My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

by Ariel Sabar

“As long as these countries were untouched by European influence and their Jewish inhabitants remained rooted in their own cultural tradition, their creativeness was unimpaired and they continued to make considerable contributions to Jewish culture,” he wrote in 1960. “However, with the penetration of European culture, to which Jews, owing to their difficult economic and political situation, were particularly attached, this creativeness came to an end during the last century. [Middle Eastern Jews] abandoned the fountainhead of their own tradition without acquiring a deeper understanding of European culture; their contact with the latter remained superficial and consequently their general cultural level dropped. In the absence of a sound, genuine culture, they were influenced by their Levantine environment and they adopted ways of life equally foreign to Judaism and to enlightened Gentile civilization.”