The Denationalization of Iraqi Jews: The Legal and Rhetorical Production of Otherness

Abstract

Since the formation of the modern state of Iraq under a British mandate in 1921, Iraqi Jews have become part and parcel of the literary, social, and political landscapes in the country. They joined their fellow non-Jewish Iraqis in debating the nature of the nascent state, taking part in anti-colonial struggle against the British presence, and contributing to debates on modernity and tradition in Muslim and Jewish communities. Starting in the late 1920s, professionals and intellectuals within the Iraqi Jewish community began to replace traditional authority and to introduce secular and liberal ideas into the community.¹ Educated Jews also played an important role in administrating and running the Iraqi state through their jobs in the railways, the oil industry, the post office, and the treasury. Notables within the community—such as Sassoon Haskell—became ministers and members of parliament in Iraq.² In the 1940s, as the Iraqi Communist Party emerged as a major player in Iraq’s political landscape, young Jews joined it with the hope of bringing about political independence and social justice, promoting inclusion, and fighting against fascism and ultranationalist tendencies. The vibrant role Iraqi Jews played in the country’s public life inspired them to perceive themselves as citizens of the new nation of Iraq and to adopt a new Arab ethnicity.³

At the same time, the rise of fascism and pro-German elements in Iraq in the 1930s, as well as the Farhud (Pogrom) in 1941, jeopardized the position of Iraqi Jews. For instance, writers in ultranationalist newspapers argued that all Iraqi Jews were Zionists who should not be treated as equal citizens, and perceived them to be ethnically, religiously, and culturally different from the Arab population.⁴ Orit Bashkin maintains that “this profascist contingent was sharply criticized by pro-British politicians, and by social democrats, the nascent communist party, and religious intellectuals who objected to what they saw as the deification of the state under fascism.”⁵ Moreover, she argues that the media were “key here, since BBC radio, the newspapers of the social-democrats, communist pamphlets, the Jewish press, and the larger Arab print market, especially in Egypt, helped to reassure Iraqi Jews that they were not alone in their abhorrence of Nazism and fascism, despite the popularity of these systems in nationalist circles.”⁶ However, on the eve of the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, ultranationalist groups and the Iraqi state “singled out” Iraqi Jews as “a major problem” and suspect in their loyalty to Iraq.⁷ In March 1950, the Iraqi government passed a law giving Iraqi Jews the option to emigrate to Israel on the condition that they renounced their Iraqi citizenship. Following the bombing of Jewish institutions in Baghdad in 1950–51, the majority of Iraqi Jews registered to emigrate, and around 130,000 left Iraq.

This article explores the process of the denationalization of Iraqi Jews by examining articles in ultranationalist Iraqi newspapers since 1948 and laws of denaturalization. I argue that the expulsion of Iraqi Jews in 1950–51 has been part and parcel of a governing strategy throughout the modern history of Iraq. First employed by the British to deport dissidents who advocated independence, denaturalization and deportation emerged as a mechanism of discipline that persisted under the postcolonial state in Iraq. The different instances of denaturalization and deportation under the monarchical reign—political dissidents and Shi‘i ulema in the early 1920s, Assyrian figures in the early 1930s, Iraqi Jews in the early 1950s, and Iraqi communists in 1954—are embedded in colonial and national elites’ anxiety over dissident political projects. Under Ba‘ath rule in 1963, communists emerged as targets for denaturalization, though execution and torture were the main instruments of violence. Finally, under the second Ba‘ath reign (1968–2003), Iraqis of Iranian origin were subjected to mass expulsion amid a changing regional political scene, namely the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the emergence of underground Shi‘i opposition to Saddam Hussein’s regime.⁸ In short, Iraqi ruling elites under different regimes deployed narratives of foreignness and disloyalty to the homeland and enacted denaturalization legislations to deport Iraqi citizens perceived to be “political undesirables.” However, the expulsion of Iraqi Jews constituted the first instant of mass deportation of a whole community.

Politicians and legislators often tout citizenship as an equal right enjoyed by all citizens; however, citizenship has always been a conditional and precarious right. During times of political upheaval, lawmakers and officeholders could use citizenship laws to strip political opponents of their nationality, rendering them stateless. Patrick Weil remarks that “The Soviet Union revoked the citizenship of 1.5 million individuals. The Nazi regime denaturalized forty thousand people and revoked the citizenship of another forty thousand native-born citizens. In France, between 1940 and 1944, the Vichy regime denaturalized fifteen thousand people, and stripped the citizenship of five hundred native-born French nationals.”⁹ The prospect of denaturalization has also been legalized and practiced in First World countries. Emma Goldman became the first American stripped of her citizenship for political reasons in 1909 after the passage of the of the Naturalization Act of 1906; the United Kingdom and France followed suit by issuing denaturalization policies during World War I.¹⁰

Denaturalization and deportation are not a thing of the past. In 2013, the Dominican Republic provoked international censure when the constitutional court stripped thousands of Dominican-born citizens of Haitian descent of their nationality, violating “the tradition birthright citizenship and Inter-American human rights system.”¹¹ Between 2014–16, the Bahraini regime denaturalized and deported activists and critics, citing “illegal acts” that included advocating regime change and defaming “brotherly countries.” Moreover, the Bahraini regime enacted a law that targeted “anyone whose acts contravene his duty of loyalty to the kingdom” in 2016.¹² In February 2023, the Israeli parliament issued a law that stripped Palestinian citizens of Israel who have been convicted of terrorism and gotten financial aid from the Palestinian Authority of their citizenship on the grounds that they “have betrayed the Israeli state.”¹³ Likewise, a Nicaraguan judge stripped ninety-four Nicaraguans of their citizenship in early 2023. Some prominent writers and journalists were targeted by this law after the Nicaraguan regime designated them as “traitors to the motherland.”¹⁴ In this framework, like education and military service, citizenship laws emerge as a mechanism to discipline the population, enforce commitment to the state’s political order and normative values, and get rid of subversive and opponent elements through charges of disloyalty and treasons.

