In August 1914 war broke out among six Christian European empires–Britain, France, Russia and Italy on the one side, Germany and Austria–Hungary on the other. Two smaller Christian nations, Serbia and Belgium, were its first victims. Throughout August and September 1914, Germany pressed a Muslim country, the Ottoman Empire, to enter the war on its side.
Ottoman Turkey entered the conflict as an ally of Germany in October 1914. The Ottoman authorities at once took several thousand Jews and Christians from throughout Palestine to work as forced labourers for the Turkish war effort. These captives built roads, constructed railways and worked on military fortifications in Syria. Leading Jews were exiled from Palestine to Istanbul and Damascus, while more than ten thousand Jews fled by ship to Alexandria in the hope of finding security in British–ruled Egypt. They brought with them their Zionist ideals, and soon stimulated the development of a federation of Egyptian Zionist organisations.
Inside Palestine, the Jews were subjected to the autocratic rule, hostility and whim of Djemal Pasha, the Generalissimo of the Ottoman ‘Army of Syria.’ Djemal issued a proclamation against all Zionist enterprises, threatening severe punishment for anyone who showed public support for the Jewish national cause, or who flew the Jewish flag–the Star of David. Djemal then disarmed the Jewish self–defence force, hitherto sanctioned by the Ottomans, and with it the only protection the Jewish villages possessed against all–too–frequent attacks by Arab marauders. Finally, Djemal closed down the Anglo–Palestine Bank, the main source of funding for the Jews in Palestine.
The Jews suffered further hardship when the Turkish Army made its way southward through Palestine to the Sinai front. In the words of a British Zionist, Norman Bentwich, the army ‘scoured the countryside for provisions and made pitiless requisitions. It cut down the trees and laid bare the forest of the colony of Chederah.’1 The village of Chederah had been founded in 1890 by young Zionists from Vilna, Kovno and Riga, on land reclaimed from malarial swamps. More than half of its founders had died of malaria in the intervening twenty–five years. In 1916 the village’s eucalyptus groves, needed to drain the swamps, were still young, and were essential for the survival of the village.2
The First World War also brought troubles for the Jews in the Ottoman province of Mesopotamia. As British troops landed in the south in November 1915, occupying Basra, the Ottoman Governor of Mesopotamia, Nur a–Din Pasha, arrested a number of Jewish and Christian leaders in Baghdad and expelled them to the northern city of Mosul. Those who remained in Baghdad did not fare well; when the value of Turkish securities fell in the money market, it was Jews who were accused, falsely, of profiteering and causing a financial crisis.
As British troops drew near to Baghdad in the first two weeks of March 1917, many more Jews were arrested by the Turks. They were accused of secretly supporting a British victory, tortured and killed. Meanwhile, eighteen thousand Jews were serving in the Ottoman Army, marching under the banner of the Crescent and reaching officer rank even when they had never studied at a military academy. These soldiers fought–and died–on the battlefield for Turkey. A Jewish medical officer, Menahem Abravanel, fought at the Dardanelles, was decorated and survived the war.3 But as many as a thousand Jewish Ottoman soldiers were killed in action.4
On 11 March 1917, British troops entered Baghdad. They were welcomed by the Jews as liberators, and for several years afterward their arrival was commemorated by the Jews of Baghdad as ‘a day of miracle.’5 After the British conquest of Amara, it was a Jewish merchant, Ezra Hardoon, who persuaded the Muslim tribes of Luristan, on the Mesopotamian–Persian border, to support the British. The Turks condemned Hardoon to death, but commuted this to a long prison sentence. After the war, the British gave him an honourary decoration in recognition of his help. He refused to accept any financial reward.6
On 2 November 1917, while the First World War was still being fought, and as British forces approached Jerusalem, the British Government issued its Balfour Declaration. This was a letter from the Foreign Secretary, A.J. Balfour, to the head of the British Zionist Federation, Lord Rothschild, promising British support for a Jewish National Home in Palestine in return for help in the Allied war effort. That promise would come into effect once the Ottoman Turks were defeated. The Zionists did not have long to wait.
