Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Jews of Baghdad in 1910

1971; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 7; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00263207108700187

1743-7881

Eliè Kedourie,

Jewish Identity and Society

Vice-consul Wilkie Young's report on Mosul in 1909, printed in the last issue of this Journal, deserved publication both by reason of its lively and shrewd observation, and by reason of the general paucity of information on this city in the last years of Ottoman rule. Another British consular report which also seems worth publishing-but not for exactly the same reasons-is the 'Account of the Jewish Community at Baghdad', which the consul-general, J. G. Lorimer, sent with marginal annotations to Constantinople with his despatch no. 191/10 of February 27, 1910,1 and which is reproduced below. The report is dated February 17 and signed H. D. S. These initials seem to refer to Haron Da'ud Shohet who was then employed as a dragoman at the British consulate-general. Though this report does not share the brilliance of Wilkie Young's description of Mosul and its notables, yet it may claim our attention both because the details which Haron Shohet brings together are not easily, if at all, available in any other source, and because the report constitutes an inside view, intelligent and well-informed, of this community at that point in its history. A few salient points are worth noticing. Shohet shows how marginal a position the religious leadership of the community had come to occupy: the Chief Rabbi, he says, is 'simply a mouth-piece', a 'mere puppet'. The rabbinate, whom he calls 'the clergy', 'enjoy no influence over their co-religionists'. The writer is aware that this constitutes a change from what used to be the case, and that the change is an outcome of the educational activities of the Alliance israelite universelle. These had begun in the eighteen-sixties and, steadily expanding for half a century or so, had gradually-though not without encountering some resistance2-propagated a secular outlook within large and influential sections of the community. It is also to those educational activities that Sholet attributes the growing prosperity of the community. The education provided by the Alliance made the Jews of Baghdad open to the outside world, and enabled them, earlier than the Muslims or the Christians, to take advantage of Mesopotamia increasingly becoming drawn into the world economy. The methods of education introduced by the Alliance were inspired by French pedagogical doctrine and practice, and seem to have been from the outset extraordinarily efficient. Within a decade or so after its establishment, the Alliance school was attracting favourable comment. Grattan Geary, editor of The Times of India who visited Baghdad in 1878, wrote that instruction in this school was 'of the best modern kind. Arabic is the mother tongue of the Baghdad Jews, and the pupils are taught how to write and speak that language grammatically. They are also taught Hebrew, Turkish and French; within the last few months English has been added to the curriculum. ... I went to the school to be present at the final examination of the boys in English.... Many of them spoke and read English with wonderful fluency, and some of them wrote to dictation without an error of spelling or punctuation. Most of them had been learning French before they began the study of English, and they all declared that their knowledge of French greatly helped them in acquiring our more difficult tongue.... They speak French with singular purity of accent and expression.'3 Important as the role of the Alliance was, yet it would seem that the Jews of Baghdad had other channels by which to become acquainted with the outside world. Gobineau remarks, in Les religions et les philosophies dans l'Asie centrale