Farhud: a slaughter in Iraq
Posted onThe Jewish Chronicle Online
05/31/2011By Lyn Julius
There was a frenzied banging on the front door. When my mother answered it, she recognised her aunt's Jewish cook, ashen-faced, pleading to be let in: "I was on a bus, and the Muslims were pulling the Jewish passengers out and killing them. I said I was a Christian." A month earlier, pro-Nazi officers led by Rashid Ali al-Ghailani, had staged a successful coup in Iraq. The German-backed Rashid Ali and his men were soon routed by British troops - but not before they had incited murder and mayhem against the Jewish "fifth column". Seventy years ago, on June 1 1941, a group of Jews, wearing their Shavuot best, had ventured out for the first time in weeks to greet the returning pro-British Regent, only to be ambushed by an armed Arab mob. Terrified Jews barricaded themselves inside their houses, or ran for their lives across the flat rooftops. The rioting went on for two days: around 180 Jews died in Baghdad and Basra (the exact figure is not known); hundreds were wounded, 900 homes and 586 Jewish-owned shops were destroyed; there was looting, rape and mutilation. Stories abound of babies murdered and Jewish hospital patients refused treatment or poisoned. The dead were hurriedly buried in a mass grave. Jews recognised some assailants - the butcher, the gardener. But some brave Arabs saved Jews. My aunt tells how the neighbours sheltered her until the trouble had died down. The neighbour was a prominent Nazi, but his wife was "a lady --- she even made the beds for us," my aunt recounts.
The screams reached the ambassador at a candlelit dinner
The Farhud (Arabic for "violent dispossession") marked an irrevocable break between Jews and Arabs in Iraq and paved the way for the dissolution of the 2,600-year-old Jewish community barely 10 years later.
A question mark hovers over the role of the British - encamped on the city outskirts, they delayed intervening until the looting had spread to Muslim districts. Yet the victims' screams reached the British ambassador, Cornwallis, who was enjoying a candlelit dinner and a game of bridge.
Loyal and productive citizens comprising a fifth of Baghdad, the Jews had not known anything like the Farhud in living memory. Before the victims' blood was dry, army and police warned the Jews not to testify against the murderers and looters. Even the official report on the massacre was not published until 1958.
Despite their deep roots, the Jews understood that they would never, along with other minorities, be an integral part of an independent Iraq. Fear of a second Farhud was a major reason why 90 per cent of Iraq's Jewish community fled to Israel after 1948.
But the Farhud was not just another anti-Jewish pogrom.The Nazi supporters who planned it had a more sinister objective: the round-up, deportation and extermination in desert camps of the Baghdadi Jews.
The inspiration behind the coup, and the Farhud itself, came not from Baghdad, but Jerusalem. The Grand Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, sought refuge in Iraq in 1939 with 400 Palestinian émigrés. Together, they whipped up local anti-Jewish feeling. An illiterate populace imbibed bigotry through Nazi radio propaganda. Days before the Farhud broke out, the Nazi youth movement, the Futuwa, went around daubing Jewish homes with a red palm print. Yunis al-Sabawi, who, together with the Mufti and Rashid Ali, spent the rest of the war in Berlin, instructed the Jews to stay in their homes so that they could more easily be rounded up.
The Farhud cemented a wartime Arab-Nazi alliance designed to rid Palestine, and the world, of the Jews. The Mufti's postwar legacy endured. The uprooting of the 140,000 Jews of Iraq followed a Nazi pattern of victimisation - dismantlement, dispossession and expulsion. Nuremberg-style laws criminalised Zionism, freezing Jewish bank accounts, instituting quotas and restrictions on jobs and movement. The result was the exodus of nearly a million Jews from the Arab world.
More Jews died than on Kristallnacht, yet the Farhud has not become part of Holocaust memory. Indeed, the Washington Holocaust Museum had to be vigorously lobbied to include the Farhud as a Holocaust event.
Nazism gave ideological inspiration both to Arab secular parties and the Muslim Brotherhood (Gaza branch: Hamas). The unremitting campaign to destroy Israel is simply a manifestation of the genocidal intentions of Arab nationalism and Islamism. The demons awakened by the Farhud are still with us today.
