IN BAGHDAD, SHORTLY AFTER the 2003 war, I visited the place which the city’s Jews had used as their community centre and school. All was quiet in the street as we approached; only a slight movement in a window opposite showed that the neighbours were watching. Inside, dust awaited us and the feel of a place hurriedly abandoned. From a great pile of books I tried to extract one. The others slid and crashed into an antique typewriter. The book, a schoolbook introduction to Hebrew for Arabic speakers, had been printed in the 1950s.
It was in 1941 that a pogrom in Baghdad sparked a first major wave of Jewish emigration. In 1951 Israel
