Lyn Julius
The Impact of the Shoah on the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa

Lyn Julius | The Impact of The Shoah on the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa | 06.17.21

- Morning, everybody. Good morning. Morning, Judy. Good morning, Lyn.

• Morning.

• So it’s my great pleasure today to welcome a new presenter, Lyn Julius. Lyn, it’s a great, great pleasure to have you with us, and thank you very, very, very much for agreeing to join our faculty.

Lyn Julius is the daughter of Jewish refugees from Iraq. Lyn was born in the UK and educated at the French Lycee in London and the University of Sussex. She’s a journalist and founder of Harif, the UK Association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. Harif is an organisation dedicated to educating about the history and culture of MENA Jews and has been running an active Zoom programme. So MENA is M-E-N-A Jews. And has been running an active Zoom programme.

Lyn blogs daily at Point of no Return, which has over 6,000 posts of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, Huffington Post, Jewish News, and the Jerusalem Post. She has a regular column in the Times of Israel and JNS News. Her book, “Uprooted: How 3000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight,” came out in 2018 and has been published in Norwegian and Portuguese, an Arab big translation is in progress.

So Lyn, I thank you very, very much for joining us today. We are looking forward to your presentation. What I would also like you to do, please, is just to slowly show everybody your book, where they can get the book, and also please… Yes, thank you. Good.

• [Lyn] Yes.

• Thank you very much.

• Available on Amazon and other places as well.

• Great.

• [Lyn] All good bookshops, as they say.

• And who are the publishers?

• Vallentine Mitchell.

• Okay. Vallentine Mitchell are the publishers. Thank you very much. And also, if you would like to share your webpage, your links, whatever you feel, please feel free to do so because this is a platform of sharing and community building.

• Thank you very much.

• So now I’m going to hand over to you to talk about the Jews in the Middle East. Thank you very, very much. Looking forward to it. Over to you.

• Well, thank you Wendy, and thank you, Trudy. If you’re listening, thank you Judy. I am immensely honoured and privileged to be invited to present here.

Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.

Today I will be talking about the impact of the Shoah on Jewish communities in the Arab world, and I will start to share my screen. If you ever you visited the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, you might have noticed that there is a plaque at the entrance which says, “Memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe.” It is beyond dispute, of course, that Jews on the continent of Europe were the primary victims of the Shoah.

There were also Sephardi communities wiped out by the Nazis, for instance, in Salonika and the Balkans. But there is a common misperception that the Holocaust affected only the Jews of Europe. Middle East and North Africa Jews, known as MENA Jews, were also affected. And as I shall try and show, we are all impacted today by an ideology born in the Nazi era.

So this is the Villa Wannsee, where the Nazi high command met in January, 1942 to agree on the final solution to the Jewish question. They went through every Jewish community outside America, about 11 million people, and they put a figure on each one. And the figure for France was 700,000, but France only had 300,000 Jews. So they must have incorporated the Jews of North Africa, the Jews of Tunisia, of Morocco, and Algeria. And most scholars agreed that the Nazis must have had a plan to exterminate the Jews in North Africa and probably also further afield.

But their aim was thwarted by the Battle of El Alamein in late 1942, when the German General Rommel was defeated by the allies. Of El Alamein Churchill said, “Now this is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning.” The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa comprised a minority of the total Jewish population, about 10%. In terms of numbers, the Holocaust affected a minimum of Jews of the MENA. Some 4,000 Jews died in the war, mostly as a result of allied bombing.

And that, of course, is a drop in the ocean compared to the numbers of European Jews who were killed. But there were about 2,000 Jews from MENA countries living in Europe, mainly in France, and they were affected by the Holocaust. Young Perez was a boxing champion born in Tunisia, and he died on the death march from Auschwitz in January, 1945. Messaoud El Mediouni, known as Saoud L'oranais, was a reputed Jewish Algerian band leader and proprietor of the original Café Oran. And he died in Sobibor in 1943.

Alfred Nacache was a swimming champion, and he actually survived Auschwitz. He was born in Constantine, in Algeria and he actually had a fear of water, and that’s how he came to start swimming to overcome his fear. And he became so good at it, he became a swimming champion. Very sad story. He, his wife and his baby daughter tried to escape from Toulouse in 1943. They were in the free French zone and they could have got over the border into Spain and eventually to freedom. But the daughter couldn’t stop screaming and disturbed the rest of the group. They were travelling with to such an extent that Alfred Nacache, his wife, and daughter turned back and they were denounced, sent to Auschwitz where the wife and daughter died. But Alfred survived, and the Nazis would make him dive into dirty water for sport and retrieve objects. But such a remarkable man was he that a year after the end of the war, he was already breaking swimming records, competition records, and he even participated in the Olympic Games in London in 1948.