View article hereJune 14, 2011
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There was a frenzied banging on the front door. When my mother answered it, she recognised her aunt’s Jewish cook, ashen-faced, pleading to be let in: “I was on a bus, and the Muslims were pulling the Jewish passengers out and killing them. I said I was a Christian.” A month earlier, pro-Nazi officers led by Rashid Ali al-Ghailani, had staged a successful coup in Iraq. The German-backed Rashid Ali and his men were soon routed by British troops – but not before they had incited murder and mayhem against the Jewish “fifth column”.
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Lawyer and filmmaker Carole Basri has many facets, and most of them reflect her roots as a Jew of Iraqi descent.
An adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, she is an expert on international relations and Jewish history in the Middle East. Since 2003 she has worked in various capacities as a legal adviser to the American and Iraqi authorities in Baghdad. A filmmaker, Basri has served as director on The Last Jews Of Baghdad: End of an Exile, Beginning of a Journey (2005), a documentary that presents a historical and personal view of the persecution, torture, escape, and flight of over 160,000 Jews from Iraq between the years 1940 and 2003.
Searching For Baghdad: A Daughter’s Journey (2002), on which Basri served as a producer and director, documents her travels to find the remnants of her heritage outside of Iraq.
Basri will discuss “The Taboo History of Jews in Arab Countries” at the annual meeting and dinner of the American Jewish Committee Metro NJ region on Thursday, June 16. Linda Kohl of Short Hills will receive the 2011 Community Relations Award at the event, which is being cochaired by Carol and Robert Marcus and Thelma and Richard Florin.
In her talk, Basri will present her own family’s story with a historical overview. She discussed her topic with New Jersey Jewish News by phone on March 15.
NJJN: Why is the history taboo?
Basri: It is taboo on many levels, and not just in Arab countries. It was taboo in my own family, where we had a hanging of my father’s cousin, Joseph Basri, in Baghdad. My uncle, Meir Basri, was tortured by Saddam Hussein for three months because he was head of the Jewish community in 1969 when nine Jews were hanged in Tahrir Square [after being convicted on trumped-up charges of spying for Israel]. A lot of people were tortured. One quarter of the Jewish males between ages 20 and 60 in 1969 and 1970 were either tortured or went missing….
The Arab League drove out 900,000 indigenous Jews from their countries. The Jews left after ethnic cleansing, torture, suppression of religion, and vandalism.
In Iraq, anti-Jewish legislation started in 1933. Fritz Grobba, Hitler’s ambassador to Iraq, bought up newspapers and started printing Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, redacting those parts that were anti-Arab.
In 1941 there was a pro-Nazi uprising in Iraq that is compared to Kristallnacht because there was so much glass shattered in Jewish streets. Almost 200 people were killed.
NJJN: Were Iraqi Jews sent to concentration camps?
Basri: No. But the Iraqis drew up plans to do that. It was very much talked about. The prime minister said, ‘We should take all the Jews to the border with Jordan, and if Jordan doesn’t take them, they can shoot them.”
NJJN: Did the situation for Jews in Iraq ease after World War II?
Basri: No. Jews were no longer able to practice their professions. All their bank accounts were frozen. It was a very tragic situation. They made the Jews pay for the Iraqi war effort against Israel in 1948.
NJJN: What happened to your family?
Basri: My mother’s father had to bribe his way out. He was able to get a plane to take him out of the country with my grandmother and four children, but he had to leave two daughters behind.... He took his two oldest daughters, fearing they would be assaulted or killed. He took his two sons. He left his two youngest daughters with relatives and smuggled them out of the country one year later through Kurdistan. This was the “taboo history.” The family always said, “We left,” but we left as refugees. We went to Belgium, then the United States.
On my father’s side, they all went to refugee camps in Israel and lived like refugees in tents. It was horrible.
It also has been a taboo history in Israel and it has not been brought up until recently in peace talks.
It is a taboo history to Jews all over the world and to the Arabs, of course.
NJJN: Haven’t there been similar persecutions of Jews in other Arab countries?
Basri: Right; in Iraq, though, it was very calculated. In 1952 they brought in legislation which said, “If you give up all your property we will allow you to travel out of the country.” They didn’t expect that many Jews to do it, but at least 90,000 applied…. Then, while they were figuring out how they would leave, the government confiscated their passports and all the Jewish property.
They were penniless, and the Muslims were told not to buy their property, so the Jews left destitute. It was like going to a refugee camp…. They had to leave everything behind.
