The year Naomi Lightman came to study at Oxford – 1962 – was the first in which women were allowed to become members of the Oxford Union. 

Four years earlier, the five women’s colleges had finally been granted equal status with the men’s colleges. Six years before that, the quotas limiting the number of female students at Oxford had been abolished. 43 years previously, women had been allowed to obtain degrees for the first time. 84 years earlier, in 1879, 21 women entered two cloistered halls of residence – the newly-founded colleges of Lady Margaret’s Hall and Somerville – and were the first female students at Oxford. Much remained to be done, but change was already under way. 

Naomi Lightman (née Claff), my grandmother, was born in September 1943 in Blitz-ridden London into a Jewish family. In her early days she was put under the kitchen table to keep her safe from the relentless wartime bombings. Soon after, she moved with her mother to Ayr, a small town in Scotland, to escape the Blitz. Her father was a doctor in Scotland in the Navy. “He was very deeply affected by the very high casualty rate”, Lightman tells me. “It had a lifelong psychological effect on him.”

Lightman turned two just days after World War Two ended. The war that had defined her earliest years now existed not in bombs or evacuations but rationing and ruins. Postwar London was a site of rapid reconstruction as thousands of evacuees returned to what had previously been the site of enemy attack. 

But school was not trouble-free. Bullied at her previous school, nine-year-old Lightman was sent to a recently opened Jewish girls’ school: Hasmonean High School.The following year, she did the eleven plus exams to apply for a grammar school. Her English paper was one of the best, but “the maths paper was the worst they had ever seen, so that was the end of that.”

With less than a decade having passed since the Holocaust, many of the students at the Hasmonean were the children of survivors. But the Holocaust was never mentioned. “This was the 1950s. People were so traumatised they didn’t want to talk about it or pass on the information to their children”, Lightman tells me. “I had to learn about it myself. I heard girls in the corridor whispering to each other.”

As sixth form approached, Lightman says that she “had every intention of staying on to the sixth form.” The only problem was, there wasn’t a sixth form. In previous years, very few girls stayed on at Hasmonean past the age of sixteen; many left to attend secretarial college and then get married. “As far as they were concerned, they had no desire and no incentive to carry on, and the school didn’t provide any incentive either,” she tells me.

“A friend of mine, Freya, wanted to stay on too, and so the school had to create a sixth form for us,” Lightman recalls. “Because she was doing different A levels from me, I had private lessons for two years, and I was very fortunate that there was one outstanding English teacher.”

During the first year of her A Level studies, the teacher said: “I read English at Oxford. Why don’t you have a go at it?” The teacher suggested she apply to Somerville College in particular, rather than any of the other women’s colleges, as it was seen as more inclusive – accepting of women who had not attended prestigious private schools like Cheltenham Ladies’ College or Roedean. “Of course the Hasmonean would have been totally alien, not only because it was not recognised by the Ministry of Education, but because it was a very new school and it was also a Jewish school”, Lightman notes. She was one of the first Hasmonean students to even apply to Oxford.

She then found out she had been called to interview. “I had never been away from home before,” she tells me. “I hadn’t even been on a train on my own before. I really was inexperienced in every respect.” 

Lightman remembers the trepidation she felt as she sat waiting to be called into the interview, surrounded by “very sophisticated young women”. “When I got there, all the girls were sitting there wearing little black suits, high-heeled black shoes, and very smart handbags, and they all had cut glass accents.”

The interviews themselves were no smooth affair. The first interview saw Lightman appear before a panel of people all wearing black gowns. “Very intimidating”, she remembers. “They shot questions at me, and I had never been in a situation like that before.” Her second interview was with the Somerville College Principal, Dame Janet Vaughan, a woman who was both warm and dignified. Lightman describes vividly how, on entering the cavernous interview room, she was unable to spot Vaughan. “You’re supposed to sort of walk into a room and look vaguely confident. But for me, it was the exact opposite. I spent some time trying to see where she was, and then eventually she put her arm up and said, ‘I’m here, dear.’” Lightman felt that Vaughan was “quite interested” in her, as she was “an unusual candidate from an unconventional background”. Years later she discovered that Vaughan, a haematologist, had been sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after its liberation in 1945 to aid in efforts to feed survivors suffering from extreme starvation.