So this is a map showing the French Protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia and in the middle, Algeria, which actually was considered part of mainland France. Now, in June, 1940, the Germans invaded France. The Vichy Regime, headed by the veteran World War I, Marshal Philippe Pétain, was installed in North Africa and it set up a special department for the control of the Jewish problem. Almost immediately, it imposes a set of anti-Jewish laws called the statut des Juifs. Algeria, which had a hundred thousand Jews, was considered part of mainland France. And Jews in Algeria had actually benefited from French citizenship under the 1870 Decree Cremieux.

The anti-Semitic measures of the statut des Juifs went far beyond anything taken in metropolitan France. And immediately Jews were stripped of their French citizenship and the Decree Cremieux was abrogated. Jewish children were expelled from primary schools and high schools, and the university students subject to a rigorous quota. Jews were sacked from public service, trade, banking, the media, medicine, law, and the professions. A second statut de Juifs was introduced in November, 1941 and was intended to implement economic Aryanization, that is, to prepare for the liquidation of Jewish assets.

And while many Europeans sought to profit from the Jews, Muslims as a whole refrained from acquiring Jewish businesses. And to their credit, mosques told their flocks not to take advantage of their fellow Algerians. It has to be said that there was an atmosphere of intense antisemitism amongst the Pied-Noir, the white settlers in Algeria, and the North African press lashed out at the Jews and the police constantly harassed them and they were suspected of black marketeering. Morocco had 230,000 Jews, the largest Jewish community in the Arab world, in fact.

And here too, the statut des Juifs was applied by the Vichy Regime headed by General Nogues. But the actual head of state was the future Mohammed V, the Sultan of Morocco. You might have heard that the Sultan heroically protected the Jews of Morocco and prevented their deportation. But deportation was never really a realistic possibility. It was logistically difficult, as North Africa was separated by the continent of Europe by a body of water. And there were no train lines leading to the concentration camps. But a legend has grown up about the Sultan of Morocco, one promoted by Moroccan Jews themselves.

It is that the Sultan not only wore the yellow star, but asked for 20 more for his family. It’s true that the Sultan was a philosemite and he was reputed to have said, “There are no Jews in Morocco, only Moroccans.” But historians now agree that he may have prevaricated, but he ended up signing every single anti-Jewish decree. The Sultan himself was just, but powerless. Real power really lay in the hands of the Vichy Regime. Restrictions were not as rigidly enforced as in Algeria. Converts, Jewish converts to Islam were not persecuted, but Jews had to donate money and jewellery to the war effort.

Now, a ratline for refugees from Europe to travel by ship to the US was established by a lawyer in Casablanca, and her name was Hélène Cazès-Benatar. And her refugee committee actually operated from 1940 until the end of the war, and she managed to help thousands of refugees flee Europe and board ships to America.

You may remember Rick’s Bar in the 1942 film, “Casablanca” with Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, and Humphrey Bogart. And at Rick’s Bar refugees was shown to congregate while they were waiting for their visas to the United States. And here I have the famous scene when a group of Germans walk into the bar. Sorry.

[Clip plays]

• There must be some reason why you won’t let me have them.

• There is. I suggest you ask your wife.

• I beg you pardon?

• I said ask your wife.

• My wife?

• Yes.

[Clip ends]

• Okay. Would have been nice to show a bit more of that. But we must proceed. Whoops. So it’s not well known that Morocco actually had labour and punishment camps. In fact, they were on the border between Morocco and Algeria and about 14,000 or 15,000 men, women, and children were interned in about 30 camps. Men were sent to forced labour camps, building the Trans-Sahara Railway. And of those, it is estimated about 4,000 were Jews, mainly European Jews and Jewish soldiers from Algeria who had fought in the French Army, but also Moroccan Jews of British nationality.

One camp, Bouarfa, only had Jews. There were political prisoners, Spanish communists fleeing Franco, soldiers of the French Army, refugees, general undesirables. The punishment camps were particularly cruel, and scores of prisoners must have died in them. There was one particular punishment called the Toumbou, in which the prisoner was placed in a ditch, he was left in the heat of the day and the cold of the night with hardly any food and water. And there were other forms of torture too. And here’s another picture of the labour camps in Morocco. Now, if you wanted to actually escape, there was no fence around them, but there didn’t need to be, because you would just die in the Sahara Desert.

And here’s another. Not a lot is left of these camps. Well, the tide of the war began to turn with Operation Torch. That was the operation planned by the allies to land on the North African coast. And this took place on the 8th of November, 1942. Now, the allies who are mainly the Americans, were aided by the local resistance in Algiers. Astonishingly enough, 315 out of 377 resistance fighters were young Jews led by . They took control of strategic points, the police station, the admiralty, the general staff, the telephone exchange, and the governor’s residence. They were the rag tag band of young men who had trained in a sports club and did not have a clue as to how to fire a gun.

