Arab rulers reach out to Jewish families
Attempting to rebuild ancient Jewish communities from Morocco to Saudi Arabia
Greetings to Gold and Silver Level Templar Knights. I couldn’t resist sharing this story with you. Of late, Arab rulers from Morocco to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and even Syria have been reaching out to Jewish families enticing them to return to their ancestral homelands. For centuries, cities like Marrakech and Baghdad had huge and thriving Jewish populations but then they collapsed. Why did that happen? And why do these countries want to rebuild what was tragically lost? Read on.
The Middle East once had thriving Jewish communities from Marrakech to Baghdad with well attended synagogues in Cairo and Damascus. A century or more of conflict in the region led many Jews to leave for the state of Israel created in 1948 or emigrate further afield.
But now many Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Morocco are looking to attract Jewish families back with even Syria recently hosting a delegation of Jews from the United States.
The Economist just reported that Yemeni Jews, who have been in that war-stricken part of Arabia for millennia, are leaving as Houthi rebels drive them out. Yemen was a trading hub believed to have been the biblical land of Sheba - but its prosperity is long forgotten.
Jewish Yemenis are packing their bags. But instead of heading for Israel, they have been offered inducements by the UAE to settle in Dubai. It’s all part of a new effort to “seed new Jewish communities in the country”. The Economist states:
“From Morocco to the Gulf, a surprising number of Arab countries are welcoming back Jews and embracing their Jewish heritage. The reasons vary. The failures and excesses of Arab nationalism and Islamism have forced many countries to rethink chauvinist dogmas.”
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have hosted multicultural gatherings and muzzled clerics who “step out of line”. Portrayals of Jews in the media have become more sympathetic and some Arab universities have even opened departments of Jewish history.
Bahrain is home to the Gulf’s oldest synagogue – The House of Ten Commandments. Jews started arriving in Bahrain in the 1880s from Iraq and Iran seeking a better life. They settled in the Al-Hatab neighbourhood of Manama working at first in the clothing industry.
By 1935, the community was thriving enough for an Iranian immigrant, Shimon Cohen, to establish a synagogue. It now only services about 50 people but the authorities have spent US$160k renovating the synagogue as a sign that Jews are very welcome to return.
Left behind in all of this is the Israel-Palestine question. Sceptics in the region have always questioned the commitment of Arab rulers to the Palestinian cause. As it seems forever intractable, their interest has shifted to accommodating Israel and rebuilding Jewish communities.
The Economist notes that it’s no accident that Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman has located his new US500bn hi-tech city Neom on the north-west coast, close to Israel to attract its IT expertise.
Mizrahi Jews and the Arab world
To understand what is happening, we have to re-think Judaism and the Middle East. We’ve become so used to the idea of the Jewish state of Israel and its Muslim neighbours. But the Jewish world in past centuries included large concentrations of Jewish families across the Arab world.
There are just under five million Mizrahi Jews in the world today with the majority in Israel but large communities in the United States, Russia, and central Asia. They descend from Jews who never lived in Europe – like the Sephardic Jews – but remained in the Middle East until modern times.
Their culture often blended elements of their Arab neighbours and their language mixed Hebrew with Arabic. There is a very charged debate over whether they should be called Mizrahi or Arab Jews that I’m going to avoid as it’s just another political quagmire that it’s best to step around. In short, the Mizrahim always retained a sense of their religious identity while assimilating and contributing to the surrounding Arab culture over the centuries.
Many are now reportedly re-discovering their roots, particularly in Morocco. And the government there has been keen to renovate historic sites, support museums and increasingly encourage inter-faith dialogue.
Fascinating to read in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that in the 1920s, there were attempts to bring together Mizrahi Jews and Palestinians in a common cause: “Before Israel’s establishment in 1948, some Jews and Arabs saw each other as ‘brothers’ and had a utopian vision of a shared future”. That of course did not come to pass.
