1. INTRODUCTION

Toward the end of the 1940s and during the early 1950s, largely in the framework of the mass immigration of Iraqi Jews, many talented writers and poets emigrated from Iraq to Israel. Among them were Murād Mīkhā’īl (1906–1986), Shalom Darwīsh (1913–1997), Ya‘qūb Balbūl (1920–2003), Nuriel Zilkha (1924–2015), Ibrāhīm Obadyā (1924–2006), Sami Michael (b. 1926), Zakkay Binyamin Aharon (Binyāmīn Hārūn) (1927–2021), Isḥāq Bār-Moshe (1927–2003), Nīr Shoḥet (1928–2011), Shlomo Zamir (1929–2017), Shimon Ballas (1930–2019), Salīm Sha‘shū‘a (1930–2013), Sālim al-Kātib (Shalom Katab) (b. 1931), Najīb Kaḥīla (b. 1931), David Semah (1933–1997), Sasson Somekh (1933–2019), Shmuel Moreh (1932–2017), and Samīr Naqqāsh (1938–2004). The harsh material conditions in the new Jewish state, the difficulties of adapting to a new society, and a lack of knowledge of Hebrew took their toll on a number of them. They underwent an “experience of shock and uprooting,” as Somekh says, and under these conditions “it became difficult to think about literature.” Nevertheless, and in spite of the difficulties in adapting to the new and fundamentally different Hebrew-Jewish society, the fact that they arrived to a state where Arabic was considered an official language, apart from Hebrew, gave them, at least in the beginning, the hope that they would be able to continue their literary careers. Also, following the events of 1948, the greater part of the Arab urban intelligentsia abandoned the territories of Palestine, while those who remained inside the boundaries of the State of Israel were generally from the poorer or the uneducated village population. This cultural vacuum was partially filled by the immigrating Jewish writers and poets.

And, indeed, not a few of the Jewish immigrants continued to create in Arabic while adhering to the poetics they had grown accustomed to in Iraq, which was suffused with literary English and French inspiration.