These Jews are called the forgotten Jews.
While the entire world was still leaking its WWII wounds and the Jewish nation was counting the Jews the Holocaust left alive, the Jews of Moslem countries were going through their own Kristallnacht and Pogroms.
Each year, at the Sephardic Tefe’ert Israel Synagogue, in Los Angeles, the Jewish community commemorates this 2nd great in number expulsion of Jews. The first one was from Spain, in 1492.
Joseph Samuels tells his expulsion story – the story of the Jews of Iraq
Joseph Samuels - on December 31st, will celebrate his 87th birthday - is an Iraqi Jew. He was born in 1930 in Taht Al Takia, in the Jewish quarter of the old city of Baghdad, Iraq.
Photo: Joseph Samuels at the Mizrahi Jews commemoration, November 30, 2017, Los Angeles
His mother’s tongue is Arabic and his Arabic name is Yusef, [Joseph]. His father, Sasson Shumail Hacham Sasson, was a prominent Iraqi Jew textile importer.
Baghdad was Joseph Samuels’ hometown and Iraq was his homeland.
Jewish roots in Iraq go back over 26 centuries, rooted in the destruction of the first Temple in Jerusalem and expulsion of the Jews to Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia is a historical region in West Asia, situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in modern days roughly corresponding to most of Iraq plus Kuwait, the eastern parts of Syria, Southeastern Turkey, and regions along the Turkish–Syrian and Iran–Iraq borders. The Biblical prophets Ezekiel and Jonah and the Jewish leaders Ezra and Nehemiah were all buried in Iraq. By the mid-20th century, one in four citizens of Baghdad was a Jew.
Jews in Iraq were an integral part of the Iraqi economy, many of much wealth, education and the administration; in fact a stabilizing element of Iraq.
The Jews in Iraq believed in, “We are all Iraqis.” Zionism was a remote, far removed and a weak idea, and the conception of a state named Israel was only a dream. The thought of leaving Iraq was never on any Jew’s mind, hardly ever contemplated.
Then things began to rapidly change. Kristallnacht, Iraq style hit the Jewish population.
On June 1st, 1941, Muslim mob went on a rampage, looting and burning Jewish homes and businesses. The angry mob raped Jewish women and girls, robbed the men, and then killed many. The Iraqi government reported 179 Jewish citizens murdered and 400 more wounded that day. This violent outbreak became known as the ‘Farhud’.
Sadly, there were no arrests or convictions following this tragedy. For fear of retaliation and threats, Jews would not file a complaint against Muslims.
Joseph Samuels was ten-year-old when the Farhud took place. There was nowhere to run to. No country would take the Iraqi Jews in. Jews now lived in fear. When Joseph was 14-year-old he already faced death when two Muslim youth chased him with a knife.
On May 14th, 1948, the State of Israel was born. Jews in Iraq felt a spark of hope, a glimpse of possible safety, freedom and recharged dignity. After 2000 years of forced abandonment of the Jewish commonwealth in the land of Israel, Jews had a homeland again, to serve as a sanctuary for all Jews from persecution, humiliation and death.
As the history attest, the day after David Ben Gurion declared the birth of the Jewish state, on May 15th, 1948, five Arab countries, including Iraq, declared war on the nascent state, Israel. Luckily, they failed, they lost the war. But the Iraqi government could not bear the defeat, it needed to vent its humiliation and the local Iraqi Jewish community was its target. Zionism sentiments were declared treason, and Zionist aspiration was punishable by death. Arrests, torture and public executions soon followed. Every Jew became a suspect.
