Year: 2021

Thousands of Jews died in Granada pogrom of 1066

The crucifixion of the Jewish vizir Joseph Ibn Naghrela and the killing of thousands of Jews put an end to the Golden Age in Granada, 955 years ago, argues Aaron Reich in The Jerusalem Post (with thanks: Lily):
A view of Granada, once known as a Jewish city (Photo: Pixaby)

 

December 30 marks 955 years since the Granada massacre, a brutal event when a Muslim mob stormed the royal palace in Granada in Muslim-ruled Spain, crucified the Jewish vizier and slaughtered thousands of Jewish residents of the city.
Granada was the capital of a Berber Muslim kingdom of the same name in modern-day Spain, then known as al-Andalus when it was under Muslim rule. At the time, it was ruled by the Zirid dynasty, and while control of the kingdom would change hands for several centuries, Granada would ultimately be known as the last bastion of Muslim rule in al-Andalus before it fully fell to Spanish rule in 1492 in the culmination of the Reconquista.
But the Jewish presence in Granada is far older. In fact, while some legends even posit that Jews had lived in the city since the destruction of the First Temple, the first known evidence dating back to the year 711. In fact, the Jewish presence in Granada is so old and established that the city is said to have once been known as Garnāta-al-Yahūd, meaning Granada, City of the Jews. Although some scholars cast doubt on this widespread assumption of Jewish history in the city, the traditional legacy lives on, as has its importance in Jewish history.

Four paintings restituted to Egyptian Jew’s heirs

According to Today-in-24,   the French Government reported this week  that four works that were looted by the Nazis during the German occupation of France in the Second World War have been restored to the heirs of the Egyptian-Jewish businessman Moïse Levi de Benzion.  Benzion was born in Alexandria in 1873 and was the founder of the Benzion department stores in Cairo. He had an impressive collection of Chinese and Oriental art, textiles, carpets, books and Egyptian antiquities. The restitution of the paintings to Benzion’s heirs is a blow for Magda Haroun, head of the Cairo Jewish ‘community’, who had demanded that the works go back to Egypt.

Frontage of the Benzion department store in Aswan

The four works, three kept in Paris in the Louvre Museum and another in the Orsay Museum, are small in size and date from the 19th century.
The authorship of these paintings corresponds to Georges Michel, Paul Delaroche, Auguste Hesse and Jules-Jacques Veyrassat. This batch of four pieces belongs to the state program National Museums of Recovery (MNR), whose objective is to return to their rightful owners the thousands of works that the Nazis stole.

According to the French Ministry of Culture, investigations carried out on the origin of these four paintings determined that they belonged to Levi de Benzion (1873, Alexandria, Egypt-1943, Roche-Canillac, France).The collector and businessman bought these works in 1920 and they were stolen from his palace de la Folie in Draveil (Paris region) by the Nazi art looting organization l’Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg.
There were about 60,000 works and objects recovered from Germany that returned to France since the end of the war, in 1945, of which about 45,000 were returned to their owners before 1950.

Among those that were not claimed, a large part was sold and another, about 2,000, was left to the care of French museums due to its artistic interest.
Since 2016, the MNR program has helped restore 54 works to their legitimate heirs.

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During the Second World War, according to Wikipedia, Lévi de Benzion’s collections in Paris and the chateau La Folie in Draviel were extensively looted by units of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the Nazi unit charged with following behind invading German troops and identifying and seizing works of art from occupied countries. Records of the ERR indicate that 989 items were seized from the Lévi de Benzion collection alone. Lévi de Benzion was arrested by the Nazis in France and died in September 1943. His collection was sold at auction at Villa Benzion, 6 Rue El Amir Omar, Zamalek, Cairo, in March 1947 in a sale of over 900 lots. (Here is the auction Catalogue. ) Several other department-store owners lived in Zamalek, but like many other large private houses in the area, Villa Benzion no longer exists.

Gustave Courbet’s ‘Entrée d’une Gave’. looted from Benzion by the Nazis.

