The Farhud as a performing history

The Farhud (literally pillaging and plunder), a pogrom carried out against the Jews in Iraq on the holiday of Shavuot in June 1941, marks a point of crisis in this community's history.Footnote ⁴ During the 1920s, Iraqi Jews benefited from the enabling and tolerant reign of King Faisal I. The Jews were integrated in the economy, politics and culture, and members of the middle and upper classes acquired a modern Western education. As a result of Iraqi nationalism's opposition to the influences of the British Empire over Iraq and the intensification of Nazi propaganda by the German embassy in the 1930s, hatred and violence against Iraqi Jews increased. In 1941, Rashid Ali and a group of pro-Nazi Iraqi officers overthrew the government in a coup d’état. They ruled for several months until the British army defeated them and returned the Iraqi heir to government. The flight of the rebels from British forces left a political vacuum that was fruitful ground for Iraqi citizens, soldiers and policemen to carry out the Farhud. Approximately two hundred Jews were murdered and two thousand injured, while substantial quantities of Jewish possessions were confiscated. As a result of the crisis, young Jews began searching for new paths. The educated majority turned to the communist underground, while the less educated minority turned to the Iraqi Zionist underground movement. The crisis amplified questions about national and ethnic identity, which were tied to the complex relationship between Jew and Muslim, East and West.

Following Hayden White's historical narrative approach,Footnote ⁵ Freddie Rokem proposed the term ‘performing history’,Footnote ⁶ whose double meanings – depiction of past events and live performance – are represented by actors, in the ‘here and now’. The ‘present-ness’ of the theatrical event is confronted with represented history, while exposing analogies between the two, both of similarity and of difference. Therefore, according to Rokem, performing history quite often touches upon traumatic experiences, such as the Farhud in our case, and arouses amongst the audience awareness of alternative ‘lost’ histories, of what cannot return. In this sense, Ghosts in the Cellar and The Father's Daughters are a performing history because they are part of a process of grieving for what is lost, what cannot be regained. However, at the same time, they are political because they are reminiscent of that which the Zionist discourse attempts to disremember and exclude from the Jewish collective memory, and alternatively illuminate the Middle Eastern Jewish lost history in a new and different light.

Ghosts in the Cellar: complex realism

The Haifa Theatre produced Ghosts in the Cellar in 1983. This was an unusual choice of play as Israeli mainstream theatre has barely produced plays based on historical events in Jewish communities in the Middle East. In the 1970s–1980s, the Haifa Theatre was a pioneer in advancing original Hebrew plays which mostly dealt with social and political topics, including intra-Jewish ethnic tensions and Middle East Jewish history. Furthermore, Sami Michael, the author of Ghosts in the Cellar and a very well-known Hebrew writer who deals with these topics, lives in Haifa. Thus the Haifa Theatre perceived him as a resident artist whose unique play deserved to be produced.

The plot of Ghosts in the Cellar takes place in Iraq in 1943 when the German army threatened to conquer the Middle East, and two years after the Farhud undermined the safety of Iraqi Jews. At the centre of the plot is a middle-class Jewish-Iraqi family, headed by the grandfather, Itzhak-Haim, a traditional and conservative patriarch. The family has a good relationship with its neighbours, a traditional Muslim family whose patriarch, Abu Reduan, saved the Jewish family during the Farhud. The protagonist is Farid, Itzhak-Haim's grandson, an educated medical student and atheist who dreams of a progressive and egalitarian Iraq, and who, in response to the Farhud, is driven toward political activism and joins the communist movement. Zahara, Abu Reduan's daughter, is coerced into marrying an elderly man against whom she rebels. Farid and Zahara are in love, and as members of the communist underground they riot against the government and distribute leaflets. The central conflict is between their parents’ conservative generation and their own revolutionary and educated younger generation. However, Farid and Zahara's story of clandestine love and friendship ends tragically. Farid is captured by the secret police and Zahara is murdered by her father for desecrating the family's honour; in other words, for having an extramarital affair with Farid. Dan Urian argues that while the love story signifies a vision of Jewish–Arab reconciliation and cooperation, and of a progressive and egalitarian life, the tragic ending signifies its failure.Footnote ⁷

Zionism is also perceived as a problematic and unworthy solution. Baruch, Itzhak-Haim's son and Farid's uncle, is a Zionist activist who, while immigrating to the land of Israel (which was under British mandate), returns to Iraq four times. He is portrayed in a ridiculous and parodic fashion, not as an idealist, but as an adventurous idler who steals money from his mother for his pointless journeys.

