With the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany in 1933, the European powers faced the threat of German territorial expansion. In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria, and in March 1939, German forces entered the Czechoslovak capital, Prague. In April 1939, Germany’s ally Italy, under Benito Mussolini, invaded Albania. Then on 1 September 1939, German forces attacked Poland. Honouring their recent treaty with Poland, Britain and France responded by declaring war on Germany two days later. The Second World War had begun.
Although the initial epicentre of the war was in northern Europe and Scandinavia, the fighting soon encroached upon Muslim lands. By 1940, Italian and German forces were battling the British and Commonwealth forces in Italian–ruled Libya. Hitler and Mussolini meanwhile continued to broadcast persistent radio propaganda to Muslim lands, extolling the virtues of Nazism and Fascism, and blaming the Jews for the world’s ills. Claiming to be patrons of Arab national aspirations, Germany and Italy denounced France for its Syrian Mandate and Britain for its Palestine Mandate.
Following the Franco–German armistice in June 1940, a collaborationist regime was set up under Marshal Pétain, based in the French provincial town of Vichy. With German acquiesence, Vichy rule extended to French North Africa–Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia–with its large Jewish communities. The Vichy authorities imposed many anti–Jewish regulations. One of these was a quota restricting the number of Jewish doctors who could practise medicine in Vichy–controlled Algeria. A United States consular report described how the quota was ‘violently criticized by the natives, for in the past, Jewish doctors were about the only ones who were willing to take care of the native sick, particularly in the towns.’ This situation was ‘especially acute’ in the Muslim Quarter of Algiers.1
Jewish communities became a target of violence from the outset of Vichy rule. In Tunisia, local Arabs frequently attacked Jews. In August 1940, riots and looting were reported from four Tunisian towns: Keff, Ebba–Ksour, Moktar and Siliana.2 To deflect Arab discontent away from France, the Vichy Foreign Minister, Paul Baudouin, ordered the French Resident–General in Tunisia, Admiral Estéva, to find ‘quiet ways to indulge Arab sensitivities.’ Arabs who had been convicted of pillage and theft during the anti–Jewish riots were released from prison. As a result, the riots resumed. Jews were attacked in Degache in November 1940 and in Gafsa a few months later.3
In May 1941 three days of anti–Jewish violence broke out in the Tunisian city of Gabès. It began when thirty Muslims attacked a synagogue in the Jewish Quarter, killing eight Jews and injuring twenty. Local Arab police made no effort to intervene while the violence continued. A Jewish survivor, Yosef Huri, recalled sixty–two years later the tragic fate of his neighbour, Afila Rakach, who was cooking dinner for her family in her small kitchen when a group of Arabs broke into her home: ‘They grabbed a pot of boiling soup, poured it over her, tortured her in her house, stoned her, and then killed her.’4
Another Jew from Gabès, Tzvi Haddad, who lived near a coffee house at the end of a largely Arab street, remembered how his mother went to look for his sister when the riots began, but was assaulted as soon as she got out of her front door. He recalled: ‘An Arab knocked her down and another grabbed her and tried to cut her throat.’ Tzvi Haddad, hearing her screams, rushed out to find her covered in blood. Miraculously, she survived, but she carried a scar on her throat for the rest of her life.5
The Vichy police, fearing a total breakdown of their control, eventually brought the riots to an end. Admiral Estéva telegraphed his explanation of the riots to Vichy, explaining that German prestige, which had been on the rise ‘for some time’–with German victories in the Balkans, North Africa and the Atlantic–‘leads Muslims to believe themselves to be more and more on top of the Jews, since the latter keep their confidence in Britain and America.’ The presence of German soldiers in Gabès, Estéva noted, ‘has without doubt, even without intervention on their part, let the Arabs believe they would be protected in the case of riots.’6
Although anti–Jewish sentiment rose significantly in French North Africa under Vichy rule, there were many Muslims there who stood by and assisted their Jewish neighbours. Their support was voiced even before the imposition of Vichy rule. One of the Muslim leaders in Algiers, Abdelhamid Ben Badis, had earlier founded an Algerian League of Muslims and Jews. After his death in the spring of 1940, his place as a conciliator between Muslims and Jews was filled by Sheikh Taieb el–Okbi. In November 1940 an Arab member of the Algiers municipal council protested publicly at the exclusion of a Jewish colleague from the annual Armistice Day commemoration. As it was a day of deep significance in the Pétainist calendar, his protest was ignored. He refused to participate.7