Typical of the handling of the looted paintings was Gustave Courbet‘s Entree d’un Gave (1876). Lévi de Benzion acquired the painting in 1919; the ERR seized it in 1940 and moved it to the Neuschwanstein castle. In 1941 it was acquired by Walter Hofer for the Hermann Göring collection.[8] Göring, however, was not interested in modern art, preferring Old Master paintings instead, and the work was among a number of modern paintings subsequently exchanged for older works selected from Theodor Fischer‘s Galerie Fischer in Lucerne.[9][10] Fischer sold the painting to Willi Raeber of Basel, who in turn sold it to Galerie Rosengart of Lucerne, who sold it to Arthur Stoll. After the war, the painting was claimed by Paule-Juliette Levi de Benzion of Cairo and restituted to her in 1948. After changing hands several more times, it was sold to the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama in 1999.

Among the other works seized and later returned were paintings by Eugène BoudinJean-Baptiste-Camille CorotCharles CottetCharles DaubignyClaude MonetAlfred Sisley, and Vincent van Gogh.

 

 

 

Whitewash and conspiracy: how the Jews from Arab lands issue is distorted

What really happened to the million Jews who lived in Arab lands? Unfortunately, so many people spread lies about what happened to those Jews – chiefly as a way of propping up a false Palestinian narrative – that most people have no idea of the truth or the scale of the disaster. They see the lies spreading online, but simply do not have the material they need to counter the disinformation campaign. David Collier summarises the issue in his blog:

The ‘Jewish problem’ in the Arab lands:

A simple fact: in the 20th century almost a million Jews resided in ancient Jewish communities spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
Another simple fact: at the end of the 20th century, there was almost nothing left.

So what happened?

At the root, although there is no ‘catch-all’ that tells the story of every single Jew in all of the Arab lands – it was belief in the supremacy of Islam, rising Arab nationalism and Islamic antisemitism that all played their role. Whilst it is true that Jewish history in the MENA region was better than the Jewish experience in Europe, this is hardly a difficult benchmark to pass.

Peaceful co-existence’ involved the subordination and degradation of the Jews. The status of Jews as Dhimmi (second class citizens) meant that life was unpredictable; sometimes calm – sometimes violent – but the Jewish experience was always left to the whims of the local rulers.

The 19th century brought about the partial collapse of the Ottoman Empire – and this signalled dark times for the Jews. Pogroms – violent riots against Jews – began to reappear with alarming frequency. The Arab response to the vacuum of power left from the weakness in the Ottoman regime, resulted in power struggles – and both rising Arab nationalism and religious extremism left Jewish blood flowing down city streets. All this upheaval started occurring long before modern Zionism entered the equation.

A key point must be made. The idea that before Zionism, Jews had lived in peace in Arab lands is an absolute myth. For a full history it is worth reading the Lyn Julius book ‘Uprooted’ .

The need for the whitewash:

By the early 20th century, the attacks on these Jewish communities were brutal. Much of it was government driven, with increasing anti-Jewish legislation appearing throughout the region. But there was also a lot of anti-Jewish violence on the street. This all spiked dramatically when Israel was founded but had started long before. The growing hostility was to drive the ethnic cleansing of every major Jewish community inside Arab lands. The creation of nearly a million Jewish refugees.

For those pushing an anti-Israel agenda – and whose entire narrative is built around the non-necessity of Zionism and the tragic existence of Palestinian refugees, the true history surrounding Jewish refugees creates five key problems:

  1. The image of co-existence is a myth
  2. There were more Jewish refugees created than Arab refugees
  3. The value of what the Jewish refugees had stolen from them was many times greater than anything the Arab refugees can claim they lost
  4. The attack on the Jewish communities was unprovoked and on an innocent civilian population. The same is not true of much of the Arab population in the mandate, with many Arab villages choosing a violent confrontation that fuelled a civil conflict
  5. Like it or not, many Arab families in the mandate area had simply moved into the area as the Ottoman empire collapsed – or as Zionist investment created opportunity. This means many of the Arab refugees had no real roots in the mandate area (one example – the ‘Palestinian’ hero of the 1930s, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam – was born in Northern Syria.) The same could not be said of the ancient Jewish roots in places such as Egypt, Iraq or Yemen.

All of these factors create a huge problem for anti-Israel activists. In real terms, the unprovoked destruction of the Jewish communities in the MENA region was far worse than the destruction of the Arab communities engaged in civil conflict in the mandate area.