Urian claims that Michael's preferred style in Ghosts in the Cellar, as in his fiction, is critical realism, and therefore the characters are complex and full of contrasts.Footnote ⁸ This style enables Michael to shatter the stereotypes at the basis of the orientalist Zionist narrative. The relationships within the Jewish family are presented as a pungent contrast to the orientalist image of the warm family, and are replete with sarcasm and aloofness, particularly between Itzhak-Haim and his wife Simcha, and his children and daughter-in-law. This image is completely shattered when Itzhak-Haim cowardly reveals his grandson Farid's hiding place to the secret police who invade his home in search of communists. This is despite the fact that Farid is the only member of the family who receives loving attention from his grandfather. Furthermore, the Muslims in the play are not presented in a frightening or demonic manner, but rather as complex personalities. The neighbour, Abu Reduan, is trapped between his love for his daughter and the social decree according to which he must murder her for escaping her ageing husband. Farid attempts to convince Abu Reduan not to hurt his daughter and to defy the repressive social imperative like he did during the Farhud. ‘In the pogrom I was more scared’, Farid says to Abu Reduan, and continues, ‘There were many knives like yours, they gleamed in the dark and I cried. You [Abu Reduan] protected us, you too were in danger’. Although Abu Reduan proclaims his love for his daughter, he surrenders to the social pressure: ‘You saw them in the cafes. She has already been tried and sentenced to death … God is abusing us … has turned us into our children's murderers.’Footnote ⁹

Ghosts in the Cellar is a performed history of Iraqi Jews that challenges the Zionist perception of Middle Eastern Jews as faltering and backward. Nonetheless, Sami Michael does not create a harmonious picture as an anti-stereotype. On the one hand a firm conservative and religious patriarchy is presented, while on the other hand we witness a young educated generation with a progressive outlook and political boldness. Farid's character is based on Sami Michael himself, a communist activist and educated student who acknowledges his own complex identity as comprising many cultures, languages and ideas from both the West and the East, grounded in a hybrid outlook.Footnote ¹⁰ Similarly, Farid maintains a Jewish-Arab viewpoint that integrates Western ideas of equality and liberty.

Given that the role of Farid was played by a Palestinian citizen of Israel, Yousef Abu Warda, it is charged with additional meanings from the Israeli present. Casting is significant for different reasons, beyond the actor's physical suitability for the part and his or her ability to play the character. Both Quinn and Carlson have claimed that beyond these factors, the audience perceives the actor through his or her public image and previous roles.Footnote ¹¹ In Israeli theatre, the casting of an actor who is a Palestinian citizen of Israel in plays that are not related to Israeli politics is invariably interpreted in political terms.Footnote ¹² The casting of Abu Warda in the role of Farid, an Iraqi Jew, points to the Arab element (in terms of culture and language) in the identity of Middle Eastern Jews in Israel, as well as to the complicated political situation of Palestinian citizens of Israel who straddle the boundary between Jews and Arabs.

The play premiered in 1983 following the political turmoil of the 1970s: the Yom Kippur War (1973) and the rise of the political right to government (1977). These events, through which governmental corruption based on superficial Zionist rhetoric was exposed, enabled the representation of Zionism in a ridiculing and divisive light in Ghosts in the Cellar. In addition, in the 1970s, the leadership of Iraqi Jews in Israel constructed contrasting narratives on Iraqi Jewry. I propose viewing Ghosts in the Cellar as part of this public debate. Also in the 1970s, two institutions were established: The Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center, which was founded in 1973, and the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC), in 1975. The founding of these institutions was initiated by Mordechai Ben Porat, born in Baghdad, who was active in the Zionist underground in Iraq in the 1940s and, following his immigration to Israel, served as mayor of Or-Yehuda,Footnote ¹³ as a member of the Knesset, and as a government minister. Located in Or-Yehuda, the Heritage Center, which functions as a museum, cultural centre and research venue, constructs the history of Iraqi Jews in accordance with the Zionist metanarrative, ‘From Holocaust to Rebirth’. It presents the Farhud as part of the Holocaust era, the Zionist movement in Iraq as an appropriate response to it, and Iraqi Jews as longing to immigrate to Israel as Zionist pioneers. This narrative completely ignores not only the Iraqi-Jewish elite – which was an integral part of the Iraqi economy, politics and culture – but also the considerable number of its younger members who preferred joining the communist movement out of a sense of shared Jewish-Arab identity.

