A court in Lyon, France, has begun its trial against a 55-year-old man to determine whether antisemitism was a motive behind the murder of his 89-year-old Jewish neighbour in 2022. At the time, an antisemitic motive was almost immediately ruled out. The Jerusalem Post reports:
René Hadjaj, thrown out of a window in 2022
While the defendant, Rachid Kheniche, denies antisemitic motivation, he has so far been charged with aggravated murder because of the victim’s religion.
The incident took place in May 2022, when Kheniche threw his neighbor, René Hadjadj, from the 17th floor of his building. Kheniche admitted to the act, but said he was having a paranoid attack on the day of the murder. Nevertheless, following two psychiatric assessments, Kheniche was found to be criminally responsible.
Fez-born Yona Elfassi’s research into Morocco’s history eventually grew into a vocation to teach Darija, the Moroccan Arabic dialect. His project, Limud Darija, allows diaspora Moroccan Jews to connect with their ancestors through language, culture, and stories. Now Muslims are reachng out too, the Times of Israel reports:
Yona Elfassi with some of his students (screenshot)
Through this shared connection, divisions begin to fade,” Elfassi said. “The Israelis the Muslim Moroccans meet are seen as Moroccans like themselves, as family. They are talking a common language, talking about what unites them, people are begun to be seen as individuals.” The Muslims and Jews, he said, get the chance “to bond over music and heritage and language, not political or war-related topics, and they do not further the false ‘pro-Palestine’ vs ‘pro-Israel’ dichotomy, and instead humanize everyone as individuals, as human beings.”
Limud Darija students describe how the program has connected them more deeply with people in their own lives as well. “My parents talked between them in Moroccan language, but by the time I was an adult, I forgot,” said Yehudit Levy, a retired schoolteacher in Ganei Tikva, Israel, who has studied with Elfassi for three years. “Since I started to learn with Yona, everything comes up — songs, music, food, poetry, all the traditional things come up. I smell Morocco when I am in the class.”
Noam Sibony, a Limud Darija alumnus, is a neuroscience researcher and musician living in Toronto. The 28-year-old spent nine months volunteering in Lod, an Israeli city whose population is Arab and Jewish, at a community center, working with local children and youth. Limud Darija, he said, showed him how learning the language of another culture can help build relationships that transcend regional politics and conflicts.
Ashkenazi Jews responded to the ‘critical race theory’ vogue sweeping the US by emphasising Jewish diversity. But 7 October only reinforced the misconception, in progressive circles, that all Jews were white supremacists. What all Jews should do, argue Maia Zelkha and Aurèle Tobelem, is emphasise their Levantine Jewish practices and origins. Important article in Yad Mizrah:
Jewish girl from the Megouna tribe. Photo by Jean Besancenot in 1934
By 2020, racial self-flagellation and masochism were considered the responsible things to partake in. The Mizrahi Jew became the mascot of Ashkenazi anti-racism, our only apparent function to be paraded before the left as evidence of millennia of DEI compliance.
Mizrahi and Sephardi organizations that had existed for decades began to be invited into mainstream Jewish institutions and gained a different kind of relevance altogether, fueling conversations about who gets counted as “Jews of Color,” and how Mizrahim fit (or don’t fit) into American racial frameworks. Popular manifestos began to be published on who is the “right” or “wrong” kind of Jew in this evil, Ashkenormative world that supposedly erases Mizrahi Jews. New and curious categories of “Mizrahi” Jews began to emerge, including figures who, on closer inspection, were not Jewish at all. The campaign against imperial whiteness, the effort to reframe Jewish–Arab relations as an ideological counterweight to pro-Palestinian social justice politics, and the defense of Zionism itself came to hinge on the recovery of Jewish “brownness”—a project in which Mizrahi Jews became largely unwitting, and frequently unwilling, symbols. To be more specific, the majority of Mizrahi Jews in Israel had no fucking clue that their identity was being repackaged by American DEI vultures. A monster began to grow: growling, drooling, and slumbering in the shadows.
