Lyn Julius, "Was the 'Farhud' Really a Nazi Event?"
David Shasha
Was the ‘Farhud’ Really a Nazi Event?
By: Lyn Julius
It has been some time since I have addressed the matter of the Farhud and the noxious role of hard-core Arab-hating Jews like Lyn Julius, so perhaps this would be a propitious time to deal with both issues.
I would remind SHU readers of the phenomenon of the self-hating Sephardi who has internalized the concerns and prejudices of Ashkenazi Jews to the point where it has become automatic for them to act in a way that affirms the agenda of those who have done so much to erase our history; preferring to accentuate tragic events in our history and accept the forced suppression of our intellectual and religious heritage by the Ashkenazim.
I have recently presented a number of examples of this phenomenon:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/davidshasha/7jan8Sr24ec
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/wahba/davidshasha/EQSW1owUVaA/Fqp0LMSuWwEJ
Although there are few, if any, Sephardi-run Jewish institutions designed to preserve and promote our culture and history, there is a spate of organizations dealing with Middle Eastern Jews that have been given the imprimatur of the establishment Jewish leadership. These institutions are dedicated to presenting a deeply negative view of Arabs and the Middle East and promote the alienation of Jews from the culture and history of the region:
http://www.justiceforjews.com/
http://jewishrefugees.blogspot.com/
Those who look carefully at these websites will notice how closely the agenda of the organizations dovetails with the Right Wing Zionism of many important Jewish institutions. Particularly noteworthy is Ms. Julius' use of the term “pre-Islamic Jewish communities”; a clever attempt to de-couple Jewish acculturation in the Arab world. There is also the use of quotation marks around the word “co-existence” which naturally reaffirms the separation between Jews and Arabs and would deny that Jews could actually also be Arabs. It is a rhetorical construction that has become common in an institutional Jewish world that is deeply antagonistic to the Arabs.
It has become clear that Sephardic Jewish culture and history is only meaningful when it can be slotted into the larger agenda of the Ashkenazi world. The possibility of presenting Sephardic history in a way that connects it to the larger Arab-Muslim world does not seem to be possible given the fact that Zionist values have made Arabs the enemy and severed the organic links of Jews who have roots in the region.
So that is the context in which we must read the following article. The article presents the usual complex of issues that tie Arab Jews to Zionism and the Ashkenazi agenda of mainstream Jewish institutions.
For those unfamiliar with the tragic details of the 1941 pogrom known as the Farhud I have taken the liberty of providing a section of Nissim Rejwan’s The Last Jews of Baghdad which gives us one of the rare eyewitness accounts of the event; an account that is not presented in an article whose information is taken exclusively from the tendentious book by Edwin Black. I have also chosen to resend a piece I wrote back in 2005 that deals with these issues in a wider conceptual framework.
The events of the Farhud are not in dispute. It is the background and interpretation of those events that are a matter of contention.
The current discussion now seems to be more focused on the Nazi angle than it has been in recent memory. The institutional movement to claim compensation for Arab Jews – initiated by Irwin Cotler, the former Canadian Justice minister – continues to look for ways in which to build a legal case as did the World Jewish Congress when it sued the German banks and received a massive financial settlement.
Ms. Julius’ article is part of the larger attempt to delimit Arab Jewish history to the immediate events leading to the exodus of Jews from the Middle Eastern countries after the founding of Israel in 1948.
The Jews of Iraq were shaken by the events of 1941 but it is to be noted that many continued to remain in the country and the mass exodus to Israel only took place after 1950 when a prominent Synagogue was bombed under somewhat mysterious circumstances:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950%E2%80%9351_Baghdad_bombings
The links between the Nazis and pro-nationalist Iraqi forces present a particularly complicated issue. Many Iraqis were not Nazis and indeed there were Muslim families who during the awful events of the Farhud saved Jewish lives; some at the expense of their own personal safety. Numbers of those killed range widely from source to source, but it is clear that there were Muslims who tried to protect their Jewish neighbors from the rioters:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farhud#Casualties
Who is ultimately to blame is a question that contains a number of elements that include not only the Nazis who spread Anti-Jewish propaganda throughout the Arab world, but also the British whose behavior before and during the pogrom was highly suspect.
Ms. Julius is intent on presenting a one-sided view of the matter that has been designed to link all Arabs to the Nazis and support the idea that native Jews were akin to victims of the Holocaust. It is an argument designed to bring Arab Jewish history into sync with that of European Jewish history and mirror efforts by Jewish groups to litigate the matter of compensation.
As is consistently the case, the voices and values of the native Jews are ignored and left absent from the discussion. In addition, the wider history of the Arab Jewish communities is also left absent. The focus is exclusively on the Farhud itself and does not present the wider frame of reference that might allow us to better understand the matter and the way that those – like Rejwan – who lived through it actually understood it.
