The Ben-Porat (Irak) Family

Every Jewish lineage from Iraq is part of a history whose antiquity rivals that of almost every other community in the diaspora. When Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the First Temple of Jerusalem and deported the elites of Judah to Mesopotamia, he did not merely create captives: he founded, without intending to, the most enduring Jewish home in history outside the Land of Israel. Psalm 137 — "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept" — remains the inaugural testimony of this presence, which did not cease until the mid-twentieth century.

It was in Babylonia that the Talmud known as the Babylonian Talmud was composed, between the third and sixth centuries — a monumental work that became the backbone of halakha for the entire Jewish people. It was there that, under Muslim rule following the Arab conquest of the seventh century, the academies of Soura and Poumbedita, led by the gaonim, held sway over the entire diaspora, while the exilarch — the resh galuta — embodied, as a purported descendant of the house of David, a princely continuity of Jewish authority. The Iraqi historian Yūsuf Rizq Allāh Ghanīma, in his Promenade du nostalgique dans l'histoire des Juifs d'Irak (1924), devotes an essential portion of his study to this antiquity and continuity — the first major synthesis on the subject in the Arabic language.

From this matrix, the Ben-Porat lineage inherits a fundamental trait that Jewish tradition places at the forefront of its virtues: talmudic learning as the foundation of collective identity. Baghdadi Judaism, until the threshold of the modern era, remained deeply literate, bound to study, to the synagogue, and to the rigor of observance — a Judaism that had never ceased to live where it was born. The Ben-Porat family, even before history came to record its individual names, belongs to this people of study and Memory, custodians of the diaspora's longest-rooted presence.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Jewish community of Baghdad was one of the most significant and most flourishing in the Arab world. Under the declining Ottoman Empire and then under the British Mandate, the Jews of Baghdad formed a considerable share of the city's population and occupied a central place in its economy, commerce, banking, and administration. The Judeo-Arabic language, the Baghdadi rites, the great merchant families wove a world that was at once deeply integrated into the city and faithful to its own singularity. The scholarly study by Iraqi historian Kāẓim Ḥabīb, Les Juifs d'Irak et la citoyenneté arrachée (2015), traces precisely this integration of Jews into the nascent Iraqi nation, before it was gradually taken from them.

It was in that Baghdad that Mordechai Ben-Porat was born, in 1923. According to his own memoirs — To Baghdad and Back, published by Gefen — he grew up in a Jewish family in the city, within a community that believed, with good reason, that it had been at home there for millennia. The life he describes is that of an ordinary Baghdadi child of a world that was about to disappear: the home, the synagogue, the street, the market, the still-possible coexistence in a cosmopolitan city. The very title of the work — "To Baghdad and Back: the miraculous return to the land, two thousand years in the making, of the Jews of Iraq" — condenses the thesis of an entire life: that the exile of Babylon would find its end not through assimilation but through the return to Zion.

This community carried high, in Iraqi collective life, a virtue that Jewish tradition holds to be cardinal: involvement in the city, economic and intellectual contribution to the host society, without self-abnegation. The Jews of Baghdad were builders of their city. That this contribution was paid, a generation later, at the price of exile, belongs to the shadows of this story and not to its light.

The year 1941 marks, in the Memory of the Jews of Iraq, the irreparable fracture. On June 1st and 2nd, in Baghdad, during the feast of Shavuot and in the power vacuum that followed the collapse of the pro-Nazi regime of Rachid Ali al-Gaylani, there erupted the pogrom known as the Farhoud. Hundreds of Jews were murdered, women raped, homes and businesses looted and destroyed. The Farhoud shattered, for many, the belief in the possibility of a Jewish future in Iraq.

Mordechai Ben-Porat was eighteen years old. This event, as he recounts it in his memoirs, was decisive in shaping his trajectory: the conviction that the security of the Jews of Iraq could no longer rest on the goodwill of the surrounding society alone. Like many young people of his generation, he turned toward the clandestine Zionist movement then organizing within the community, and toward the idea of a gathering in the Land of Israel.

The climate that deteriorated in the years that followed — heightened by the partition of Palestine in 1947, the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and the war that ensued — placed the Jews of Iraq in an increasingly precarious situation. The historian Nissim Qazzāz, in his study Les Juifs d'Irak à l'époque du régime de Abd al-Karim Qasim (2013), documents the manner in which the legal and social status of the Jews deteriorated, transforming a prosperous community into a suspect and threatened population. It is from this ordeal that the vocation was born which would make the lineage's greatness: not vengeance, but rescue — pikuah nefesh, the saving of lives, which halakha places above almost all commandments.

Between 1950 and 1951, one of the largest population transfers in contemporary Jewish history took place: the exodus of virtually the entire Jewish community of Iraq to the young State of Israel. The operation bore the name Ezra and Nehemiah, after the two scribes who, in the fifth century before the common era, brought the exiles of the first return from Babylon to Jerusalem. The choice of these names was not incidental: it explicitly placed the event within the long biblical duration of the return from Babylon.

Mordechai Ben-Porat was at the heart of this undertaking. Sent clandestinely to Iraq, he organized there, beginning in 1949, under a false identity and at the risk of his life, the registration and routing of Jews seeking to leave, and then the airlift that, via Cyprus and Tehran, transported them to Israel. According to his memoirs, he coordinated on the ground the immense clandestine logistics that made it possible to evacuate the community almost in its entirety — on the order of one hundred twenty to one hundred thirty thousand persons according to commonly cited estimates — in just over a year. He was arrested, hunted, and forced to live in complete secrecy. His nickname, "Mordechai Bibi," remained attached in Iraqi memory to this figure of the invisible organizer of the exodus.

