Haj Amin Al-Husseini’s pro-Nazi Germany and anti-Jewish rhetoric were never challenged and were allowed to fester. A reading of al-Husseini’s work from the early 1930s and 1940s offers ample evidence that his anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist incendiary rhetoric had devastating consequences on ancient Jewish communities who lived in the Arab world for thousands of years – witness the Algeria pogrom of 1934; violence and disturbances in Rabat and Oujda in Morocco in 1933, 1934 and again in 1938; the “Farhoud” pogrom in Iraq in 1941; the 1945 street riots in Egypt and Libya; and the pogrom against the Jewish community in Cairo in 1948.1
Who can believe that Baghdad, where I was born, was once among the most Jewish cities in the world? Two years ago, I interviewed British-Iraqi and Jewish Lyn Julius, the author of “Uprooted.” I asked her, “what is left of Jewish history and heritage in Iraq; she replied, “Very little is left; Jewish shrines have been converted to mosques, cemeteries built over, and Jewish property has been taken over or crumbled to dust.”2
Yes, we are talking about the same Iraq where the Babylonian Talmud was written, and the prophet Ezekiel’s Tomb is under threat of destruction.
* * *
Notes
