Point of.No Return has moved!

 The new address is www.jewishrefugees.org.uk. See you there!

Persian-Israelis defy ban to reach out to Iranians

Persian Jews in Israel have been keeping channels open with people in Iran, as demonstrated by a Voice of America  documentary series made in 2017. Now the series has  been posted online, i24 News reports:(with thanks: Lily)

Broadcaster Menashe Amir surrounded by Persian memorablilia in his Israeli home

Amid long-standing and deepening tensions between Israel and Iran, some prominent Israelis with Persian roots have engaged in little-publicized contacts with Iran’s people and advocated for reviving the historic friendship between the two Mideast powers.

 These Israelis are part of the world’s only Persian diaspora community located in a country that Iran’s Islamist rulers have banned their citizens from contacting. They spoke about their barrier-breaking conversations with Iran’s people and hopes for reconciliation as part of VOA’s Persians of Israel documentary series that was filmed in 2017 and published online Friday. 

 The Israelis featured in the series include veteran journalist Menashe Amir, who has been broadcasting to Iran in Farsi via radio and online for six decades; Rita, one of Israel’s most successful pop stars; Dorit Rabinyan, a novelist who has won international acclaim for writing about romances of young Persian women and a taboo-breaking Jewish-Muslim couple; and Dan Halutz, who led Israel’s military during two of its most challenging operations of the 2000s. 

See clip

 

Iraqi man in pro-Israel video beaten up and hospitalised

It was one of the most eye-popping videos to surface from the Arab world: an Iraqi man calling for Benjamin Netanyahu to save him and bring him to Israel.

The video, which seemed to  attract  the approval of bystanders,  was hailed by Israeli talk show host Avi Abelow as running contrary to the predominant narrative: that Arabs are instinctively hostile to Israel. 

 But delight amongst Jewish viewers turned to horror as these pictures began to emerge. They show that that the man was badly beaten and is now being treated in hospital.

According to  Israeli Arabic-media monitor Linda Menuhin, the man made his outburst following the fire that killed  92 in a hospital in Nasiriya. Iranian-supported militias were responsible for almost beating him to death, she claims. 

Simply to fly the Israeli flag earns an Iraqi three years in prison. Which goes to show how brave - or desperate - this man was, to speak out in favour of Israel.

Tunisians serve up Merguez with everything before 9th Av

Tonight begins the longest fast of the Jewish year, Tisha b'Ab (9th of Av), in memory of the destruction of the two Jewish Temples in Jerusalem. Writing in Harissa, Victor Hayoun reminisces about the customs specific to Tunisian Jewry. To make up for the ban on eating meat in the run-up to the 9th of Av, Jews ate a surfeit of Merguez, the spicy sausage typical of North Africa.

Detail from the Arch of Titus showing the Romans carrying off booty from the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD

We commonly called this period, in Tunisian Judeo-Arabic, "Agein"  or "Ayamet-El-Tkal" [literally: "heavy days"], these were the expressions used by our parents to talk about it. These days were heavy with fear and prohibitions. 

We knew it was in memory of a serious event, even of mourning, since we did not eat meat. These are austere days, full of restraint, no festivities, no excess of joy, no cutting your hair, no buying new clothes or anything else new, no undertaking new projects or signing new contracts, no starting to new approaches. In fact, we stopped making progress, we treaded water. It was our way of mourning the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem. 

 That was not all, there were also the dietary restrictions. We did not eat meat or chicken, except on Shabbat. We were entitled to fish in all its forms: fresh, canned: tuna / sardines / anchovies, dried fish (Bou-Zmeimar) and boutargue (for wealthy people who could pay the price). It was fried in whole fish, cooked in a spicy sauce: H'raiimé, or cooked in a vegetable broth: fish couscous accompanied by fish balls, fried and cooked. We had a great choice. A whole series of possibilities of consumption of fish to "fill" the absence of meat and chicken. 

 But the Tunisian Jew is all the same a pleasure-lover. He does everything to have fun in all circumstances and also and especially at the table. No prohibition can resist him. If he has found a way to consume rice on Passover, 'it is really nothing for him to consume meat, or any derivative, during the days leading up to the fast of Ninth of Av, becomes a heavy consumer of Merguez (spicy sausage) during these first eight days of the month of Av (not Shabbat of course). In our childhood, our mother, peace be on her soul, prepared us Merguez before the month of Av, she dried them on a clothesline and then she prepared us Shakshouka with Merguez, Mloukhia with Merguez, beans "Bsal-ou-Loubia" with Merguez and many other dishes cooked with Merguez. 

 To these dishes of fish and dried meat, We added"Falsou" dishes."Falso" in Italian which means "false". These are in fact the "fake" dishes that we called so because the "real" ones were with meat, chicken or fish. In fact, these dishes which did not contain any, were equally delicious dishes such as pasta, cooked vegetables, couscous, or more rarely rice. 

 Read article in full (French)

More about Tisha b'Ab

Muslims in Aden pose with book by Israeli

How come a book about the Jews of Aden is suddenly appearing on the streets of this war-torn port at the tip of the Arabian peninsula?

Adenis pose with 'Passage from Aden' in front of the Selim school, where Jewish children once studied, and in the main streets of Crater. Here 8,000 Jews once ran businesses and shops. Not a single Jew still lives in the city today.  Before it became part of the independent state of Yemen,  Aden was under British rule for over 100 years.

What is more startling is that Passage from Aden was written by an Israeli, Sarah Ansbacher,  and is about a museum in the heart of Tel Aviv at 5 Lillienblum Street.

Above: Esplanade Road  in Crater as it was in 1947 (left) and the same street today ('Before' photo: The Aden Jewish Heritage Museum)

Sarah Ansbacher is the manager of the Aden Jewish Heritage Museum. Passage from Aden is a compilation of remarkable stories that Sarah collected from visitors to the museum, both tourists and Jews with links to Aden.

The photos were taken at the initiative of an Adeni Muslim historian who still lives in the port. It was on a visit to the Adeni Jewish community in Stamford Hill in London that he bought a copy of Sarah's book and took it back with him to Aden. He and Sarah have since been in touch on line.

Is this a promising sign that Yemen will be the latest Arab country to sign the Abraham Accords? Do not hold your breath. Yemen is controlled by the Houthis, a fanatically antisemitic group which has chased out the last few Jews from the country. The Houthi watchword is 'Convert or die'. 

I

The Selim school in Crater is unchanged in over 70 years ('Before' photo: The Aden Jewish Heritage Museum).

