On 14 May 1948, Israel declared its independence. Two days later, a New York Times headline warned: ‘JEWS IN GRAVE DANGER IN ALL MOSLEM LANDS: Nine Hundred Thousand in Africa and Asia Face Wrath of Their Foes.’1
These ominous words reflected a sense of foreboding that had spread among Jews in Arab countries from the moment Israel declared independence. Hatred of Zionism had been integral to the Arab States’ world view for three decades, and on May 14 that hatred became a hatred of Israel. Three Baghdadi Jews later recalled the ‘bad omens’ that appeared in their city overnight: ‘army troops on the main routes, demonstrations, threats in newspapers and radio, plottings against Jews in the streets and market places.’ They remembered how ‘Jews walked liked shadows, terrified about their own destiny and that of their brothers in the Land of Israel.’2
The New York Times article, published on 16 May 1948, also reported ominous events in Lebanon, where ‘Jews have been forced to contribute financially to fight against the United Nations partition resolution in Palestine. Acts of violence against Jews are openly admitted by the Press, which accuses the Jews of “poisoning wells” etc.’3 Even more worrying was the rapidly approaching conflict between Arab and Israeli forces. On May 16–two days after David Ben–Gurion declared independence in Tel Aviv–the five armies of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Transjordan began their advance against the new Jewish State.
In Egypt, King Farouk had met a delegation of Egyptian Jewish leaders on the eve of the Arab–Israeli war and assured them of his commitment to protect the Jews.4 Never a strong character, however, the King was unable to stem the rising tide of anti–Israel feeling in his country. The Egyptian Prime Minister, al–Nukrashi Pasha, decided to proclaim a state of emergency and arrest all Communists, declaring that all Jews were potential Zionists and that all Zionists were in fact Communists.
The Prime Minister’s orders dealt a massive blow to the Jewish community. Hundreds of Jews were arrested in the hours after Israel’s declaration of independence, and hundreds more were arrested as Egyptian troops advanced through the Gaza Strip–which they occupied–and deep into Israeli territory.5 Before the end of the year more than six hundred Jews had been arrested and had their property sequestered by the government.6 Those arrested in Cairo were interned in a former United States air base near the city. Those arrested in Alexandria were taken to Camp Aboukir, near the Mediterranean shore.7 Another group of Jews was sent to the Sinai coastal village of el–Tor, where they were interned in a former British quarantine station. Conditions there were harsh in the extreme.
The Egyptian Government also asked the Chief Rabbi of Egypt, Haim Nahum Effendi–then seventy–six years old and almost blind–to order that prayers be recited in every synagogue in Egypt for the victory of the Egyptian Army over the Israeli forces. He refused to do so.8 Then on May 25, the Government issued a proclamation stipulating that no Jew could leave Egypt without a special visa from the Ministry of the Interior. This even applied to the many thousands of Jews who held foreign passports. As it turned out, the special visas were ‘very scarce.’9
Relations between Jews, Christians and Muslims in Egypt had hitherto been accepting, even cordial. Elie Amiel, a basketball player for Alexandria’s Jewish Maccabi team, had become a member of the Egyptian national basketball team after the Second World War. He played for Egypt both at home and overseas; his Muslim teammates gave him the nickname ‘The Invincible.’ It was only when the anti–Zionist campaign gained momentum that demands by the authorities forced him to leave the team.10
Another Egyptian Jew, Levana Zamir, enjoyed good experiences in the small town of Helwan, today a part of greater Cairo, in the years before the turmoil. She later recalled: ‘When I left Egypt I was twelve years old and my best friend was a Muslim girl… . It was perfectly natural. As my mother said, there was a full harmony between Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and together we built Helwan.’ A traumatic turning point came on 18 May 1948. ‘At midnight, Egyptian police came into our house and they opened everything, they took everything. In the morning, I went to school and my teacher told me they had taken my uncle to prison. “They say we are Zionists,” my mother explained.’ Levana Zamir’s uncle was freed nearly two years later, when he was brought in handcuffs to a ship leaving for France. The family left Egypt for good in 1950: ‘All our money was finished and we left for France with nothing.’11
Suzy Vidal recalled the events in Cairo following Israel’s declaration of independence. ‘Pandemonium broke loose’ during an attack on the Jewish Quarter, she wrote. Her uncle Jacques, ‘seeing the crowd close in on him, called out in Arabic the name of a patriotic paper to a newspaper vendor. Because of his dark complexion they believed he was one of theirs. They turned on their heels to hound another victim.’ Two other relatives were not so fortunate: ‘My youngest aunt, Lydia, who was pregnant, and her husband Joe, convinced they would reach home two streets away unharmed, took the small alley that led to the Synagogue. But the crowd was already there at the side door screaming and hunting the enemy. My aunt and uncle were both beaten up and left on the pavement. We still don’t know by what miracle they escaped death and how the baby was safe.’12