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Don’t stand the facts about the Mufti on their head

In exposing ‘racism against Palestinians’ , the young members of the far-left UK organisation Na’amod went too far when at a recent Limmud UK session they tried to minimise the collaborative role of the Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini with the Nazis. Lyn Julius  writes in a blog previously published in the Jewish News:

The Mufti meeting Hitler in November 1941

‘You are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts’.

I was reminded of this old adage while listening a presentation at Limmud by Na’amod (Hebrew for ‘Let’s stand’). This UK-based organisation, which is supported by leftwing young Jews and claims to represent both Zionists and anti-Zionists, is currently running a campaign called ‘Racism isn’t kosher’.

All individuals have their prejudices and biases. The speakers went through common tropes that Jews believe about Palestinians. They were not an invented nation. The ‘Nakba’ was not a lie. The Arabs love their children as much as the Jews do.

But when the speakers suggested that Palestinian collaboration with the Nazis was a trope, they were in danger of losing all credibility.

A reminder of the facts:

It is well-documented that many, if not most, Arabs supported the Germans. Beginning in 1933, the self-declared leader of the Arab world, the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al Husseini, made overtures to Hitler. He received Nazi funding—as did Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood—for his 1936 -1939 Palestinian revolt, during which his thugs killed Jews, British soldiers and any Arabs who rejected his pro-Nazi agenda. He was the driving force behind a pro-Nazi coup and the massacre of hundreds of Jews in Iraq in 1941. He then fled to Berlin and spent the rest of the war, together with 60 other Arabs, as Hitler’s personal guest, broadcasting antisemitic radio propaganda to the Arab world. He was never tried at Nuremberg for war crimes.

In the service of the Third Reich, the Mufti recruited thousands of Muslims to the Waffen SS. He intervened with the Nazis to prevent the escape to Palestine of thousands of European Jews, who were sent instead to the death camps. He had plans to bring the Holocaust to Palestine. The Arabs pressured the British into curtailing Jewish immigration that could have saved millions of lives. The Mufti dragged the Arab League into war with Israel and into driving out their Jewish citizens. His legacy still endures today in Palestinian and Islamist rejectionism of the Jewish state.

If ‘Palestinian collaboration with the Nazis’ is a trope, then I’ve got some snake oil to sell you.

But in an echo of the former London mayor Ken Livingstone’s 2017 claim that Hitler supported Zionism, the young Na’amodists crossed the moral Rubicon when they claimed that Palestinian collaboration with Nazism was parallel to the agreement that the Zionists negotiated with the Nazis in the 1930s. The Ha’avara agreement facilitated the relocation of Jews to Palestine in 1933. It allowed a portion of Jewish emigrants’ possessions, which they were forced to hand over before they left Germany, to be re-claimed through transfers to Palestine as German export goods. But Hitler did not care whether the Jews went to Madagascar or Palestine, as long as he got rid of them from Germany. When Israel later reached an agreement to airlift Jews from Yemen or Iraq, or when it paid hard cash to Morocco to secure the emigration of its Jews in 1961, did this mean that the Yemeni, Iraqi or Moroccan governments supported Zionism?

Apologists both Arab and western have tried to downplay the pivotal role played by the Mufti. Even the new chairman of Yad Vashem, Dani Dayan, caused a scandal in Israel recently when he refused to re-instate a photo of the wartime Mufti meeting Hitler.

But wishful thinking and bending the facts — however inconvenient — to suit an agenda, is in nobody’s interest. Concealing racism in the Palestinians while holding a microscope to Jewish ‘Islamophobia’ or Israel’s purported crimes does nothing to advance mutual understanding and reconciliation.

 

Researchers find Jewish manuscripts in Atlas synagogue

According to this article in Haaretz by Ofer Aderet, academics and archeologists have found amulets and Hebrew manuscripts in the ruined  synagogue in Tamanart, one of  several Jewish sites slated for restoration by the  Moroccan government.   After the destruction of the First Temple, refugees fleeing Jerusalem are said to have established a Jewish kingdom in the adjacent village of  Ifrane in the Atlas mountains, one of the oldest  communities in North Africa. In 1792, 50 Jews  jumped into a burning furnace after the local ruler made them choose between converting to Islam or death by fire. They’ve been called “the immolated” since, their ashes interred in the ancient local cemetery.

