Eugène Delacroix, Jewish Musician in Mogador Costume, Morocco, from "Le Magasin Pittoresque", January 1842 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Across the centuries, the terms used to describe the geographic, historical and religious significance of such communities has fuelled socio-political controversy. The discourse ranges from hotly-debated classifications such as Sephardi (Heb. “Spaniard”) and Mizrahi (Heb. “Easterner”), to more obscure and nuanced terms like Toshav (Heb. “Native”), Megorash (Heb. “Deportee”), Musta’rib or Musta’arabi (Ar. “Those who behave like Arabs,”; used by Arabs to distinguish Jews that resided in Arab countries before the Muslim conquest of the Levant, including the Land of Israel). Some deeply misguided individuals with an axe to grind against the modern State of Israel have adopted the historical aberration of the “Arab Jews.” [2] 

Regardless of what we call them, Jews from the MENA and their descendants are undeniably misunderstood and weaponised in the modern political arena. 

Historical Background

Jews have lived in the wider MENA region since at least the summer of 586 BCE, when the armies of the Neo-Babylonian Empire under King Nebuchadnezzar II defeated the Kingdom of Judah and conquered Jerusalem.[3] From then on, Jews would be forced to adapt to ever-changing geopolitical landscapes, playing a crucial role in the dynamics of imperial power. For example, records from the Persian-ruled Achaemenid Empire mention the presence of a partially Jewish garrison in southern Egypt from 530 BCE, tasked with defending against Cushite invasions.[4] Yet, they never relinquished their ancestral attachment to the Land of Israel despite their exilic conditions. Psalm 137 best reflects the sorrow of the Babylonian exile: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, sat and wept, as we thought of Zion.”[5]

Like the Jews of modern-day Iraq, other communities of the Sephardi-Mizrahi world are so ancient that they have become enshrined in Biblical literature. The Jews of Rhodes, an island community in the southern Aegean region of Greece, are briefly mentioned in the First Book of Maccabees.[6] The Book of Jeremiah records a dispute in which the “entire remnant of Judah” travelled to Egypt in defiance of divine will.[7] Despite the odds considerably stacked against them, Jewish populations stretching from Morocco to Turkey weathered millennia of abuse by countless imperial warlords, forced religious conversions, expulsions, and other manifestations of the same irrational hatred historically faced by our brothers, the Ashkenazim. 

Amid the legendary medieval struggle between the fanatical ranks of the Spanish Catholics and the unrelenting Muslim armies of North Africa, MENA Jewry would become suffused with the Hispanising force of Sephardi exiles from the Iberian Peninsula. These Jews exported a flourishing religious, scholarly, scientific and liturgical tradition, informed by icons such as Shelomoh ibn Gabirol (c.1021–c.1057), Yehudah HaLevi (c.1075–1141), and Avraham ben Meir Ibn Ezra (c.1089–c.1164). One of these emigrés, a certain Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon – known today as the Rambam or Maimonides – is often regarded as the man whose works became definitive of modern Jewish identity. Yet, in a powerful illustration of Jewish adaptability, his most influential treatises were originally written in Judeo-Arabic. [8] 

Following the 1492 Alhambra Decree in which the Spanish royal family formally purged Spain of Jewish life, an enormous wave of Sephardi Jews fled to the Ottoman Empire and North Africa, with some settling in more tolerant regions of Western Europe. In North Africa, these Jews became known as megorashim, or the “expelled ones”, to differentiate them from pre-existing Jewish residents, the toshavim. While their close proximity entailed frequent interaction, the differences of opinion between these populations in matters of religious law and communal administration led to repeated schisms. The Sephardim, having observed the power-wrestling strategies of their Christian and Muslim neighbours, eventually won the battle for institutional control. In her demographic analysis of Jewish life in early modern Fez, historian Jane Gerber notes: “At first glance, the indigenous community of Toshavim appears to have been all but absorbed by the newcomers, its customs and traditions obliterated.” [9]

For centuries, Jews in the MENA would continue to navigate the complex social position they occupied in an Arabo-Islamic environment which, though more tolerant in some respects than Western Christendom, fundamentally viewed them as inferior subordinates. The arrival of European colonial enterprise to the Middle East and North Africa led to the attainment of greater freedoms for some Jewish communities, which at times enraged their Muslim neighbours. For example, the 1912 Treaty of Fez, which established a French protectorate over Morocco, prompted thousands of Moroccan soldiers to use the Mellah (Jewish quarter) of Fez as an outlet for their fury. Hundreds of Jewish homes and businesses were destroyed, and dozens of Jews murdered. [10]  