Edna Anzarut, looking back fifty years later, wrote that ‘the atmosphere was of anguish and fear. Every week, more and more of my parents’ acquaintances and friends were arrested, forcibly taken from their homes for interrogation and internment.’ As the ‘witch hunt’ against Zionists and Jewish Communists intensified, her parents decided to get rid of all their Hebrew books. ‘The thought of destroying books, any books, was something intolerable, but it had to be done. The books could not be burnt–the smoke would have alerted the people who were watching our home. There was no safe hiding place. Every single evening, after the Muslim hired help had left, my Dad, my Mum and I would tear Hebrew books, most of which were valuable and very old prayer books. We were weeping as we did this. They had to be torn into tiny pieces and we then flushed them down the toilet, night after night after night.’13
Amidst all the political turmoil, incitement and violence, relations between Muslims and Jews were still possible. In the Aboukir internment camp, Egyptian–born Abraham Matalon met the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Alexandria, who had also been imprisoned. ‘At first,’ Matalon remembered later, ‘I didn’t know he was a member. We embraced, and we started meeting every day. He said he wanted to learn Hebrew, and I wanted to learn Koran, so this is how we spent our time. I wanted to have a dialogue with the Muslims, and they loved me for it! I did the call to prayer in the camp and the soldiers admired it, they even answered me. And they knew I was a Zionist, but they did not manifest any attitudes against me. They said we are friends in life. When you come to talk to your enemy, you see that he is a different person, you can see his human side.’14
Like the Egyptian authorities, the Iraqi Government was implacable in its opposition both to Israel and to any Jews who might try–as did tens of thousands–to fulfil the ancient Jewish longing for a return to the Jewish homeland. Babylon (Iraq) had been the first Jewish place of exile 2,534 years earlier. But more than three hundred Jews were arrested in the first days of the Arab–Israeli war. They were brought to trial before military courts martial and fined or imprisoned. The charge against them was that they had given support to Israel.
One of those arrested, Shafiq Ades, was the richest Jew in Iraq. In the past, he had lunched with Government ministers and dined with the Regent. Ades was accused simultaneously of being a Zionist and a Communist. For the main charge against him, that he had sold arms to Israel, the military court presented no evidence. Ades was refused the right to a proper defence, fined five million Iraqi pounds and sentenced to death. He was hanged in public on 23 September 1948, in front of his mansion in Basra.15 Mona Yahya, whose family lived in Iraq at the time, later wrote about the incident: ‘Crowds gathered to watch the spectacle and their cheers incited the hangman to a repeat performance. The next day, close–up shots of the hanged man covered the front pages of the Iraqi newspapers. His neck was broken, his corpse dangled over his puddle of excrement. He was labelled the Serpent, the Traitor, the Spy, the Zionist, the Jew, while his estate worth millions was appropriated by the Ministry of Defence.’16
That July, Zionist affiliation was made a criminal offence in Iraq. Jews were removed from many areas of Iraqi public life, which they had served so patriotically and so well for three decades. Jewish bankers were forbidden to continue offering their services. Wealthy Iraqi Jews were forced by the government to pay money towards the Iraqi war effort against Israel.17 On 19 October 1948 the Cairo daily newspaper al–Ahram reported that the Iraqi Government had ordered the wholesale dismissal of all Jewish officials and employees in government offices. Within a year, ninety–five per cent of all Jews in official positions in Iraq had been dismissed: 1,500 in all, some of whom had been in government service for as long as thirty years, from the first days of Iraqi self–government.
Arrests and trials continued throughout 1948 and into the following year. One Jew arrested in 1948 was fifteen–year–old Uri David, who was falsely accused of anti–government activity. He was held for eight years in a prison deep in the Iraqi desert, where he was often beaten ‘black and blue.’18 In March 1949 another Iraqi Jew was sentenced to five years hard labour because a scrap of paper with a Hebrew inscription from the Old Testament had been found in his home. That same month, ten Jews were sentenced to three years hard labour because of an allegation that they had danced the Hora, an Israeli dance. Then in April, a sixty–year–old Jew was sentenced to seven years’ hard labour because he had received a letter from his son in Israel. He died as a result of his brutal treatment in prison.19
Despite the actions taken against Jews supportive of Israel in countries like Egypt and Iraq, the prevailing opinion in the Arab world was that the State of Israel was doomed. King Abdullah of TransJordan expressed it succinctly: ‘The Zionist fortress will fall after the first attack.’ Azzam Pasha, Secretary of the Arab League, declared publicly: ‘This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.’20 Yet at the end of the first week of June 1948, it was clear that the Arab nations attacking Israel had been over–confident. Although Iraqi forces were within sight of the Mediterranean Sea north of Tel Aviv, and Egyptian troops had reached the southernmost suburb of Jerusalem, the Arab armies were not yet succeeding in their aim of driving the Jews into the sea.
