The Jews driven out of homes in Arab lands
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, 160,000 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 38,000 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 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 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 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.
https://www.thejc.com/culture/features/the-jews-driven-out-of-homes-in-arab-lands-1.448713