Scholarship on citizenship and migration often examines the ways authorities—whether national or colonial—employ the discourse of foreignness and national security to justify the denaturalization and deportation of naturalized citizens. The citizenship of native citizens is often assumed, and hailed, as an inalienable right equally enjoyed by all the inhabitants who are native-born or enjoy blood genealogy. The emphasis on inalienability and equality often obfuscates the fact that citizenship is a conditional right that is closely tied to loyalty to the state as defined by ruling elites. Given the rise of nativism, right-wing nationalism, and authoritarianism all over the world at the current moment, citizenship can become an arena of silencing opposition and producing precarity through denaturalization. The latest news from Israel and Nicaragua is examples of how citizenship practices continue to be an engineering project concerned with constructing new political subjects through obedience, and denaturalization is a mechanism for getting rid of citizens who pose a challenge to the existing political and economic arrangements. During the research for this article, the term “political undesirables” or “undesirables” often came up in descriptions of citizens who lost their citizenship because they opposed colonial and national ruling elites.¹⁵ The term invokes an assertion that some citizens can become undesirable members of a polity for their political views and activism. The rhetoric of betrayal of a state and/or threat to national security enshrined in the codes of many democratic and authoritarian countries constitutes citizenship as a privilege that is closely interlinked to loyalty to the state, rather than a right enjoyed unconditionally. In the late 1940s, Iraqi Jews emerged as precarious citizens whose loyalty to Iraq was called into question. Political developments in Palestine coupled with Iraqi Jews’ political activism in Iraq—in particular their involvement with the Iraqi Communist Party—at the time sealed their fate with the Iraqi authorities, who perceived them as “a fifth column.”

Hannah Arendt captures the impact of the loss of citizenship in her famous phrase “the right to have rights.” Aiming to critique the concept of human rights as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Arendt, who became a stateless refugee under Nazi Germany, argued that in order for individuals to have human rights, they must be members of a political community.¹⁶ In their engagement with Arendt’s phrase, DeGooyer et al. remark that “only as a citizen of a nation-state can a person enjoy legally protected rights to education, to work, to vote, to healthcare, to culture, and so on. Hence, Arendt declared that before there can be any specific civil, political, or social rights, there must be such a thing as a ‘right to have rights.’”¹⁷ DeGooyer et al. critique the current use of “the rights to have rights” by activists who perceive the phrase as a poetic name for human rights, and emphasize that the concept of human rights is theoretically inadequate to understand democratic politics and the question of citizenship and statelessness.¹⁸ To Arendt, minorities and the stateless who lose their citizenship formally or functionally became “something distinct from members of a political community” in that they “were stripped to their bare status as members of the human species.”¹⁹ In this framework, human beings do not have rights, as rights are enjoyed by citizens only.

In the late eighteenth century, the American and French republics championed the notion of natural rights for human beings. However, Arendt postulates that things turned out to be the opposite, ironically, in that “nation-state citizenship was in some sense merely the concrete realization of these abstract rights.”²⁰ Hence, the “so-called Rights of Man can be enjoyed only as the rights of citizens.”²¹ According to DeGooyer et al., Arendt’s insight was constituted in the realization that the one right that is needed is the right to be a citizen of a nation-state, or at least a member of some kind of political community.

This article examines the ways Iraqi Jews were portrayed as foreigners who did not belong to the national realm, whether in the past or the present, through a discussion of articles in ultranationalist newspapers and laws of denaturalization. Iraqi politicians and ultranationalist writers defined Iraqi Jews as the enemy within and employed the binary of Jews vs. Arabs to exclude them from the nation state. These narratives and laws meant the subversion of the hybrid identity Iraqi Jews embraced—as Iraqis and as Arabs—and the reconfiguration of difference in terms of mutually exclusive binaries. This process of negation erased a history of hybridity and exchange, based on a Judeo-Muslim culture in the Middle East, and undermined the notion of citizenship for Iraqi Jews. If Iraqi Jews figure in the official history of Iraq, they do so only as eternal enemies. While denaturalization laws constituted a legal process of denationalization, the anti-Jewish rhetoric in the ultranationalist press entailed the de-Arabization of Iraqi Jews, namely the denial of their cultural and political belonging. Though Iraqi Jews were citizens of the Iraqi state and played an active role in the country’s political and cultural landscapes, legal membership in the modern state of Iraq did not confer inclusion. Rather, their very citizenship raised national anxiety over the presence of the Other within the nation among the ruling elites after 1948 in particular.

Scholarship on Iraqi Jews includes a vast body of works that provide revisionist readings of different aspects of Iraqi Jews’ lives in Iraq. This historiography aimed to dismantle Orientalist and Zionist discourses, which perceived Jews from the Middle East as victims of persecution, and to emphasize the existence of leftist and liberal voices within the Iraqi society that challenged fascist views.²² In addition, this scholarship shed light on the process of Orientalization Iraqi Jews experienced in Israel when they found out that Ashkenazi Jews perceived their Arabic culture as “primitive and degenerate” and that their Arabness was racialized to denote foreignness and non-European racial identity.²³ These scholarly debates also interrogated reductionist binaries (such as Jews vs. Arabs) and examined the reconfigurations of concepts such as “Arab” and “Semitic.”²⁴ This article, in contrast, endeavors to focus on a specific issue that has received little attention by offering a legal reading of laws. The denaturalization legislations in 1950 did not only strip Iraqi Jews of their citizenship but also portrayed them as outsiders who did not belong to Iraq. Moreover, this article discusses the anti-Jewish rhetoric in ultranationalist presses in order to show how denaturalization laws codified and lent legitimacy to these Othering discourses. Even though ultranationalist authors did not represent the majority of Iraqi society, their narrative was embraced and reproduced by Iraqi officials when they enacted denaturalization legislations.

