Polluted identity and biblical retreat.

Ibrahim, Abdallah

The question of identity and its definition is posed as a fundamental question in the novels of Arab Jews and particularly of Iraqi Jews. Most of these works exhibit a yearning for the early years of life and for Iraq as a homeland. This contradicts the Zionist claim that the return of Jews to the "Promised Land" liberates them from their exilic condition. This article analyzes novels of Iraqi Jewish writers in Israel who consider their migration a second Babylonian exile. Novelists such as Samir Naqqash, Shimon Ballas, and Sami Michael express in their fiction and statements the sense of shock and tragedy that the rupture constituted for them.