The current state of Sephardic culture and history is quite deplorable. It seems that the only time we get heard is when there is something that can assist to or connect with the larger Ashkenazi-Zionist Jewish agenda. Arab Jews are now inert objects whose experiences are deployed in order to promote a lachrymose understanding of Jewish history and reinforce the idea that all Arabs and Muslims are Anti-Semites.
The reality of Arab Jewish history is far more complex than this reductivist portrait and the concern for cultural and intellectual continuity is, sadly, not at all served by the linkage between the Ashkenazi agenda and compliant Sephardic groups who seek to serve the very forces that have done so much to isolate and remove us from the Jewish discourse.
DS
Last week was the 73rd anniversary of a cataclysmic event in the tragic annals of Iraq’s Jews: the outbreak, on June 1-2, 1941, of the Farhud.
The Farhud – a Kurdish word meaning “violent dispossession” – erupted at the peak of World War ll. During two days of rioting coinciding with the Jewish festival of Shavuot, a frenzied mob, including Arab neighbors and policemen, murdered approximately 180 Jews in Baghdad and other cities (the exact figure is not known); 242 children were orphaned, scores of women raped, hundreds wounded, 900 homes and 586 Jewish-owned shops were looted. Although some Arabs did heroically defend their Jewish neighbors, stories abound of pregnant women eviscerated, babies mutilated, and Jewish hospital patients refused treatment or poisoned. The dead were hurriedly buried in a mass grave.
Was this just another spasm of violence, as occurred from time to time throughout 14 centuries of Jewish-Muslim “coexistence”? Or should the Farhud be considered a Holocaust event?
In a fascinating development reported in Haaretz, three lawyers are fighting a case against the Israeli government. If they can prove that Nazi Germany was behind this particularly gruesome bout of bloodletting, then the Farhud’s survivors are entitled to claim compensation and state benefits under Israel’s Disabled Victims of Nazi Persecution Law.
The plaintiffs claim that the riots against the Jews in Iraq were “a direct result of incitement and deliberate, organized, German-Nazi propaganda whose purpose was to make the Jews hateful to the Arab inhabitants of Iraq and motivate them to strike at the Jews.” The historical evidence includes German and British army correspondence and minutes, and an investigative report into the Farhud, which Iraq made public in 1958.
The key player in the financing and dissemination of Nazi propaganda was Fritz Grobba, the German ambassador to Baghdad from 1932.
Among other activities, Grobba acquired the newspaper Al-Alam Al-Arabi, in which he published an Arabic translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He sent Iraqi officers and intellectuals on trips to Germany as guests of the Nazi party. He also gave financial support to nationalist youth groups in Iraq and provided them with Nazi propaganda materials. A delegation from the Al-Futuwwa nationalist youth movement even visited Germany in May 1938, attended the Nazi party conference in Nuremberg, and returned to Iraq armed with anti-Semitic messages of Jewish power, corruption, and conspiracy.
The Farhud took place immediately after the defeat by British forces of Iraq’s short-lived pro-Nazi government, headed by Rashid Ali (al-Gaylani), and the flight of its main actors. Grobba funded Rashid Ali’s May 1941 coup by transferring him tens of thousands of gold ingots. At a meeting of the supreme German command on May 7, 1941, Hitler resolved “to assist Iraq in every possible way, including sending arms, ammunition, money, and military aid.”
Arguing the case for the defense (the Holocaust Survivors’ Rights Authority at the Israeli Finance ministry), historians claim that Iraq was way down the list of Germany’s priorities; that Grobba was not a “sworn” Nazi; that Nazi propaganda was marginal; that Arab nationalists enlisted Nazi support in order to defeat the British, which they failed to do; and that the Farhud was simply classic Arab anti-Semitism, without adding Nazism to the mix.
But as Edwin Black argues in his seminal book Farhud, Nazi Germany needed more and more Iraqi oil as the war progressed. Arab overtures to Hitler, initially rebuffed, were ultimately welcomed.
In its enthusiasm to indict Grobba, the case for the prosecution appears to downplay the role of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, exiled to Baghdad between 1939 and 1941. Through the prosecution’s focus on Germany, the Arab supporters of Nazism become puppets, without agency.
The Mufti sought Nazi license to exterminate Jews in Arab countries as well as Palestine “in the same way as the problem was resolved in the Axis Countries.” He played a key role in inciting the Muslim population against the Jews in his two-year sojourn in Baghdad. With him were hundreds of Palestinian and Syrian teachers, spreading their noxious anti-Semitism. Fleeing Baghdad before advancing British forces a few days before the Farhud, and after the collapse of the pro-Nazi Rashid Ali government - which he had plotted to put into power, the Mufti nailed his colors firmly to the Nazi mast when he spent the rest of the war as Hitler’s guest in Berlin.