The first part examines articles that portrayed Iraqi Jew as the enemy within after 1948. I rely on Watha’q wa Mutqtafat min al-sahafa and al-masadir al-Iraqiyya ‘an yhood al-Iraq fi al-asr al-hadith [Documents and Excerpts from Iraqi Newspapers and Sources about Iraqi Jews in the Modern Age], collected and edited by Nassim Qazaz, and revised by Shmuel Moreh (2013), to discuss the anti-Jewish rhetoric in ultranationalist press.²⁵ The second part offers a legal reading of the Iraqi laws that stripped Iraqi Jews of their nationality and property, which were published in Al-Waqaʼiʻ al-ʻIraqiyya [The Official Gazette of Iraq] housed in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, and available online since 2016.²⁶ It also discusses Abd al-Razzaq al-Hasani’s Ta’rikh al-Wizarat al-Iraqiyah [The History of Iraqi Ministries], which is a chronicle of different ministries under the monarchy. The eighth volume of this body of work provides a discussion of the denaturalization of Iraqi Jews and reproduces anti-Jewish sentiments expressed in legislation and ultranationalist newspapers. The third part explores the consolidation of the notion of Otherness for Iraqi Jews who stayed in Iraq until the late 1960s and early 1970s. These processes of negation exposed the intricacies of citizenship and the construction of Iraqi Jews as noncitizens.

Discourses of Othering

Iraqi Jews began to occupy a precarious position in the late 1930s when certain elements in the Iraqi public sphere began to associate Judaism with Zionism. The failure of the Arab Revolt in Palestine (1936–39), the arrival of the Palestinian leader Hajj Amin al-Husayni and other Palestinian exiles in Iraq in 1939, and increased German propaganda in Iraq with its pro-Nazi tendencies complicated the position of Iraqi Jews. The incendiary anti-Jewish rhetoric culminated in the Farhud (pogrom) following the failure of the Rashid ‘Ali al-Kaylani coup in 1941. Over the span of two days, Jewish shops and houses were attacked by angry mobs.²⁷ It was estimated that between 135 and 189 Jews were killed, and between 700 and 1000 injured. Around 550 stores and 900 apartments were looted.²⁸

Following the Pogrom and the British reoccupation of Iraq in 1941, the anti-Jewish campaign subsided until the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Articles in the ultranationalist newspapers al-Yaqdha and al-Nahda published after 1948 portrayed Iraqi Jews as the enemy within who trained each other to bear arms against the Arabs in Iraq and Palestine, migrate to Israel illegally, undermine the Iraqi state, and spy on behalf of Israel. One writer in particular, Salman al-Safwani, wrote fiery articles about the destructive activities of Iraqi Jews. He portrayed Iraqi Jews as Zionists who remained loyal to the state of Israel, rather than Iraq. In one article, titled “We and the Jews,” al-Safwani accused the Jews of the Arab countries in general and of Iraq in particular of playing an important role in supporting “the Jewish gangs in Palestine” by donating money and sending young men and women to fight Arabs in Palestine.²⁹ Moreover, according to al-Safwani, Jews aimed to undermine Arab countries by “destabilizing the markets, controlling prices, stopping people from working, and suspending monetary transactions.”³⁰ Al-Safwani condemned “the devilish means and ways” to which the Jews resorted and called upon Arab governments to limit their ability to import and export. Seeing himself as representing “the Arab public opinion,” he remarked, “It is really shameful that a person walks the streets in Baghdad on a Saturday, and he think he is in Tel Aviv . . . Why? Because the Jews are the masters of the markets, and they hold the keys of the economic situation. When it is Saturday, they close down.” He ended the article by calling upon the Iraqi people and government to protect national wealth, give national companies licenses to import and export, and replace Jewish money exchange with national money exchange. While this article posited the Jews as the other of Arabs, it also reproduced anti-Jewish discourse that saw Jews as conspiring to destroy Arab countries through control of the economy and support of the state of Israel.

On June 24, 1949, al-Yaqdha published a commentary on an anecdote that a Jew made fun of a soldier who went to fight in Palestine and who said, “They went to Palestine and threw it away and came back.” The anonymous writer of the comment asserted that this was not the first time a Jew ridiculed and disparaged Arabs, and referenced another Jew who wrote on some official documents “a stamp to save donkeys” instead of “a stamp to save Palestine.” The newspaper read these remarks as reflecting “the psyche of Jews in Iraq and Arab countries toward the Arabs, who unfortunately still think highly of these enemies (citizens). We hope these incidents would wake up the sleepers among our nation and urge our government to protect our dignity.”³¹ While this commentary depicted Iraqi Jews as the enemy even though they were citizens, it again emphasized the idea that Arabs and Jews were different. The writer of the comment erased the Iraqiness and Arabness of Iraqi Jews and associated them with the state of Israel. In this framework, Jews in Iraq could only be loyal to Israel. This characterization relied on the premise that Judaism and Zionism were closely linked and that Jews could not be loyal citizens in Arab countries.

Another writer, Adnan Firhad, penned an article titled “Local Zionism and Its Danger to the Safety of Arab Countries” in Al-Nahda in August 1949.³² He wrote about a letter sent to Arab countries by the Superior Arab Organization warning them of the dedication of Jews in Arab countries to Zionism and of “the devilish ways” they devised to move to Palestine and to smuggle their money. Firhad asserted that the organization would not have sent such a letter unless it was certain of Jewish plans to serve Israel and expand their influence in Arab countries. Remarking that this was not the first time Jews in Arab countries rushed to support Zionism, he declared that “Jews were not, and will not, be loyal citizens who know the duties of citizenship at any time because they are ‘a minority’ that gather all its diasporas to build a strong front that stands up to international trends. There is no doubt that ‘the state of Israel’ today is the aim of all the Jews in the world to establish this entity and seek reunion.” Firhad called upon Arab countries to intensify their surveillance of the movements and activities of Jewish people in order to safeguard Arab countries from danger. He further argued that “Arab countries would not be able to eliminate the state of Israel before it first succeeds in eliminating ‘the Zionist fifth column’ in Arab countries, who works day and night with all the means available to it to establish a strong Zionist network in each country . . . with the aim of controlling Arab countries economically first, and then politically and militarily.”