WOJAC conveyed a different narrative. It was founded by Ben Porat together with politicians of Jewish Middle Eastern origin, and with the support of the Israeli government, for purposes of international propaganda. Israeli sociologist Yehuda Shenhav (2006), who researched WOJAC's activities, demonstrates that the organization had three major claims:

1. 1 that Jews were a deep-rooted historical presence in the Middle East (the primordialism thesis),

2. 2 that there had been a de facto mutual population exchange of Arab refugees and Jewish refugees in the Middle East (the population-exchange thesis),

3. 3 that the lost property of these Arabs and Jews could thus be mutually counterposed (the property-exchange thesis).Footnote ¹⁴

WOJAC portrayed the Iraqi Jews as refugees in compliance with its aim to include the issue of the abandoned and nationalized properties of Jews from Iraq and other Arab states in the international agenda as a bargaining chip vis-à-vis the question of Palestinian properties and lands seized by Israel with the establishment of the state.Footnote ¹⁵ Thus Jewish property seized by Arab countries could ostensibly be deducted from Palestinian lands and properties seized by Israel.

Shenhav highlights the contradicting viewpoints among Zionist Iraqi Jews in Israel. He argues that through WOJAC, they appealed to the international community and claimed that Middle Eastern Jews, although having been an integral part of the Arab states, were forced to leave for Israel due to the Arab–Israeli conflict and became refugees. Thus, from this point of view, population exchanges did in fact occur between Jewish and Palestinian refugees. In contrast, by way of the Heritage Center, the Iraqi-Jewish activists communicate a completely opposite historical narrative – that the Jews in Iraq were motivated by their Zionist ideology to leave Iraq and were happy to emigrate to their historical homeland – the ‘promised land’.

As part of the debate on the historical narrative of Iraqi Jewry, Ghosts in the Cellar gives a voice to the many Iraqi Jews who did not identify with Zionism. The play portrays the Jewish activists in the Iraqi communist underground in a positive light, particularly the Arab–Jewish camaraderie which is constructed around the Jewish–Muslim love story and the casting of a Palestinian actor in the role of Farid. Likewise, Sami Michael holds members of the Iraqi Zionist underground accountable for joining the Labor Party, which ruled from 1948 to 1977, by depicting them in a parodic and ridiculing manner in the image of the parasitic Zionist uncle. This unflattering portrayal was possible only after the political upheaval of 1977, the downfall of the Labor Party, and the severe public criticism of its corruption, including the systematic repression it exercised toward Middle Eastern Jews. Michael condemns the Zionist stereotyping that portrayed Middle Eastern Jews as primitive and lacking history and culture, and their Muslim neighbours as bloodthirsty anti-Semites. He attempts to present a more complex picture in which Jewish and Muslim characters are trapped in stringent life circumstances and restrictive social perceptions. At the same time, however, the play's protagonists attempt to fight, courageously, for a more egalitarian and enlightened future. Michael's vision regarding the Israeli present is embodied in Farid, whose identity contains all of the worlds that nourish him: Jewish, Arab and Western, at a time when in Israel these worlds are still often perceived as opposites or contradictions. Shenhav, who studied Iraqi Jews and the complex interplay between ethnicity, religion and nation, develops the concept of a ‘community of memory’, which underscores that resistance to the Zionist narrative is not homogeneous, and that within the ethnic community itself different narratives, which challenge the official national narrative, emerge spontaneously:

Thus the construction of the Iraqi-Jewish memory by Michael's play, the Heritage Center and WOJAC exemplifies how a community of memory acts out. The memory's contradictions in relation to Zionism and the community self-image, simultaneously as Zionist pioneers as well as refugees, create an unstable and dynamic memory which blurs and undermines the Zionist narrative and its rigid boundaries. Following Shenhav, the contradictions in the Iraqi-Jewish community of memory do not weaken this memory but provide a vitality to grow in new directions beyond the Zionist narrative. This construction of the memory continues to develop in the minds of the Iraqi-Jewish second generation, such as the playwright Gilit Itzhaki, who, born in Israel, has constructed the previous generation's memory through the Israeli political experience, as we will see in the next section.

