This chapter deals with a journal entitled al-Misbah (The Lamp), a Jewish Iraqi publication which appeared in Baghdad between the years 1924 and 1929. To the best of my knowledge, it is one of the only journals in the Arab world that has been characterised as a Zionist mouthpiece, on the one hand, and also as a testimony to the success of Arab nationalism, on the other. Reading the pages of al-Misbah does not resolve the puzzle easily. In what follows, I examine the various issues which dominated al-Misbah's pages in order to highlight the identity of the paper and to enrich our understanding of the nature of the Iraqi press under the British Mandate. I address two discursive circles – the Iraqi and the Jewish one. I propose that the paper conveyed an unmistakable Iraqi and Arab identity. Despite the editor's Zionist inclinations, the conversations between readers and writers acquired a life of their own and the paper had, in fact, promoted a new Arab Jewish identity. The themes dealt with by al-Misbah's readers, moreover, illustrate how Jews sought to use the state's institutions built under the Mandate as venues for the cultivation of non-sectarian and democratic citizenship.

The Jewish community in Iraq at the end of World War I numbered about 87,488 individuals out of a population of 2,849,238. In 1920, 50,000 Jews populated Baghdad; this Jewish Baghdadi community had been relatively affluent as far back as the nineteenth century. The community enjoyed commercial ties with migrant communities of Iraqi Jews in India and England, and boasted a secular education system whose roots date back to the mid-1860s when a school of the Alliance Israélite Universelle was opened in Baghdad. During the 1920s, the number of exclusively religious Jewish schools decreased and more Jews began attending secular schools (either governmental or sponsored by the Jewish community). Their bilingual education enabled many middle-class Jews to integrate into the state's economy under the Mandate, and many worked in British banks and commercial companies.

Jews began to affiliate themselves with the Iraqi community subsequent to the Young Turk Revolution in 1908. This process was culturally marked by the abandoning of Judeo-Arabic (Arabic written in Hebrew characters) and the adoption of Arabic and Ottoman Turkish in its stead.