Three Worlds-Avi Shlaim

Avi Shlaim’s: Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew effectively counters the false narrative of Israel being a welcome home for all Jews! Shlaim tells of having a real home, with creature comforts, in Baghdad. His story is one of a long established wealthy culture of Jews in Iraq coming apart, after centuries of inclusivity. The “enemy” is not the Iraqi People or “Arabs” or anything similar.

Under the Ottoman Empire the Jews had the status of a protected minority with the same rights and obligations as the other minorities. Although Islam was the official religion of the empire, Islamic law was not imposed on the non-Muslim communities. The Jews flourished under the pluralist system…

In Europe, by contrast, the Jews were the minority seen above all as the ‘other’ and therefore constructed as a problem. …

Unlike Europe, the Middle East did not have a ‘Jewish Question’ — antisemitism was a European malady that later infected the Middle East. …

Iraq’s Jews did not live in ghettos, nor did they experience the violent repression, persecution and genocide that marred European history.

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Shlaim acknowledges the despotic nature of the Ottoman Empire, which both had poll taxes for non-Muslims, and treated Jews as a protected minority. British colonialism infected Iraq beginning after World War I, seeking oil profits for the British Empire.

The Jewish middle class included not only merchants and financiers but members of the…