Mizrahi Jews went to Israel after 1948 pulled in part by the attraction of a Jewish homeland – especially after the horror in Europe of the Nazi holocaust – and pushed by xenophobic and sectarian currents in what had been their homelands for millennia.
Ottoman cosmopolitan paradise – or not
At its height, the Ottoman Empire ruled everything around the eastern Mediterranean much as the preceding Byzantine and Roman empires had done. This was undoubtedly a multi-cultural, multi-faith empire. Which has led some commentators to argue that had western colonialists not intervened in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Abrahamic faiths might have continued to rub along together in increasing harmony.
By this argument, Britain and France are the villains who cynically carved up the Ottoman Empire after World War One, imposing random borders and using the dangerous tactic of divide and rule. They, therefore, are primarily to blame for sectarian bloodshed in Lebanon and the enmity between Jews and Palestinians in modern Israel and the West Bank. If only the Ottomans had endured, none of this would have happened.
But history is a more complex beast. Jews were able to prosper under the Ottoman Empire, but it wasn’t always plain sailing. There were long running tensions with Greek communities going back to the Roman period. As early as 38 CE, we know that Jews and Greeks clashed in Alexandria when the former were accused of dishonouring the emperor. Well, he was Caligula. Hard to honour really.
Fast forward to April 1821 and we have the Ottoman Sultan dragging the elderly Greek patriarch Gregory V out of his church in Constantinople at Easter and having him hanged. In the sultan’s eyes he had failed to suppress the Greek war for independence from Ottoman rule. Greeks within the empire and in neighbouring Russia accused Jews of collaborating with the sultan and in Russia there was the first of what would be many, horrific pogroms against Jewish communities.
In between those two far distant sectarian clashes, there were indeed long periods in which Jews were able to prosper under Ottoman rule. But it was always dictated by whatever was in the interests of the sultan. So, for example, when Constantinople was taken from the Byzantines in 1453, the sultan needed it repopulated with reliably loyal citizens. Among others he turned to the Balkans-based “Romaniote” Jews and moved thousands of them into the city.
They were soon joined by a large influx of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal as both Jews and Muslims were forced at pain of death to convert to Catholicism, die or leave. The Ottoman Empire was more than happy to absorb these people with their skills and resources. Spain’s loss – Ottoman gain.
Jewish communities disappear in Arab countries
Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the diversity of faiths and ethnicities that was once a hallmark of the region has been systematically undermined. Purges, pogroms, and discrimination has rearranged the demographic map so that cities like Baghdad and Istanbul have become far more homogenised in religious terms.
In 1945, about 856k Jewish people lived in the Middle East spread across north Africa, the Levant, and the Gulf. Today, outside of Israel, about 4,500 remain – mostly in Tunisia and Morocco. 2,500 years of coexistence evaporated in decades following the 1947 United Nations partition of Palestine.
The figures are shocking. Before 1975, there were 38,000 Jews in Libya while today there are none. Just 50 years ago, there were 140k Jewish people in Algeria and today there are none. About 295k left Morocco, 55,000 left Yemen, 20,000 left Lebanon, 180k left Syria and 25,000 left Iran.
In 1939, a third of the population of Baghdad was Jewish. Some could no doubt trace their roots back to the Babylonian captivity detailed in the bible. The Talmud was written by the rivers of Babylon.
One could argue that the Jewish religion was shaped more in what we now call Iraq than in modern Israel. But in 1951, Iraqi Jews were stripped of their nationality and in 1969, many fled after nine Jewish Iraqis were publicly hanged on spying charges.
As I wrote above, there were push and pull factors that led many Jews to move to Israel. Before the Nazi holocaust, not everybody thought they needed to up sticks and move to a new homeland. But the slaughter of six million Jews by the Third Reich and the rise of Arab nationalism and Islamism plus the creation of the state of Israel transformed the political and religious dynamics in the Middle East.
So, is the clock now being turned back?