BBC: Inside Iran's Jewish community

[CJCRANE]

"Although Iran and Israel are bitter enemies, few know that Iran is home to the largest number of Jews anywhere in the Middle East outside Israel.

About 25,000 Jews live in Iran and most are determined to remain no matter what the pressures - as proud of their Iranian culture as of their Jewish roots."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5367892.stm

[cali]

1. Interesting

and well balanced article. I admire the Iranian Jews for their determination to stay and be part of a culture in which they've participated for thousands of years, but it's clear from the article that their situation in Iran is a precarious one, and that there is institutionalized prejudice against them.

[Ian David]

2. See also: The Silent Exodus

Silent Exodus was selected at the International Human Rights Film Festival of Paris (2004) and presented at the UN Geneva Human Rights Annual Convention (2004)



In 1948 nearly one million Jews lived in Arab lands. But In barely twenty years, they have become forgotten fugitives, expelled from their native lands, forgotten by history and where the victims themselves have hidden their fate under a cloak of silence.

A people whom legend have always associated with "wandering" many of these Jews from Arab lands had lived there for thousands of years and accepted their fate, through good times and bad times.

But 1948, the beginning of their exodus, also saw the birth of the State of Israel.

And, while the Arab armies were preparing to invade the young refugee-country, the survivors of the Shoah were piling up in rickety boats. Meanwhile a few hundred thousand Arabs from Palestine were getting ready to flee their homes, convinced that they would return as winners and conquerors.

Soon - by a terrible twist of fate they, as well, began to fill up refugee camps and passed on their refugee status to new generations.

The Jews, however, did not receive refugee status.

They had just rediscovered the land of their birthright.

And if they came from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq or from Yemen, if they had lost everything, even their relatives and their cemeteries, they were ready to rebuild their lives in the West and for many - in Israel - and try to forget their past.

Without ever asking for compensation or the right of return, or even wishing that their story be told...

More:
http://www.pierrerehov.com/exodus.htm

And surely you heard all the "light-hearted" jokes about the last two Jews in the entire country of Afghanistan who spent the last few decades not talking to one another?

Brotherly Enmity: No Love Lost Between Afghanistan's 'Last Two Jews'

By Paul Holmes (Copyright 2001 Reuters)

K A B U L, Afghanistan, Dec. 2 - Yitzhak Levy and Zebolan Simanto say they are the last two Jews in Afghanistan and they hate each other with a vengeance.

"Yitzhak and the Taliban, they're the same," said Simanto, 41, pressing the tips of two fingers together to make the point.Across the courtyard of a crumbling apartment building on Flower Street that used to be home to a community of some 30 Jewish families, Levy is just as bitter about his neighbor. The building has no glass in its windows, no running water and two synagogues, one that Simanto climbs into through a window frame and another that Levy keeps under lock and key.

"All my problems are because of Zebolan," said Levy, a squat man with a flowing white beard and battered sheepskin Astrakhan hat, who gave his age as 60. He recites a litany of woes capped by accusations that the only other Jew in Kabul had denounced him to the Taliban as a spy for Israel and landed him in jail five times." They threw me on the floor and one sat on my neck and two on my feet. The other two beat me with electrical cables. Now I can't walk properly," he said of one spell in jail.

The Last Ones

Levy and Simanto, it seems, are all that is left of a Jewish presence in Afghanistan that stretches back 800 years. All the other Jews left when communist-backed rule collapsed in 1992, many of them for Israel where Levy and Simanto both say their wives and children now live. Levy, a traditional healer born in the western city of Herat, remained in Kabul when the Taliban took over in 1996 and imposed their radical Islamic creed and intolerance of other religions on the city. Simanto, a dealer in carpets and handicrafts who is also from Herat, spent six years travelling in Israel, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. He returned to Kabul in 1998 and moved in." I came here for three months and it's been 3-1/2 years. I was in prison four times and all because of this man," said Simanto, who insists it was Levy who denounced him as a spy.

More:
http://www.isjm.org/news/article1.htm



See also:


THE ARABS WITHOUT THE JEWS: ROOTS OF A TRAGEDY
by MAGDI ALLAM
(translated from Italian by Lyn and Lawrence Julius)

Israel is the keeper of a mutilated Arab identity, the repository for the guilty consciences of the Arab peoples, the living witness to a true history of the Arab countries, continuously denied, falsified and ignored.