Even so, the case for the prosecution does not seek to prove intent on the part of Iraqi Nazis to bring the final solution to the Middle East.
But to Edwin Black, their purpose was clear. He writes: “The original plans for the anti-Jewish action of June 1st was intended to mimic Nazi extermination campaigns in Europe.”
As in Poland, lists of Jews were compiled. In a chilling meeting on May 28 with the Chief Rabbi, Sassoon Kadoori, the self-styled pro-Nazi governor of Baghdad, Yunis al-Sabawi tells the Jews of Baghdad to lock themselves in their homes, cook enough food for three days’ travel, pack a small suitcase, and prepare to be transported to detention camps in the desert.
The next day, al-Sabawi was due to broadcast a call to military and Iraqi Nazi units to exterminate Baghdadi Jews in what Edwin Black calls a ‘massive murderous pogrom’. He even had his ‘victory’ speech ready.
In anticipation of certain slaughter, the Futuwwa youth movement went around marking red ‘hamsa’ handprints on the doors of Jewish homes.
Although al-Sabawi’s plans were thwarted at the last minute, the stage was set for the Farhud as Jews, in their Shavuot best clothes – thinking the danger had passed, ventured out of their homes.
“The perpetrators of the Farhud were not a gang nor a few errant officers,” continues Edwin Black. ” It was a mass movement unleashed, one that broadly adopted the Nazi desire to destroy the Jews.”
By focusing mainly on the activities of the ‘unlikely’ Nazi – Fritz Grobba – the prosecution fails to convey a sense of how deeply Nazi thinking had infected Iraq. Already in the 1930s, Nazi-style numerus clausus quotas were being applied to Jews in public service and education. Nazism inspired Arab nationalist movements, such as the Ba’ath Party, to marginalise and exclude Jews and non-Arabs. Independent Iraq’s first act was to massacre 600 Assyrians.
Shockingly, the legacy of Nazism endured after the end of the war when the Arab League drafted a raft of discriminatory laws reminiscent of Nuremberg. The mass exodus of the 140,000 Jews of Iraq, and the destruction of pre-Islamic, Jewish communities across the Arab world, followed a Nazi pattern of victimisation – dismantlement, dispossession, and expulsion – for which Arab states have never been called to account.
But the lawsuit is significant because, for the first time, it attempts formally to cast light on links between the Nazis and Arab countries. The plaintiffs’ claims have so far been rejected, but they are determined to pursue their case to the highest court in the land.
From Algemeiner, June 10, 2014
On the Misrepresentation of Arab Jewish History
The history of Middle Eastern Jews is both the most contested and least known in the panoply of Diaspora Jewry. Even the name by which Middle Eastern Jews are identified is one that is not agreed upon. There is great ambiguity as to how the history and culture of Middle Eastern Jewry – Sephardic, Arab-Jewish, Mizrahi, Musta’arab, or what have you – is to be interpreted.
The recent call to have the 1941 events in Iraq, known as the Farhud, linked to the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust is yet another step in the regrettable process of having Sephardic Jewish history measured and calibrated along the lines of Ashkenazi Jewish history. Such a phenomenon is more than lamentable. Under a strange confluence of forces, merging Sephardi weakness, Ashkenazi dominance and the pressing need to lay out Arabs as a primal demonic and anti-Semitic force, a committee has now been formed in Los Angeles – replete with a website and a media campaign – to formally insert the Farhud into Holocaust history thereby distorting the historical and political context of the original event.
For those unfamiliar with the history of the Jews in Iraq – and I am sure that would encompass a majority of those reading this article – some historical perspective is in order: The British took effective control over Iraq after the First World War in the wake of the Sykes-Picot Agreement that effectively carved up the Arab Middle East into protectorates and colonies. Iraq had up to that time been one of the oldest and most venerable of the Diaspora Jewish homelands.
As has been noted by the Iraqi Jewish historian and community leader Lucien Gubbay in his study Sunlight and Shadow: The Jewish Experience of Islam (New York: Other Press, 2000):
The kingdom of Iraq, also under British control, flourished during the first part of the inter-war period. Jews, who constituted one-quarter of Baghdad’s population, dominated the city’s trade. Better educated than their neighbors and speaking some English because of the Alliance schools, they were favored by King Faisal and his British advisors. The king proclaimed: “Freedom of religion, education and employment for the Jews of Baghdad, who had played such an important part in its welfare and progress.” Jews were appointed to high positions in government; and several served in Parliament and the Senate. It was a good period for Iraq and for its Jewish community in particular. (pp. 151-152)
Gubbay then recounts the post-Faisal era where discriminatory laws began to crop up in the legal system, denying Jews government positions. This led to the 1941 events.