This episode embodies, with rare intensity, two virtues that Jewish tradition has never ceased to extol: care for the other carried to the point of self-sacrifice, and the responsibility of the individual toward the community — kol Israël arevim ze la-ze, "all Israel is guarantor one for another." The scale of the upheaval is also comprehensible within the broader context of the birth of Israel, that moment when, as historians of the period have analyzed, Ben-Gourion and his contemporaries made the ingathering of the exiles — the kibboutz galouyot — the very axis of national construction. Ben-Porat was one of the anonymous artisans of this doctrine as applied to the most ancient of the diasporas.

One must not, however, pass over the shadows in silence. The massive arrival of Eastern Jews in the Israel of the 1950s was accompanied by discrimination and marginalization that the newcomers, housed in transit camps — the ma'abarot — experienced harshly. The historian Bryan K. Roby, in The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion, demonstrated how profoundly the struggle of Mizrahi Jews for equality was an occluded part of Israeli history. The trajectory of Ben-Porat, who later became a spokesperson for this community, cannot be understood outside this tension between salvation and humiliation, between the dreamed-of return and the difficult welcome.

Settled in Israel, Mordechai Ben-Porat devoted the second half of his life to public affairs and to the cause of his community of origin. He served as mayor of Or Yehuda, a town in the Tel-Aviv suburbs largely populated by Iraqi immigrants, and sat in the Knesset on several occasions, where he represented the experience and interests of Jews who had come from Arab countries. He also held ministerial responsibilities. His political career, often independent, made him a recognized voice of the Mizrahim in an Israeli landscape long dominated by elites of European origin — a continuation, on the democratic stage, of that same virtue of engagement in collective life which had characterized the Jews of Baghdad.

But the work through which he most fully entered Israel's long Memory was the founding, in Or Yehuda, of the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center. Understanding that the exodus of 1951 had closed two thousand five hundred years of History and that this world risked fading away with the disappearance of those who had known it, he devoted his energy to gathering, preserving and transmitting the heritage of the community: ritual objects, manuscripts, photographs, testimonies, the reconstruction of Baghdad's synagogues and homes. This gesture belongs to a profoundly Jewish virtue: zakhor, "remember," the commandment of Memory, which makes transmission a sacred duty.

His memoirs, To Baghdad and Back, proceed from the same intention: to fix in writing what exile might have dissolved. The scholar and the man of action meet within them, just as there met in him the two faces of the Babylonian tradition — that of study and that of responsibility. He died in 2022, at ninety-nine years of age, the last great witness to the operation that closed the cycle opened by the deportation of Nebuchadnezzar.

The name Ben-Porat deserves a moment's reflection, standing at the crossroads of tradition and history. One must first observe, with due caution, that in the Israel of the first generation, the Hebraization of names was a widespread and often encouraged practice: many immigrants adopted, or were given, a Hebrew name bearing meaning, marking a break with the Judeo-Arabic patronym inherited from the diaspora. It is plausible — without being possible to establish here with the rigor of the archive — that the name Ben-Porat belongs to this movement of identity refoundation, in which the return to Zion was accompanied by a return to the sacred language.

Yet this choice, if it was a choice, is laden with a meaning that transcends the individual. Ben porat is the blessing of Joseph, the man of the Egyptian exile who became, in a foreign land, the savior of his people and ultimately led them back toward the Promised Land. Jewish tradition has made Joseph the model of the tsaddik who maintains his fidelity far from his home and who, from the very depths of exile, prepares the deliverance. That this name should have designated the one who organized the "ascent" of the Jews of Babylon reconnects with the biblical figure to the point of vertigo: the Memory of the text and the history of the twentieth century answer each other.

This intersection illuminates the place of the lineage in the collective Memory of Israel. Compared to the great rabbinical lineages of the medieval West — the Abulafia of Toledo or the house of the Rosh transplanted in Iberia, whose scholarly authority historians have traced — the Ben-Porat lineage does not belong to the aristocracy of knowledge but to that of action and testimony. Its greatness lies not in the responsa nor in the commentaries, but in the rescue of a people and in the care of its Memory. This is another way, no less Jewish, of serving: not through the pen of the decisor, but through the committed body and the preserved archive.

The Ben-Porat lineage crosses Jewish history like a bridge thrown between the most ancient and the most recent: from the rivers of Babylon where the ruins of Jerusalem were mourned, to the airplanes that, in 1951, brought the descendants of those exiles back to the Rediscovered Land. A late branch of the oldest Judaism of the diaspora, it gathered the learned heritage, yet expressed it in a manner uniquely its own.

For if one must name, above all others, the virtue this lineage most fully embodied, it is the care shown to the other carried to the point of rescue — that mutual responsibility by which all Israel is surety for one another — and its extension into the duty of Memory, the zakhor. Where other lineages gave Israel masters of the Law, this one gave it a rescuer and a guardian. To organize the clandestine exodus of an entire community at the risk of one's own life, then to devote one's old age to preventing that engulfed world from sinking into oblivion: these two gestures are one and the same. To save the living, to save the memory of the dead — it is the same faithfulness.

Thus the prophetic name shall have been fulfilled. The "fertile branch by the spring" shall have, like the Joseph of Genesis, scaled the wall of exile and brought his own back toward home. And in the Center for Babylonian Heritage in Or Yehuda, as in the pages where Mordechai Ben-Porat set down his journey "to Baghdad and back," the lineage continues to speak to the people of Israel the most ancient of its commandments: remember.