Trading stories from Aden

African politician discredited for his Jewish ancestry

Antisemitism is threatening to penetrate deep  into the heart of Africa as the Congo contemplates disqualifying presidential hopeful Moise Katumbi for having a Sephardi father from Rhodes. JTA report in Times of Israel (With thanks: Nancy)

Moise Katumbi, successful businessman and presidential challenger.

JTA — The ancestry of the son of a Jewish refugee in the Democratic Republic of Congo has emerged as a flashpoint for a political crisis that is threatening the integrity of the massive African country. 

 The crisis came to a head last week when lawmakers loyal to President Felix Tshiseked introduced a bill that would restrict the presidency to those with two Congolese parents. 

 It’s a thinly veiled move against Moise Katumbi, one of Congo’s most popular politicians, whose father was a Greek Jew who fled the Holocaust in Europe and settled in Congo, where he married a local woman, Katumbi’s mother.

Read article in full

Lapid to make official visit to Morocco

Matters are moving apace as the new Israeli Foreign Minister, Yair Lapid, prepares to implement the next stage of the Abraham Accords with Morocco.The Times of Israel reports:

Foreign minister Yair Lapid (photo AFP)

The Foreign Ministry is in talks with Morocco to arrange an official visit by Foreign Minister Yair Lapid to the Arab nation, diplomatic sources told the Times of Israel Tuesday. 

 Last week, Lapid invited his Moroccan counterpart, Nasser Bourita, to visit Israel. After a 20-year lull in diplomatic relations, Israel and Morocco renewed their ties late last year, amid a wave of normalization agreements between Jerusalem and Arab countries.

  Read article in full

A boost for Israeli-Moroccan normalisation? (INSS)

The Libyan Jew preserving 'la dolce vita' in the kitchen

Meet Hamos Guetta, who fled his native Libya for Italy in 1967. Italy and Italian cooking has had a profound influence on Jews like Guetta as Libya was an Italian colony. It was to teach his daughter his family's cuisine that Guetta first started making cookery videos. Now he has 17,000 followers on Youtube. Charming interview in Haaretz:

Hamos Guetta demonstrates a recipe (Photo:Tamar Applebaum)

“I was 12 when we arrived in Rome, desperately poor. We went for a walk in Piazza Vittorio, a huge square with a colorful market that rocked my world. I had never seen such produce. It stimulates all your senses at the same time. The colorful abundance of fruit and vegetables, the fresh herbs, the smells, the hustle and bustle of the market. It’s important to stop here and note that we arrived as refugees fleeing Libya after a month of hiding in different houses.

 “I was totally shocked by the freedom with which people went about their affairs. In one spot, chickens were being slaughtered right there, and in another, there were stalls of Parmesan cheese that the vendors let me taste. Everyone was drinking wine and enjoying life. That evening, I returned to the square and was enchanted by a beautiful musical performance. I realized that this was la dolce vita Italiana.”

 Read article in full

Cairo Book Fair still purveying Antisemitism

The good news is that the Gulf States, bound by the Abraham Accords,are not pumping out antisemitism at their book fairs. The bad news is that Egypt, despite its Peace Accord with Israel, still displays  'hate literature' at this year's Cairo Book Fair. Article by Shimon Samuels of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in the Jerusalem Post:

An Arabic edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Ziyon

 The Simon Wiesenthal Center annually monitors the shelves of seven Arab Book Fairs for incitement to hatred and violence. We send our findings to the Frankfurt Book Fair, where measures are taken to ban the listed offenders. COVID-19 closed down some of the Arab fairs, but until last year, Abu Dhabi was among the offenders. This May, in the spirit of the Abraham Accords, that book fair was totally clean. This was not the case of Egypt, however, where the ongoing fair hosts 1,218 publishers in 756 stands representing 25 countries, led by Spain, whose ambassador recently waxed lyrical regarding Hispano-Arab literature.

 At the same time, Egyptian author Mansour Abdel Hakim was signing at the Dar Al Kitab Al Arabi (House of the Arab Book) stand, the fourth volume in his series The Great Secrets of Freemasonry – The World Hidden Government (in English and in Arabic). This demeaning book takes you through various conspiracy theories and the beliefs they promote, including one that says Jews divided the world into two parts: masters and slaves.

 Each year in Frankfurt we present The Worst Offender Award. In 2019, it went to Iran for its books for four-to-seven year old children extolling “shehada,” suicide martyrdom. The runner-up award went to Egypt for a plethora of questionable editions.

Read article in full

  Antisemitism plagues the Cairo Book Fair

Context-free Haaretz exposes 1949 discrimination

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz likes to publish context-free articles alleging discrimination by Ashkenazim of Sephardim in order to portray Zionism as a racist, colonial movement. Here is the latest example by Ofer Aderet, based on research by the historian Shay Hazkani. Hazkani discovered thousands of letters from disgruntled Moroccan  Jews who fought in Israel's War of Independence, complaining of discrimination by European Jews. Further into the article,  it transpires that discontent was also rife among Ashkenazi  Mahal volunteers, so this is not simply a binary Sephardi-Ashkenazi issue, more a clash of cultures. We are told that 6 percent of Moroccan Jews returned (i.e an impressive 94 percent stayed), while 95 percent of soldiers from the US and Europe went back to their home countries. The piece fails to report that  conditions in Israel were dire in 1949 after it lost one percent of its population; there was rationing and all manner of hardships. The piece does not reference antisemitism and the deteriorating situation in  Morocco in the run-up to independence. In spite of 'selectsya' and 'protectsya', one third of Moroccan Jews made  aliya before 1956.     

          

         Moroccan Jews arriving in Israel

The army’s top brass itself generally displayed a patronizing, hostile and distant attitude toward soldiers of North African origin, according to the IDF’s own files, from which the letters quoted by Hazkani were taken. “Even though the soldiers are of inferior education and culture, they manifest potent criticism,” one army report states. “North African immigrants suffer from an inferiority complex that might be caused by the way their Ashkenazi colleagues treat them,” a censorship official wrote after analyzing the soldiers’ letters. “This phenomenon is serious and raises concern,” he continues, not just because of the damage to morale among the soldiers, “but also because of the information sent by the ‘offended’” to their families and friends in their countries of origin. "The European Jews, who suffered tremendously from Nazism, see themselves as a superior race and the Sephardi Jews as belonging to an inferior one."

 Data from the Central Bureau of Statistics shows that 6 percent of those who immigrated from Morocco in the years 1949 to 1953 actually returned to their native land: 2,466 out of approximately 40,000. Proportionally, Hazkani found, this was almost twice the number of those who returned among the immigrants from Europe and America (Ashkenazim).

