Back to Baghdad

Others, such as Soviet olim and Jews from Arab countries, immigrated to Israel because they were forced from their country of birth

By BARRY DAVIS
Director Wilder with Marlene Dietrich, star of his 1948 romantic comedy ‘A Foreign Affair' (photo credit: PHOTOFEST)
Director Wilder with Marlene Dietrich, star of his 1948 romantic comedy ‘A Foreign Affair'
(photo credit: PHOTOFEST)
 ome of us made aliya of our own volition. Others, such as Soviet olim and Jews from Arab countries, immigrated to Israel because they were forced from their country of birth.
Iraqi Jews certainly were, with the bulk of some 120,000 predominantly Baghdad-born immigrants arriving, by hook or by crook, in 1950 and 1951. My parents-in-law were among them, and for many years I thought that was that for Jews in Iraq. I later discovered that a few thousand remained until the 1970s, when Saddam Hussein made life there intolerable and, practically overnight, forced them to leave. Today the Baghdad “community” consists of just five members.
Edwin Shuker is one of those who left Iraq in the second, Saddam-driven, wave. He relocated to London where there has been a sizable Iraqi community for more than half a century. The story of both the British and Israeli-based Iraqi immigrants is told in Fiona Murphy’s Remember Baghdad, which will be screened at the Jerusalem Cinematheque on December 17 at 7 p.m. as part of this year’s Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival from December 16 through 21.
All told, the festival will screen some 40 works, including international and Israeli feature films, documentaries, shorts, restored movies, and films with artistic and philosophical themes.
Murphy certainly took on a sizable project with Remember Baghdad. While she came to direct the film through an ostensibly unconnected route, the story turned out to be closer to Murphy’s own history than she first knew.
For starters, despite her surname, Murphy is a Jew. “I had become close to my grandfather’s cousin who had come to London [from Jamaica], and my mother’s family is Jewish,” she said. That relative’s public profile was slightly scandalous for the somewhat stodgy London of the time.
“She was the original Pussy Galore,” said Murphy, referring to the character in the 1964 James Bond movie Goldfinger, which was based on a book by Ian Fleming. “This aunt was Ian Fleming’s lover in Jamaica, called Blanche Blackwell.”
The family plot thickened and eventually pointed to what would become Remember Baghdad.
“I became fascinated with the fact that I was Jewish,” Murphy continued. She was a teenager when that fascination, along with some unexpected developments, prompted her to discover more. “We were Sephardi Jews, I am a Sephardi Jew, and this man pops up with his archive,” she recalled.
The gent in question was an Iraqi-born Jewish Londoner who saw Murphy’s name in a British newspaper, in an article about her work as a researcher. The man enlisted her help in sorting out a mountain of memorabilia he had from Iraq. Murphy soon found herself sifting through old monochrome photographs of all kinds of family gatherings and social events that took place long ago in Baghdad. “What I saw was that they had a lot of parties back then,” she chuckled. “That is not given to everyone, to have that sort of life. They had an absolutely amazing time. And you could see, by the way they hugged each other, that it was a warm, emotional world.”
Murphy’s own background and that of her new, temporary employer would, as a result of the work, ultimately share a common focus. “This man with the archive, I remember him telling me that the Iraqi rabbis ran the Jewish world. He said to me that for a very long time my Sephardi ancestors would have taken legal rulings from these rabbis from the Mesopotamia area. I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, these geezers are telling my ancestors, my great-great-great whatever grandmothers whether or not they could get divorced.’ I felt affected by that.”
Murphy became ever more drawn to her family history.
“My great-aunt Blanche died earlier this year at the age of 104. I’d been expecting her to die for the last six to eight years,” she said. “And there is something about how the Iraqi Jews have gone and the Jamaican Jews have gone. Blanche was about to be gone and I wanted, somehow, to put my finger in the dike.”