For the Jews, the defeat of the Palestine part of the Ottoman Empire came in two stages. The first was the liberation of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem from Turkish rule in October–November 1917, by troops under the command of a British General, Sir Edmund Allenby. The second was the liberation a year later by Allenby’s forces of Tiberias, Safed and the manyJewish farming villages of the Jezreel Valley and Galilee.
The terms of Britain’s Mandate for Palestine, drawn up by the British Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill, stated that the Jews were in Palestine ‘of right and not on sufferance.’7 Encouraged by this pledge, Jews accelerated their exodus from all over the Arab and Muslim world, as they did from Ashkenazi Europe and the Americas. Among the first to reach Palestine after the First World War were Jews from Muslim Kurdistan. In the seven years between 1920 and 1926, almost 2,000 Kurdish Jews emigrated to Palestine, an average of almost 300 a year. In 1935, 2,500 Kurdish Jews emigrated.8
Also reaching Palestine were several hundred impoverished Yemeni Jewish orphans who had been repeatedly subjected to forcible conversion. In 1923 forty–two Jewish orphans were forced to convert in the Yemeni port city of Hodeida. ‘A few of them managed to escape into the wilderness,’ stated a letter to Jerusalem from the Jewish community in Hodeida. But there ‘they weep and scream because of their dreadful suffering.’ Muslims in Yemen blackmailed Jewish neighbours who were known to be sheltering Jewish orphans by threatening to denounce them.9
For more than two years, the Arab armies had been led in their fight against Ottoman rule by Emir Feisal, the son of Emir Hussein, Grand Sharif of Mecca and leader of the Arabs of Hejaz. As the war was ending, Feisal saw Zionism as beneficial to the region. On 4 June 1918, near the Arab port of Akaba on the Red Sea, he signed an agreement with the Zionist leader Dr. Chaim Weizmann in which Feisal welcomed the Jews to their National Home in Palestine.10
Feisal was expecting to be given the throne of Syria and hoped to win Zionist support for Arab national ambitions. On 1 March 1919 he wrote to a leading American Zionist, Felix Frankfurter, stating: ‘We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement.’ His letter continued: ‘We will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.’ Feisal then explained his understanding of Zionism: ‘I hope the Arabs may soon be in a position to make the Jews some return for their kindness. We are working together for a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complete one another. The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist: our movement is national and not imperialist, and there is room in Syria for both. Indeed I think that neither can be a real success without the other.’
Feisal ended his letter by stating: ‘I look forward, and the people with me look forward to a future in which we will help you and you will help us, so that the countries in which we are mutually interested may once again take their place in the comity of the civilized peoples of the world.’11 In January 1921 he informed the British Government that, in return for the throne of Syria, with its capital in Damascus, he ‘agreed to abandon all claims of his father to Palestine.’12
Among leaders in the Muslim world, Feisal was a striking exception. Palestinian nationalism was on the rise, and with it there came an upsurge in anti–Zionism that was spearheaded by Palestinian Arab leaders who saw Jewish land purchases in Palestine–which were encouraged at that time by the British Mandate authorities–as a direct threat to their hopes of statehood. The nationalism of the wartime Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule had stimulated the prospect of Arab sovereignty in an area spanning the whole Arabian Peninsula and Greater Syria–including Palestine.
Opposition to Zionism was seen in its most anti–Jewish form in the Palestinian Arab petitions presented to Winston Churchill when, as Colonial Secretary, he visited Palestine in 1921. These petitions demanded an immediate end to Jewish immigration. In one of them, the Haifa Congress of Palestinian Arabs characterised the Jewish people in the language of age–old stereotypes. ‘The Jew,’ the petitioners wrote, ‘is clannish and unneighbourly, and cannot mix with those who live about him. He will enjoy the privileges and benefits of a country, but will give nothing in return. The Jew is a Jew the world over. He amasses the wealth of a country and then leads its people, whom he has already impoverished, where he chooses.’13
Jewish leaders within Palestine attempted to challenge this implacable hostility. They sought to build bridges between the Jewish and Muslim communities in the neighbouring countries of Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Iraq–where Arab nationalism was gaining strength. But these efforts were countered by Muslim leaders who actively inflamed Muslims against Zionism. One such leader was Haj Amin el–Husseini, who became Mufti of Jerusalem in 1922. When anti–Zionist propaganda reached Iraq in 1925, he encouraged it. The spread of Arab national independence from Britain–Egypt in 1926, Iraq (formerly Mesopotamia) in 1932–led to an intensification of anti–Zionism, and served to worsen the position of the Jews living in Arab lands.
