Farhud: a slaughter in Iraq

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The Jewish Chronicle Online

05/31/2011

By 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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Iraq’s Kristallnacht: 70 Years Later

Posted on

Haaretz

05/31/2011

By Robert S. Wistrich

Seventy years ago, on June 1, 1941, the most dramatic and violent pogrom in the Arab Middle East during World War II took place in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. Known in Arabic as the Farhūd, this devastating pogrom left approximately 150 Jews dead, hundreds more wounded, and led to the ransacking of nearly 600 Jewish businesses. The grim events of June 1-2, 1941 were the Iraqi Arab equivalent of the mass violence on Kristallnacht, which had taken place some two and a half years earlier across Nazi Germany. The anti-Jewish riots were mainly led by Iraqi soldiers (bitter and frustrated by their defeat at the hands of the British Army), some members of the police and young paramilitary gangs, swiftly followed by an angry Muslim population that went on the rampage in an orgy of murder and rapine. The pogrom struck at what was the most prosperous, prominent and well-integrated Jewish community in the Middle East – one whose origins went back more than 2,500 years – long before there was any Arab presence in the country. The 90,000 Jews of Baghdad, it should be said, played a major role in the commercial and professional life of the city. However, in the 1930s they already found themselves confronted by an increasingly virulent anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist propaganda in the Iraqi press and among nationalist political groups. This agitation treated the intensely patriotic Iraqi Jews as an alien, hostile minority who had to be ejected from all the social, economic and political positions it held in the Iraqi state. Iraqi Arab nationalists, like their counterparts in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt, had been much influenced in the 1930s by the rise of Nazi Germany. Hitler’s National Socialism attracted them as a spectacular, authoritarian model for achieving Iraqi national unity and a wider union of Arabs in the region. It was no accident that the pro-German ideologue of pan-Arabism, Sati al-Husri, exerted a major influence on Iraqi education after arriving in Baghdad in 1921, or that Michel Aflaq, the chief theoretician of the Iraqi and Syrian Ba’athists had also absorbed German national-socialist ideas while studying in Paris between 1928-1932. The Director General of the Iraqi Ministry of Education in the 1930s, Dr. Sami Shawkat, was another fanatical ideologue, especially active in instilling a military spirit (resembling the German Nazi model) in Iraqi youth. He also developed radically anti-Jewish ideas which were heavily indebted to Nazi anti-Semitism. In a book published in Baghdad in 1939, These Are Our Aims, Shawkat openly called for the annihilation of the Jews in Iraq, as a necessary prerequisite for achieving an Iraqi national revival and fulfilling the country’s ”historical mission” of uniting the Arab nation. Significantly, it was also in Baghdad that the first official Arabic translations of parts of Hitler’s Mein Kampf appeared in 1934. In order not to offend Arab sensibilities the final translation “edited” out Hitler’s racial theories about inferior “Semites” – making it clear that anti-Semitism related only to Jews, not to Arabs. The Iraqi translator of Hitler’s “magnum opus” was Yūnus al-Sab’āwī, a young Nazi enthusiast and extreme anti-Semite. A close confidant of nationalist officers in the Iraqi army, Al-Sab’āwī came to play an important role in Iraqi politics. From April to June 1941 he even served as Iraqi Minister of Economics. Al-Sab’āwī was indeed one of the architects of the Farhūd in which his anti-Semitic para-military youth group also took part. Al-Sab’āwī had earlier established a close connection with Nazi Germany’s Ambassador to Iraq in the late 1930s, Dr. Fritz Grobba. The latter was a distinguished Orientalist (fluent in Arabic, Persian and Turkish) who eventually convinced Hitler that helping Arab nationalists to throw off British control of Iraq should be part of German strategy. Grobba also contributed much through the networks he had established in Iraq, towards spreading the idea that Iraqi Jews were a “fifth column” of Great Britain – sworn enemies of Germany and of the Arab