Jacques Zermati’s mission was to occupy the governor’s residence, Zermatis’s group find the governor and his wife in bed. In front of the weapon pointed at him, the governor complies, but says, “You are a gentleman. I will ask you to leave the room while my wife gets dressed.” To which Zermati responds, “This is not the first time that I have seen a lady in her night dress. I promise you that I will close my eyes morally.” It’s 3:00 AM and they all seem to have a civilised cup of coffee together. And the governor takes the young Zermati aside. “I am faithful to Marshall Pétain, and I assure you that tomorrow I will have you shot,” he says. But a few moments later, they hear the canons firing and Zermati announces to the governor, “I have the honour to announce that the Americans have just landed.”

But the Americans delayed restoring Jewish citizenship, the Decree Cremieux, for a year. And astonishingly enough, some of the resistance fighters were actually interned in labour camps for two months. So the Nazis responded to Operation Torch by regrouping and occupying Tunisia. So this was to drive a wedge between the advancing allies in Algeria on the one hand and Libya on the other. In Tunisia, the Vichy rules were not so rigorously applied. In fact, the French resident general was a practising Christian. His name was Admiral Esteva. And he delayed implementing the rules as far as possible.

Now, the Nazi commanding the occupation was Walter Rauff, who you will remember, was the inventor of the mobile gas van and responsible for the murder of a hundred thousand Jews in Eastern Europe. The Einsatz gruppen he headed in Greece had plans to liquidate the Jews of Egypt and Palestine. But Rauff did not have many SS troops. And two thirds of the occupying forces in Tunisia were Italian. And only one unit was German. Most of the first-rate fighters having been diverted to Hitler’s Russian campaign, Rauff gave the Jewish community 24 hours to recruit 3,000 Jews for forced labour. But only 150 volunteers turned up.

Rauff took over the great synagogue in Tunis and his men started wrecking it. So enter one of the heroes of the Jewish community. This is Paul Ghez. He was a lawyer who would serve as head of the committee for the recruitment of Jewish labour, the Judenrat. He had distinguished himself in World War I and had won the Croix de Guerre after volunteering for the French Army in World War II. “At this point, I have a single aim,” he declared. “I will stand erect and not project the spectacle of a trembling Jew.” Wearing his officer’s uniform throughout the war, Ghez protested that the Germans had no right to humiliate the Jews. If they wanted to shoot 10 of the community’s leaders, he would be the first to die.

Rauff back down and took a hundred Jews’ hostages instead. His men rounded up 2,000 men on the 9th of December. Between the 9th and the 18th of December, another 3,700 were recruited from the provinces. It was the Jewish community’s job to feed and clothe the inmates from taxes raised by the community itself. And here you see Jews being marched off to the forced labour camps. In fact, all Tunisian Jewish males over 17 were sent there. The yellow star was applied in some Tunisian towns. Now, the occupation lasted six months.

Throughout the spring of 1943, the allies advanced. Rauff described the mood in his diary. The Jews were hopeful, the Arabs depressed. Now, Robert Satloff was an American who wrote a book about 10 years ago, examining the long reach of the Holocaust into Arab lands. It must be said that the general mood was one of sympathy for the Germans in Tunisia. Satloff writes, “As Jews went to labour camps in Tunisia, gestures of support and active assistance for the minority being displaced, disenfranchised, plundered, and conscripted into forced labour were very rare. Arab passersby would publicly insult and physically attack individuals.”

The general pattern was that the bey of Tunis, who was the titular head of the country, was philosemitic, like the Sultan of Morocco. And in fact, the bey of Tunis said, “Jews and Muslims are my children.” And the Muslim aristocrats were also sympathetic to the Jews. But the nationalists and the lower classes were anti-Jewish. Many Arabs were influenced by Nazi propaganda. So in order to break down the wall of Holocaust denial, Satloff looked for Arabs who rescued Jews. He found stories of persecution and he found stories of rescue. But most Arabs were indifferent. He could not find many and not many Arabs had wanted to be found.

In fact, Satloff found only four candidates. One was not even in in North Africa. And these four were the king of Morocco, the bey of Tunis, Khaled Abdel-Wahab and Si Kaddour Benghabrit, who is the rector of the Paris Mosque. Now Khaled Abdel-Wahab was a Tunisian aristocrat who owned a farmhouse outside Tunis. And he sheltered members of the Jewish Boukhris and Ouzzan families who had some pretty girls in them. Now, Robert Satloff wanted to put forward Khaled Abdel-Wahab as a righteous Gentile, but he was turned down by Yad Vashem. They said that he had not risked his life to save Jews. And in fact, the Nazis were probably perfectly well aware of what was going on.

Moving on to Libya, which had 30,000 Jews. Libya was an Italian colony. Mussolini passed the race laws in 1938. By the second half of 1941, all Jews holding foreign citizenship in Italian-occupied Libya were deported. And that included Ashkenazi Jews on their way to Palestine. And these ended up mostly in Italian labour camps and were then sent on to extermination camps in Germany and Eastern Europe. In 1942, Mussolini ordered the Jews of Cirenaica, which is on the eastern side of Libya, near the Egyptian border. He ordered them to be moved out of the Libya war zone. Most of the 2,600 Jews deported on the orders of Mussolini, away from the front line in Cirenaica, were sent to camps. And these camps were absolutely awful. They were local camps in Libya.

