“These Hearts, Can They Reach Tranquility?”

Abstract

The article examines the Arabic literary poetry written by Iraqi Jews in Israel during the 1950s after their immigration from Iraq. This temporal revival of Arabic poetry by Jews was the swan song of the Arab-Jewish culture as we are currently witnessing its demise– a tradition that started more than fifteen hundred years ago is vanishing before our eyes. Until the twentieth century, the great majority of the Jews under the rule of Islam adopted Arabic as their language; now Arabic is gradually disappearing as a language mastered by Jews.