The Lure of Zion: The Case of the Iraqi Jews
Abbas Shiblak
Al Saqi Books
The Iraqi Jewish community was one of the oldest and most deeply rooted in the world. In the early 1950s - in circumstances that remain the subject of heated controversy— most of the Jews left Iraq. Israel claimed them as its own.
The Lure of Zion begins with a description of the Jews of Iraq. It then focuses on the critical years of the late 1940s, when deep rifts began to appear in Iraqi society. In a final chapter, based on recently released archive documents, Shiblak provides a sober analysis of the events that finally led to the mass exodus of jews from Iraq. It was a sad saga marked by dishonesty on all sides. Shiblak’s book may not please partisans of either camp, but it will be welcomed as a fair account of what really happened.
Abbas Shiblak is a young Palestinian now working in Tunisia. This is his first book.
Contents
List of Tables / 7
List of Appendices / 8
Acknowledgements / 9
Preface / 11
1. The Jews of Iraq / 17
Demographic Changes / 18
Educational and Cultural Integration / 23
Economic Assimilation / 28
2. The Colonial Legacy / 37
The Colonial Approach to Minorities /
in the Arab East / 37
Zionism Versus the Orient / 39
Iraqi Nationalists in the 1920s / 45
The Power Struggle After Independence / 48
The Zionist Failure / 53
3. Tension Mounts / 58
The Jewish Intelligentsia and the /
Democratic Movement / 59
The Israeli Dimension / 64
Repercussions of the Palestine Defeat / 67
Zionism in Action / 71
4. Denaturalization / 78
The Transfer Schemes / 80
The Issue of Jewish Property / 86
Winners and Losers / 90
5. Exodus / 103
Latent Push Factors / 103
‘Push and Pull’ and the Arab-Israeli Conflict / 107
The Hillel-Suwaidi Evacuation Deal / 115
‘Cruel Zionism’ / 119
Conclusion / 128
Appendices / 131
Notes / 153
Bibliography / 163
Index / 175
Tables
1. Religious and Ethnic Composition of Iraq in 1947 / 19 f
2. Jews in Iraq by Place of Residence / 22
3. Schools Supervised by the Jewish Community in Baghdad / 24
4. Literacy Rates Among Middle Eastern Immigrants in Israel / 26
5. Composition of Baghdad Chamber of Commerce,
Financial Year 1938-39 / 31
6. Original Occupations of Israeli Immigrants 1951 / 34
7. Composition of Administrative Committee of Baghdad Chamber of Commerce,
Selected Years / 36
8. Iraqi Jewish Immigrants to Palestine 1919—48 / 44
9. Israeli Immigrants by Age, 1948—52 / 93
10. Percentage of Males Among Israeli Immigrants, 1948-52 / 94
11. / Israeli Immigrants by Marital Status, Sex, Country ofOrigin, 1948—52 / 96
12. / Israeli Immigrants by Family Status and Country of Origin, 1948-58 / 99
13. / Immigrants from Iraq to / Israel, 1948—53 / 111
Appendices
1. Law No. i of 1950 / 131
2. Report by the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on
Emigration of the Iraqi Jewish Community / 133
3. Summary of Correspondence with British Legations,
Autumn 1949, on Proposed Exchange of Iraqi Jews for Arab Refugees / 138
4. British View of Denaturalization Bill / 140
5. / Documents on Control and Administration of
Property of Jews Deprived of Iraqi Nationality / 144
A. Law No. 5 of 1951: Control and Administration
of Property of Jews Deprived of Iraqi Nationality / 144
B. Regulation No. 3 of 1951: Control and Administration of Property of
Jews Deprived of Iraqi Nationality / 146
C. Law No. 12 of 1951, Supplemental to Law No. 5 of 1951:
Control and Administration of Property of Jews Who
Have Renounced Iraqi Nationality / 150
PREFACE
Before 1948 there were about eight hundred thousand Jews (roughly 6 per cent of the world’s total) living in Arab countries. They did not constitute a single ethnic group, however, for they differed in origin, came to live in the Arab countries at different periods of history, and occupied varying positions in the societies in which they lived.
The roots of the indigenous groups among them (Yemeni and Iraqi Jews, for instance) can be traced back centuries before Christ. In the fifteenth century after Christ, following the collapse of Arab rule in Spain, waves of Sephardic Jews emigrated, mainly to Arab North Africa and Egypt, where they were soon assimilated into the new environment. Finally, groups of European Ashkenazi Jews settled in the Arab world during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as part of the colonial presence. The cultural and social characteristics of these groups approximated those of the foreign upper bourgeoisie, and the bulk of these European Jewish communities went back to their countries of origin when the colonial presence ended.