In early 1942, el–Okbi heard rumours that a French pro–Fascist group, the Légion Française de Combattants, was urging the Muslims in Algiers to launch a pogrom against the Jews. He immediately issued a formal prohibition on Muslims attacking Jews. The leader of the predominantly Jewish resistance in Algiers, José Aboulker, later recalled that when German agents had tried to push the Arabs ‘into demonstrations and pogroms,’ it had been in vain. WhenJewish goods were confiscated and put up for public auction, Aboulker wrote, an instruction went around the mosques: ‘Our brothers are suffering misfortune. Do not take their goods.’ Not one Arab, Aboulker added, agreed to become an administrator of confiscated Jewish property.8
The Jews also benefited from similar support in Tunisia.9 The Muslim ruler, Ahmed Pasha, the Bey of Tunis, showed his contempt for Vichy’s anti–Jewish laws by granting exemptions to several leading Jews.10 Ahmed Pasha’s successor as Bey of Tunis was Muhammed al–Munsif, known to the French as Moncef Bey. Eight days after coming to the throne, he showed his support for his Jewish subjects by awarding the highest royal distinction to twenty prominent Jews. When the Germans occupied Tunisia at the end of 1942, Moncef Bey summoned his senior officials to his palace and told them: ‘The Jews are having a hard time but they are under our patronage and we are responsible for their lives. If I find out that an Arab informer caused even one hair of a Jew to fall, this Arab will pay with his life.’11
At this time, a Muslim citizen, Khaled Abdelwahhab, who had studied in both France and the United States, saved several Jewish families in the Tunisian coastal town of Mehdia. They were being held by the Germans in an olive oil factory while the men of the families were taken away for forced labour. Abdelwahhab, the son of a former minister at the Tunisian court–who often entertained German officers at his home–had learned that the Jews were in danger. Through the night, he took all those at the oil factory, two dozen in all, to his farm at Tlelsa, twenty miles inland from Mehdia. There they found safety, wearing the obligatory yellow star on their clothing, until the arrival of the British Army in early 1943.12 Whenever a nearby German Red Cross unit visited Abdelwahhab, he told the Jews to remove their yellow stars in order to avoid any risks to them and to himself.13
A similar instance occurred in early 1943 in the Zaghouan Valley, deep in the Tunisian countryside. Jews brought there from Tunis were being forced to build a small military airstrip when fierce fighting erupted in the valley. In the turmoil, sixty Jews escaped. They made their way across nearby fields to the country estate of a former mayor of Tunis, Si Ali Sakkat, a member of the ancient Quraysh tribe of the Arabian Peninsula and a proud descendant of Mohammed. Si Ali opened his gates and took the refugees in, gave them food and a place to sleep, and kept them safe until the Allied armies reached his estate.14
In his researches into Muslim help for Jews in wartime North Africa, the historian Robert Satloff has found that Moncef Bey’s Prime Minister, Mohamed Chenik, ‘regularly warned Jewish leaders of German plans, helped Jews avoid arrest orders, intervened to prevent deportations, and even hid individual Jews so they could evade a German dragnet.’ Acting in the name of Moncef Bey, Cabinet members found ways to give ‘special dispensations’ to some Jewish men to exempt them from forced labour, and intervened with the German authorities on behalf of Jewish hostages. Members of Moncef Bey’s court also hid Jews who had escaped from German labour camps.15
Jews living in Europe suffered enormously during the Second World War. Several thousand of them, originally from Muslim lands–North Africa, Egypt, Syria and Iraq–were living in France when the war broke out. They had gone to France in the interwar years in search of work and opportunity. Starting in 1941, they were arrested by the Vichy police along with other foreign–born Jews then living in France–mostly from Poland–and sent to holding camps. From these camps they were deported to Auschwitz, where most of them were murdered. On the basis of the French deportation lists, it is possible to see the birthplaces of Jews from North Africa who were deported to Auschwitz with the active collaboration of the Vichy French Government and police.16
At least thirteen Jews who were born in Muslim lands were executed in France for their part in the French Resistance. Each was named in the official German lists of those executed. René Hayoun and Lucien Liscia were both born in Tunis, while six others were born in Algeria: Abraham Cohen, whose city of birth is not given; Isaac Zerbib from Ain Beda; Isaac Sellem from Bou Saada; and Chao Abecassis, Mardoche Amesellem and Isaac Ben Zimra from Oran. Elias Solomon was born in Beirut, Raphael Caraco in Bursa, Salomon Levy and Haim Liaser in Izmir, and Haim Hatem in Jerusalem–when Beirut, Bursa, Izmir and Jerusalem had been part of the Ottoman Empire.17
of the Moroccan–born Jews living in 1940 in France, 153 were deported from Paris to Auschwitz and murdered there. The oldest was seventy–three–year–old Messaoud Aknine from Tangier. The youngest was Michel Dray, whose family had come from Casablanca. He was just twenty months old; born on 4 May 1942, he was deported to his death on 20 January 1944. His three siblings were deported with him: Jacqueline, aged three and a half; Simone, aged two and a half; and Leon; aged eight. Their parents, Marguerite and Marius Dray, had been deported to their deaths six months before their children. ‘For six months,’ writes Rabbi Serels about the four Dray children, ‘they remained without parental love.’18
