Forgotten Millions: The Modern Jewish Exodus from Arab Lands [Paperback]

Malka Hillel Shulewitz (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0826447643 | ISBN-13: 978-0826447647 | Publication Date: October 27, 2000

The untold story of how the once flourishing Jewish communities in the Arab Middle East have virtually disappeared. The Forgotten Millions tells the story of the modern Jewish exodus from the Arab lands against the backdrop of the historical presence of Christian and other minorities. The Jewish presence in this area-present-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, the Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen-preceded the rise of Islam by more than a thousand years. These Jewish communities often played a leading role in the development of the region, particularly as recorded in the Cairo Genizah, with which the book begins. In 1948 when the state of Israel was declared, there were an estimated 870,000 Jews in the region. By 1986, a generation later, the ancient Jewish peoples had virtually disappeared. Only about 20,000 remain, mainly in North Africa. Of these refugees, some 200,000 opted for the Americas and other Western countries; the majority migrated to Israel, where today they and their progeny comprise over 40 per cent of the population. What happened to trigger the transfer of whole communities? Why did this historic movement and the tragedy that preceded it fail to leave their impress either on the contemporary annals of the Jewish people or on the consciousness of the free world? The Forgotten Millions probes the reasons for this silence.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"These essays by ten scholars of Middle Eastern history dealing with the exodus of Jews from Arab lands, where they had lived in some instances for 2,500 years, should be required reading....This book provides an in-depth history and analysis of minorities in Arab countries, with its special focus on Jews. Although half a century has elapsed since the beginning of the refugee problems, both Jewish and Arab...this book corrects the distortions of Arab claims and presents substantial evidence supporting the contention that the Jews failed to receive recognition by the international community of their plight."--Emuna Magazine

"These essays by ten scholars of Middle Eastern history dealing with the exodus of Jews from Arab lands where they had lived, in some instances, for 2,500 years, should be required reading for those discussing the question of compensation or return of Palestinian refugees as part of a peace agreement with Arafat. . . . This book provides an in-depth history and analysis of the situation of minorities in Arab countries, with its special focus on Jews. . . . The Forgotten Millions is an important and timely volume which focuses on people whose history we have almost forgotten, whose exodus, resettlement and restitution claims have been overshadowed by the Holocaust and by the more recent immigrations from the Soviet Union and Ethiopia. . . . This book corrects the distortions of Arab claims."-Emunah Magazine

"[The essays] highlight important issues of which readers should be better aware."--Jewish Book World

"This book is a scholarly work and a fascinating one at that....Read the book; see if you agree."--The Jewish Press and The Jewish Post and Opinion

About the Author

Malka Hillel Shulewitz is a lecturer and writer. She has participated in the work of many organizations, including serving for seventween years as Executive Director and Publications Editor of the Israel Academic Committee on the Middle East, and is a founding member of the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries.

Product Details

• Paperback: 258 pages
• Publisher: Continuum (October 27, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826447643
• ISBN-13: 978-0826447647
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,255,262 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How the Modern Arab World Became Judenrein: Implications, February 17, 2002

By 

Andrew G. Bostom (Chepachet, RI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Forgotten Millions: The Modern Jewish Exodus from Arab Lands (Paperback)

In Jews and Arabs (New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1975), the author Albert Memmi, a Sephardic Jew, observed the following:  ..The head of an Arab state recently made us a generous and novel offer. Return, he told us, return to the land of your birth! Are you not Arabs like us- Arab Jews?. What lovely words! We draw a secret nostalgia from them: yes, indeed we were Arab Jews- in our habits, our culture, our music, our menus. I have written enough about it. But must one remain an Arab Jew if, in return, one has to tremble for ones life and the future of ones children and always be denied a normal existence? There are, it is true, the Arab Christians. What is not sufficiently known is the shamefully exorbitant price that they must pay for the right merely to survive.

The Forgotten Millions is a compendium of nine thoughtfully interwoven essays which present a compelling sociopolitical discussion of the unheralded expulsion of ~ 850,000 Jews from Arab North Africa and the Middle East between 1941 and 1976. The presentation by Yaakov Meron debunks a widely held misconception that this Jewish exodus resulted solely from the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. After documenting the brutal Iraqi (1941), Egyptian (1945), and Libyan (1945) pogroms inspired by local Arab movements sympathetic to the Nazis, as well as the anti-Jewish riots in Aleppo and Aden of 1947, the author rightfully asks how these events could ..be attributed to the State [of Israel] in 1948?.

