The Million Jewish families driven out of homes in Arab lands
The removal of the Jews from the Arab world has been all but ignored, says Tom Gross
Most of the Expelled Jewish families were resettled in Israel
Liliane Levy Cohen, 'Camelia', A leading Egyptian actress in the 1940's Photo by Eliot Elisofon/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
It is not surprising, given the sheer scale of the Holocaust and its sadism, that it has dominated contemporary discourse among Jews and others. But, while the extermination of European Jews has rightfully (though belatedly) generated a great deal of study and research, the removal of the Jews from the Arab world has been all but ignored.
This ignorance extends to policy-makers at the highest level. Some journalists and politicians I have spoken to have expressed surprise when I even mentioned that Jews had lived in sizeable numbers in the Middle East before Israel’s independence.
In fact, Jews have lived in what is now the Arab world for over 2,600 years, a millennium before Islam was founded, and centuries before the Arab conquest of many of those territories. In pre-Islamic times, whole Jewish kingdoms existed there, for example Himyar in Yemen.
Up to the 17th century, there were more Jews in the Arab and wider Muslim world than in Europe. In Baghdad, in 1939, 33 per cent of the population were Jews, making it at the time proportionately more Jewish than Warsaw (29 per cent) and New York (27 percent). Jews had lived in Baghdad since the destruction of the first temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE. Today, only five Jews reportedly remain there.
Before they were driven out en masse, the Jews of the Arab world, like Jews in Europe, were often important figures in their societies. The first novel to be published in Iraq was written by a Jew. Iraq’s first finance minister was a Jew, Sir Sasson Heskel. The founder of Egypt’s first national theatre in Cairo in 1870 was a Jew, Jacob Sauna. Egypt’s first opera was written in 1919 by a Jew. Many of the classics of Egyptian cinema were directed by Jews and featured Jewish actors.
The pioneer of Tunisian cinema was also Jewish (he was one of the first in the world to film underwater sequences), as was Tunisia’s leading female singer.
The world bantamweight boxing champion was also a Tunisian Jew and so were many other leading boxers and swimmers — including Alfred Nakache, the Algerian swimming champion who later survived Auschwitz. (Hundreds of Jews died in Nazi camps set up in Libya and some other Libyan Jews were deported to Bergen-Belsen.)
Even the less prominent Jews were often interwoven into the wider societies. As a Moroccan proverb put it: “A market without Jews is like bread without salt.” (In the west, there are many prominent Jews with roots in the Arab world. The American comedian Jerry Seinfeld has a Syrian Jewish mother; Bernard Henri-Levy’s parents were Algerian Jews, and so on.)
In Israel, 260,000 Arabs stayed after the country’s rebirth in 1948 and took Israeli citizenship. (That number is now 1.7 million, representing over 20 per cent of Israel’s population, and Israeli Arabs serve in posts ranging from Supreme Court justices to Israeli diplomats). And when Israel declared independence following the UN partition plan, many of the Palestinian Arabs who left were not pushed out, but departed on the orders of their own leadership so as to stay out of the way when several Arab armies marched in with the aim of wiping out the Jews.
In sharp contrast, the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Jews from the Arab world in the mid-20th century was systematic, absolute and unprovoked.
There were 48,000 Jews in western Libya before 1945. Now there are none; 47 synagogues are gone and a highway runs through Libya’s main Jewish cemetery. In Algeria, there were 190,000 Jews. Now there are none. In Iraq, there were about 230,000 Jews. Five remain. There were 95,000 Jews in Egypt. Almost all are gone. Morocco had over 210,000 Jews, Syria had 40,000 Jews, Sudan had 45,000 Jews, Yemen had over 60,000 Jews, Tunisia had 40,000 Jews, Iran 90,000, 30,000 Jews in Lebanon, 60,000 in Turkey.
Many Jewish refugees from the Arab world still suffer the trauma of armed men arriving at their door, and being marched away without explanation and without being able to take their possessions.
