Readers may recall a Time magazine article from July, “The Last Jews of Baghdad,” reporting that, in the Iraqi capital, only eight Jews remain of a population that numbered around 150,000 in the 1940’s, before decades of anti-Semitic persecution forced them to flee. This Diaspora is the subject of a moving, deftly written 1975 memoir Farewell Babylon: Coming of Age in Jewish Baghdad by the Baghdad-born Canadian author Naïm Kattan (born 1928). The book is newly reprinted by David Godine Publishers.
In his book, Kattan describes the culture of Baghdad’s ancient Jewish community, which produced the Babylonian Talmud. By the modern era it was a teeming, multi-lingual society that was doubtless inspiring to a young writer. One of Kattan’s boyhood friends, described in Farewell, Babylon, was Elie Kedourie (1926-1992), the distinguished anti-Marxist historian (who memorably asserted that Marxism turned the Middle East into a “wilderness of tigers”).