Core issues addressed effectively in Parts 2 and 3 (essays 5 through 9) include: the Jews unprovoked forced expulsion; their de facto population exchange with Arab Palestinians displaced primarily by the Arab invasion of Israel in 1948; and the stark contrast between the rapid, but difficult integration of ~650,000 Sephardic Jewish refugees from Arab lands into a resource poor Israel, relative to the Arab worlds ongoing refusal to permanently re-settle the original 540,000 Palestinian Arab refugees (and their descendants) from the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict, despite more than sufficient geographical (fully one tenth of the worlds land mass), and economic (i.e., Arabian peninsula, Iraqi, and Libyan oil wealth) resources. In sum, the essays in Parts 2 and 3 clearly obligate objective international policy makers and diplomats to re-address the validity of the current Palestinian Authority claim to a right of return for Arab Palestinians to the pre-1967 borders of Israel.

The earlier essays in Part 1 introduce key thematic elements that support the presentations in Parts 2 and 3. Bat Yeor highlights how the post-colonial resurgence of traditional Islamic oppression (i.e., dhimmitude) of Jews and Christians intensified following the creation of Israel, as the liberation of an indigenous dhimmi people (i.e., the Jews) within its historic homeland was viewed as a Naqbah (Catastrophe) not only by Arab Palestinians, but by the Islamic Arab world at large. Walid Phares summarizes how the Arab world, already Judenrein, has become progressively Christianrein as well since the end of World War II.

Ultimately, it is this widespread, brutal religious intolerance of non-Muslims in the Arab world that must be addressed and ameliorated by the international community to achieve a long term peaceful settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. As a specific example, the international community should compel a moderate Arab state, Jordan, to repeal immediately an unconscionable existing law that actively sanctions the notion of Judenrein (i.e., Feb. 6, 1954, Section 3 [3] of the Jordanian Nationality Law, prohibiting an Jew from becoming a Jordanian citizen, which is still in effect). It is perhaps an ironic ray of hope that dehumanizing, repressive laws such as The Jordanian Nationality Law, are sharply contrasted by the nearby legal status of 1 million permanent Arab Muslim citizens currently living within the pre-1967 borders of Israel.

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The ethnic cleansing of the Jews from the Arab world., December 11, 2002

By 

M. D Roberts (Gwent, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Forgotten Millions: The Modern Jewish Exodus from Arab Lands (Paperback)

This book tells the disturbing story of the unprovoked expulsion and ethnic cleansing of the Jewish populations from the Arab countries in the Middle East surrounding the re-birth of the State of Israel in 1948.

The book is extremely disturbing one two counts. On one count that such an ethnic cleansing and racial segregation of the Jews could be allowed to occur in the modern day, (especially so soon after the Second World War & the Holocaust), and in another regard that such a forced expulsion could be so soon forgotten and overlooked by the International Community & it's media, which have both clearly chosen to turn a blind eye to this issue.

Any accurate assessment of the Arab-Israeli conflict is indeed incomplete without addressing this very troubling subject.

Whilst some readers will inevitably draw an initial correlation to the Palestinian refugee issue, it only becomes too apparent that there are some fundamental differences.

With appropriate references to the brutal Iraqi (1941), Egyptian (1945), and Libyan (1945) pogroms inspired by local Arab movements extremely sympathetic to the Nazis/Final Solution, together with the anti-Jewish riots in Aleppo and Aden of 1947, the writer correctly asks how these events could in any way '...be attributed to the State of Israel in 1948 ?'.

As the book unfolds one is also faced with the cold, callous indictment that this forcible expulsion of the Jews, effectively made the Arab worl Judenrein. The Jews,- whose families had inhabited these Arab lands for thousands of years, leaving with only the possessions that they could carry, being robbed of homes, businesses, and all their worldly possessions by their Arab `overlords'.

One reads the moving story of the forcible ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Arab nations, not because of war but due to unregulated racial hatred and gratuitously cruel Arab policies. The de-humanising policy of dhimmitude towards Jews and Christians, treated in so many ways as second class/inferior citizens in Islamic society, also receiving a commendable examination.

One is left with an understanding of the glaring dissimilarity to the Palestinian refugee issue, where the vast number of Palestinian refugees, (composed primarily of Arab migrant workers who had been living in the 'Palestine' area as little as two years prior to Israel's creation in 1948 & most of whom left their homes of their own accord) fled their homes leaving of their own accord, hoping to return when the Arab military had completed the genocide of the Jewish people from their midst in 'Palestine' too.

(Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land Settlement and the Arabs, 1878-1948 by Aryeh Avneri is another excellent work on this issue).

It is clear from this excellent book that the ability of the Arab world to re-settle these Palestinian refugees, is indisputable when one considers their more than sufficient geographical areas (fully one tenth of the world's land mass), together with their vast economic wealth. An outlined ability only matched by an unwillingness which instead saw the Arab world purposely deciding to use these refugees as a political anti-Israeli weapon within the UN and through the media to serve their own purposes towards their agenda of eventually eradicating the Jewish state in it's entirety.

The book showing that over the years this policy has been discovered to be a more effective way of swaying world opinion, with the Arabs having now adopted humanitarian terminology in support of the `demands' of the Palestinians, for circumstances that they themselves largely created but for which they entirely blame the Israelis.

This is a remarkable study of how the Jewish presence in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, a presence that preceded the rise of Islam by over a thousand years, has virtually disappeared through forcible expulsion. An estimated number of only some 20,000 Jews now remaining in the North African area.

The story of a forgotten Jewish people ignored by the World and the media. Readers will be able to draw their own conclusions as to why this is so. Very highly recommended, indeed absolutely required reading on the Middle East.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting discussion of minorities and refugees, December 26, 2004

By 

Jill Malter ([e-mail]) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Forgotten Millions: The Modern Jewish Exodus from Arab Lands (Paperback)

This book is a collection of nine articles that deal with the treatment of minorities in Arab lands in general, and the expulsion of Jews in particular.

Mordechai Nisan begins with an discussion of the treatment of minorities by the Islamic world. That includes Jews, Copts, Armenians, Kurds, Maronites, Assyrians, and Berbers. He also asks about the status of those people who say they have been represented by Arafat. Such people have been at the forefront of the fight against minority rights. Are they really a minority as well?

Next, Walid Phares gives a report on Middle Eastern Christians. He includes the ones in southern Sudan. It's similar in most places: the Christians are vanishing from the region. And there is a systematic, general, and political abandonment of these Christians by the West.

Bat Ye'or talks about the role of dhimmitude in the exodus of the Jews from Arab countries. Dhimmis have no right to life, but must purchase it by humbly paying "protection money" to real people. Bat Ye'or reminds us that dhimmis are not slaves. They can and do earn money. That enables them to pay taxes. But they lack rights. For example, they are not permitted to defend themselves from physical attack by Muslims or testify against Muslims in court.

The fact that dhimmis are not slaves does suggest a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel, by paying sufficient protection money and humbly apologizing for existing, might be tolerated as a dhimmi nation. And then again, it still might not be tolerated.

Bat Ye'or reminds us that the Muslim world would be better off were it to denounce dhimmitude. Otherwise, Muslim relations with other nations will be adversely affected, as will interactions of Muslims and non-Muslims in the West.

Harold Troper tells about the campaign to rescue Syrian Jews, and the role of the Canadian Jewish community in achieving this.

Ya'akov Meran talks about Arab reactions to the claims of expelled Jews. One point he makes is that there have been multiple Arab requests for refugees from Israel to be paid back in land: that is, asking that Israel cede, say, a third of its land given that a third of the population in 1948 was expelled. He reminds us that 35,000 Jews were expelled from Libya, which at the time had a total population of less than one person per square kilometer. By Arab reasoning, Jews would be owed over 35,000 square kilometers from Libya alone (it gets more interesting when we add in nations such as Yemen or Iraq). The entire West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan is about 5,000 square kilometers.

Malka Hillel Shulewitz and Raphael Israeli argue for resettling the Arab refugees who are at present in refugee camps. Given how quickly large numbers of refugees have been resettled in other population exchanges, there is no excuse to abide by Arab demands to keep the refugees in camps. In addition, the camps are breeding grounds for terrorism.

Avi Beker shows how UN and UNRWA obstructionism has made the Arab refugee situation much worse. Yehuda Dominitz describes the absorption of 600,000 Jewish immigrants from Arab lands into Israel. And Pnina Morag-Talmon explains how all these immigrants have been integrated into Israeli society.

What are we to conclude from all this? I think the book suggests that refugees need to be integrated into society and not used as shock troops to fight irredentist wars.