The rise of the Zionist movement and its quest for Jewish state-building in the Levant in subsequent decades would only further inflame tensions between Jews and Muslims, prompting the outbreak of bloody pogroms. Prominent Israeli author and former Knesset politician Einat Wilf notes that the institutional framework of a deeply discriminatory and increasingly supremacist Islamic world could only be repulsed by “the idea of equal sovereign Jews, governing a share of the Earth’s land on their own.” [11] With the advent of the Second World War, notorious antisemites in the region such as the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, came to champion the atrocious genocidal mission of Hitler’s Third Reich. In a March 1944 radio broadcast from Nazi Germany, al-Husseini urged the Arab world to “kill the Jews wherever you find them.”[12] 

There were some notable exceptions: Sultan Mohammed V of Morocco fervently opposed the imposition of anti-Jewish legislation in North Africa by Nazi-occupied France, although his efforts were largely unsuccessful in preventing systemic discrimination against his Jewish subjects.[13] My great-great-uncle, Joseph Berdugo, was a Rabat-based grain broker who in December 1941 was barred from employment by the Vichy administration in Morocco. It was only after a lengthy appeals process that the Secretary-General of the French Protectorate, Pierre Voizard, finally relented and issued an exemption in a letter dated 27 June 1942. Joseph was one among tens of thousands of North African Jews who were oppressed and abused by the forces of Nazism.  

The declaration of the State of Israel in May 1948 and the subsequent outbreak of the Arab-Israeli War was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Faced with mounting suspicion, unspeakable hatred, and explosions of violence, Jews between Agadir and Aleppo knew better than to stay. In the following decades, it became a common occurrence in countless Jewish families to wake up in the dead of night, pack a suitcase with bare essentials, and hastily leave with no prospect of return, often aided by elements of the Zionist underground. While many wealthy Jews headed for the developed West or well-established communities in central Israel, a large proportion of Jewish refugees from the MENA found themselves housed in squalid and claustrophobic development towns in Israel’s peripheral regions. Known as ma’abarot, these temporary camps came to house hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab lands – later known as Mizrahim – who were forced to contend with lack of employment, limited food and water supplies, and poor facilities until the 1970s. The deprivation in the ma’abarot would become emblematic of the institutional discrimination Mizrahi newcomers faced from a state with distinct foundations in Ashkenazi intellectualism. Fortunately, such prejudices have virtually disappeared in present-day Israel, though Mizrahi history remains critically ignored in the Israeli educational curriculum.[14]

Contemporary Perspectives

Before the 1950s, almost a million Jews lived in the Middle East and North Africa. Fifty years later, only a few thousand remain outside of Israel, most of them in Morocco and Tunisia. Iraqi-Jewish author Lyn Julius has referred to this monumental event as the “Great Mizrahi Exodus.”[15] Needless to say, the term must be of particular irony to Egyptian Jews. There remains an enormous gap between the attention given to Palestinian Arab refugees and that given to Jewish refugees from the same era. Hundreds of United Nations resolutions concerning the Israeli-Palestinian issue since 1948 have consistently ignored the plight of Mizrahim, yet countless specifically reference the Arab refugee issue. UN General Assembly Resolution 194, passed in December 1948, called for a right of return or compensation for Palestinian refugees.[16] 

More recently, Resolution 67/19, adopted in November 2012, urged a “just resolution of the problem of the Palestine refugees.”[17] One might wonder why the UN has never called for the resettlement or compensation of hundreds of thousands of Jews who were forced to abandon all their possessions against Arab nationalist and Islamist onslaughts.

If one were to write down every Jewish contribution to the landscape of the MENA region, they could fill the shelves of the Library of Congress a thousand times over. Yet, mainstream cultural perceptions of Jews continue to be viewed through a western – often thoroughly racialised – framework. While efforts are being made by powerful Mizrahi voices via social media (e.g. Hen Mazzig, Rudy Rochman, Chama Mechtaly, etc.), far more awareness remains to be raised as to the diversity of Jewish experience. The memory of MENA Jewry is often obscured and overshadowed by a seemingly monolithic narrative of Ashkenazi culture and historical suffering which, while incredibly significant in its own right, impedes modern education on world Judaism. The average secondary school student might be familiar with the horrific atrocities of the Holocaust, but you will hardly find one who knows about the June 1941 Farhud (Ar. “robbery”), in which thousands of Iraqi Jews were brutalised by a pan-Arabist and pro-Nazi lynch mob.[18]

In the search for a definitive name for the mass exodus of Jews from the Arabo-Islamic world, a number of names have been proposed. One of these is the “Jewish Nakba”, which repurposes the Palestinian Arab claim to expulsion in 1948 to highlight the parallel plight of Jews in the region. However, the Nakba (Ar. “catastrophe”) references a component of modern Palestinian Arab identity and has been sharply criticised as a sensationalist narrative which necessarily overshadows the mass expulsion of Jews from the MENA during the same era.[19] Its application to Jews does not particularly make sense here. Other terms to describe the movement have included Nishul (Heb. “Dispossession”) and Girush (Heb. “Expulsion”). In 2021, Kurdish-Jewish peace activist Levi Meir Clancy suggested a novel term: Damgana. The acronym consists of five Hebrew letters, each representing a component of Jewish experience in the twentieth-century MENA: bloodshed, riots, expulsion, dispossession, and immigration to Israel.[20] Yet, these names have not been received with much enthusiasm in Israel and in Mizrahi communities across the globe. 