( ..... )

Although the historian's current focus is on soldiers of Moroccan origin, other archival documents show that they were not the only foreign-born soldiers during the state's first decade who had scathing criticism about the Israeli society in which they found themselves. Soldiers from the United States, Great Britain and elsewhere who arrived as part of the Mahal project – involving army volunteers from overseas who were not immigrants – also weren’t wild about the so-called sabras. 

A survey conducted among the volunteers in 1949 by the Israel Institute of Applied Social Research (later renamed the Guttman Institute, and today called the Viterbi Family Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research) found that most of the newcomers expressed negative opinions about the Jewish state and its inhabitants (55 percent), with the bulk of the complaints referring to the phenomenon of proteksya (cronyism or favoritism). “Other reasons for resentment,” Hazkani notes, “were chutzpah, egoism, hypocrisy and lack of respect.

” In this country, “it’s not what you know but who you know” that’s important, one of the volunteers noted in his answers to the questionnaire. “Proteksya… proteksya… what chance does a guy like me have without that vitamin?” added another. Some complained that the locals made no effort to be friendly, and were impolite, impudent and loud. A common theme was that Israelis think they’re always right and can’t abide the idea that sometimes the other side is right. The volunteers also felt that the locals attached too much importance to their country of origin, which affected their attitude. And, of course, that Israelis love aliyah but not olim.

 The army’s postal censors diligently copied passages in which the volunteers expressed highly negative views about their experience in Israel. “It is enough if I say that when the Anglo-Saxons [first] came here, 95 percent were interested in settling. Today, you can’t even find 5 percent,” a soldier wrote to his family in England. “In this country, soldiers try not to die for their country, but try, and with success, to have others (foreigners) die for their country,” another observed.

Read article in full

  

 

Why Kobi Oz is the new voice of Israel

Who is the most important Israeli musician of the last generation? Not the most gifted or popular, but the most influential, one without whom the country’s sound wouldn’t be the same? Matti Friedman's vote goes to Kobi Oz, who is best know internationally for a provocative entry in the Eurovision Song Contest. Domestically Oz and his Teapacks band broke through into the Israeli scene with a distinctive brand of Mizrahi-Moroccan music. Feature in Tablet magazine (with thanks: Michelle)

My vote goes to Kobi Oz—the mix-track trickster, the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down, the Tunisian from a town of Moroccans who brought the South to Tel Aviv and changed what we mean by Israeli pop. Of course, more than one person is responsible for the rise of the once-disdained sound known by the generalization “Mizrahi,” or “Eastern,” which has become Israel’s spiritual equivalent of American country and western music, though the two genres sound absolutely nothing alike. If we must choose one musician responsible for the mainstreaming of the Israeli Eastern sound, it might be Oz. 

 Listening to Oz’s work over the past 30 years, you get a portrait of a changing country—one constantly in crisis but also one with an irrepressible life, a place that has given up on being someplace else and has come to terms with itself. Because Oz and his band broke through in the ’90s, the age of the music video, it’s actually possible to witness the crucial moments in their rise on YouTube, like the release of “In Newsprint” in 1993. The odds were stacked against the song, which has prickly lyrics about Israelis—describing them as people diverted by jokes, journalism, and self-delusion—and a complicated melody that changes rhythm abruptly in the middle and moves into explicitly Moroccan territory. The song was unlike anything people had heard before. It wasn’t immediately clear if the band was earnestly channeling the North African sound or laughing at it, as was common in those days, when Mizrahi culture was still mocked by the wardens of popular taste.

  Read article in full

More by Matti Friedman

The Moroccan girls lured into Brazilian prostitution

With thanks: Michelle

Earlier this year, in  a Harif Lockdown Lecture about the Jews of the Amazon, Dr Saul Zadka  shocked listeners with tales of a massive prostitution racket run by a crime syndicate named after a Polish Jew called  Zvi Migdal. At the turn of the  century, Migdal lured Jewish girls from the synagogues and shtetls in eastern Europe to South America with the promise of Jewish husbands. But the girls were forced into offering sexual services to the large population of single male fortune -seekers in Argentina and Brazil. Migdal ran 431 brothels in Rio alone.

Descendants of Moroccan Jews in the Amazon celebrate Shabbat

Evidence has now emerged that the girls were not all Ashkenazi.  A resident of Carlsbad , California, Solange Aderholdt, contacted Soly Anidjar, who collects information about Jews from Morocco, to tell her tale of woe.

Solange was born in Tangier as Solange Hazan. In 1920, her aunt Messody Sicsu, from a respectable family, set off in a steamer ship with her brother Jose for Amazonia to meet her intended  Polish-Jewish husband who was already settled in Brazil. It was all the rage at the time : Moroccan Jews were leaving Tangier and Arcila to seek a better life from the Amazonian rubber boom. They established a community in Belem and Manaus on the Amazon river. A synagogue still exists in Belem wit a few hundred practising Jews, but many more have assimilated.

As soon as they arrived in Brazil, however, Messody and her brother disappeared. The only thing her family knew was that she was due to travel to Parintin, a remote town in north western Brazil at the mouth of the river Parana do Ramos.

Decades later, Solange learned through a DNA test that Jose had had grandchildren. if he had had grandchildren, Jose must have got married.

As for Messody, one can only assume that she was forced into a prostution ring. According to historian Kaleb Bensaud Bensousan,  who lives in Beersheba, Israel, but has links with his family in the Amazon, many Moroccan Jewish girls became prostitutes.

 

Farewell Naim Kattan, celebrated author from Baghdad

The death in Paris of the celebrated author, literary critic and professor Naim Kattan, was announced by his son Emmanuel on 2 July.

 Kattan, aged 92, published 30 books in his second language of French, but is best known for his autobiographical novel, Farewell Babylon.

The book describes Kattan’s childhood as a Baghdad schoolboy at the Alliance Israelite Universelle school, where he excelled in French and Arabic. Reading Law at Baghdad University,  he won a scholarship in 1947 to study at the Sorbonne just before the great exodus of Iraqi Jewry in 1950.  Farewell Babylon captures the foreboding atmosphere of rising nationalism in the 1930s,  relations between the sexes and between Jews and Arabs and  his experience of the Farhud massacre of 1941.

He lived the rest of his life mostly in Quebec and in Ontario, Canada, but spent the last two years in Paris.

See biography here

Moroccan Airforce plane lands in Israel

The Abraham Accords seem to have built on a new era of military collaboration between Israel and Morocco, according to a report in Infos - Israel News (French) (with thanks: Michelle)

A Royal Moroccan Airforce C-130

 A Royal Moroccan Air Force miitary transport 'plane has landed  on the Israeli airforce base of Hatzor.

The arrival of the  C-130 plane in southern Israel marks the first time that a North African aircraft has landed on Israeli soil.