Toward the end of the article, Firhad commented on the relationship between Judaism and Zionism. He asserted that he did not believe in the claim that Judaism was a religious creed while Zionism was a colonial movement, since he did not care as much about appearance as about essence and aims. To him, there was no doubt that Judaism and Zionism both aimed to serve Israel. Not only did Firhad erase the fact that Iraqi Jews had been part of the political and cultural landscape in Iraq and that the majority of Iraqi Jews did not endorse Zionism, but also he ignored the fact that Iraqi Jews mostly identified as Arabs and worked to combat Zionism by establishing the League for Combating Zionism. Firhad ended the article by associating Zionism with communism in Iraq, arguing, “What aggravates the situation is that the Jews succeeded in finding local press that serves their interest in the Arab countries and especially Iraq. The government has unfortunately failed to stop it. On the contrary, some politicians encouraged it to continue in challenging the feelings of the people and to broadcast Zionist propaganda openly.” He finally named al-Sha‘b, the Iraqi Communist Party’s newspaper, as carrying the banner of defending Zionism, while also questioning the patriotism of loyal men in the national press.

Another article in al-Yaqdha reporting on a demonstration by Iraqi Jews in Baghdad against their persecution portrayed Jews as “the Jewish fifth column” and Jews and communists as “the communist Jewish fifth column.” The anonymous writer of the article emphasized that Jews were conspiring against Iraq, and shouting slogans like “Long live the Israelite sect,” “Glory to our dead in Palestine,” “Jews are the chosen people,” and “Down with Arab fascism.”³³ The depiction of Iraqi Jews as a fifth column was accompanied by further assertions that they were not citizens of Iraq. Nour al-Din Dawoud wrote an article in al-Nahda titled “It Is Time We Cleanse Our Country from Elements of Treason, Sedition, and Riots” about the legal status of Iraqi Jews.³⁴ He asked his readers to consider the following premises: first, the Iraqi Essential Law prohibited the exile of Iraqis outside Iraq, but it did not force the country to accept foreigners or those who claimed another foreign citizenship into the country; second, most Jews in Iraq did not hold Iraqi citizenship, and many could not prove descent from Iraqi parents because they sneaked into Iraq from Iran, Turkey, Poland, Germany, and other countries after World War I; and third, the constitution of Israel considered all Jews in the world as citizens unless they renounced this citizenship within a year. Dawoud argued that no Iraqi Jews objected to being citizens of Israel and that it was necessary to differentiate between Jews who professed loyalty to Iraq and those who did not by calling upon them to show their Iraqi Certificates of Citizenship. He further called for the deportation of Iraqi Jews who could not prove their Iraqiness and the confiscation of their property except for an amount of money that would enable them to get by for a month.

In addition to articles and editorials, al-Yaqdha also had a gossip and news column on page 2, which included short and anonymously published pieces on “Iraqi Jews’ crimes and propensity for wrongdoings.” This rumor column traded in anti-Semitic rhetoric, which reiterated conspiracy theories about Iraqi Jews’ control of the economy and support of Israel in alliance with the communists and about collaboration with Israel, and called for the expulsion of Jews from Iraq.³⁵ The basic assumption in al-Nahda and al-Yaqdha was that all Iraqi Jews were Zionists and should not be treated as equal citizens. Moreover, writers in these newspapers called for the expulsion of Jews from their jobs in state ministries and public institutions, though most newspapers in Iraq did not publish such anti-Semitic articles against Iraqi Jews.³⁶ Furthermore, the Iraqi government had a long history of censoring communist and leftist newspapers for their critical articles on social and pro-British policies, while it did not censor articles in Al-Yaqhda and al-Nahda. This state of affairs indicated to Iraqi Jews that the government supported the nationalists’ views. Rabbi Khaduri complained that the Iraqi government failed to restrain attacks on Jews in the press.³⁷

Denaturalization of Iraqi Jews

This anti-Jewish campaign and the increased activity of the underground Zionist movement led to the illegal migration of a limited number Iraqi Jews to Israel in the late 1940s. Illegal migration was the only possible venue for Iraqi Jews who wished to leave for Israel, since the Iraqi government had enacted a law in 1946 that decreed that any Iraqi Jew who wished to go abroad had to deposit 2000 dinars. This amount of money, which represented a fortune at the time, would be forfeited if the person failed to return. On 15 May 1948, this amount was increased to 5000 dinars.³⁸ After 1948, the Iraqi government faced increased international pressure, exerted by Israel and the United States, to allow the free movement of Iraqi Jews. Given this pressure and continuing illegal migration, the Iraqi authorities concluded that passing a law to legalize migration to Israel was the only way to stop illegal flight. According to Avi Shlaim, the Iraqi authorities sought the advice of the British ambassador before the enactment of any legislation. He remarks that “the Iraqi cabinet asked Salih Jabr, the minister of the interior, to seek the advice of the British government. Jabr went to see the British ambassador in Baghdad and was informed that the British not only agreed that Iraq’s Jews should be permitted to move to Israel but that they had already drafted a law to make it possible.”³⁹ These different considerations resulted in the enactment of Decree No. 1 of 1950, also known as tasqit al-jinsiyya (the denaturalization law) among Iraqi Jews.

The law, which was the product of negotiations between the Iraqi prime minister (Tawfiq Suwaydi) and Zionist emissaries, was presented as a liberal act, since the Iraqi authorities offered Iraqi Jews the option of leaving the country legally.⁴⁰ Decree No. 1 of 1950, which contained seven articles, was published in the Official Gazette of Iraq and signed by the Interior Minister and the Prime Minister on 9 March 1950. Article One granted the Iraqi cabinet the right to strip any Iraqi Jew of his Iraqi nationality if he wished to leave Iraq for good after he signed a document to this effect in front of an employee from the Ministry of the Interior. Article Two stated that any Iraqi Jew who left, or attempted to leave, Iraq illegally would be stripped of his nationality by a decree from the cabinet. Article Three dictated that any Iraqi Jew who left Iraq illegally would be considered as if he had left the country for good if he did not return within two months after the enactment of this law, and would be stripped of his nationality.⁴¹ Article Four empowered the Minister of Interior to deport anyone who was stripped of their Iraqi citizenship according to Articles One and Two unless the person could present reasons for his temporary stay outside the country. Article Five stated that this law would be valid for a year after its issuance and that it could annulled at any time during this time by a royal decree published in the official gazette. Article Six made this law effective once it was published in the official gazette, while Article Seven entrusted the minister of the interior with implementing the law.⁴²