nation. Equally, Palestinian nationalists, led by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini (who had had fled to Baghdad in the late 1930s), conducted an especially vicious campaign to incite a jihad among the local Arab population against Great Britain, Zionism and the Jews of Iraq. The Mufti – a close ally of Hitler during the four years he spent in Berlin between 1941 and 1945 – would also exert a particularly toxic influence on the pro-Nazi politician Rashid Ali al-Kailani, whose successful anti-British coup had forced the unpopular Hashemite Regent Abd al-Ilāh to flee the country. The coup brought to power on April 1, 1941 some of the most rabid Jew-baiters in Iraq. Anti-British and anti-Semitic propaganda now reached a zenith that greatly contributed to the violence that burst forth two months later. Ironically enough, it was the decisive victory of the British and the return of the Regent on June 1 that immediately provoked the pogrom, an act of unparalleled revenge by the Muslim masses against the Jews of Baghdad that expressed their deep disappointment at the fall of the popular Rashid Ali regime. The British Army, now encamped on the outskirts of Baghdad, could easily have intervened but it chose not to do so, dubiously claiming this would have damaged the prestige of the (pro-British) Regent in the eyes of his own people. The British behaved in a similar fashion on several occasions in Mandatory Palestine, in Libya (November 1945) and in Aden (December 1945) – standing by as Arab mobs killed defenseless Jews. In fact, for most Iraqi Muslims in 1941, the British were perceived as oppressive colonizers, the Jews as their “agents” and the German Nazis as “anti-imperialist” saviors! But German military assistance, when it finally came, was too little and too late to save the Rashid Ali regime. The Farhūd has been incomprehensibly ignored or downplayed both in Zionist historiography and even more in general histories of the Middle East. Arab historians have been silent or else falsified the facts and there are even Israeli and Jewish writers who have unconvincingly tried to dismiss its importance. Yet this traumatic event was indeed of seminal importance. It proved beyond reasonable doubt the strength of Arab nationalist anti-Semitism and of Nazi-style incitement on a Muslim population that had come to see in its patriotic Jewish minority “the enemy within.” The Jews of Iraq, seventy years ago, suddenly found themselves in the crossfire of three converging forms of murderous anti-Semitism – that of the German Nazis, the Palestinian exiles in Baghdad led by Amin el-Husseini, and Iraqi pan-Arab nationalists. Ten years later, the government of Iraq under the pro-British Nuri es-Said, expropriated, dispossessed, disenfranchised and brought about the forced emigration of nearly 120,000 Iraqi Jews, thereby cruelly terminating the oldest of all Diaspora histories. This was not only a crime against humanity but an insufficiently acknowledged part of the history of the Holocaust. The Farhūd exposed with shocking clarity just how vulnerable the Jews in Arab lands really were and what their fate was likely to be under any decolonized Arab regime in the future, especially if there was a breakdown of law and order. Despite the “Arab Spring” not much has changed for other minorities in the Middle East in the last 70 years. As for the Jews, from Morocco to Iraq and Iran they would be “ethnically cleansed” after 1945 by their Muslim rulers. The Farhūd already represented the writing on the wall for those willing to read it. The reinforcement of a strong Israel was and still remains the only viable long-term answer to the repetition of such horrific atrocities in the future. Prof. Robert S. Wistrich is the director of The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (SICSA) and the author of A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (Random House, January 2010). This article is a condensed version of a recent lecture on the 1941 pogrom in Baghdad hosted by SICSA in Jerusalem. View article here
June 14, 2011
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Seventy years ago, on June 1, 1941, the most dramatic and violent pogrom in the Arab Middle East during World War II took place in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. Known in Arabic as the Farhūd, this devastating pogrom left approximately 150 Jews dead, hundreds more wounded, and led to the ransacking of nearly 600 Jewish businesses.