The realisation that the State of Israel might survive led to an intensification of anti–Israel and anti-J ewish feeling throughout the Arab world. There was a genuine disbelief and indignation at the Jews’ ability to defend themselves. In the Moroccan town of Oujda, on the border with Algeria, five Jews were stabbed to death and thirty more injured during a mob rampage in the Jewish Quarter on June 7. Many small shops were destroyed and homes looted. That evening, in the nearby town of Djerada, thirty–nine Jews were killed and thirty seriously injured, out of a total Jewish population of one hundred.21
In Libya, where eighteen Jews had been murdered during Israel’s first days, anti–Jewish feelings boiled over in a dramatic fashion. On June 12, a day after the first truce was declared in the Arab–Israeli fighting, several thousand Arabs from Tripoli’s poorest area rushed towards the Jewish Quarter armed with iron crowbars, knives and sticks embedded with razor blades. They called out: ‘If we cannot go to Palestine to fight Jews, let’s fight them here.’22 But at the gate of the Jewish Quarter, the Jews were waiting with stones and explosives. The mob eventually retreated, though not after many had been injured and some killed by the determined defenders.
The rioters then moved to parts of Tripoli where Jews and Muslims lived side by side; they raided and plundered Jewish shops and homes at will, burning whatever loot they could not carry off with them. Among the Jewish businesses destroyed were sawmills, craft workshops and a large garage. Many other buildings were attacked across the city, including a synagogue that had already been looted and burned during the riots of 1945. It took three days for the British to restore order. By that time fourteen Jews had been killed: seven old men, six women and one child. One Jewish woman had been raped and twenty–two Jews had been seriously injured. The Arab dead were between three (the British figure) and thirty (the Jewish figure). More than 1,600 Jews were made homeless. Three hundred Jewish families were destitute after losing everything they owned.
Attacks on the Jews also continued in Egypt, where on the night of June 19–20, bombs were thrown into Cairo’s old Jewish Quarter. Twenty–two Jews were killed in the blasts and forty–one wounded. In the Levi family, only one eight–year–old boy, Yossef Levi, survived.23 Two days later the Egyptian daily newspaper al–Ahram published a full report, with photographs, accusing the Muslim Brotherhood of responsibility.24 The authorities managed to restore order and a month later a British diplomat reported that the Jews, ‘both rich and poor, carry on their normal activities in satisfactory conditions, although they are apt to be nervous of their position.’25
In spite of the return to order, an Egyptian Arab wrote a revealing letter to the Bourse égyptienne newspaper on July 22: ‘It would seem that most people in Egypt are unaware of the fact that among Egyptian Moslems there are some who have white skin,’ he wrote. ‘Every time I board a tram I see people pointing at me and saying “Jew, Jew.” I have been beaten more than once because of this. For that reason I humbly beg that my picture (enclosed) be published with an explanation that I am not Jewish and that my name is Adham Mustafa Galeb.’26
Fourteen–year–old Rosa Molcho witnessed the persistent anti–Jewish violence first–hand. On 22 September 1948, while lying in bed in Cairo, Rosa heard shouting in the street outside. Going to the window, she heard her mother, Aimée Mizrahi–a volunteer guard in the Jewish Quarter–calling out to the neighbours that there was a bomb, and that they should leave their homes and run. A former Egyptian Jewish soldier in the British Army, Jacques Lévy, who had defused two earlier bombs, was called to defuse this one. It exploded as he was working on it and he was killed instantly. Running into the street, Rosa found her mother mortally wounded. Aimée Mizrahi died in her daughter’s arms.27
The first truce in the Arab–Israeli war–which came into force on 11 June 1948–broke down twenty–seven days later, on 8 July 1948. Fighting quickly intensified on the Egyptian front in the Negev, and on July 15, Israeli aircraft bombed military targets in both Cairo and Alexandria. The following day, as reported by the British Embassy in Cairo to the Foreign Office in London, ‘violent anti–Jewish speeches’ were delivered in the mosques of Cairo by members of the Muslim Brotherhood. After Friday prayers the speakers voiced their hatred and were ‘evidently doing their best to incite the population against the Jews as a whole.’ During and after the Israel air bombardment, ‘attacks were made in various parts of Cairo on individual Jews’ and on a number of Christian foreigners; three Egyptian Jews ‘and two others, probably Egyptian Jews,’ were killed.28
On 18 July 1948 a second truce was declared between the Israeli and Arab forces. A day later a bomb went off in the centre of Cairo that damaged two department stores. The government fanned the flames of popular anger by blaming the explosion on ‘an aerial torpedo from a Jewish aircraft,’ although no aircraft had been sighted over the city. A Muslim member of one of the two department store boards, Hasan Rifat Pasha–a former Egyptian Government minister–stated emphatically that the explosion ‘could not possibly have been caused by a bomb from the air.’
