My grandfather, when he was still alive, never spoke about the Farhud. To my surprise, I had never even heard of the word Farhud— Arabic for “robbery” or “violent dispossession”— until I was 18 years old, doing research on my Iraqi-Jewish family’s history. I was horrified by what I learned: in 1941, on the eve of Europe’s Holocaust, an Iraqi pro-Nazi pogrom swept through Baghdad during the Jewish high holiday of Shavuot. Over two days, thousands of Iraqi Muslims participated in the murder and disappearance of as many as a thousand Iraqi-Jews, with countless Jewish women raped and tortured, and Jewish property ransacked and looted. 

In the months leading up to it, antisemitic propaganda was frequently broadcast both by the local radio station and Radio Berlin in Arabic; shops owned by Muslims had “Muslim” written on them, so that they would not be damaged in the case of anti-Jewish riots.

It occurred to me that my grandfather, who lived in Baghdad at that time, was 24 years old when it happened. I imagine the reason he rarely spoke about it was due to how traumatic and horrifying it was. A few years later, Jews began to be publicly hanged in Baghdad and Basra due to various charges of “Zionist conspiracy.” In 1950, the Iraqi government reversed their previous ban on Jewish emigration out of Iraq for one year only, and my grandparents, along with over 130,000 Iraqi-Jews, began their exodus from Iraq. Their citizenship was renounced, and they began a new life in Iran where my father was born. 

Their story is just one of many in the Middle East and North Africa’s ethnic cleansing of nearly a million Jews from the 1930’s until the 1970’s. Much of their expulsions from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Egypt, Bahrain, Iran, Sudan, Morocco, Algeria, and Afghanistan were preceded with local, violent antisemitic riots and large-scale violence. 

The Nazi regime itself directly reached North Africa and the Mediterranean through France’s Vichy Regime and Nazi occupation. Jews in Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya were persecuted and dehumanized, many dying after being sent to labor and death camps. Greece’s small Jewish city of Salonika was annihilated when more than 45,000 Salonikan Jews were murdered after being deported to Nazi death camps.

Yet, through my entire education growing up, I had never heard of such things. The Holocaust was an ethnic cleansing that had happened in Europe. I had never known of a Holocaust in the Middle East. 

Unfortunately, for most people, the Holocaust is about as far as their knowledge goes in terms of Jews, let alone 2000 years of Jewish history. In other words: because of mainstream Holocaust education, most people’s only sense of Jewish history and events is traced back to Europe. 

It’s a notion that has blown up in global Jewry’s face, despite the fact that one of the goals in most Western Holocaust education curriculum is to fight antisemitism. Some of the most common antisemitic rhetoric I observe in today’s explosive anti-Zionist movement is that Jews are “white Europeans”; many have no concept or idea that huge numbers of Jews also come from the Middle East and North Africa. Regardless of that, Ashkenazi Jews are certainly not “white Europeans”— given that for the bulk of history, they were expelled, tortured, and massacred in pogroms, with two-thirds of their population completely annihilated in the Holocaust in murder-factories because they were considered an inferior, non-white minority of  “outsiders” in Europe. 

Of course, the modern idea that Jews are white has created its own subcategory of hatred— a mythological inverse of what Hitler believed. Instead of Jews being vile, non-white controllers and dominators, much Jew-hatred today typically categorizes Jews as vile, white controllers and dominators— their own oppressive category of “white”, in fact. A recent Harvard poll reported that (although the vast majority of respondents answered otherwise)  67% of respondents aged 18-24 agreed that “Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors”— a jarring conclusion for an otherwise “progressive” generation in the U.S. In the context of Israel-Palestine, Holocaust inversion is rampant; even 1 in 3 Germans say Israel treats Palestinians like how Nazis treated Jews. 

Yet it doesn’t surprise me that, as the ignorant trace Jewish roots back to Europe, they invert a conflict in the only Jewish state through the only Jewish event they know of: the Holocaust, with “Zionism” being Nazism, Jews being the white Nazis, and Palestinians being the Jews. 

If only they knew that just as the Nazi Regime relied on the help of local Europeans to cooperate with rounding up and turning in Jews, the very same enthusiasm to help Nazis occurred in the MENA region. Renowned American historian on Arab and Islamic politics, Robert Satloff, writes in his article about countering Holocaust denial in Arab and Muslim societies, “In all of this, Arabs played a central role. Indeed, Arabs’ actions were not too different from those of Europeans. With war waging around them, most were indifferent. A percentage collaborated, including Arab officials in royal courts, Arab guards in labor camps, and those who went house to house pointing out where Jews lived. Without the help of local Arabs, at all levels, the persecution of Jews would have been virtually impossible.”