By contrast, the cultural affinities of Jews and Muslims, as well as their similar socio-economic background, facilitated the integration of the indigenous Jewish communities, which were Arabized in many respects. The term ‘Arab Jew’ is therefore probably appropriate, and in the areas of Ottoman rule, they had the right to administer their communal affairs under the millah system.
Arab Jews played an important economic role during the period of the Abbasid caliphate and through most of the centuries of Ottoman rule. They worked in commerce, crafts, and credit and money exchanges, while the enlightened middle strata secured a significant share of public office. Because of their occupational structure, most Jews tended to be concentrated in towns and cities, but many others lived in rural areas as farmers, especially in Kurdistan, Yemen, and the interior of North Africa.
For many years Zionism, which emerged from historical conditions peculiar to Europe, had little impact on Jews in Arab countries. Later, however, the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine proved to have more dramatic and far-reaching consequences for these Jewish communities than for any others. From 1948 onwards, Arab Jews left their countries in successive waves, going mainly to Israel. The two most deeply-rooted communities —in Yemen and Iraq—were evacuated en masse between 1949 and 1951.
Official Israeli estimates (see the 1961 census) put the number of oriental Jews living in Palestine in 1948 at 44,809, or 10.4 per cent of the total Jewish population of 452,158. But their relative numbers have increased rapidly since then, and oriental Jews now constitute more than 60 per cent of Israel’s Jewish population. Meanwhile, estimates of the number of Jews still living in Arab countries vary widely. The American Jewish Yearbook (AJY) made estimates in 1968 and 1971. These are given in columns 1 and 2 of the table below. The third column gives the estimates of the periodical al-Ard in 1975 (vol. 3, no. r, 21 September 1975, p. 113). My own estimate, given in column 4, is a reconciliation of these figures based on a number of recent reports in periodicals and newspaper accounts.
Jewish Population in Arab Countries
Country / I / 2 / 3 / 4
Algeria / 2,000 / 1,000 / 1,000 / 1,500
Egypt / 2,000 / 1,900 / 500 / 2,000
Iraq / 6,000 / 2,500 / 500 / 300
Lebanon / 7,000 / 2,000 / 1,800 / 2,500
Morocco / 55,000 / — / 31,000 / 40,000
Sudan / — / — / — / 1,000
Syria / 4,000 / 4,000 / 4,000 / 4,000
Tunisia / 20,000 / 10,000 / 8,000 / 9,000
Yemen / 1,000 / 500 / — / 3,000
Total / 97,000 / 21,900 / 46,800 / 63,300
The Jewish exodus from Arab countries cannot be understood in terms of the models typically used to analyse mass migrations. It was not caused, for instance, by shifts of borders, as happened in Europe between the two world wars. Nor can it be likened to the European settlement in America, Australia, or Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, fundamentally an outflow of rural population stimulated by rising population pressures on limited means of subsistence. There are some similarities between Euro¬pean overseas settlement and Jewish settlement in Palestine before the thirties, but the analogy collapses in the case of the emigration of Arab Jews. Especially in the more established communities like that of Iraq, few Jews saw Palestine as more economically rewarding than their own countries, in which they enjoyed prominent positions in social and economic life.
The closest analogy to the emigration of Arab Jews is the transfer of population caused by the drawing of new borders based on racial or religious distinctions, as in the Indian subcontinent, whose partition was followed by the two-way traffic of Hindus and Muslims.
The mass emigration of Arab Jews can be understood only in the light of the establishment of Israel and the armed and political hostilities that followed. But this is itself one of the difficulties in examining this emigration, since the various explanations for the exodus are themselves intertwined with the political confrontation that arose as a result of the conflict in Palestine.
Pro-Zionist sources, for instance, see the emigration of Arab Jews as the result of a long history of oppression and racial and religious prejudice. Zionist activists among the Arab Jewish communities tend to stress the importance of ideological commitment to Zionism as a motivation for the exodus. Both versions frequently rewrite history in the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
On the other hand, the emigration of Arab Jews has not received adequate attention from Arab scholars. With very few exceptions, Arab authors consider the emigration the result of Zionist activities and propaganda. Significantly, they have generally failed to take account of the position taken within the Arab national movement and to evaluate Arab government policies critically. Most arguments of this type display a lack of understanding of Zionism and consequently underestimate the extent to which the policies of Arab governments were self-defeating.
Rather than dealing with the emigration of Arab Jewish communities in general, this book focuses on one of the most deep-rooted of these communities, examining the circumstances that led to its mass exodus between the summer of 1950 and the summer of 1951.