Despite ominous developments in the wider world, the life of Jews in some Muslim countries was never better than in the 1920s. The Middle East seemed on the verge of a new openness. Russian–born Yechezkel Steimatzky was able to expand his chain of bookstores beyond Palestine, establishing stores in Beirut in 1927, then in Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo and Alexandria. Jews and Muslims alike browsed in these stores and bought the latest books and current newspapers.14
In Persia, Jews enjoyed greater freedom and tolerance after Reza Khan Pahlavi became Shah–with the support of Britain–in 1925. His social reforms opened new occupations to the Jews and allowed them to live outside the Jewish Quarters of towns.15 Similarly, a Persian Jew, Ayyub Loqman Nehuray, represented the interests of Jews for more than thirty years as the Jewish delegate in the Persian Parliament. Nehuray secured leave for Jewish officers in the Persian Army on the Jewish High Holydays. Working with Armenian and Zoroastrian delegates, he also secured a law that enabled nonMuslim marriage and divorce to be regulated by their own religious authorities, liberating the Jews of Persia from their previous dependence on Islamic law.16
In neighbouring Iraq, after the establishment of the British Mandate there, Jewish community leaders played an important role in shaping the country’s political destiny. One of the Jews who held high office in the first Iraqi Government was Sasson Heskel, the former Deputy for Baghdad in the Ottoman Parliament. Heskel was appointed Minister of Finance in 1920. On his appointment he invited a fellow Iraqi Jew, Abraham Elkabir, to become Assistant Accountant General. Elkabir accepted, explaining that while he had declined government service in Ottoman times, he was ‘no longer serving a rotten and doomed administration. We will serve our own country with a glorious past and a promising future.’17 The appointment of these Jews–the recognition of their Iraqi patriotism, and their optimism for the future of Iraq–was a sign of the level of trust that existed between Iraq’s Muslim and Jewish communities.18
The warm relationship between Jews and Muslims in Iraq was much in evidence after Emir Feisal was proclaimed the King on 11 July 1921. A month later, a banquet was held in his honour by the Jewish community in Baghdad. The London Jewish Chronicle reported that the banqueting hall ‘was decorated with Arab and English flags, and on the walls were inscriptions in both languages–“Long live King Feisal” and “Long live the free Arab people.”’ The Baghdad Jewish boy scouts formed a guard of honour at the entrance of the hall, while pupils of all the Jewish schools in the city assembled along the streets around the building.
On the King’s arrival at the banqueting hall, he was welcomed by the Haham (Chief Rabbi) of Iraq, Ezra Dangoor, who presented him with a copy of the Pentateuch in gold binding. In response, King Feisal announced: ‘I thank my Jewish citizens, who are the mainspring of the life of the people of Iraq.’19 Jewish poets then recited odes glorifying the King and his people.20
In the years ahead, King Feisal’s support was of central importance to the tolerance shown to Jews by the Muslim population. Under his rule, Jews continued to play an influential role in the country’s government. Sasson Heskel was elected a member of the Iraqi Parliament in 1925; he had already received high decorations from Feisal and the Shah of Iran, and had been knighted by King George V in 1923. One of Heskel’s greatest contributions to Iraq was his role in the country’s negotiations with the British Petroleum Company (BP), in which he successfully persuaded the company to pay Iraq for its petroleum in gold and not in banknotes.21
Another Jewish former Deputy in the Ottoman Parliament, Menahem Saleh Daniel, was appointed a Senator of the Kingdom of Iraq in 1925. He was succeeded as Senator by his son, Ezra Daniel, seven years later. Other Jews held positions of influence through the 1930s and beyond.22 From 1927 to 1948, Abraham Elkabir served as Accountant General of Iraq and Director General of Finance.23 Likewise, Daud (David) Samra, who had been a judge in Iraq during the Ottoman period, served as Vice–President of the Iraqi High Court of Cassation from 1923 to 1946.24 When the statutory time came for Samra’s retirement, the Iraqi Parliament passed a special law–the first of its kind and the first for any Iraqi citizen–extending his term of office for a further five years.25
Zionist activity in Iraq in the 1920s was stimulated by a Jewish literary society that was formed in 1920. In 1921 a group from within the society set up a separate Mesopotamian Zionist Committee, which received permission to function from the Iraqi Government. In the years 1920 and 1921 a substantial sum–£16,434 sterling–was also donated for Jewish land purchase, agriculture and tree–planting in Palestine.26 Much of this funding was provided by a single Iraqi Jew, Ezra Sasson Suheik.
