Reminiscences of old Baghdad by one of last Jews

By Peter Graff

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - One of the last eight Jews in Baghdad, a portly retired accountant, erupts in a bellyful of laughter when asked why he never married.

"I was a playboy. Don't write that!" he jokes, grinning. "How old do you think I am? Wrong. I'm 65! Don't write that! Write that I am 55!"

His government ID proves his age, and on the back it says, unmistakably: "Religion: Jewish."

He has made contact with a reporter, not because he wants to tell the story of his persecuted community, but because he wants to complain about the landlord who is raising his rent.

"Because we are Jewish he knows we can do nothing. He isn't afraid because he knows we have no tribe here. Don't use my name."

Once one of the largest Jewish communities in the Middle East, Baghdad Jews have now nearly vanished while the country has been consumed by sectarian war.

Speaking in fluent English, the ex-accountant launches into a description of the Baghdad of his youth, one of the Muslim world's most cosmopolitan cities.

He recites the names of legendary social clubs where Jews, Christians and Muslims mingled in better days, with music and whisky and parties that ran through the night.

"So many people -- Muslim people -- say if the Jewish people come back it will be nicer," he says.

His family have left. Some are in London, some in the United States. His father was offered a chance to move to Canada, but turned it down because he wanted to die and be buried in Iraq.

The ex-accountant himself stayed, but if he can sell his father's house -- now a ruin bombed out in the Iran war in the 1980s -- he will finally leave.

"I want to sell the house and go. I like Iraq, but I am fed up. We had very nice times in Iraq, but now we don't like it."

Iraq's Jewish community dates from biblical times. According to Charles Tripp's History of Iraq, the country was home to 117,000 Jews in 1947.

Under Ottoman rule, well into the first half of the 20th century, Jews made up about a fifth of the population of the capital. Some of the villas in neighborhoods along the Tigris still have six-pointed stars of David in their stucco.

How many Jews are there now?