And then the monster awakened. No need to describe in detail the horror of October 7th. We all know what happened that day, and we know what happened after—the celebrations, the institutional statements of support, the calls for more violence. Progressive Jews were beside themselves. “Hadn’t we marched with you in your time of need?” they cried out. “Weren’t we also your faithful allies?”, they screamed into the void of the internet, as various progressive causes abandoned them to support the perpetrators of the massacre. (Spoiler alert: they were never “allies” to begin with).
Their cries fell on deaf ears. No matter the amount of Jewish families slaughtered, women raped, or hostages taken—the Palestinians were the “brown” victims, and the Jews were the “white” oppressors. The Palestinians were simply resisting white supremacy. October 7th, then, was justified, because it was an act of resistance against white oppression, colonialism. They were Jesus, the brown Palestinian—the pure one, the son of God—crucified by white Judas.
And so Jews, of all colors, began to try to find a life raft in the raging storm of mythological hatred. They took to arguing in broken Arabic with Pakistani Muslims on Omegle, or recruiting Nigerian Christians to Judaism, desperate to perform a fundamentally non-Western identity—jettisoning, in the process, centuries of Jewish contributions to European science, philosophy, and ethics. The costume followed: the sudra, or its $80 keffiyeh-styled substitute, probably stitched by Suleiman rather than Shlomo. Enthusiastically taking on the left’s moral geometry of indigenous versus colonizer—oppressor versus oppressed—brown versus non-brown—by self-orientalizing. Anything to shed themselves from this new label of “white colonizer” (but really just the label of “white”) that the political left immediately associated with Zionism in a post-October 7th world. Didn’t these arrogant leftists know that MIZRAHI AND SEPHARDI JEWS EXIST???!!
It was Hillel II, a descendant of the Babylonian rabbi Hillel, who standardised the holidays of the Hebrew calendar. These included the New Year for Trees – Tu B’shvat, which begins tonight, 1 February 2026. The Sephardi kabbalists of Safed adapted the Passover seder for Tu B’shvat, which is not mentioned in the Bible. The festival has gained popularity since the Jewish return to the Land of Israel, contends Rabbi Eli Kavon on the blog Guerre and Shalom:
While Hillel II’s work has seemed to set in stone the holidays of the Hebrew calendar, there is some fluidity in his work. The only addition accepted by all Jews was the celebration of Simchat Torah, about 1000 years ago. In addition, Religious Zionists have accepted Israel Independence Day as a legitimate holiday.
Despite the standardization of the holidays by the Nasi, the importance of certain holidays has changed over time. The importance of certain holidays is fluid—I think of Chanukah and Lag Ba’Omer. This fluidity is certainly the case of the Fifteenth of Shevat, in Hebrew the holiday of Tu B’Shvat.
What did Tu B’Shvat celebrate for 2000 years? The Mishnah, edited by Judah HaNasi in 200, refers to the Fifteenth Day of the Hebrew month of Shevat as “the New Year for Trees.” Why did trees need this New Year? I turn to Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg’s The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays (1988) to answer that question: “There is no trace of the festival in the Bible. The origins of the day may lie in the ancient custom of celebrating the first day of each season. A Talmudic passage describes the year as divided into six seasons. From 15 Shevat to 15 Nissan is the season of kor (cold) which comes after the season of choref (winter) and before the season of katzir (reaping, harvesting). “ It was a special day in an agricultural, rural society.”
The Fifteenth of Shevat emerged as an important day in the Hebrew calendar 500 years ago. The great mystics and legal minds exiled from Spain in 1492 found a home in the Galilean city of Zfat (Safed). They adapted the Passover Haggadah for Tu B’Shvat. But instead of liberation, the focus was on Kabbalah—the celebration of the bounty of the Land of Israel was given mystical meaning as an ushering in of the Tikkun (the reunification of the Godhead, not “Social Justice”) and the coming of the Messiah. This Tu B’Shvat Seder has gained popularity since its creation and has achieved more importance since the Jewish return to Israel in modern times. While these rabbis were certainly waiting for the Messiah, rituals such as the Tu B’Shvat seder established them as proto-Zionists in their yearning for redemption in a living land, not an abstraction of “The Jerusalem of the Heavens.”
The modern movement of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel moved what was a Kabbalistic holiday to a national one. The Fifteenth of Shevat gained even more importance in the immigrant experience and psyche.