The facade of the ruined synagogue in Tamanart, Morocco. (Photo: Orit Ouaknine-Yekutieli)

Remainders of a Jewish-Moroccan community that existed for centuries were recently found in a remote town in the Atlas Mountains, on the edge of the Sahara Desert. The small Jewish community of Tamanart lived there from the 16th century to the early 19th century. Recently, researchers from Israel, Morocco and France conducted salvage excavations in its ruined synagogue.

Along with the building’s walls, they found Scriptures and pages from the synagogue’s genizah, a repository for damaged written matter and ritual objects, as well as a few paper amulets. One was meant to protect a woman in labor and her newborn, another a personal charm meant to protect its owner from trouble and disease. “The texts in these amulets are based on formulas found in the Book of Raziel, an ancient Kabbalist book,” says Orit Ouaknine-Yekutieli, a researcher of modern Morocco who teaches at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The book, which includes texts for charms, was in use by Jewish communities in Morocco.

Among other texts written on these amulets were a Kabbalist version of one of God’s names, as well as quotes from the book of Genesis and from the priestly blessing (such as “the angel who hath redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads; and let my name be named in them, and the name of my fathers Abraham and Isaac; and let them grow into a multitude in the midst of the earth” Genesis 48:16) and “The Lord lift up His countenance upon thee, and give thee peace; So shall they put My name upon the children of Israel, and I will bless them,” Numbers 6:26-7).

Ouaknine-Yekutieli says the synagogue was damaged by natural events such as the recent floods in the area, as well as by looters. She reached the remote site last month as part of a new historical and anthropological research study, together with her archaeologist husband Yuval Yekutieli and Moroccan and French researchers Salima Naji, Mabrouk Saghir, David Goeury and Aomar Boum.

2021: The Year in Review

As has become our end-of-the-year custom, we bring you the Point of No Return  review of 2021.

This year was still in the grip of the Coronavirus pandemic. Nevertheless, there was no shortage of news.

Sculpture of the Yemenite Zviv family unveiled this year by the Jewish American Society for Historical Preservation on the Haas promenade in Jerusalem to recall the exodus of Jewish refugees from Arab countries and Iran.

Good news: 

Much the best news of the year was the consolidation of the Abraham Accords. Israel and Morocco signed a defence agreement. A Jewish wedding was celebrated in Bahrain, and the UAE continued to build on its new alliance with Israel. Israel and  the UAE and Bahrain opened embassies.

The two last Jews of Afghanistan, Tova Muradi  and Zevulun Simentov, managed to escape the country’s takeover by the Taliban.

Two Jewish families  escaped war-torn Yemen.

It was a good year for Algerian-Jewish Eric Zemmour, who has now declared his candidacy in the French presidential elections.

Niran Bassoon-Timan was voted one of the top 100 influencers in Iraq by a magazine.

Bad news:

Levi Salem Marhabi still languishes in jail in Yemen despite efforts to have him released.  Only six Jews remain in the country, after a group of 13 , led by Rabbi Yahya Youssef, left for Egypt.

After the death of Thafer Eliyahu, Jewish property in Iraq has fallen prey to racketeers.

Moroccan survivors of wartime camps have failed in their bid to be considered Holocaust survivors.

The new chairman of Yad Vashem, Dani Dayan,  has refused to re-instate a photo of the Mufti of Jerusalem meeting Adolph Hitler.

Obituaries: 2021 saw the passing of Shlomo Hillel, Naim Kattan, Ruth Rejwan Pearl and two members of the Egyptian-Jewish community.

Mixed news: 

A conference of 200 Iraqis demanded normalisation with Israel. But the government issued arrest warrants for the main participants.

While relations have improved in Arab countries and more was done to raise awareness of the Jewish refugees from Arab countries,  more still can be done in schools. In the West, a worrying trend to minimise and deny the exodus is sweeping over academia.

