Month: May 2011

The Farhud dead were buried in a mass grave

Seventy years ago, an event occurred whose repercussions are still being felt in the Middle East today. The Nazi pogrom known as the Farhud – or Iraq’s Kristallnacht – cemented the Arab-Nazi alliance while marking the dissolution of the ancient Jewish community, writes Lyn Julius in The Jewish Chronicle:

There was a frenzied banging on the front door. When my mother answered it, she recognised her aunt’s Jewish cook, ashen-faced, pleading to be let in: “I was on a bus, and the Muslims were pulling the Jewish passengers out and killing them. I said I was a Christian.”

A month earlier, pro-Nazi officers led by Rashid Ali al-Ghailani, had staged a successful coup in Iraq. The German-backed Rashid Ali and his men were soon routed by British troops – but not before they had incited murder and mayhem against the Jewish “fifth column”.

Seventy years ago, on June 1 1941, a group of Jews, wearing their Shavuot best, had ventured out for the first time in weeks to greet the returning pro-British Regent, only to be ambushed by an armed Arab mob. Terrified Jews barricaded themselves inside their houses, or ran for their lives across the flat rooftops.

The rioting went on for two days: around 180 Jews died in Baghdad and Basra (the exact figure is not known); hundreds were wounded, 900 homes and 586 Jewish-owned shops were destroyed; there was looting, rape and mutilation. Stories abound of babies murdered and Jewish hospital patients refused treatment or poisoned. The dead were hurriedly buried in a mass grave.

Jews recognised some assailants – the butcher, the gardener. But some brave Arabs saved Jews. My aunt tells how the neighbours sheltered her until the trouble had died down. The neighbour was a prominent Nazi, but his wife was “a lady — she even made the beds for us,” my aunt recounts.

The Farhud (Arabic for “violent dispossession”) marked an irrevocable break between Jews and Arabs in Iraq and paved the way for the dissolution of the 2,600-year-old Jewish community barely 10 years later.

A question mark hovers over the role of the British – encamped on the city outskirts, they delayed intervening until the looting had spread to Muslim districts. Yet the victims’ screams reached the British ambassador, Cornwallis, who was enjoying a candlelit dinner and a game of bridge.

Loyal and productive citizens comprising a fifth of Baghdad, the Jews had not known anything like the Farhud in living memory. Before the victims’ blood was dry, army and police warned the Jews not to testify against the murderers and looters. Even the official report on the massacre was not published until 1958.

Despite their deep roots, the Jews understood that they would never, along with other minorities, be an integral part of an independent Iraq. Fear of a second Farhud was a major reason why 90 per cent of Iraq’s Jewish community fled to Israel after 1948.

But the Farhud was not just another anti-Jewish pogrom.The Nazi supporters who planned it had a more sinister objective: the round-up, deportation and extermination in desert camps of the Baghdadi Jews.

The inspiration behind the coup, and the Farhud itself, came not from Baghdad, but Jerusalem. The Grand Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, sought refuge in Iraq in 1939 with 400 Palestinian émigrés. Together, they whipped up local anti-Jewish feeling. An illiterate populace imbibed bigotry through Nazi radio propaganda. Days before the Farhud broke out, the Nazi youth movement, the Futuwa, went around daubing Jewish homes with a red palm print. Yunis al-Sabawi, who, together with the Mufti and Rashid Ali, spent the rest of the war in Berlin, instructed the Jews to stay in their homes so that they could more easily be rounded up.

The Farhud cemented a wartime Arab-Nazi alliance designed to rid Palestine, and the world, of the Jews. The Mufti’s postwar legacy endured. The uprooting of the 140,000 Jews of Iraq followed a Nazi pattern of victimisation – dismantlement, dispossession and expulsion. Nuremberg-style laws criminalised Zionism, freezing Jewish bank accounts, instituting quotas and restrictions on jobs and movement. The result was the exodus of nearly a million Jews from the Arab world.

More Jews died than on Kristallnacht, yet the Farhud has not become part of Holocaust memory. Indeed, the Washington Holocaust Museum had to be vigorously lobbied to include the Farhud as a Holocaust event.

Nazism gave ideological inspiration both to Arab secular parties and the Muslim Brotherhood (Gaza branch: Hamas). The unremitting campaign to destroy Israel is simply a manifestation of the genocidal intentions of Arab nationalism and Islamism. The demons awakened by the Farhud are still with us today.

Lyn Julius is a journalist and co-founder of Harif, an association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. The Farhud will be commemorated at 7.30pm on June 1 at Ohel David Eastern Synagogue, London NW11. For details see www.harif.org.

Read article in full

There will also be a Facebook Virtual Commemoration on 1 and 2 June.