On 27 January 1969, nine innocent Jews were among 14 people hanged by the Ba-ath regime. The executions of Jews continued into the 1970s. David Kheder Basson has compiled the most comprehensive summary of these tragic events to-date:
Some of the accused in the dock at the show trial in 1969
The 57th Anniversary of the hanging of Iraqi Jews by the Ba’ath regime in the al-Tahrir (Liberation) Square in Baghdad and Um al-Broom in Basra fell on 27 January 1969 .
Today, the 27th of January, is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. For us, Jews from Iraq, it has an additional very sad and painful memory related to that specific date in 1969. We who lived in Iraq and witnessed the events remember it with awe and stand silent for those of our brothers who gave up their lives, just because they were Jews.
Today is the fifty-seventh anniversary of the executions of Iraqi Jews in Liberation Square in Baghdad and Umm alBroom Square in Basra. May God bless the souls of all those Iraqi Jews who were executed, killed, or disappeared without a trace by the hands of the criminal Ba’ath regime. יהי זכרם ברוך.
After the crushing defeat of the Arab armies in the Six-Day War, the remaining Jews in Arab countries became scapegoats for governments – especially in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Libya -and for mobs incited by official Arab media. Jewish communities in these countries were subjected to campaigns of persecution, detention, executions, killings, and property burning, among the worst they experienced in the 20th century. Here, I will address what happened to the remaining Iraqi Jews who had not left their ancestral homeland even after the mass migration in 1950–1951, following the establishment of Israel in 1948.
In the first months after the Six-Day War in 1967 (under Taher Yahya’s government), dozens of Iraqi Jews were arrested. They spent months in prisons where they were beaten, insulted, and humiliated. A violent persecution campaign began, including firing Jews from their jobs, not renewing import licenses, imposing additional income taxes, preventing students who completed secondary education from entering universities, cutting off phones from homes, expelling them from private clubs, closing and then seizing the community social and sports club (Malaab Menahem Daniel) in Bataween (now called the Army Club), prohibiting the sale of properties, freezing bank accounts and limiting the amount of money that could be withdrawn monthly, not allowing travel more than a few kilometers without police approval, and watching Jewish homes 24 hours a day by secret police and informants. Students at Al-Hikma private University, which was established by the American Jesuit Fathers, were also subjected to insults and even physical assault by some of their fellow students. However, all that I described does not compare to what happened after the Ba’ath Party came to power in the coup of July 17, 1968.
Background to the Death Sentences: In the autumn of 1968, a frantic campaign began against the Jews of Iraq, during which dozens of people of all social classes and ages were re-arrested. They were accused of spying for Israel and carrying out acts of sabotage; this was followed by campaigns of executions and physical liquidations in prisons. Initially, the Jews were used as a tool to terrorize the Iraqi people and the Ba’ath’s political opponents.
The arrest campaigns began in September 1968, when four Jews were arrested and disappeared without a trace; rumors began to circulate that they were in the “Palace of the End” (Qasr Al-Nihaya). Weeks later, we heard that seventeen Jews from Basra had been arrested and brought to Baghdad on charges of spying for Israel – ten of them were university students. After a few weeks, the number grew to more than thirty people.
On December 14, 1968, Iraqi television broadcast an interview conducted by a well-known Ba’athist, featuring Abdul Hadi Al-Bajari, a Muslim lawyer, and Sadiq Jafar Al-Hawi, a Muslim from Basra. The Ba’athist interviewer presented four accusations to them, which they quickly confessed to being complicit in.
The first accusation alleged that Naji Zilkha, a household goods merchant from Basra, led an Israeli spy network and sent Jewish youth across the border to Abadan, Iran for training by Israeli agents in the use of machine guns, hand grenades, and explosives for sabotage operations such as blowing up bridges.
The second accusation claimed that Jewish spies had blown up a bridge near the Babylon Lion statue in central Basra and were ready to carry out other operations (no such bridge was actually blown up; apparently, a lorry had hit the bridge at some point, causing some stones to fall)
The third accusation involved the spy network receiving large sums of money from an Israel via Iran to Iraq through a Pakistani-owned shipping company (Muhammad Abdul Hussein Jita) in Basra. According to this fabricated story, these funds were distributed to members of the spy network, to Kurds in the north, and to Zionist agents in Lebanon such as Camille Chamoun (former president) and Henri Pharaon (a well-known politician).