Must-read articles of the year:

‘Arab Jew’ invention erases Mizrahi history and identity (Adiel Cohen )

Nostalgia for vanishing Jews masks their ethnic cleansing (Dara Horn)

Loyalty of last Jews of Yemen repaid with expulsion (Lyn Julius)

How Tunisia got rid of their Jews by stealth (André Nahum)

Anniversaries

70 years since the great ‘aliya’ from Iraq

Remembering the Second Exodus on 30 November

How Jews escaped Bizerte, one dark and stormy night

BBC Radio breaks its silence on the Farhud

Reviews of Past Years

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

WISHING ALL BLOG READERS A VERY HAPPY and HEALTHY NEW YEAR!

Syrian Jewess deceived into marrying Lebanese Muslim

For weeks, the story has been hogging the headlines of the Lebanese Muslim who posed as a Jew and married into an observant family in Brooklyn. The deception is all the more scandalous since the Syrian-Jewish community is bound by a takana or decree, forbidding marriage with non-Jews. Even marriage with Ashkenazim was not encouraged until recently. Jonathan Sacerdoti reports in the Jewish Chronicle: 

Ali Hassan Hawila at his wedding: he now wants to convert to Judaism to win back his bride

The father of an Orthodox Sephardi woman who discovered her husband was a fake Jew after their wedding has warned the groom to “back up a million feet” if he believes he can win his daughter back.

Ali Hasan Hawila had posed as an observant Jew for years before marrying his bride from the Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn New York.

His true identity as a Lebanese Muslim who had not converted was uncovered just weeks after they got married.

Now the bride’s father, Yosef Kredi, has spoken about the terrible damage done to his daughter and the family by the deception.

Mr Kredi said: “He knows what he did. And he knew before, but he took a risk, he took the chance. He gambled on my account, he gambled with my money, with my own life he gambled.” He added: “He destroyed our life.”

Mr Hawila recently told the JC that he now wants to go to Israel where he intends to convert to Judaism so as to win back his bride.

Spluttering with fury and disbelief at Mr Hawila’s delusional hopes, Mr Kredi said: “I want him to back up a million feet, to go back to where he comes from, to go back as far as he can, not to come near us, not to call my daughter any more, not to try with anything.

“He called her sister last time. And even my daughter. Please, stay far from our family, please.”

Mr Kredi had even taken Mr Hawila to pray alongside him at his synagogue.

The distraught father said: “He acted one thousand percent Jewish.

“What he did is wrong. He passed his limit. He’s smart, but he’s not smart like this. No way what he did can be accepted.

“He hurt me, he fooled me around, he fooled my daughter, he fooled my family. He killed me.” Hawila, 23, adopted the first name Eliya when he emigrated from Lebanon to America in 2015. (…)

Born in Aleppo, Mr Kredi came to the United States in 1983. He said: “I’m from Syria. I was born with Arabs. I came from Arabs, we know the Arabs, we love the Arabs. They come to us on Saturday for Havdalah, they help us, we talk to them, we love them. In this community we have a lot of Arabs on Fifth Avenue.

“We go to them, they know us, we do business together, we joke together sometimes. I want the whole world to hear me. I’m not against anybody, I love everybody. I love the Arabs, I love the Jews, I love the Christians. I wish for everybody the best. But I don’t want nobody to come near my family if they’re going to fool me about like this.”

Mr Kredi’s daughter had met Hawila on a Jewish dating website, and believed him to be Jewish when they got married earlier this year.

Since his deception was uncovered, she has been living apart from him in a safe house, and has even lost her job as a result of all the public attention.

Mr Kredi said: “It’s going to take time. The pain is not going to go away for two, three, four months. This is big pain he caused. Hashem, he knows why this happened. Slowly everything’s going to go back to normal.

Read article in full

Tablet article 

 

Mizrahi left magazine ‘Haokets’ is to close

Haokets (the Sting) has run out of funding and is being forced to close. The magazine has focused on socioeconomic disparities and  ‘discrimination’ against Mizrahim in Israel by the Ashkenazi establishment. But its pro-Palestinian stance is unpopular with Mizrahim generally, who mostly support the rightwing.  Now the Mizrahi left is at a crossroads. ‘Obituary’ in +972 magazine:

Yossi Dahan, co-founder of Haokets

When (Yossi) Dahan established Haokets nearly 19 years ago with his friend and fellow academic Itzik Saporta, they were even paying out of their own pocket. The two had become acquainted as members of the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition (“HaKeshet” in Hebrew) — a collective of scholars and activists promoting Mizrahi equality in Israel — and, in an era before social media, decided to set up a blog through which to spread a political-economic analysis that was almost totally absent from the Israeli media landscape.