Jadu was especially dire. 2,000 Jews were sent there, and of them 600 died of disease and starvation. Now, the picture you see on the screen shows Jews of British nationality from Libya who were actually deported to Bergen-Belsen. And you see them returning after the war to Tripoli. And you might just be able to make out a Union Jack scrolled on the side of the railway carriage and it says, “To Tripoli.” And these Jews were actually used in prison exchanges with the Germans. And as far as I know, not that many of them or none of them died. Jews of French nationality were sent to Tunisia. And there they had a very hard time because the allies bombed Tunis and other towns. And you hear stories of Jews sheltering in the cemeteries from the bombing.

Moving on to Egypt, the front line shifted back and forth during 1941 and into 1942. And at one point the Wehrmachtt was 85 kilometres from Alexandria. King Farouk, who ascended the Egyptian throne in 1936, wrote a letter to Hitler declaring his support and saying 90% of Egyptians were pro-Nazi. The Jews of Egypt were a robust, proactive community. And throughout the 1930s they tried to boycott Nazis. They started a league against antisemitism. And during the war, they tried to help refugees from Europe flee through the Suez Canal to India and the Far East, and even tried to get some of them to Palestine. But Egypt was crawling with spies and Nazi agents, Jews of Alexandria fearing a Nazi victory fled to Cairo, and Jews of Cairo fled to Old Cairo.

Rumour had it that there was a blacklist of businessmen and some fled to the Sudan, to Ethiopia, and South Africa. But El Alamein, the battle of El Alamein, was the turning point. This is Hasasn Al-Banna. Now, he was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928. The Brotherhood wanted to reestablish the caliphate and was a reactionary movement against modernity. Hassan Al-Banna was influenced by fascism, and antisemitism was at the core of his philosophy. The Jews represented the enemy, western decadence, women’s rights, minority rights, everything that the Brotherhood hated most and considered un-Islamic. Everything Jewish was evil and everything evil was Jewish. The Muslim Brotherhood resurrected the idea of jihad to achieve a new political order. They incited violence against the Jews and the cops in the 1930s. And by 1945, from 800 members, they had half a million men under arms.

So moving on to the Levant, the period 1950 to 42, sorry, 1940 to 42, saw intense fighting in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. Tel Aviv and Haifa were periodically bombed by the axis powers, and hundreds of civilians were killed. The Yeshuv was actually fighting on two fronts. They aided the British, especially in special operations in the Levant. At the same time, they tried to help as many Jewish refugees reach Palestine as possible and run the British shipping blockade. And of course, tens of thousands volunteered to join the British Army, 15 times as many Jews wanted to join the British as Arabs. But it was only in 1944 that the Jewish brigade was established, in which 5,000 Palestinian Jews served under the Zionist flag.

In the spring of 1941, it looked as if the Nazis were winning the war. So much so that the leaders of the Yeshuv made plans for a government in exile to be evacuated to the US or South Africa. Arabs in Palestine generally believed that the Nazis would win the war in 1941, and they wanted to back the winning side, and they began to plan to divide the spoils and lay claim to Jewish property. Throughout the Levant, Arab public opinion was mostly pro-German. For many Arabs, being on the side of the Nazis was a practical anti-colonial alliance against the British and the French, and the Jews were seen as collaborators with the colonialists.

Moving on to Syria. The 1930s saw the establishment of ultra nationalist parties like the Ba'ath Party, which was also in Iraq, and the Syrian Socialist National Party whose flag you see on the screen. And this party actually still exists today in Syria and Lebanon. And the founder of the Syrian Ba'ath Party actually said, “We were racists. We admired the Nazis. Anyone who lived in Damascus at the time was witness to the Arab inclination towards Nazism.” On the 8th of June, 1941, the British invaded Syria and defeated the Vichy Regime which was in place there. The local Jews were thus spared the full impact of the Vichy anti-Semitic laws.

But in the 1930s, during French colonial rule, Syria emerged as a centre of Arab anti-Zionist sentiment. And throughout World War II, anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist demonstrations were common. The French authorities turned a blind eye to attacks on Jews. And in 1944, the Jewish quarter of Damascus was twice sacked by mobs. Iraq had become the centre for a very form of pan-Arab nationalism. The British and the French had thwarted Arab aspirations for a pan-Arab kingdom in Damascus after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. And this Trudy has explained in her lectures. Faisal, who had helped the British defeat the Ottomans, was given the throne of Iraq in 1921 as a consolation prize for not getting the throne of Syria. The Syrian nationalist Sati’ al-Husri entered Iraq with King Faisal, and he and other ultranationalists set about dominating the government in Iraq.