The bomb blast signalled the beginning of what the British Ambassador Sir Ronald Campbell called an ‘orgy of looting.’ In the days that followed, attacks on Jews escalated as ‘groups of students and the riffraff of Cairo indulged in Jew–baiting and assaults on a considerable number of foreigners, including British, causing deaths and injuries.’ Even a number of ‘fair–skinned’ Egyptians, the Ambassador reported, were unable to escape ‘molestation in the streets by students and others who have mistaken them for Jews.’ Members of the Muslim Brotherhood worsened matters by distributing pamphlets in Cairo, ‘exhorting the public to boycott Jews and generally make life unbearable for them.’29 Anti–Jewish and anti–foreign protests soon proliferated in mosques and newspapers, heightened because it was Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting and prayer.
The violence in Cairo grew more intense in August and September, with bomb attacks on Jewish–owned cinemas and retail stores. Leading members of the Jewish community, in an attempt to prove their loyalty to Egypt, condemned Zionism and donated almost a quarter of a million United States dollars to the Palestine Fund welfare appeal for Egyptian troops fighting against Israel.30 Such efforts were in vain. On September 22 a number of bombs were thrown into the old Jewish Quarter. According to a report in the New York Times, nineteen Jews were killed and sixty–two wounded, and many Jewish shops looted.31 The attacks did not stop there; between 1949 and 1952, anti–Jewish riots became a regular feature of life in Cairo. Suzy Vidal later recalled how, ‘standing on the roof of the Extaday Hotel,’ her family ‘watched the traditional riots of Cairo as one would a movie.’32
Anti–Jewish violence in Libya also persisted throughout the summer of 1948. When a bomb was thrown in the Jewish Quarter in Zliten, two Jewish children were blinded. Reprisals led to an increase in tension and the arrest of thirtyJews for possessing arms.33 Tensions had already been exacerbated by first dozens, and later many hundreds of Arabs from French North Africa, who passed through Libya on their way to join the Arab armies attacking Israel. The Jewish community of Tripoli had called on the British military authorities to protect them, leading the British to establish a bus service from Tripoli to the Egyptian border that sped up the transit of Muslim volunteers. But this was not a complete solution; some Jews making their way to Tripoli across the hinterland were murdered. From the same hinterland, Jews were soon fleeing en masse in the opposite direction: from Gharyan the whole community left, abandoning their homes and their land for good.
One Muslim ruler, Sultan Muhammad V of Morocco, sought to calm the anti–Israel mood of his population and protect his Jewish subjects. Speaking at the start of the first Arab–Israeli war, which began in May 1948 with five Arab armies attacking Israel simultaneously, the Sultan called publicly on ‘all of you, Moroccans, without exception’ for calm and for the preservation of public order. At the same time, he distanced himself from Zionism and warned his Jewish subjects to do likewise. The ‘only goal’ of the Arab armies, he said, was ‘to defend the first qibla of Islam’–Jerusalem, Mohammed’s initial direction for Muslim prayer–‘and to re–establish peace and justice in the Holy Land, while preserving for the Jews the status that has always been accorded them since the Muslim conquest.’
The Sultan was calling for a return to the Covenant of ‘Omar, rather than a massacre or expulsion. Once the Arab armies were victorious against Israel, the Jews of Palestine would be allowed to live as dhimmis, free to practice Judiasm, protected, but subservient. Nor would the Jews of Morocco be in any danger of attack. That, the Sultan explained, ‘is why we enjoin our Muslim subjects not to let themselves be incited by the undertaking of Jews against their brother Arabs in Palestine to commit any act whatsoever that might disturb public order and safety.’
Muhammad V wanted his Muslim subjects to know that ‘the Moroccan Israelites who have lived for centuries in this country which has protected them, where they have found the best welcome, and where they have shown their complete devotion to the Moroccan throne, are different from the rootless Jews who have turned from the four corners of the earth towards Palestine, which they want to seize unjustly and arbitrarily.’ The Jews of Morocco, he went on to warn, should refrain from any act that is ‘liable to support the Zionist aggression or show their solidarity with it; because in doing so they would be violating their particular rights as well as their Moroccan nationality.’34
In Bahrain, Sheikh Sulman–the Sultan–also displayed comparative tolerance towards the Jews. With the establishment of the State of Israel, he announced that any Jews who wished to do so could leave Bahrain, but could take neither money nor belongings, and could not return to Bahrain. They would have to abandon their homes and businesses. Following this announcement, many members of Bahrain’s Jewish community went by boat to Bombay and then on to Britain. Only a dozen Jewish families remained in Bahrain. One of the few Bahraini Jews who went to Israel, returned to Bahrain and was arrested, imprisoned for a year, but then allowed to remain in Bahrain.35
Another Muslim ruler, the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Shah, also refused to adopt a violent anti–Zionist stance. Starting in 1944 several Zionist youth organisations had been legally established in Iran. At the same time, Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution and Soviet exile had been making their way freely through Iran in their journey towards Palestine.