“Itzik and I were quite frustrated with the established Israeli media and how they cover all kinds of issues, especially socioeconomic and cultural issues,” Dahan explains in a phone call soon after the announcement. Compared to the public discussion around these topics in other countries, they were dismayed at the “poor and restricted” Israeli discourse; in particular, the pair had grown “frustrated with the Israeli left on economic issues.”

Whereas in most political contexts the left/right spectrum indicates the extent to which parties or individuals support the equal distribution of resources, in Israel, the distinction is more about where one stands on the question of Palestine. Class issues have little bearing on Israel’s left/right divide; in fact, the support base of Labor and Meretz, considered Israel’s mainstream left parties, tends to comprise the wealthiest sectors of society, which remain, in large part, Ashkenazi.

This aberration is partly what makes it so hard for Haokets to raise the funds it needs to operate. Dahan tells +972 that the magazine’s financial troubles are largely a reflection of its dual readership: Mizrahim on the one hand, most of whom do not identify as left-wing, and the Israeli left on the other hand, most of whom are Ashkenazi.

As a result, while Haokets’ Mizrahi audience appreciated the focus on socioeconomic disparities and ethnic discrimination, the same audience complained whenever it wrote about the occupation. Left-wing Ashkenazi readers, meanwhile, were excited that Mizrahim were talking about Palestinian rights but disgruntled that they brought up intra-Jewish ethnicity, deeming it an unimportant or unnecessarily divisive topic. “It’s very difficult to raise money when you have audiences that like you but also hate you at the same time,” Dahan jokes.

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How Tunisia got rid of its Jews by stealth

Tunisia got rid of its Jews by pretending it was doing everything in its power to keep them. Andre Nahum explains how Jews fell victim to Arabisation, abuse of property law, economic strangulation and a policy to replace Jewish civil servants with Muslims. This extract covers the period between independence in 1956 and the Bizerte crisis of 1961, but the rest of the article, which appeared in Pardès no 34 (2003) is well worth reading too.

Prime minister Habib Bourguiba: no overt hostility to Jews

At the beginning, the bey Sidi Lamine remained on his throne and Habib Bourguiba was appointed prime minister.

The transition went smoothly and the new regime showed no hostility towards the Jews. Quite the contrary … If there were Cassandras predicting the inevitable emigration of the community, most wanted to hope that a Jewish minority could still live in an Arab country.

As early as 1948, there had certainly been, with the creation of the State of Israel,  emigration to this new country. The Jewish agency, particularly active in North Africa, had managed to persuade a  number of families to make their aliya. Most were the  poorest and most deprived in the community,  and  they were particularly  people from the provinces. Very few  white-collar workers left, only a few die-hard  Zionists. The Jews, for the most part, remained in limbo –  although very attracted by France, its democracy, its language, its culture. The end of the protectorate made them Tunisian citizens, but they could not allow themselves to see the old metropolis as a foreign country. The majority accepted this situation; a few families decided to emigrate, mainly to France. The memory of the dhimmi status  in which their grandparents had lived until the arrival of France in 1881 was too vivid. Moreover, the Israeli-Arab conflict, which had had no impact until then on relations between Jews and Arabs, could change their lives at any time.

When Habib Bourguiba abolished the monarchy and proclaimed the republic, the first articles of the new constitution stated that: “Tunisia is a republic,  Islam is its religion and Arabic the language”. Ipso facto  the Jews were put in a special category.since they were not Muslims and they did not speak classical Arabic which became the official language of the country.

I remember a funny episode in this regard. One fine day, the authorities wisely decided that all Tunisians should have a surname, which was not the case until then: individuals were known as “X ben Y ben Z”. It was stipulated that all citizens had to fill out a form, in Arabic, of course. Like everyone else, I went to the relevant office.  As I could neither read nor write Arabic although I spoke the language perfectly, I had to get an interpreter who willingly agreed to help me for a fee – a few coins since I was “illiterate”. We must give Bourguiba credit for always saving face.