The Father's Daughters: a family melodrama

The Father's Daughters (2015) is the first play to be produced by Hashahar – Multicultural Theatre, which is an unsubsidized fringe theatre founded by Gilit Itzhaki and Uri Gavriel. The theatre's stated aim is to create a theatrical tradition that deals with the legacy of Jewry from Arab countries, and it aspires to create a fruitful dialogue with a cultural legacy that mainstream theatre excludes and does not recognize. Uri Gavriel, a renowned veteran actor, sheds light on his complicated relationship with mainstream theatre:

Itzhaki explains that she was motivated to write this play following her parents’ death, both of whom were members of the Zionist movement in Iraq. Itzhaki understood that their significant legacy, history, Iraqi-Jewish tradition and language could disappear without any trace of memory in Israeli culture. Thus, from her point of view, the function of the play is to preserve a part of the Iraqi-Jewish community of memory. Ghosts in the Cellar was produced in the early 1980s when for political reasons, as I have mentioned above, critical observation of Zionism was allowed, whereas The Father's Daughters, produced more than thirty years later, reflects a new trend of Middle Eastern Jewish theatre-makers, who return to their ethnic identities by staging their autobiographies, playing in Judaeo-Arabic languages, or as in our case, performing their absent history.Footnote ¹⁸

Contrary to the complexity of Ghosts in the Cellar, The Father's Daughters is a family melodrama, which enables the construction of the relationships between Jews and Muslims in Iraq in shades of black and white. It also enables the organization of the plot in terms of the ‘Holocaust to Rebirth’ Zionist narrative,Footnote ¹⁹ which is seemingly opposed to the theatre's stated multicultural objective. At the same time, the play brings to the Israeli audience an important and less familiar chapter in the history of Iraqi Jews, while offering a gendered point of view communicated through the characters of three brave, ambitious and activist sisters who were members of the Zionist underground in Iraq and who came to Israel for idealistic reasons. Although the Zionist narrative is the basis for the play, it contains ‘fissures’ through which one can glimpse the Arab (cultural and linguistic) element in the identities of the characters onstage. The characters miss the Arab world left behind, a longing that is largely expressed in the music that marks a tension between Israeliness, Western-ness and Arabness. On the one hand, The Father's Daughters presents an ambivalent standpoint that views the history of Iraq's Jews as part of the Zionist narrative and which is proud of their integration in the Israeli melting pot. On the other hand, in the text, Arabic elements constantly arise, which allude to the complexity of ethnic (Jewish-Iraqi) and national (Zionist Israeli) identity.

The play shifts between two points in time: a sealed room in an apartment in Ramat-Gan during the First Gulf War (1991),Footnote ²⁰ and the home of the Eliyahu family in Baghdad in the 1940s. During the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein attacked Israel with Scud missiles, and there was a genuine fear that he would use chemical weapons. As a result, during attacks, Israeli citizens wore gas masks and confined themselves to sealed rooms. Itzhaki's choice of time frames is not coincidental – these are two moments in time in which Iraq takes aggressive and violent measures toward Jews. Befitting a melodrama, the dramatic events take place in the family's living room in Ramat-Gan, while the larger events of pogroms and war occur offstage. The transition from the Israeli living room to the house in Iraq is marked not only by a slight change in lighting, but mainly by way of a combination between the siren, which signals the family to enter the sealed room, and the cries of terror during the Farhud – a deliberate audial sign that links Saddam Hussein's aggression and the Farhud, which occurred half a century before.

At the centre of the plot are three sisters: Julie, the eldest; Miriam; and the youngest, Mazal. Other characters are the sisters’ father, Eliyahu; Daud, who works with Eliyahu and who is in love with Julie; and Sigal, Mazal's daughter, who was born in Israel. The plot begins in the Gulf War, following the death of Eliyahu. There is a dispute among the sisters regarding their father's will, in which he bequeathed his apartment to Mazal as an act of reconciliation for his past injustice toward her. She refuses to accept the apartment, however, given that she has not spoken to either Eliyahu or Julie for forty years. To understand the root of the family dispute, the action is transported back to the 1940s in Baghdad.

