BAGHDAD–One of the last eight Jews in Baghdad, a portly retired accountant, erupts in a bellyful of laughter when asked why he never married.
"I was a playboy. Don't write that!" he jokes, grinning. "How old do you think I am? Wrong. I'm 65! Don't write that! Write that I am 55!"
His government ID proves his age, and on the back it says, unmistakably: "Religion: Jewish."
He has made contact with a reporter, not because he wants to tell the story of his persecuted community, but because he wants to complain about the landlord who is raising his rent.
"Because we are Jewish, he knows we can do nothing. He isn't afraid because he knows we have no tribe here. Don't use my name."
Once one of the largest Jewish communities in the Middle East, Baghdad Jews have now nearly vanished while the country has been consumed by sectarian war.
Speaking in fluent English, the ex-accountant launches into a description of the Baghdad of his youth, one of the Muslim world's most cosmopolitan cities.
He recites the names of legendary social clubs where Jews, Christians and Muslims mingled in better days, with music and whisky and parties that ran through the night.
His family left. Some are in London, some in the United States. His father turned down a chance to move to Canada because he wanted to die and be buried in Iraq.
The ex-accountant himself stayed, but if he can sell his father's house – now a ruin bombed out in the war with Iran in the 1980s – he will finally leave. "I want to sell the house and go. I like Iraq, but I am fed up. We had very nice times in Iraq, but now we don't like it."
Iraq's Jewish community dates from biblical times. According to Charles Tripp's History of Iraq, the country was home to 117,000 Jews in 1947. Under Ottoman rule, well into the first half of the 20th century, Jews made up about a fifth of the population of Baghdad.
How many Jews are there now?
"We know them all," says the ex-accountant. There's the ex-accountant himself, plus the nephew with whom he shares a rented house in Baghdad's Karrada district. There's the man who lives near them, the man who leads the community, the very old woman, the male doctor and the female dentist. And the man whose brother was a goldsmith.
The goldsmith married the dentist a few years ago. A few months later, he was abducted by gunmen.
So that leaves eight.
The synagogue in central Baghdad has been boarded up since 2003.
In the old days, Jews were an integral part of Iraqi life. A relative of the ex-accountant was finance minister decades ago. But beginning in the late 1940s, successive Arab governments accused Baghdad's Jews of supporting Zionism.
Some were jailed, others were barred from government posts, and thousands left for Israel or the West. By the time of Saddam Hussein's fall, the ex-accountant estimates there were only a few dozen Jews left. Western organizations evacuated most of the rest.
Apart from his row with his landlord, the ex-accountant says he's had few problems with neighbours.
"I think most people think we are Christian because they don't know there are still Jews in Iraq."