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The ‘taboo history’ of the Jews of Iraq. Questions for Carole Basri

Posted on

New Jersey Jewish News

05/09/2011

By Robert Weiner

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="250" caption="Carole Basri addresses a committee of the British House of Lords in 2007 on the plight of Jews in Iraq. Photo courtesy Carole Basri"][/caption] 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. View article hereJune 14, 2011
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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.

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Iraq demands return of its Jewish archive

Posted on By Glenn Kessler Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, April 30, 2010 The soldiers came looking for weapons of mass destruction. What they found in the flooded basement of Saddam Hussein's secret police headquarters was a legacy of destruction -- the demise of one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world. There was a treasure trove of Torahs and Haggadas, centuries old. And there were marriage records, university applications, financial documents -- the living record of a community, seized by the Mukhabarat from the homes of Jews as they fled Iraq under pressure and amid persecution, with only a handful remaining. Now comes the historical conundrum: Who owns these materials? In the chaotic aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion of 2003, the thousands of sodden documents were spirited out of the country with an assist from then-Vice President Richard B. Cheney's office and a vague promise of their return once they had been restored. With the materials still sitting in a College Park office building, stabilized but with mold on them, the Iraqi government is demanding that they be shipped back, saying they are the property of the Iraqi people. "They represent part of our history and part of our identity. There was a Jewish community in Iraq for 2,500 years," said Samir Sumaidaie, the Iraqi ambassador to the United States. "It is time for our property to be repatriated." ad_icon A high-level Iraqi delegation, led by Deputy Culture Minister Taher al-Humoud, met Thursday with senior State Department officials to press for the return of the artifacts. But others, including many involved in saving the materials, say that they belong to the Jews who fled, or their descendants -- many of whom live in Israel. "I don't see any reason for it to go back to Iraq, because if it is the patrimony of the Jewish community of Iraq, then wherever they are it's theirs," Harold Rhode, a former Defense Department official, told the Jerusalem Post last month. "When they left, they would have taken it with them had they been able to take it with them. You don't abandon Torahs." The State Department does not dispute Iraq's claim to the documents. But another concern is the condition of the materials, which total 3,500 tagged items, including clumps of paper yet to be separated. They were found floating in three feet of sewage water because U.S. bombs had burst the pipes in the Mukhabarat's basement. Preservation efforts Susan Cooper, a spokeswoman for the National Archives and Records Administration, said the agency takes no position on who owns the documents but believes the materials need much more preservation work. "They continue to be very fragile and have mold on them," she said. "There are health implications to materials that have mold." NARA has spent less than $1 million stabilizing the material, Cooper said. The agency's staff members recently completed an item-by-item assessment and are in the final stages of estimating the cost of a full preservation, including digitizing images of the pages. An NARA estimate in 2003 pegged the cost at $1.5 million to $3 million. Sumaidaie said he had been told that the cost could be as high as $6 million. But he said he thinks that the materials are stable enough so that no "further damage or decay can take place" and that Iraq can handle any additional restoration work. After the discovery of the materials by troops looking for illegal weapons, Rhode, working at the time in Iraq, sought help from Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi exile leader and at the time a U.S. favorite. Chalabi provided a pump, bins and other help. The materials were left in the sun to dry, but when Rhode learned that freezing kills mold, they were transferred to a refrigerator truck running 24 hours a day. "It was absolutely awful. No one was interested," Rhode said. "And then very simply [former Russian dissident Natan] Sharansky, who phoned me from time to time when I was there to make sure I was still alive -- I've known him for many years -- called Cheney. The American government, all of a sudden, got very interested." With the apparent blessing of what was left of the Iraqi Ministry of Culture, the materials were flown to Texas to be freeze-dried and then were transferred to College Park for preservation and restoration. The State Department says that when the Coalition Provisional Authority transferred sovereignty to Iraq in June 2004, it gave the Ministry of Culture the right to demand the documents upon written request. Point of contention Dov. S. Zakheim, a senior Pentagon official in the George W. Bush administration, is opposed to sending the materials back to Iraq. "I have no sympathy for a government which stole it from the rightful owners and then a successor government saying it belongs to them," he said. Iraq would be willing to consider individual claims to the documents, Sumaidaie said, but the question of giving them to descendants is "not for us a matter for dispute or discussion." He pledged that the documents would be made available in Iraq to any researchers. Sumaidaie noted that "we had a huge amount of plunder of our historical artifacts as a result of the American intervention." Any full accounting of what is owed to whom, he said, "is not going to be very favorable to our American friends." November 11, 2010 No Comments

By Glenn Kessler Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, April 30, 2010 The soldiers came looking for weapons of mass destruction. What they found in the flooded basement of Saddam Hussein’s secret police headquarters was a legacy of destruction — the demise of one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world. There was a treasure […]