Zionism aroused significant misgivings and tensions in Iraq. As Norman Stillman has commented: ‘The Zionists enjoyed considerable sympathy from the poorer Jewish masses, who demonstrated their support in vocal public gatherings that offended Arab public opinion and frightened members of the Jewish upper class.’27 One member of that upper class, Menahem Saleh Daniel, a Senator in the Iraqi Parliament, warned the Zionist Organization in London of the dangers of a Zionist policy. ‘You are doubtless aware,’ he wrote, ‘that, in all Arab countries, the Zionist movement is regarded as a serious threat to Arab national life. If no active resistance has hitherto been opposed to it, it is nonetheless the feeling of every Arab that it is a violation of his legitimate rights, which it is his duty to denounce and fight to the best of his ability.’ The Senator explained that Iraq ‘has ever been, and now is still more, an active centre of Arab culture and activity, and the public mind here is thoroughly stirred up as regards Palestine by an active propaganda.’
Senator Daniel made it clear to the Zionist Organization in London that, ‘in the mind of the Arab,’ sympathy with the Zionist Movement ‘is nothing short of a betrayal of the Arab cause.’ He also pointed out the problems being created by the success of Iraqi Jews in commerce and government. In Baghdad, the success of Jews was ‘nearly an outstanding feature of the town,’ so much so that the Iraqi Jew was ‘being regarded by the waking–up Moslem as a very lucky person, for whom the country should expect full return for its lavish favours.’ The Iraqi Jew was, moreover, ‘beginning to give the Moslem an unpleasant experience of successful competition in Government functions, which, having regard to the large number of unemployed former officials’–former Ottoman officials–‘may well risk to embitter feeling against him.’
Senator Daniel went on to describe the ‘regrettable effects’ of the arrival in Baghdad from Palestine of Dr. Ariel Bension, a representative of Zionist fundraising activities: ‘There was for a time a wild outburst of popular feelings towards Zionism, which expressed itself by noisy manifestations of sympathy, crowded gatherings, and a general and vague impression among the lower class that Zionism was going to end the worries of life and that no restraint was any longer necessary in the way of expressing opinions or showing scorn to the Arabs.’ This feeling, Senator Daniel wrote, was ‘more Messianic than Zionistic.’ To an observer, ‘it was merely the reaction of a subdued race, which for a moment thought that by magic the tables were turned and that it were to become an overlord.’
Senator Daniel’s forebodings of what harm Zionism might do were intense. ‘In this state of raving,’ he wrote, ‘the Jews could not fail to occasion a friction with the Moslems, especially as the latter were then high up in nationalist effervescence.’ A prominent member of the Iraqi Cabinet–a Muslim–had remarked ‘reproachfully’ to the Senator that, ‘after so many centuries of good understanding, the Moslems were not at all suspecting that they had inspired the Jews with so little esteem for them.’28
Senator Daniel’s ominous warnings presaged dangers that even he could not envisage. Two nationalisms, Arab and Jewish, were on a collision course. In 1922 the Iraqi Government refused to renew the permit of the Mesopotamian Zionist Committee, which had to operate unofficially for the next seven years. Meanwhile, Jews were joining their fellow Iraqis on the path to independence. On 7 March 1929 a Jewish journalist, Anwar Shaul, published an open letter in his weekly magazine al–Hasid, addressed to the British High Commissioner and Commander–in–Chief, Brigadier–General Sir Gilbert Clayton, demanding full independence for Iraq from Britain.29
Zionist activity continued to gain momentum in the Muslim world, but not without meeting significant obstacles. In the autumn of 1919, Joseph Joel Rivlin, a Palestinian Jew who had been exiled by the Ottomans to Damascus, reported that Zionist activity was flourishing in Syria. He wrote that more than two–thirds of Jewish schoolchildren in Damascus attended Zionist institutions, while more than five hundred Jewish teenagers attended classes organised by the Maccabi League, a branch of the worldwide Zionist sports movement.