In the period leading up to the establishment of Israel, when Jews throughout the Arab world were entering their worst years, the Jewish community in Iran found opportunities and fulfilment under the Shah’s tolerant rule. Jewish newspapers and schools were unrestricted in what they could write and teach. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (‘The Joint’) was allowed to help Jewish social welfare cases, and to give medical assistance to Jewish schoolchildren, many of whom went to Alliance schools. In 1947 the Jewish Ladies Organization of Iran was founded to extend financial help to those in need, including a growing number of Jewish refugees from Iraq.36 One of the founders, Shamsi Hekmat, an Iranian–Jewish woman, was for many years the treasurer of the Iranian Women’s Organization and a pioneer of women’s rights in Iran.
The Iranian–Jewish historian, physician and early Zionist, Habib Levy, called this period the ‘golden age’ of Jewish life in Iran. In the words of another Iranian Jew, Houman Sarshar, who left the country with his parents in 1978–on the eve of the Iranian Islamic revolution–Jews living under the rule of Mohammad Reza Shah ‘became some of the leading contributors to the country’s full blown industrialization and Westernization campaign. Banking, insurance, textiles, plastics, paper, pharmaceuticals, aluminium production, liquor distillery and distribution, shipping, imports, industrial machinery, and textiles were all segments of Iran’s then new and booming national industry that were either established by Jews or financed and directed under their leadership.’37
Even for those Jews who were not affected by violence during the Arab–Israeli war, life under Muslim rule was no less uncertain and precarious. In Iran, where the Jewish community flourished, prosperity and opportunity did not bring an end to discrimination. An Iranian Jew recalled many years later that when he was a young schoolboy, ‘not a day passed when I was not beaten up. I would go to school with a chain around my belt and some sand in my pocket to throw in their eyes.’38
Even deeper problems were evident in Libya, where poverty stalked the 36,000–strong Jewish community. By the middle of 1948, sixty per cent of all Libyan Jews were living on welfare provided by Jewish communities in Europe and the United States. Likewise, almost all the Libyan Jews who had left their coastal and inland towns to seek refuge in Tripoli were living off whatever the local Jewish community could provide. They joined a third of Tripoli’s twenty thousand other Jewish inhabitants who were in the same position already.
In a letter that July to the United Nations Security Council, a group of Libyan Jews wrote of their situation as ‘unbearable materially, economically, as well as morally. We live under the spectre of the pogroms, our minds are full of fear at the danger that disorders may break out at any moment… . We have knocked on all doors to escape from this hell on earth, but we have found that the local authorities prevent all Jews from leaving the territory… . We appeal to you, the Supreme World Organization, to help us, make our lives secure, and free us from this hell on earth where twice in a year and a half we have been assaulted by conscienceless bloodthirsty masses and have lost our lives and goods.’39
Two Yemeni Jews, Hannah and Saadya Akiva, gave a similarly bleak account of Yemen in the aftermath of the Second World War. Speaking to the historian Bat Ye’or, they recalled how it was forbidden for a Jew to work in agriculture, to write in Arabic, to possess firearms, or to ride on a horse or a camel. Jews could only ride on donkeys, and even then they were obliged to ride sidesaddle in order to jump to the ground whenever they passed a Muslim–as in the early days of the Covenant of Omar more than 1,200 years earlier.
In the streets in Yemen, Jewish pedestrians had to pass Muslims on the left. Although Jewish cobblers made shoes for Muslims, they were not allowed to wear them. Hannah and Saadya Akiva explained: ‘The Arabs forbade us to wear shoes, so that we hid them when, as children, we went searching for wood for cooking. When we were far enough away, we put on our shoes; on returning we took them off and hid them in the branches. The Arabs frequently searched us, and if they found them, they punished us and forbade us to collect wood. We had to lower our heads, accepting insults and humiliations. The Arabs called us “stinking dogs.”’
Some of the harshest aspects of Islamic dhimmi practice were re–imposed on the Jews of Yemen. Most notably, Jewish children who became orphans before they were fifteen were forcibly converted to Islam. Hannah and Saadya Akiva recalled the considerable efforts made by the Jews to help children avoid this fate: ‘The families tried to save them by hiding them in bundles of hay. Afterwards, the children were sent to villages where they hid with another family and were given other names. Sometimes the children were put into coffins and the Arabs were told they had died with their parents. Then they were helped to escape.’
