UPROOTED
Uprooted
How 3,000 Years of Jewish Civilisation in
the Arab World Vanished Overnight
Lyn Julius
First published in 2018 by Vallentine Mitchell
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Copyright 2018 Lyn Julius
Foreword 2018 Tom Gross
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:
An entry can be found on request
ISBN 978 1 910383 64 3 (Cloth)
ISBN 978 1 910383 65 0 (Ebook)
ISBN 978 1 910383 80 3 (ePub)
ISBN 978 1 910383 84 1 (Mobi)
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:
An entry can be found on request
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, reading or otherwise, without the prior permission of Vallentine Mitchell & Co. Ltd.
Printed by
Toleration is not the opposite of Intoleration,
but is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms.
Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man
Dedicated to my parents,
Bertha Bekhor and the late Maurice Bekhor, Jewish refugees from
Iraq, and to the memory of my friend Nvine Rose (ne Savdi),
a Jewish refugee from Egypt.
Contents
A Note on Terminology
Ashkenazi : Jews from medieval Germany and northern France. The term has now come to refer to Jews of central and eastern European descent.
Mizrahi : modern Hebrew term deriving from Edot HaMizrah , Jews from the East. It denotes eastern or oriental Jews who have been settled in the Middle East and North Africa since Biblical times. It also refers to the Jews of the greater Babylonian diaspora (present-day Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and the southern ex-Soviet republics). Nowadays it also encompasses Jews from Yemen, the Indian subcontinent and Ethiopia any Jew who is not Ashkenazi. This book uses Mizrahi as a catch-all, although the term is technically inaccurate when describing North African (Maghrebi) communities since these are geographically westerly (Morocco is to the west of much of western Europe).
Sephardi : literally, Spanish. Jews expelled from Spain (Sefarad) and Portugal after 1492. Most Middle Eastern and North African communities are now mixed Sephardi and Mizrahi.
The term is often used to describe any community that is not Ashkenazi.Sephardi also means following the broad traditions of Sephardi Judaism.
Foreword
A People Ignored
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 ethnic cleansing of the Jews of the Arab world has been all but ignored.
This ignorance extends to policymakers at the highest level. Some journalists at leading news outlets, as well as politicians I have spoken to, have expressed surprise when I have even mentioned that Jews lived in sizeable numbers in the Middle East before Israels 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, for example Himyar in Yemen.
Up until the seventeenth 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 per cent). 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. Iraqs first finance minister was a Jew, Sir Sasson Heskel. The founder of Egypts first national theatre in Cairo, in 1870, was a Jew, Jacob Sanua. Egypts 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 Tunisias 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 Levys parents were Algerian Jews, and so on.)
In Israel, 160,000 Arabs stayed after the countrys rebirth in 1948 and took Israeli citizenship. (That number is now 1.7 million, representing over 20 per cent of Israels 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 departed were not pushed out, but left 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-twentieth century was systematic, absolute and unprovoked.
There were 38,000 Jews in western Libya before 1945. Now there are none, forty-seven synagogues are gone and a highway runs through Libyas main Jewish cemetery. In Algeria there were 140,000 Jews. Now there are none. In Iraq, there were about 150,000 Jews. Five remain. There were 80,000 Jews in Egypt. Almost all are gone.
Many Jewish refugees 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 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 856,000 Jews who were made refugees from Arab countries have never received any proper recognition or international financial help. Instead, there is wilful 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.
