Journal of the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center
No.16, Spring  2008


 

Dr. Zvi Yehuda:

YOSEF MEIR

 

 

On April 4, 2007, the scholar Yosef Meir (underground code name: Yehoshafat) passed away, after a period of illness.

 

Yosef was born in 1924 in Baghdad, where he grew up and went to school. He joined the underground “He-Halutz” (“Pioneer Zionist Movement") in Iraq and became one of its important leaders. He wrote numerous articles for the movement’s publications and held a number of key positions, the most important of which was commander of the “Shura” (Jewish self-defense organization) in the Jewish Quarter of the old city of Baghdad. After he came on Aliyah to Israel in 1949 he served the young state and contributed to its security. From the end of the 1960s until his death he devoted himself fully to scholarly writing. He published eight books and numerous articles. His illness did not put an end to his scholarly activity and he continued writing up to his death.

 

The topics which Yosef Meir addressed can be divided into three main categories:

1. The underground “He-Halutz” movement in Iraq.

2. The Jewish community in Iraq.

3. The difficulties faced by Oriental Jews in the process of absorption in Israel.

He addressed other issues as well, especially when he thought that his own input could provide a positive contribution to the matter at hand, as for example on the question of relations with Palestinian Arabs.

At the moment two of his books are going to press, one on Zionist prisoners in Iraq and the other on the “Hagana” defense organization in Iraq. Another book in manuscript deals with the intellectual heritage of Rabbi Shimon Agassi.

 

Yosef Meir’s intellectual and scholarly contributions can be briefly summarized as follows:

A.      Yosef’s major contributions to scholarship were in the field of Iraqi Jewry during the first half of the twentieth century. In his studies he not only provides comprehensive and objective information on the topic at hand, but also an analysis of his findings and his opinions on the processes he found. In addition, he sheds light from his own personal experiences on his sources and reveals them with precise clarity.

B.      In his writings on the absorption of Oriental Jews into Israeli society he is very critical of the official establishment of the Jewish state, although he himself was closely associated with the Zionist movement and the institutions of the state. In this respect he continued to maintain the same “revolutionary” opinions which he had held during his “He-Halutz” days in Iraq. His approach is most fully expressed in his Babylon and Catrealivka, in which he criticizes the Zionist and Israeli establishments and proposes a plan for a new kind of “Oriental” Zionism that is at the same time also a platform for a revolution in Jewish society in the Diaspora and in Israel. Yosef Meir hoped that his plan, on which he had worked for some twenty years, would serve as the basis for a mass movement which would bring about the social change he described. He thought that the publication of his book on the one-hundredth anniversary of the Zionist political movement would breathe new life into the old “Ashkenazi” Zionism which, so he believed, had achieved its aims and whose historical role was at an end. But in the ten years which have passed since then nothing happened; Yosef Meir did not live to see the implementation of his plan.

 

The importance of Yosef Meir’s scholarly and intellectual works is such that it is incumbent on us to collect his articles, published in a great variety of different journals and collections, and make them available to scholars, students and other interested people, together with his archive, at the Center.

 

With his death Babylonian Jewry has lost a man who devoted most of his life to his community, which he served with devotion and much love.

May he rest in peace.