Even Walter Rauff himself, the Nazi colonel credited with creating the “mobile gas chamber,” wrote in his diary about how cooperative the Tunisian-Arab population was with the Nazis, that they were “friendly” and “willing to help.” The former Mufti of Jerusalem too, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, met with Hitler in 1941 to discuss the “annihilation” of Jewry living in then Mandatory Palestine and the greater Arab world. 

Even before the rise of Nazism, al-Husseini did his best to inflict violence upon Jews living in Mandatory Palestine. Already in the 1920s, he had begun invoking the antisemitic publication The Protocols of the Elders of Zion among other conspiracies to incite bloodshed; the 1929 Hebron Massacre followed, an anti-Jewish massacre in the city of Hebron that resulted in the brutal murder and maimings of hundreds of Jews who were part of Hebron’s over 800 year old Jewish community. (During the massacre, rape, burning, maiming, looting, and mutilation were widespread.) 

Al-Husseini is considered one of the founding fathers of Arab and Palestinian nationalism; many remain unaware that he was one of the high Nazi leaders of the Arab world. In fact, from 1941 to 1945, Hajj Amin al-Husseini lived in Nazi Germany where he served the Nazi war effort in many ways. He was appointed by the Nazis to be the head of their Arabic-language propaganda network on Radio Berlin, and even assisted in recruiting Arab-Muslim and non-Arab Muslim soldiers for the Nazi regime’s military, including three SS divisions which consisted of Bosnian Muslims. 

Determined to spread Nazi propaganda, al-Husseini traveled throughout the Middle East on several campaigns to incite violence against Jews; more often than not, those campaigns were successful. In fact, for several months before the Farhud, al-Husseini lived in Iraq and gained a large number of loyal followers in the Iraqi government and military. In his public speeches, he often encouraged mass violence upon the local Jewish population— the very violence that my grandfather directly experienced. It was only two years after the Farhud, when the Holocaust in Europe was at its height, that al-Husseini informed his audience that the Germans had “decided to find a definitive solution to the Jewish danger.” He urged all Arabs and Muslims to join the Germans in this “common battle against the Jewish danger.” [1]

Author Sabrina Soffer writes in her article on Arab and Jewish relations during the Holocaust that “the importation of Nazi antisemitism [into the Arab world] made Jews an easy scapegoat that influenced publications, such as a 1940 editorial in the Algerian newspaper El-Balagh that voiced the desire to expel Jews to ‘a faraway desert’ or ‘desert’ under ‘rigorous international control…predictably, the toxic blend of bigoted fabrications, hateful ideology, and propaganda triggered violent anti-Jewish riots in Iraq, Tunis, and Cairo among other Arab cities from 1941 through the 1950’s and 60’s, mirroring similar events on European streets.” Syria’s former Ba’athist prime minister Sami al-Jundi writes in his memoir, “Whoever has lived during this period in Damascus will appreciate the inclination of the Arab people to Nazism, for Nazism was the power which could serve as its champion, and he who is defeated will by nature love the victor.” 

The Farhud, then, can only truly be understood within that context; that much of the Arab world, in fact, allied themselves with Nazism during World War II. That my grandfather was one of thousands of Jews ethnically cleansed from Iraq due to Nazi ideology that many locals gladly took part in. And that the story of Jews living in Arab lands is largely neglected and forgotten; to this day, even the United Nations has yet to acknowledge Jewish mass expulsion from the MENA region. 

Of course, when the Jews of MENA, Mizrahi Jews like my grandfather, were ethnically cleansed from the region, most didn’t flock to Western nations in Europe and North America. Most fled to Israel, and Mizrahi Jews make up over 50% of Israel’s demographic. Although many Ashkenazi Jews also refuged in Israel after the Holocaust, many others sought a new life in Western Europe and the United States. In the U.S., where most American Jews descend from post-Holocaust Europe, Holocaust education’s missing story of Middle Eastern Jews gives fuel to the revisionist narrative that all Jews are “white” and of European descent. 

Standard Holocaust education in the West discusses Nazi violence and dehumanization perpetuated against European Jewry, albeit in a broader, generalized context of “racism”; it may speak of the measures taken in order to oppress Jews in Europe, isolate them, humiliate them, and murder them in the most efficient way possible. Yet as Holocaust education overlooks the very existence of other Jewish groups during this period, it also suppresses any dialogue on the actual origins of Jewish people: who are the Jews, and why are they spread across the world, spurned from nearly every society they’re part of? Where did they come from, and from where did their Diaspora begin? 