The result of her Oxford application came by telegram, or rather, “a man on a bicycle.” “To my absolute and everybody else’s astonishment, I got a scholarship.” But Lightman felt she could not accept the offer. “I was an only child, and my mother and I were very attached to each other. She and my father had a very difficult relationship, and I thought it would upset her very much if I lived away from home for three years. So I decided on my own to turn the scholarship down, and I wrote a letter to the Principal.” She still wanted to continue her studies whilst supporting her mother, so she enrolled at University College London to study English. Very quickly she realised she had made a mistake; she had little in common with the academic assigned to support her studies and realised that the tutorial system at Oxford would have been ideal for her.

Lightman wrote a letter to Vaughan, explaining her mistake. Vaughan responded that she could take up her offer the following year, but this time would have to pay her fees. How would she pay the fees to attend Oxford? While it only cost a few hundred pounds, it was money her family – living in their cramped London flat – could not afford.

“I made some inquiries, and I discovered there was a Jewish charity that gave money for education”, Lightman tells me. “I had an interview with them, and it was very stiff and uncomfortable, but eventually they said they would give me part of the money.” The rest was lent by a friend of her mother. Finally, after numerous exams, interviews, letters, and changes of plan, Lightman was to matriculate at Oxford.

The first thing Lightman remembers about Oxford is that she had her own room. “I had never had a room of my own”, she says. Due to her family’s poor financial situation, she had shared a bedroom with her grandmother her entire life and would do so until she got married.

Life at Oxford was markedly different for men and women. The latter were in the minority: in 1959, women made up just 16% of the university’s undergraduate population. Male students only could enter Somerville during set hours, and female students were barred from male colleges in the evenings. Lightman recalls that fellow students used to climb over barbed wire to enter college secretly if they had been out later than curfew.

Male Oxford graduates were expected to use their degrees as launching pads for impressive careers. Women, meanwhile, were still expected to do little more than marry and have children. This was no more clearly demonstrated than when, in Lightman’s second year, a fellow English student at Somerville was told by the careers service that she should aspire to become a tour guide at Blenheim Palace. Lightman also remembers writing arts reviews for Cherwell, though the paper was, in the 1960s, no bastion of female empowerment: there were few, if any, women in senior positions.

“When I went to seminars and social events, there were very few women, and the men seemed very confident in a different sort of way”, Lightman observes. Many of the men carried themselves with the effortless assuredness and sophistication born of their public school education. “It was like a very rich family and we were the poor relations,” Lightman says, describing her experience in these situations.

Lightman had three very close friends throughout her time at Oxford, all of whom remained friends with her long after she left. Their rooms were close together, and they were constantly in and out of one another’s. One, whom Lightman remembers as lively and friendly, acted in a play for which Lightman designed the costumes. Another was at ease in Somerville’s intensely academic environment, as her father was a Cambridge professor. Of the third, Lightman recalls that “we could talk to each other about things that upset and worried us more than with others”. 

One aspect of Oxford life that has changed little is the stress of Finals. To cheer her up during the agonising wait for results, Lightman’s mother took her to a play, but halfway through she fainted out of nervousness. Just a few days later, she received the telegram informing her that she had been awarded a First.

After graduating, Somerville offered Lightman a graduate scholarship. She told them she was getting married. She had met her future husband, Gavin, the year before she matriculated at Oxford, through a mutual friend. They started dating in her second year. “Gavin used to come at weekends to visit me, and it was very sweet because the girls used to say, ‘It’s a Gavin weekend, isn’t it?’ and they said they could tell from my face.” 

