In this episode we spoke with Marian Scheuer Sofaer, Esquire, and Dr. Einav Yehuda-Shnaidman about The Expulsion of Jews from Iraq, 20th Century: The Agonies of Redemption (Brill, 2024), by Dr. Zvi Yehuda, and translated by Sofaer.
Dr. Zvi Yehuda, born in Iraq in 1936, immigrated to Israel
as a teenager during Operation Ezra and Nehemiah and went on to complete
a PhD in History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, later founding
and heading the research institute at the Babylonian Jewry Heritage
Center. He began to write the book in 1984, in a conversation with
former Knesset Speaker Shlomo Hillel, and grew into a forty-year project
of archival research across Israel, the United Kingdom, France, the
United States, and Iraq, conducted in Hebrew, English, French, German
and Judeo-Arabic. Yehuda passed away before he could complete editing
the English translation; his daughter, Dr. Einav Yehuda-Shnaidman,
together with Sofaer, brought the English edition to completion.
The book situates the modern Iraqi Jewish community within a
more discontinuous history than is often assumed. Yehuda's research
identified a substantial gap, from the fourteenth through the eighteenth
centuries, in which no functioning Jewish community existed in Iraq;
the community that flourished into the twentieth century instead
descended from waves of immigration beginning after 1740, drawing Jews
from Kurdistan, Iran, and Europe, and developing its own distinct
Judeo-Arabic dialect.
Following Israel's establishment and victory in 1948,
Sofaer and Yehuda-Shnaidman described the systematic persecution that
followed: mass dismissals of Jews from government employment, punitive
import-export regulations, and new restrictions on real estate and
mortgages. Yehuda-Shnaidman emphasized that Prime Minister Nuri al-Said
was a central architect of this policy, proposing to the United Nations a
plan to force Iraq's Jews to leave within four months, stripped of
citizenship and property—a plan ultimately abandoned only after Jordan
refused to allow the deportation convoys to cross its territory.
Central to Yehuda's research is his conclusion that the
expulsion was not, as long assumed, a response to Zionist activity, but a
deliberate, state-directed policy to remove Iraq's Jews and seize their
assets. The book also overturns the long-standing claim that bombs
thrown at Jewish targets in Baghdad in 1950–51 were planted by Zionists
to encourage emigration; evidence uncovered only in 2013 by an Iraqi
journalist instead implicates Arab extremists, and points to the
wrongful execution of Jews framed for the attacks.
Altogether, the book documents the expulsion and
dispossession of some 150,000 Jews from Iraq, part of the roughly one
million Jews forced from Muslim-majority countries across the twentieth
century—a history Yehuda insisted be established on primary evidence
rather than inherited assumption.
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