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"THE FORGOTTEN EXODUS - JEWS IN THE ARAB COUNTRIES"
I wrote this book so that my non-Jewish fellow citizens and my Arab cousins would get to know our history which is also partly theirs.
I wrote down these facts in memory of our relatives who had to start all over again.
I penned these lines so that the dead who we were obliged to leave over there, who were abandoned against our will with no one left to place a stone on their graves, would know that they have not been forgotten.
My intention was neither revenge nor rancour. I had no accounts to settle and I penned these lines so that my children and the children of the 940,800 men, women and children, young and old, thrown out of their homes because they were Jews should not be forgotten.
Perhaps we refrained from mentioning them out of respect for the victims of the Shoah. Our tragedy was infinitely less compared to what happened to six million of our fellow Jews. We lost a home, our work, friends, property and our country. Sometimes, even often, our families were torn apart. But what was this compared to the Holocaust and all those destroyed lives?
We did not feel we had any right to complain so we didn't do it. Like the survivors of the Nazi hell, we had to rebuild our lives under circumstances that were horrible but very different. They had no one while we had our relatives and children. We had but one objective - to rebuild our lives. To grumble would have been unacceptable.
Nearly 50 years have now passed. It is time to gather our memories together, to vent our feelings, to open our hearts and to shout from the rooftops - we are also refugees from the conflict between the Arab states and Israel. The resolution of the UN Security Council laid down a "just solution to the problem of the refugees", all refugees. We are the Jewish refugees from the Arab-Islamic states and the world has forgotten us.
Up until 1947, generally speaking, the Jews had a peaceful existence amongst the Arabs. However, this wonderful life was shattered the day Israel was born and the Arab nations declared their independence. There was extortion and murders perpetuated in Algeria, Morocco, Yemen, Iraq, Aden, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Egypt. Jews were targeted everywhere.
We were just as much Egyptians, Syrians, Iraqis, as the natives of those countries. We were first and foremost Jewish Egyptians in Egypt and in the Arab states and never considered ourselves as Jews living in these countries. With one stroke of the pen, these regimes forged a new identity for us.
Our and our parents' generation did not want to reopen this wound which continues to gnaw at us. Why was it that so many reunions with friends from "over there" invoking our "former life" were steeped in so much sadness and regrets?
Certainly if you ask several people about their country of birth they often speak of it in nostalgic terms. They maintain excellent intercommunal relations forgetting that this circle is made up of friends, relations and neighbours. For most of us, we left when we were children, sometimes adolescents, but rarely young adults. Like many of my generation, I left my country of birth at the age of eleven. I therefore only have pleasant memories, memories of festivities, family parties, loved ones and friends or even teenage romantic attachments and these are pleasant reminiscences.
We, young exiles still see that world through "rose-coloured glasses" as a British friend, Alec N., born in Alexandria, so succinctly put it. We view this period with the distortion of children. We were loved and protected. We lived within a family, surrounded by friends. Our contacts with the Arabs were those of classmates from families similar to ours, the bné adam, whether Copts or Muslims, and relationships with servants – respect and mutual affection linked us – and with the often servile small shopkeepers. We had little, even no contact with the general population. It is therefore normal that we have such pleasant memories and that we have fed this myth of peaceful co-existence.
We, the children, do not have knowledge of pogroms perpetrated by the Arab Muslims. We do not know that the Tribune juive, printed in Egypt, reported in its issue of 8 February 1938: "Any Muslim who sticks his knife in the entrails of a Jew is assured a place in paradise". Note the date: 8 February, 1938. Well before the decision to partition Palestine. Before the Second World War and more than ten years before the establishment of the State of Israel. Have today's views changed that much?
The forgotten exodus is their story.
Moïse Rahmani
L’Exode oublié, Juifs des pays arabes, [The forgotten exodus, Jews from the Arab countries] by Moïse Rahmani, 444 pages, 20 euros. moise.rahmani@sefarad.org
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