As the war continued, Jewish communities in the Muslim world faced increasing difficulties. In 1942, fierce battles were fought in North Africa between British and Commonwealth forces on the one side, and German and Italian forces on the other. When the Italians drove the British from Libya for the second time at the beginning of 1942, Mussolini ordered the roundup of all Libyan Jews. More than two and a half thousand Jews were arrested and taken to two Axis–run camps, one at Giado, the other at Gharyan. of the 562 Jews interned at Giado, more than a quarter died there, mostly of typhus. One survivor sharply contrasted the Libyan Muslim guards in the camp with the ‘brutality’ of the Italian guards. ‘When they see a Jew,’ Yehuda Chachmon recalled of the Arab guards, ‘they don’t talk to him, they don’t torture him, they don’t make trouble for him.’19
The Jews of Tunisia also suffered the oppression of European fascist rule. When Tunisia came under direct German rule for six months, starting in November 1942, Jews were rounded up and incarcerated in labour camps. They were also ordered to wear the Star of David. Plans for their deportation were interrupted only by the Allied victory in May 1943, which drove the Germans out of North Africa.20
Even Jewish communities untouched by the fighting became the targets of increased hostility during this period. On 8 January 1942 the British Ambassador in Cairo, Sir Miles Lampson, reported to the Foreign Office in London that ‘anti–Semitism created by the Palestinian situation and intensified by Jewish monopolizing tendencies during the war, has certainly become a more or less permanent factor in Egypt.’ In the Ambassador’s view, the Zionist dimension was the culprit. ‘As you are aware,’ he commented, ‘Jews have long enjoyed a privileged situation in Egypt, where many of them were on intimate relations with influential authorities including the Palace. But during the last few pre–war years the Palestine question began to create feeling against the Jews.’ The Ambassador noted that Palestinian Arab refugees from the 1936 rebellion had stirred up feeling against the Jews. Pointing out that many Egyptian Jews were in British employ in the Allied headquarters, where army contracts and commercial orders were distributed, he reported that it was ‘widely asserted that it was impossible for a Moslem to get an order without going through a Jew.’21
Anti–Jewish attitudes also drew significant strength from Nazi Germany. The Mufti of Jerusalem, who had been living as a fugitive in Iraq since 1936, wrote to Hitler from Baghdad on 20 January 1941, styling himself ‘Grand Mufti of Palestine.’ In his letter, Haj Amin al–Husseini offered his services to the Third Reich, sending Hitler a draft declaration three weeks later, setting out his conditions for Arab support. One condition was that Hitler agree to ‘condemnation of the Jewish national home in Palestine as an illegal entity.’ Another was ‘recognition of the right of the Arabs to solve the Jewish question in accordance with Arab nationalist aspirations and in the same manner as in the Axis countries.’ Yet another was ‘prohibition of all Jewish emigration to Arab countries.’22 Under Haj Amin’s plan, the Arabs were to expel the Jews from Palestine and not allow them to join their fellow Jews in any Muslim country.
After the Mufti fled Baghdad in May 1941–to avoid capture by the British–he went first to Iran, then to Italy and finally to Berlin, where he offered his help to Hitler in person. He then successfully pressed Hitler not to allow the transit of four thousandJewish children from Bulgaria to Palestine, and was active in the formation of a Muslim SS Division in Bosnia, at the same time that individual Muslims in Bosnia and Albania were saving Jews from deportation. The most horrific of the Mufti’s influences was the creation of an SS task force intended to kill the half million Jews in Palestine. At least 30,000 of those Jews were pre–war refugees from Germany and Austria.
In October 1942, ‘Einsatzgruppe Egypt,’ headed by SS Colonel Walter Rauf–who had used the mobile gas chamber to devastating effect in German–occupied Eastern Europe–was ready to accompany Rommel’s troops from Athens to Palestine.23 The plan was for the twenty–four–member killing squad to enlist the help of Palestinian Arab collaborators, just as they had enlisted the help of local Ukrainian, Belorussian, Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian volunteers in Eastern Europe. Had German forces defeated the British in Egypt and crossed the Suez Canal, not only would the Jews of Palestine have been in grave danger, but also the Jews of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Fortunately, with Rommel’s defeat at El Alamein in November 1942 and the subsequent retreat of German and Italian forces from Egypt, the killing squad was disbanded.
Nazi influence became particularly strong in Iran–as Persia was known after 1935. Since the rise of Hitler to power in 1933, Reza Shah had reversed his earlier tolerance towards the Jews and turned his country more and more towards Germany. The Shah also stimulated anti–Jewish feeling among his Muslim subjects. Britain and the Soviet Union deposed him after jointly occupying Iran in August 1941–hoping to forestall German control–but the Shah’s replacement, his twenty–two–year–old son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, found his father’s pro–German influence difficult to eradicate.