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IraqiJewishArchive

The Iraqi Jewish Archive

Posted on To whom do antiquities belong? Are they the property of modern states, current proprietors of the real estate where they were created, however many centuries or millennia ago? Do they belong to the descendants of those who created them, to the extent these can be identified? Or are they somehow the heritage of "all mankind"? For Jews, these questions took on flesh in 2003 in the flooded basement of a building belonging to the Iraqi secret police. There, American soldiers searching for clues to Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction came upon an even stranger sight: a waterlogged trove that had once belonged to Iraq's Jewish community. The Iraqi Jewish Archive, as it became known, is both proud and pitiful. The earliest item dates to 1568, but most of the other materials are from the late-19th and early-20th centuries: Judeo-Arabic manuscripts, Torah scrolls and mantles, children's primers, family photographs, letters, all seized from Iraq's long-banished Jews. Through a confluence of initiatives involving the U.S. military, the Iraqi opposition, the Coalition Provisional Authority, and the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, the trove was transported to the U.S. where it was freeze-dried, conserved, and photographed. It remains in the charge of the National Archives and Records Administration and the Center for Jewish History. Although basic cataloging has been done, more extensive preservation and digitization await funding and a resolution of the archive's fate. Representatives of the Iraqi Jewish community in Israel have staked a claim to the trove. But so, for its part, has Iraq itself, whose new Minister of Tourism and Antiquities has named the return of the archive as a top priority. After all, countless items looted from Iraq's museums and archaeological sites, from ancient tablets to Saddam's gold plated AK-47, have already been restored. Why not the Iraqi Jewish Archive? Indeed, Western democracies have lately become accustomed to such demands. The Elgin Marbles, their fate still undecided, are the most famous example, but countless objects have already been repatriated to countries ranging from Peru to China, sometimes before requests were entered. Even outright gifts, like Cleopatra's Needle in New York's Central Park, are on the list of Zahi Hawass, the Egyptian pharaoh of archaeology who travels the world demanding that every object ever created in Egypt be returned or otherwise made subject to his personal decision. Scholars and intellectuals have largely acceded to these demands out of post-colonial guilt and fear of losing access to excavation permits. "Retentionists," who wish to keep antiquities in the West, have been accused of greed; having stolen other peoples' legacies, they now defy international law and public sentiment. To this one might respond that the demands themselves often seem more about exercising political power in the present than about preserving the past—and in any case they are of dubious relevance to the Iraqi Jewish Archive. What is true is that the Jewish community in what is now Iraq is of ancient and distinguished lineage—more ancient than any other outside the Holy Land. For more than 2,500 years, from the Assyrian conquest of Israel and then the Babylonian conquest of Judah, Jews resided along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates as an integral minority, and by the 20th century had long learned to accommodate themselves to new rulers and new empires washing back and forth. But in the race unleashed by the British after their conquest of the territory, Jews along with Christians, Kurds, and other minorities were soon crushed by Muslim supremacism, now cloaked in the name of Iraqi nationalism. The process of dispossessing Jews from the new state of Iraq began almost immediately with the dismissal of Jewish officials in 1934 and 1936, unofficially complemented by bombings of Jewish establishments in 1936 and 1938 and culminating in the Farhud massacre of June 1941. The official process intensified with the criminalization of Zionism in 1948. A year later, Prime Minister Nuri as-Said was describing to foreign diplomats a plan to expel Iraq's Jews. The climax occurred with a 1950 bill on de-naturalization, confiscating the property of Jews who emigrated, and the bombing of Baghdad's Masuda Shemtob synagogue in January 1951. By March 1951, 120,000 Jews had left Iraq, being permitted to take with them no more than 50 pounds sterling per adult and 20 per child. In 1952, the gates were closed. In 1963, Jews were forbidden to sell property. After the Six-Day war of 1967, Jews were dismissed from jobs, their property seized, bank accounts frozen, and telephones disconnected. Jews were hanged as alleged spies in 1968 and 1969. By the 1970s, the few remaining Jews were permitted to leave after being pressured to turn over title to property. When the Americans arrived in 2003, perhaps two or three dozen remained. By what right should a society that barely tolerated and then expelled its Jews, and that loathes and forbids the presence of Jews now, be given 27 cases of Jewish documents and books? Saad Eskander, the director of the Iraq National Library and Archives, has stated one rationale: "Iraqis must know that we are a diverse people, with different traditions, different religions, and we need to accept this diversity . . . [and] that Baghdad was always multiethnic." A glance at the headlines from Iraq suggests that such noble aspirations are increasingly belied by reality. Besides, should the materials be returned to Iraq, what assurances are there that anyone, much less Jews, will have access to them? What assurances that the materials will be preserved at all? Countless artifacts from Israeli excavations in Sinai were returned to Egypt as part of the 1979 peace agreement. No one knows their fate, but rumors have long circulated that they were simply dumped alongside the road. Similar proposals have been made regarding artifacts, even demonstrably Jewish ones, excavated in the West Bank, which Israel is being urged to turn over to the Palestinian Authority as a confidence-building measure. Intellectuals, who in other settings deplore "politicization" of the past, are usually at the forefront of such seemingly therapeutic schemes. Free societies, with their competing interests and concerns, do a mixed but on the whole creditable job of maintaining their pasts. Unfree societies, thanks to corruption and racism, typically do a very poor job, and when they do make an effort, as in Iraq under Saddam, it is in furtherance of the regime's dictatorial and repressive aims. International refugee law provides for "non-refoulment": that is, refugees must not be returned to a situation where they would be put in jeopardy. Might a similar principle be considered for antiquities? Could it be asserted that unfree states forfeit their claims to antiquities, particularly those originating with minorities they have expunged or exterminated, and against whom they discriminate in the present? The legal dimensions remain to be explored; in the meantime, like many of the Jews who created it, the Iraqi Jewish Archive lingers in exile—so far, thankfully, in a free country. Alex Joffe is a research scholar with the Institute for Jewish and Community Research.February 1, 2011 No Comments

