Forgotten Millions: The Modern Jewish Exodus from Arab Lands Review

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(More customer reviews)In 'Jews and Arabs' (New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1975), the author Albert Memmi, a Sephardic Jew, observed the following: ' ..The head of an Arab state recently made us a generous and novel offer. 'Return,' he told us, 'return to the land of your birth! Are you not Arabs like us- Arab Jews?'. What lovely words! We draw a secret nostalgia from them: yes, indeed we were Arab Jews- in our habits, our culture, our music, our menus. I have written enough about it. But must one remain an Arab Jew if, in return, one has to tremble for one's life and the future of one's children and always be denied a normal existence? There are, it is true, the Arab Christians. What is not sufficiently known is the shamefully exorbitant price that they must pay for the right merely to survive.'
'The Forgotten Millions' is a compendium of nine thoughtfully interwoven essays which present a compelling sociopolitical discussion of the unheralded expulsion of ~ 850,000 Jews from Arab North Africa and the Middle East between 1941 and 1976. The presentation by Ya'akov Meron debunks a widely held misconception that this Jewish exodus resulted solely from the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. After documenting the brutal Iraqi (1941), Egyptian (1945), and Libyan (1945) pogroms inspired by local Arab movements sympathetic to the Nazis, as well as the anti-Jewish riots in Aleppo and Aden of 1947, the author rightfully asks how these events could '..be attributed to the State [of Israel] in 1948?'.
Core issues addressed effectively in Parts 2 and 3 (essays 5 through 9) include: the Jews unprovoked forced expulsion; their de facto population exchange with Arab Palestinians displaced primarily by the Arab invasion of Israel in 1948; and the stark contrast between the rapid, but difficult integration of ~650,000 Sephardic Jewish refugees from Arab lands into a resource poor Israel, relative to the Arab worlds ongoing refusal to permanently re-settle the original 540,000 Palestinian Arab refugees (and their descendants) from the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict, despite more than sufficient geographical (fully one tenth of the world's land mass), and economic (i.e., Arabian peninsula, Iraqi, and Libyan oil wealth) resources. In sum, the essays in Parts 2 and 3 clearly obligate objective international policy makers and diplomats to re-address the validity of the current Palestinian Authority claim to a 'right of return' for Arab Palestinians to the pre-1967 borders of Israel.
The earlier essays in Part 1 introduce key thematic elements that support the presentations in Parts 2 and 3. Bat Ye'or highlights how the post-colonial resurgence of traditional Islamic oppression (i.e., 'dhimmitude') of Jews and Christians intensified following the creation of Israel, as the liberation of an indigenous dhimmi people (i.e., the Jews) within its historic homeland was viewed as a 'Naqbah' ('Catastrophe') not only by Arab Palestinians, but by the Islamic Arab world at large. Walid Phares summarizes how the Arab world, already Judenrein, has become progressively Christianrein as well since the end of World War II.
Ultimately, it is this widespread, brutal religious intolerance of non-Muslims in the Arab world that must be addressed and ameliorated by the international community to achieve a long term peaceful settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. As a specific example, the international community should compel a 'moderate' Arab state, Jordan, to repeal immediately an unconscionable existing law that actively sanctions the notion of Judenrein (i.e., Feb. 6, 1954, Section 3 [3] of the Jordanian Nationality Law, prohibiting an Jew from becoming a Jordanian citizen, which is still in effect). It is perhaps an ironic ray of hope that dehumanizing, repressive laws such as The Jordanian Nationality Law, are sharply contrasted by the nearby legal status of 1 million permanent Arab Muslim citizens currently living within the pre-1967 borders of Israel.

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The untold story of how the once flourishing Jewish communities in the Arab Middle East have virtually disappeared. The Forgotten Millions tells the story of the modern Jewish exodus from the Arab lands against the backdrop of the historical presence of Christian and other minorities. The Jewish presence in this area-present-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, the Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen-preceded the rise of Islam by more than a thousand years. These Jewish communities often played a leading role in the development of the region, particularly as recorded in the Cairo Genizah, with which the book begins. In 1948 when the state of Israel was declared, there were an estimated 870,000 Jews in the region. By 1986, a generation later, the ancient Jewish peoples had virtually disappeared. Only about 20,000 remain, mainly in North Africa. Of these refugees, some 200,000 opted for the Americas and other Western countries; the majority migrated to Israel, where today they and their progeny comprise over 40 per cent of the population. What happened to trigger the transfer of whole communities? Why did this historic movement and the tragedy that preceded it fail to leave their impress either on the contemporary annals of the Jewish people or on the consciousness of the free world? The Forgotten Millions probes the reasons for this silence.

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