And in fact, al-Husri became the director general of education in the 1920s. The ultra nationalists established the Muthana Club, which was later to play a part in inciting the Farhud massacre of June, 1941. There was also a rising tide of pro-Nazi feeling in Iraq in the 1930s. And King Ghazi, who succeeded his father, Faisal, surrounded himself with pro-Nazis. After the failure of the Arab Revolt in 1939, about 400 Palestinian and Syrian teachers came into Iraq and incited against the local Jews.

Now my mother was growing up in Baghdad in the 1930s, and she tells the story of the family’s gardener who lived with his family in a hut at the bottom of the garden. She asked the gardener’s wife who just had a baby, “Oh, what did you have? And what did you call him?” And she said, “I had a boy and I called him Hitler.” And you can imagine my mother was absolutely mortified. And we don’t know to this day whether the gardener had actually called his son Hitler. He might well have done, because Hitler was a very popular name at the time. Or maybe he just said it to spite her.

The Nazis were emulated across the Arab world. There were paramilitary youth groups established on the model of the Hitler Youth, so-called shirts brigades, like Young Egypt and the Futuwwa in Iraq. The Futuwwa were actually invited in 1938 to take part in the torchlight processions in Nuremberg.

Right, so we now come to the three-way alliance between the Mufti Hassan Al-Banna and this man here, Fritz Grobba, who was the German ambassador to Iraq in the 1930s. He was a German Lawrence of Arabia, a career diplomat, and he set up a network of spies and agents and procured nubile German girls to seduce Iraqi politicians. He also serialised “Mein Kampf” in Arabic and had it published in Iraqi newspapers. Now, the Germans financed the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Mufti, and the aim was to encourage Arabs to rise up against the colonialists.

Now the Mufti was the nearest thing to a leader of the Arab world. And he was of course the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, whom Trudy has mentioned at length. And he was a sort of Arab Führer. As soon as Hitler became leader in Germany, the Mufti made overtures to set up an Arab-Nazi alliance. The Germans were first reluctant because the Arabs were technically unmentioned. But the anti-Arab passages in “Mein Kampf” were soon excised and the Arabs became honorary Aryans. Now, the Mufti concocted a new kind of antisemitism fusing anti-Jewish verses in the Koran and the Hadid with the European idea that the Jews were all-powerful and wanted to dominate the world, and therefore they must be fought at all costs. And wherever he went in the Arab world in the 1930s, he incited hatred against the local Jews.

Between 1939 and 1941, he took up residents in Baghdad after being exiled from Palestine by the British. But he never ceased to plot the overthrow of the pro-British government in Iraq. Finally, he and a pro-Nazi group of politicians led by Rashid Ali al-Gaylani and pro-Nazi army officers, succeeded in overthrowing the pro-British government. The pro-Nazi government barely lasted two months, from April to the end of May, 1941, but it was the only Arab government to sign a military pact with the access powers. Fearful of losing access to Iraqi oil, Britain declared war. It took 30 days for the British to defeat the pro-Nazi government.

The Mufti and Rashid Ali were put to flight and ended up in Berlin, where they spent the rest of the war as Hitler’s guests. But they had already laid the groundwork for a terrible massacre, the Farhud, and this is an Arabic term meaning forced dispossession. The Farhud followed on the first and 2nd of June, 1941, after two months of sustained Nazi radio propaganda and incitement, which branded the Jews as the enemy within and collaborators with the British.

There were 179 identified dead, but there could have been up to 600 Jews who were murdered. We will never know the final tally. About a thousand were injured. There was terrible rape and babies were mutilated. Jews were thrown in the River Tigris. Jewish patients were poisoned in-hospital. Some Muslims saved Jews, but others turned against them. The Jewish community received a terrible shock. It had been in Iraq for 2,600 years and constituted a quarter of the inhabitants of Baghdad. The Farhud is evidence that for the first time, the Mufti’s anti-Zionism had spilled over beyond the confines of Palestine, where he had incited riots in 1920 and 1929, of course. It had spilled over beyond the confines of Palestine into unabashed anti-Semitism.

The British army was stationed at the gates of Baghdad and could have intervened to quell the violence. But they stood by because they did not want to appear to be reoccupying the country. The Farhud proved to be the death nail of the oldest Jewish diaspora. It was primarily fear of a second Farhud which caused 90% of the hundred and 50,000-member community to flee to Israel in 1950. Today there are three Jews living in Iraq. In Berlin, the Mufti was lavishly funded. He was given a villa formally owned by a Jew, and he began broadcasting anti-Jewish propaganda on Radio Berlin, “Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion.”