Unlike Arab/Palestinian refugees who left in smaller numbers (between 1948 and 1951, according to UN statistics, 711,000 Palestinian Arabs left what became Israel, although many historians put the numbers at fewer than this) the 956,000 Jewish families who were made refugees from Arab countries have never received any proper recognition or international financial help. Instead, there is willful ignorance. So, for example, in Cairo today, the Swiss, German, Canadian, Dutch, South Korean and Pakistani embassies all occupy the stolen homes of wealthy, expelled Jews. Similar situations exist in some other Arab capitals.
Adding to the injustice, some Middle East commentators like to propagate the myth that the Jews of the Arab world were never discriminated against or persecuted or attacked.
Not only were Jews often treated as second-class citizens with discriminatory laws and additional taxes imposed on them, but many were killed or injured in pogroms: Jews were killed in Fez in Morocco, in 1912; in Constantine in Algeria, in 1934; in Rabat in Morocco in 1934; in Gabes in Tunisia in 1941; in Aden in 1947, when 82 Jews were killed, hundreds of shops were destroyed; in Iraq in 1941, when at least 180 Jews were murdered and many others raped and injured, thousands of homes were also looted.
In Libya, 130 Jews were killed in 1945; in Aleppo in 1947, 75 Jews were said to have been murdered. In 1939, bombs were planted at a Cairo synagogue.
Nor can such attacks be excused as somehow being merely in reaction to Zionism. There were many attacks before this period. In 1807, in Casablanca, there was a massacre of Jews. In 1840, the infamous Damascus blood libel led to the kidnapping and torture of dozens of Jewish children. (As late as 1986, the Syrian Defence Minister, Mustafa Talas, published a book, The Matzah of Zion, in which he claimed that the Jews did indeed use the blood of a Christian monk to bake matzah and therefore he said the 1840 pogrom was justified.)
In 1857, an innocent Tunisian Jew, Batto Sfez, was beheaded and his head tossed around like a football by a mob, leading the French authorities to intervene.
In Morocco, as far back as the eighth century, whole communities were wiped out by Idris the First. In 1033, about 6,000 Jews were murdered in Fez by a Muslim mob. In 1465, another massacre took place in Fez, which spread to other cities in Morocco. There were pogroms in Tetuan in 1790 and 1792, in which many children were murdered. Between 1864 and 1880, there were a series of attacks on the Jews of Marrakesh, and hundreds died. In 1903, there were pogroms in Taza and Settat, in which more than 40 Jews were killed.
Other pogroms occurred in Aleppo in 1850 and 1875, in Damascus in 1848 and 1890, in Beirut in 1862 and 1874. In Cairo, Jews were set upon by mobs in 1844, 1890, and 1901-02, and in Alexandria in 1870, 1882 and 1901-07. In 1907, in Casablanca, 30 Jews were killed and many women raped. There were also a series of massacres in Algeria in 1805, 1815 and 1830, and in Libya in 1785. And so on. By the 1880's, the situation for Yemeni Jews was so bad, that many started to walk to Palestine to join European Jews there and 15,000 Yemeni Jews had arrived by the late 1930's.
Today, the only Middle Eastern state where Jews and Arabs cohabit together in any numbers is Israel. (Indeed the Arab population in Israel is now much larger than it was during the British mandate period.)
Some Arab reformers have lamented the loss of Jews, giving it as a key a reason why the Arab world is now in such disarray. The Egyptian-born journalist Magdi Allam says that “by losing their Jews the Arabs have lost their roots and have ended up losing themselves.”
A deeper understanding about the fate of the Jews of the Arab world is not just important because a great injustice has been done to them, but because, by ignoring their plight, and history, and concentrating only on the Palestinian Arabs who in 1947-48 were made refugees from Israel, policy makers from US Secretary of States downwards have formed a lopsided view of the conflict.
If it were better understood that there were two sets of suffering — Jewish and Arab — then grievances surrounding the Palestinian question could be more easily reconciled and a resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict perhaps made less hard to achieve.
This article is a foreword by Tom Gross to a new book ‘Uprooted: How 3,000 years of Jewish civilization in the Arab world vanished overnight’ by Lyn Julius (Vallentine, Mitchell and Co, £25). Tom Gross is a former Middle East correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph.
Justice for Jews from Arab lands: support grows in UK
"Jews from Arab lands suffered - their story should be told. They weren't just uprooted; their history was uprooted."