Continuing graduate study at Oxford was impossible, as Gavin worked in London as a barrister. Somerville found a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) supervisor in London, where Lightman worked on her thesis. One day, years into the DPhil, her supervisor said: “I’m retiring in three months, and you haven’t finished yet. You’ve got three months to finish it.” This prompted weeks of frenzied writing as Lightman rushed to finish her PHD even whilst pregnant. Soon after, her supervisor “rang me up and said, ‘You’ve done it, Naomi. You’ve got your DPhil”.

Graduating with an Oxford degree – and a doctorate – may have opened doors for men, but it certainly did not for women in the 1960s. Lightman recalls an interview at a London university for a lecturing job. The first question she was asked was: “Does your husband approve of you working?” She was so taken aback she was unable to answer.

Her mother had built careers for herself despite the barriers facing women in the workplace, working variously as an artist, agony aunt and magazine editor. Lightman would do the same, working as an English tutor at Surrey University, Royal Holloway, the Open University and Birkbeck.

Fifty years after graduating, Lightman returned to Somerville for a reunion. The college, she found, looked almost exactly as she remembered it. The entrance hall, the Junior Common Room (JCR), and the gardens, seemed untouched by time. Each room she entered resurrected a memory, a tutorial, a seminar, a friendship. “There were ghosts, the shades of the people as they had been in their youth,” she recalls. “I could see them in my mind”.

But amid the familiarity, there was a marked reminder of how much had changed. Two decades before Lightman arrived at Somerville, Margaret Roberts had studied Chemistry there. Better known by her married name, Margaret Thatcher, she went on to become Britain’s first female prime minister. A woman reaching the highest political office in the country would have been unthinkable when Lightman attended Oxford in the 1960s. She expected, therefore, to find Somerville proud of its most distinguished alumna. But the students and faculty were more concerned with the substance of Thatcher’s policies than the significance of her achievement. “There was a bust of Thatcher in the college, but it was nowhere to be seen”, Lightman recalls. “I asked someone in the college and they said they had to put it in a hiding place as it was being assaulted. People intensely disliked her policies.”

Even as the college grappled with how to pay tribute to Thatcher, the very fact of her success captured something of the changes that had occurred since Lightman’s student days.

When Lightman left Somerville after the reunion, she was leaving a college that had changed little in appearance but profoundly in the possibilities it offered its students.

Long before he became one of Israel’s ‘new historians’, Avi Shlaim was a boy in Israel, self-conscious about the sound of his first language. Years earlier, that same boy had been growing up in Baghdad, a city that had been home to Iraqi Jews for two millennia, in a Jewish family that called Iraq home and felt, in his words, “very Iraqi”.

In Baghdad, Shlaim recalls only speaking Arabic growing up, and tells me the other main aspect of Arab culture that remained with him throughout his life was food: “very spicy” rice and chicken, a staple in his Iraqi household. Upon moving to Israel, he encountered Ashkenazi food which he said was “culturally alien” and, in comparison, tasted “incredibly bland and boring” to him. 

“Religion didn’t mean very much to me then,” Shlaim says, as he describes his family as being culturally, rather than religiously, Jewish. Equally, he felt “very Iraqi”, and that in Iraq, his family “felt very much that this was our home. This was our country. We did well there. The Jews in general did very well.” 

Shlaim points to the thriving Jewish communities that existed throughout the Middle East, the Levant, North Africa, Iran, and Turkey, before the creation of the state of Israel: “We were Iraqis whose religion happened to be Jewish.”

For him, a sense of belonging is the crucial difference between his experience in Iraq and that of Jews in Europe. “Iraq didn’t have a Jewish problem”, describing this as a problem that pertained instead to European Jews, in particular in Germany. In Iraq, however, “we had a sense of belonging, rather than feeling that we were a persecuted minority”. “We were not aliens, we were not intruders, we were not strangers.”