The close proximity of Syria to Palestine meant that Jews there were well exposed to Zionist ideas. Hebrew newspapers from across the border were being widely read, and because Syria was a point of transit for Kurdish Jews on their way to Palestine, local Jews had frequent contact with Zionist immigrants. Damascus Jews often helped travelling migrants who were destitute, giving them shelter and paying for their train tickets from Damascus to the border of Palestine, sixty miles away. From the border, these migrants then travelled to nearby Tiberias, where they worked in agriculture.
In his report, Rivlin mentioned that Zionism was even winning sympathy among local Arabs. One Arab newspaper in Damascus ‘had begun to speak favourably about the Jews’ until the authorities closed it down on the grounds that its editor had formerly been a Turkish spy. In particular, Rivlin stressed that there were two ‘Arab notables’ who were ‘favourably inclined towards us.’ These two men, Riyad Bey al–Sulh, the son of a prominent Syrian–Arab politician, and Hashim Bey, Chairman of the Drafting Committee for the Arab Constitution for Syria, had promised to disseminate the ideas of the Syrian Jews to ‘their ardent nationalist friends.’ Rivlin and the two men had ‘a long conversation about our aspirations and rights and what would be our relations with the Arabs,’ and as a result, Rivlin was hopeful of ‘compromise between us and the Arabs.’30
These discussions were based on the expectation of Syrian independence–something the Arabs believed–wrongly–to be imminent. The French had no intention of giving up the control they had established over Syria following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. Arab hopes for an independent Syria were dashed in July 1920, when France imposed its control over Syria. Zionist enterprises also suffered. In 1922 the French Mandate government ordered all Syrian Jewish schools to ensure that ‘instruction in your school be in the Arabic language as opposed to any other, because it is the official language.’31 Hebrew could be taught only as a foreign language; any school that continued to teach its curriculum in the Hebrew language–as many did–would be closed.
In Cairo, Zionism was also an increasing feature of Jewish life. In 1920, Albert Mosseri founded a pro–Zionist weekly, Israël, which for the next twenty years was the leading Jewish newspaper in Egypt, and was also read by Jews in other Muslim countries.32 Yet the Egyptian Government, which finally won its struggle for independence from the British in 1926, looked with hostility atJewish Zionist aspirations, just as it was hostile to the national identity of its own Christian Copts. Under the first Nationality Code, promulgated on 26 May 1926, Egyptian nationality was only to be for those who ‘belonged racially to the majority of the population of a country whose language is Arabic or whose religion is Islam.’
Despite this denial of citizenship, the Jews of Egypt continued to participate in all aspects of Egyptian life. In 1923 the former Chief Rabbi of Turkey, Haim Nahoum Effendi, became Chief Rabbi of Egypt.33 A distinguished scholar, lawyer, linguist and diplomat, he was one of the founders of the Egyptian Royal Academy of the Arabic Language, and was appointed a Senator in the Egyptian Legislative Assembly. At the request of King Farouk, Haim Nahoum translated into French all the Ottoman imperial decrees relating to Egypt, dating back to the Sixteenth Century. He also helped to revitalise the Society for the Historical Study of the Jews of Egypt.34
In 1924, the year after Haim Nahoum became Chief Rabbi, an Egyptian–born Jew, Joseph Aslan Cattaui, was made Finance Minister. He had already played a major part in developing the Egyptian sugar industry; his family had helped finance the railway system in Upper Egypt. Like Chief Rabbi Haim Nahoum, Cattaui later became a Senator.35 Also in 1924, the stature of many attendees at the funeral of Jewish financier Moussa Cattaui Pasha revealed just how prominent Jews had become in Egyptian society. The leading Cairo newspaper wrote of the ‘large number of dignitaries,’ both foreign and Egyptian, who came to pay their respects; among them were the King’s representative, Prime Minister Zaghloul Pasha, two former Prime Ministers and the former Governor of Alexandria, who read a eulogy.36 Then in 1928, Salvator Cicurel–later the President of Egypt’s Sephardi community–captained Egypt’s national fencing team at the Amsterdam Olympic Games. The team reached the finals, winning a silver medal.