The Jews, of course, came from Judea; they were expelled 2000 years ago with violence so brutal and traumatic that it still remains etched into Jewish collective consciousness thousands of years later. They’ve remained in Diaspora ever since— and the Holocaust is just one example of mass violence perpetrated upon us throughout history and geographical location, although it was immense as to the sheer numbers. Diaspora Jews today collectively remain to essentially have the same oral history, purity laws, and dietary laws, despite thousands of years of isolation; each of their festivals come directly from their ancient Torah, and are deeply tied to the Land of Israel’s harvest cycles as well as the Hebrew calendar. Their prayers too, remain recited in the direction of Jerusalem, longing for the return to their homeland— seemingly important context missing in many educational discussions about how and why Jews didn’t belong, how they were considered “others” in nearly every society they were part of across the globe. 

Yet it’s that very context that demonstrates that Jews— despite having significant ethnic diversity due to millenniums of diaspora— ultimately come from a single tribal, indigenous origin still ingrained in their practice and culture today. My own grandparents spoke Judeo-Arabic, a Hebrew dialect of Arabic which is thousands of years old and originates from the Levant (it was also my father’s first language). My grandfathers’ last name— Zelkha— is a Hebrew acronym (Zecher L’Kohen HaGadol - זלכה) which translates to “Remember the High Priest”, a reference to my family’s tribal priesthood lineage, passed down through thousands of years of oral history after they were expelled from then-Judea. 

Meanwhile, while mainstream Western Holocaust education’s exclusion of Jewish history and origins inadvertently leads people to trace Jews’ lineage to Europe, in the Middle East the Holocaust altogether is a taboo subject, with rarely any Holocaust literature that exists in Arabic, and Holocaust education virtually non-existent. Arab societies remain flooded with support for Hitler and other anti-Jewish figures. Just last year, at the Cairo International Book Fair, featured books that were in demand included Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Tsarist Russia’s The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Henry Ford’s The International Jew, and Guy Carr’s Pawns in the Game— a wild book on the “implementation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. 

Holocaust denial runs rampant, despite MENA’s own recent history of the violent expulsion of Jews and common rhetoric in the region that appropriates the Holocast in the context of Palestinian struggle; sitcoms about the “fake Holocaust” have been hits in Egypt and Gulf countries, while hundreds of books that denied the Nazi genocide were and are still sold in bookshops across the Arab world. In 2010, an opinion poll conducted by the Saban Center for Middle East Policy showed that 56% of citizens in the six countries surveyed (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates) do not sympathize with the Holocaust, compared to only 3% who do. 

According to a survey run by the University of Haifa in 2007, more than a quarter of Israeli Arab citizens denied the Holocaust; a street in Gaza is lovingly named after Hajj Amin al-Husseini. The denazification of Europe that occurred after World War II remains disturbingly absent in the Arab and Islamic world. 

It’s what author Dara Horn describes as “the triumph of evil”: like Europe, societies in the Middle East and North Africa decided it was unacceptable to have Jews living there, and to this day, have not been held accountable by the world or through education. When Holocaust education creates the notion that the Holocaust and its antisemitism was an event that carefully occurred within the borders of Europe, it damages Holocaust memory and erases the experiences of Jews expelled from the Middle East and North Africa, many who are still alive today.

I never learned about any of that during the Holocaust education of my formative years, and I went to a Jewish high school. I consider it lucky that I at least learned about the beautiful traditions and communities of Eastern European Jews before they were murdered in the Holocaust, as well as atrocities like Babi Yar. For my friends in non-Jewish schools, the most they got was Anne Frank’s diary (a work that seems to define mainstream Holocaust memory, despite the glaring fact that it has no testimony on the actual horrors of death camps like Auschwitz, where Frank was murdered before she could write about it).

When I myself visited Auschwitz in 2018, I came upon an enormous book that seemed to stretch from one end of the room to the other. It was a list of names belonging to millions of Jews murdered in the Holocaust; an incomplete list, given the large number of people whose names were lost in history. I often wonder about MENA’s forgotten Jews like my grandfather, the ones who survived brutal loss and expulsion. 

I think about the others who didn’t even survive to be expelled. What were their names? 

Additional Sources: 

1. ‘Parallels between Nazi and Islamist Anti-Semitism.” Joseph S. Spoerl, Jewish Political Studies Review, Vol. 31, No. 1/2 (2020), pp. 212-214. Published by: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

2. Mattar, P. (1992). The Mufti of Jerusalem: Haj Amin al-Husseini and the Palestinian National Movement. Columbia University Press. archive.org, https://archive.org/details/muftiofjerusalem0000matt/mode/2up 

Maia Zelkha is an Iraqi-Jewish writer living in Jerusalem. Her work has been published in the Jewish Book Council, Parabola, Furrow Magazine, Times of Israel Blogs, and more. She is the founding editor-in-chief of Yad Mizrah Magazine.