On the surface, these articles define the legal conditions for a lawful departure from Iraq and for retributions in case of illegal flight, though both forms of migration entail the loss of Iraqi citizenship. However, a close reading of the law reveals some sinister connotations, especially the title of the law and the rationale provided for its enactment at the end of the document. The title of the law is “An Appendage to the Denaturalization Decree, No. 62 of 1933.” On 15 August 1933, the Iraqi government passed Decree 62, which gave the Cabinet the right to strip Iraqis whose family did not reside in the country before World War I of their citizenship if “they took—or attempted to take—–an action that posed a threat to the state’s security and safety.”⁴³ According to this law, the Iraqi authorities deported the Assyrian patriarch along with his family on the ground they were not Iraqis. By making the denaturalization decree of Iraqi Jews an appendage to the 1933 law, the Iraqi authorities not only designated Iraqi Jews as a threat to the state’s security and safety, but also defined Iraqi Jews as foreigners whose families had recently arrived in Iraq, rather than an established community with deep historical roots in the country. This law legally enshrined the process of de-Arabization and de-Iraqization of Iraqi Jews as laid out in ultranationalist presses.

The second issue is related to the rationale for the law. A statement was included at the end of the document, which read, “It was noted that some Iraqi Jews have resorted to different illegal ways to leave Iraq for good, and some had already left illegally. Having subjects who are forced to stay in the country and compelled to keep their Iraqi citizenship will definitely result in consequences with far-reaching repercussions for national security, and will create social and economic problems. Therefore, it was crucial not to stand in the way of those who desire to leave Iraq for good, and to strip them of their Iraqi nationality. This law was enacted to achieve this purpose.” Given the fact that the number of Iraqi Jews who left Iraq was limited, this reference to concerns over national security and over economic and social problems reiterates the idea that Iraqi Jews represent a threat to the Iraqi state. Thus, the rationale and the title of the law work to insinuate that Iraqi Jews were foreigners who posed an existential threat to the state of Iraq. The Iraqi prime minister, who signed the law, was Tawfiq Suwaydi. Interestingly, Suwaydi had close Iraqi Jewish friends and he attended the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a Jewish school in Iraq established by French Jews in 1864.⁴⁴ Seen as “well-disposed towards the Jews,” his decision to relegate the organization of migration of Iraqi Jews to Jewish leaders in Iraq was read as a sign of his good will toward Iraqi Jews.⁴⁵ That someone like Suwaydi signed a law that vilified Iraqi Jews reflects the fact that the anti-Jewish rhetoric in ultranationalist newspapers was institutionalized by the state through this wording of the law.

While a legal analysis of the law can unveil the exclusionary state rhetoric at a specific historical moment, an autobiographical reading of the meaning of the law for Iraqi Jews shows the way legislation can be reconfigured and reinterpreted by people in power once a government changes. Avi Shlaim’s detailed conversations with his mother shows how Iraqi Jews perceived the law. According to Shlaim’s mother, “many of the Jews who registered under the law had not finally made up their mind to surrender their Iraqi citizenship; they simply wanted to give themselves a way out should the situation became intolerable. In other words, it was an option rather than an irrevocable decision. Moreover, they assumed, reasonably enough, that even in the event of leaving, their property rights would not be affected.”⁴⁶ Still the majority of Iraqi Jews had no desire to leave Iraq, and “very few Jews registered to relinquish their Iraqi nationality” after the enactment of the law on 9 March 1950.⁴⁷ In addition, Iraqi officials did not think many Jews were interested in leaving Iraq for Israel. In enacting this law, they were motivated by the desire to get rid of radical Jews—namely communists and Zionists—as well as poor Jews.⁴⁸

Two events changed the course of history for Iraqi Jews at the legal and economic levels. First, bombs were thrown at Jewish centers in Baghdad on 8 April 1950, 14 January 1951, 14 March 1951, 10 May 1951, and 5–6 June 1951. These bombings have been a source of controversies and heated debates for the past seven decades in Iraq and Israel, and among the Iraqi Jewish diaspora. The controversy revolves around the identity of the perpetrators, namely, whether the Iraqi government or Zionist emissaries were behind the bombings. This debate is beyond the scope of this article. However, the bombings had a huge impact on the Iraqi Jewish community, in which 105,000 Iraqi Jews had registered to leave Iraq by the beginning of March, 1951, of whom 70,000 were still in Iraq.⁴⁹

The other crucial event was a change in the Iraqi government. In September 1950, the veteran Iraqi politician Nuri al-Said replaced Suwaydi as a prime minister.⁵⁰ Bashkin remarks that al-Said “immediately took steps so that Jews would leave Iraq as rapidly as possible.”⁵¹ Al-Said’s government issued a law that rendered Iraqi Jews destitute and penniless. On 10 March 1951, the Iraqi cabinet issued Law No. 5 of 1951. Article One offers definitions of two terms. According to it, the term “the Iraqi who is stripped of his Iraqi nationality” refers to “an Iraqi who lost his citizenship according to Law 1 of 1950.” The term “property” is defined as “immoveable assets, including insurance policies, rent revenue, mortgage, cash, foreign currencies, transfer policies, debts, shares, or ‘any material right.’”⁵² The most important article in the law, namely Article Two, dictates that the denaturalized person’s property and assets will be frozen, that the person cannot dispose of them, and that future guidelines concerning managing these assets will be issued later on. Moreover, Article Two established a special governmental body to overlook and manage denaturalized people’s assets. The second item in Article Four states that any person who violates this law will be subject to a two-year prison sentence or a fine that cannot exceed 4000 dinars.

On 22 March 1951, the Iraqi Cabinet issued Law No. 12 of 1951, which was an appendage to Law No. 5 of 1951.⁵³ Article One dictates that any Iraqi Jew who left Iraq after 1 January 1948 will have his property frozen and managed according to Law No. 5 of 1951. Article Two contains four subheadings that grant Iraqi Jews, impacted by Article One, the option to return to Iraq within two months after Iraqi embassies and consulates publicize this law in newspapers published in the capitals where they are located; moreover, this article specifies that any Iraqi Jew who does not return to Iraq will be considered as if he has left Iraq for good, and will be stripped of his citizenship and subject to Law 5 of 1951, while if he returns in time, he will have his frozen property back after processing fees are deducted. Article Three details the exemptions to the loss of citizenship within two months, including staying abroad for medical reasons or education. The rest of the articles restate measures concerning migration and loss of citizenship and the confiscation of properties.

