Exodus

How the departure of Jews from Islamic lands has been misunderstood

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In the years following the country’s establishment, around one million Jews left their native countries in the Middle East and North Africa to move to Israel. Another major wave of emigration took place during the 1960s. Today, across the region, a total of around 30,000 Jews live in Iran and Turkey, with a few thousand more in Morocco and Tunisia.

While scholarship on this issue has been surprisingly limited, the circumstances of their departure have been the subject of fierce polemical debate in recent years. In a recent essay, ‘From narratives to history: new perspectives on mass emigration of Jews from Islamic countries in the early 1950s,’ Ben-Gurion University’s Esther Meir-Glitzenstein describes the two main narrative perspectives:

For years the State of Israel has portrayed the driving forces behind Jewish immigration from Islamic countries as a combination of factors: the hardship of exile – that is, persecution and a hatred of Israel that drove the Jews to leave – and religious ideological motives, such as messianism and redemption, that drew Jews to the Land of Israel and helped realize the prophecy foretelling the People of Israel’s return to its land.

Versus:

In contrast to the Zionist narrative, however, these [Arab] accounts refer not to redemption but to the destruction of a Jewish-Arab symbiosis, a destruction instigated by Zionism, which they describe as a divisive force that generated the Arab-Jewish conflict, and, through its various activities in the Middle East, undermined the position of Jews in Arab countries.

Both these narratives were led from above, and it’s only since the 1970s that the voice of the emigrant Jews themselves has been heard:

These Jews offered a narrative of suffering and expulsion that attributed the emigration from Islamic countries to hatred of Jews, anti-Semitism reminiscent of Nazi Germany, and persecution…The new narrative attacked the Arab counter-narrative of a continuous Jewish-Muslim symbiosis, describing instead a miserable life in the shadow of Islam and linking the Jewish exodus from Arab countries with expulsion and ethnic cleansing. Concepts of Zionism, redemption, and messianic longing are not featured in this narrative. Rather, the Jews were portrayed as outcasts who became refugees and were then forgotten from history.

Over the last decade, though, the narrative of suffering and expulsion has taken prominence over that of redemption in the Israeli narrative, partly in response to the Palestinian Nakba narrative. This is reflected in the 2012 Foreign Ministry slogan “I am a Jewish refugee” and the selection of November 30 (the day following the UN Partition Resolution) as the date to commemorate the exodus of Jews from Muslim lands.  

In turn, this narrative has been criticized by certain academics, including second-generation Jewish immigrants from Islamic lands, for example Avi Shlaim, who have either adopted anti-Zionism wholesale or critiqued the idea that life for Jews in Islamic lands was always so terrible, similar to the same way the historian Salo Baron critiqued the “lachrymose” narrative of European Jewish history.