The fourth accusation claimed that the head of the spy network, Naji Zilkha, sent important messages to an Israel using a wireless device placed in the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Basra with the help of Albert Habib Thomas, a Christian from Basra and a Jewish spy.
Due to torture, most of the accused were forced to incriminate one another according to instructions, except for Naji Zilkha, Charles Horesh, Zaki Zitto, and Abdul Hussein Noor Jita, who refused to comply with threats and insisted on their innocence despite the severe torture they endured, according to the testimony of fellow prisoners. The court appointed a defense lawyer who merely confirmed the accusations and confessions, asking only for a measure of mercy.
On Saturday, January 4, 1969, the opening session of the Revolutionary Court was held, presided over by Colonel Ali Hadi Watut. Some proceedings of the first session were broadcast on Iraqi television and radio, where eight defendants were seen and fabricated charges and alleged confessions were presented. This was followed by four other sessions that were not broadcast live. On the seventeenth of the month, Iraqi radio began broadcasting excerpts from session recordings every night until the early hours of Monday, January 27. The Revolutionary Court had secretly issued death sentences, by hanging, on January 12 and 15 for fourteen defendants. The death sentences were secretly ratified by the Council of Ministers with two republican decrees on January 23.
The sentences were carried out in Central Prison in Baghdad on the night of January 26/27 (the last night of the recorded trial broadcast). On the following morning, January 27, the bodies of eleven of the accused were hung in Liberation Square in Baghdad, and three in Umm Al-Broom Square in Basra.
Names of those hanged:
The following are the names of those executed and whose bodies were hanged on January 27, 1969, with a placard on each one’s chest containing their name, profession, and religion:
• Ezra Naji Zilkha (51) – Jewish household goods merchant from Basra
• Naim Khadhouri Hilali (19) – Jewish high school student from Basra
• Daoud Heskel Dallal (16) – Jewish student from Basra (forced to say he was 19 to allow execution)
• Heskel Saleh Heskel (17) – Jewish student from Basra (forced to say he was over 18 to allow hanging)
• Sabah Haim Dayan (30) – Jewish car parts merchant from Basra
• Daoud Ghali Yadgar (23) – Jewish student from Basra
• Yaakov Gourji Namirdi (38) – Jewish employee in a transport company from Basra
• Fuad Gabbay (30) – Jewish employee in the customs department in Basra
• Charles Raphael Horesh (44) – Jewish merchant and import agent from Baghdad
• Jamal Sabih Al-Hakim (18) – Basra University student of Jewish origin (father converted to Islam, mother Muslim)
• Abdul Mohsen Jarallah (Shia Muslim)
• Mohammed Abdul Hussein Noor Jita – Shia Muslim trader of Pakistani origin
• Zaki Andrawus Zitto (Christian)
• Albert Habib Thomas (Christian)
The bodies of eleven of the accused were hanged in Liberation Square in Baghdad, and three in Umm Al-Broom Square in Basra.
The day of the executions was one of the worst days experienced by Iraqi Jews (after the Farhud of 1941) and had the deepest impact on their psyche. The best of our sons were executed and their bodies were hung on gallows erected in Liberation Square and Umm Al-Broom Square, witnessed by hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people – many of them under the influence of instructions from the student union, workers union, or farmers union, or out of curiosity or gloating. The radio and television were urging Baghdad and Basrah residents to attend. Buses transported students from schools and colleges to Liberation Square and Umm Al-Broom Square to attend these disgraceful celebrations where Ba’ath leaders and representatives of professional organizations and Iraqi army brigades delivered numerous speeches about the great victory over spies, the fifth column, Israel, and colonialism.
Salah Omar Al-Ali, a member of the Revolutionary Command Council, addressed the masses who were dancing, singing, eating, spitting, and throwing stones at the bodies of the innocent: “O great people of Iraq. Today’s Iraq will not tolerate any traitor, spy, or agent of the fifth column…” He continued threateningly: “This is just the beginning. The great and eternal squares of Iraq will be filled with the bodies of traitors and spies. Just wait.” President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr toured the streets of Baghdad and Liberation Square to see for himself “the joy of our heroic people’s masses” as reported in Iraqi newspapers. After Saddam’s fall, several Ba’athist leaders admitted that these charges were fabricated.