Shlaim advances two reasons for al-Said’s positions toward Iraqi Jews. He argues that “Nuri had not displayed any anti-Jewish sentiments in the past. On the contrary, he was associated with Faisal I’s policy of befriending the Jews, a policy that Gertrude Bell had strongly recommended to both of them. But the large number of Jews who had participated in the Communist demonstrations against the Portsmouth Treaty in January 1948 was said to have incensed Nuri . . . Popular protests forced Nuri to repudiate the new treaty, but they also turn[ed] him against the rebellious Jews. It was even rumored that he swore to reduce the Jews to pauperism, to the selling of chickpeas in the streets of Baghdad.”⁵⁴ In addition, Nuri al-Said feared that the Iraqi economy would suffer tremendously if Iraqi Jews transferred their capital abroad.⁵⁵ Hence, he “reversed Suwaydi’s accommodating policy towards the Jewish community” and ordered a special session for the cabinet in order to pass Law 5 of 1951. As this law took effect immediately, banks “were ordered to close their gates for two days, Jewish companies were impounded and Jewish shops were closed and sealed by the police, denying access to their owners.”⁵⁶ While some Iraqi Jews managed to get some assets by illegal means, the majority of them—especially the 70,000 who were still in Iraq—became stateless, jobless, penniless, and in many cases homeless overnight.⁵⁷ At the end, each adult was allowed to take fifty Iraqi dinars and one suitcase. Orit Bashkin estimates that Iraqi Jews lost between 150 and 200 million U.S. dollars.⁵⁸

The laws of 1950 and 1951 represented the first time that the Iraqi authorities employed amendments in the citizenship law to denaturalize and dispossess a whole Iraqi community on political grounds. The denaturalization of Iraqi Jews on the pretext that they represented a threat to national security meant that the Iraqi government endorsed the conspiratorial discourses in ultranationalist circles. Noticeably, this vision of Iraqi Jews was embraced and reproduced by one of Iraq’s most celebrated historians, Abd al-Razzaq al-Hasani, who documented the history of Iraqi ministries under the monarchy in eleven volumes. Before citing the denaturalization law, al-Hasani provides a historical overview of Iraqi Jews. He dates the arrival of Jews to the Babylonian captivity, and asserts that Islam treated then respectfully, since they are People of the Book. Under the modern state of Iraq, according to al-Hasani, Iraqi Jews enjoyed equal rights in all aspects of life. However, al-Hasani wanted “to set the records right” about “Jews in Iraq” as well, in that “they got filthily rich at the expense of others,” that they welcomed the British troops who entered Baghdad in 1917, that they assisted the British by “taking positions in the occupier’s bureaucracy,” and that they refused, along with Christians, to sign a petition that demanded independence.”⁵⁹ Furthermore, al-Hasani portrays Iraqi Jews as Zionists, who founded “the Zionist Foundation in Mesopotamia” in 1921 in order to support the international Zionist movement, who established literary and athletic institutions whose true purpose was to assist the Zionist movement to collect donations for Jews in Palestine, and who began to flee to Palestine after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.⁶⁰ Through a sketchy history of Iraqi Jews, al-Hasani reproduced anti-Semitic discourses that considered all Iraqi Jews as Zionists who were loyal to Israel.

After citing the laws that confiscated Iraqi Jews’ assets, al-Hasani titles the next section, “The Jews’ Crimes.” Here, he relies on reports from the Iraqi police to discuss the bombings of the five Jewish institutions in Baghdad, and accuses Zionist emissaries of coordinating these bombings and collaborating with Iraqi officers trained in Britain and “foreign experts” to push Iraqis Jews to migrate to Israel. What is striking about this discussion is al-Hasani’s use of words. Rather than distinguishing between European Jews and Middle Eastern Jews, al-Hasani employs the word al-Yahud constantly as if Jews, whether in Iraq or Israel, constitute a unified community without any cultural, political, religious, national, or historical differences.⁶¹ Though al-Hasani recognizes that Iraqi Jews were slow to respond to Zionist propaganda, he describes them “as ungrateful to Iraq, which provided them with shelters for thousands of years, and as unfaithful through migration and action.”⁶² Al-Hasani’s eighth volume was published in 1955, namely five years after the denaturalization law and four years after the exodus of Iraqi Jews from Iraq. This body of work, which is considered to be an authoritative account of Iraqi history under the monarchy, reiterated anti-Semitic views, which employed reductionist binaries and a simplistic reading of the Jewish presence in Iraq to promote the idea that Iraqi Jews were outsiders, rather than citizens of the Iraqi state.

Within a short period between 1950 and 1951, Iraqi Jews were uprooted from their homeland through charges of disloyalty and foreignness. The association of citizenship with national security rendered Iraqi Jews precarious citizens whose legal belonging was dependent on being docile citizens and on changes in the political landscape in Iraq and the region. The processes of de-Arabizing and de-Iraqizing Iraqi Jews signaled the end of a flourishing Jewish community in Iraq.

Laws and Policies in Iraq After 1958

A few thousand Iraqi Jews remained in Iraq after 1951. Their status within the state improved greatly after the fall of the monarchy in 1958, as the new leader Abdul al-Karim Qasim had their reintegration into Iraqi society as one of his goals.⁶³ For instance, in 1960, the Iraqi government issued Law 11, which did away with Section B in Article Five of the 1951 law on monitoring and managing the property of Jews who had been stripped of their nationality in 1950. The law of 1960 was accompanied by this explanation: “Iraqi Jews who reside in Iraq have endured tremendous difficulties due to the application of this article [Article B]. In addition, the continuation of this article goes against the goals of the revolution [of 1958] and the constitution, which ensures the equality among Iraqis with regards to rights and responsibilities. Also, the principle of stripping a person of the Iraqi nationality goes against the spirit of the constitution on the basis that nationality is a natural right for every citizen, a right that cannot be taken from him simply because a person was late to returning to Iraq within the time limit set in the passport.”⁶⁴ Qasim’s reign represented a reprieve for Iraqi Jews from constant persecution and exclusion. The law of 1960, importantly, recognized Iraqi Jews as full Iraqi citizens who were entitled to the same rights and responsibilities as all other Iraqi citizens and who were entitled to live a life free from exclusion and vilification.