The Jewish presence in Iraq goes back more than 2,500 years. In fact, there was a time when Jewish scholarship in Iraq was the ultimate spiritual authority for world Jewry. The renowned Babylonian Talmud was produced there, as were some of the most outstanding Jewish literary works. Learned rabbis presided over the great Jewish academies of Sufa and Pumbaditha, and the exilarchs too resided in those centres. Jewish history refers to the first five centuries of Islam as the ‘Gaonic period’, because the heads of the two academies were known as Gaons, considered by Jews throughout the world as the ultimate authorities on all matters pertaining to religion, which then included civil law as well. The Iraqi Jews continuously maintained their communal identity and were among the wealthiest and most fully integrated of all Jewish communities in Arab countries. They played a major cultural, social, and economic role in the life of Mesopotamia and of modem Iraq alike.
Because of these and other factors, the Jewish exodus from Iraq, more than any other, offers a rich opportunity to understand the circumstances of Arab Jewish emigration to Israel. Iraq’s proximity to the conflict in Palestine, its direct involvement in the 1948 war, and the connection made at one stage between the destiny of Iraqi Jews and proposals to settle the Palestinian question link events in Iraq closely to those in Palestine. Moreover, Iraq in the late forties and early fifties was a showcase of the crisis of the Arab ruling class at the time, still under colonial influence and riddled by various competing factions of the Arab national movement. Finally, the dramatic nature of the exit of the Jewish community distinguishes it from other cases.
The Iraqi situation also illustrates the complexity of factors involved: the impact of the colonial legacy and the advance of Zionism on the position of the Jews; the attitudes of the different factions of the Arab national movement, as well as the policies of the Arab governments. More important, it illustrates the way these factors interacted and affected the Jewish community during the crucial years just prior to the exodus.
In writing this book, I have had access to a wide variety of sources.
Extensive use has been made of British Foreign Office (FO) documents recently made available in the Public Record Office (PRO). These shed light on some of the more obscure aspects of the subject, especially events following the establishment of Israel and leading to the exodus.
Relevant official documents and newspaper sources available in the Iraqi National Archives have also been examined. These pro- vide additional insight, particularly into the political involvement of the Jewish intelligentsia in the late 1940s, and into the attitudes of the nationalists and the Iraqi press to the Jews.
Unpublished manuscripts also helped to fill some of the gaps. Interviews and discussions with Iraqi Jews now living in England were of great help.
1
The Jews of Iraq
The boundaries of modem Iraq, formerly known as Mesopotamia, t were drawn as part of the territorial division effected by the victorious colonial powers after the first world war. Home of some of the world’s oldest civilizations, it has been subjected to numerous foreign conquests and has hosted many immigrant groups. As a result, Iraq contains more ethnic and religious groups than any other Arab country.
The Jews of Iraq formed a homogeneous community and were able to maintain their communal identity, their culture, and their traditions through the centuries. There was little conversion to other religions.1 No immigrants settled in Iraq when the Sephardic wave of immigration spread through most provinces of the Ottoman empire during the fifteenth century, nor did Iraq witness the arrival of large numbers of European Jews during the colonial era. This is in sharp contrast to Egypt and other countries of Arab North Africa, where Sephardic and European immigrants mixed with and, to varying degrees, affected the character of the indigenous Jewish communities. In Egypt, for example, the numA ber of foreign Jewish nationals in 1917 was estimated at 34,601 (58-1 per cent of the total Jewish population of 59,507); 12 per cent of the French who arrived in Algeria after its occupation in 1830 were Jews (Cohen, 1973, p. 48). The number and influence of European Jews in both countries rose steadily thereafter.
Among the Jewish communities in Arab countries, the Yemeni Jews were probably the only ones as deeply rooted and uniform in origin as the Iraqis. But the Yemenis lacked the wealth, extent of culture and integration, and openness toward the world that Iraqis enjoyed.
…..
Abbas Shiblak
The Lure of Zion: The Case of the Iraqi Jews
Al Saqi Books
Al Saqi Books
The Lure of Zion
The Case of the Iraqi Jews
British Library
Cataloguing in Publication Data
Shiblak, Abbas F.
The lure of Zion: the case of the Iraqi Jews.
I. Jews - Iraq History
I. Title
956.7’004924 - DS135.17
ISBN 0-863 56-121-7
ISBN 0-86356-033-4 Pbk
First published 1986.
© Abbas Shiblak, 1986.
Al Saqi Books,
26 Westboume Grove,
London W2.
Photoset by Cover to Cover,
Cambridge.
Printed in Great Britain by
Billing and Sons Ltd
Worcester.
Cover design by Adrian Yeeles
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