dispute, about the history of Jews in
Islamic countries, symbolized a larger struggle within Somekh’s life to bridge the gap between the Arab world and Israel.
Sasson Somekh was born in Baghdad in 1933 to a middle class family. His father was a bank clerk who had spent much of his life trying to learn
English in order to accommodate the British. “My father never read an Arabic newspaper” (p. 53). However, the family’s life was thrown into
turmoil when they decided to immigrate to the newly created state of Israel. Somekh arrived first, in 1951. He was sent to live in a transit camp for
immigrants. “I was not familiar with all the social classes comprising the Baghdad Jewish community, not to mention the Jews of northern IraqKurds and those from Mosul” (p. 1). At the camp, he was suddenly thrust into a huge diversity of Jewish immigrants. He was confronted
immediately with the problems that immigrants from Arab countries faced in Israel. “The fact that the Jewish Agency clerks spoke Yiddish among
themselves (they, too, were new immigrants—Holocaust survivors who had arrived from Eastern Europe not long before), created a feeling, for the
first time among many of the Iraqis, that they were second-class citizens, that only a Yiddish speaker could aspire to the status of a full-fledged
citizen” (p. 3). The families also found their lives and respect diminished. “Most of these families were used to living in brick buildings, between
solid walls. Here they were greeted by rickety canvas huts” (p. 2). Even though the author’s father secured decent employment at a bank, many of
the people who had been middle class found themselves forced to work construction and manual labor. In addition to the conditions and low wages,
the new immigrants were forced to live in a “camp surrounded by barbed wire” where the immigrants “were warned against going outside” (p. 9).
Evidently this was not the land of milk and honey that many had imagined Israel to be.
The author decided that in such circumstances he would double his efforts at finding his way into the academy. He had been a budding poet and
now he intended to find a way into Israel’s intellectual circles. In order to do that he had to master Hebrew. He threw off the Hebrew-Arabic of his
birth, with the guttural expressions, and embraced the new European Hebrew that was being used in Israel. As a member of the political left,
Somekh began to meet with members of the Israeli Communist party and local Arab intellectuals. He also immersed himself in the Arabic
newspapers then published in Israel, such as al-Jadid. In one issue of this newspaper, an article appeared arguing for the “mutual translation of the
two languages and familiarization of the