To whom do antiquities belong? Are they the property of modern states, current proprietors of the real estate where they were created, however many centuries or millennia ago? Do they belong to the descendants of those who created them, to the extent these can be identified? Or are they somehow the heritage of “all mankind”? […]

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LegacyofHate

A Farhud legacy of hate

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The Jerusalem Post - December 16, 2010

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
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The Jerusalem Post – December 16, 2010 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 […]

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Ezekil

Crossroads of Antiquity Can’t Decide on New Path

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New York Time – October 19th, 2010

KIFL, Iraq — This small town, shaded by date palms on a bend of the Euphrates River, has been revered as a holy place for centuries — by Jews, by Muslims and, for periods of peace, at least, by both. “The old democracy,” as the local police chief put it. Kifl, in what was once Babylonia, has survived millenniums of war and natural disasters, exile and expulsion, the fall of empires and the ravages of a troubled modernity. It embodies Iraq’s rich, layered past and might yet represent its future — if the country’s leaders could stop quarreling over it and its religious provenance. In the center of town — and in the middle of a dispute — is the tomb of Ezekiel, the biblical prophet who preached to the Jews in captivity under Nebuchadnezzar in the sixth century B.C. Somewhere near here is where, according to tradition and faith, he saw his visions of God. Leaders of the town and the province now have a more earthly vision, too: tourism. Iraq remains a country at war, and the town, dusty and strewn with litter — and, the other day, the burned wreck of a car — lacks a single hotel. Nonetheless, they dream of travelers of all faiths streaming through Kifl — Muslims, Christians and even the Jews, who lived and worshiped here until the last families left by 1951, “because of the problem of Palestine,” said one of them, Zvi Yehuda. That has thrust the tomb, with its distinctive (and Islamic) conical dome, which dates from the 14th century, into a debate that mirrors Iraq as a whole as it emerges from dictatorship and war. It is a debate between the competing aims of historic preservation and modern development, between a multifaith history and the increasing sway of Islam, particularly the Shiite branch, whose clerics have their own designs for the site. “We can prove to the world that this place is one of the cultural places that promote civilization and peaceful coexistence between peoples,” said Qais Hussein Rashid, the director of the State Board of Antiquities, which oversees Iraq’s myriad ancient sites. He did not say it would be easy. Late last year the antiquities board began a project to restore the ancient center of Kifl, with the aim of earning a coveted designation as a World Heritage site by Unesco, joining three other places in Iraq: Hatra, Samarra and Ashur. The historic core includes not only Ezekiel’s tomb and the synagogue around it, but also a precariously leaning 14th-century minaret of a mosque long since destroyed, and a vaulted T-shaped bazaar built in the 1800s under Ottoman rule, when Jews and Muslims lived in relative tolerance, if not exactly harmony. All are at the center of Kifl’s redevelopment plan, still under consideration and very much contested. A copy of the plan, hanging on the wall of the mayor’s office, depicts modern hotels, restaurants, shops, parks, parking lots and even a boat launch on the Euphrates shore: Kifl in 2030. “We hope everyone who visits Iraq comes to Kifl,” said the mayor, Khalid Obeid Hamza. His ambitions are as grand as the Malaysian city he improbably cited, when asked, as the inspiration for the plans. “Kuala Lumpur,” he said. “It’s a very nice place.” The plan, like the restoration work, has been greeted with deep suspicion by Kifl’s residents, including the tailors, shop owners and restaurateurs who work in the covered bazaar. Last month Kifl’s residents staged a protest, fearing the redevelopment would force them out. “If it’s good for my work, but hurts others, I won’t accept it,” said a baker, Malik Ali, expressing fears that hotels and restaurants for tourists would ruin the town’s historic, albeit worn, charm. He then echoed a familiar Iraqi