He was not the only Arab Nazi sympathiser. There were 60, including Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, Fawzi al-Qawuqji, Ibrahim al-Kabil, Hassan Salama, . And this is a picture of incitement against the Jews. It was actually taken before the Farhud in 1939, two years before the Farhud broke out. Now, was the Farhud a Holocaust event? A case was heard recently in the Israeli courts, and it was brought by about 2,000 survivors of the Farhud, who claimed that it was thanks to the machinations of the Mufti of Jerusalem and the impact of Nazi propaganda that the Farhud broke out. But the judges in the Israeli courts decided that the Farhud was just another pogrom as broke out sporadically in the Arab world.

So what is the evidence for the Farhud being a Holocaust event? Well, just before the pro-Nazi government fell, the self-styled Nazi governor of Baghdad, Yunis al-Sabawi, who incidentally had translated “Mein Kampf” into Arabic, he summoned Chief Rabbi, Sasson Khaduri, to see him. And he told him, “Tell the Jews to stay in their homes and pack enough food for three days. Rumour has it that they plan to deport the Jews into concentration camps in the desert.” Now, this man you see here, Daniel Sasson, was five when he and his family were confined to a ghetto in the city of Diwaniya, which is south of Baghdad on the River Euphrates.

Now this ghetto was surrounded by armed guards. The men were sent to do forced labour. And it is thought that had the pro-Nazi government endured, this would’ve been the first stage to extermination. Another reason why the far hood should be considered a Holocaust event is the Mufti’s famous meeting with Hitler in November, 1941. He wanted Nazi backing for Arab independence and he let it be known that he was willing to manage the extermination of the Jews wherever they were, not just in Palestine. The Mufti was a witness to the Armenian genocide, having been an officer in the Ottoman Army. Many of the Germans he and other Arabs worked with went on to manage the extermination of the Jews.

It is often said that the Mufti’s alliance with the Nazis was a pragmatic one, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” But I would argue that it was an ideological one. The Mufti would not have stopped short of exterminating the Jews once the allies had been defeated. And here you see the mass grave of the Farhud victims. This grave was actually demolished in 1960. And on the left, the Mufti is there with Rashid Ali al-Gaylani. And that’s the famous picture of his meeting with Hitler in 1941. Now, while in Berlin, the Mufti set up SS divisions in Bosnia and Albania, and here you see the Muslim soldiers at prayer and reading a propaganda pamphlet.

Here he is visiting a concentration camp. And he was never tried as a war criminal for various reasons. He died in his bed in 1974. But you could say that the Palestinian leadership has not really changed its objective. Genocide has been replaced with politicide. So the end of the war left the Jews of the Middle East exhausted and disillusioned. The colonial powers whom they had so faithfully served had betrayed them and often they hadn’t protected them, as in the Farhud. Many Jews turned to communism or Zionism. But just a few months after the end of the war in Europe, in 1945, riots broke out in Egypt and Libya.

And here you see a picture from the aftermath of the Tripoli riots. What was the cause of these riots? Was it anti-Zionism? Was it anti-colonialism? It is thought that the mob did not even know what Zionism was. One cannot discount the fact that Nazi propaganda had a profound effect on an easily-swayed and illiterate Arab population. In 1947, the Arab League draughts Nuremberg-style laws against their own Jewish citizens, stripping them of their citizenship, basically dispossessing and pauperizing them, preventing them from leaving, making Zionism a crime. And this leads to the exodus of almost a million Jews. I shall be telling you more about this in my next lecture.

The post-war era saw the rise of Nazi-inspired Arab antisemitism. What the great historian Bernard Lewis calls the War Against the Jews. Dozens or even scores of Nazis found refuge in the Arab world. And here’s one of them, Alois Brunner, who died in Syria in 2010. There was Dr. Aribetrt Heim, who converted to Islam and became Uncle Tarek Hussein Farid in Cairo, where he lived a happy life as a medical doctor for the Egyptian police. Two of Goebbels best propagandists, Alfred Zingler and Dr. Johann von Leers, became Mahmoud Saleh and Omar Amin, working in the Egyptian Information Department. Franz Bartel, an assistant Gestapo chief in Poland, became El Hussein. And so the list goes on.

Now, Eichmann had said in his memoirs, he wrote in his memoirs, “I have not managed to complete my task of total annihilation, but I hope the Muslims will complete it for me.” So just to go back a second to the Muslim Brotherhood, both the Mufti and the Muslim brotherhood, to which he was closely allied, introduced Islamized antisemitism after the war. And they propagated the conspiracy theory that the Jews wanted to control the world. Sayyid Qutb was this man here, who was actually executed by Nasser, radicalised the doctrines of Hassan Al-Banna. He was the ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood, described by Benny Morris as the face which launched a thousand suicide bombers. He wrote our struggle against the Jews.

And again, this is a new idea which he introduced into Islam, which traditionally Jews were held in contempt, but they were not very important and they were not a threat. But what the Muslim Brotherhood did and what Sayyid Qutb did was to make them the epitome of evil and to replace contempt with hatred. So we’re seeing the result of this popular antisemitism that’s still rampant in the Arab world, in this Nazi-style cartoon that appeared only three years ago in Kuwait. Sayyid Qutb, his writings are very influential today, and they even influenced Iran. His work was translated into Persian. And today, not only does the Islamic Republic of Iran deny that a holocaust occurred, it seeks to carry out a second one.

