To educate an Iraqi-Jew : or, what can we learn from Hebrew autobiographies about Arab nationalism and the Iraqi education system (1921–1952)

Abstract

Historians tend to work within the national languages of the communities they study. In the Iraqi case, Arabic source material is often used to explore Iraq’s modern history. However, the existence of Iraqi diasporic and exilic communities means that Iraqi history is mediated in other languages as well. In this chapter, I discuss Hebrew autobiographies as a way of illuminating the manners in which Iraqi education had instilled a sense of Iraqi patriotism and Arab nationalism amongst its young members. I likewise explore the modes in which such narratives expose the limits of the state’s power. Seemingly, the educational experiences of Iraqi Jews appear far from an ideal prism through which we might examine the relationship between Iraqi education and Iraqi-Arab nationalism, because the Iraqi Jewish community, almost in its entirety, had left Iraq in the early 1950s, propelled by the circumstances created after the 1948 War in Palestine. Moreover, both Arab and Jewish nationalists understood this mass migration as a failure of the Iraqi nation-state to inculcate a true sense of nationalism within this minority community (Moreh & Yehudah 1992; Cohen 1969; Barrak 1985; Fawzi 1988). Nonetheless, members of the Jewish community in Iraq had left a large body of texts from which their educational experiences can be reconstructed, including newspapers produced by students, teachers’ accounts, reports in the local press, and works of poetry and narrativeprose. In recent years, following the recognition that national and colonial historiographies have often sought to appropriate and silence subaltern voices, historians reassessed their archival practices and engaged in innovative reading techniques (of the colonial archive, national historiographies, and ethnographies) in order to reconstruct such voices. Gayatri Spivak (1988), however, criticized the presumptions of scholars to represent themselves as part of a subaltern group whom they historicize and study. Historians could, however hear indirectly subaltern voices and challenge nationalist and colonial representations, while being aware of the partiality of their reconstruction and the problematic mediums they employ. When writing about the history of education, the question of “voice” becomes immensely important. How can we hear the voices of Jewish children from the accounts of their teachers? Can we think of children as a subaltern group? How can we learn about what transpired in the classrooms, or about the children’s reception of their educational curricula? More broadly, how are we to identify zones of agreement, mediation and interpretation between children, teachers and the state?