The Farhud

Jews had lived in Baghdad (Iraq) 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 and, in 1925, gone to England on her honeymoon and never returned: she was already sixteen years and half a world away when the Farhud took her father. She died in Essex in 1982, buried at Hoop Lane in Golders Green. Her grandchildren include my father; her great-great-grandson maintains this page. The name she carried out has a page of its own.