Disrupted identity: Naim Kattan’s Farewell Babylon and the exile narrative of Baghdadi Jews
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his multi-genre writings, the Québécois-Canadian author Naim Kattan often refers nostalgically to his early years as an Iraqi Jew growing up in the 1940s’ Baghdad. His autobiographical novel Farewell Babylon (1975) represents an important historical document about the complex reality of the life of Iraqi Jews, often referred to as the Babylonian Jews. Part of the novel’s historicity is the dramatization of the Farhud (violent looting) of 1941, which took place in Baghdad and to which the author was a witness as a young boy. The novel traces the trajectory of the coming of age of an aspiring intellectual, facing challenging personal, social and political obstacles in a fraught, alienating and bigoted environment, with exiting the country being the only possible salvation. This article argues that both minority persecution and exile create identitarian havoc for those subjected to them, especially when evoking the vexed, often misunderstood, issue of the Arab Jew. Kattan’s novel, as well as those of the other forcibly exiled Iraqi-Jewish writers, illustrates nevertheless the notion that while uprootedness is painfully destabilizing, it carries with it a potential for rebirth, the reinvention of self and the accretion of layered identities. Moreover, the article foregrounds Kattan’s skilful deployment of the autobiographical novel as a genre to convey complex intellectual and political issues while maintaining his reader’s sympathy and interest. Finally, the article aims to pay tribute to Naim Kattan, an often-overlooked writer by both Iraqi and Canadian critics, and highlight his touching, lyricized narrative of nostalgia about his birthplace, Baghdad.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".