When Bourguiba called legislative and then presidential elections, he insisted that Jewish citizens register on the electoral roll and fulfil their duty when he did not need a single Jewish vote. But he did need the Jews to bridge the gap between the French who were leaving and the Muslims who were not quite ready to take their places.

In the early days of independence, gestures of friendship multiplied towards the community. Everything was done to reassure it. Friendly relations were established between bourgeois Jews and Arabs, which had hardly been the case under the protectorate. We saw Jews attend large Arab receptions and vice versa and we thought that, contrary to what was happening in other Arab countries and in particular in Iraq and in Nasser’s Egypt, it would be possible for Jews to live  normal lives in this Arab Muslim country.

Very soon the new republic abolished the elected Jewish community council under the leadership of  lawyer Charles Haddad and replaced it with a “provisional commission of Israelite worship” appointed by the authorities. Unless I am mistaken, “provisional” became permanent.

It also abolished the rabbinical court which handled the personal status of  Jews. It  may seem the norm in a democracy to place Jewish citizens under the jurisdiction of national courts. The old Jewish cemetery on Avenue de Londres, which reminded us of the very ancient Jewish presence in the city, was transformed into a public park: the rabbis prohibited access to Jews. After the authorities promised to exhume the corpses and send them to Israel, bulldozers were used to level the land. As for the hundreds of gravestones, no one knows what happened to them. A friend of mine told me he saw a few stored in a senior official’s garden, perhaps waiting to be used to pave his garden paths.

From 1956 to 1961 things went more or less well. Bourguiba ruled the country with an iron fist. The all-powerful police ensured the full safety of people and property. But seeing no future for themselves and no longer used to living under a dictatorship  since the French protectorate, many Jews considered leaving, even as the regime interfered  in all sectors of public life. For example,  some leaders of the national doctors’ union displeased the president: tremendous pressure was put on the practitioners to resign from the organization. Every day the radio announced triumphantly the names of the doctors who had abandoned the union.  In the end, only a few members of the board of directors remained until the very last government ultimatum to lower the flag and dissolve this rebel institution.

Since the establishment of the State of Israel, Tunisian Jews have always felt close to it.

They could not show their solidarity in public for obvious reasons and avoided pronouncing the very name Israel for fear of reprisals. But they would regularly listen to “Kol Israel”,  Jerusalem radio,  and keep themselves informed of every incident, however insignificant, taking place there.

With the Muslims there was a kind of modus vivendi and we avoided talking about the problems of the Middle East. Habib Bourguiba, who had courageously distanced himself from fundamentalist Islam by drinking a glass of fruit juice on television in the middle of the month of Ramadan, did not show any hate-filled hostility towards Israel and even advised the PLO during a trip to Jordan to favour a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

Economically, Tunisia had adopted a new currency, the dinar, which was theoretically worth ten francs. But, to protect it, very strict exchange controls were imposed and the new currency could not be exported or imported. However, the Jews, made wary by the vagaries of their history, tried to transfer money to France when they could. Legal shipments were made by postal order. These could not exceed fifty francs; to transfer a substantial sum it was necessary to make numerous trips to every post office. All had long queues.

The second possibility was to transfer the money illegally by various means, including smugglers.  Many thought that their departure would be illegal. That’s why we talked about it in a low voice, away from prying ears, and if we were in a public place, we looked carefully to right and left to make sure we weren’t overheard. The government artfully tried to get rid of the Jews by pretending that it was doing everything to keep them. Officially it wanted to retain them. In reality everything concurred to make them leave. Perhaps they already had left, as President Bourguiba once said, “their  bodies in Tunisia and hearts elsewhere”. Perhaps  the Jews who had already decided to go into exile and  the regime were playing a kind of poker.