So all these Islamist movements we hear about today, Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, Al-Nusra, their roots are really in the Muslim Brotherhood. And Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was the leader of Islamic State, was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas is the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. And you only have to read the Hamas charter to see that its ideology is pervaded by European antisemitic theories of Jewish power. The Jews started the French Revolution, World War I, world War II. This is all straight out of the protocols of the elders of Zion or “Mein Kampf.”

Before I finish, I just wanted to clarify one thing, and that is what is the difference between the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafism? Or also known as Wahhabism, the austere and puritanical form of Islam that originated in Saudi Arabia in the 18th century? Undoubtedly, there has been cross-pollination between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists, but Salafism began as a theological movement about the relationship of the Muslim and his God.

The Muslim Brotherhood is an international utopian political movement to impose a new Islamist world order and to use violence in order to achieve it. The legacy of a totalitarian ideology born in the Nazi era, let’s call it Islamo-fascism, is still with us today. And this is the flag of Islamic State. “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.” Had there been Jews in northern Iraq in 2014, when Islamic State was on the rampage, it is a certainty that Jews would’ve been killed and their women and children sold into slavery as surely as the Yazidis and the Assyrian Christians.

The defeat of Islamic State has not put an end to the threat. And I would just caution that even though moderate states such as the UAE have made peace with Israel, there are still extremist regimes around, for instance, Qatar. There are still Muslim Brotherhood parties in the Arab world, in fact, in Morocco, in Tunisia, and elsewhere in Egypt. And of course, Iran presents a terrible threat. And on that note, I will finish, and very happy to answer questions. Thank you very much for listening.

• Well, thank you very much. And that was absolutely outstanding. You certainly gave us a full overview, and it would be fabulous to go into more detail into the various countries, which we will do in time. And I just wanted to say that Robert Satloff is a close friend.

• [Lyn] Wonderful. Yes.

• So I’m sure that I… Do you know him?

• I don’t, no, but I do have a signed copy of his book.

• Oh, well. It’ll be my great, great pleasure to introduce you to him. In fact, he was in South Africa with his boys just before the lockdown, 18 months ago. So, good. I’m glad I’ll make that introduction. So I’m now going to hand back to you to answer questions. Thank you.

• Right, thank you. I shall just have a look.

• You know where to find them?

• Yes, I think so.

• [Attendee] Sorry.

• Sorry. I just called on my dear husband Lawrence to help me here.

• [Attendee] There’s a Q&A button and there’s, I think, we see 24.

• [Attendee] We’re going through them. Some of them are statements rather than questions. Sorry, I should be quiet. Right.

• Lyn, how much time do you have to answer questions? I think… Yeah, sorry.

• As long as you want me to.

• So I think let’s set a limit of 15 minutes, Judy. Is that okay? Because we have another presentation in an hour’s time, so I think 15 minutes. We’ll be very grateful. And I’m sure that you’re tired Lyn, too, so…

• I’m very happy to answer questions.

• [Wendy] Thank you so much.

Q&A and Comments

• Yes, no, thank you.

Donny says that, a comment, in the movie Casablanca many of the extras in the Hollywood movie were Jewish refugees from Europe to the US. Amazing.

Q: This is Monty, European Jewry was highly assimilated and secularised. To what extent were the Jews in North Africa also assimilated and secularised? A: That is a very good question. I hope to go into a bit more detail about this because, of course, some Jews were extremely assimilated and secularised, for instance, the Jews of Algeria, who are actually French citizens. And in fact, identified more with French culture than with Arab culture after a while. In fact, I think it is it too simplistic to say these were Arab Jews, as you often hear. It’s not true. I think European culture was actually very influential in the Arab world. But I will go into that in more detail in the future.

Hannah asks about a detention camp in Algeria. Her father from Gafsa in Tunisia was put in a detention camp. Would you know what the camp was called? I have no idea, Hannah, I’m afraid. There were about 30 of these camps and they would’ve been operating up until Operation Torch, really, when the allies landed in North Africa. Glad to see that your father was released and returned to his town.

Sorry, I just have to scroll down here. Okay. Robert Satloff. Yes, that’s right. Early 2000s. He actually spent three years in Morocco, I think, among the writers. Thank you for that, Helen.

Q: Who was the lead of the ragtag group of partisans? A: It was (indistinct).

Q: What proportion the Arab-Jews descendants would want to return? A: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we know of one person. And even then, I don’t think he’s really serious about returning. The answer is none.

Q: What was done to the bodies of the mass grave? A: That is a very interesting question, anonymous attendee. The grave was demolished along with the rest of the Jewish cemetery in Iraq in between 1958 and 1960. We have no idea what happened to the bodies. And that’s why we have no idea how many people were actually killed.

