The Sudden End Of Iraqi
Jewry
by Edwin Black
Suddenly the phones went
dead in Baghdad.
The day was March 10, 1951.
By the time the dial tone came back, within
about 24 hours, some 120,000 middle-class
and affluent Jews
in Iraq, nearly the whole of Iraqi Jewry,
would discover they were paupers.
Penniless, they were then
expelled en masse to Israel,
leaving behind property now valued at $1
billion by some and many billions by others.
Today, as attorneys, Jewish
organizations and individual claimants prepare
to launch a massive claim against Iraqi assets
held in Washington, the question remains:
How did it happen and why?
For 2,600 years the Jews
of Iraq had dwelled successfully in the land
of Babylon, achieving as much acceptance
and financial success as a non-Muslim group
could in an Islamic society that despised
infidels. Iraqi Jews were well entrenched
at all levels of farming, banking, commerce
and the government bureaucracy. They virtually
invented the modern Iraqi monetary and financial
system after that nation emerged from the
British mandate in 1932. Jews contributed
vibrantly to the arts and were the heart
of Iraq’s international commerce.
Indeed, Jews were among
the best-educated people in the country,
and fiercely loyal to a land they had thrived
in for millennia. As such, they were the
wealthiest and most assimilated Jews in the
Arab Middle East. In many ways they resembled
the middle-class and affluent, entrenched
Jews of Germany who
felt more German than Jewish. Likewise, Iraqi
Jews, universally Anti-Zionist,
believed they were more Iraqi than Jewish.
But with the outbreak of World
War II, it all began to change. On
Oct. 13, 1939, just six weeks after the
war began, the mufti of Jerusalem slipped
into Baghdad to make Iraq his new base.
From Baghdad, the mufti repeated his Palestine
incitements, launching a venomous and unrelenting
campaign against Iraq’s Jewish community,
accusing them of a Zionist plot
to dominate Iraq and the wider Middle East.
At the same time, the mufti
sealed an alliance with Adolf
Hitler personally, seeking Germany’s
help in destroying the Jews of Palestine
and Eastern Europe, from where the stream
of emigrants were escaping. In return, the
mufti promised Iraq’s abundant oil
reserves, the fuel Hitler needed to conquer
Russia and the entire East.
On April 1, 1941, just months
before the long-anticipated Nazi invasion
of Russia, the mufti and a fascist cabal
of pro-Nazi Iraqi officers known as the Golden
Square staged a coup. The British-appointed
ruler, the Hashemite regent, fled for his
life.
To keep the oil out of Hitler’s
hands, the British invaded Iraq, and flew
air missions day and night to defeat German
bombers sent by Hitler to assist the Baghdad
coup. Within two months, the British had
ousted the Golden Square, whose leaders escaped
to Iran.
But on June 1 of that year,
in the last hours of the revolt, indeed even
as the regent was returning to his Baghdad
palace from the airport, a frenzied Arab
mob unleashed a two-day Kristallnacht-style
pogrom against the Jews of Baghdad. Women
were raped and infants crushed in front of
their terrified families. Jewish shops were
looted and torched. A synagogue was burned
and its Torahs ceremoniously destroyed.
British forces eventually
broke through, shot dozens of rioters and
restored order. A government commission reported
that at least 180 Jews had been killed and
240 wounded, 586 Jewish businesses pillaged,
and 99 Jewish homes burned.
The carnage of those 48
hours would be forever seared upon the collective
Iraqi Jewish consciousness as “the
Farhud,”
best translated as “violent dispossession.”
From that moment Iraq’s
Jews, once a settled and peaceful group within
Iraqi society, would be systematically targeted
for violence, persecution, commercial boycott
and confiscation.
Cry
To Battle
After the mufti had
fled Iraq in 1941, Nazi leader Heinrich
Himmler sponsored him in Germany, offering
him lavish facilities. In regular radio programs,
the mufti broadcast the Iraqi rallying cry
to Muslim Nazi troops and to Arabs everywhere
to fight the Allies: “O Muslims! Proud
Iraq has placed herself in the vanguard of
this Holy Struggle … It is the duty
of all Muslims to aid Iraq in her struggle
and seek every means to fight the enemy.”
As for the Jews, he exhorted, “Arabs!
Rise as one and fight for your sacred rights.
Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This
pleases Allah, history and religion. This
saves your honor.”
So while Arab Jewish communities,
such as those in Iraq, savored every day
of seeming peace since the Farhud, the desire
to see their destruction only ramified throughout
the Arab world, particularly in Iraq. Moreover,
the Jews were a convenient scapegoat for
Iraqi politicians in the absence of any great
industrial or national achievements.
Maj. John Glubb, the British
officer who organized the Arab Legion, complained
bitterly in a letter to Whitehall.
“We ... imagined that
we had bestowed on the Iraqis all these blessings
of democracy, which the British people enjoy
with such relish,” he wrote.
“Nothing could be
more undemocratic than the result. A handful
of politicians obtained possession of the
machinery of government, and all the elections
were rigged,” Glubb lamented, going
on to say, “In this process they all
became very rich.”
After the defeat of Germany
in 1945, Iraq retained its Nazified ideology.
The situation escalated fiercely in February
1947, when the United
Nations agreed to vote on the question
of partitioning
Palestine. Uniformly the Arab regimes,
including the Baghdad government, officially
threatened that if the UN dared vote “yes” to
partition, the Arabs would exact reprisals
against the 700,000 Jews who had dwelled
in countries throughout the Middle East.
