Babylon's Broken Dreams.(Iraqi Jews)

Memories as old as Babylon, hopes and fears as new as the headlines out of Baghdad, all blend together in the living history of Iraq's Jews. Eileen Khalastchy, 70, remembers falling asleep on the roof of her house near the Tigris River as a child in the 1950s, listening to "the sound of music and of people clapping; the sky was full of stars." Now living in Britain, she longs to go back to Iraq, she says. Edwin Shuker, 48, member of the World Sephardic Congress, recalls living as if "we were in a big, virtual concentration camp" in Iraq in 1971. He was 16 when his family fled north through the mountains to freedom. "We were willing to lose everything," he says. "You felt you were going to die anyway." Yet he, too, wanted to return, and last month for a few days he did. "I was unable to control the tears," he says. As he saw Baghdad from the air, he broke down. "I cried for our whole life, for our community, now dispersed all over the world, for all the people killed by Saddam Hussein."

As the United States moved to oust the Iraqi dictatorship earlier this year, many partisans of the war imagined it would create a new Middle East where Israel could survive in security, where borders would open, trade would flourish. Even the road to peace among Israelis and Palestinians would go through Baghdad, it was said, as the city would become an example of prosperity, tolerance and coexistence. After all, less than a century ago a quarter of the city's population was Jewish, and among their hundreds of thousands of descendants, many dared imagine they could visit their old homes, perhaps reclaim their birthrights, even build new businesses.

But Emad Levy, 38, who was born and raised in Baghdad and lives there still as the "acting rabbi" of a community that has dwindled to 26 people, shares neither the exiles' nostalgia, nor any grand hopes for what's to come. "We have no future here, believe me," he says. Levy's 82-year-old father was given the chance to leave with five other aging Jews in July, aboard a secret charter flight direct from Baghdad International to Ben-Gurion Airport. "Later I will follow," says Levy, after he has sold off the house and other assets too difficult to take with him.

In the harsh reality of today's Iraq, those Jews who remain are much freer than they were under Saddam, who watched them all as potential spies. But they say the remnants of their culture are in greater danger now, and so are their lives. Baghdad's last open synagogue, behind a high wall in the district of Bataween, was locked and shuttered about two weeks before the American invasion began, and has not been used for regular services since. "We cannot let anybody enter the synagogue," Levy explains, "because the neighbors see people and say, 'They are Zionists.' And, then, it is so easy to throw a bomb over the wall."

The community has lived through millennia of persecutions and prosperity, panic, hope and despair. "We have been here for 2,600 years, from the time of Nebuchadnezzar," says Levy, when the Babylonian tyrant carried thousands of Jews from Jerusalem into exile. ("By the rivers of Babylon," says the psalm, "there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.") But they could not survive the frightening tumult of an Arab world inflamed for more than 60 years by anger against modern Zionism. ...