lament: “I wish the restoration work would start with electricity and water and sewage.” In fact, the restoration of the tomb and its environs had barely started before it came under attack. News reports early this year that the project aimed to turn Ezekiel’s tomb into a mosque, removing architectural details like carvings in Hebrew, provoked a fury in Israel and beyond. The reports were false — the carvings remain in place, as do the wooden balustrades that separated the men’s and women’s sections and a carved cabinet that once held the Torah — but the fears were not without some foundation. Modern plaster, including some with painted Hebrew words and designs, was removed, ostensibly to expose the original stone walls, which have their own designs. The Shiite council that administers mosques and shrines across Iraq has strongly objected to the restoration, for different reasons. Its leaders argued both that the initial work was shoddy and that the authorities should be more concerned with excavations to find an undiscovered — and possibly nonextant — mosque where Imam Ali, the cousin of the Prophet Muhammad, tarried in the seventh century before his murder in Kufa and burial in Najaf, just south of here. “They focus on historical matters,” the Shiite caretaker of the tomb, Sheik Aqil al-Ghraawi, said of the board’s officials and experts. “We focus on both the historical and the Islamic.” As it is throughout the region, history in Iraq is a battleground in which faiths seek precedence for modern-day claims. The earliest known references to the Jewish tomb date to the 10th century. Before the establishment of the modern state of Israel, Jews from across the region made pilgrimages to the site, staying in guest rooms that are now ruins. Muslims, too, revere the site as the tomb of Dhul Kifl, a prophet mentioned twice in the Koran who gave the town its name and who has long been assumed to be the same man as Ezekiel. Millions of Shiite pilgrims travel each year to the major holy sites of Islam here, including Najaf and Karbala. Associating Kifl with Imam Ali would put the town on the tourist map, as it were. The region’s governor, Salman al-Zargany, who has already clashed with the antiquities board over profiting from tourism at the ancient ruins of Babylon in Hilla, threw his support to the clerics. “Archaeology is a very nice cake,” said Mr. Rashid, the antiquities board director, “and everyone is taking a piece.” In June, Mr. Zargany ordered the local police to occupy the site in order to halt the restoration work. Despite repeated negotiations since then, the project remains suspended, though scaffolding now braces the leaning minaret, believed to be part of a mosque that once stood beside Ezekiel’s tomb. Two weeks ago, Mr. Rashid canceled the rest of the project’s budget for the year, a little more than $500,000, shifting the money to other projects. Mr. Zargany has taken a leave of absence amid a dispute with the region’s provincial council. Sheik Aqil, the caretaker, despite his fervent belief in the site’s Islamic origins, said that he had no intention of undermining its Jewish heritage. “It’s a Muslim’s duty to protect it,” he said during a tour of the tomb, interrupted by midday prayers. On the walls are old photographs of the Jews who once prayed here. “We take care of the Islamic and the Jewish,” he went on. “It is the history of all Iraq.” Mr. Yehuda, a Jewish historian who was born in Kifl in 1936, recalled the town through the nostalgic prism of childhood, capturing the reverence it seems to have always inspired. “It was a very small place, and filled with date palms,” he said in an interview at the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center in Or Yehuda, Israel, where he is the research director. “The Euphrates, the colors of the waters. As a child, near our house, we have a horse, and we had a cow and we had milk. We had everything.” He welcomed the idea of Jews returning someday. “Not only Iraqi Jews, every Jew who wants to come, as it was in older times, when Jews came from everywhere to visit Ezekiel,” he said. “If the Iraqis want to do it, I think they will succeed.”November 11, 2010
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New York Time – October 19th, 2010 KIFL, Iraq — This small town, shaded by date palms on a bend of the Euphrates River, has been revered as a holy place for centuries — by Jews, by Muslims and, for periods of peace, at least, by both. “The old democracy,” as the local police chief […]

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