 The Israeli authorities have refused to confirm the aircraft's nationality, stating that 'Israel cooperates with a variety of countries and their militaries and conduct joint exercises and high level meetings with them.

In January 2020, the Moroccan military took delivery of three Israeli reconnaissance drones as aprt of a $48 million contract. The agreement was signed with the French company Dassault.

 Read article in full  (French)

The other Nakba: New film will tell Jewish refugees ' story

 Coming soon - a new documentary about Jews from Arab Countries. The makers are South-African based Pulp Films. This punchy trailer is not shy to use the expression 'Jewish Nakba' to describe the forced exodus of 870,000 Jews.

The title 'Quiet Triumph' was chosen to show the refugees' determination not to dwell on the past. They quietly got on with lives  after their uprooting - and did well in their new countries.  In spite of all the trials and tribulations, they triumphed.

If you would like to contribute towards the funding of this film, please write to Jason Hoff at Jason@pulpfilms. co.za.

Diplomat updates list of Egyptian-Jewish surnames

Using sources such as periodicals, memoirs, geneaological records and telephone directories, veteran Israeli diplomat and researcher Jacob Rosen-Koenigsbuch has updated his list of surnames of Jews living in 20th century Egypt for Avoteynu: (with thanks: Shula)

Jacob Rosen-Koenigsbuch

The Jewish community in Cairo (as well as in Alexandria and Port Said) during the first half of the 20th century is an example in place. There is no central depository or database which is accessible. Some of the documents of the Jewish Community which found their way out such as those at Yeshiva University in New York deal mainly with Jewish education and community affairs. 

 The same may be said about the “Central Archive for the History of the Jewish People”( http://cahjp.nli.org.il/content/egypt) in Jerusalem which is in possession of the same kind of materials. The main problem with those materials is that they deal mainly with the community’s dignitaries and Jewish schools and education. 

The Central Zionist Archive (CZA)in Jerusalem possesses lists of Egyptian Jews who emigrated to Israel but without mentioning their cities of origin. The Jewish Distribution Committee (JDC) has some lists of Egyptian Jews but with no city of origin. Those lists represent only a fraction of the Egyptian Jews because many of them were holders of European passports (Italian, British, French, Greek, and Spanish) and left Egypt independently and were not in contact with those organizations. 

This is the place to mention that only half of the Egyptian Jews made their way to Israel while the rest settled mainly in the USA, Brazil. Argentina, France, Italy, and Australia. This paper intends to fill those lacunae and lists the surnames of the Jewish families, Sephardic and Ashkenazi and the Karaites, which resided in Cairo from the turn of the 20th century with a brief survey of the available sources which were consulted and used to construct such an index. 

 The main source for harvesting Jewish surnames are the two weeklies in French that were published in the city between 1918-1945: “Israel” and “L’Aurore”. They are scanned and can be viewed on the website of the National Library of Israel. They can be searched online by OCR technique which, because of the print quality, misses a considerable number of surnames. The fact that many surnames are spelled in a variety of ways necessitates a creative search methodology.

 However, the major drawback of these two weeklies is that they focus on Jewish communal life, institutions and Jewish schools and organizations. Unfortunately, many Jewish kids did not attend Jewish schools, and their parents were not donors to Jewish organizations and institutions, thus they fell beyond the coverage of the Jewish press. The second source is the personal memoir books by authors who grew up in Cairo, some of whom drew literary praise and positive coverage by the media.

 However, they are very poor in providing surnames. The Farhi’s Family website “Les Fleurs de L’Orient” has a large index of families that are related to the Farhi family by marriage. The index notes the place of birth, residence or death of each indexed individual thus constituting an additional source for Cairo Jewish surnames.

 Another important source is the different Egyptian business and telephone directories but they require careful scrutiny to dig out the Jewish surnames keeping again in mind that only a fraction of the city’s Jews are listed in them.

  Read article in full

Israeli foreign minister inaugurates UAE embassy

Pursuant to the Abraham Accords, Israeli foreign minister Yair Lapid formally opened Israel's new UAE embassy. Bahrain's ambassaor arrived in Tel Aviv and Morocco unveiled its new building in the city.

Yair Lapid meets the minister of foreign affairs and international cooperation of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, in Abu Dhabi

The Guardian reports:

Israel’s foreign minister has inaugurated the country’s new embassy in Abu Dhabi in the first official Israeli visit to the United Arab Emirates since the two countries normalised relations last year. 

 Speaking at the ribbon-cutting ceremony on Tuesday, Yair Lapid appeared to reach out to other regional adversaries.

 “Israel wants peace with its neighbours – with all its neighbours. We aren’t going anywhere. The Middle East is our home … We call on all the countries of the region to recognise that, and to come talk to us,” he said, according to a transcript released by the Israeli foreign ministry. 

  Read article in full

Bahrain's new ambassador to Israel is Khaled al-Jalahmah (Middle East Eye). See report.

Morocco's new liaison office in Tel Aviv (Photo: Zamane - with thanks Michelle)

Progressives should support Jewish victims of Arab colonalism

One of the most persistent slurs against Israel among progressives is that it is a 'settler colonial state'. The truth is that the only empire has been Arab and Muslim, and Israel is an example of 'decolonisation' . James Sinkinson pens this punchy piece in JNS News:

James Sinkinson: who are the real colonists?

Ironically, Jews are the only people in history since the brutal Arab conquest, occupation and colonization of the region who have risen up to reclaim their land. This has been considered an affront to Islam, and it is no coincidence that Hebrew, the indigenous language of the Jewish people, and Zionism, the national movement to return the people to their land, were violently repressed and banned in Arab countries.

 There’s no doubt who is the colonizer and who the colonized. There is only one empire in this conflict, and it is not Jewish, a people who have never conquered any territory on the planet not their own, as opposed to the Arab world, which currently encompasses 5,070,419 square miles of land mass. 

 Rather than condemning Israel, progressives in the West who recoil at “settler colonial projects” should embrace the Jewish state as an example of decolonization—indigenous return and restored sovereignty. If they were honest, they would stand by the side of tiny Israel—with a population of nine million, surrounded by hundreds of millions who seek its destruction and its return to the huge Arab empire.

 Just ask the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa who lived under Arab repression, discrimination and constant fear of violence for almost 13 centuries—who have finally returned home and make up the majority of the Jewish citizens of the State of Israel. Their recent history and experience of Arab imperialism, conquest and oppression reflects a sad, violent tale of Arab Muslim privilege. These Jews truly understand colonialism and what it is like to live under its yoke.

  Read article in full

Five Israeli women ministers have Moroccan or Iraqi roots

 The new Israeli cabinet under the leadership of Naftali Bennett has nine women ministers, two with Iraqi roots, two with Moroccan roots, and one with mixed Iraqi-Moroccan roots.