Other Executions and Deaths of Dozens:
It was later revealed in early 1969 that even before the public executions, four Jews arrested in autumn 1968 had died under torture:
• Nissim Yair Hakham (37) from Baghdad – An accountant arrested in early September 1968, died from torture that month.
• Yaakov (Jack) Atrakchi (46) – A textile merchant arrested on November 8, 1968, died the same day from torture.
• Fuad Yaakov Shasha – An iron merchant arrested on December 21, 1968, disappeared after being imprisoned in the infamous Qasr Al-Nihaya (Palace of the End).
• Shimon Moslawi – A newspaper seller in Baghdad, arrested in December 1968 and died from torture that month.
After global outrage over the executions and public celebrations, the Iraqi government resorted to other methods of executing and killing Jews between 1969-1970. In addition to executions and killings, dozens of Jews were arrested and tortured in the Palace of the End and other prisons for periods ranging from several months to three years. Some were released only to be arrested again, even up to three times. Those killed include:
• Daoud Sasson Zebaida – A building contractor arrested on July 23, 1969, died under torture after three days.
• Ishaq Eliyahu Dallal (46) – Toshiba company agent in Baghdad, hanged in Central Prison on August 25, 1969.
• Heskel Rafael Yaakov – A property owner from Basra, hanged in Central Prison on August 25, 1969.
• Akram Zion Bahar (22) – Arrested on September 27, 1969, killed in the Palace of the End after torture.
• Naji Saati (63) – A property broker executed in Central Prison on November 7, 1969.
• Albert Yehuda Noonoo (53) – Executed on January 21, 1970, in Central Prison in Baghdad.
• Naji “Aloutaji” – Resident of the old Jewish quarter, disappeared in 1969.
• Shua Shlomo Sofer – A trademark registrar, died after torture in the Palace of the End in 1970.
• Ezra Yaakov Jouri (36) – Arrested in January 1970, released in January 1971, found dead near Baghdad airport a week later.
These events occurred against the backdrop of severe persecution of Jews in Iraq, leading to the near-complete exodus of the remaining Jewish community in the early 1970s.
Deaths in 1970s:
Even after the majority of Jews left Iraq, with only a few hundred remaining, many Jews were kidnapped or arrested in 1972-1973, and their whereabouts remain unknown to this day:
• Naji Ezra Qashqoush – Car parts merchant, arrested on February 6, 1972, with his young wife Suad Saleh Heskel (Qashqoush).
• Yaakov Abdul Aziz – Lawyer, kidnapped on September 14, 1972, before Yom Kippur.• Yaakov Yamin Rajwan – Merchant, arrested from his home on September 27, 1972.• Shaul Yamin Rajwan – Liquor store owner, arrested from his home on September 28, 1972.
• Ezra Khazam (45) – Doctor, kidnapped on the street on October 2, 1972.
• Heskel Victor Abu Daoud – Fabric merchant from Basra, arrested from his home on October 11, 1972.
• Shaul Baruch Shammash – Property owner, arrested from his home on October 11, 1972.
• Azzuri Menashe Shammash (77) – Father of eight, kidnapped on October 14, 1972.
• Salim Sadka – Accountant, arrested on October 29, 1972.
• Ezra Shemtob – Arrested in October 1972.
• Naji Jitayat – Arrested on November 5, 1972.
• Two from the Qahtan family – Ezra Menashe Qahtan and his brother Salim Menashe Qahtan, arrested on March 20, 1973.
• Naim Salim Fattal – Hardware seller, arrested on March 29, 1973.
• Shua Ezer Al-Baqqal – Carpenter, arrested on April 4, 1973.
• Three from the Twaiq family – Yehuda Khadhouri Twaiq and his sisters Rahma and Eliza, arrested on April 9, 1973.
• Yaaqub Ishaiq – 1973.
• Five from the Qashqoush family – On April 12, 1973, unknown individuals (or police according to another account) stormed the family home and killed father Rouben Ezra, mother Clementine, sons Samir and Fuad, and daughter Joyce.
• Khedhouri Abraham Al-Iny – Killed 27 Sep 1973.
