Published: 25 May 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Eighty years on from 1941, PHILIP MENDES reflects on a massacre that made Iraqi Jews lose faith in their future, prompting a mass migration to Israel. Today only four are left
THE JEWS OF BAGHDAD were subjected to a pogrom during the holiday of Shavuot on June 1-2 in 1941 which arguably resembled the night of the broken glass (or Kristallnacht) in Nazi Germany in November 1938.
The pogrom is known as the Farhud, an Arabised Kurdish word which means “unrestrained massacre, burning, looting and rape by hooligans”, or simply violent dispossession.
About 180 Jews were murdered, nearly two thousand injured, including multiple cases of gang rape, many children orphaned, numerous Jewish properties, businesses and religious institutions damaged and looted, and more than 12,000 people left homeless.
The Farhud was perpetrated by Iraqi soldiers and officers who had returned from an unsuccessful battle with the British army, sections of the police force, and gangs of young people such as members of the paramilitary fascist youth group known as Al-Futuwwa.
This group included women (which was unusual for Arab society) influenced by religious and nationalist fanaticism, and the popular perception of a Jewish alignment with Britain.
These groups rejected the presence of national or religious minorities in the Arab world and regarded the Jews as a fifth column sympathetic to the Western powers.
The Farhud caused an enormous shock to the Jews of Iraq, who were one of the oldest communities of the Jewish Diaspora, dating back over 2500 years to the time of the Babylonian exile and the destruction of the first temple in 586 BCE.
They were a relatively prosperous and well-integrated community forming 33 per cent of the population of Baghdad (a total of 80,000 Jews in 1939), which was a higher Jewish proportion than in Warsaw (29 per cent) or New York (27 per cent). The principal city market would shut on the Sabbath.
