Babylonia to Zion: Salman Shina on Iraqi Jews in Early Israel

There have been a number of well-known memoirs written by Iraqi Jews, yet few of their authors were as established as Salman Shina was when he migrated to Israel at age 53. Shina had served in the Ottoman military as a young man, edited an Arabic Jewish journal, and even served in the Iraqi parliament (1947–1951), roles that highlight Iraqi Jews’ interconnectedness with the Islamic and Arab world around them. Yet Shina would migrate along with most Iraqi Jews under difficult circumstances, and here he recounts some of the challenges Iraqi Jews faced in the new Jewish state.