The four ministers with Moroccan roots (Photo: Moroccan World News): Meir Cohen, Karine Elharrar-Hartstein, Yifat Shasha-Biton, Meirav Cohen

Three with Iraqi roots: Yifat Shasha-Biton becomes Minister of Education; Ayelet Shaked, Minister of the Interior and Major-General (reserve) Orna Barbival, Economics Minister. (Photo: RT)

Morocco World News reports: 

Meir Cohen has taken up the post of Israel’s new Minister of Labor, Welfare, Social Affairs and Social Services. Cohen was born in the Moroccan coastal town of Essaouira in 1955, migrating to Israel with his family when he was seven years old. The minister started a career in politics by successfully running for mayor of Dimona in 2003. Since then he has worked with several parties, most notably Yesh Atid, a centrist party under which he served as Minister of Welfare & Social Services between 20134 and 2014. 

 Yifat Shasha-Biton, born to a Moroccan-Jewish mother and Iraqi father in 1973, will now be heading the Ministry of Education. Shasha-Biton received her doctorate in education in 2002, from the University of Haifa. She previously served as Minister of Construction and Housing under the Likud party between 2019 and 2020. 

 Meirav Cohen, for her part, will continue working as the Minister of Social Equality, a post she’s held since 2020. Continuing her post, she has changed the party under which she works, migrating from the Blue and White party to Yesh Atid. Cohen was born in Jerusalem to two Sephardic Jewish immigrants from Morocco.

 Karine Elharrar-Hartstein, an Israeli lawyer and a politician, has taken up the post of Minister of National Infrastructures, Energy and Water Resources. Elharrar was born in 1977 to Moti and Colette Elharrar, two Moroccan Jewish immigrants. She currently serves under the Yesh Atid party. 

 The new Israeli government, headed by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, is keen to further enhance the relationship between Tel Aviv and Rabat. “Israel views Morocco as an important friend and partner in the efforts to advance peace and security in the region,” Bennett said.

Read article in full

There are still Jews in Bangladesh - or are there?

Are there still Jews in Bangladesh? There was a liberating military commander (General Jacob), there may be a few business people and expatriates, but these a community do not make, writes Shalva Weil (of the School of Education, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Visiting Scholar, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge)  in Asian Jewish Life:

 

  The National Assembly (Parliament) building of Bangladesh, designed by Jewish architect Louis Khan of Philadelphia  and completed eight years after his death

The Jews in East Pakistan (before it became Bangladesh) were in no way numerous and kept a very low profile in this Muslim country. Apparently today, a few Jews still remain, but they are quite assimilated.

 There is no synagogue today in Bangladesh, although a few expatriates do meet up on the eve of the Jewish New Year and on the Day of Atonement. Getting a portrait of this elusive community requires patience, a few of the right contacts and quite a bit of ‘digging’. A posting on Trip Advisor by a tourist asking where the synagogue is in Dhaka for Yom Kippur received no serious response and a few months later, the blog was closed “due to inactivity”. 

Another Jewish blogger shared that he went through a full orthodox conversion, is himself of mixed ancestry, his father being Yemenite Jewish and his mother Bangladeshi. Other people have written into the same blog saying they do business with Bangladesh, visit there and a few even reside there. As one person wrote: “The only Jews you will find in Bangladesh are those merchants with extensive business reasons to stay in Bangladesh.”

But liberating military commanders, the monuments of great architects, intrepid travelers and fortune seeking businessmen do not make a community. The question still remains, who are the Jews of Bangladesh? Joseph Edward of Ontario, Canada, explained the history of his family and their unique ties to the region. Joseph’s father Rahamim David Barook and his older brother Ezra Barook, were born in Calcutta, and moved to what was then East Pakistan. They adopted the surname Edward; his brother Ezra was known as Eddy Edward. Rahamim David Edward, Joseph’s father, married a Catholic of Portuguese descent. His uncle married a tribal king’s daughter from the Chittagong Hill Tracts, and she gave birth to a son. However, his wife died during childbirth and Joseph Edward’s uncle gave the baby up to a Muslim family for adoption. Edward has been in contact with cousins living in Arad and Beersheba, Israel. Other members of the family live in Sydney, Australia, in the UK and in Toronto, Canada.

Two other families of Jewish descent do in fact still live in Dhaka, but they have converted to Catholicism. Priscilla nee Jacob was married to Alfie D’Costa, who died some years back. Priscilla had her own private school in Dhaka. Her brother Henry also married locally and still resides in Dhaka as a Catholic. Likewise, there were two other Jewish brothers in East Pakistan, whom Joseph Edward knew: Enoch and Zebulon Daniels. Enoch lived in Chittagong and Zebulon lived in Dhaka. Their children now live in Canada and the UK.

While the Jews in West Bengal managed to create a full community, the Jews of East Bengal largely lived there for commercial reasons. They were never numerous. Nevertheless, documentation of the Jews of Asia and specifically Pakistan is incomplete without information on the Jews of East Pakistan, or what is today Bangladesh. The full story of this elusive community remains to be written. 

  Read article in full

Farhud witness remembers, and identfies the main actors

Dr Nimrod Raphaeli, emeritus senior analyst with MEMRI, was a witness to the Farhud, the deadly anti-Jewish pogrom in Iraq of 1 and 2 June 1941. In this fascinating MEMRI report, he sketches out pen portraits of the main actors in the massacre. While the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini, is considered to have played a major part, the role of Younis Bahri, who broadcast virulent anti-Jewish radio propaganda to Arabs congregating in cafes, must not be underestimated: (with thanks: Lily) 

Front cover of Younis Bahri's autobiography (Photo: MEMR)

 Iraq's port city of Basra, where I was born and grew up, suffered less than Baghdad, but from the windows of our house I witnessed looters running through the streets carrying whatever they could grab from Jewish stores. 

There was always the uncertainty of whether the mob of looters was going to turn into a mob of murderers. 

Even though we were spared the fate of the Baghdadi Jews, the terror of our experience remains indelible in my mind. 

 The word farhud itself needs some explanation. It describes both an action and a cultural value.

 According to Nabil Abdul-Amir Al-Rubayi, who wrote two important volumes on the history of Jews in Iraq, the word is uncommon in the Arabic language; rather, it is adopted from Bedouin dialect and refers to looting and plundering. 

Quoting the well-known Iraqi sociologist Ali Al-Wardi, Al-Rubayi notes that the concept of farhud is part of Bedouin culture, in which looting and plundering are activities signaling "courage and daring."[1] The events of the Farhud are well documented in numerous publications, and there is no need to dwell on them in detail in this report.

