Uprooted: How 3000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight by Lyn Julius (Author)

Uprooted: How 3000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight

by Lyn Julius (Author)

Who are the Jews from Arab countries? What were relations with Muslims like? What made Jews leave countries where they had been settled for thousands of years? What lessons can we learn from the mass exodus of minorities from the Middle East? Lyn Julius undertakes to answer all these questions and more in Uprooted, the culmination of ten years of work studying these issues. Jews lived continuously in the Middle East and North Africa for almost 3,000 years. Yet, in just 50 years, their indigenous communities outside Palestine almost totally disappeared as more than 99 percent of the Jewish population fled. Those with foreign passports and connections generally left for Europe, Australia, or the Americas. Some 750,000-including a minority of ideological Zionists-went to Israel. Before the Holocaust they constituted ten percent of the world's Jewish population, and now over 50 percent of Israel's Jews are refugees from Arab and Muslim countries, or their descendants. This same process is now repeating in Christian and other minority communities across the Middle East. This book also assesses how well these Jews have integrated into Israel and how their struggles have been politicized. It charts the growing clamour for recognition, redress and memorialization for these Jewish refugees, and looks at how their cause can contribute to peace and reconciliation between Israel and the Muslim world. *** "Lyn Julius provides a riveting account of a fascinating, but disgracefully overlooked subject. Anyone who really wants to understand the Middle East, Israel and world history, should read it." --Tom Gross, former Middle East correspondent, Sunday Telegraph; contributor to The Guardian and Wall Street Journal[Subject: Middle East Studies, Jewish Studies, History, Sociology, Politics]

About the Iraqi Jewish Archive

On May 6, 2003, just days after the Coalition forces took over Baghdad, 16 American soldiers, entered Saddam Hussein’s flooded intelligence building. In the basement, under four feet of water, they found 2,700 books and tens of thousands of documents, in Hebrew, Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, and English relating to the Jewish community of Iraq – materials that had belonged to synagogues and Jewish organizations in Baghdad. The Iraqi Jewish Archive was shipped to the United States for preservation and exhibition, under the agreement that the US State Department would ship the trove back to Iraq after an exhibition of select documents in Washington DC. Using US tax dollars, the National Archives spent $3 million restoring select documents.

In October, 2013 the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) opened an exhibit in Washington DC, titled “Discovery and Recovery” that displayed 24 objects from the Iraqi Jewish Archive including: A Hebrew Bible with Commentaries from 1568, a Babylonian Talmud from 1793, a Torah scroll fragment from Genesis (one of 48 Torah scroll fragments found), a Zohar from 1815, materials from Jewish schools in Baghdad, and other sacred ritual objects. Although there is no Jewish community remaining in Iraq, these items and the rest of the Iraqi Jewish Archive are slated to be returned to Iraq in May, 2016. Learn more by watching, “The Iraqi Jewish Archives: To Whom Do They Belong?” Legal Symposium at Cardozo Law

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