In January 1942 the British Consul in Kermanshah, Vaughan Russell, informed the Foreign Office in London that the Muslims, largely ‘pro–German in sentiment,’ were reluctant to work for the occupation forces, but that the non–Muslims were glad to do so. ‘It has been reported to me several times,’ he noted, ‘that Moslems have warned pro–British Christians and Jews here of the fate which awaits them and their women folk “when the Germans come into Persia and drive the Anglo–Russian forces out of the country.” Many reports have reached this consulate of Christians and Jews having been threatened by Moslems in this town with death “after the cursed British have been defeated.”’24
The danger to non–Muslims was well understood in London; on 12 March 1942 the British Ambassador in Teheran, Sir Reader Bullard, was warned by the Foreign Office that the British authorities, military and civil, ‘should wherever possible employ Moslem Persians, and should at least not concentrate exclusively on Christians and Jews, Armenians etc, since this tends to rouse Moslem feelings against them.’25
One of the most devastating setbacks for Jews in Muslim lands during the Second World War occurred in Iraq. The tragic chain of events began on 31 March 1941, with an anti–British revolt spurred on by the Germans and Italians. Headed by a former Iraqi Prime Minister, Rashid Ali al–Gaylani, the revolt ousted the pro–British Prime Minister, Nuri Said, and seized power in Baghdad. The Regent of Iraq, Abdul Illah, who had been ruling since the death of King Ghazi in 1939, was forced to flee to the British air base at Habbaniya–fifty–five miles west of Baghdad–and was then sent for safety to a British warship in the Persian Gulf.
Britain, being hard pressed by German and Italian forces in North Africa, called on British India to send troops to Basra. Meanwhile, Rashid Ali proceeded to restore the relations between Iraq and Nazi Germany that had been severed by Nuri Said in 1939. One of the leaders of his coup, Yunis al–Sabawi, the new Minister of the Economy and a prominent Iraqi nationalist lawyer, had translated Mein Kampf into Arabic. Among the active supporters of Rashid Ali was the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al–Husseini, who at that time was still living in Baghdad with a number of his Palestinian Arab supporters. From Berlin, the previously expelled German Ambassador to Iraq, Fritz Grobba, returned to Baghdad by air and offered Iraq a new era under the patronage of Germany. Rashid Ali promised the Germans vital fuel oil from the Mosul oilfields.
On 18 April 1941 the first British forces from India landed at Basra. By the end of the month, British warplanes from Habbaniyah were bombing Iraqi troop concentrations in Baghdad and Mosul. On May 2, Rashid Ali’s troops began a siege of Habbaniya. Four days later, as British troops advanced to Baghdad from Basra, armed Iraqi rioters attacked one of the main Jewish hospitals in Baghdad, the Meir Elias Hospital. The building was looted, the pharmacist shot dead, the hospital accountant gravely wounded, and the doctors and administrative staff taken to prison. After the President of the Jewish community, Chief Rabbi Sasson Khedouri, intervened, the Inspector–General of Police ordered the Jews released and the rioters arrested.26 But this did not prevent another attack. On the following day, May 7, a number of Arab youths burst into a circumcision ceremony, knives in hand, murdering a young boy and wounding his brother.27
In the last week of May, British forces were locked in battle with Rashid Ali outside Baghdad. On the night of May 29, outmatched and outwitted by a far smaller British force–1,200 soldiers against at least 20,000–Rashid Ali and the Mufti panicked, and together with the military and civilian leaders of the revolt, they fled under cover of darkness to Iran. Fritz Grobba and the German military mission left Baghdad the next morning.28 But as soon as they had gone, the pro–Nazi Yunis al–Sabawi appointed himself Military Governor of Baghdad.
At ten in the morning of May 30, with British forces gathering outside Baghdad–but reluctant to reveal their weakness in numbers by entering the city–al–Sabawi summoned the Chief Rabbi, Sasson Khedouri, to his office, and ordered him to instruct the Jews to enter their homes and not come out again after noon that day. They had to have their bags packed, one suitcase for each family, and stand by to be taken to detention camps ‘for their own safety.’ Even as his order was being transmitted, Yunis al–Sabawi is said to have tried to arrange for members of the youth wing of the pro–Nazi Katayib al–Shabab militia to markJewish houses, shops and stores in red.29 He also instructed the broadcasting station to issue a call to the Baghdad public to massacre the Jews. The broadcast was to go out at the noon deadline.