But 1928 also saw an ominous development for Egyptian Jews: the formation in Ismailia of the Muslim Brotherhood, headed by Hassan al–Banna, which set its heart and its energies against Zionism. A populist movement with a strong Islamic fundamentalist message, the Muslim Brotherhood stirred up hatred not only against Zionism as a political and national movement, but against Jews as the bearers of an alien and destructive religion and ideology. Its very first topic for debate was ‘The Subject of Palestine and the necessity of Jihad.’37
Not only Jewish nationalism, but Judaism, was under threat in the 1920s. In Yemen, a Nineteenth–Century decree for the forcible conversion of Jewish orphans was reintroduced in 1922. The conversion of a dhimmi orphan to Islam had always been considered a meritorious act. This followed the belief that every child, whoever his parents, was born into the fitra, or innate disposition, which was taken to mean that he was born a Muslim.38 The ruler of Yemen, Imam Yahya, was in search of recruits for his orphanages that were in fact military training schools. For seven years the decree was rigorously implemented. When it was re–promulgated in December 1928, twenty–seven Jewish orphans were forced to convert to Islam within four months.
In a letter sent to the Board of Deputies of British Jews on 7 March 1930, the Jewish community in Yemen reported: ‘The government has formally ordered that searches be carried out in all the towns and villages for children, boys and girls, with no father, to arrest them and take them to a qualified police officer so that they should be instructed in the religion of Muhammad in conformity with the teaching of the Quran. Government agents have started to implement these orders. All children caught in the net are taken to the police officer who is charged with the task of indoctrinating them and offering them the moon if they convert to Islam.’
The letter described how, in spite of the authorities’ attempts at bribery, ‘these poor victims, deprived of all support and of any means of being purchased back, refuse to give up their faith.’ But it went on to note that ‘their persecutor gives them no respite, he frightens them with all kinds of threats, hits them on the back with a stick, slaps them and punches them until they cry, and finishes up by chasing them away and ordering that they be locked up.’ The letter then stated: ‘The unfortunate children find themselves locked up in dark cellars, bound in iron chains. The prison guards visit them frequently and threatened to kill them so that in the end the children gave up and betrayed their faith.’
On 3 January 1929 the capital of Yemen, Sanaa, became–in the words of the letter–‘the scene of a terrifying and impressive spectacle.’ The events were recounted in full: ‘Two young orphans, brother and sister, agreeable looking, were snatched away from their mother in full view of the Jewish population, despite the cries of the desperate family. The Jews got together and collected a sum of money in order to buy back the children. But this was in vain. The Quran prohibits Muslims from accepting money in order to prevent a conversion. The government has decided to convert all the orphans on pain of death. The brother and sister in question were so cruelly beaten that they had to convert. During the official ceremony hundreds of people accompanied the children. Around the children were fifty or so young children, gloomy and silent, as if it were a funeral procession.’39
The situation of the Jews everywhere under Muslim rule took a turn for the worse in 1929, when Palestinian Arabs, incited by Haj Amin al–Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, claimed that the Jews in Palestine had designs on the Muslim Holy Places in Jerusalem, then under British protection. Specifically, they alleged that the Jews intended to restore the glory of the Temple of Solomon at the expense of the al–Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock.
That August, Haj Amin turned his followers savagely against the Jews.40 The attacks began on August 23, when armed Arabs attacked individual, unarmed Jews walking in the Old City of Jerusalem. Two days later there was a sustained Arab attack on Jewish suburbs in Jerusalem; fortyJews were killed and four thousand fled their homes, many of which were then looted. In the village of Motza, just outside Jerusalem, six Jews were killed in their homes, and their bodies mutilated. In another attack the same day, more than sixty Jews were killed in the Jewish Quarter of Hebron, many of them women and children. Ten Jews were killed in Safed, while in the Jewish village of Hulda, most of the homes were destroyed.