Instead, this report will focus on a number of individuals who played critical roles in the policies of the country which led to violence against a peaceful community and planted the seeds for the Farhud.

 Read article in full

David Harris: 'I am a forgotten Jew'

Eyes glaze over when David Harris of the American Jewish Committee, whose wife escaped Libya in 1967,  tries to raise the issue of the forgotten Jewish refugees from Arab countries. But the main reason for the general  amnesia is that Jews driven from Arab countries have been able to pick up the pieces of their lives. Here's his eloquent re-working of an earlier article for the Times  of Israel (with thanks: Roger, Edna, Dhia): 

David Harris

I am a forgotten Jew. My experience — the good and the bad — lives on in my memory, and I’ll do my best to transmit it to my children and grandchildren, but how much can they absorb? How much can they identify with a culture that seems like a relic of a past that appears increasingly remote and intangible?

 True, a few books and articles on my history have been written, but— and here I’m being generous — they are far from best-sellers.

 In any case, can these books compete with the systematic attempt by Libyan leaders to expunge any trace of my presence over two millennia? I repeat, can they vie with a world that paid virtually no attention to the end of my existence? 

 Take a look at The New York Times index for 1967, and you’ll see for yourself how the newspaper of record covered the tragic demise of an ancient community. I can save you the trouble of looking — just a few paltry lines were all the story got.

 I am a forgotten Jew.

 I am one of hundreds of thousands of Jews who once lived in countries like Iraq and Libya. All told, we numbered close to 900,000 in 1948. Today, we are fewer than 4,000, mostly concentrated in two countries—Morocco and Tunisia. We were once vibrant communities in Aden, Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and other nations, with roots dating back literally 2,000 years and more. Now we are next to none.

 Why does no one speak of us and our story? Why does the world relentlessly, obsessively speak of the Palestinian refugees from the 1948 and 1967 wars in the Middle East — who, not unimportantly, were displaced by wars launched by their own Arab brethren — but totally ignore the Jewish refugees from the 1948 and 1967 wars? 

 Why is the world left with the impression that there’s only one refugee population from the Arab-Israeli conflict, when, in fact, there are two refugee populations, and our numbers were somewhat larger than the Palestinians?

 I’ve spent many sleepless nights trying to understand this injustice. Should I blame myself? Perhaps we Jews from Arab countries accepted our fate too passively.

 Maybe we failed to seize the opportunity to tell our story. 

Look at the Jews of Europe. They turned to articles, books, poems, plays, paintings, and film to recount their story. They depicted the periods of joy and the periods of tragedy, and they did it in a way that also captured the imagination of many non-Jews. 

Perhaps I was too fatalistic, too shell-shocked, or just too uncertain of my artistic or literary talents. But that can’t be the only reason for my unsought status as a forgotten Jew.

 It’s not that I haven’t tried to make at least some noise. I have. I’ve organized gatherings and petitions, arranged exhibitions, appealed to the United Nations, and met with officials from just about every Western government. But somehow it all seems to add up to less than the sum of its parts. No, that’s still being too kind. 

The truth is, it has pretty much fallen on deaf ears. You know that acronym — MEGO? It means “My eyes glazed over.” 

That’s the impression I often have when I’ve tried raising the subject of the Jews from Arab lands with diplomats, elected officials, and journalists — their eyes glaze over (TEGO).

 No, I shouldn’t be blaming myself, though I could always be doing more for the sake of history and justice. There’s actually a far more important explanatory factor, I believe. 

 We Jews from the Arab world picked up the pieces of our shattered lives after our hurried departures — in the wake of intimidation, violence, and discrimination — and moved on. We didn’t stand still, wallow in self-pity, or pass on our victim status to our children and children’s children. 

 Most of us went to Israel, where we were given a new start. The years following our arrival weren’t always easy — we began at the bottom and had to work our way up. We came with varying levels of education and little in the way of tangible assets.

 But we had something more to sustain us through the difficult process of adjustment and acculturation: our immeasurable pride as Jews, our deeply rooted faith, our cherished rabbis and customs, and our commitment to Israel’s survival and well-being.

 Read article in full

Shooting of Algerian-Jewish musician marked turning point

Sixty years ago this month, the murder of Raymond Leyris, a famous Jewish musician in Constantine, Algeria (Enrico Macias's father-in-law) marked a turning point in the fortunes of the Algerian-Jewish community. A year later, almost all of them had fled. We re-post an article by Martin Evans in History Today:

Raymond Leyris, master of malouf music. Examples on Youtube.

On Wednesday June 22nd, 1961 the 48-year-old Jewish musician Raymond Leiris was shopping with his daughter in the crowded market of his home town, Constantine, in eastern Algeria. Suddenly, without warning, a young Muslim gunman surged forward to shoot him in the back of the neck. The defenceless Leiris was killed instantly, another victim of a round of shootings in Constantine that day, which left one Algerian woman dead and two other people seriously wounded.

 It was a shocking incident even if, after nearly seven years of war between the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) and France, the colonial power, there was no shortage of horrific events to record. By no stretch of the imagination was Leiris a military target. Popularly known as Cheikh Raymond, he was one of the great figures of the Andalusian musical tradition, a gifted oud player, blessed with an astonishing voice.

 Studying under the greats of Algerian music – Cheikh Chakleb and Cheikh Bestandji – his Cheikh Raymond Orchestra encapsulated the style known as malouf. He was a living symbol of a shared Jewish-Muslim culture. We still do not know why he was murdered. Neither the FLN, nor the Secret Army Organisation (OAS), the hard-line pro-French Algeria terrorist group formed in January 1961, ever claimed responsibility for his murder. 

 The killing threw into sharp relief the dilemmas of Algeria’s Jewish community in 1961. Numbering 130,000, as opposed to nine million Arab-Berber Algerians and just under one million European settlers, this minority was faced with three choices: either they could accept independence, which by this point seemed inevitable given that the French government and the FLN had entered into negotiations; fight a last-ditch stand to defend colonial Algeria; or leave.

 With names like Derrida, Nouischi and Stora, Jews had lived in North Africa for over 2,000 years. Some had arrived with the Phoenicians between 1100 and 146 bc. Others sought refuge after their expulsion, along with the Muslim population, following the fall of Granada, the last bastion of Islamic Spain, in the Reconquista completed in 1492. As such the Jewish population was derived from a complex mosaic of Judeo-Berber, Judeo-Arab, Portuguese and Spanish roots, in which each locality had its own customs.

Under Islamic law Jews were accorded a protected status as the ‘people of the book’*. In return for a tax they were allowed to practice Judaism. 

