June 1-2, 1941: The Farhud In Baghdad

The historian Lyn Julius has just published a piece on “Remembering the Farhud.” Far too few people – perhaps one in a thousand – has ever heard of the Farhud, the two days of mass slaughter of Jews by Arabs in Baghdad on June 1 and 2,1941. This was one of many such mass killings of Jews in Arab lands, including pogroms in Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. But it was the deadliest of those pogroms, with up to 1,000 Jews killed, and many more wounded; it is the only mass killing of Jews in Arab lands which has been given a unique name.

Julius’ article is here: “Why We Need to Remember the Farhud,” by Lyn Julius, JNS.org, June 1, 2022:

Iraq is in the news again, this time due to its passage of a “draconian” law that forbids contact between Israel and Iraqi citizens on pain of death. Several Arab states have embraced normalization with Israel in the wake of the Abraham Accords. They have signed trade deals, established air links and encouraged tourism, but Iraq has bucked the trend.

Iraq has “bucked the trend” because the country is now firmly in Iran’s orbit, and does Tehran’s bidding. Sixty-five percent of Iraq’s population is Shi’a; it was inevitable that Iraq’s powerful Shi’a neighbor, just next door, would come to dominate Iraqi politics. At least one major militia in Iraq, the Krtaib Hezbollah, is openly a proxy of Teheran, receiving money, and weapons, and its marching orders, from the Iranians.

The law [to make contact with Israeli citizens punishable by death] was proposed by the largest party in the Iraqi parliament, led by the pro-Iran Shi’ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr. It was passed by an overwhelming majority. Although antisemitic and anti-Zionist laws are already on Iraq’s statute books and have been used to chase out Iraq’s Jewish community, the al-Sadr law extends its remit to Kurdistan, where Kurds have been open about their sympathy for Israel.

The Kurds have long identified with Israel. They see the Israelis as sharing the same enemies – it is Muslim Arabs who have tried to destroy Israel, and Muslim Arabs who have persecuted Kurds in both Syria and Iraq. Kurds are heartened by the Jewish state’s ability to fend off those enemies, as Israel managed to do in 1948, 1967, and 1973, when the country’s very life was at stake, and no doubt the Kurds dream of emulating that success.

It is ironic that the al-Sadr law was passed within days of the 81st anniversary of the worst catastrophe to strike the Iraqi Jewish community: the 1941 massacre of hundreds of Jews in the wake of the defeat of Iraq’s pro-Nazi regime led by Rashid Ali al-Kilani. It has been known ever since as the Farhud.

In an awful coincidence, the slaughter took place during the festival of Shavuot on June 1 and 2, 1941. “On the first night of Shavu’ot we usually go to synagogue and stay up all night studying Torah,” said Heskel Haddad, now a veteran ophthalmologist in New York. “Suddenly we heard screams: ‘Allah Allah!’ and shots were fired. We went out to the roof to see what was happening, we saw fires, we saw people on the roofs in the Jewish quarter screaming, begging God to help them.”

The violence continued through the night. Jewish homes were targeted by a red handprint, or hamsa, painted on their walls. Haddad remembers that the mob came down his street at dawn, and he watched them from the roof as they looted his neighbor’s house.…

The Farhud was caused by a toxic mix of Nazi influence and propaganda, anti-colonialism that scapegoated the Jews as a fifth column, and militaristic nationalism. Many blame the pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who together with 400 Palestinian and Syrian exiles incited anti-Jewish hatred during the two years he spent in Baghdad. But some argue that the shadowy figure of Yunis Bahri did more harm than the Mufti. Bahri broadcast radio propaganda from Berlin. In coffee shops, Iraqis huddled around shortwave radios to hear his broadcasts. They always started with the call Huna Berlin. Hayii al Arab—“This is Berlin. Arab greetings.”

The power of Bahri’s broadcasts cannot be discounted. Four days before the Farhud broke out, he took to the airwaves to incite Arab listeners to violence. “The biggest enemies of mankind,” he declared, “are those who believe the Jews.”…

Why do we need to remember the Farhud? Because the Farhud and the antisemitic rejectionism embodied in the al-Sadr law constitute a continuum. Iraq never signed a peace treaty with Israel and is still at war with it. The rejectionist baton has been passed from those who incited the Farhud to al-Sadr’s Iranian puppet-masters, who deny the Holocaust even as they express their desire to repeat it.

There is a link between the violent antisemitism expressed in the Farhud of 1941 and the “antisemitic rejectionism” of 2022, that Iraq has now demonstrated in declaring any contact by an Iraqi citizen with the Jewish state as punishable by death. In both cases we also see the power of outsiders to foment that antisemitism. In Iraq, two years before the Farhud, 400 Palestinians and Syrians arrived, under the direction of the Mufti of Jerusalem, the pro-Nazi and violently antisemitic Hajj Amin el Husseini, who encouraged the murderous antisemitism that gave rise to the Farhud. An even more influential prompter of the Farhud was one Yunis Basri, a pro-Nazi Arab propagandist who broadcast his own antisemitic messages from Berlin. In Iraq today, the law that punishes with death any citizen having contact with the Jewish state was, like the Farhud, prompted in part by outsiders as well, the puppet masters sitting in Iran, who gave the Iraqi Shi’a Muqtada Al-Sadr his marching orders on the legislation.