Amidst the bloodshed and destruction, there were several acts of rescue by Muslims. During the riots in Hebron, even as the ferocious mob rampaged through the Jewish Quarter looking for Jews to attack, several Palestinian Arabs risked their own lives to save Jews. One of those who was saved later became the wife of an Israeli Minister of the Interior. She recalled how the Arab caretaker of her building had hidden her in a cupboard as marauders charged through the building looking for Jews, murdering the rest of her family.41
When the attacks ended six days later, 133 Jews had been killed. But the end of the attacks was not the end of the incitement. On September 11, a Jerusalem Arab students’ leaflet was widely circulated in the Muslim sections of the city. ‘O Arab!’ it warned, ‘Remember that the Jew is your strongest enemy and the enemy of your ancestors since older times. Do not be misled by his tricks, for it is he who tortured Christ (peace upon him), and poisoned Mohammed (peace and worship be with him).’ The leaflet went on to urge all Palestinian Arabs to boycott Jewish businesses in order to ‘save yourself and your Fatherland from the grasp of the foreign intruder and greedy Jew.’ Three weeks later, the British High Commissioner in Palestine, Sir John Chancellor, telegraphed to the Colonial Office in London that ‘the latent deep–seated hatred of the Arabs for the Jews has now come to the surface in all parts of the country. Threats of renewed attacks upon the Jews are being made freely and are only being prevented by visible presence of considerable military force.’42
Within a year of the 1929 riots in Palestine, the British Government gave the Arab rioters a victory that they had hardly dared to hope for: it imposed the first severe restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine since the 1922 White Paper had stated, emphatically, that the Jews were in Palestine ‘of right and not on sufferance.’ The restrictions of this new White Paper set much stricter limits on Jewish land purchase and settlement building, pushing the prospect of a Jewish majority in Palestine far into the future.43
Encouraged by the White Paper, Arab violence in Palestine and the denunciation of Zionism that accompanied it had wide repercussions in the Arab world. In Baghdad, on 12 December 1929, anti–Zionism came to the fore when the chairman of the Zionist Organization and of the Jewish National Fund Committee in Iraq, Aharon Sasson, was summoned to appear before the Central Police. He was ordered to sign a declaration by which–in his words–he ‘obligated himself to stop collecting funds for the Jewish National Fund and to refrain from organizing a Zionist Society here.’44
A visit to Iraq in 1928 by a leading British Zionist, Lord Melchett, had already led to Arab anti–Zionist demonstrations in Baghdad. Following the 1929 riots in Palestine, there was further anti–Zionist agitation in Iraq. The Iraqi Government’s response was to make Zionism illegal.
1 Norman Bentwich, Palestine of the Jews, pages 182–6. Bentwich later immigrated to Palestine, becoming Attorney General in the British Mandate administration.
2 By 1961, Chederah (Hadera) was an Israeli town of twenty–six thousand people, more than six thousand of whom were Jews from Muslim lands who arrived after 1948.
3 Another medical officer in the Ottoman Army, Eliahu Eliashar–in 1917 a recent graduate from the University of Beirut–served as a parliamentary representative of the Sephardi Jews in Israel’s first Knesset (February 1949 to July 1951).
4 Information provided by the Turkish historian Nayim Güleryüz, letter to the author, 18 January 2009.
5 Peter Wien, Iraqi Arab Nationalism, page 49.
6 Nir Shohet, The Story of an Exile: A Short History of the Jews of Iraq, pages 24–6.
7 Statement of British Policy on Palestine, Command Paper 1700 of 1922, also known as the Churchill White Paper.
8 Abraham Ben–Jacob, ‘Kurdistan.’ Encyclopaedia Judaica, Volume 10, column 1299. Ben–Jacob gives the figure for 1920 to 1926 as 1,900.
9 Tudor Parfitt, The Road to Redemption: The Jews of the Yemen, 1900–1950, page 67.
10 In 1921 the British excluded Transjordan from the Jewish National Home, giving it to Feisal’s brother, Emir Abdullah.
11 Letter dated 1 March 1919, Central Zionist Archives: re–printed as a removable facsimile document in Martin Gilbert, The Story of Israel, page 13.
12 Letter of 17 January 1921, T.E. Lawrence (Arab Affairs Adviser) to Winston S. Churchill (Colonial Secretary): Churchill papers.
