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The question that arises out of Sereni’s dual role is of course that of the
extent to which he may have been conflicted, since he was a genuine, pas-
sionate Zionist at the same time as being fiercely antifascist and anxious to
prosecute the Allied cause—SOE’s cause—against Nazism. Things were
perhaps made a little easier for Sereni by the fact that Mossad LeAliyah Bet
were not at all prescriptive about his covert Zionist role, leaving the orga-
nization of migration to Palestine almost entirely up to his imagination and
initiative. And organize he did, using textbook tradecraft to liaise with his
two assistant emissaries by means of cutouts and secret meetings. However,
when operating alone, Sereni could be careless about his own cover, believ-
ing it to be unbreakable and therefore not bothering to disguise his activi-
ties. He once said, ‘The more you seek concealment, the more easily you
will be apprehended.’^47
Enzo Sereni quickly became enormously popular with the Jews of Iraq
and began a movement among them known as Ah-Tenuah (The
Movement). Not unlike Freya Stark’s Ikhwan-al-hurriya, Sereni estab-
lished cell-like meetings of middle-class Jewish women, for instance, by
having one individual arrange a meeting of ten women at which he would
speak. Within a week the ripples would spread, and at the next meeting
there would be twenty women, and so on. However, the Tenuah tech-
nique differed from that of the Ikhwan in two respects: it was based on
family units, and it was illegal. Furthermore, given Sereni’s radical socialist
politics and his enthusiastic support for the Soviet war effort, he advocated
for something rather less theoretical than Stark’s democracy, and thus
communist influence quickly grew among the Iraqi Jews—illegally. Yet
this influence militated against Sereni’s own Zionist cause, for many of the
young Jewish men and women attracted to Marxism did not see emigra-
tion as a solution, certainly not to Palestine. They preferred the path of
social revolution within Iraq—what Sereni disparagingly termed ‘red
assimilation’—and thus they rejected Zionism, labelling it capitalist and
even imperialist.^48
In November 1942, news of the Holocaust finally reached Baghdad.
When he heard of the systematic extermination of the Jews of Europe,
Enzo Sereni was devastated and began to speak of returning to the kib-
butz. He also began to drink quite heavily. Six months later, when Sereni
finally left Iraq, clandestine activity among the Jewish community had
increased to a degree that he felt incapable of managing. His SOE cover
was in peril, the communists had named him publicly as a Zionist orga-
nizer, and he sensed that he might be under surveillance (presumably by