(Jewish Group) The Inconvenient Truth About Jews From Arab Lands

[Behind the Aegis]

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

(This article is from 4 years ago, but is worth the read, especially since someone here actually used this piece to claim treatment of Jews in Arab lands, and their expulsion "wasn't so bad" by quoting the LAST paragraph of the article, completely ignoring the REST of the article!!)

Nathan Weinstock hadn’t planned to write a book about the Jews of Arab lands. But when he looked for information about the modern history of Moroccan or Iraqi Jewry, he was surprised to discover that there was no book in French that told the story of the elimination of the Jewish communities in the Middle East and North Africa in the mid-20th century. “In the end,” he says, “I decided to write it myself.”

One of the surprising discoveries he made was about the powerful bond with their roots felt by many of the roughly one million Jews in North Africa and the Middle East who left their homes in the decade after the creation of Israel.

“The story I knew,” Weinstock relates in a Skype interview from his home in Nice, in the south of France, “was that the Jews were happy to leave the Arab countries the moment they were given the opportunity to do so. We were not told anything about the Jews’ deep connection with Arab culture, for example. It was only later that I learned that Jewish writers were the foundation of Iraqi literature. And that in mid-19th-century Egypt, the man who invented the nationalist slogan ‘Egypt for the Egyptians,’ and was known as ‘the Egyptian Molière,’ was a Jew named Jacob Sanua.

“In the course of my research,” he continues, “I found out that the story we had been told – that the Jews left the Arab countries because they were Zionists – was for the most part wrong. True, they had an affinity for the Land of Israel – that is certainly correct – but the organized Zionist movement was very weak in the Arab countries. The great mass of Jews left under duress. They were expelled. They were subjected to such enormous pressure that they had no choice but to leave.”

Weinstock, a self-taught historian, now in his 70s, who previously published studies about the Bund movement in Eastern Europe and Yiddish literature, decided to assume the task of chronicling the expulsion of the Jews from the Arab countries. The result is a book that was published in France in 2008 as “Une si longue présence: Comment le monde arabe a perdu ses Juifs, 1947-1967” (“A Very Long Presence: How the Arab World Lost Its Jews, 1947-1967)” and has now appeared in Hebrew (Babel Books; translated by Hagit Bat-Ada).

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Read the entire article (a bit long). Shows how some are duped, others conveniently ignore history, and still others cherry pick in order to defame Jews by ahistorical means.