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Remembering The Farhud, The Pogrom That Ended Iraqi Jewish Life

An Iraqi boy plays in front of a closed synagogue in Baghdad. Only a few Jews remain in Iraq today.



But on June 1-2, 1941, something previously unthinkable in the city occurred. Mobs attacked the capital's prosperous and influential Jewish community, killing more than 100 people and looting homes.


The two days of terror are known in Iraq as the Farhud, the Arabic word for pillaging or looting an enemy. Yet most Iraqis know very little about the event because Iraq's history books rarely speak of them. Those writers who do mention those days simply explain the violence as the result of the Iraqi Jewish community's "Zionist activities," without detailing more.

But people who survived the attacks and remember the events tell another story -- like Layer Abudia, who now lives in Israel, who was a child at the time of the pogrom.

"I watched people killing at least four to five Jews in front of me," Abudia says. "Every car that passed by was stopped by the mob that pulled Jews out and killed them. I heard they killed 20 to 25 people in the airport area."



"That night we heard screams coming out of the houses of Jews," recalls Nassim al-Qazzaz, another survivor who now lives in Israel. "They were killed and their homes were pillaged. This continued for less than 24 hours."

"The next day, approximately at noon, the regent Abdul Illah issued an order to fire on the mob," Qazzaz says. "He could have done that the same day of course, before things got worse, but he preferred not to interfere so the mob could release their anger at the Jews."

Vulnerable Minority



A Baghdad street in 1941
But by 1941, several things had happened to make the Iraqi Jews' position especially vulnerable.

One was the rise of fascism in Europe, followed by the Axis powers' sweeping successes against Britain in the first years of war. And central to the Nazi ideology was hatred of the Jews. Finally, there was the common cause some Arab Muslim leaders made with Nazism and its hatred of Jews in hopes the Axis powers would propel them to power in the Middle East.


Husayni had been a key instigator of violence on the Arab side as the number of Jews jumped from 17 percent of Palestine's population in 1931 to 30 percent in 1935. Many of the arriving Jews were fleeing Germany and now the grand mufti was seeking Berlin's help to expel both them and the British mandate authorities from the Holy Land.

But it was in Iraq, not Palestine, that the kind of alliance Husayni was proposing got its first test. There, Berlin backed an anti-British coup in April 1941 led by nationalist Rashid Ali al-Gaylani -- a Husayni ally -- and supported by high-ranking army officers. The coup easily toppled the country's weak Hashemite monarchy, which was originally from the Hejaz region of Saudi Arabia and widely regarded as London's puppet.


Driven From Their Home

Exactly what set off the pogrom is not known, but it may have been the Jewish community's celebration of its annual harvest festival, Shavuot, on June 1. The sight of Jews celebrating became a pretext for fascists to portray them as welcoming the coup's failure. And the chance to act came as British troops waited outside Baghdad so that royalist Iraqi soldiers could enter first, creating a power vacuum in the city.

Survivor Qazzaz says that even today he doesn't know what happened to his father in the pogrom. But he says after such violence, most Iraqi Jews felt they had no option but to emigrate.

"Since then we have not heard anything about the fate of my father and his companion. Some 180 Jews were killed in this massacre. Scores of houses and shops were looted and plundered, women violated and murdered," Qazzaz says. "That was the Farhud. In my opinion it was one of the main reasons that drove Jews to leave Iraq."

Most of the exodus took place in the early 1950s, after tensions over the 1948 Arab-Israeli war isolated the Jewish community even further. The Iraqi government declared "those who want to leave can leave" and some 100,000 left for Israel.

Today the Farhud -- Baghdad's Krystallnacht -- remains significant not only for breaking the spirit of Baghdad's once thriving Jewish community. It also proved how powerful the fusion of fascism and radical Islam could be.


His messages were a continuous call for uprisings to evict the allies. But he reserved his greatest invective for Jews, saying their "spilled blood pleases Allah, our history, and religion," and proclaiming "if America and England win the war, the Jews will dominate the world."

At the same time, he vigorously recruited European Muslims for the Wehrmacht and for special Waffen SS units, especially in the former Yugoslavia. And he actively lobbied against any deportation of Jews to Palestine from Romania and Hungary, urging they be sent to Poland -- where the Nazis operated death camps* -- instead.

Arab Independence


Husayni was always accorded the respect due a head of state in Berlin, leading many historians to speculate he may have hoped to be the Axis' fuhrer of the Middle East, had it won the war. But it didn't, and as Germany surrendered, Husayni was arrested by the French.





The argument flies in the face of history in a region that has always been home to many religions and ethnicities. But it continues to be a justification for intimidation and attacks as fundamentalist groups today try to cleanse their home countries of "others" just as the Nazis once did in Europe.

* CLARIFICATION: This story has been amended from the original version to specify that Nazis were operating death camps in Poland.

Karam Mnashe is a correspondent for RFE/RL's Radio Free Iraq. Charles Recknagel is a senior correspondent for RFE/RL in Prague

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