NJJN: In the years of Saddam Hussein and since, what has life been like for the Jews in Iraq?
Basri: Under Saddam the Jewish population decreased from 3,500 down to 50. He was terrible to the Jews. Since 2003, some have died and some have gone to Israel. There are only seven Jews left there today.
NJJN: Are you in touch with them?
Basri: Yes. I know them all. I have been to Baghdad seven times since 2003. I have worked with U.S. Ambassador L. Paul Bremer at the Coalition Provisional Authority and with the Iraqi Ministry of Health…. I’ve worked with the Iraqi tribunal on the war crimes of Saddam [and] I worked on the oil-for-food program.
NJJN: What is life like now for the seven Jews still in Iraq?
Basri: I can’t go through it in depth because…these people are trying to keep a low profile, and I want to respect that low profile. They are in danger.
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Jews were massacred by Arabs in 1929 for sitting while praying at the Western Wall. Those events, argues the author of a new book, remain pivotal.
As Israelis and Palestinians struggle with a 21st-century peace process, the world must face the forgotten history that was so pivotal in determining the present crisis. In many ways, a turning point was the day Arabs massacred Jews because they dared to sit at the Western Wall while praying. This simple act of prayer was so unacceptable to Arabs that it helped launch a worldwide crisis of hate that provoked a global Islamic jihad, forged an Arab-Nazi alliance during the Holocaust and still echoes to this day.
The year was 1929. Jewish Palestine was still being settled by torrents of Eastern European refugees.
The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine included the provision for a Jewish homeland. The Balfour Declaration, widely endorsed by many nations, was a matter of international law. But the Arabs in Palestine refused to coexist with Jews in any way except as second-class dhimmis (non- Muslim subjects of a Shari’a law state).
Islam had been at war with the Jewish people since its defining inception in 627 when Muhammad exterminated the Jews of Medina and launched the Islamic conquest that swept north and subsumed Syria-Palestina.
For centuries, Jews and Christians in Arab lands were allowed to exist as dhimmis, second-class citizens with limited religious rights. These restrictions were enforced by the Turks who, until World War I, ruled the geographically undetermined region known as Palestine, which included Jerusalem.
When the Ottoman Empire fell, after World War I ended in 1918, the British were obligated by the Mandate to maintain the Turkish status quo at the Western Wall. That status quo, according to numerous decrees under Shari’a, maintained that Jews could pray at the Wall – the last remnant of the Temple – only quietly and never sit, even in the heat. Nor were Jews allowed to separate men from women during prayer.
The Jews revered the Wall as their holiest accessible place and a direct connection to God. But under Turkish and Arab tradition, the Wall was not the Jews’ holy site.
Rather, it was revered by Muslims as al-Buraq, the place where Muhammad tethered his winged steed during his miraculous ascent to heaven. During that miraculous journey, according to Islamic tradition, Muhammad flew through the air on his magnificent horse to the farthest mosque. The farthest mosque was in Jerusalem, hence al-Aksa, meaning “the farthest.” Therefore, the Western Wall became preeminently a Muslim holy place, only available for Jewish visitation with permission and under strict guidelines that would not connote independent worship or ownership.
IN 1928, on Yom Kippur, Jews decided to bring benches and chairs to sit on while they prayed, and they also brought a mehitza, in this case a flimsy portable partition to separate men from women. This provoked outrage among Arabs, and the British even tried to pull chairs out from under people to force them to stand. The offense catapulted Haj Muhammad Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, to sudden international Islamic importance, as Muslims everywhere – from India to London – objected to Jews sitting. Husseini even convened an emergency international conference of Muslims in Jerusalem to stop Jews from sitting at the Wall to pray.
The mufti and his machinery also began a nonstop protest movement against the perceived Jewish encroachment on the Wall. As the chief religious authority, it was Husseini who directed that the muezzin, the man who calls Muslims to prayer from the minaret, position himself within earshot of the Western Wall pavement, and then dial the volume up to rile Jews during prayer and prove Islamic dominance.
At the same time, it was Husseini who directed the revival of the cacophonous dhikr ceremony, complete with repetitive shouts of “Allahu akbar,” as well as loud gongs and cymbals, once again disrupting Jewish prayers with strategic noise. The mufti also was the one who permitted mules to be herded through the Jewish prayer area, dropping dung and creating the feel and smell of what one Jerusalem newspaper termed “a latrine.”