• Abraham Nassim Al-Sayegh – Killed in his home on October 10, 1973.
• Rouben Bulbul – Killed in Baghdad under mysterious circumstances in 1975.
• Estrina Bakhash-Abed – Killed in her apartment in 1992.
• Khedhouri alMukhtar – 1995.
These incidents demonstrate the continued persecution of the remaining Jewish community in Iraq even after the escape/exit of most of the Jews.
In October 1998, a Palestinian raided the Jewish Community Center in Baghdad, killing Zion Hakak and Moshe Shlomo Ephraim. Finally, after Saddam’s fall, in 2005, young Yaakov Shahrabani was kidnapped and disappeared.
Many others were subjected to torture and long imprisonment, which led to heart attacks or worsening of their illnesses due to lack of healthcare. For example, Moshe Hakham Eliyahu (52), a pharmacist, was released in April 1975 and taken to the hospital where he suffered a fatal heart attack.
To complete the picture: In 1964, after the government of Abdul Salam Arif banned Jews from traveling outside of Iraq, a young Jewish man named Fuad Ishaq Dabby attempted to escape through northern Iraq. However, he never reached Iran. It appears he was killed, as the police eventually contacted his family to collect his suitcase from the Sarsink police station; his body was never found.
End of Presence in Iraq: The execution campaigns, killings, and persecution drove the remaining Jews of Iraq to seize the first available opportunity to flee this hell— escaping through the north to Iran in 1970–1972 with Kurdish assistance, and some with passports since late 1971 when not many remained. Thus ended the history of Iraqi Jews after more than 2,600 years.
Professor and writer Shmuel Moreh (may he rest in peace) says in one of his poems:
My mother said to me,” with sorrow in her eyes”:
They oppressed us in Iraq,
And our place here has become unbearable, my son,
So, what have we to do with ‘beautiful patience’?
Come, let us depart!
Note: This article is based on my memory from that period and several important books on this subject.
• Dr. Nissim Kazzaz – Documents and Excerpts from Iraqi Press and Sources about Iraqi Jews in Modern Times. One of the most important books published under the auspices of the Association of Jewish Academics from Iraq, which includes details about the victims.
• Gourji Bekhor – A Wonderful Life and Sensational Death (in English), 1990.
• Max Sawdayee – All Waiting to be Hanged (in English), 1974.
• Shaul Hakham Sassoon – In Saddam Hussein’s Hell. Published by the Association of Jewish Academics from Iraq, 1999.
• Meer Basri – Life Journey from the Banks of the Tigris to the Thames Valley. Published by the Association of Jewish Academics from Iraq, 1993.
France’s international TV channel, France 24 broadcasting in English, has cast a rare spotlight on the history of the Jews of Iraq. Interest in the subject has been sparked by a court case, heard in Paris on 19 January, concerning the non-payment of rent for the French embassy in Baghdad to the Jewish Lawee family which still claims to own it. (With thanks: Boruch)
In this clip, journalist Shirli Sitbon explained the background to the case of Beit Lawee, which became the French embassy in Baghdad after the Jewish owners were forced to flee. The case has attracted unprecedented mainstream publicity in the New York Times and Le Figaro.
Forced out by discrimination and violence in Iraq, 135,000 departing Jews were stripped of their citizenship and abandoned their property. However, Beit Lawee remained officially the property of the family, who rented the building to France. The French government ceased to pay rent to the family on its embassy in Baghdad when the Ba’ath party took power in 1969. The Lawee family have sued for unpaid rent in a French court: the result of a Paris hearing on 19 January is expected next week.
Scholar Omar Mohammed has a particular interest in Iraq’s Jewish heritage, although he is not Jewish himself. Mohammed explained that the Jewish community was one of the most ancient in the region and contributed greatly to Iraq. The country had a diversity of peoples and religions – Christians, Sabeans, Yazidis, Mandaeans, but there are now no more than five Jews. Diversity should be accompanied by inclusion in order to foster tolerance and coexistence, he said.