13 Palestinian Arab Congress, memorandum, 14 March 1921: Central Zionist Archives.
14 Eri Steimatzky (Yechezkel Steimatzky’s son), in conversation with the author, 2004.
15 On a visit to the Jewish community of Isfahan, Pahlavi also became the first Persian ruler since Cyrus the Great, 2,500 years earlier, to pay respect to the Jews by praying in a synagogue. Along with his liberalisation, Pahlavi turned against the Shiite clergy and banned Islamic dress. When women were seen veiled in the streets, their veils were compulsorily removed; women teachers were not allowed into the classroom even with headscarves.
16 Houman Sarshar (editor), Esther’s Children: A Portrait of Iranian Jews, page 264.
17 Meir Basri, ‘Prominent Iraqi Jews of recent times,’ The Scribe, Issue 76, Spring 2003.
18 In March 1921, Heskel was one of the two senior representatives of Iraq at the Cairo Conference, at which Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, chose Emir Feisal to be ruler of Iraq, initially under a British Mandate.
19 Jewish Chronicle, 23 September 1921.
20 Nir Shohet, The Story of an Exile: A Short History of the Jews of Iraq, page 31.
21 Tamar Morad, Dennis Shasha and Robert Shasha (editors), Iraq’s Last Jews, page 4.
22 In 1932, Abraham Haim, the son of a rabbi and cantor, was elected as a deputy for Baghdad. He served eighteen years in the Iraqi Parliament, including as the rapporteur of the financial committee of the Chamber. He was also a member of Iraq’s parliamentary delegation to the League of Nations when Iraq joined the League in 1932. He later headed the Iraqi Directorate of Pensions. Meir Basri, ‘Prominent Iraqi Jews of recent times,’ The Scribe, Issue 76, Spring 2003.
23 In 1944, Elkabir represented Iraq at the Bretton Woods Conference in Washington that helped to establish a post–war global economic plan.
24 Courts of Cassation could review and overturn the decisions of lower courts. Samra was also a lecturer at the Baghdad Law College for thirty–two years, beginning in 1919.
25 Gourji C. Bekhor, Fascinating Life and Sensational Death: The Conditions in Iraq Before and After the Six–Day War, page 45.
26 £16,434 is worth more than £330,000 in the money values of 2010.
27 Norman A. Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, page 86.
28 Letter of 8 September 1922, quoted in Norman A. Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, pages 331–3.
29 Nir Shohet, The Story of an Exile: A Short History of the Jews of Iraq, page 32.
30 Report of Joseph Joel Rivlin, August–September 1919, quoted in Norman A. Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, pages 263–273.
31 Instruction of 3 July 1922: quoted in Norman A. Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, page 274.
32 Norman A. Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, page 70.
33 The title Effendi was an Ottoman title of honour.
34 Victor D. Sanua, ‘Haim Nahoum Effendi (1872–1960),’ Image Magazine, February 1998.
35 Victor D. Sanua, ‘The Contributions of Sephardic Jews to the Economic and Industrial Development of Egypt,’ Image Magazine, March 1998.
36 Al–Ahram, 19 May 1924.
37 Ada Aharoni, Aimée Israel–Pelletier, Levana Zamir (editors), History and Culture of the Jews from Egypt in Modern Times, page 137.
38 ‘Allah’s Apostle said, “No child is born except on Al–fitra (Islam) and then his parents make him Jewish, Christian or Magian (Zoroastrian), as an animal produces a perfect young animal: do you see any part of its body amputated?”’ Sahih al–Bukhari, Volume 2, Book 23, Number 441; prophetic traditions collected by Muhammad ibn Ismail al–Bukhari (810–870).
39 Tudor Parfitt, The Road to Redemption: The Jews of the Yemen, 1900–1950, pages 68–9.
40 The account and quotations that follow, relating to the events in Palestine in August–September 1929, are taken from the British Government’s comprehensive enquiry, Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August, 1929 (known as the Shaw Report), Command Paper 3530 of 1930.
41 Personal testimony of Mrs. Yosef Burg (born Rivka Slonim), an eighth–generation Hebron Jew, in conversation with the author, Jerusalem, 1972.
42 Telegram of 29 September 1929: National Archives (Kew), Cabinet Papers, CAB 27/206.
43 Palestine White Paper of 21 October 1930: Palestine Statement of Policy by His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom, Command Paper 3692 of 1930.
44 Aharon Sasson, report of 18 December 1929, Baghdad: quoted in full in Norman A. Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, pages 342–4.