Hannah recalled the fate of one of her uncles, who worked for Muslims. He was married with four children. ‘One day the Arabs wanted to convert him and locked him in a room.’ There they tied him up and forced him to swallow meat that Jews were not allowed to eat–probably camel meat. ‘They beat him terribly, then they went to sleep. My uncle was able to free himself from his bonds and escape. He returned home and cried continuously. He was questioned, but didn’t reply, and tears flowed all the time. He refused to eat or drink. He died two days later. When he had been prepared for burial, one saw that his body was covered with wounds. We learned the whole story later because the Arabs told it to us secretly.’40
The Jewish community in Yemen was even subjected to a variant of the Christian poisoning of the wells accusation of past ages. The accusation spread through the capital city of Sanaa in the aftermath of a palace coup on 17 February 1948, during which the ruler of Yemen, Imam Yahya–Yahya Muhammad Hamid ed–Din–had been assassinated. The Jews were accused of murdering two young Muslim girls and throwing their bodies down a well. The leaders of the Jewish community were seized in their houses, beaten, taken to prison and chained together by their ankles. A mob burst into the Jewish Quarter, looting and robbing. Only the timely intervention of one of Imam Yahya’s sons, Prince Sayf ul–Islam al–Hassan, prevented loss of life: the prince sent soldiers into the Jewish Quarter to protect the Jews and force the rioters to leave.41
In a letter from nearby Aden, the British Governor, Sir Reginald Champion, telegraphed to the Colonial Secretary in London that ‘the two Arab girls may have been murdered by Arabs to justify attack on the Jewish Quarter for loot. Considering the apparent provocation and widely advertised anti–Jewish tension elsewhere, I think the Sanaa Jews are lucky not to have suffered a pogrom.’42 Anti–Jewish tension was also appearing in other towns across Yemen, as the Arab–Israeli war fanned the flames of Muslim anger. A letter from a Jew in Sanaa, sent on 10 January 1949, reported that in the town of Dhamar, Jews were beaten and robbed ‘because of one thing–that the Israelis are waging war on the Arabs in Palestine and are trying to conquer the whole of Palestine.’ The letter from Sanaa contained the plea: ‘Who can pull us out of this iron furnace?’43
The answer to that question was another of the Imam Yahya’s sons, Imam Ahmad bin Yahya, who, in 1949 and 1950, allowed 44,000 Jews to leave Yemen for Israel. The Israeli–organised emigration–code–named Operation Magic Carpet–was conducted entirely by air. None of those who left Yemen for Israel had ever flown before. The airlift was supervised by Israeli–sent emissaries, including the Yemeni–born future Speaker of the Knesset–the Israeli Parliament–Yisrael Yeshayahu.
The rescue of the Jews of Yemen proceeded in two phases: taking the Jews from Yemen to Aden–then under British control–and flying them from Yemen to Israel. At first the Jews coming from Yemen made their long and dangerous way to Aden overland, but then the Imam allowed them to fly from Sanaa to Aden. The first group of Yemeni Jews to be flown through Aden arrived in Aden on 6 March 1949. On the following day the Manchester Guardian included a report of the plight of those who had come overland, quoting ‘Jewish sources’ who said that ‘emaciated Jews arriving here all tell the same story of a ninety–mile trek to avoid capture and imprisonment in Yemen.’ The overland arrivals ‘say that rabbi and prominent members of the Jewish community in Yemen are imprisoned in chains.’44
In November 1948, Israeli forces began to push back the Arab invaders, including the largest and most successful of the five armies, that of Egypt. Israel’s War of Independence ended in the first months of 1949. On February 24, Israel signed an armistice agreement with Egypt, on March 23 with Lebanon, on April 3 with Jordan and on July 20 with Syria. Iraq, alone among those who had attacked Israel, declined to sign an armistice; in March 1949, Iraq withdrew its forces from Israeli soil.
On 2 February 1949, three days after Britain belatedly agreed to recognise Israel as an independent State, the British military administration in Libya allowed Libyan Jews to travel to Israel. This brought an end to a travel restriction that had been in force since the start of the Israel War of Independence. In Tripoli, the British authorities issued 8,000 exit permits within a few days. Between April 1949 and December 1951, more than 31,000 of Libya’s 36,000 Jews left Tripoli on Israeli ships. Most of those who remained had property and other financial interests that they did not want to sell at absurdly low prices.
When the United Nations voted on 21 November 1949 to give Libya independence within fourteen months, even the Jews who did not want to lose their property felt the need to leave, fearing what an independent Muslim Libya might do to them. From the Libyan province of Cyrenaica, where more than five thousand Jews lived, fewer than three hundred remained by mid–1950. In all, 31,343 Libyan Jews emigrated to Israel, some through Italy, but most by ship from Tripoli to Haifa: forty–two ships in all made that journey within a year.45
Haim Abravanel, who was about to be put in charge of organising the emigration from Libya to Israel, wrote about the activities and mood of February 2, the first day of legal emigration: ‘It was snowing for the first time in Tripoli and under the white flakes blown by the wind thousands of poor Jewish wretches ran towards the street where the police offices were, the Municipality and the Community offices, to get their passports at last.’ At the same time, ‘they were selling, liquidating everything: furniture, business assets, work tools etc. Without even knowing how they would reach Israel, unless it was through Italy, they wanted to leave immediately.’ Abravanel continued: ‘An indescribable excitement reigned everywhere and especially in the Jewish quarter.’ The municipal authorities ‘were deluged in the incessant and determined throng animated by a single desire: to leave Libya.’46 In a few days, more than eight thousand passports were issued.
