One More Thing To Blame Bush For: The Disappearance Of The Jewish Community Of Baghdad?

From Stephen Farrell of The New York Times:

Baghdad Jews Have Become a Fearful Few

...The community of Jews in Baghdad is now all but vanished in a land where their heritage recedes back to Abraham of Ur, to Jonah's prophesying to Nineveh, and to Nebuchadnezzar's sending Jews into exile here more than 2,500 years ago.

Just over half a century ago, Iraq's Jews numbered more than 130,000. But now, in the city that was once the community's heart, they cannot muster even a minyan, the 10 Jewish men required to perform some of the most important rituals of their faith. They are scared even to publicize their exact number, which was recently estimated at seven by the Jewish Agency for Israel, and at eight by one Christian cleric.

The reasons for the decline of the once prominent Jewish community?

decades of trauma: the 1941 Farhud pogrom in which more than 130 Jews were killed during the Feast of Shavuot, World War II, the Holocaust, the anti-Zionism of Saddam Hussein and the post-2003 rise of Islamic militants.

Abe Greenwald notes that what Farrell implies, Matthew Yglesias makes explicit:

Yglesias writes:

Farrell doesn't make a big deal about it, but the upshot of the factoid about the synagogue seems to be that the U.S. invasion actually turned Iraq into a less hospital place for Jews than was Saddam Hussein's rabidly anti-Zionist rapacious dictatorship.

But Greenwald sees something odd here:

What’s most astounding here is the even weight Farrell places on, say, World War II, the Holocaust, and post-2003 Iraq. It’s as if each fact further displaced an equal number of Jews. In reality, the Ba’athist persecution of Jews (including public hangings) had caused that 130,000 to dwindle to scarcely more than a minyan before the Iraq War.

Greenwald's point that the shrinking of the Jewish community was not equally distributed over time is supported by a report by the American Jewish Committee in 1953:

In the course of 1951 an additional 89,088 Jews left Iraq for Israel, leaving in Iraq at the time of writing some 12,000 Jews. Thus, one of the oldest Jewish settlements in the world was practically liquidated.

Another point to take into account is that the disappearance of a variety of Jewish communities from Arab countries as they fled to Israel tends to point to the irrelevance of Farrell's alleged 'post-2003 Islamic militants' to this phenomenon.

In September 2003, The Justice--the student newspaper of Brandeis University--reported:

Beth Hatefutsoth, the Jewish Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv, estimates that a mere 100 Jews live in Iraq, which covers 168,000 square miles and has a total population of 23 million. Today, in Baghdad, just 35 Jews remain in what was once a bustling community of merchants, traders, and bankers.

Earlier, in May 2003, NPR was already reporting on the dwindling Jewish community of Baghdad that could not put together a minyan. No mention of the effect of Islamists on the flight of Jews. Instead:

Most of Baghdad's Jews left in two massive waves, first in 1948 after the founding of the state of Israel, then in 1970, a year after several Jewish men were publicly hanged, accused by the Ba'athist government of spying for Israel. [Listen to the radio report here]

There is plenty of valid things to criticize about the Bush administration in general, and the handling of the Iraq War in particular--but the disappearance of the Jewish community in Baghdad does not come remotely close.

Crossposted at Soccer Dad

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