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"In the years following the founding of the State of Israel, close to a million Jews became refugees fleeing their ancestral homelands in the Middle East, North Africa, and Iran. State-sanctioned discrimination, violence, and political unrest brought an abrupt end to these once vibrant communities, scattering their members to the four corners of the earth. Their stories are mostly untold. Sephardi Voices: The Forgotten Exodus of the Arab Jews is a window into the experiences of these communities and their stories of survival. Through gripping first-hand accounts and stunning portrait and documentary photography, we hear on-the-ground stories of pogroms in Libya and Egypt, the burning of synagogues in Syria, the terrible Farhud in Iraq, families escaping via the great airlifts of the Magic Carpet and Operations Ezra and Nehemiah, husbands smuggled in carpets into Iran in search of wives. The authors also provide crucial historical background for these events, as well as updates on the lives of some of these Sephardi Jews who have gone on to rebuild fortunes in London and New York, write novels, and win Nobel Prizes. Sephardi Voices is at once a wide-ranging and intimate story of a large-scale catastrophe and a portrait of the vulnerability of the passage of time."--
About the author
Henry Green is Professor of Religious Studies and the former Director of Judaic and Sephardic Studies at the University of Miami, Florida. He is the Founding Director of MOSAIC: the Jewish Museum of Florida, and of Sephardi Voices, an audio-visual digital archive of Arab Jews. He has served as a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and has given testimony to the USA Congressional Human Rights Caucus as an advocate for the rights of those displaced.Richard Stursberg is the author of The Tower of Babble (2012), named by The Globe and Mail (Canada's national newspaper) one of the best books of the year; and The Tangled Garden (2019), which was shortlisted for Canada’s Donner Prize for the best book on public policy. He is the President of PEN Canada and Chairman of Sephardi Voices International.
Summary
In the years following the founding of the State of Israel, close to a million Jews became refugees fleeing their ancestral homelands in the Middle East, North Africa, and Iran. State-sanctioned discrimination, violence, and political unrest brought an abrupt end to these once vibrant communities, scattering their members to the four corners of the earth. Their stories are mostly untold.
Sephardi Voices: The Forgotten Exodus of the Arab Jews is a window into the experiences of these communities and their stories of survival. Through gripping first-hand accounts and stunning portrait and documentary photography, we hear on-the-ground stories of pogroms in Libya and Egypt, the burning of synagogues in Syria, the terrible Farhud in Iraq, families escaping via the great airlifts of the Magic Carpet and Operations Ezra and Nehemiah, husbands smuggled in carpets into Iran in search of wives. The authors also provide crucial historical background for these events, as well as updates on the lives of some of these Sephardi Jews who have gone on to rebuild fortunes in London and New York, write novels, and win Nobel Prizes. Sephardi Voices is at once a wide-ranging and intimate story of a large-scale catastrophe and a portrait of the vulnerability of the passage of time.
Foreword
Introduction
Jews have lived in the Middle East and North Africa since time immemorial. Known by various names, such as Babylonian, Persian, Sephardi, Arab, or Mizrahi Jews, their presence predated the arrival of Islam by more than two millennia.*[CREATE FOOTNOTE: * See the glossary (p. [XX]) for more on these terms.] They have one of the longest, continuous written histories of any people on the planet. Many of the key building blocks of Western civilization were invented by these ancient Jews, including the origin stories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: the creation of the earth in six days, Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, the Flood and the Ten Commandments. They created monotheism and its contemporary manifestations in the words of Jesus and Muhammad.
With the arrival of Islam in the seventh century CE and the conquest by early caliphates of Persia, Palestine, most of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Iberian Peninsula, the Sephardi Jews found themselves the subjects of Muslim rulers. They became—like the Christians—second-class citizens, but were still respected as “People of the Book.” Their situation varied from place to place. In parts of the Muslim empire they prospered; in other parts, they suffered discrimination. But nowhere did they fare as badly during the Middle Ages as the Jews of Europe.
The Jews of North Africa and the Middle East continued to live in their ancestral homelands until the end of the World War II. Then, with the rise of Arab nationalism and the founding of the State of Israel, their Muslim neighbors turned against them. Their governments seized their property, imprisoned their leaders, stripped them of their citizenship, and forced them to flee the places they had lived for millennia—and to become refugees in North America, Israel, and Europe.
The plight of the Palestinian refugees in the War of Independence in 1948 is well known. Roughly 725,000 people lost their villages, farms, homes, and businesses. The United Nations set up a dedicated agency to assist them. Their situation has been the subject of global concern for seventy years.
The story of the Sephardi Jewish refugees is much less well known. Where there were close to 850,000 Jews in the Middle East and North Africa after World War II, by 2021 there were less than 4,000. No UN agency was established to assist them, and no countries demanded justice for them. Their displacement and dispossession was largely ignored by the international community.
In 2009, the Sephardi Voices International (SVI) project was launched to document the lives of those who had to leave their ancient homes, and preserve, as best it can, the stories of their ancient cultures and of peoples that will soon be gone forever. The SVI digital audiovisual collection is the largest of its kind in the world. To date, over 450 interviews have been done, recording what life was like for the Jews living in Arab lands and Iran, what happened to the individuals who had to flee, and what has become of them since. The SVI Archive contains not only the interviews, but also family photographs, school report cards, passports, property deeds, identity cards, and souvenirs, a vast assemblage of materials from the world that was lost. It is housed in the Sephardi Voices International website and the National Library of Israel.
Sephardi Voices: The Forgotten Exodus of the Arab Jews draws on this extraordinary collection to tell the story of this catastrophe. It does so through the words of the people who lived through it. They describe their lives before the expulsions began, the terror they had to endure, and the ways in which they rebuilt in the countries that embraced them. The book includes many of their family photographs and portraits. There are rare and privileged glimpses into their schools, family gatherings, marriages, and celebrations. They appear as they were then—in Baghdad, Cairo, and Algiers—and as they are now. Their stories are stories of loss, but also stories of redemption.