Enrichment

It is often easier to label the plight of Mizrahim as an “untold story” than it is to pay attention to active storytellers. Though unfederated, a considerable network of academics, activists, and organisations have attempted to tell the Mizrahi story. Among the organisations working to preserve the history of Jewish life in the MENA are Harif, the American Sephardi Federation, Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA), and Sephardi Voices UK. 

Recommended readings for beginners are Uprooted: How 3000 Years of Jewish Civilisation in the Arab World Vanished Overnight (2018) by Lyn Julius, The Wrong Kind of Jew: A Mizrahi Manifesto (2022) by Hen Mazzig, The Art of Leaving: A Memoir (2019) by Ayelet Tsabari, and Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (2011) by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole. Those with busy schedules may instead opt for a quick scroll through Instagram to @mizrahbox, who recently published a comprehensive work on the Jews of Peki’in, a community of Jews who resided in the Land of Israel since Roman expulsion and colonisation. Alternatively, one could listen to songs by The Revivo Project or Ofra Haza on their morning drive to work. If you have a passion for cooking, Linda Dangoor’s Flavours of Babylon (2014) and Adeena Sussman’s Sababa (2019) will transport celebrated dishes from MENA Jewish communities to your dinner table. 

There are many avenues of remembering when it comes to Jews from the MENA. Let them not be forgotten. 

References

1. https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/the-expulsion-of-jews-from-arab-countries-and-iran--an-untold-history, accessed 29 August 2024. 

2. Aurele Aaron Tobelem, “Why the term Arab Jews is wrong: A response to Avi Shlaim”, The Jerusalem Post, 23 August 2023, pp. 11.   

3. Avraham Faust, Judah in the Neo-Babylonian Period: The Archaeology of Desolation (Atlanta, 2012), pp. 1-2. 

4. Pierre Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire, trans. Peter T. Daniels (Indiana, 2002), pp. 54-55. 

5. Psalms 137:1

6. 1 Maccabees, 15:21

7. Jeremiah 42-44 

8. Alberto Manguel, Maimonides: Faith in Reason (Yale University Press, 2023), pp. 4, 45-49. 

9. Jane S. Gerber, “The Demography of the Jewish Community of Fez After 1492”, Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies, Vol. 2, Div. B (1973), 31.

10. Moshe Gershovich, French Military Rule in Morocco: Colonialism and its Consequences (London, 2000), pp. 56-58.

11. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/anti-feminism-and-anti-zionism, accessed 31 August 2024.  

12. Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 213. 

13. Joseph Tolédano, Les Juifs maghrébins (Turnhout, 1989), pp. 35-36.

14. https://fathomjournal.org/fallacies-about-mizrahi-jews-and-israeli-politics-a-reply-to-sam-shube/, accessed 1 September 2024.  

15. https://www.jns.org/making-sense-of-the-great-mizrahi-exodus/, accessed 29 August 2024.

16. UN General Assembly, 194 (III). Palestine - Progress Report of the United Nations Mediator, A/RES/194, 11 December 1948. 

17. UN General Assembly, 67/19. Status of Palestine in the United Nations, A/RES/67/19, 29 November 2012. 

18. Daphne Tsimhoni, “The Pogrom (Farhud) against the Jews of Baghdad in 1941”, in J.K. Roth et al. (eds.), Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide (London, 2001), pp. 570-588. 

19. https://www.camera.org/article/nakba-narrative-is-nonsense/, accessed 1 September 2024.  

20. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/from-the-nishul-to-yom-hagirush-the-damgana-emerges/, accessed 1 September 2024.  

Morrocan Arabic, known to its speakers as Darija (Ar. “Vernacular”), is replete with expressions, proverbs, and rhetoric which cannot easily be reproduced in the English-speaking world. 

One of these is Ya Ḥasra. The term generally translates to “Alas!”, yet is more indicative of a deep nostalgia, a heartbroken state in which one finds themselves grasping at the tattered remains of an idealised utopic existence from a time long since passed. While it may be interpreted as a longing for the “good old days”, it is in fact far more complex. 

If this expression could only be relevant to one group, it no doubt is the Jewish communities of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) who were forced out of their homes by pan-Arabist ideologues and Islamist mobs in the 20th century. [1]

Aurele Tobelem is a final-year undergraduate History student at King's College London (KCL), with a specialisation in colonial North Africa. A commentator and pro-Israel activist, Aurele is of Moroccan-Sephardi heritage and is also a member of Harif UK. He has been featured in The Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, and Global Arab Network.