Mir Basri
Iraqi Jewish Author and poet

Mir (also transliterated as Me'īr and Meer) S. Baṣrī (Arabic: مير بصري; 1911-2006) was an Iraqi writer, economist, journalist, politician and poet. Among many public positions he held, Basri served as the head and central leader of Iraqi and Baghdad's Jewish community.
Early life
Basri was born on 19 September 1911 in Baghdad to Shaool Basri and Farha Dangoor (the daughter of the Chief Rabbi of Baghdad, Ezra Reuben Dangoor). His father was a cloth merchant in Baghdad, and his uncle was the head of the Sharia court in Baghdad in 1848 AD. Basri was educated Baghdad at al-Ta'awun and the Alliance school where he studied Hebrew, English, and French. Following his secondary education, he trained as an economist and studied Arabic literature.
He mastered the Arabic sciences at the hands of Father Anastase-Marie al-Karmali and Dr. Mustafa Jawad. He studied the history of Iraq at the hands of the lawyer Abbas Al-Azzawi, and studied the Hebrew language at the hands of Isaac Butfis, and prosody at the hands of the poet Mahmoud Al-Mallah. He turned to studying economics and world literature in depth, and he was familiar with ancient and modern Arabic poetry and was influenced by the writers of the diaspora, so he wrote poetry in Hebrew and French and then left them for Arabic.
Economic research and literature
Basri graduated from the University of Baghdad, where he studied economics.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Mir Basri” as iraqi Jewish Author and poet. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as iraqi Jewish Author and poet. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q12246626. VIAF identifies the subject as 93144417. The Library of Congress control number is n88179708. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1911, 2006 and 1848.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mir Basri” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.