This scene in Tripoli was being repeated across the Arab world. Jews whose ancestors had lived in uneasy harmony with Muslims for so many centuries, amid alternating prosperity and peril–succeeding and even flourishing when they were allowed to, and always making the best of their lot–judged that the moment had come when, as Arab hostility mounted, they must leave their homes and roots and prospects, and make a new life beyond Muslim control. They did not wish to be dhimmis any more. Finally they had a choice.
Between 1949 and 1952, more than 25,000 Jews left Egypt. of these at least 15,000 went to Israel. The Egyptian authorities would not allow them to travel the 130–mile journey overland from the Suez Canal to the Egyptian–occupied Gaza Strip, and to use the Gaza crossing into southern Israel. Instead, with the tacit acceptance of the Egyptian Government, Israeli emissaries accompanied the Jewish refugees by sea via Genoa or Marseille, on a journey of more than two thousand miles. The money for the sea journey was provided by the American–Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in the United States and by the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem. Some wealthy Egyptian Jews also helped finance the move.
From the area that had been British Mandate Palestine, 726,000 Arabs were made refugees in 1948, having lost their homes, their lands and their livelihoods. The number of Jews who were forced to leave Arab lands after the establishment of the State of Israel was 850,000. While the Arab refugees were protected as refugees–and remain protected until today, along with their several million descendants–the Jews from Arab lands made new starts in life, bereft of the financial benefits and international sympathy of refugee status, either for them or for their descendants.
Despite facing severe economic difficulties and a war that caused much destruction and impoverishment, the young State of Israel took in 580,000Jewish refugees from Muslim lands from the first days of its independence, as well as more than 100,000 survivors of the Holocaust in Europe. All of these refugees came with nothing, and were taken in, sheltered, fed, housed and found places in the workforce, despite the heavy financial costs to the Israeli Government.
The Jews living in Muslim lands in 1948 might have hesitated to make their way to a land at war, or to trust the emissaries who came from the new Jewish State to promote such a long and often hazardous journey. But they did not hesitate, even in the lands and towns and homes in which their families had lived for so many generations. They knew what their situation would be if they remained where they were. They knew that under Muslim rule their existence would be harsh and full of danger.
1 Mallory Browne, ‘Jews in Grave Danger in All Moslem lands,’ New York Times, 16 May 1948.
2 Shlomo Sheena, Yaacov Elazar and Emmanuel Nahtomi, A Short History of the Zionist Underground Movement in Iraq, page 33.
3 New York Times, 16 May 1948.
4 Norman A. Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, page 151.
5 One of those arrested on the evening of 14 May 1948 was Habib Vidal, the owner of a printing shop and the custodian of the synagogue at Helwan. Without being charged or brought to court, Vidal was sentenced to fifteen months in the Huckstep Prison, in the Egyptian desert. Shortly before he was released his daughter was allowed to hold her marriage ceremony in the prison. Habib Vidal’s son later recalled: ‘Father came to the ceremony handcuffed,’ and after the family intervened, ‘the Colonel in charge of the prison gave him a concession: one hour without handcuffs.’ Samuel J. Cohen (Habib Vidal’s nephew), manuscript, ‘My Exodus from Egypt,’ Tel Aviv, 10 May 2009.
6 Barry Rubin, The Arab States and the Palestine Conflict, page 202. Some have put the arrest count as high as a thousand.
7 Benjamin Bright, ‘The Exodus revisited,’ Jerusalem Post, 24 April 2006. Egyptian–born Abraham Matalon was arrested on the Friday night after Israel’s declaration of independence. He was taken to Aboukir and kept in internment for a year and a half, until after Egypt’s defeat. He later recalled: ‘There was never a formal accusation, but we knew we were imprisoned for being Zionists.’
8 Victor D. Sanua, ‘Haim Nahoum Effendi (1872–1960),’ Image Magazine, February 1998.
9 Ada Aharoni, Aimée Israel–Pelletier, Levana Zamir (editors), History and Culture of the Jews from Egypt in Modern Times, page 143.
10 ‘Elie Amiel, 1925–2001,’ obituary: IAJENewsletter (International Association of Jews from Egypt Newsletter), 2002, Volume 4. No. 1, pages 5–6. Elie Amiel emigrated to Israel, where he continued his basketball career.
