Although In modern times, Jews were nowhere as open to participation in the wider Arabic-Muslim culture, and at home in literary standard Arabic, as from the 1920s in Iraq. Writing in literary standard Arabic, Iraqi Jews produced works that quickly became part of the mainstream of modern Arabic literature. Following the war in Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel, many Iraqi Jewish intellectuals, poets and writers emigrated to the new state. On their arrival in Israel they faced a new linguistic situation in which the Hebrew language was limited to a single religion, a single nation, and a single ethnic entity. While in Iraq, Arab cultural and national identity encompassed Jews together with Muslims and Christians—in Israel, Jewish identity became enmeshed with cultural and national identity. Such immigrants thus faced a fierce clash between their original Iraqi-Arab narrative and the Jewish Zionist Western-oriented dominant master narrative. The natural Iraqi hybrid of a Jewish-Arab identity became contradistinct and even diametrically opposed identities—Arab versus Jew. As a result, the literature twentieth century Iraqi Jews produced in Arabic has been gradually disappearing; there is no Jewish writer on record born in Israel after 1948 who writes belles-lettres in Arabic. The demise of Arabic literature among Jews has precipitated a controversy regarding the cultural preferences of Israeli society. The dilemma is whether Arab culture can be considered a ‘correct’ source of inspiration for the Israeli Hebrew culture. ‬