David Abulafia, emeritus professor of history at the university of Cambridge, has died aged 76. Professor Abulafia, whose grandfather was born in Morocco, had an impeccable pedigree of ancestors which included kabbalists and advisers to the kings of Spain, before the Inquisition forced the family to leave. He was a pioneering maritime historian whose research on medieval Mediterranean trade, in Sicily, the Balearic Islands and the Levant, led him to write acclaimed books such as a history of the Mediterranean across time entitled The Great Sea and The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans. Obituary in The Telegraph (with thanks: Michelle):
David Samuel Harvard Abulafia was born on December 12 1949, the son of Leon Abulafia and his wife Rachel, née Zafransky. His father was a Sephardic Jew whose ancestors had migrated to Galilee from Spain on the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 and lived for generations in Tiberias. David’s paternal grandparents, both from Jewish merchant families, met in Morocco.
David’s parents had settled in Twickenham by the time of his birth. “South of the Thames, many of the Jews were spread out,” Abulafia recalled in an interview with the Jewish Telegraph. “We went to an Ashkenazi synagogue and I often found that a barrier because, although I was familiar with the tunes, there were differences. Being Sephardi, I felt I was a minority within a minority and I still feel like that.”
After St Paul’s School he read history at King’s College, Cambridge, and then embarked on a PhD on the history of Sicily. He was fascinated by the influence of Jews on Mediterranean culture – “from 11th-century Jewish merchants to 16th-century Sephardi naval officers, they have played a disproportionate role” – and felt emotionally connected to the region through his ancestors: he recalled the overwhelming effect of “walking through Toledo and going into a museum and seeing a key which belonged to the Abulafia family”.
Fifty-seven years ago this week, nine innocent Jews were among 14 people executed in Baghdad as ‘spies for Israel’. Other Jews were arrested but released, after an agonising wait for their families. Writing on Facebook Daoud Karkoukli recalls the atmosphere at the time and his young sister’s bravery when their father was about to be arrested for a second time: The front page of the Al Jumuhuriya newspaper showing the executed so-called spies for Israel in January 1969
“Fifty-seven years have passed, yet the memories of that Baghdadi winter never leave me. More than a quarter-century later, the child within me still looks to the sky every evening, praying to the Almighty to have mercy on his father.
Yes, the Baghdad sky was overcast and the night air was piercingly cold. Time has transported me back to January 1969. I had just finished my primary education at the Menachem Daniel School and joined the Frank Iny Secondary School (known today as Al-Nizamiyah). On the morning of January 27th, I woke to the sound of my mother’s sobbing. She was weeping over the execution of 11 Jews in Baghdad and Basra. She wept for those whose lives were snuffed out and whose bodies were hung on gallows in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square and Basra’s Umm al-Broom.
At the same time, she lived in terror over the fate of my father, who had been arrested days earlier by the Ba’athist intelligence services. This was part of a frenzied campaign led by the henchmen of the Ba’ath regime, who had seized power in 1968. They tightened the noose around 3,000 Iraqi Jews—stripping us of telephone services, banning us from government employment, closing university doors in our faces, and severely restricting our movement both inside and outside Iraq.
For several weeks, we tried in vain to trace my father, who had been “kidnapped” in Baghdad. We eventually learned—after paying massive bribes—that he was being held in Basra. Our days were miserable; I would drag my feet to school in the morning and return at noon, only for my mother, my younger sister, and me to lock ourselves behind closed doors until the following day.
In the evenings, I would sit before the television watching the “execution bulletin.” At the end of the news broadcast, the announcer would read a list of names of those to be executed at dawn the next morning! It was a pitch-black period of history, and I searched the sky for a savior to release my father from his captivity.
God answered the prayers of that young child. My father returned—gaunt and pale—without uttering a single word about the “arts of torture” he had endured. But our joy was short-lived. Only a few days passed before another intelligence branch knocked on our door (and there was no shortage of different intelligence branches in those bygone days) to arrest my father once again. Before they could take him, my six-year-old sister stood up to those “ravens of the regime.” She screamed in their faces: “You will not take my father from me! He is mine, and he is innocent!” That image will never leave me as long as I live.
May God have mercy on those assassinated by the hand of treachery and executed without guilt, solely for being Jewish. May they rest in peace.”