Seeing Pierre Rehov's documentary film 'The Silent Exodus' about the expulsion and flight of a million Sephardi Jews helped me gain a better understanding of the tragedy of a community that was integral and fundamental to Arab society. Above all it has revealed to me the very essence of the catastrophe that befell it, a catastrophe which the mythical Arab nation has never once called into question. In a flash of insight I could see that the tragedy of the Jews and the catastrophe of the Arabs are two facets of the same coin. By expelling the Jews who were settled on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean centuries before they were arabised and islamised, the Arabs have in fact begun the lethal process of mutilating their own identity and despoiling their own history. By losing their Jews the Arabs have lost their roots and have ended up by losing themselves.

As has often happened in history, the Jews were the first victims of hatred and intolerance. All the "others" had their turn soon enough, specifically the Christians and other religious minorities, heretical and secular Muslims and finally, those Muslims who do not fit exactly into the ideological framework of the extreme nationalists and Islamists. There has not been a single instance in this murky period of our history when the Arab states have been ready to condemn the steady exodus of Christians, ethnic-religious minorities, enlightened and ordinary Muslims, while Muslims plain and simple have become the primary victims of Islamic terror.

<snip>

The fact remains that of the million Jews who at the end of 1945 were an integral part of the Arab population, only 5,000 remain. These Arab Jews, expelled or who fled at a moment's notice, have become an integral part of the Israeli population. They continue to represent a human injustice and an historical tragedy. Above all, they are indicative of an Arab civil and identity catastrophe. That is why to recognise the wrongs committed towards the Arab Jews - as the maverick Libyan leader colonel Gaddafi has recently done - by objectively rediscovering their past and millenarian roots, by finding again their tolerant and plural history and by totally and sincerely reconciling themselves with themselves, the Arabs could free themselves from the ideological obscurantism which has relegated them to the most basic level of human development and has changed the region into the most problematic and confict-ridden on earth.

More:
http://www.pierrerehov.com/exodus.htm

[Ian David]

3. See also: Jews in Exotic Places

See also:

Jewish Communities in Exotic Places
by Ken Blady
ISBN: 0765761122


This unique volume looks at seventeen Jewish communities in Third World countries and chronicles the history of these groups by tracing their survival, exploring aspects of their culture, religion, and folkways. These Jewish communities are situated in remote places on the Asian and African Jewish geographical periphery, which, over the centuries, became isolated from the major centers of Jewish civilization.

Jewish Communities in Exotic Places examines seventeen Jewish groups that are referred to in Hebrew as edot ha-mizrach, Eastern or Oriental Jewish communities. These groups, situated in remote places on the Asian and African Jewish geographical periphery, became isolated from the major centers of Jewish civilization over the centuries and embraced some interesting practices and aspects of the dominant cultures in which they were situated.

<snip>

Table of Contents
Pt. 1. From the land of frankincense and myrrh. The Jews of North Yemen — The Jews of Habban, South Yemen —
pt. 2. Pariahs among ayatollahs. The Jews of Persia — The Djedid al-Islam (New Muslims) of Meshed —
pt. 3. Lost in the land of Assyria. The mountain Jews of Kurdistan —
pt. 4. On the Russian riviera. The Krimchaks of the Crimea —
pt. 5. From the land of the golden fleece. The Ebraeli of Georgia —
pt. 6. Samson warriors, Bar Kochba's heirs. The mountain Jews of Daghestan —
pt. 7. The people with the blue-stained fingers. The Tadjiki Jews of Bukhara —
pt. 8. A remedy for the evil eye. The Jews of Afghanistan —
pt. 9. Jewish untouchables? The Bene Israel of Bombay — The Malabaris and Paradesis of Cochin —
pt. 10. The "blue-turbaned Muslims". The Jews of Kaifeng, China —
pt. 11. Mellah, Medinah, Marabouts, and Mahia. The Judeo-Berbers of the Atlas Mountains of Morocco —
pt. 12. Cave rabbis? Cave synagogues? The Jews of Libya : merchants and cavern dwellers —
pt. 13. From the land of the lotus eaters. The Jews of Jerba, Tunisia —
pt. 14. The Queen of Sheba's lost children. The Beta Israel of Ethiopia.

More:
http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-0765761122-1