Q: Why didn’t the Mossad try to assassinate the Mufti after 1948? A: Gosh, that’s another question, isn’t it? I think there was several attempts. There was an attempt in France before the Mufti ended up in Egypt. I think you’ll have to ask Trudy for the detail on that.

Q: Why was he not prosecuted as a war criminal? A: I think the short answer is oil. I think the British and the French had their reasons for not prosecuting him.

Thank you very much, Susan, for your compliment. The Flight from Jewish Peoplehood explains, this is Abigail, that the view that in between French emancipation and the Nazi reaction. Right. Thank you for that, I’ll have a look.

Q: Can you explain how Jordan was formed? A: I’m sorry, I can’t really go into that now.

Q: How many Moroccan Jews have returned to live in Morocco? A: Very few is the answer to that. There are about 1,500 Jews living in Morocco. There are, if you like, people who have villas in Marrakesh or Essaouira, but I wouldn’t count them as really part of the community. I mean, there is very little future really for Moroccan Jewry. And I think in a generation or two, they might well have all gone.

Thank you for your compliments. The full name of Saoud mentioned after… Yes, his name is… Let me just find it for you. His name is Messaoud El Mediouni and he was known as Saoud L'oranais. In other words, Saoud from Oran, and he was the propriety of the original Café Oran and the uncle of the French-Algerian pianist, Maurice El Mediouni, who you may have heard of. Who said that?

Q: How many Jews in Syria at the last count? A: I think there are three.

• [Lawrence] How many were there?

Q: How many were in Syria? A: About 30,000.

Rose Rahmani says, “My mom was a victim of the Shoah from Rose Island, Egypt, my dad left Egypt.” Are you anything to do with Moise Rahmani? I did not know the details. Okay, yes.

Q: Do you think Israel should work on getting the UAE to ban the Muslim Brotherhood? Is this pie in the sky? A: I’m not sure Israel has that much influence on the internal affairs of the UAE, unfortunately.

Okay. Anonymous attendee says, “Thank you for an informative lecture.” Thank you. “My father was in Egypt when the Germans were 85 kilometres away, and he organised and paid for many Jews to be flown out of Egypt. My aunt’s father and brother and Cairo were killed by a German bomb.” Gosh, that’s absolutely terrible. Very interesting, though.

Q: Where are there Arabs or Muslims who are not contaminated by Jew hatred? A: I can’t really answer that.

The last book mentioned. Oh, you mean my book, of course, don’t you? No. The last book mentioned, it was “Among the Righteous” by Robert Satloff.

Hello, Melody, nice to see you here. And thank you for your thanks.

Q: What is your opinion of the Islamist Party now in the Israeli coalition? A: I think it’s too early to tell.

Sorry, can you just…

Q: Is there actions Jews of North African origin should be taking? A: They’ve already taken some action actually, and that is they have been given some reparations. Jews in Morocco who suffered through the war and also Jews in Algeria have received reparations. The only ones who haven’t received reparations are the Jews of Iraq who survived the Farhud. In Egypt it didn’t quite affect them. No. Action International. Yeah, I mean… I think if more people knew about the Mufti complicity with and the importance of the Muslim Brotherhood, really, I think that would make a big difference.

Thank you. Barry. You grew up in Rhodesia where there was a large Sephardic community. This is true. Most have now left Rhodesian and went to Cape Town and Israel.

Q: Is it worth visiting Morocco now? A: Yes. Why not? I can’t see a reason not to. If you’re not worried about the COVID situation, I think yes, I would recommend a trip.

El Alamein was a British victory over Rommel, the eighth army commander by General Montgomery. Thank you for that, Peter.

Q: Why did the allies allow the Vichy? A: That’s a very good question, Alan. Why did the allies allow the Vichy anti-Jewish laws to stay? I think the reason was because the Vichy officials were still in post when the allies landed, and they left them there.

Q: How many Jews still in the Iran? A: That’s another question. There’s about 8,000 of them. Yes, synagogues are still functioning.

Hello, Debbie. Thank you for sharing and explaining to those who may not have known anything about Harif. Thank you.

And Marlena. My maternal grandfather was the chief rabbi of Aleppo. His name was Harari. Interesting. And thank you all for your wonderful compliments. Okay. I think we’ve covered most of them.

• Yes, thank you. And that was absolutely fabulous. Excellent, excellent presentation.

• [Lyn] Thank you.

• Very thrilled to have you with us. And thank you to all our audience, to all our participants, for joining us. A very, very big thank you to Judy, as always. So on that note, I’m going to say goodbye and goodnight and enjoy the rest of your day, for those of you who are in LA. Thanks, Lyn. See you soon.

• Thank you. Thanks for having me.

• No great pleasure. Thank you from all of us. Thanks. Bye.

• [Lyn] Bye-bye.