It was bound to happen: as the regime blames ‘foreign states’ and the Mossad for inciting the protests in Iran, Jews would be arrested. The community, always anxious to show its loyalty, says the arrests are ‘a mistake’:
Homayoun Sameh Najafabadi, the Jewish representative in the Iranian parliament
Several members of Iran’s Jewish community have been arrested in recent days, purportedly on suspicion that they were involved in the recent mass anti-regime protests, Hebrew outlets reported on Tuesday.
The community has reportedly denied any connection to the demonstrations, saying the arrest of the Jews was a mistake. Iranian Jewish leaders are involved in efforts to have the detainees released, sources close to the community said, according to Kan and Israel Hayom.
The community is trying to show total loyalty to the regime, the sources added.
The leftwing kibbutzniks on the Gaza border who were kind to their Arab neighbours had their generosity repaid with death. The 7 October was a rude awakening for many Israeli Ashkenazim, who had projected their liberal values on Gazans. Coming from an Arab country, Yehuda Meitav’s family was always more sceptical; Mizrahim sent out warnings for decades that compassion is exploited as weakness. Meitav now worries about the Ashkenazi-dominated diaspora. Powerful post on Facebook (with thanks: Michelle):
There is an old folktale called The Crocodile and the Old Woman. A woman lives by a lake. A small crocodile appears. It is weak, so she feeds it. As it grows, it needs more. She keeps feeding it. It becomes stronger, bolder, less afraid. One day it eats her. The moral is simple. Compassion does not change the nature of a predator. It only makes it stronger.
I was born into a Mizrahi family. My father was Tunisian and my mother was Yemenite. Later in my life I was moved into a kibbutz, a world that was mostly Ashkenazi, many of them Holocaust survivors. That gave me a rare vantage point inside Israel. I grew up between two Jewish worlds, the Middle Eastern and the European. Two histories, two traumas, two ways of understanding danger, trust and survival.
My parents came from Arab countries. They lived among Muslims for generations. They knew the language, the psychology, the codes, the smiles and what hides behind them. They did not hate Arabs, but they did not romanticize them either. They understood how honor, power, religion and fear operate in that world.
The European Jews came from a different story. They came from Enlightenment Europe, from socialism, from universalism, from the belief that people are basically the same everywhere. That worldview shaped the kibbutzim, the peace movements and the idea that if you show goodwill, you will receive goodwill back.
That difference still lives inside Israel. It is not about being better or worse. It is about having lived in different civilizational realities.
The communities most devastated on October 7 were border kibbutzim. Left leaning, peace oriented, humanitarian. These were people who drove Gazans to Israeli hospitals, raised money for them, gave them work, created joint projects. They believed they were building bridges. They believed goodwill would be returned with goodwill.
What many did not see was that while they were feeding, the crocodile was growing.
After October 7, we found the maps, the lists of names, the layouts of homes, the notes saying where the children sleep, where the dog is, who to kill first. This was not rage. This was intelligence gathered patiently over years. That information came from access, trust and proximity. From the very openness meant to create peace.
That is taqiyya in practice. Smiles, cooperation and dependency used to prepare slaughter.
Mizrahi Jews warned about this for decades, not out of hatred but out of memory. They knew that in the Middle East, power is respected, not goodwill. Weakness is not met with compassion. It is exploited.
October 7 forced even the most idealistic Israelis to confront this. Many of the same people who once believed in absolute coexistence now say they no longer trust what stands across the fence. The crocodile showed its teeth.
What worries me now is not only Israel. It is the Jewish diaspora in the West. New York, London, Sydney, Paris. Many still see the world through European lenses. They assume everyone plays by the same moral rules. They assume radical Islam is just another political opinion. They assume tolerance will be returned with tolerance.
Meanwhile the crocodile is swimming among them.
You see it in the street intimidation, the open calls for violence, the mobs, the targeting of Jewish neighborhoods and institutions. You see it in politicians who appease it for votes, whether it is Mamdani in New York or the Mayor of London. You see it even among Jews who believe they are being virtuous while helping empower something that despises them.
The old woman thought she was being kind. In truth she was feeding her own executioner.
I am not claiming absolute truth. I am sharing what a Mizrahi child raised among Ashkenazim learned by standing in both worlds. October 7 was not just an attack. It was a revelation of what happens when you mistake a crocodile for a neighbor.
Maybe it is time, in Israel and in the diaspora, to stop feeding it.
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