The context of the 1941 events was related, as all the reputable historians agree, to the political machinations of the British. In the only historical work written in English on the exodus of Iraqi Jewry, The Lure of Zion: The Case of the Iraqi Jews (London: Al Saqi Books, 1986), Abbas Shiblak illuminates the reasons for the unrest:
The al-Gailani government declared its intention to keep Iraq out of the War [World War II]. This gave the British an excuse to reoccupy Iraq as part of their war strategy. The treaty of 1931 was served as justification. The regent, who had fled Baghdad, found shelter with British forces in the Gulf and later in Amman, Jordan. British troops landed in Basra at the beginning of May 1941 and neared Baghdad by the end of the month. The nationalist leaders, recognizing that they had lost the battle, fled the country on 30 May. The British forces occupied strategic positions on the outskirts of Baghdad, and the regent returned to capital on 1 June. (pp. 50-51)
This provides the background for the events of the Farhud. Two different versions of the riots exist: The official British version lays the blame on the nationalist, anti-Imperial elements with the aid of German propaganda – the Arab nationalists having allied themselves against the British with the German Nazi regime – thus fomenting the riots which targeted Jews and Jewish interests. The second version of the events focuses more precisely on the shadowy figure of Nuri al-Said the British puppet who would become Prime Minister after the reinstallation of the regent and British authority. The latter version sees the Farhud as a spontaneous expression of violent emotions by the poorer classes of Baghdad whose anti-British rage had been vented on the Jews who, as Gubbay has argued, were a dominant feature of Baghdad’s merchant classes and the reflection of wealth and power.
Nissim Rejwan in his recently-published memoir The Last Jews in Baghdad: Remembering a Lost Homeland (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004) recounts the events of the Farhud as both historian and eyewitness:
The trouble started late Sunday morning, when a group of soldiers crossing the Khir Bridge to the western side of the city met a group of Jews on their way to share in greeting the crown prince. The Jews were attacked, first with blows and then with knives – and of those who couldn't run for their lives a total of sixteen were injured and one died of his wounds. As the morning progressed and the attacks became more savage, some of the civilians, passersby, and bystanders took part in the fracas – while the policemen on duty at the bridge acted as mere onlookers and did not lift a finger.
Word quickly spread to the other side of the bridge, where the Jews were concentrated –and when it reached the slum areas adjoining King Ghazi Street groups began to gather. Rumors spread that the police were not interfering, although on several occasions they fired warning shots into the air when houses were forced open and their contents looted.
Taking heart at this obvious encouragement and seeing that not only the soldiery but some of the policemen were taking part in the forages, the mobs in such destitute neighborhoods as Abu Sifain and Ras el-Tchol – where Muslims and Jews lived in close proximity – became more systematic, and by early afternoon large trucks were seen moving furniture and other household goods from one side of the city to the other. According to an official commission later appointed to investigate the events and report on them, soldiers accompanying these lorries told enquiring police officers that they were merely moving the office furniture of the Iraqi Air Force headquarters, which had moved to another address!
These forages, often accompanied by physical violence resulting in deaths and injuries, and provoking no effective reaction on the part of the police, led the governor (mutasarrif) of the Baghdad Province to try to take charge himself. But when he asked the police officers on the spot why they were refraining from shooting at the attacking mobs, the reply was that "there were no orders." He got the same reply when he approached the chief of police.
It was only when he brought an order, signed by the regent himself, that orders were issued to fire at looters and murderers. It took just over an hour to scatter the mobs and empty the streets. By that time, however, the farhud (the untranslatable Arabic word which best describes the events of those two days) had spread throughout the poor neighborhoods in and around Ghazi Street as well as to some far districts like Al-A`dhamiyya and el-Karrada al-Shariqiyya. In this latter neighborhood, where the attacks took place only on the second day, six Jews were injured and one Muslim who tried to defend his Jewish neighbors was killed.
It is interesting to note here that Karrada and some of the more fashionable suburbs of Baghdad, where Jews constituted a majority of the inhabitants, witnessed the least trouble, some of them none at all. In many cases, armed Muslim neighbors stood guard and managed to chase away mobs intending to attack and loot. (pp. 128-129)
According to Rejwan, the British had strongly miscalculated resistance to their return and did not secure the Baghdad corridor. The riots were spontaneously ignited by the Arabs and were quelled once the British were able to retake control of the city. Many Muslims were caught in the crossfire of the riots, some dying and some protecting their Jewish neighbors. While the events were fueled by the classic markers of anti-Semitism, the residual effects of that anti-Semitism were not seen as endemic to the Iraqi Arab people. And while there is little question that the Farhud shattered the security of Iraqi Jews, by no means did it put to an end millennia of Jewish habitation in the country.