Knowing nothing of the imminent broadcast, but fearful of what the deadline meant, Sasson Khedouri asked the community leaders what he should do. They urged him to go to see the Mayor of Baghdad, Arshad al–Umari, a man they knew to be compassionate and fair. As he entered the Mayor’s room, Khedouri swept off his rabbinical turban and flung it to the floor, thereby expressing his intense grief; baring one’s head in the presence of a Muslim is the ultimate display of desperation. Al–Umari, a suspicious man with fear in his heart, picked up the turban and said to Khedouri, ‘Tell me what the matter is.’ Khedouri then told the Mayor about the deadline, pleading: ‘Don’t let them do this terrible thing!’ The Mayor handed back the turban and told Khedouri: ‘Please, put it back and go home. Tell your people not to worry. I shall take care of everything.’30
Al–Umari was as good as his word, taking immediate action by seizing control of the city. Yunis al–Sabawi fled to the Persian border and the inflammatory broadcast was never made. Violette Shamash has described the mood of the Jews on the following day: ‘Much to our relief, the radio that Saturday evening reverted to playing Arab songs … and at 5.30 p.m. an announcer declared that an armistice had been signed. Half an hour later another bulletin broke the news that the Regent would arrive at the airport at ten o’clock the following morning.’31 The armistice had been signed by the British forces and a Security Commission of leading Iraqis.32
Yet the dangers facing the Jewish community were only beginning; the British forces allowed the defeated Iraqi troops to return to their barracks without surrendering their weapons. Stung by their humiliating defeat, and already fuelled with anti–Jewish rage, al–Sabawi’s followers decided to act. On June 1 a group of Jews were attacked and stabbed while travelling to the airport to welcome the Regent back to the city. A full–scale pogrom–the farhud–began at three o’clock that afternoon.33
Demobilised soldiers from Rashid Ali’s forces and a few members of a pro–Nazi militia Katayib al–Shabab encountered a group of Jews on a bridge and attacked them with knives. One Jew was killed and sixteen wounded, in full view of Iraqi policemen who took no action. One witness recalled: ‘In the streets, unsuspecting men had been seized and beaten to death; others had been slaughtered in their looted homes; some had been zealously protected by Arab neighbours.’34
The killings spread rapidly. Julian Sofaer, who was not quite seventeen, was told by a passing friend not to venture out because ‘they have started to kill Jews.’ Moments later, as the same friend reached the end of the street, Sofaer saw people gather around the boy. ‘I learned later that he was killed. Another rumour had it that he was injured and taken to hospital where he was killed.’ That night, Sofaer remembered, ‘there were periods of ominous silence, I assume as victims were surrounded, followed by wild screams as an act of violence was perpetrated. This continued throughout the night.’35
The violence found many willing hands: members of the Katayib al–Shabab militia, pro–Nazi students, Palestinian Arab followers of the Mufti, demobilised soldiers and policemen disloyal to the mayor. All participated and fought among themselves for their share of the loot. The victims, meanwhile, feared not only for their families but for their entire community. When a mob broke into the house of Heskel Haddad and he heard his father’s cry of ‘God save us!’ he realised ‘that “us” meant more than just a single Jew in jeopardy. This wasn’t just another sickening but isolated outrage. The unseen sword hung over all of “us.”’36
Mordechai Ben–Porat, who was eighteen at the time, has described how the Jewish neighbourhood in Adhamiya, north of Baghdad, was invaded by Muslims ‘armed with vicious tools such as axes, knives and all manner of sticks and clubs.’ As they approached his home, he could hear very clearly ‘their strident voices and calls on Allah to sanction their murder of Jews–”Allahhou Akbar!” (God the Almighty), “Idhbah Al Yahud!” (Slaughter The Jews!) and ‘“Mal el Yahud–Halal!” (It is permitted to rob the Jews!).’
Ben–Porat and his family barricaded themselves into their home and climbed up to their roof to see what was happening. Ben–Porat later recalled: ‘I watched as our “good” Moslem neighbours, living on the opposite side of the street, those to whom mother would offer occasional savoury dishes from her kitchen, participated in the general madness: they guided the raving attackers to our front door.’ But at the very moment when the mob reached Ben–Porat’s house, the wife of another Muslim neighbour, Colonel Taher Mohammed Aref, stopped them from proceeding. Holding one of her husband’s guns and a hand grenade, she ‘stood facing the menacing crowd… . Her determination and show of arms convinced them of her serious intent and they retreated.’ Ben–Porat never forgot this woman’s actions: ‘It was an act of bravery and left an indelible impression on my mind.’
Ben–Porat’s mother, Regina, was attacked on the street by a young Arab ‘brandishing a tar–smeared staff,’ who hit her on the head several times until she fainted. But again help was at hand: a policeman revived her and then offered to take her home. ‘It was yet another instance,’ Ben–Porat recalled, ‘of a kindly Moslem showing concern for someone not of his faith.’37 Hundreds of Baghdadi Jews were protected in this way by their Muslim neighbours. Hundreds of others were given refuge in police stations loyal to the Security Commission.
