Jewish Populations are More Diverse Than Many Believe
By Eden Janfar, 2020–2021 CAMERA Fellow at Binghamton University
The Farhud was a violent pogrom and massacre waged against the Jews of Iraq in 1941, in which about 180 Jews were murdered and many more injured. Raging during the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, the Farhud was the climax of a creeping antisemitic zeitgeist — anti-Jewish graffiti such as, “Hitler was killing the Jewish germs” was scrawled on walls, and antisemitic propaganda regularly aired on Radio Berlin in Arabic, as Farhud witness Sami Michael recalls.
The Farhud was just one of hundreds of ruthless pogroms that spurred the wider Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Morocco, Egypt, and others. Approximately 850,000 Jews, predominantly of Sephardi and Mizrahi background, were expelled from their homes from 1948 to the early 1970s.
Unfortunately, many are sorely uneducated about Sephardi (from Spain) and Mizrahi (from the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia) Jews, who make up 50.2 percent of Israeli Jews. As a result of this ignorance, some unfairly classify all Jews as solely white and European. However, most Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews descend from Jews expelled by the Romans after the siege of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. — meaning that the majority of today’s Jews have never even lived in Europe. Of course, European Jews are no less authentic than Middle Eastern Jews — I solely aim to point out that this generalization is factually incorrect.
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