New Books in Diplomatic History

In this episode we spoke with Marian Scheuer Sofaer, Esquire, and Dr. Einav Yehuda-Shnaidman about The Expulsion of Jews from Iraq, 20th Century: The Agonies of Redemption (Brill, 2024), by Dr. Zvi Yehuda, and translated by Sofaer.

Dr. Zvi Yehuda, born in Iraq in 1936, immigrated to Israel
as a teenager during Operation Ezra and Nehemiah and went on to complete
a PhD in History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, later founding
and heading the research institute at the Babylonian Jewry Heritage
Center. He began to write the book in 1984, in a conversation with
former Knesset Speaker Shlomo Hillel, and grew into a forty-year project
of archival research across Israel, the United Kingdom, France, the
United States, and Iraq, conducted in Hebrew, English, French, German
and Judeo-Arabic. Yehuda passed away before he could complete editing
the English translation; his daughter, Dr. Einav Yehuda-Shnaidman,
together with Sofaer, brought the English edition to completion.

The book situates the modern Iraqi Jewish community within a
more discontinuous history than is often assumed. Yehuda's research
identified a substantial gap, from the fourteenth through the eighteenth
centuries, in which no functioning Jewish community existed in Iraq;
the community that flourished into the twentieth century instead
descended from waves of immigration beginning after 1740, drawing Jews
from Kurdistan, Iran, and Europe, and developing its own distinct
Judeo-Arabic dialect.

Following Israel's establishment and victory in 1948,
Sofaer and Yehuda-Shnaidman described the systematic persecution that
followed: mass dismissals of Jews from government employment, punitive
import-export regulations, and new restrictions on real estate and
mortgages. Yehuda-Shnaidman emphasized that Prime Minister Nuri al-Said
was a central architect of this policy, proposing to the United Nations a
plan to force Iraq's Jews to leave within four months, stripped of
citizenship and property—a plan ultimately abandoned only after Jordan
refused to allow the deportation convoys to cross its territory.

Central to Yehuda's research is his conclusion that the
expulsion was not, as long assumed, a response to Zionist activity, but a
deliberate, state-directed policy to remove Iraq's Jews and seize their
assets. The book also overturns the long-standing claim that bombs
thrown at Jewish targets in Baghdad in 1950–51 were planted by Zionists
to encourage emigration; evidence uncovered only in 2013 by an Iraqi
journalist instead implicates Arab extremists, and points to the
wrongful execution of Jews framed for the attacks.

Altogether, the book documents the expulsion and
dispossession of some 150,000 Jews from Iraq, part of the roughly one
million Jews forced from Muslim-majority countries across the twentieth
century—a history Yehuda insisted be established on primary evidence
rather than inherited assumption.
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Henry VIII is England’s most famous king. He is simultaneously the virtuous Renaissance prince gone wrong, the psychopathic, paranoid tyrant, the religious disruptor and the much-married glutton.

Overlord: The Life and Reign of Henry VIII (Birlinn, 2026) is a groundbreaking study of Henry’s life examines and destroys many of the long-repeated myths about this complex monarch: he was not particularly gluttonous, not particularly prudish, and not particularly messy in his religious changes. Nor did he see himself as simply King of England. Drawing on archival sources from across the British Isles, Dr. Steven Veerapen reveals how Henry fashioned an image of himself as a law-abiding and benevolent emperor who dreamed of uniting England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and swathes of France under Tudor rule.

Yet the image was false and the dream a nightmare for his queens, his ministers and many of his subjects. This new portrait shows Henry for what he really was: a self-aggrandising actor who, by fair means and foul – murder plots, marriage negotiations and military ventures – did all he could to realise his imperial fantasy.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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In
this episode of New Books Network, I speak with Nabi Sahak about his
book, Anglo-Afghan Power and Politics, 1893–1947: The Durand Line Unmasked (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025).