However, the overthrow of Qasim’s regime during the CIA-back Ba‘ath coup in 1963 jeopardized the position of Iraqi Jews, as the state again adopted repressive measures toward them. Shortly after the coup, on 31 March 1963, the new regime, which endorsed an Arab nationalist and socialist agenda with authoritarian tendencies, issued a law that annulled the 1960 law and reinstated Section B in Article Five of the 1951 law, which dictated, “Every Jew who left Iraq with a passport after this law became valid has to return to Iraq within the time limit set in his passport. If he does not come back after this period, the Council of Ministers, on the suggestion of the minister, can decide to strip him of the Iraqi Nationality and manage his property according to Law 5 of 1951.” This justification for the law was provided at the end of the document: “The conditions under which Law 12 of 1951 was enacted were still valid since a big number of Jews left Iraq without coming back. The denaturalization was carried out since they did not come back and since they proved their disloyalty to Iraq by going to Israel, which necessitates the freezing of their property for the sake of national interests.”⁶⁵ This law was followed by a series of laws that stripped of Iraqi Jews who left Iraq between 1960 and 1963 or who acquired foreign citizenship of their nationality and also enshrined the confiscation of their property.⁶⁶

The Ba‘ath regime also issued new guidelines that restricted the ability of Iraqi Jews to leave Iraq. On 4 August 1963, the Official Gazette of Iraq published instructions that dictated that the Public Security Director had to approve the travel of an Iraqi Jew abroad, based on certain conditions.⁶⁷ The first condition was the need for medical treatment abroad. However, the patient had to provide a medical report that stated why they needed to seek medical care abroad, and they could only stay abroad for the period of time stated in the report. In addition, an Iraqi Jew could go abroad for educational reasons and stay abroad for the duration of their study, but they had to renew their passport in an Iraqi consulate annually and provide paperwork showing their ongoing academic enrollment. Moreover, an Iraqi Jew could travel for tourism as long as the government could guarantee that the purpose was strictly tourism, but the person could not stay abroad for more than four months. Finally, a person could travel to do business abroad, as long as they were registered with the Chamber of Commerce and provided documents related to their business transactions. Again, the person could not stay abroad longer than four months. Together, these laws reinstated discriminatory measures against Iraqi Jews, again casting them as citizens who were suspect in their loyalty to Iraq and who had to endure surveillance and restrictions on their mobility in the name of protecting Iraq’s national interests.

The vilification of Iraq Jews reached its peak in 1967, after the Six-Day War. The president of Iraq at the time, Abdul Rahman Arif, was a pan-Arabist. Al-Jimhuriyya regularly had a column called “These are the Moral Traits of the People of Zion,” written by someone who used the name “Muwafaq.” These columns were a collection of anti-Jewish sentiments expressed by Western writers and by Christian and Muslim figures with the aim of showing that Jews had always conspired against the people they lived with, hated Jesus, and conspired to control the world. In one column, the author cited the character Shylock in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, who demanded payment in flesh for a merchant’s failure to pay his debt, as exemplifying the character of Jews. The writer also cites Jesus as saying, “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” The argument that Muwafaq advanced was that Jews worshipped money rather than God. The writer also invoked Ben Hecht’s A Jew in Love as an instance of Jewish hatred of Jesus. Ben Hecht wrote, “One of the finest things ever done by the mob was the Crucifixion of Christ. Intellectually it was a splendid gesture. But trust the mob to bungle the job. If I’d had charge of executing Christ, I’d have handled it differently. You see, what I’d have done was had him shipped to Rome and fed him to the lions. They could never have made a savior out of mincemeat!”⁶⁸

In another column, Muwafaq cited the Talmud as a text that revealed seven hidden principles of Jews. Some of these principles included the belief that other races were created to serve the Jews, that the Jews could be hypocritical toward non-Jews, that Jews are allowed to corrupt non-Jews by any means, and that whatever good existed among non-Jews should be destroyed. Moreover, the writer alleged that Pope Gregory IX declared in 1243 that the Talmud contained blasphemes against Christianity. Muwafaq also quoted Mohammed bin Maslama al-Ansari, a figure in Islamic history, as citing the Prophet Muhammad’s call for the murder of Jews. In another column, he alleged that the Jews killed John F. Kennedy after he welcomed students from the United Arab Republic to study in the United States. In that column, the writer addressed the American people, saying, “Did you hear, people of America . . . You want to help the Jew but where is the loyalty! . . . They killed your president in the street and you could not speak in spite of your police. This is Judaism, people of America. The Jew sought your help and treated you like a big child by asking you for help but hitting you with a shoe whenever he wanted. He knew you as a naïve tiger so he lived on your blood and messed with your brain, so you imagined that his existence in our land would benefit you. Oh you poor, ignorant American people, you do whatever international Judaism wants from you. . . . Oh learn, you ignorant people, that the Jews will destroy America just as they destroyed the Romans and Napoleon.” The address went on to ask the American people to shake themselves from “the Jewish dust” and to stand up to the Jews. These conspiratorial fabrications portrayed the Arab–Israeli conflict not as a political conflict over the land of Palestine but rather as part of a Jewish conspiracy to control the world and inflict pain and destruction on non-Jews.⁶⁹