As Ammiel Alcalay states in one of the only academic treatments of Middle Eastern Sephardic Jewish history and culture written from within a Sephardic perspective, his After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993):
In Iraq the situation was defined by its own unique history. Thoroughly assimilated into Arab society while retaining their own distinct identity, Jews did not act out premonitions of impending doom (despite the virulent and devastating anti-Jewish violence of 1941, which was ignited by social unrest, nurtured by British nonintervention, and fueled by struggles between Axis collaborators, deposed rulers, and up-and-coming opportunists). This is borne out by the fact that “even after the proclamation of Israeli statehood in 1948, new schools were still under construction – one out of nine schools established by the community after Iraqi independence, six were built in the 1940s, including two in 1948-49.” (p. 45)
We can thus see that the situation of Iraqi Jewry and the events of the Farhud were variable. By no means should we think that the anti-Jewish violence was benign. But neither can we state that the violence was determinative as a means to exterminate the Jewish community. The violence was a spontaneous eruption that was meant to express both anti-British sentiment as well as a fierce Iraqi nationalist pride in the context of the impoverishment of the lower classes. In no way were these riots structurally or materially linked to the horrible events in Nazi Germany; there were no Concentration Camps erected in Baghdad and the Iraqi nationalists never adopted the eliminationist strain of anti-Semitism that Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has identified in the Nazi ideological program.
Thus we see a strange and disturbing manifestation of a historical parallelism among those who have created a committee to promote study of the Farhud as a component of Holocaust studies.
After working on the matter of Sephardic culture and tradition over many years, I have found that there is a sense of inferiority among many Sephardim owing to their absence from the mainstream of Jewish discourse. Sephardim have been frozen out of the institutional Jewish world and some have developed strategies of inclusion that would present the Sephardi experience as a variant of the Ashkenazi experience. This modality would allow us to better understand the linkage between the Holocaust and the Iraqi Farhud.
Jewish History is a highly variegated and complex phenomenon. The notes of Sephardic history strike a very different chord than that of our co-religionists in the West. It is sometimes helpful to set up parallels, but often the parallels tend to distort the integrity of these histories. Iraqi Jewish life, as was the case for much of Middle Eastern Jewry, had a long and distinguished tradition that traced itself back to the days of the great Talmudic academies in Sura and Pumbeditha and even further back to the time of the Prophet Ezekiel, whose tomb was a pilgrimage site for the Jews of Iraq. Such a history is most certainly not free of the prejudice and hatred that Jews have been forced to endure elsewhere. But the dynamic of anti-Semitism as a living force in the Arab world cannot be seen as identical to that of Christian Europe, which has only recently come to relinquish its hatred of the Jews.
The attempt to recalibrate the history and the cultural trajectory of the Sephardic Jews along the lines of Ashkenazi Jewry is both a historical distortion as well as a cultural mistake of the first order. Jews have lived in the Middle East for centuries and have felt themselves native to the region. The emergence of a European Zionist movement brought with it a strong sense of alienation from the native world of the Levant, North Africa and the Middle East. This sense of alienation has been a strong component in the cognitive dissonance that undergirds the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Native Jewish voices with a strong sense of their own history would be able to serve as a solid bridge between the various combatants in the region. But, as we see with the creation of a Farhud committee, these native voices have been co-opted into an Ashkenazi-based discourse that leaves little if any room for a native Sephardi dynamic in the larger scheme of contemporary Jewish culture. The lost voices of Sephardi intellectuals, community leaders and religious figures have now been replaced by an ever-more strident cache of Sephardic voices that have mimicked those of their Ashkenazi counterparts thus serving to eviscerate the traditions and the culture of the Sephardim and further alienate the mass of contemporary Jews from adopting what I have called “The Levantine Option”; a foundational Jewish cultural construct that reflects the expansive values of Sephardic Religious Humanism. This Religious Humanism preserves the parochialism of Jewish law and lore but ties that Judaism to a universal value system that honors rational thought, science and an ecumenically liberal approach to human civilization.
It is therefore vital that the Sephardi voice be heard and not distorted in a maelstrom of Ashkenazi-infused ways of seeing. In our long and valiant march out of the ghetto, the Jewish people should look to the salient and positive models of the Sephardic past and not have that past neutered and diffused into a more pessimistic and paranoid model of existence that does not acknowledge the dynamism and creative spark that lit the fire of the Sephardic tradition in its greatest heights.
