The memoirs of Iraqi Jews, however, tell a very different story: The fragrance of walnut and apricot trees pervaded the garden; kebabs were grilled in a tanoor , a wood-burning clay oven. Europe exerted a strong attraction: But local traditions held their ground: As in most memoirs by wealthy exiles, life seems idyllic until things go bad.
Now it all seems a little unreal, even to her: The vast majority lived in cities, apart from a handful of Kurdish Jews. As bankers, traders and money-lenders the wealthier members of the community had made themselves indispensable: By the 19th century, Baghdad was famous for its Jewish dynasties — the Sassoons, the Abrahams, the Ezras, the Kadouries — with their empires in finance and imports cotton, tobacco, silk, tea, opium that stretched all the way to Manchester, Bombay, Calcutta, Singapore, Rangoon, Shanghai and Hong Kong.
Compared with Palestine, Mesopotamia was paradise. This is the Garden of Eden, said one; it is from this country that Adam was driven forth — give us a good government and we will make this country flourish. For us Mesopotamia is a home, a national home to which the Jews of Bombay and Persia and Turkey will be glad to come. Jewish fear of majority rule led, early on, to fateful miscalculations. After this was rejected, a group of Jewish notables petitioned for British citizenship, giving the distinct impression that they regarded themselves as separate from and superior to the emerging national community.
The British, seeking to harness — and neutralise — the energies of Arab nationalism, were in no position to grant this request. Urbane, Western-educated, often fluent in both Arabic and English, Jews staffed the civil service, ran the economy and helped lay the foundations of the modern Iraqi state. Yet they were to suffer increasingly from their association with Faisal and al-Said. The Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of , for example, concluded three years after oil was discovered in Kirkuk, allowed the British to keep control of Iraqi foreign policy, itself partly directed by British advisers who stayed on after independence, notably Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, a severe Arabist who had attracted T.
In fact, they were indifferent, and often hostile, to Zionism: But the Zionists in Palestine claimed to speak in the name of the Jewish people, and thus in their name as well.
Already resented for their enormous economic power — 2 per cent of the population, Jews handled 75 per cent of imports — they were twice guilty by association. Nothing they said or did to oppose Zionism — even donations to Palestinian fighters — protected them from being portrayed in the Iraqi press and radio as a fifth column, especially after the death of King Faisal in The Futuwaa, a paramilitary brigade modelled on the Hitler Youth, began to threaten Jews in the streets. Jewish nerves were calmed somewhat when, in , Ghazi was killed in a car accident — possibly an assassination engineered by Nuri al-Said and the British — and replaced by his pro-British uncle, Emir Abd al-Ilah.
That same year, however, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, took refuge in Baghdad after the defeat of the Arab revolt in Palestine. The mufti launched a campaign of incitement against the Jews, and became a key adviser to the Golden Square, a group of pro-German, pan-Arab colonels led by Rashid Ali al-Gailani. For the Golden Square, Iraq was part of a larger Arab nation, in which Jews were an irremediably foreign element.
In April , the Golden Square overthrew the regent and concluded a secret treaty with the Axis that would have allowed them oil and pipeline concessions, the lease of ports, and the right to build naval and military bases.
In May the British invaded to restore the regent. Had they not done so, Iraqi oil might have fuelled Operation Barbarossa. To preserve the fiction that Britain had not so much occupied Iraq as restored its legitimate government, defeated but fully armed Golden Square soldiers were permitted to enter Baghdad, singly rather than in formation. It was 1 June, the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. As these soldiers crossed the Khir Bridge to the western side of Baghdad that morning, they passed small groups of Jews walking in the opposite direction after prayer services to welcome the regent.
They were furious to see the Jews in all their finery, and since it was Sunday, not the Jewish Sabbath, they assumed they had dressed up for the regent. The Jews were set upon, first with fists, then knives. The farhud continued for two days, an orgy of murder, rape and arson that left two hundred Jews and a number of Muslims dead.
No help came from the British, who remained on the right bank of the Tigris, out of respect for Iraqi sovereignty. After the farhud wealthy Jews began to leave Iraq; some, like Shamash and her family, joined relatives in India, where there were entire communities of Baghdadi Jews.
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Jews built new homes, schools and hospitals, showing every sign of wanting to stay. They took part in politics as never before; at Bretton Woods, Iraq was represented by Ibrahim al-Kabir, the Jewish finance minister. Some joined the Zionist underground, but many more waved the red flag.
Somekh grew up in a mixed neighbourhood of Baghdad known as the Lettuce Beds. He studied Arabic under a Shia cleric from the al-Sadr dynasty and began writing Arabic poetry in his teens; his literary mentors, to whom he pays tribute, were also Arabs. He has written a gentle book about one of the least gentle of historical relationships.
Many of the writers Somekh knew in Iraq were in the orbit of the Communist Party, which became the most powerful opposition force in the s, leading protests against the British and strikes in the oil industry, and developing an Iraqi civic identity that transcended sect. In , a group of Jewish Communists formed the League for Fighting Zionism, which braved threats from the Zionist underground and would later, absurdly, be accused of being a Zionist front itself by Nuri al-Said, who felt betrayed by Jewish involvement in the Communist opposition.