So says Florette Hyman, who was born Florette Menir in Cairo, and who came to the UK in 1957 after her family was forced to leave Egypt.
"Everyone is talking about the Arab/Palestinian refugees. I feel that no one has asked the question: What about the million Jewish families from Arab lands?" she said.
Until now, there has been no official date to mark the mass exodus of Jews who abandoned their homes and businesses in the face of increasing persecution in Arab countries after the state of Israel was established in 1948.
Over 970,000 Jewish families are refugees that were driven out of Arab countries and sought sanctuary around the world, including in the UK where they make up just under five per cent of British Jewry.
Achievers from Iran, Iraq and IndiaA number of prominent public figures can trace their roots to the Jewish communities of Arab countries.
Iranian-born Lord Alliance prevented the collapse of the British textile industry for many years when he put together the Coats Viyella company.
A Liberal Democrat peer, he came to the UK aged 17 with just £14 in his pocket. Last month, he donated £15 million to the Manchester Business School, one of the largest donations ever to a UK institution.
Dr Naim Dangoor, whose grandfather was Chief Rabbi of Iraq, sought refuge in Britain in the 1960's. A property developer, he established a centre in London for immigrants. The family donates millions to communal organisations and education initiatives.
Brothers Maurice and Charles Saatchi were born in Baghdad, but grew up in Finchley. They went on to build one of the world's largest advertising agencies.
Property tycoons David and Simon Reuben, who are worth an estimated £9bn, are of Iraqi-Jewish descent, but were born in Bombay.
Alan Yentob, an award-winning broadcaster at the BBC, was born in London to an Iraqi-Jewish family.
This year, the Knesset in Israel passed a bill designating November 30 as the official day to commemorate the stories of Jews who fled Arab countries such as Iraq, Egypt, Syria, as well as Iran.
Some of the refugees have campaigned for restitution, hoping to regain the property or value of the capital lost at the time of displacement. Others just want to be heard.
Mrs Hyman, now 64, was eight-years-old when she left Egypt for Britain. Along with her parents and five siblings, she lived in one-room in a refugee camp near Leeds. Her father Abraham, grateful for the "haven", wrote a letter of thanks to the Queen and named his youngest daughter Elizabeth after her.
"I'm quite emotional talking about it now," Mrs Hyman said. "When Israel was created, it was dangerous for Jewish people to go out at night in Egypt; they would disappear.
"I remember a policeman coming into our house with papers on a Friday night, saying we had to leave. My father's family had been in Egypt since the 12th century.
"Everything we had was taken away from us - my father's packing company was taken away. They made roads out of the tombstones in Jewish cemeteries. I can't even go back and visit my grandfather's grave." In 1948, more than 80,000 Jews lived in Egypt - now, there are fewer than 15.
Roger Bilboul attended the Jewish Lycée de l'Union Juive school in Alexandria before leaving, aged 18, in 1959. He has backed an international campaign to regain access to Jewish archives left in Egypt.
"I left because of the situation, it wasn't good for Jews," recalled Mr Bilboul, who now lives in London.
"People were being put in prison all the time with no excuse. There was the nationalization of Jewish businesses, a lot of stuff was confiscated and left behind. Some people are now going through the courts to try and get back their property.
"The contribution that Jews made has been largely forgotten; but it's something Egyptians themselves are now keen to put on the map."
Moshe Kahtan, whose father Saleh was a legal adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Finance, also regrets that the contribution made by Jews has been forgotten. He dismisses the prospect of restitution as "wishful thinking".
"Freedom," he said. "You better forget this word in that place - it didn't exist for Jews.
"At its peak, half of the population in Baghdad was Jewish. In the 1930's, they started relieving Jews of their positions… they were imitating what was happening in Nazi Germany. Jobs were taken over by Muslims. Jews had a yellow identity card - they confiscated my passport."
The father-of-three was given refuge in the UK, after dramatically fleeing Baghdad and leaving the country in a smugglers' boat in 1967. Mr Kahtan, who escaped before Iraqi secret police came looking for him, recalled: "One day, I thought 'I have to leave'. I got in the boat with women and children.