In 1956, independent Tunisia had very few Muslim cadres,  most civil servants and technicians being French,  and a few Jews. When the French went back home, the Tunisians skilfully played on this situation to  fill the places vacated by the French with Jews for as long as it took to train their Muslim replacements. They were thus able to secure the transition from a French administration to a Tunisian Muslim administration cheaply after a short  ‘Jewish’ period. A friend of mine, a police officer under the protectorate, was thus offered an unexpected promotion in this administration and, when he had trained a young Muslim, his secretary, his company car and his driver were removed and he was made redundant, leading to exile. This policy therefore allowed a smooth transition  But, little by little, each profession was confronted with its own hardships. Jewish judges and lawyers who had previously used French found themselves hamstrung when literary Arabic became the official language of justice. In hospitals, a Jewish doctor who would normally have reached the post of head of department, saw his Muslim pupil promoted above his head.

For Jewish traders, things were different. Since essential goods came from abroad and mainly from France:import licences had to be obtained for each product. The licences granted to Jews became increasingly few and far between and  were given to Muslims who were often completely new to the field. Moreover, Jews only obtained licences  if  they had Muslim partners. This applied to  the wholesale textile trade, a business  I knew well, my family being established in Souk-el-Ouzar, the centre of the trade.

Bullying, bordering on discrimination, overwhelmed the Jewish owners of land and buildings, often leading them to sell them at ridiculously low prices to Muslims.

As with the French, as soon as an apartment appeared unoccupied,  the law allowed it to be taken over by a Muslim Tunisian under the pretext that it was empty.

This is what almost happened to my parents who spent the summer by the sea. They saw our family home requisitioned. It took the energetic intervention of a friend of mine, a Muslim radiologist, to halt this abuse of power. Gradually, the Jews began to lose heart.

What is worse Mr. Ben Salah, Minister of Commerce, managed to convince Bourguiba that the economic future of the country lay in a kind of collectivism, vaguely inspired by Marxist ideals. He established “cooperatives” in all  sectors. I mean all,  in agriculture as well as trade and commerce.

Thereafter  modest Djerba grocers, known until then for their generosity and their individualistic working methods, were  forced  to register in a cooperative. This  made them go through multiple administrative formalities to acquire a bag of semolina or a can of olive oil. This “brilliant” initiative, which traumatized Jews and Arabs alike, put the country on the verge of bankruptcy and caused a number of Jewish traders to emigrate for economic reasons, simply because they could not feed their families.

The community thus began to unravel, but the bulk of the Jews still remained in place, although concerns gained ground when it became more and more evident that we could only be second-class citizens. To the difficulties of the whole population, we had to add our own. And as here below, only Allah is eternal. Ben Salah fell from grace, he was deposed by Habib Bourguiba who with great wisdom sent his minister and his socialism packing and revived the liberal economy, thus saving what could still to be saved.

Read article in full (French)

 

Canadian film describes Jewish refugee plight

The experiences of Jews  forced to leave Egypt, Iraq, Tunisia, Lebanon, Algeria, Morocco and Iran are told in a new documentary, ‘L’Exode Silencieux’.

The film , which is 56 minutes long in its full version, was made by the Communauté Sépharade Unifiée du Quebec and the Montreal Consulate of Israel to mark the 30 November annual commemoration of the exodus of more than 850,000 Jews from Arab countries and Iran. It begins by describing the comfortable lives of these middle class Jews. Attitudes towards them changed over time, with the rise of pan-Arabism and repercussions of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Many left with nothing.

Some acknowledge that they were refugees, but never enjoyed the rights of refugees. However, one speaker, Abraham Elarar, objects to describing Moroccan Jews as refugees : he says they left for economic reasons or Zionism.

On the other hand, the historian Georges Bensoussan says that they left out of fear and therefore the word ‘refugee’ could apply to almost all Jews who left the Arab world.

While conditions did vary from country to country, there is no hope of reconciliation while Arab countries distort their own history, Bensoussan claims.

For the first time, Sylvain Abitbol of Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC) discloses that JJAC appointed the accountancy firm Baker Tilly to carry out an assessment of  lost Jewish property and assets. The total value is estimated to be between $300 and $330 billion while the Palestinian losses are estimated to total $30 billion.

Sima Goel from Iran and Lisette Shashoua from Iraq say that they hope that the ordeal they went through will serve as a warning to Jews threatened by antisemitism today in the West.

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This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, of the Middle East and North Africa, documenting the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution.

Point of No Return

Jewish Refugees from Arab and Muslim Countries

One-stop blog on the Middle East's
forgotten Jewish refugees - updated daily.