The league published a newspaper that had a readership of six thousand, larger than the entire Zionist movement in Iraq. Jewish integration was doomed by the war in Palestine. On 15 May , three months after the Wathba, the state of Israel was proclaimed, the Arab armies invaded, and al-Said imposed martial law. The exact number of victims is uncertain. With respect to Jewish victims, some sources say that about Jewish Iraqis were killed and about were wounded, Jewish-owned businesses were looted and 99 Jewish houses were destroyed.
When the forces loyal to the regent entered to restore order, many rioters were killed. Within a week of the riots, on 7 June, the reinstated Monarchist Iraqi government set up a Committee of Enquiry to investigate the events. The monarchist government acted quickly to suppress supporters of Rashid Ali. Many Iraqis were exiled as a result, and hundreds were jailed.
Eight men, included amongst them Iraqi Army officers and policemen, were legally sentenced to death in consequence of the violence by the newly established pro-British Iraqi government. In some accounts the Farhud marked the turning point for Iraq's Jews. The Jewish community strived for integration in Iraq before and after the Farhud. In fact, the attachment of the community to Iraq was so tenacious that even after such a horrible event, most Jews continued to believe that Iraq was their homeland.
Either way, the Farhud is broadly understood to mark the start of a process of politicization of the Iraqi Jews in the s, primarily amongst the younger population, especially as a result of the impact it had on hopes of long term integration into Iraqi society.
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In the direct aftermath of the Farhud, many joined the Iraqi Communist Party in order to protect the Jews of Baghdad, yet they did not want to leave the country and rather sought to fight for better conditions in Iraq itself. It was only after the Iraqi government initiated a policy shift towards the Iraqi Jews in , curtailing their civil rights and firing many Jewish state employees, that the Farhud began to be regarded as more than just an outburst of violence instigated by foreign influences, namely Nazi propaganda.
On October 23, , Shafiq Ades , a respected Jewish businessman, was publicly hanged in Basra on charges of selling weapons to Israel and the Iraqi Communist Party, despite the fact he was an outspoken anti-Zionist. The event increased the sense of insecurity among Jews. A monument, called "Prayer", located in Ramat Gan , is in memory of the Jews who were killed in Iraq during the Farhud and in the s.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Anti-Jewish riots that took place in Baghdad in History of the Jews in Iraq and Baghdadi Jews. This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. May Learn how and when to remove this template message. Iraq coup and Anglo-Iraqi War.
Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries. The atlas of Jewish history , William Morrow and Company, Baghdad's slaughter of the Jews". Retrieved 19 January According to them, the outbreak of violence resulted from the anti-Zionist zeal of the public From the Zionist standpoint, the Farhud was the outcome of the anti-Semitism and Iraqi nationalist rhetoric in the s. It was also viewed as having galvanized the Zionist movement in Iraq and ultimately as causing Iraq's Jews to recognize that their country had rejected their attempts at integration and assimilation.
In some Zionist circles, the event came to be understood as an extension of the European Holocaust into the Middle East. This connection is made manifest today by the archiving of certain documents relating to the Farhud in Yad Va-Shem, the Israeli Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. Jews who left Iraq immediately after the riots, later returned. Jews built new homes, schools and hospitals, showing every sign of wanting to stay. They took part in politics as never before; at Bretton Woods, Iraq was represented by Ibrahim al-Kabir, the Jewish finance minister.
Some joined the Zionist underground, but many more waved the red flag.
Farhud memories: Baghdad's 1941 slaughter of the Jews
Liberal nationalists and Communists rallied people behind a conception of national identity far more inclusive than the Golden Square's Pan-Arabism, allowing Jews to join ranks with other Iraqis — even in opposition to the British and Nuri al-Said, who did not take their ingratitude lightly. Haddad , "The turning point for the Jews in Iraq was not the Farhood, as it is wrongly assumed.
It was the only pogrom in the history of Iraqi Jews and it did not spread to other cities: Historians agree that this was an exceptional event in the history of Jewish-Muslim relations in Iraq see Cohen Groups and individuals ranging from the communists to Haj Amin al-Husayni, who disagreed on almost every political issue, all backed the regime. Their reasons for doing so naturally varied greatly: All, apparently, yearned for the departure of the British after two long decades of interference in Iraqi affairs. Jews, rumor had it, used their radios to broadcast information and to signal to British airplanes, and distributed British propaganda, especially the leaflets that the British dropped from their airplanes on Baghdad.
There was no truth to these rumors, but they nonetheless circulated in the city. Archived from the original on According to some testimonies, it is possible that the British wanted passions to boil over in the city and actually had an interest in a clash between Jews and Muslims. They were placed on trial, many of them were exiled, hundreds were incarcerated in concentration camps and a very small minority were even executed.
In parallel, the government acted swiftly to defend Jewish quarters and was resolved to prevent any similar events from occurring in the future. On the decision of the Iraqi government, a committee of enquiry was set up on 7 June a few days after the pogrom, to examine the facts and find who was culpable. In addition to its effect on relations between Iraqi Muslims and Jews, it exacerbated the tensions between the pro-British Jewish notables and the younger elements of the community, who now looked to the Communist Party and Zionism and began to consider emigration.
A History of Jews in Modern Iraq. The Jewish exodus from Iraq: The Jewish Exodus from Iraq, Rogan; Avi Shlaim The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of