The Farhud took place on the holiday of Shavuot. The daughters are preparing for the holiday, but the festive atmosphere is arrested when their mother, who has been severely injured, is brought home. The violence is communicated mainly through the anxiety of the family, which is now confined to their home in fear of what will happen next, and the only thing left to do is pray. In the aftermath of the Farhud, the family leans toward Zionism. The father understands that they cannot remain in Baghdad. The injured mother requires medical treatment, therefore she and Julie are the first to illegally immigrate to Israel prior to the establishment of the state. Miriam joins the Zionist underground, against her father's will and despite his Zionist outlook. She is captured, tortured and raped before being released for a ransom. Consequently, Eliyahu and Miriam escape to Israel before the Iraqi secret police manage to arrest them. Mazal stays behind with Daud, who, despite his love for Julie, marries her, and they have a son. Because of their difficult relationship, without any love or affection, Mazal escapes Daud with the baby, but the baby does not survive the arduous journey to Israel. Two years later, Daud also immigrates to Israel, where he marries Julie, with whom he has four sons. Mazal marries Naim, an ex-member of the Zionist underground who facilitated her escape to Israel, and they have a daughter, Sigal. Mazal is enraged by her father's abandonment, and therefore does not speak to him for the rest of his life.

Seventeen-year-old Sigal wants to be a musician, and her aunts support her decision to study in England, against her mother Mazal's judgement. In the last scene, we return to Ramat-Gan during the Gulf War, where each sister recounts the suffering she endured in her youth, from the Farhud to the immigration to Israel, and the consequential difficulties in the relationships between the sisters. The young Sigal becomes aware of these events for the first time and begins to understand the complexity of the relationships between the sisters. An opportunity for reconciliation arises.

The epilogue is a monologue by Sigal that takes place in the 2000s, following the deaths of the older generation. She talks about her travels around the world, and introduces the third generation of her family, which contains ethnic combinations, including marriage to a Chinese woman: ‘Three of them are half Iraqi and half Chinese, five are half Iraqi and half Ashkenazi [Jews of European origin], six are half Iraqi, a quarter Romanian and a quarter Moroccan, and one is half Yemenite.’Footnote ²¹ The presentation of these ethnic blends is a proud demonstration of the success of the Israeli melting pot. Consequently, the sisters’ suffering, as a result of their activities in the Zionist resistance, attains new meaning. The suffering that the previous generation endured for the sake of their Zionist ideology facilitated the unification of all parts of the Jewish people in their historic homeland – Israel.

In this context, the Arab Muslim characters in the play are anonymous and perilous, and remain offstage. Muslims are largely extreme nationalists who despise Jews, and represent a corrupt and evil regime. In absolute contrast to Ghosts in the Cellar, the physical absence of Muslims onstage creates the illusion that Jews and Muslims lived in complete separation from each other, contrary to historical reality. The point of view from which the play is presented is that of the Israeli-born second generation that views the Arab Muslim in terms of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Therefore, similar to plays from the beginning of the Hebrew theatre of the 1920s and 1930s, the Arabs are positioned offstage, and represent an anonymous threat.Footnote ²² Moreover, the majority of the characters immigrate to Israel illegally in the 1940s and not as part of the large immigration after the establishment of the state. Thus there is no reference to the traumatic experiences of most Iraqi Jews in the Israeli transit camps (ma'abarot) during the early 1950s.

Following the establishment of the state of Israel, Iraqi nationalism intensified, and the Iraqi regime viewed Zionist activity in Iraq as representing Iraqi Jewry in its entirety. The Iraqi government eventually permitted Jews to emigrate to Israel; however, only after it confiscated their possessions and money and retracted their Iraqi citizenship. Destitute, Iraqi Jews arrived in Israel and were relegated, in transit camps, to economic, social and cultural hardship. The audience is well aware of the hardships endured in these camps, and the absence of any mention of them onstage is conspicuous and significant. Therefore the harmonious ending about integration in the Israeli melting pot is all the more striking in its deliberate avoidance of these tremendous difficulties, including the prejudices, racism and discrimination against Jewish immigrants from the Middle East perpetrated by the Israeli hegemony.

