The Farhud

Jews had lived in Baghdad for two and a half thousand years — since the Babylonian exile, longer than almost anywhere on earth. By the twentieth century they were perhaps a third of the city: merchants, bankers, musicians, civil servants. My Baghdadi line sat in that world — among them a 2×great-grandfather born in 1880, of a family of traders.

Over the festival of Shavuot, in the power vacuum after the collapse of the pro-Nazi government of Rashid Ali, mobs turned on Jewish Baghdad. For two days — while British forces waited outside the city — Jews were murdered in the streets and in their homes, women assaulted, shops and houses looted and burned. The dead numbered in the hundreds. Among them was my 2×great-grandfather. The pogrom has a name: the Farhud — 'violent dispossession'.

The Farhud broke something that two and a half millennia had built: the community's belief that Baghdad was home. Through the 1940s came dismissals, arrests and property seizures; after 1948 the squeeze became expulsion in all but name; and in 1950–51 the airlifts carried away almost the entire community. A Jewish Baghdad of 2,500 years ended within a decade of those two days.

His daughter — born in Baghdad in 1901 — had married into the Basrah branch that reached England through the empire's trade routes, the surname anglicised on arrival. She died in Essex in 1982, buried at Hoop Lane in Golders Green, half the world from the Tigris. Her grandchildren include my father; her great-great-grandson maintains this page.