The turning point, as he sees it, was the establishment of the state of Israel on 14th May 1948. Following this, “any Arab who didn’t like Jews could say, ‘You are foreigners. You don’t belong here’”. Shlaim also singles out the Farhud, a violent pogrom against the Jewish population of Baghdad that took place on 1st and 2nd June of 1941, as a pivotal moment for Arab Jews. However, while Zionist historiography has often claimed Farhud as evidence of pervasive antisemitism in the Arab world, Shalim rejects this interpretation: “I don’t deny that there was an antisemitic element in it, but I attribute it mainly to British colonialism and the British policy of divide and rule and the British choice of the Jews as a scapegoat after the nationalist revolt of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani.” 

This event was traumatic for the Jewish community. In his memoir, Three Worlds, Shlaim argues that Arab Jews were caught between Zionism and nationalism.

His own family, however, firmly belonged to the mainstream, which was non-nationalist and non-Zionist. Shlaim recalls once asking his mother, who always “loved talking about the wonderful Muslim friends we had in Baghdad”, whether their family had any Zionist friends. She responded: “No, Zionism is an Ashkenazi thing. It’s nothing to do with us.”

For Shlaim, his family’s attitude was “very typical and representative of the mainstream attitude towards Zionism.” His family were “Iraqis who were happy to stay in Iraq” and “Zionism was something alien”, something which “didn’t have the slightest appeal” to his Iraqi-Jewish family or community in Baghdad.

Shlaim says the alienation went both ways: “The leaders of the Zionist movement looked down on Arabs as backward and primitive,” and they also “looked down on Arab Jews as part of a backward and unenlightened society.” Indeed, his memoir opens with a scene from his childhood in which he feels embarrassed speaking to his father in Arabic in front of his non-Arab Jewish friends.

In Three Worlds, Shlaim challenges the idea that Israel was a haven rescuing Iraqi Jews from antisemitism. “I say that the Zionist movement was a ruthless and exclusive movement that only cared about Jews and didn’t care about Arabs, and that the state of Israel, the Mossad, played a part in uprooting Arab Jews from their homes and bringing them to Israel.”

He tells me that his family’s migration from Iraq to Israel was not something they actively chose: “My parents didn’t really understand how we were catapulted, how we were uprooted from Iraq, where we were very happy, and landed in this European-style country.” His mother found the transition from Iraq to Israel “really traumatic” but later recovered. His father never did.

He makes it clear that the encouraged migration was not a humanitarian mission nor noble support for Jews in trouble. Rather, it was intended to serve the interest of the newly born Israeli state, which was “very short of manpower”. When asked what his evidence for this claim was, Shlaim spoke about his research, which found that three out of five bombs that went off on the streets of Iraq between April 1950 and June 1951, which targeted Jewish gathering places and a synagogue in Baghdad, were instigated by the Mossad through Jewish Zionist activists. This led to panic-driven urgency to leave Iraq, and helped accelerate the exodus of roughly 120,000 Iraqi Jews through Operation Ezra and Nehemiah.

He also tells me about an elderly friend of his mother’s, Yakov Kuli, who worked in the Zionist underground, and confessed to forging documents and paying bribes to encourage Aliyah, the immigration of Jewish people to the Land of Israel, and named a colleague, Yusef Basri, as a Mossad controller in Iran. Basri and another Mossad operative who planted the bombs, Shalom Salih Shalom, were convicted and executed by Iraqi authorities in 1951.

Shlaim’s Zionist critics instead argue that the main reason for the Exodus was not Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, but persecution of the Jews by the Iraqi government after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. In response to these claims, Shlaim says: “I don’t deny that there was persecution, but the bombs on Jewish premises was another factor that has to be taken into account.” He also says that even if not one Iraqi Jew had left because of them, he would still condemn Israel: “Israel wasn’t created in order to make life for Jews in the Arab world unsafe.”