11 Levana Zamir’s family, the Mosseris, had emigrated from Italy three hundred years earlier, and still held Italian passports after being refused Egyptian ones. Benjamin Bright, ‘The Exodus revisited,’ Jerusalem Post, 24 April 2006.
12 Sultana Latifa (Suzy Vidal), The Jasmine Necklace, page 67. Also a communication from Suzy Vidal, 2 January 2009. Lydia was nineteen at the time of the attack. She and her husband managed to leave Egypt before the baby was born, by ship from Alexandria to Haifa. The baby was a girl, Aliza, born in Israel, who lives in Israel today with her own children and grandchildren.
13 Edna Turner (née Anzarut), letter to the author, 18 April 2009.
14 Quoted in: Benjamin Bright, ‘The Exodus revisited,’ Jerusalem Post, 24 April 2006.
15 Hayyim J. Cohen, The Jews of the Middle East, 1860–1972, pages 33–4.
16 Mona Yahya, When the Grey Beetles Took over Baghdad, page 115.
17 Nissim Kazzaz, The End of a Diaspora: The Jews in Iraq during the Twentieth Century, pages 287–293.
18 Uri David, communication to the author, 22 February 2009.
19 ‘Memorandum on the Treatment of the Jewish Population in Iraq,’ submitted to the United Nations Secretary General, Trygvie Lie, 22 October 1949: copy in the British Foreign Office papers FO 371/75183.
20 Both quotations from: Barry Rubin, The Arab States and the Palestine Conflict, pages 200–1.
21 André Chouraqui, Between East and West, pages 181–2.
22 Quoted in Maurice M. Roumani, The Jews of Libya, page 58.
23 Yossef Levi emigrated to Israel. In 1996 he was living in the Israeli coastal town of Herzliya.
24 Ada Aharoni, Aimée Israel–Pelletier, Levana Zamir (editors), History and Culture of the Jews from Egypt in Modern Times, page 143.
25 ‘The Position of Jews in Egypt,’ G.L. McDermott, 2 July 1948, to the Foreign Office, London. National Archives, Kew, Foreign Office papers, FO 371/69259.
26 Letter of 22 July 1948: quoted in Yaakov Meron, ‘The Expulsion of the Jews from the Arab Countries …,’ Malka Hillel Shulewitz (editor), The Forgotten Millions: The Modern Jewish Exodus from Arab Lands, page 92.
27 Rosa Molcho, recollections, in conversation with the author, Tel Aviv, 17 May 2009.
28 Telegram from Sir Ronald Campbell to the Foreign Office, London, 19 July 1948. National Archives, Kew, Foreign Office papers, FO 371/69182.
29 Telegram from Sir Ronald Campbell to the Foreign Office, London, 23 July 1948. National Archives, Kew, Foreign Office papers, FO 371/69259.
30 A quarter of a million dollars was more than $5 million in the money values of 2010.
31 Julian Louis Meltzer, ‘… 14 DIE IN CAIRO EXPLOSION 10 Jews Included in Toll …’ New York Times, 23 September 1945.
32 Suzy Vidal–Pirotte, Extaday: a Childhood in Cairo, 1939–1949, quoted on the back cover.
33 One of the arrested men, Lillo Mahluf, committed suicide while in custody.
34 Proclamation of 23 May 1948, Rabat. Quoted in full in Norman A. Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, pages 511–4.
35 Charles Belgrave, Personal Column: A History of Bahrain, pages 148–51.
36 Support for the organisation’s work came from The Joint in the United States: Houman Sarshar, Esther’s Children: A Portrait of Iranian Jews, page 424, and Baruch Gilead, ‘Iran,’ Encyclopaedia Judaica, volume 8, column 1440.
37 Houman Sarshar, Esther’s Children: A Portrait of Iranian Jews, page xix.
38 Communication to the author, 29 June 2009.
39 Quoted in Renzo De Felice, Jews in an Arab Land: Libya, 1835–1970, pages 226–7.
40 Interview of 8 October 1982: Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi, pages 380–382.
41 Tudor Parfitt, The Road to Redemption: The Jews of the Yemen, 1900–1950, pages 188–90.
42 Telegram of 30 April 1949: Colonial Office papers, CO 4918/78009/1, document 58.
43 Letter of 10 January 1949: quoted in Tudor Parfitt, The Road to Redemption: The Jews of the Yemen, 1900–1950, pages 188–9.
44 Manchester Guardian (Manchester, England), 7 March 1949.
45 Renzo De Felice, Jews in an Arab Land: Libya, 1835–1970, pages 223–8 and 232.
46 Haim Abravanel, recollections, April 1950, Central Zionist Archive, S/20/555, quoted in Renzo De Felice, Jews in an Arab Land: Libya, 1835–1970, pages 229.