Salim Sasson, a Jew who worked in an agricultural machinery firm in Baghdad, noticed the stark difference in the attitudes of his neighbours during the pre–war years: ‘The Muslims sometimes showed us intimacy as if we were brothers and at other times could be hateful.’ He had encountered that hatefulness on the day of the farhud, while attempting to visit a Jewish neighbour, Abdullah Elias: ‘Three armed soldiers ran after me and one of them, wielding a knife, blocked my way. I fought with him and tried to get to Abdullah’s door, but it was locked. The three men knocked me down, fired shots over my head, and the man with the knife plunged it into my chest and made a deep cut in my wrists. Then a Muslim woman walking by threw bricks at me in an attempt to finish me off. They left and as I lay helpless on the ground bleeding I looked over and saw that my mother was watching helplessly from our window.’
A taxi driver who was passing by, and who knew Salim Sasson, drove him to the hospital. But as he lay outside the hospital on a stretcher, his troubles resumed: ‘Two Muslim workers picked me up and as they carried me inside they decided to have a game of it by throwing me up in the air and catching me and then they laughed while I writhed in pain.’ His life was then placed in serious danger when two Iraqi soldiers approached: ‘One of them put his bayonet at my throat and spat at me: “You dirty Jew.” He then asked his partner, “Shall I finish him off?” His friend replied, “To hell with him. He’s already finished.”’ Salim Sasson was taken into the hospital and survived. While he was there he saw many wounded Jews succumb to their injuries.38
On June 2, in an attempt to defuse the volatile situation in Baghdad, the newly returned Regent appointed as Prime Minister Jamil al–Madfai, a man known to be well–disposed towards the Jews. At noon that day, the Regent also ordered the Kurdish division, which had remained loyal, to enter Baghdad and open fire on the rioters. His order was obeyed. The Kurdish soldiers acted with unrestrained zeal, shooting the rioters without mercy and dispersing the mobs. Yunis al–Sabawi and two of his closest collaborators were arrested at the Iranian border, and hanged in Baghdad on the morning of July 20, at the entrance to the Jewish Quarter.
This brought an end to the violence, but the farhud marked the beginning of the end of the vibrant life of Iraqi Jewry: 178 Jews had been murdered in Baghdad and nine outside the city. Several Muslims who had tried to come to the defence of their Jewish neighbours were also murdered. Several hundred Jewish women and young girls were raped. More than 240 Jews were orphaned and at least two thousand Jews were badly wounded. In addition, 911 Jewish homes and 586 Jewish–owned shops and stores were looted, as were four ancient synagogues.39
Abraham Elkabir, who served in the Iraqi administration for a quarter of a century, later reflected–while living in Israel–on what went wrong between the Muslims and Jews. He traced Muslim hostility to three factors: the Palestine issue, the Mufti of Jerusalem’s campaign in Iraq identifyingJews and Zionists, and the ‘anti–Semitic tendencies’ of the British officials and other Westerners in Iraq. He recalled a speech by Dorothy Thompson, Secretary of the American Friends of the Middle East, to an audience of the women’s branch of the Iraqi Red Crescent Society: ‘She warned the Arabs to beware of the Jews.’ The Hitler regime in Germany had also given ‘an additional and greater stimulus to the embryonic anti–Jewish movement.’ The striking German military successes in the early stage of the war, the formidable German propaganda machine led by the Mufti and assisted by the Iraqi pro–Nazi broadcaster Younis Bahri, and the savage attacks of the farhud all ‘had a tremendous effect on the population already infected by the anti–Semitic virus.’
