Escape from Babylon
Epstein, Mark A.
Escape from Babylon Operation Babylon: The Story of the Rescue of the Jews of Iraq by Shlomo Hillel Doubleday, 1987.312 pp, $1995 Reviewed by Mark A. Epstein This is a story from the heroic age...
...Their story—often forgotten by students of Jewish history— dates from the Babylonian Exile, not from the Spanish Inquisition...
...The goal was to get Jews out of Iraq and into Palestine/Israel, by whatever means...
...It features daring undercover operations, the dramatic war for Israeli independence, and the rescue of persecuted Jews...
...Before the cry of Middle Eastern Jews for political power became loud and impatient, he was cited as a successful Sephardic politician...
...But the real story takes place in Iraq...
...One also wonders whether it is necessarily true that "By May 1939 there could be no question about what awaited the Jews of Germany...
...Shlomo Hillel has had a long career in Israeli public life...
...Anybody who remembers the early, satirical Topol film Salah will encounter here a different version of that old tune...
...The opening pages of the book are the weakest...
...It would be interesting to know why he thinks the Arabic (and by adoption, Persian and' Turkish) phrase mashallah ("whatever Allah wills"), ubiquitous in the Middle East, is an Iraqi idiom and particularly popular among Jews...
...He is a consultant to congressional committees...
...It tells of wily desert sheiks and corrupt Iraqi bureaucrats, and reminds us how recently Britain ruled an empire...
...He attempts too much and is overly facile with generalizations, possibly because he considers his English-speaking audience less informed than his Israeli readers...
...Hindsight is a great thing...
...Operation Babylon will chip a bit from the wall of ignorance surrounding the history of Jews in the Middle East, and help us to recall how precarious were the early days of Israel...
...Read the book and find out...
...Imagine our young protagonist, no longer a Moroccan, now posing as pipe-puffing English businessman Richard Armstrong...
...He is in the home of the Iraqi prime minister, about to sign an agreement for his air transport company to fly Jews out of the country...
...HilleFs theme, to which he returns in the last lines of the book, is that Zionism and only Zionism will save the Jews...
...For daring and imagination as well as silly foul-ups and recklessness, a lot of spy fiction pales by comparison...
...Would cousin Ezekiel recognize the visage behind the blue pipe smoke as that of ". . . Selim, Aharon and Hanini's boy," whom he had not seen since childhood...
...Interspersed with the story of how he got involved in these adventures is Shlomo HilleFs description of the world in the middle of the 20th century...
...in Jewish and Middle Eastern history...
...Hillel has described the closing chapter of the long history of the Iraqi Jewish community in Iraq...
...To check a detail, the prime minister sends for his neighbor, the head of the Jewish community, who happens to be the cousin of our hero's mother...
...A son of Baghdad and member of Israel's establishment, Hillel has told the exhilarating story of an exciting time...
...Those who disagree should not stop reading because it would be a shame to miss the adventure that Hillel relates...
...Using the code name Shammai (Shammai was the rabbinical adversary of Hillel in first-century Babylonia), Shlomo Hillel had the task from 1947 to 1952 to help the mostly young Zionist underground members in Iraq...
...He was an active member of the kibbutz movement, a Knesset member, a cabinet minister and a diplomat...
...By the time the story is over, more than 100,000 Iraqi Jews have left their native land...
...He holds a Ph.D...
...There are moments when the reader wants to scream at the seeming stupidity of Hillel and his colleagues: sending a kid who speaks halting French and Baghdadi Arabic dialect to Iraq on a French Moroccan passport is like sending an Irishman to Boston to pass himself off as a Sicilian mafioso...
...Escape from Babylon Operation Babylon: The Story of the Rescue of the Jews of Iraq by Shlomo Hillel Doubleday, 1987.312 pp, $1995 Reviewed by Mark A. Epstein This is a story from the heroic age of Zionism...
...Somewhere between pages 30 and 75 the weak parts of the book fall by the wayside and the power and excitement of the tale take over...
...Mark A. Epstein has served as the executive director for the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews and has published books and articles about Jews in Turkey...
...Some of the bureaucratic obstinacy, about which the author is quite frank, says much about Israel of the 1950s and 1960s...
...It has David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol and Chaim Weizmann from Israel and freebooters from the United States and Europe...
Vol. 13 • July 1988 • No. 5