Witness” The massacre of Baghdad’s Jews” (BBC World Service radio) will be broadcast at 9.50;13.50;17.50 and 22.50 on 1 June and at 1.50 and 3.50 on 2 June (GMT + 1). Podcasts (with thanks: Silke)

CBC Radio The Current

Sarah Ehrlich’s report on the BBC website.

Sarah Ehrlich in Haaretz

Recounting the Farhud (Jerusalem Post)

Remembering the Farhud (Galus Australis) –( with thanks Antonio)

When Iraq had its Kristallnacht (Jewish Chronicle)

Remember the Farhud by Aryeh Tepper (Jewish Ideas Daily)

Remember the Farhudby Zvi Gabay (The Jerusalem Post)

Reut Cohen on the Persecution of the Jews in Iraq

Daphne Anson on the Farhud and its Nazi influences

Article in Norwegian (MIFF)

Svenska Dagladet(Swedish)

The pro-Nazi Mufti

The Farhud against the Jews of Iraq, whose 70th anniversary is being marked this week, was not just another pogrom, but an extension of the project to exterminate the Jews, Arye Tepper explains in Jewish Ideas Daily:

The end of 2,500 years of Jewish life in Iraq began during two days in June 1941. For 30 terrifying hours, mobs of marauding Iraqi Arabs, soldiers and civilians alike, killed 137 Jews and injured thousands more, pillaged scores of homes, and destroyed more than 600 Jewish-owned businesses. The event came to be known as the Farhud, a Kurdish term for the murderous breakdown of law and order. Within ten years, almost the entire Jewish community of Iraq was gone.

Its exotic name aside, the Farhud wasn’t an isolated eruption of anti-Jewish violence in some far corner of the world. According to the historians Shmuel Moreh and Robert Wistrich, it was at least in part an extension of the Nazi war of extermination against the Jews. Moreh is the editor of a 1992 collection of essays on the Farhud, recently revised and updated in English translation. Marking the seventieth anniversary of the attack, he and Wistrich, the distinguished historian of anti-Semitism, recently chaired a provocatively titled symposium, “Nazism in Iraq,” in the hope of raising public awareness of the event and combating “Farhud denial” among today’s Iraqi Arabs.

At the symposium, Wistrich noted that in 1941, Iraqi Jews “found themselves in the crossfire of three converging forms of anti-Semitism”: the anti-Semitism of Iraqi nationalists, the anti-Semitism of Palestinian exiles in Iraq, and the anti-Semitism of German Nazis. Both the Iraqi and the Palestinian versions were deeply influenced by Nazism.

Consider the case of Yunus al-Sabawi, an Iraqi journalist who became the country’s minister of economics and governor of Baghdad. Al-Sabawi also happened to be the author of an Arabic-language translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. In the work’s preface, he celebrated the “great adventurer, the great German leader who rose from being a simple soldier to the leadership of . . . one of the culturally and scientifically most developed nations in the world.” During the Farhud itself, paramilitary groups organized by al-Sabawi were ordered to participate in the attacks.

Or consider the role played by Palestinian exiles. Approximately 400 leading Palestinian families had moved to Iraq after the anti-Jewish riots in Palestine in 1936-39. The most prominent was the orchestrator of those riots: Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, whose connections to Nazism in general and Hitler in particular have been thoroughly documented. But the mufti wasn’t alone in channeling Nazi ideals: in their own account of the events leading up to the Farhud, British officials—the British ruled Iraq off and on from 1914 until 1955—noted the electrifying effect on Iraqi youth groups of their pro-Nazi Palestinian teachers.

Then there is the role played by German Nazis themselves in the Farhud. Dr. Fritz Grobba was the German envoy stationed in Baghdad; fluent in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, he successfully tailored the Nazi message to local sensibilities. Already in 1939 Grobba was predicting in a report to Berlin that “a day will come when the anger of the masses will erupt, and the result will be: a massacre of the Jews.”

Nazism exercised a double appeal to Palestinian and Iraqi Arabs. Its anti-Semitism resonated with certain powerful streams in Arab and Islamic tradition, and its anti-British animus resonated with the anti-imperialism promoted by Arab nationalists who despised the British as occupiers bent on thwarting their aspirations. Ironically, many Jews in Palestine viewed the British in similar terms (which did not prevent them from throwing in their lot with the British in the struggle against Hitler). The Jews in Iraq, however, were naturally more sympathetic to Great Britain, and were accordingly regarded by Iraqi nationalists as a fifth column.

There were also deeper affinities between Nazism and Arab nationalism. Commenting on the Ba’athists, the nationalist group that would go on to dominate Iraq for the last four decades of the 20th century. Wistrich observed in an interview:

The kind of people who founded the Ba’athist movements . . . looked up to Nazi Germany. The German national rebirth, including its anti-Jewish ideology, really appealed to them. The Third Reich represented militarism, glory, obedience, national unity, a messianic political faith—and the removal of the Jews.

Read article in full