08/30/2026
Baghdad, 1951:
A Jewish family stands beneath the hard Iraqi sun with everything it is still permitted to carry. A few suitcases. Several changes of clothing. Perhaps a prayer book that had belonged to a grandfather. Behind them lies the house where their children were born, the shop that fed them, the synagogue where generations of their family had worshiped. Ahead waits an airplane bound for a country most of them have never seen.
Before leaving, they have been required to surrender their Iraqi citizenship. They will not be coming back.
These were not recent European arrivals to the Middle East. The Jews of Iraq traced their presence there to the Babylonian exile, more than twenty-five centuries earlier. Jewish scholars in Babylon had produced the Babylonian Talmud, one of the foundational works of Judaism. Long before Baghdad was founded, the lands of Mesopotamia had been home to Jewish prayer, scholarship, commerce, and family life.
Now nearly all of it was being abandoned.
The process had begun before Israel declared independence. In June 1941, during the violent pogrom remembered as the Farhud, mobs swept through Jewish neighborhoods in Baghdad, murdering at least 180 Jews, assaulting women, looting homes, and leaving a community that had once considered Iraq its home wondering whether it still had a future there.
Then came 1948.
When Israel declared independence and survived the invasion of neighboring Arab armies, anger against the new Jewish state fell upon Jewish communities that had lived throughout the Arab world for centuries. Men and women who had never set foot in Israel were increasingly treated as though they were enemy agents merely because they were Jews.
In Iraq, Jews were dismissed from government positions, arrested on accusations of Zionism, and subjected to mounting restrictions. In September 1948, Shafiq Ades, a wealthy and prominent Jewish businessman, was publicly hanged in Basra after a trial widely regarded as politically motivated. If a man so connected and respected could be killed by the state, ordinary Jewish families understood how little protection remained.
In 1950, Iraq permitted Jews to emigrate, but only if they renounced their citizenship. The following year, the government froze the property of those who had registered to leave. Families who had lived in Mesopotamia for more than two thousand years suddenly found themselves stateless and dispossessed.
Israel and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee responded with Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. Between 1950 and 1952, nearly 120,000 Iraqi Jews were carried to Israel. A community that had survived Persians, Greeks, Romans, caliphs, Mongols, and Ottomans almost disappeared within a few years.
And Iraq was not alone.
In Egypt, after Israel won its independence, Jews were arrested, businesses were seized, citizenship was revoked, and thousands were expelled or pressured to leave. In Libya, deadly pogroms and recurring violence helped destroy a community that had existed since antiquity. In Yemen and Aden, persecution, insecurity, and massacre sent almost the entire Jewish population toward Israel in another enormous airlift. Syria imposed restrictions on Jewish movement and property. Across Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, the circumstances differed, and many departures were not formal expulsions. But fear, discrimination, nationalist upheaval, violence, and the Arab-Israeli conflict steadily emptied communities that had once numbered in the tens or hundreds of thousands.
Their stories cannot all be reduced to a single cause. Some fled mobs. Some were expelled by governments. Some lost their citizenship or property. Some left because they believed Israel offered their children a future their old countries no longer could. But taken together, the result is unmistakable. Around 850,000 Jews left or fled Arab countries in the decades surrounding Israel’s creation. Many came from families that had lived in those lands for far longer than Islam had existed.
Israel was itself desperately poor. It faced food rationing, housing shortages, and continuing threats of war. New arrivals were often placed in tents, huts, and crowded transit camps. Mizrahi Jews also encountered condescension and discrimination from parts of Israel’s European-born establishment. Their reception was not effortless or perfect. But Israel did not leave them stateless.
The new country opened its doors, granted them citizenship, and attempted to absorb a refugee population so large that it transformed Israel almost overnight. They became soldiers, laborers, teachers, artists, rabbis, politicians, parents, and grandparents. They did not remain a permanent refugee class. They became part of the nation.
Today, ancient Jewish communities in Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Yemen have virtually vanished. Only a few thousand Jews remain across the Arab world, principally in Morocco and Tunisia. A region that was once home to nearly a million Jews outside the land of Israel has been almost entirely emptied of them.
In Israel, meanwhile, synagogues, churches, mosques, monasteries, and sacred places belonging to several faiths remain active.
The suitcases carried from Baghdad, Cairo, Tripoli, Aleppo, and Sana’a were never simply luggage. They held the last fragments of civilizations that had taken thousands of years to build and only a generation to uproot.
And for most of those families, there was only one country willing to call them home.
- Tony Valerino
