"Religion is for God, The Fatherland is for Everyone": Arab-Jewish Writers in Modern Iraq and the Clash of Narratives After Their Immigration to Israel (Report‪)‬

Jews writing in Arabic have only seldom been able to make a name for themselves in the history of Arabic belles-lettres. There are Jewish poets in the pre-Islamic period, such as al-Samaw'al ibn 'Adiya', (1) but once Islam appeared it is almost only in Muslim Spain (al-Andalus), in the eleventh-thirteenth centuries, that we find Jewish authors so at home in fusha (literary Arabic) that they achieved recognition for their Arabic works. (2) Some became famous in both Hebrew and Arabic; a few wrote only in Arabic. Since the mid-thirteenth century, Jews were not as open to participation in the wider Arabic culture, and as at home in fusha, as they became from the 1920s onward in Iraq. (3) This involvement was encouraged by the process of modernization and secularization of the local Jews beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century. Other Jewish communities in the middle East and North Africa went through a similar process, but only in Egypt can we also find some involvement in Arabic literature, (4) although less intensive than in Iraq. The present article examines the emergence of the literary writing of the Jews of Iraq in the 1920s and the beginning of its demise after only a few decades, both inside and outside Iraq, and followed by the switch to Hebrew writing in Israel. I will try to show that these processes were due not only to political and national circumstances and motives but also to the aesthetic and cultural norms of both Arabic-Muslim and Hebrew-Jewish cultural and literary systems. Furthermore, the Andalusian vision of cultural cooperation and religious tolerance which emerged in Baghdad in the first half of the twentieth century was the product of a very limited period, a very confined space, and a very singular history.