The day Israel declared
its independence,
the Arab League, including major units of
the Iraqi army, invaded from all sides. The
Arabs vowed an “extermination and a
momentous massacre of the Jews.”
It didn’t happen.
Only Iraq refused to sign
the armistice following Israel’s victory
in 1948. Instead, it became convenient to
again blame Iraqi Jews and “Zionist
gangs” for this latest Iraqi military
disaster.
On July 19, 1948, Iraq amended
penal code Law 51, making Zionism itself
a crime punishable by up to seven years in
prison. Although Zionism was
never defined, every Jew was thought to be
a Zionist, thereby criminalizing every Jew.
Hundreds of Jews were arrested, tortured
until they confessed, and sentenced to long
jail terms.
By October 1948, all Jews
holding government positions
— an estimated 1,500 — were summarily
dismissed. There followed an organized boycott
and systematic expulsion of Jews from Iraq’s
commercial and cultural mainstream. Many
purged Jewish government employees, highly
skilled and well paid. Now destitute, they
were reduced to selling matches on the streets
to avoid being arrested for vagrancy.
Citizenship
Revoked
An estimated 130,000 Jews
lived in the Iraq of 1949, half in Baghdad.
The Baghdad Chamber of Commerce listed 2,430
member companies; a third were Jewish. In
fact, a third of the chamber’s board
and almost all its employees were Jewish.
Jewish firms transacted
45 percent of the exports and nearly 75 percent
of the imports. A quarter of Iraqi Jews worked
in transportation, such as the railways and
port administration. The controller of the
budget was Jewish; a director of the Iraqi
National Bank was Jewish; the Currency Office
board was all Jewish; the Foreign Currency
Committee was about 95 percent Jewish. Over
the centuries, Jews had become essential
to the economy.
Now Jews began fleeing,
mainly to neighboring Iran.
They smuggled out whatever valuables they
could to rebuild their lives. On March 3,
1950, to halt the uncontrolled flight of
assets and people, Iraq passed a one-year
amendment to Law 1, the Denaturalization
Act. This statute revoked the citizenship
of any Jew who willingly left the country.
Upon exit, their assets were frozen but were
still available to the emigrants for use
within Iraq.
Thousands of Jews seized
the opportunity to leave, believing at least
that their assets, while frozen, would still
be viable within Iraq until a better day.
But when the one-year law expired, a successor
anti-Jewish statute was enacted secretly
on March 10, 1951. Law 5, known as the Law
for the Control and Administration of Property
of Jews Who Have Forfeited Nationality, permanently
seized all the assets of Jews who had been
denaturalized by the previous law and any
others that would be pressured to leave the
country.
The day the law was passed,
the phones went down all over Baghdad to
prevent panicked Jews from swiftly transferring
their assets to safety. What’s more,
the banks were closed for three days.
With Jewish assets prone
and vulnerable, Regulation 3 of Law 5 was
unveiled. Regulation 3 empowered Iraq’s
custodian general “to lay hands on
all property belonging to the person who
has forfeited Iraqi Nationality and to administer,
dispose of and liquidate it.”
Like the Nazis before them,
the Iraqi regulations meticulously constructed
an elaborate juridical structure for the
confiscations. The hope was to shield the
confiscations from the reach of international
law or compensation demands.
From 1951 to 1952, approximately
120,000 desperate Jews were airlifted from
Iraq to Israel in Operation
Ezra and Nehemiah. The speed and heartlessness
of the exodus was part of a calculated Iraqi
government plan to flood the fledgling Israeli
state with destitute Jews. The idea was to
crack Israel’s already strained infrastructure.
Defrocked of all jewelry and valuables at
the Baghdad airport, the forlorn airlifted
emigrants arrived at Lod Airport bewildered,
with little more than the clothes on their
bodies.
Israeli and Jewish officials
vociferously vowed to one day seek justice
and hold their compensation of Palestinian
claimants in the balance. That determination
faded over the years even as the Israeli
Ministry of Justice quietly gathered thousands
of files on what Israeli officials derided
as “robbery by force of law.”
After Saddam
Hussein was toppled last year, hopes
of compensation revived, not only among
the Jews but also among many groups. Indeed,
to address the many compensation claims
by any number of minorities, Iraq’s
Governing Council has created the Iraqi
Property Claims Commission, with offices
in 10 cities. The IPCC intends to review
claims by any Iraqi of any ethnicity or
religion — Kurd, Assyrian, Christian
or Shiite —
unfairly deprived of his property by the
Baathist regimes.
However, the Baath movement
first came to power in 1968, 17 years after
the 1951 law that rapidly liquidated 2,600
years of Jewish existence in Iraq. Hence,
the massive confiscations inflicted on Iraqi
Jewry will be unaddressed by the existing
mechanism, a fact not lost upon those seeking
alternative avenues of restitution.
Whether or not giant sums
are won in any court of law or claims tribunal,
no sum of dollars or dinars can make amends
for the traumatic expulsion of Iraqi Jewry
from a cradle of civilization that they helped
nurture.
Sources: New
York Jewish Week, (October 22, 2004)
Edwin
Black is the award-winning author of IBM
and the Holocaust (Random House).
This article is adapted from his just-released
book, Banking
on Baghdad (Wiley), which
chronicles 7,000 years of Iraqi history.
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