Mir Basri

Origins and early life

Mir Basri was born in Baghdad in 1911 into an Iraqi Jewish family, and he remained a Jew and an Iraqi to the end, writing his whole work in Arabic.

Work and career

He was educated at the Alliance israélite universelle school, worked as an economist for the Iraqi chamber of commerce and its journal, served in the ministry of foreign affairs and in the Spanish embassy, and published essays, poetry and economic studies in the Baghdad press of the 1930s and 1940s, when the Jews of Iraq were a third of the capital and fully part of its literary life. After the mass emigration of 1950-1951 emptied that community, and after most of its leaders had gone, he stayed, and became in the 1960s the president of what remained of the Jewish community of Baghdad, a few thousand people.

This fiche states plainly what that cost him: in 1969, in the wave of persecution that followed the public hangings of Jews in Baghdad's Liberation Square, he was arrested by the Ba'athist regime and held and tortured for three months, in his capacity as head of the community.

Personal life

He was allowed to leave Iraq in 1974 and settled in London, where he wrote the books for which he is remembered: A'lam al-Yahud fi al-'Iraq al-Hadith, Notables of the Jews in Modern Iraq, and companion dictionaries of Iraqi men of letters, politicians and Christians and Muslims of note — a rescue in Arabic of the biographies of a civilization that had been erased from the country's official memory. He also published poetry and translations.

He died in London on 5 February 2006, at ninety-four, one of the last writers formed by the Jewish Baghdad of the twentieth century.