David Shasha
From SHU 147, March 9, 2005
Notes on the Farhud
By: Nissim Rejwan
Rashid `Ali's Coup and Its Aftermath
The one and only productive thing I remember doing during the whole month of May 1941 was reading the bulky William Collins's edition of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. I was then out of a job anyway and in the second form of my intermediate school; I don't quite remember whether there was school during that month of war, but our stay in Beit Abu Ya`qoub enabled me to have my own quiet corner to read.
Although the trouble had started early in April and had resulted in the escape from his palace of the Regent Abdul Ilah, actual hostilities between Iraq and Britain started only at dawn on May 2. Twenty-eight days after, on May 29, a Committee of Internal Security was formed by the mayor of Baghdad, Arshad al `Umari, with a view to negotiating an armistice following Rashid `Ali's escape across the border to Persia together with his chief lieutenants. On May 30, al `Umari went to see the British ambassador, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, and there signed an armistice agreement whose terms were dictated by the British.
Throughout the war, which some have called the Thirty-Day War, the populace in Iraq's major cities was in a state of euphoria, which alternated with attacks of fear and xenophobia. There were some cases of minor molesting against the Jews, whose every movement tended to be interpreted as some satanic pro-British device. Jews engaging in completely innocuous activities in the course of their daily lives were accused of making signals to British airplanes flying over Baghdad, and in some cases were taken to police stations and then released after the absurdity of the accusations became clear.
A number of Jewish merchants and traders took home valuable goods and items from their shops and places of business for safekeeping. It was not quite safe or wise for a Jew to be out at night and, if he or she were really careful and sensible, not even during the day. Not only did this state of affairs fail to interfere with my life: I actually used it to advantage. At long last I was able to stay home and do my reading in peace, without any nagging from my parents about "finding something to do besides lazying around."
But there was trouble still to come. On May 31, after the facts became known and the regent announced he would return to Baghdad the following day, the Jews started to relax. The day was a Saturday and life for them seemed to return to normal. The following day, however, happened to be the first day of the Feast of the Pentecost. It was a habit with the Jews of Baghdad on such holidays to go out for a walk after prayers and breakfast--and on that particular Sunday many Jews felt it was safe enough to go out for a stroll, dressed up in their Sabbath clothes and usually with pockets full of watermelon seeds and an assortment of nuts to while away the time.
That day being also in some way a day of deliverance from the dangers posed by the pro-Nazi regime of Rashid `Ali, however, many Jews thought the occasion worthy of a double celebration, and what with reports of the crown regent's impending arrival some of them saw fit to go out for the specific purpose of participating in what was intended to be a mass welcome for him and for his entourage. Little did they know the nature of the surprises that were awaiting them.
Various versions have been told of what actually happened that Sunday and the following day. According to official figures, the riots and murders that took place on those two days claimed a total of 110 dead, among them 28 women, and 204 injured--and that the victims were from both sides, Jews and Muslims.
The number of homes and shops assaulted and broken into was not given by the authorities, but according to statistics prepared by Jewish community officials the figure for shops and stores alone was 586, while the total value of goods, valuables, and money looted was 271,402 Iraqi dinars. As to homes, the community gave the figure as 911, with a total of 3,395 families and 12,311 inhabitants--and that the total material loss sustained by them was 383,878 dinars. Unlike the official version, again, which mentioned no cases of rape, the community gave an estimate of three or four such cases.
The Jews of Baghdad were caught completely unaware. To be sure, they had very good reason to celebrate: Here at last was an end to the month-old molestation and harassments to which Rashid `Ali's regime subjected them in so many petty and unpredictable ways. The British, who were fighting Hitler's hordes, were victorious. Thus when they went out to watch the crown regent's triumphal march back that fateful Sunday, they thought they could afford to appear a little defiant, feeling secure in the knowledge that the army and the security forces were now fully in control.
What actually happened, however, was that not only did the British forces fail to enter the capital but the defeated Iraqi soldiers and officers were disbanded and allowed to enter Baghdad singly rather than in formation--and these could not help noticing the small groups of Jews heading in the opposite direction, dressed in their best clothes to welcome the regent and his entourage. What must have made things worse was that the day was a Sunday, and as far as these soldiers knew the Jews had no apparent reason to dress so festively and loiter in the streets other than the day's special occasion--namely the return of the regent under open armed protection from the hated British.
The trouble started late Sunday morning, when a group of soldiers crossing the Khir Bridge to the western side of the city met a group of Jews on their way to share in greeting the crown prince. The Jews were attacked, first with blows and then with knives--and of those who couldn't run for their lives a total of sixteen were injured and one died of his wounds. As the morning progressed and the attacks became more savage, some of the civilians, passersby, and bystanders took part in the fracas--while the policemen on duty at the bridge acted as mere onlookers and did not lift a finger.
