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Orit Bashkin , New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press , 2012). Pp. 328. $80.00 cloth, $24.95 paper, $24.95 e-book.
Citizenship and Nationhood
In New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq, Orit Bashkin has written a much-needed analysis of a community whose history has too often been distorted, marginalized, or erased in vernacular, official, and scholarly accounts of modern Iraq. The book is neither a story of a "false paradise of Arab-Jewish harmony" (p. 237) nor a melancholic account of a failed attempt at assimilation and coexistence. Instead, it is an empathetic and exhaustively researched study of the experiences of the Jews for whom Iraq was a home, a milieu, an identity, and ultimately a hostile polity.
The book starts with the founding of the Iraqi state in 1921 and concludes with the displacement of most of the Iraqi Jewish community in 1951. As Bashkin explains, it is first and foremost "about intellectual, social, and cultural histories" (p. 14) with a focus on the writings of Iraqi Jews. Drawing on Rogers Brubaker's discussion of processes of ethnicization (p. 2), Bashkin resists portraying Iraqi Jews as a group with a static self-definition. Instead, she demonstrates that in monarchical Iraq, Jews constructed their "Iraqi Jewish" and "Arab Jewish" identities in relation to emerging Iraqi- and Arabic-language discourses; the nascent Iraqi state; and local, regional, and global ideologies, such as Iraqi nationalism, Arab nationalism, anticolonialism, Zionism, and...