Elkabir also commented on a social divide between many Jews and Muslims in Baghdad. The ‘beautiful villas’ of the Jews ‘were photographed and published in the proximity of some miserable looking Arab huts. Well–dressed beautiful Jewish ladies were a striking contrast to the then–veiled Muslim women and the bare–footed Arab female milk sellers… . For every two Muslims walking along Rasheed Street, the great artery of Baghdad, you would certainly find a well–dressed Jewish passer–by.’ Envy and frustration, Elkabir noted, ‘prevented people’s looks from taking account the Jewish dwellers of the slums and the wealth of Arab politicians and nouveaux riches.’ The large number of Jews in higher education had likewise become a cause of envy.40
Other observers confirmed the persistence of that bitter divide. In November 1942 one of the leading Arab experts in the Jewish Agency, Eliahu Epstein (who later took the surname Elath), went to see the British Ambassador to Iraq, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, who was then in Jerusalem. Epstein asked Cornwallis to use his influence to persuade the Iraqi authorities to allow seven hundred Polish Jewish orphans, then waiting in Teheran, to cross through Iraq to Palestine. The orphans had the necessary British entry permits to Palestine, but the Ambassador declined. He told Epstein that ‘to those Iraqis who objected to Jewish immigration into Palestine, age made no difference, since “a little Jew is bound to become an adult.”’41
Such ill–feeling was evident to Iraqi Jews. Among those who left Iraq immediately after the farhud were Julian Sofaer, his mother and his sister. They spent three days in the passport office, filling out forms and getting them stamped. When their passports were refused, Sofaer returned with his grandfather, Abraham Haim, a former representative for Iraq at the League of Nations. He later recalled his grandfather’s outrage: ‘He proceeded to give them a dressing down and asked: “do you think that you can hold your heads up among nations when you rob, rape women and kill innocent people as you have?” On being told that this was perpetrated by the mob, he replied that it was perpetrated by the police, the army, the students and the mob… . He was requested to calm down, offered coffee and cigarettes, and the final form was stamped. We got our passports.’ For Julian Sofaer, the farhud then became ‘a tragedy which turned out to be a blessing in disguise–it got us out of that dreadful country and away from its destructive, treacherous and savage people.’42
Slowly and cautiously, the Jews who did not leave Iraq in the wake of the farhud began to rebuild their lives, repair their damaged properties and create an even wider network of medical facilities, schools and cultural activities. But their community was divided. The intellectuals, professionals and leading merchants were confident that, as loyal Iraqi citizens, they could return to their privileged status of the pre–war years, and participate fully in Iraqi life. A second group, the Jewish Communists, looked to revolutionary socialism as the way forward; the Soviet Union under Stalin was then part of the Grand Alliance fighting Nazi Germany. A third group, the Zionists, were convinced that the only way forward was emigration to Palestine, where half a million Jews–although still without statehood–already had their national institutions, and were actively participating in the Allied war effort.
Many Jews wished to leave Iraq but had yet to find the means to do so. Salim Sasson eventually emigrated a year after the terrible events of the farhud. He obtained a permit to enter the United States and travelled with his mother by flying boat to Palestine, then by air via Egypt, Sudan, Liberia and Brazil to New York. Three months after reaching the United States, Sasson was drafted into the United States Army. He won the Bronze Star serving in Europe, fighting against the Germans.43
In March 1942, Shaul Avigur, the head of the Jewish Agency’s clandestine immigration project–‘Aliyah Bet’ (Immigration B)–travelled from Tel Aviv to Baghdad in a British Army transport unit. There he witnessed at first–hand the plight that the Iraqi Jews faced, fearing as they did a repetition of the June pogrom nine months earlier. Avigur returned to Tel Aviv convinced that there would be a mass emigration from Iraq. He reported to the head of the Jewish Agency, David Ben–Gurion, that there was ‘an urgent need to help the Jews in Baghdad.’44
Shaul Avigur’s conviction was reinforced in unequivocal terms by another Jewish emissary from Palestine, Enzo Sereni. After spending ten months undercover in Iraq, Sereni came to understand the monumental impact of the farhud; he described it in a letter to Avigur in Tel Aviv. ‘In the course of these two days in June 1941,’ he wrote, ‘the dream of Arab assimilation was shattered, and the belief of the Jews that they could live normal lives in the Iraqi Diaspora came to an end. The desire to flee grew. Had all the roads not been closed, had some door been open–all of Iraq Jewry would have fled, even those who for many years had believed in and avowed their Iraqi loyalty.’
Sereni concluded: ‘For many, particularly the youth or those who had been affiliated in the past with the Hebrew or Zionist movement, Palestine now seemed the sole and complete answer.’45
1 Report of the United States Consulate General in Algiers, ‘Native Affairs in Algeria,’ 22 June 1942: United States National Archive, Record Group 84/350/48/11/01, 1942: 840.1.
2 See Map 11, page 366.
3 Robert Satloff, Among the Righteous, page 84.
4 Interview, 1 September 2003: Robert Satloff, Among the Righteous, page 85.
5 Yad Vashem interview 3563297, quoted in Robert Satloff, Among the Righteous, page 85.
6 Letter of 23 May 1941: Robert Satloff, Among the Righteous, pages 85–6.
7 Robert Satloff, Among the Righteous, page 220, note 23.
8 Robert Satloff, Among the Righteous, pages 107–8.
9 In May 2004, when the historian Robert Satloff visited Tunis, he was welcomed by Sidi Chedli Bey, the ninety–four–year–old son of the last hereditary ruler of Tunisia. Chedli Bey told him how, when his father was deposed in 1956, and his family’s wealth and property were confiscated, Tunisian Jews–recalling his father’s help for them in the Second World War–paid not only for his father’s apartment but for Sidi Chedli Bey’s own education. Robert Satloff, Among the Righteous, page 113.