Word quickly spread to the other side of the bridge, where the Jews were concentrated--and when it reached the slum areas adjoining King Ghazi Street groups began to gather. Rumors spread that the police were not interfering, although on several occasions they fired warning shots into the air when houses were forced open and their contents looted.
Taking heart at this obvious encouragement and seeing that not only the soldiery but some of the policemen were taking part in the forages, the mobs in such destitute neighborhoods as Abu Sifain and Ras el-Tchol--where Muslims and Jews lived in close proximity--became more systematic, and by early afternoon large trucks were seen moving furniture and other household goods from one side of the city to the other. According to an official commission later appointed to investigate the events and report on them, soldiers accompanying these lorries told enquiring police officers that they were merely moving the office furniture of the Iraqi Air Force headquarters, which had moved to another address!
These forages, often accompanied by physical violence resulting in deaths and injuries, and provoking no effective reaction on the part of the police, led the governor (mutasarrif) of the Baghdad Province to try to take charge himself. But when he asked the police officers on the spot why they were refraining from shooting at the attacking mobs, the reply was that "there were no orders." He got the same reply when he approached the chief of police.
It was only when he brought an order, signed by the regent himself, that orders were issued to fire at looters and murderers. It took just over an hour to scatter the mobs and empty the streets. By that time, however, the farhud (the untranslatable Arabic word which best describes the events of those two days) had spread throughout the poor neighborhoods in and around Ghazi Street as well as to some far districts like Al-A`dhamiyya and el-Karrada al-Shariqiyya. In this latter neighborhood, where the attacks took place only on the second day, six Jews were injured and one Muslim who tried to defend his Jewish neighbors was killed.
It is interesting to note here that Karrada and some of the more fashionable suburbs of Baghdad, where Jews constituted a majority of the inhabitants, witnessed the least trouble, some of them none at all. In many cases, armed Muslim neighbors stood guard and managed to chase away mobs intending to attack and loot.
The Farhud and I
Totally unaware of what was going on in other parts of the city, I left the house just a little after 4:00 p.m. that same Sunday and took the bus to Bab el-Sharqi, where the open-air cafes and snack bars were. As usual, my friends and I had a meal of kebab, chips, and salad and sat there chatting and discussing the month's events for the nth time. Although a true patriot himself, my Muslim friend Salman was pleased with the outcome of Rashid `Ali's rebellion since the British and their allies were fighting the Nazis and Fascists. Anti-British he certainly was, but like many moderate Iraqis with left-wing leanings he was content with leaving his anti-imperialist sentiments in abeyance.
But, of course, our preoccupations were not solely or even mainly political, and Salman and I discussed literature and my latest readings and "discoveries," while he related his endless jokes and anecdotes both from Arab literary and social history and from his experiences in Al-Zubeir, a townlet in the south of Iraq from which he hailed and which was known mainly for two phenomena--the exceptional quality of its dates and the disproportionate number of active homosexuals in its population. Salman himself, I suspected, was a homosexual; he never had a good word to say about a woman's looks and throughout our time together I never could persuade him to accompany me on my way to see a prostitute.
There was no indication whatever of what was going on not far from where we sat and chatted--and when it was time to leave--about 10:00 or 11:00 p.m.--we decided that the weather was too good to take a bus and walked the whole length of Al-Rashid Street on the way to our homes. During that long stroll, I began to feel that something was not quite as it should be. There was, for instance, a small group of Jewish young men who were carefully following in our footsteps, trying not to lose sight of us. There were also fewer buses going.
But it was only when we approached Suq el-Shorja and the adjoining way that led to the Taht el-Takya quarter that I began to feel something was definitely wrong. Besides Salman and myself, there was with us a young Jewish friend whose home happened to be in an alley leading from Taht el-Takya to a parallel alley also leading to Al-Rashid Street. Seeing that something was wrong, we decided to walk him to the door of his home and thus took the turn to the way leading to the Jewish quarter. As soon as we took that turn, a group of about ten or twelve young men felt encouraged to do the same--but they decided to make a run of it. They knew no doubt what was going on at the other side of the city.
We duly saw our friend safely home, refusing to leave him until he was inside the house. Then Salman decided, and I did not object, that he should see me home as well. I will never forget the way in which I was let in. I had a key to the door, but the door was bolted and I could not go in. When I knocked I was asked who it was and only after assuring the people inside that it was me that they agreed to come down from the roof--where Baghdadis slept in summer--and opened the door. It transpired that my people, and the family that was sharing the house with us, had got wind of what was happening and, seeing that I was so late (it was nearing midnight by the time I was home) simply gave me up for dead, killed by one of those murdering bands of agitated Muslims roaming the streets and the alleyways.
