The “Farhud,” which in Arabic means “violent dispossession,” was the pogrom carried out by Arabs against Baghdad’s Jews on June 1-2, 1941. This was the beginning of the ethnic cleansing of Iraq’s Jews, who had been there for millennia. 180 Jews, or 780 count the 600 corpses in a collective grave, were murdered. Over the next decade, almost all of Iraq’s around 135,000 Jews fled the country, most of them going to the new State of Israel.
One theme of Palestinian propaganda is that the Jews in Israel came from outside the Middle East, were from Europe, and arrived in Palestine to displace the indigenous Palestinians. The fact that almost a million Jews were expelled or fled from Arab lands between 1948 and the early 1950s – far more than the number of Arabs who left Mandatory Palestine and then Israel – has been deliberately obscured. Until recently, how many supporters of Israel knew that many more Jews than Arabs had become refugees? And how many had believed the Arab propaganda that insisted that Jews were always well treated in Arab lands, and it was only the trouble caused by the seizure of Arab land by “the Zionists” that led to a worsening of relations between Arab and Jew?
The Farhud reminds us of how insecure life was for Jews in Arab lands. They might be left alone, if they kept their heads down, plied their trades, helped improve the Iraqi economy, and of course never tried to suggest that they might deserve equal treatment with Muslims. But they could also suddenly become the victims of murderous violence by Arab mobs so easily whipped up by demagogues. The Arabs in Baghdad who engaged in the “Farhud” were whipped up by leaders who blamed the Jews for what the British had done when they removed the pro-Nazi Prime Minister Rashid Ali by force and replaced him with a pro-British regime. Since the Arabs couldn’t very well take on the British troops, resentful mobs directed their fury at the entirely inoffensive and unarmed Jews of Baghdad, who of course had had nothing to do with the coup by which the British removed Rashid Ali. Another source of the anti-Jewish riots were the antisemitic broadcasts of the leader of the Palestinian Arabs, who was also the most prominent Arab leader of the period, Hajj Amin el Husseini, a great admirer of Adolf Hitler who spent the war years in Berlin, broadcasting from there his murderous anti-Jewish messages to the Muslims of the Middle East.
In preparation for the massacre, Arabs first marked the houses where Jews lived. Then roving gangs of Arabs went from street to street. They were brandishing scimitars and knives, screaming threats in a frenzy of hatred. They killed Jews on the street, in their houses, at their businesses. They raped Jewish women, and murdered Jewish men. Jewish children were not spared. The Arabs looted whatever Jewish property they could take with them, and burned down Jewish homes and businesses. Along with the 780 killed, between 1,000 and 2,000 were wounded. 900 Jewish homes and 586 businesses were destroyed.
The Farhud was the beginning of the end of the Jewish community of some 135,000 that had lived in Iraq for more than 2,500 years. It took another decade for that community to flee entirely, with most of them going to Israel. Whatever property they had, estimated to be worth several billion dollars, had to be left behind.
In remembering the Farhud, we are also reminded of all the other attacks on Jews in Arab countries during the last unappetizing century. There were the pogroms in Palestine, of course, the 1921 attacks on defenseless Jews in Jerusalem; the 1929 pogroms throughout Mandatory Palestine, that was especially devastating in Hebron, the second holiest site in Judaism, where every last Jew was either murdered or managed to flee. There was the 1934 pogrom in Constantine, in Algeria, where a witness reported that “the only comparison I can think of is the Palestine riots of 1929. I found Jewish girls with their breasts cut off, greybearded Jews stabbed to death, little Jewish children dead of numerous knife wounds and whole families locked in their homes and burned to death by the rioters.”
In the post-war period the position of Jews in Arab lands only became ever more perilous. There was the 1945 pogrom in Egypt (Cairo and Alexandria), as well as the bombings of Jewish areas throughout the country in 1948 and 1949. In Libya, there was the 1945 pogrom in Tripoli, and then again, in 1948, maddened crowds of Arabs attacking Jews in Tripoli, Benghazi, and the countryside throughout Tripolitania. In Syria, the Damascus Jewish Quarter was twice sacked by mobs in 1945. Over 150 Jewish shops were looted and destroyed in Aleppo in 1947. Less than two years later, in 1949, organized attackers threw grenades into the Al-Menashe synagogue in Damascus, killing 13 and wounding 32. In Aden (Yemen), there were anti-Jewish riots in 1947, in which nearly 100 Jews were killed, and the Jewish Quarter devastated. In 1967, Arabs in Gabès (Tunisia) killed Jews in 1941, and in 1967, another pogrom took place in Tunis. In Algeria, there were major attacks on Jews in Constantine in 1956, and later in Oran and Algiers. In Morocco, in 1948, there were attacks on Jews in Oujda and Jerada, and in 1956, still in Morocco, there were pogroms against Jews in Mazagan, Safi, Oued Zem and Ouezza.
These are but a small sampling of the Arab attacks – pogroms – against Jewish communities. But there were also a steady stream of killings, and disappearances, of individual Jews all over the Arab world. Dina Gabay remembered that in Morocco, Jews were under continuous and murderous assault: “first her father’s best friend vanished. Then one of Dina’s cousins, a remarkably beautiful 14-year-old girl, also disappeared, never to be seen again. In the Moroccan Jewish community, such things weren’t exactly unusual. And they happened more and more frequently after 1948, when Israel declared itself an independent state.” In Syria in 1974, the conditions of Jews was intolerable; having been defeated by Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Syrian regime and ordinary people were determined to punish “their” Jews for the Israeli victory. Subject to constant torment and fearful of being killed in Syria, four Jewish girls — Lulu Zeibak, 23, and her sisters, Mazal, 22, and Fara, 24, and their cousin, Eva Saad, 18. tried to flee to Israel, via Lebanon, where Christian Lebanese allies of Israel might help them. They never made it. All four of them were raped, murdered, and their bodies mutilated. The perpetrators were known, but never prosecuted.
So let the mention of the Farhud put you in mind not just of what happened in on June 1-2, 1941, in Baghdad, terrible as that was, but also of other torments endured by Jews in Muslim Arab lands, from North Africa to the Persian Gulf, with the looting and destruction of property, the rapes, the mutilations, the murders, in Constantine and Oran, in Gabès and Tunis, in Oujda and Jerada, in Cairo and Alexandria, in Aleppo and Damascus, in Tripoli and Benghazi and Aden – of which the world still needs to learn. And once our giddy globe, so easily distracted by trivia, finds out about that largely overlooked chapter of Middle Eastern history, it can’t be reminded of it often enough