"The smugglers were Arabs; they smuggled alcohol, cigarettes - not only Jews.
"It was supposed to be a 15-minute journey from Iraq to Iran, but it took hours after the naval border police started shooting at us. After we escaped, they closed the border."
Mr Kahtan had paid for his boat passage, but saw gold coins being used to bribe guards at Iranian checkpoints - money that he later learned had been provided by Israel.
A banker, Mr Kahtan, who sat on the Board of Deputies in the 1990s, made aliyah in 2008 and now lives in Herzliya. "From 1948 onwards, all we've heard is about the rights of Arab/Palestinian refugees," he said. "It's very important that the stories of Jews expelled from Arab countries are told, so people know what happened and don't listen to falsehoods."
Nadia Nathan, who was a teacher at the Jewish Frank Iny school in Baghdad, left after the public hanging of nine Jews in the capital in 1969.
"Things became very dangerous for us," she said. "Jewish students were beaten; we were followed everywhere, my brother was put in prison with other Jews, but we got him out with money.
"I had a Muslim friend, who said to my Christian friend: 'If I see you talking to Nadia again, I will kill you'.
"One day, Kurds came into the school and said 'we can smuggle out six people'. And so, we went up through the mountains to Iran. The smugglers took everything from us, even our blankets, but they left us with one cooked chicken to eat. They didn't know that we had hidden money in it." Mrs Nathan settled in Israel before marrying her husband in 1972 in London, where she now lives.
To mark the commemoration day this Sunday, Harif, a UK group which represents Jews from North Africa and the Middle East, has organised a private lecture event at the Jewish Museum. A film by Sephardi Voices UK, which collects testimony, will also be screened.
This week, Moroccan artist Bettina Caro, who links her work to the stories of Jews from Arab and North African countries, spoke about her experience on a panel at the London Jewish Cultural Centre. Her exhibition will run at the LJCC until December 18.
We thought the end was near, says Farhud survivor
A British Jewish group has called on David Cameron’s Holocaust Commission to include the Farhud in its memorial project.
On 1-2 June 1941 – 74 years ago today - a Nazi-inspired mob rose up and attacked Iraq's Jewish community, which numbered 230,000 at the time.
The attack, known as the Farhud, devastated the community. According to historian Elie Kedourie, up to 600 Jews were killed. Around 180 Iraqi Jews were buried in a mass grave, 2,000 were injured, women were raped and kidnapped, the Baghdad’s Jewish quarter was left in ruins and the main synagogue looted. At least 1,500 shops and homes belonging to Jews were ransacked.
Lyn Julius, the founder of Harif, a UK association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, said: “More Jews died than during Kristallnacht, yet people are woefully ignorant of the Farhud.
“The Farhud needs to be taught in schools and mentioned in textbooks and history books. I call on the Holocaust Commission announced by David Cameron earlier this year to incorporate the Farhud in its Holocaust memorial.
“The event shook the ancient Jewish community of Iraq to its foundations. Within ten years, it was gone.”
Daniel Khazoom remembers it well.
“They actually started planning for the final solution of the Jewish problem in Iraq,” said Professor Khazoom, who was eight years old when the Farhud hit.
“I heard a shot. I did not know what it was. We desperately wanted to believe that it was nothing. I held my father’s hand, tightly. And I looked at my brother and he looked very worried. But he continued walking, and then there were the shots of a machine gun. We knew something was wrong. We hurried back to our home. And that night, it was a big night for us.
“We heard the shots. We heard the voice of the mob getting close. I never felt this helpless. Then the noise of the crowd grew closer. By the afternoon, they were one block away from us…
“It looked like the end was near.”
Then, a battalion loyal to king stopped the siege.
He continued: “It took days for us to come out of our homes. No one dared to get out. It took a while to learn about the devastation they inflicted on the Jewish community.”
Richard Verber, Board of Deputies senior vice-president, said: “Today is the anniversary of a pogrom in Baghdad that brought to an end more than two thousand years of peaceful co-existence.
"This painful episode in the history of Jews from Arab lands must not be forgotten. The Board will continue to work to increase awareness of the history of Mizrahi Jews and last December held an event at the Jewish Museum in association with Harif on this very issue.”
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