Bibliography

Explore the references, sources, and research that support Iraq's stories and cultural content.

• Literature and folktales

  Stories and Writers of the Jews of Iraq

  The Jews of Iraq produced some of the most important books in Jewish history, and in the twentieth century they helped create modern Arabic literature. After 1950, their writers carried that story into Hebrew, English, and French.

  Ancient and medieval voices

  The Talmud and the Geonim

  The Babylonian Talmud, the central text of Jewish law, was compiled in the academies of Babylonia, today's Iraq. In the tenth century, Saadia Gaon, head of the academy of Sura, translated the Torah into Arabic and wrote The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, the first systematic work of medieval Jewish philosophy.

  Folktales and legends

  Prophets, pilgrimages, and a woman scholar

  Iraqi Jews made pilgrimages to the tombs of the prophet Ezekiel at al Kifl, Ezra at al Uzayr on the Tigris, and Nahum at Alqosh, and told stories of miracles there. In Kurdistan, families remembered Osnat Barazani, a seventeenth century scholar who led a yeshiva in Mosul and is often called the first woman rabbi. In Baghdad, the great rabbi Yosef Hayyim, known as the Ben Ish Hai, wrote parables and folk stories in Judeo Arabic that families read aloud.

  Modern writers

  From Arabic to Hebrew

  In the 1920s and 1930s, Iraqi Jews such as the poet Anwar Shaul were among the pioneers of modern Arabic writing in Baghdad. After the mass departure of 1950 and 1951, Sami Michael and Eli Amir wrote novels in Hebrew about Baghdad and the transit camps of Israel, including Michael's Victoria and Amir's The Dove Flyer. Samir Naqqash kept writing in Arabic in Israel all his life, and in Canada Naim Kattan described his Baghdad youth in Farewell, Babylon.

  Read with students

  Start with these

  • Osnat and Her Dove, Sigal Samuel, illustrated by Vali Mintzi (picture book, elementary)
  • A Boy from Baghdad, Miriam Halahmy (novel, middle school)
  • Beyond the Rivers of Babylon, Joseph Samuels (memoir, high school)

  See all books on the Jews of Iraq in JIMENA's bibliography →

  Sources: Saadia Gaon; Asenath Barzani; Yosef Hayyim; Sami Michael; Eli Amir; Naim Kattan.