They wanted me to tell them what was happening and the terrible scenes I had presumably witnessed--and they were visibly baffled to learn that I was not even aware of the looting, killing, and raping that were taking place. I kept my cool, told them not to panic, and went to bed. But even I could not help hearing the shots fired at a distance and even some of the shouts for help.
The next morning things worsened considerably as word spread among slum dwellers and members of displaced tribes that there was a lot to be gained by joining in the fracas. I remember watching from a window groups of men clearly from out of town and hardly knowing their way about carrying bundles of loot and streaming up and down that section of our alley that led to another alleyway. Where we lived was just two or three houses before the end of a blind alley, and ours was the only Jewish household there.
I do not remember the idea having crossed the mind of any inhabitant of our house that our Muslim neighbors would so much as touch us. The most skeptical and hysterical among us expressed fears that our neighbors would not interfere and just let the ferocious mobs do what they like with us.
They were wrong. Without even being approached, the three older sons of our aging neighbor--one of them a government official and one a student at some college or other--assured us we could rely on their protection. They were of good and well-established Baghdad family and as such they usually had some firearms. They kept watch but I don't think there was any attempt that day on the part of the mobs to attack our house, most probably because they were not even aware of the fact that Jews inhabited it.
What Actually Happened
What exactly happened on that fateful summer day in 1941 is now fairly well-known and documented. But the chain of events that had led to it, the motives, the blunders, the machinations, the failures, and the foibles that made the event possible and probably inevitable are not and will perhaps never become conclusively clear. Baghdad had fallen to the British and the government of Rashid `Ali was put to flight. Yet the British troops did not enter the city--and the results were disastrous for the Jews and greatly embarrassing both to Britain and to the pro-British regime that succeeded the rebel government.
Somerset de Chair, the British intelligence officer who was on the spot at the time, told the full story--or something approaching the full story--in his book The Golden Carpet. There he records that one of the officers with the troops asked him: "Why do our troops not go into Baghdad? They may already be looting. I know. There will be many people killed if our troops do not enter."
To which he, de Chair, replied: "This was my own view and the ways of the Foreign Office are beyond my comprehension. From the hour of the ceasefire their word had prevailed. Having fought our way, step by step, to the outskirts of the city, we must now cool our heels outside. It would apparently be lowering the dignity of our ally, the Regent, if he were seen to be supported on arrival by British bayonets."
Another interpretation was that Regent Abdul Ilah, acting on information from his friends and agents in the city, decided that the time was not quite propitious for his entry, in view of the strength of anti-British feeling and popular resentment against his own regime. According to this theory, the regent and his entourage, including strongman Nuri el-Sai'd, were hoping for--and indirectly encouraging--just the developments which took place.
The advantages of this tactic were seen as self-evident. In the first place, the mob would vent its anger and resentment on a ready scapegoat, the Jews. Second, the new regime could make good use of the resulting general confusion in order to settle old accounts with the prorebel elements.
The psychological consequences that the farhud had on the Jews of Iraq, and its effects on their morale, were far-reaching. The Jews of Baghdad, the most influential and well-established single element in the city, were shocked, terrorized, and demoralized. In the long history of this community, indeed, no other event had been so traumatic. It could well be said that the mass exodus of 1950-1951, when almost all the Jews of Iraq were hurriedly transferred to Israel, was the end result of a process that had started on those two fateful days of June.
It was those events that made the Jews of Iraq receptive to Zionist teachings and ideology, an ideology that had failed to take root because most of them could not reconcile it with their seemingly complete integration into Baghdad life. For though the Zionist movement had made modest beginnings as early as the 1920s, and though it was known in Iraq even earlier than that, it was only after Rashid `Ali's revolt and the anti-Jewish riots of 1941 that Zionism began to make real headway in Baghdad, especially in the ranks of the young.
There were, of course, other factors and pressures--notably the situation created by Iraq's participation in the Palestine conflict in 1948 and the defeat the Arabs suffered at the hands of the new state of Israel. But the events of 1941 were what really started off the cataclysmic process.
Following the entry of British troops, the majority of them Urdu-speaking Indians, residents of respectable neighborhoods became so annoyed with the harassments of these sex-hungry young males that many of them found it necessary to take some sort of action. They decided to put a huge sign at the entrance of each side street or alley reading Aki Jana Man'a Yi, Urdu for "No Prostitutes Here!"
From Nissim Rejwan, The Last Jews of Baghdad (University of Texas Press, 2004), pp. 126-133, Copyright 2004 University of Texas Press
This excerpt has been reproduced per the “Fair Use” statutes for the educational benefit of our readers with the permission of the author. No unauthorized reproduction of this material without the authorization of the University of Texas Press.