Last Days in Babylon

July 31, 2006
Through the events of her late maternal grandmother's life, British journalist Benjamin tells the saga of the Iraqi Jews, who arrived during the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles from Judea in the eighth and sixth centuries B.C. and were once Iraq's largest and wealthiest ethnic minority. Born in 1905 in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, Regina Sehayek is a compelling character who lived in tumultuous times, witnessing as a child the British takeover of Baghdad and, as an adult, Arab nationalism and revolution. A moneychanger's bright and opinionated daughter, Regina was married off (and deflowered semipublicly as tradition dictated) to a virtual stranger, a prosperous merchant 30 years her senior whose ancestor was the Persian Jewish doctor for an 18th-century shah. Although indifferent to Zionism, Regina and her kin were victims of the rabid anti-Semitism that began to pervade Iraq in the 1930s. By 1950, the Jews' desperate situation forced a widowed Regina to thwart police and petty bureaucrats and flee, eventually settling her children in London. Benjamin (Rocket Dreams
) honors her family by vivifying a once-thriving community that has dispersed worldwide, leaving only 12 souls struggling for survival in present-day war-torn Baghdad. Photos.