Mick Hartley

The Farhud – the Nazi-inspired massacre of Jews in Iraq in June 1941 – was barely acknowledged in the West until recently. As with all the Jewish persecutions and expulsions from the Arab world, it was forgotten in favour of a one-sided focus on the Palestinians and the other side of the story.

Lyn Julius, author of Uprooted: how 3,000 years of Jewish civilisation in the Arab world vanished overnight, writes in Fathom on The Three Best Books on the Farhud. Her introduction:

The 7 October Hamas attack has been commonly described as the worst massacre since the Holocaust. But among Jews born in Arab and Muslim countries, it has stirred memories of deadly violence perpetrated by local mobs. The pogroms recall a familiar modus operandi –rampages replete with slaughter, burnings, rape, mutilation, destruction, looting. One of the most serious was the two-day Farhud (A Kurdish word meaning murderous breakdown of law and order): the June 1941, Nazi-inspired massacre of Jews in Iraq. Some 179 identified Jews were murdered (some estimates put the toll as high as 600, or even 1,000), 2,000 were wounded and 900 homes and 586 Jewish-owned businesses were destroyed.

This episode shook the 150,000-member Jewish community as never before. The Jews had been settled in the region for almost three millennia – since the Babylonian exile. The Farhud sounded the death knell for the Jews of Iraq. 120,000 fled ten years later. Other riots followed (Libya in 1945 and 1948 – 148 Jews dead), Aden (87 Jews dead) Syria (the Aleppo Great synagogue destroyed), Morocco (48 dead) as Jews felt the full force of state-sponsored incitement and persecution in Arab states.

Mob violence or the threat of violence on the eve of Israel’s declaration of independence was a key factor in undermining the Jewish sense of security in a world already buffeted by the forces of Arab nationalism and anti-colonialism. The result was a mass exodus and the extinction of age-old Jewish communities.

Although the Farhud was a trauma already deeply embedded in the collective memory of the Jews of Iraq, it is only in the last 15 years that the term has become familiar to a niche English-speaking readership – thanks in part to the following three books…

You'll have to read the article for those recommendations…..