10 One of these Jews was the ophthalmologist Roger Nataf.
11 Oral history interview, Yad Vashem, No. 3559094, quoted in Robert Satloff, Among the Righteous, page 113.
12 Robert Satloff, Among the Righteous, pages 121–37.
13 Mordecai Paldiel, ‘A righteous Arab,’ Jerusalem Post, 3 April 2009.
14 Robert Satloff, Among the Righteous, pages 114–9.
15 Robert Satloff, Among the Righteous, page 112.
16 Serge Klarsfeld, Memorial to The Jews Deported from France, 1942–1944; see also Map 8., page 363.
17 Serge Klarsfeld, Memorial to the Jews Deported from France, 1942–1944, pages 642–654.
18 Rabbi M. Mitchell Serels, ‘Moroccan Jews on the Road to Auschwitz,’ Sephardim and the Holocaust, pages 95–6.
19 Oral history interview, Yad Vashem, No. 3562945, quoted in Robert Satloff, Among the Righteous, page 103.
20 Rafael Uzan, then a teenager, was among those rounded up. Ten years later, the Israeli authorities gave him and his family, for their home in Israel, an abandoned Arab house in Safed. As he entered it for the first time, and saw the sandals of a young child on the floor, he turned to walk away from the house. But an ‘inner voice’ stopped him. ‘Fool!’ it said, ‘You have a short memory. One pair of sandals and you give up? Have you forgotten how your Arab friends cheered and stamped… . How they cheered as the Germans dragged you half–naked through the market? The “klabs” and “son–of–dirty–Jew–bitches” they hissed after you were enough to build a bridge of curses from Nabeul to Jerusalem.’ Irene Awret, Days of Honey: The Tunisian Boyhood of Rafael Uzan, page 229.
21 Sir Miles Lampson, Cairo, 8 January 1942: Foreign Office papers, FO 71/31576.
22 Memorandum brought to Berlin on 12 February 1941: Lukasz Hirszowicz, The Third Reich and the Arab East, pages 109–10.
23 Klaus–Michael Mallman and Martin Cueppers, Halbmond und Hakenkreuz: Das ‘Dritte Reich, ‘ die Araber und Palästina.
24 ‘Memorandum,’ 20 January 1942: Foreign Office papers, FO 371/75182.
25 Note of 12 March 1942: Foreign Office papers, FO 371/75182.
26 Gourji C. Bekhor, Fascinating Life and Sensational Death: The Conditions in Iraq Before and After the Six–Day War, page 89.
27 Violette Shamash, Memories of Eden: A Journey Through Jewish Baghdad, page 188.
28 Robert Lyman, Iraq 1941: The Battles for Basra, Habbaniya, Fallujah and Baghdad, page 84.
29 Gourji C. Bekhor, Fascinating Life and Sensational Death: The Conditions in Iraq Before and After the Six–Day War, pages 90–1.
30 Violette Shamash, Memories of Eden: A Journey Through Jewish Baghdad, pages 195–6.
31 Violette Shamash, Memories of Eden: A Journey Through Jewish Baghdad, page 198.
32 The Security Commission was headed by a committee that included Amin al–Asima, the chairman of the Iraqi Red Crescent Society.
33 The word farhud means ‘violent dispossession.’ It is not an Arabic word, but is possibly of Persian origin, or deriving from the Hebrew word pra’ot (hafra’ot) (disturbances).
34 Tova Murad Sadka, No Way Back, page 45.
35 Julian Sofaer, letter to the author, 23 February 2009.
36 Heskel M. Haddad, ‘Shavuot in Baghdad in 1941 (The Farhod),’ Midstream, May/June 2006.
37 Mordechai Ben–Porat, To Baghdad and Back, pages 28–9.
38 Tamar Morad, Dennis Shasha and Robert Shasha (editors), Iraq’s Last Jews, pages 34–40.
39 Gourji C. Bekhor, Fascinating Life and Sensational Death: The Conditions in Iraq Before and After the Six–Day War, pages 92–3.
40 Abraham Elkabir, manuscript notes, quoted in Peter Wien, Iraqi Arab Nationalism, pages 49–50.
41 Report of 11 November 1942: Central Zionist Archives, Z4/14797.
42 Sofaer continued: ‘Am I being unfair? Possibly, but please remember: when the Egyptians threw out their King, they put him on his yacht and told him to go away. In 1958 the Iraqis murdered the entire royal family, including those who attended them, and dragged the mutilated body of the Regent in the streets of their capital.’ Julian Sofaer, letter to the author, 23 February 2009.
43 Tamar Morad, Dennis Shasha and Robert Shasha (editors), Iraq’s Last Jews, page 41.
44 Quoted in Tad Szulc, The Secret Alliance, page 206.
45 Letter of 3 February 1943, Central Zionist Archive, quoted in Moshe Gat, The Jewish Exodus from Iraq, 1948–1951, pages 21–2. On his return to Palestine from Iraq, Enzo Sereni, who until 1939 had taken a major part in the clandestine emigration of Jews from Nazi Germany, volunteered for special service with British Intelligence. Parachuted into northern Italy on 15 May 1944, he was captured almost immediately. On 18 November 1944 he was executed in Dachau concentration camp.