Down the Middle East Memory Hole

As the grandson of an Aleppan Jew, I needed to be reminded of what happened to Jews in two of the most ancient capitals of Middle Eastern Jewry—Aleppo and Baghdad—in the wake of the 1947 UN vote to partition Palestine.Matti Friedman accomplishes this very strongly in the opening section of his essay, “Mizrahi Nation.” By invoking events in present-day Syria, he also allows us to imagine what massacres would have resulted today had Syria’s remaining Jews not fled Hafez el-Assad’s viciously anti-Semitic regime.

As a Jew from Egypt, I was also pleased to see Friedman bring up the fate of the one-million displaced and dispossessed Jews of the Arab and Muslim world, about whom little or no mention is ever made in the press or in institutions of higher learning in the U.S. and around the world. Yet the vast majority of these Jews were autochthonous to the Middle East, and their presence there (as Friedman notes) predates the advent of Islam or of Christianity, in some cases by more than a thousand years.

No less compelling is Friedman’s treatment of the lingering aftereffects of nationalism, the dominant political ideology in Europe in the mid- to late-19th century, whose arrival in the Middle East at the turn of the 20th century is what spurred the persecution of Jews in many Arab countries. This contradicts the frequent claim that the real irritant to Arab and Muslim sensibilities was either the Zionist movement or the creation of Israel. “Rather,” as Friedman writes,