Music, however, is a prominent motif through which the Arab element in the characters’ identity is glimpsed. While the sisters are in the living room in Ramat-Gan, Mazal listens to Western classical music and her sisters tease her:

On the one hand, the ridiculing of classical Western music in terms of ‘wig and stockings’ contrasts it with classical Arabic music and with the resolute statement that ‘there's no one like Abdel Wahab’. On the other hand, Mazal loves classical music, does not apologize for it, and demonstrates a cultural choice different from her sisters.

The ‘radio scene’, in which we hear Arabic music, warrants attention. Between sirens in the living room in Ramat-Gan, Miriam cleans the house. Her niece Sigal is with her. Arabic-Iraqi music is playing on the radio.

Israeli-born Sigal perceives Arabic-Iraqi music as a cultural aspect of the Arab enemy, and therefore Israelis are forbidden to listen to it. This is a dichotomic perception that is congruent with the Zionist narrative, which differentiates and erases the Arab component in the identity of Iraqi Jews. Miriam's response is that music is part of the cultural foundation upon which she was raised and grew and therefore it affects her emotionally, particularly a song that deals with the love and longing for a mother. Although Miriam was a Zionist activist in the underground and suffered immensely as a result, she does not deny Arabic music and culture, and thus causes a ‘fissure’ in the Zionist narrative that underlies the entire plot.

The ‘radio scene’ is a type of recurrent cultural scenario in different autobiographical narratives of Israelis of Middle Eastern origin, particularly those that tap the discomfiture of second-generation Israelis whose parents immigrated from the Middle East. For example, in her poem Zikaron Matzhik (Funny Memory), Vicki Shiran describes her own degrading attitude, as a child, toward her Egyptian-born father, who listens to radio broadcasts in Arabic:

There is, however, no sense of shame in The Father's Daughters, but rather amazement at the gap between the characters’ Zionist ideology and the Arabic element in their identities. The scene in the play does not address this complexity beyond the ‘psychologistic’ explanation that it only has to do with childhood memories of songs. In so doing, it unconsciously hints at the deep connection between Jews and the Arab world, which cannot be easily detached. Although the play is underlined by a distinctive Zionist thesis – from the Farhud to the Gulf War, Iraq has persecuted its Jews, therefore Israel is the only safe place for them – its representations of Iraqi cultural heritage, especially the sounds of its music and songs, strike a profound emotional chord in Iraqi Jews. This in turn underscores the indissoluble Arab element in their identity. In this sense, although the play responds to the Zionist narrative, it manages to produce, to some extent, fissures and ambiguity in its attitude toward the Arab culture that is part of the identity of Iraqi Jews.

Conclusion: performing the memories of the community

The theatre scholar Shulamith Lev-Aladgem points to how community-based theatre of Middle Eastern Jews in Israel is a theatrical practice for the formulation of an alternative historical narrative:

This argument is valid as well for professional Middle Eastern theatre artists, such as Michael and Itzhaki. Both plays are performing history of a significant and traumatic chapter in the past of Iraqi Jewry and therefore they constitute a countermemory to Zionism's narrative that marginalized the history of Middle Eastern Jews. Although since the 1970s Israeli mainstream playwrights such as Hanoch Levin, Yehoshua Sobol and Motti Lerner have subverted in their plays the Zionist narrative, most of them have not added the Middle Eastern Jewish critical point of view to this national narrative.

These two plays are part of a community of memory that, as mentioned, is neither linear nor homogeneous, and which often generates contradictions and tensions. Michael, who experienced the historical events, depicts them in Ghosts in the Cellar, by way of a critical realism that criticizes Zionism. He points to a different cultural, civil and political Jewish-Arab option – albeit implicitly – in the conflictual Israeli present. Israeli-born Itzhaki, whose memory of the events is mediated, portrays a family melodrama in The Father's Daughters in tones of black and white. The characters’ Zionist activism and the absence of Muslim characters onstage signify the appropriation of the history of Iraqi Jews in the Zionist narrative. However, fissures surface in this outlook when the characters, despite their adoption of the Zionist ideology, identify with Arab culture, music and language. This complexity demonstrates the extent to which a community of memory is a dynamic sphere, which contains tensions and creates new alternatives for observing the past.