Down the Middle East Memory Hole

As the grandson of an Aleppan Jew, I needed to be reminded of what happened to Jews in two of the most ancient capitals of Middle Eastern Jewry—Aleppo and Baghdad—in the wake of the 1947 UN vote to partition Palestine.Matti Friedman accomplishes this very strongly in the opening section of his essay, “Mizrahi Nation.” By invoking events in present-day Syria, he also allows us to imagine what massacres would have resulted today had Syria’s remaining Jews not fled Hafez el-Assad’s viciously anti-Semitic regime.

As a Jew from Egypt, I was also pleased to see Friedman bring up the fate of the one-million displaced and dispossessed Jews of the Arab and Muslim world, about whom little or no mention is ever made in the press or in institutions of higher learning in the U.S. and around the world. Yet the vast majority of these Jews were autochthonous to the Middle East, and their presence there (as Friedman notes) predates the advent of Islam or of Christianity, in some cases by more than a thousand years.

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According to Friedman, the Arab and Muslim peoples who expropriated and then expelled their Jewish populations still harbor the irksome memory of a Jewish presence in their midst. In this I believe he is largely mistaken. Arabs schooled in the Middle East after 1956 have no knowledge whatsoever that Jews once lived among them. The propaganda machine has erased (or defaced) all vestiges of Jewry, and the names of streets bearing Jewish names have been altered. Ask anyone in my home town of Alexandria where the Jewish cemetery is and you will get a baffled look. A Jewish cemetery?

In presenting his case that Israel is very far from being a colony, Friedman may be seen as offering a strong refutation to Ari Shavit’s showy “confession” in My Promised Land that Israel is indeed guilty of the sin of colonialism: the very sin so frequently invoked by its enemies to vilify and delegitimize it. For these enemies, the idea that Jews are native to the region is inadmissible—intolerable. And therein lies a clue both to their expunging of any memory of their own Jews and to their obsessive fixation on the un-erasable affront embodied in the existence of the Jewish state.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/supplemental/2014/06/down-the-middle-east-memory-hole/