A year after his graduation from Al A’a Dadiah high school, Samuel, now 19-year-old, was smuggled to Iran, and from there to Israel. He became homeless and a penniless refugee, just like all other Jewish refugees from Arab lands who were expelled and found refuge in poor and struggling Israel. With the minimum means, Israel built tents cities for these refugees and Samuel, as all other Jewish refugees, stood in line for a free meal, slept on a steel bed with a straw mattress, anchored in the hot sand..jpg)
In 1950 the Iraqi government enacted the Taskit, the permit for Iraqi Jews to leave Iraq. Those who registered to leave could only take with them one suitcase, and whatever assets they had were confiscated and they were stripped of their Iraqi citizenship. There was no way back. Most of the 135,000 Iraqi Jews applied to leave, and only about 10,000 remained.
Those who chose not to leave Iraq continued to face systematic discrimination, economic deprivation, persecution, arrests, jail sentences and torture.
After Israel’s victorious Six Day War of June 1967, the remaining Jews of Iraq faced worsening living conditions. On January 27, 1969, nine Jews were accused of spying for Israel and were hanged in the public square of Baghdad. In the years that followed, the remaining Jews were smuggled out of the country or somehow managed to leave.
In 1948, it is estimated that over 850,000 Jews lived in the Middle East and North Africa countries. The Arabs’ hostility toward Jews and their aggression wars against the state of Israel brought about economic deprivation, harassment and discrimination against the local Arab-Jews, all ended up in expulsions across the entire region. Nearly 650,000 of these expelled Arab-Jews settled in Israel. The rest found refuge in Europe, Canada, the USA and other places around the world. Presently, it is estimated that only about 4,000 Jews are living in Arab countries, mostly in Morocco.
There was never a discussion about reparations for the Mizrahi Jews. As of recent years, when the Arabs, most of them ran away from Israel, at will, during the Jewish state War of Independence, started to demand reparations, the forgotten Jews expulsion came up. The two matters are weighed equally; if Arabs demand reparations, then Arab–Jews must receive reparations as well.
The War on Iraq and the Jewish artifacts.
On May 6th, 2003, during the US invasion of Iraq, the United States Army were looking for weapons of mass destruction in the headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Baghdad’s feared secret police. Instead of weapons of mass destruction, in the flooded basement of the building they found a trove of heavily damaged Iraqi-Jewish artifacts and Scriptures and Jewish books. The trove was what Dictator Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party had confiscated and stole from dozens of synagogues, schools and communities’ properties, as well from individual Jews. This trove included 2,700 books and thousands of documents, some dating back to the 16th century.
The U.S. government brought these artifacts trove to the US, and at a generous cost of $3 million restored and preserved them. The sad news is that these artifacts are scheduled to be return to Iraq in September 2018. This means that this Jewish memorabilia will be treated as before, with total disrespect, somewhat be considered an Iraq’s retribution.
There is no high moral ground or justification to send back to Iraq these Jewish archives, a place where no Jews live, has no respect and/or interest in Jewish heritage, where there is no accessibility to Jewish scholars nor access to the descendants of those who once possessed these pieces of Iraqi-Jewish history.
At his age, energetic Joseph Samuels is actively pursuing efforts to stop these artifacts from being returned to Iraq. Returning them to Iraq is like leaving the cat to keep an eye on the milk. Joseph is publishing newspapers’ op-eds’, writing to members of Congress - Congressmen and Senators alike - and now to President Trump to stop this miscalculated intention, this injustice. On October 19, 2017, The Washington Post published Joseph’s article titled, “The History of Iraqi Jews is in Jeopardy.”
We must take action
The Middle East was full of valuable ancient historical relics, most were destroyed by insensitive, ignoramus and uneducated anarchist Islamic hooligans and terrorists.
Preserving what is left of Iraqi Jews’ history is not a political issue. It is an issue of preserving history for generations to know. It is about preserving the very few artifacts of Jews left from all Arab lands.
The enlightened world, the world that understands the core of this important case and cause, must take action and help stop these historical treasures from going to where they were saved from, from being returned to Iraq.
Joseph Samuels implores every decent human being to do what is just and right, help him in his mission’s efforts to save the testimonial archives of the history of his ancestors, the ancient community of the Jews of Iraq, from returning to the hands of Jewish foes.