[1] She attended the Alliance Israélite Universelle school followed by the Shamash college, where she met her future husband, Elie Kedourie; they married in London later (in 1950).
Archivist Miriam Buncombe says the following of the influence of Haim's early life on her later political and intellectual leanings:Sylvia, like Elie, was strongly influenced by her personal experience of the destruction of the Iraqi Jewish community, to which her family had belonged for generations, and the changes to the city of Baghdad where her father and grandfather’s names were listed among the subscribers to the Jewish schools she had attended as a girl.
Her experiences of the dramatic and lasting influence of sweeping political change on this community and the difficulties of the Jewish minority in Iraq led her not to reject Arab culture, but rather to seek a better understanding this world and to share her insight with others through hospitality and scholarship.
Together with Elie Kedourie, she edited Towards a Modern Iran: Studies in Thought, Politics, and Society (1980); Zionism and Arabism in Palestine and Israel (1982), Essays on the Economic History of the Middle East (1988).
Her last book was an edited volume, Elie Kedourie's Approaches to History and Political Theory: The Thoughts and Actions of Living Men" (2006).