On August 15, 1929, when Jews again marked Tisha Be’av by sitting, as well as chanting “The Wall is ours,” the Arabs began yet another in a series of bloody massacres.
The massacres in several cities culminated in unspeakable atrocities at Hebron.
It began in Jerusalem. “Itbach al-Yahood! Itbach al- Yahood!” Slaughter the Jews. Slaughter the Jews. With knives and clubs, the mob attacked every Jew in sight, burned Torah scrolls and yanked supplication notes to God from the cracks in the Wall and set them aflame.
Attacks spread throughout the land. Jews were stabbed, shot, beaten with rocks, maimed and killed in various towns and suburbs. The chaos continued for days. With thousands of dagger- and club-wielding Arabs swarming throughout the city hunting Jews, wire services transmitted headlines such as “Thousands of peasants invaded Jerusalem and raided all parts of the city.”
Martial law was declared. Armored cars were brought in from Baghdad. British airplanes swept in to machine-gun the Arab marauders. Violence continued to spread throughout Palestine. Jews fought back and retaliated with bricks and bars and whatever they could find. Then, on August 23 and 24, 1929, Hebron became a bloody nightmare.
Arab mobs went from house to house, bursting into every room looking for hiding Jews. Religious books and scrolls were burned or torn to shreds.
The defenseless Jews were variously beheaded, castrated, their breasts and fingers sliced off and, in some cases, their eyes plucked from their sockets.
Infant or adult, man or woman – it mattered not.
The carnage went on for hours, with the Arab policemen standing down – or joining in. Blood ran in streamlets down the narrow stone staircases outside the buildings. House to house, room by room, the savagery was repeated.
One young boy, Yosef Lazarovski, later wrote of the horror: “I remember a brown-skinned Arab with a large mustache breaking through the door. He had a large knife and an axe that he swung through the doorjambs until he broke through. [He was] full of fury, screaming, ‘Allah akbar!’ and ‘Itbach al-Yahood!’...
My grandfather tried to hold my hand, then [he tried] to push me aside [and hide me], screaming, Shema Yisrael... and then I remember another Arab... with an axe that he brought down on my grandfather’s neck.”
Not a single victim was simply killed. Each was mutilated and tortured in accordance with their identities, the specific information provided by local Arabs. The Jewish man who lent money to Arabs was sliced open and the IOUs burned in his body. The Jewish baker’s head was tied to the stove and then baked. A Jewish scholar who had studied Koranic philosophy for years was seized, his cranium cut open and his brain extracted. Another man was nailed to a door. Some 67 Jews were brutally murdered.
London dispatched special investigative commissions which determined that under the Shari’a status quo, Jews were not permitted to sit. Jews were even blamed for provoking the massacres by deliberately sitting.
The mufti used the Wall controversy to continue his campaign against the British and the Jews. As part of that war, he led a broadly accepted, international and popularly accepted Arab and Islamic alliance with Nazi Germany. Eventually, when the British tried to arrest him, he fled to Iraq. There, the mufti and Nazi agents helped inspire the 1941 Farhud, a two-day spree of killing, looting and raping the Jews of Baghdad.
ONCE THE British finally helped restore order, the mufti fled again, this time to Germany, where he was taken under the personal auspices of Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler. He formed a 8,000-man plus Muslim Waffen-SS division, which partnered with the bloodthirsty Ustasha in Croatia to commit the most heinous crimes in the hell that was the Holocaust. The Ustasha wore Jewish eyeballs on necklaces.
The alliance with the Nazis spanned every aspect of the war, from intelligence offices in Paris to plans, to parachute units, to artillery battalions, to a plan to exterminate all Jews in Palestine. This alliance was more than one man, the mufti of Jerusalem – it was a movement of popular international Islamic fervor that stretched across the Middle East and Europe.
After the fall of Hitler, the legacy of hate continued in the postwar expulsions of a million Jews from Arab lands.
Periodically, the fervor that ignited the massacres of 1929 surfaces even today. Intifadas arise, riots erupt and the Arab rallying call, spoken and collectively remembered, continues to be in Jerusalem – where Jews should not be permitted to sit at the Western Wall when they pray.
The writer is the author of IBM and the Holocaust. This article is drawn from his recently released book, The Farhud, Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance during the Holocaust (Dialog 2010).December 21, 2010