The publication of these columns coincided with the translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into Arabic by Ajaj Nowaihd in Iraq. Al-Jimhuriyya published a discussion of the book in a seminar, which was televised on 9 November 1967. The seminar, which was presented by the participants as the first Arab attempt to unveil the Jewish conspiracies against the Arabs, approached the book as an accurate portrayal of the true intentions of the Jews against humanity. One of the participants asserted that Zionists and all the forces that supported them aimed to discredit the book by claiming that it was anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish and also based on fabrications. The interviewer then remarked that the translator provided evidence that the protocols were factual by citing Western figures who confirmed the accuracy of the book.⁷⁰ In another series of articles titled “The Jewish Plan and the International Status Quo,” Jihad al-Hassani reflected on the upbringing of Jewish children and remarked that “the Jewish upbringing starts with introducing the child to his religious identity according to the stories of Torah, and indoctrinate him with Jewish pride through the grand achievements of Jews, and familiarize him with the exile and banishment his people suffered at the hands of non-Jewish infidels. The Jewish child is taught rancor and hatred to any non-Jewish people. . . . The Jewish child is raised with hatred against humanity, which he considers to be his enemy since he descends from the best race, and his belonging to those that God chose to be the masters of the world.” Al-Hassani cast the stories in the Torah and Talmud as twisting the truth and argued that one could not distinguish between Jewish nationalism and the Jewish religion, since what united Jews was the sect and upbringing. He also asserted that unlike other people, Jews did not have national affiliations, since religion was considered a pillar of nationalism. Al-Hassani implied that Jews did not have any nationalist feelings about the countries in which they lived and their loyalty was only to fellow Jews all over the world, erasing the contributions Jews made in their homelands.⁷¹

The vitriolic attacks on Jews in Iraqi newspapers and television portrayed Iraqi Jews as disloyal citizens who worked to undermine the countries in which they lived and who remained loyal to the state of Israel. Implied in these attacks was that the Iraqi regime was justified in enacting laws that discriminated against Jews and jeopardized their livelihoods and safety. On 3 March 1968, the Iraqi government published Law 10 of 1968 in the Official Gazette of Iraq, which stripped Iraqi Jews of their ability to dispense with their property. The law prohibited the Department of Tapu and Endowments and the Office of Notary from processing any transaction related to selling, giving, renting for more than a year, or mortgaging any property that belonged to a Jew.⁷² The law stated that the property could not be subject to any transaction that would take it out of the owner’s proprietorship,⁷³ rendering the real estate property owned by Iraqi Jews valueless for their owners, since they could not dispose of it or benefit from it except by renting it out for a year.

Moreover, these attacks on Jews in newspapers opened the door for the use of violence against the remaining Jews in Iraq. Between 1967 and 1969, around three hundred Jews, who constituted 10% of the Iraqi Jewish population, were arrested. Moreover, the government confiscated the property of Jews and dismissed them from government jobs.⁷⁴ The status quo for Iraqi Jews in Iraq deteriorated drastically after the second Ba‘ath coup in July 1968. In 1969, the regime publicly executed eleven Iraqi Jews in Baghdad and three in Basra after accusing them of treason and espionage. Another twenty-six Iraqi Jews died in prison under torture. Al-Jimhuriyya published the pictures and details of the public executions.⁷⁵ This wave of persecution prompted a considerable number of the remaining Iraqi Jews to flee the country via Iran, since they were not allowed to leave Iraq legally. By 1971, “only fifteen hundred Jews remained in Iraq; a year later this number declined by two-thirds.”⁷⁶ This mass exodus, in addition to the exodus in 1950–51, meant that the presence of Iraqi Jews in the country became a relic of the past.

Conclusions

The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and the onset of the Arab–Israeli conflict produced conditions of dispossession and uprootedness for Iraqi Jews. The discourses and policies adopted in Iraq by the ruling elites and ultranationalist writers under different regimes—except for Qasim’s reign—reproduced a similar rhetoric, which rendered Iraqi Jews as the Other, whose persecution and exclusion were justified in the name of national interests, security, and solidarity with Palestine. As Jewishness was dissociated from Arabness, it was linked to Zionism in that being a Jew was translated as being loyal to the Zionist project of nation-building in Israel and as being disloyal citizens who were intent on the destruction of Arab countries. While denaturalization laws constituted a legal process of denationalization, the anti-Jewish rhetoric in the ultranationalist press entailed the de-Arabization and deindigenization of Iraqi Jews, namely the denial of their cultural and political belonging and their rootedness in Iraq. Furthermore, the denaturalization law entailed the loss of citizenship, careers, economic prosperity, and social relations. Moreover, the campaign of vilification of Jews after 1967 resulted in the deaths of forty Iraqi Jews through public execution and torture. The calls for the eradication of Iraqi Jews were no longer limited to the efforts to strip them of their nationality and deport them but also included the literal destruction of their bodies, since their designation as spies by the state justified their murder. This campaign of terror led to the flight of the majority of the remaining Iraqi Jews.

Under Saddam Hussein’s reign, Jews, along with “the Magi Persians,” were portrayed as eternal enemies who conspired against Iraq and the Arab world since time immemorial, even though there were barely any Iraqi Jews left in Iraq. Following the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, the office of the Iraqi presidency published a new and revamped Iraqi Nationality Law on 7 March 2006, which is supposed to constitute a break with the previous citizenship legislation and practices in Iraq. Law 26 of 2006 enacted massive gender reforms, permitted dual citizenship, and outlawed denaturalization of Iraqi citizens. However, it reproduced previous exclusionary practices in the country and it affirmed the precarity of citizenship. The law granted differentiated treatment to citizens who were denaturalized and deported under previous regimes. Article 17 of the law grants Iraqi citizens who were denaturalized and deported in the early 1980 by Saddam Hussein’s regime under the pretext that they were of Iranian origin the right to reclaim their citizenship and their properties that were confiscated at the time. Furthermore, Article 18 states that any Iraqi who lost his citizenship “for political, racial, or sectarian reasons” could reclaim this citizenship. It also granted children of those denaturalized citizens the right to reclaim an Iraqi nationality. However, the second point in Article 18 exempts Iraqi Jews and their children from the right to reapply for Iraqi citizenship. The law did not even mention Iraqi Jews by name; rather it dictates that Iraqi citizens who lost their citizenship according to Law 1 of 1950 and Law 12 of 1951 were excluded from reclaiming their citizenship.⁷⁷ This legislation did not only reproduce previous exclusionary practices, but also rendered the word Iraqi Jews unutterable.

Notes

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