Anglo-Afghan
Power and Politics revisits one of the most contested borders in the
modern world. The roughly 2,640-kilometre line drawn in 1893 by Mortimer
Durand and Amir Abdur Rahman
Khan, which today divides Pashtun communities between Afghanistan and
Pakistan. Sahak's central argument is that the historical purpose of the
Durand Line has never been settled: was it a temporary
sphere-of-influence arrangement, a frontier meant to manage dissent, or a
genuine international border? The book contends that answering this
question by using long-neglected Afghan-language sources alongside the
familiar British colonial record. Anchored chronologically in the period
from Abdur Rahman
Khan's rise to Afghan independence in 1919, with earlier and later
chapters extending the frame back to 1761 and forward to 1947, the book
draws on original correspondence between the Afghan Amir and British
viceroys, the writings of Afghan historians such as Ghubar, Kakar, and
Habibi, the accounts of colonial officials like Holdich and Caroe, and a
set of original interviews with contemporary Afghan and Pakistani
scholars and politicians. What distinguishes the book is its explicit
reframing of the dispute as a matter of missing perspective. Sahak
argues that decades of scholarship on the Durand Line have been built
almost entirely
on British and Pakistani positions, leaving the Afghan and Pashtun view
including the lived experience of communities split by the line is
largely absent
from the international debate. Writing partly from personal history as
someone who grew up in Kabul during the Soviet occupation and civil war,
Sahak situates the technical and diplomatic history of the boundary
within its human cost. The author treats
the line not only as a nineteenth-century colonial artefact but as an
unresolved question still shaping Afghanistan-Pakistan relations,
Pashtun identity, and regional security today.

Qaseem
Ahmadzai holds a master's degree in intellectual history from Södertörn
University, Sweden. His research focuses on postcolonial theory,
historiography, and non-Western intellectual traditions, with particular
attention to Afghanistan and the broader Pashto-Persephone worlds.
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How the nuclear guardrails were dismantled. What arms control actually did (risk management, predictability, geography), how it unravelled from the 2000s onward, and why its collapse matters more now as we see a resurgence of strategic instability and armed conflict.
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Anna Lively is a historian of modern Ireland, Britain, and Russia. Awarded her PhD in History from the University of Edinburgh in 2022, she is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History at the University of Strathclyde. Prior to this she held the Roy Foster Irish Government Research Fellowship in the History and Culture of Ireland at Hertford College, University of Oxford, and was a Teaching Fellow in Modern History at the University of Aberdeen. She has published in multiple journals on the centenary of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and on the Irish Save the Children Fund.

From the late nineteenth century, Ireland featured prominently in Russian liberal, conservative, and radical debates about land politics, self-determination, and empire. Equally, Irish commentators from across the political spectrum used Russia as a lens onto questions of imperialism, anti-imperialism, and socialism. But while the Irish and Russian revolutionary contexts are well-studied in isolation, their myriad political, social, and cultural entanglements are not.Drawing on extensive Russian and Irish archival accounts, newspapers, diaries, letters, memoirs, literary, and visual sources, Revolutionary Connections: Russia and Ireland, 1905-1923 (Oxford UP, 2026) looks in both directions at Irish responses to Russian revolutionary change and at representations of Ireland in Russian-language texts from the 1905 Russian Revolution to the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923. The result is a unique account of international engagement in revolutionary Russia and Ireland and of how Ireland was imagined beyond the Anglophone world. This mutual, if selective and conditional, engagement reflected wider technological changes in news communication and the expansion of international news agencies. Diasporic networks, including in Britain and the US, helped to shape Russo-Irish relations and Irish publications and political actors engaged with different parts of the Russian empire, including Ukraine, Finland, and Poland.Through five thematic chapters, the book considers Russo-Irish relations from contrasting and often overlooked angles, including Irish eyewitness experiences on the Eastern front during World War One and religious perspectives. Using a transnational methodology and expansive source base, the book offers a fresh angle on the entangled history of revolutions in the early twentieth century and the translation of news and ideas across borders.

Revolutionary Connections: Russia and Ireland, 1905–1923 will be published in September 2026 with Oxford University Press
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