Cooking and Sharing Iraqi Jewish Food Helps Me Imagine a Place I Never Knew

My grandmother’s kitchen was on the Upper East Side, but it tasted of Iraq.

As Ama brushed butter onto sheets of phyllo dough, she’d share stories of her girlhood in Baghdad. “We’d swim in the Tigris with water buffalo,” she’d say with delight at my amazement, each layer of pastry unfurling more memories. “To escape the summer heat, we’d sleep on the flat rooftops in the cool night air.” She’d yell to my grandfather in the living room in Arabic, give my dad instructions in French, and speak politely to my measured Methodist mother in English, but to me, she spoke loving words that needed no translation; she’d call me ayuni (my eyes) and qalbi (my heart). I’ll never know my Ama’s verdant, cosmopolitan Baghdad, in the region my ancestors called home for 2,500 years. But in her kitchen, I could taste it.

The food of the Iraqi Jews tells our story. M’hasha is about community. The project of coring vegetables, stuffing them with herbed rice, and stewing them in tangy tamarind is made quick by many hands. Tebit is a distinctly Jewish dish. Traditionally made to feed dozens of family members on the Sabbath, the spiced chicken and rice are placed in the oven on Friday night and cooked overnight on low through Saturday. Whole eggs are placed on the top to bake for a Sabbath breakfast, and the rice is still warm by dinner. Kubba Patata, lamb-stuffed potato patties redolent with curry powder, recalls the centuries of successful trade between Baghdad and the Indian cities of Kolkata and Mumbai. Baklava is the sweet made for massive family weddings — a celebration calls for shelling hundreds of pistachios.

To me, the spirit of the Iraqi Jews comes most alive in the simplest of dishes, like Bamia, okra stewed in sweet-and-sour tomato sauce. Where other cultures have mother sauces, we have lemon and sugar. Intense yet balanced, bamia gets its flavor from a combination of the two — a combination that expresses the history of the Iraqi Jews, both its sweetness and its bitterness.

The story of the Iraqi Jews is a tale of two exiles: the first, when Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed the First Temple in Jerusalem around 587 B.C., and the second, beginning after World War II, when the Jews were expelled from Iraq. The Jews who traveled to Babylon as captives and exiles began the community that would thrive for centuries as Babylonian, Mesopotamian, or Mizrahi Jews. “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept ... How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” asks the writer of Psalm 137. For more than 2,500 years, the Iraqi Jews did just that in the city known since the eighth century as Baghdad.

Baghdad’s Jewish community prospered in business, trade, and government, most notably under the Ottoman Empire. The Sassoons, my grandfather’s family, were among the most influential, establishing global trade routes between India, China, and Britain. With the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century, everything changed. As my grandfather Abdallah Simon writes in his memoir, Vintage Years, “The establishment of an independent state of Iraq following World War I effectively marked the beginning of the end for Iraqi Jews. The fact that they are virtually non-existent in Iraq today is a sad footnote after over two millennia of thriving.” Fueled by rising Arab nationalism and Nazi propaganda, hundreds of Baghdadi Jews were massacred in June 1941 in a multiday pogrom called the Farhud; homes were pillaged and communities ravaged.

My grandfather became a lieutenant in the Iraqi army soon after and was able to travel to Rio de Janeiro by way of Tehran, Cairo, and Lisbon, where he took a boat to Philadelphia, securing one of the 150 U.S. visas available to Iraqis that year. In 1948, my grandmother attempted to flee over the Zagros Mountains in the north of Iraq by dressing as a nun; she was caught but eventually escaped later that year hiding under a sheet in the back of a family car on a drive into Iran. A small number of Jews (including Doris Zilkha, who developed the recipes that follow) lived there into the 1970s, when they were pushed out as Saddam Hussein came to power in 1979. Today, the Jewish population of Baghdad can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Those who made safe passage planted new roots in places like Israel, London, Montreal, and New York. My grandfather joined the wine business, founding Chateau & Estate, a fine wine importer later acquired by Seagram. My childhood memories include tastes of his French wines paired with my grandmother’s Iraqi food served on green-and-white-painted Perrier-Jouët plates. On the most special occasions, he would open bottles of Perrier-Jouët’s Belle Époque or Château Lafite Rothschild. At Shabbat dinners, he would say the kiddush over glasses of Trimbach Pinot Gris.

“How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” The question still resounds. Cooking is like singing. It’s a way of remembering, safeguarding, and celebrating; it’s a form of praise. For many diasporic communities, it’s a way of connecting. Cooking, eating, and sharing Iraqi Jewish food, now without my grandparents, who have been gone for over a decade, has helped me imagine a place I never knew, but a place that is a part of me. I’ll never know their Baghdad, but I can taste it.