  Read article in full 

Listen to the Podcast

The Moroccan students who came into the cold

 During the 1950s and 1960s, the student cohort in a yeshiva or religious school in the northern  English town of Sunderland was entirely made up  of Jews from Morocco.  The religious magazine Mishpacha tells their story: (with thanks: Nigel)

Remembering Rav Shammai Zahn, who taught many students at the Sunderland Yeshiva

From 1952 to 1967 and beyond, in the quiet, chilly British town of Sunderland, far from the Mediterranean sunshine, far from their parents in Tangiers, Fez, Casablanca, or Marrakesh, boys who had barely studied Gemara before blossomed into serious yeshivah students. 

 Some notable personages include Rav Nissim Rebibo ztz”l, who became rosh beis din of Marseille, then of Paris, then of the entire France; Rabbi Shimon Biton ztz”l, who served as the venerated av beis din of Marseille, his fascinating life recorded in the ArtScroll biography of his wife Rabbanit Shulamit Biton-Blau, From Djerba to Jerusalem; Dayan Saadia Amor ztz”l, rosh beth din of the Sephardi Beth Din of the UK and mechutan of Rav Mordechai Eliyahu; Rav Avraham Baddouch ztz”l, a rosh kollel in Mexico; Rav Refael Yisrael ztz”l; and yibadel lechayim tovim, Rav Gavriel Ittah of Strasbourg, among others.

 There’s also Kabbalist Rabbi David Pinto who has set up Torah institutions around the world, and Rav Shalom Gabbai, who went back to lead the community in Marrakesh.

 Dozens of others became shochtim and menakrim trusted by stringent kashrus authorities, and sincere, learned laymen.

  Read article in full

Glossary of terms:

Bochurim: 'Yeshiva boys

Talmidei Hahamim: Rabbinical students

Av Beit din: senior religious court judge

Rosh Beit Din: Head of religious court

Rosh Kollel: Head of married students' yeshiva

Mechutan: relative by marriage

Shochtim: ritual slaughterers

Menakrim: inspectors

The Spanish Golden Age: myth or reality?

The debate rages on: did Jews experience a Golden Age in al-Andalus, in medieval Islamic Spain? Professor Mark R. Cohen of Princeton wrote an interesting prologue to the Encyclopedia of Jewish- Muslim relations published in 2014, admitting that it was to a certain extent a myth.

This image of a Jew playing a game with a Muslim  is often used to illustrate the Golden Age of al-Andalus.

It is true, he writes, that Jews were immersed in Arabic-Islamic culture  - language, poetry, science, medicine, philosophy. True, Jews became powerful advisers to Muslim rulers. True, Jews were not generally  confined to certain occupations as they were in Europe, and the idea of usury did not have the same stigma.

The Jewish intellectuals in 19th century Germany, alienated by the rise of antisemitism and unfulfilled promises of emancipation, idealised the situation of medieval Jews. They tended to ignore the Jews' legal inferiority, or dhimmi status. Yet the 'lachrymose' version of this history exaggerates the negative. The myth of the Golden Age, Cohen argues, contains a very large kernel of truth.

Yet, for over 100 years, Muslim fundamentalists, in the shape of the Amohads and Almoravid Berbers, compelled Jews to choose between conversion to Islam or death. Cohen argues that Jews could always 'pretend' to convert, as Maimonides did - so this was a mitigating factor. But he could not deny that Christianity was wiped out altogether in North Africa and the Jewish population dwindled dramatically.

It has also been argued that pogroms against Jews were unnecessary when Jews were already cowed and submissive. On the other hand, Cohen argues that the dhimmi rules were often breached in Muslim Spain. What he does not say is that while rulers were ready to breach those rules in order to promote useful and talented Jews to positions of power and influence, the masses did not take kindly to Jews behaving above their station - hence, for example,  the massacre of 3,000 Jews in 1066 when the mob was outraged at the actions of the 'haughty' Vizir Joseph Ibn Naghrela.

Cohen argues that persecution of Jews could not have been as bad as in Christendom. The proof was that they did not chronicle their persecution as Jews did in Europe. But the essence of being a 'dhimmi' was surely NOT to harp on these episodes of persecution in order not to antagonise their rulers.

Read prologue in full

Moroccan-born mogul moves into Britain

Art lover and founder of Israel's i24 News, Patrick Drahi is now the biggest shareholder in the British Telecoms company, BT. The Guardian profiles the Moroccan-born billionaire:

Patrick Drahi

 Born in Casablanca, Morocco, in 1963 to two maths teachers, Drahi moved to France as a teenager and holds Israeli, French and Portuguese citizenships. 

He lives in Switzerland, where he has homes in Geneva and the ski resort of Zermatt. Drahi attended the École Polytechnique in Paris, the French university famed for turning out the country’s most successful business leaders and politicians.

 After working for a number of cable and satellite TV companies he co-founded two of his own in the south of France in the mid-1990s.

Read article in full

On World Refugee Day, Jewish bodies remember refugees

 In honour of United Nations World Refugee Day today, Israel and Jewish organizations remembered the often forgotten story of the nearly one million Jews who were ethnically cleansed from Arab and Muslim countries over the past century. The Algemeiner reports:

Most were absorbed by Israel. The Jewish state issued a video chronicling the history of those refugees, their journey to Israel, and their absorption. 

 The Canadian branch of the Jewish rights group B’nai Brith tweeted, “On World Refugee Day we remember the nearly 1 million Jewish refugees who fled Arab Countries and Iran to resettle in the only safe haven for them, Israel, and which made Israel the largest refugee camp in the Middle East.”

 Hillel Neuer of the NGO UN Watch asked a pointed question about the UN’s double standard on Palestinian refugees, saying, “On World Refugee Day, we ask: How come the 850,000 Jewish refugees from the Arab world after 1948 were all successfully resettled in Israel and other countries—with 0 refugees left today—yet UNRWA has multiplied the number of Palestinian refugees from 700,000 to 5 million?”

Read article in full

Hamas chief meets Moroccan Islamists

In a bid to 'balance' its peace deal with Israel, Morocco has permitted Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh to visit the country and meet Morocco’s main opposition, the Islamist PJD party. Al Arabiya reports (with thanks: Michelle)

Ismail Haniyeh arriving in Morocco

 Haniyeh arrived in Morocco on Wednesday and met the Islamist PJD, the biggest party in the governing coalition, and will hold talks with several other main parties during his four-day visit. 

On Thursday he is meeting PAM and Istiqlal, two of the main opposition parties, with other party meetings scheduled before he leaves on Sunday.

 Read article in full

Israeli rabbi wants millions to build community with no Jews

Exclusive to Point of No Return

 An Israeli rabbi is claiming to be Chief Rabbi of a non-existent community and is demanding $10 million to build a mega-synagogue for them.