I ask Shlaim how he, as an Arab-Jew himself, explains why many Arab-Jews look down on other Arabs, or reject their Arab identity. Shlaim replies that while the Zionist narrative says that Arab Jews were hostile to Arabs because they lived with them, “because they ‘knew what they were like’, because ‘the Arabs only respect the language of force’”. He rejects the premise that it grew out of their experience of life in Arab countries, saying “the experience, certainly, of my family’s experience, was not a negative one. It was a very positive one, living with Arabs”.

The hostility, he says, was learned later, when Mizrahi Jews in Israel were “indoctrinated to see the Arabs as the enemy and to hate Arabs”. He felt it himself at school, where he was only taught the Zionist narrative of the conflict: “I never learned anything else… we were only taught the history of the Jews in Europe.” His education in Israel involved “an attempt to erase Arab roots, to erase Arab history, to systematically de-Arabise anything that was Arab, including the language”. Shlaim points to Arab and Iraqi Jewish writers such as Sami Michael but says they “never entered the canon of Israeli literature”, as well as noting that there are “endless memoirs by European Jews and American Jews,” yet by comparison, “there are very few memoirs by Arab Jews like mine”. As a result, his memoir became a way to “assert my right to write our history as I understand it”. Shlaim would like all people, young and old, to understand from his memoir that “Zionism changed the course of Middle East history”.

The rich history of the Arab-Jews is certainly absent from not only the Israeli school textbooks that Shlaim encountered, but from political and historical discourse, especially with regard to the creation of the state of Israel. When asked whether the history of this community is misunderstood, Shlaim is quick to respond: “The whole history of the Jews of Iraq prior to 1950 is not just misunderstood. It’s completely absent.”

When asked why the history of Arab Jews has received very little attention in wider discussions of the creation of Israel, Shlaim explains that European Jews were dominant in the making and identity-building of the state of Israel, “they gave it a Eurocentric identity”. “They didn’t want to be part of the Middle East, but they regarded Israel because of its values and its culture as part of the West”. 

Regarding his own personal schooling experience in the newly established state of Israel, Shlaim recalls carrying “a big chip on my shoulder and an inferiority complex for being an Iraqi boy,” something that governed his relationship with Israeli society and held him back at school. He did not challenge or rebel against this social order; instead, he “accepted it as a fact that I was inferior at the bottom of the pyramid”.

The change in his internal beliefs about his Arab-Jewish roots only came when he left Israel for England at the age of 15. “I could see Israel in perspective, and I could see that I wasn’t inferior”, he says. It was also his move to London that allowed his love for history to blossom. He credits this to his secondary school history teacher, who was a “classic example of one teacher who believed in me and encouraged me,” and he says that this was why he chose to study history at Cambridge University. 

I ask Professor Shlaim about his sense of identity today and whether he feels more Iraqi, Jewish, Israeli, or British. But I quickly realise that this question is itself reductive and an oversimplification of his broad and multi-faceted, multi-layered identity. “It reflects the complexity of the notion of identity”, he tells me. 

“In my case, it was Israeli society that shaped my identity as a Zionist. So I grew up as a Zionist”, but this was not an identity that Shlaim would choose for himself. Through Three Worlds, he has sought to “reinvent [himself] as an Arab Jew”. When asked how he explains an Arab-Jew identity to someone who considers it a juxtaposition, he tells me: “I don’t see the contradiction.” Linguistically and culturally, he says, his parents had “much more in common with other Muslims throughout the region than they did with Jews in Eastern Europe”. 

Shlaim is proud of his Arab-Jewish identity, though he acknowledges that “the genocide in Gaza has made me distance myself more and more from Israel, and drawn me closer to Jews”. For him, the core values of Judaism are “truth, justice, and peace”. “The essence of Judaism is nonviolence,” he says, describing Netanyahu’s government as the “antithesis of these core Jewish values”.

Near the end of our conversation, he tells me he is “proud of being a Jew, and equally proud of being an Arab. The hyphen in Arab-Jews doesn’t divide Jews from Arabs; it unites Jews and Arabs”.