Where to call home?

I saw a movie last night, a documentary, and it evoked quite a few issues to ponder on.

The documentary followed four Jewish writers of Iraqi descent. Baghdad to be precise. Three older gentlemen who actually grew up in Baghdad, and a middle aged younger lady whose parents are from Baghdad originally. They are all Israeli citizens.

The three men became intellectuals at an early age during the 40s, and at that time in Baghdad, many intellectuals were attracted to communism and joined the communist party. It’s a two hour movie, and I don’t want to spoil it for you, but for this short post, here are just a few interesting points:

These people kept identifying themselves as ‘Arab Jews’ which technically, I didn’t understand because the religion part of the identity is inherited from the mother in Judaism and since it wasn’t customary to invite people to join the religion, and intermarriage did not happen often, I would have thought that these writers were ethnically Hebrew, but that’s not important here. The important thing is that all four of them saw themselves as Arabs.

They talked about a major persecution event that happened in Iraq in the early 40s (maybe 1941) when many Jews of all ages were massacred during a period of unrest in the country, but they attributed that to the fact that the instigators were people seeking to fight the British influence in Iraq, and so, had aligned themselves with the Nazis, and it wasn’t because the Jews and Muslims hated each other.

In the late 40s, there were anti-Zionist Jewish movements in Iraq (although there was also a small Zionist movement there as well).

After the formation of the state of Israel, most Jews did not want to leave Iraq, but the Arab government no longer wanted them (and issued laws to annul their citizenship), and the Zionist movement wanted them to move to Israel, but mainly to bolster the number of Jews in the Holy Land (according to the documentary). All four writers were convinced that there was collaboration between the government and the Zionist movement !!! (what’s up with that?)

All four spoke of long years of discrimination in their new homeland because the Europeans saw them as backward and uncivilized even though the majority were well educated intellectuals, and so they continued to see themselves as outsiders and had to struggle with all kinds of issues of assimilation, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. The lady who grew up in Israel, wrote a book about this discrimination which opened eyes and shocked many. She finally found a home for herself in New York where she feels she can now be both a Jew and an Arab, without being her own enemy. !!

Of course there is much more to the movie, but what I wanted to bring up here, is what seems obvious to me (in this case at least), that religion was used (/abused), yet again for political reasons. Of course it’s naïve to say that the relationship among people of different religions was ideal throughout the centuries, specially where followers of one religion were the dominant majority, but the animosity we see today, is way out of proportion compared to a century ago, and most of it did not start with the people themselves.

We have the political and religious leaders to thank for that.

As to “where to call home?”, some of us will have to wait, while for some of us, “The earth is but one country, and mankind, its citizens”.