Israeli Rabbi Daniel Edri, who headed the Haifa Beth Din and has no Kurdish roots, has produced a letter from the Kurdish Ministry of Religious Affairs nominating him as the Chief Rabbi of Kurdistan. But the Ministry itself has claimed that the letter is a forgery.

The forged letter nominating Rabbi Edri as Chief Rabbi of Kurdistan

This month, the rabbi claims to have been in touch with an old Jew in Baghdad called Daoud Benattar who told him that there were ''close to 100 Jews in Baghdad'. Benattar is not known to anyone who is familiar with the few Jews still in Iraq. According to Edwin Shuker, who visits Iraq regularly, there are only four Jews still living there.

Likewise, there are no Jews in Kurdistan, although some Kurds claim distant Jewish ancestry.  The entire community -  some 18,000 Jews -  was airlifted to Israel in 1950. 

A non-Jew called  Sherzad Mahmoud Mansani was exposed as an imposter after the Kurdistan Regional government sacked him as head of the Directorate of Jewish Affairs and exiled him. Mamsani's objective was to raise funds from the Jewish diaspora in order to 'rebuild' the Kurdish Jewish community.

Rabbi Edri was first introduced to Sherzad Mamsani in 2017 and has admitted knowing that he was not a Jew.  He is now believed to be working with  one of Sherzad's acolytes,  Ranjar Cohen. Rabbi Edri has been quoted as saying, 'Sherzad is out of Kurdistan so we are going ahead without him.'

Despite his name, Cohen is not a Jew either. After failing to  register a synagogue with the Ministry of Religious Affairs,  Ranjar Cohen  registered a non-profit humanitarian organisation named Aramaic Organisation which he promoted as a Jewish congregation. After the imposters were denied entry to the shrine of the Prophet Nahum, they organized a Hanucah ceremony at a hotel instead.

 

Rabbi Daniel Edri wearing traditional Kurdish headdress

Rabbi Edri 'supervised' the  Hanucah menorah lighting ceremony in December 2020. Of  the two founders of the Aramaic Organisation  one is now in jail, convicted of murder.

It is suspicious that in order to achieve his objective of reviving the Kurdish Jewish community, Rabbi Edri seems to have avoided working with the late Dr Moti Zaken, the leading authority on Jews of Kurdistan, who spoke out against any abuses. Rabbi Edri has preferred to use his own dubious Kurdish contacts. In order to minister to the phantom community he purportedly heads, Rabbi Edri would have to register Muslims as Jews.

It appears that the death of Dr Zaken  may have left a vacuum which imposters and fraudsters can freely fill.

Of 'Jewish Arabists' and 'Arab' Jews

Khaled Diab is an Egyptian journalist who has always had an interest in Jews from Arab countries. In fact he was one of the first to write about them and celebrate their contribution to Arab societies. But as this New Lines Magazine article demonstrates, he sees them as 'Arab' Jews 'in love ' with Arab culture and in some cases Islam. (Even Disraeil is a 'Mosaic Arab'). Here he writes about Sasson Somekh, who called himself the last Arab Jew. But Somekh also saw himself as an Israeli patriot and repudiated those young Mizrahim who claimed a political 'Arab' identity without having themselves been immersed  in Arab culture and language.

The late professor Sasson Somekh

Despite the hatred and animosity created by the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the rampant scapegoating of local Jews that occurred across the Arab world, some Arab Jews continued to feel and express pride in their heritage and act as unofficial ambassadors between two worlds at war. 

 One such figure was the late Sasson Somekh, the Iraqi Israeli poet, writer, academic, and translator. Somekh had been a promising teen poet and leftist political activist in Baghdad, frequenting the city’s vibrant cultural cafes. “I recall the Tigris river where we used to go swimming in the summer. When the water level fell, small islands, which were known as jazra, would appear,” Somekh told me when I visited him at Tel Aviv University, where he was still allowed to keep an office despite having officially retired.

 “We would take a boat, load it up with fish and a grill, and go out to one of those small islands and have a good time — those were the most enjoyable days of my life.” The Baghdad that Somekh recalls from his youth was in some ways a very Jewish city.

 “When you walked down the main street, al-Rashid, which went from one end of Baghdad to the other,” he recounted, “half the names on the shops and offices, such as lawyers’ practices, were Jewish.” But a mix of popular anger at the Zionist project in Palestine, which was deftly exploited by Nazi propaganda during the war to spread a virile brand of antisemitism, made life progressively untenable for Iraq’s Jews. 

This forced Somekh’s family, along with the vast majority of Iraq’s Jewish minority, to depart the country in 1951, stripped of everything but the clothes on their backs. After a life of comfort in Iraq, the Somekhs found themselves, like the Palestinians who were forced to flee during the 1948 war, stuck in impoverished refugee camps. 

Caught between the racism and persecution they had experienced in their homelands and the racism and marginalization they experienced from Ashkenazi, or “European,” Jews in Israel, many Arab Jews quickly jettisoned their Arab identities in a bid to integrate in their new homes. 

 Somekh, who passed away in 2019, was among the minority who resisted this zero-sum identity game. He continued to identify as Arab as well as Israeli, write in Arabic, and dedicate his life to the study of Arabic literature. 

 Read article in full

More about 'Arab Jews'

Collective biography of Jewish doctors in Muslim Spain

A new book by Professor Efraim Lev focuses on  600 Jewish doctors  who lived in Islamic Spain in the Middle Ages. Review in the Jerusalem Post by Kenneth Collins: (with thanks: Jeremy)

A fragment from the Cairo Geniza

Using Geniza records and fragments along with extant medieval Muslim Arabic sources Lev has been able to present information on the lives of more than 600 Jewish physicians and pharmacists in the Islamic world of the Middle Ages. 

 He employs the technique of “prosopography,” a study that identifies and relates a group of persons or characters within a particular historical context, to create “a collective biography.” This shows how these practitioners functioned as they cared for Jewish, Christian and Muslim patients in the Islamic world, which stretched from Morocco and Andalusia to Iraq and Iran.

 Jewish physicians and pharmacists had mainly good relations with Christian and Muslim colleagues, and medical students of the three faiths learned together in the eastern Muslim lands, often in hospitals and at other times within family networks. Jews were attracted to the medical profession.

 Medicine carried prestige and offered opportunity where other scholarly options were closed to them.

 These physicians were literate in Arabic and Hebrew and had access to medical libraries. Even during times of restrictions on Jewish doctors, Muslim rulers and the public still consulted them.

 This work brought Jewish physicians close to the center of power and some Jewish court physicians were killed in court intrigues. 

 Read article in full