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Hitler “received the Iraqi Prime Minister Rashid Ali al-Gaylani. The interview took place in the spirit of friendship that the German people feel toward the Arab peoples” (1941)

The Grand Mufti of Palestine, Amin Muhammad al-Husayni, who arrived in Iraq in 1939 and was an ally of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani was later made President of the Gaza Strip by Egypt. He arrived in Iraq in 1939. Stalin and Hitler were still allies at the time of this massacre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov–Ribbentrop_Pact

The Grand Mufti meeting with Hitler in 1941.
“Husayni went on to serve for decades in Egypt as a central member and ideological inspiration of the Muslim Brotherhood. His ideas have since passed on to generations of radical Islamists, far outlasting his own death in Syria in 1974 at the age of about 80” https://www.rferl.org/a/Remembering_The_Farhud_The_Pogrom_That_Ended_Iraqi_Jewish_Life/2058848.html The Muslim Brother is the original parent of both Hamas and Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front (FIS).

Background:
A Jewish community had lived in Iraq for over 2500 years, since 586 BC. In stark comparison, the ruling family of Qatar, the Al Thanis, only moved to Qatar ca 1720 AD, and became Emirs of Qatar in 1847 AD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Thani
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_bin_Thani Islam itself dates from ca 610 AD, meaning that Jews were in Iraq for over 1000 years prior to Islam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam

“The history of the Jews in Iraq (Hebrew: יְהוּדִים בָּבְלִים, Yehudim Bavlim, lit. ’Babylonian Jews’; Arabic: اليهود العراقيون, al-Yahūd al-ʿIrāqiyyūn) is documented from the time of the Babylonian captivity c. 586 BCE. Iraqi Jews constitute one of the world’s oldest and most historically significant Jewish communities. The Jewish community in Mesopotamia, known in Jewish sources as “Babylonia”, traces its origins to the early sixth century BCE, when a large number of Judeans from the defeated Kingdom of Judah were exiled to Babylon in several waves by the Neo-Babylonian Empire.[6] A few decades later, some had returned to Judah, following the edict of Cyrus. During this time, the Temple in Jerusalem was rebuilt, significant changes in Jewish religious tradition were made, and the Judeans were led by individuals who made Aliyah from Babylonia, such as Zerubbabel, Ezra and Nehemiah.”
There were 156,000 living in Iraq in 1947, but almost none today (Wikipedia says 3.)
(…) “Most of the 15,000 Jews remaining [in Iraq] after Operation Ezra and Nehemiah stayed through the Abdul Karim Qassim era when conditions improved and began to return to normal, but anti-Semitism increased during the rule of the Arif brothers (Abdul Salam Arif and Abdul Rahman Arif). With the rise of the Ba’ath Party to power in 1963, restrictions were placed on the remaining Iraqi Jews. Sale of property was banned, and Jews had to carry yellow identity cards….” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Iraq

The connection of Jews to Iraq is even older as their patriarch Abraham, and matriarch, Sarah, were from there: “Abraham, the patriarch of the Hebrews, originated from Mesopotamia.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Iraq Arabs apparently claim Abraham as their patriarch through his wife’s, Sarah’s maid named Hagar, who is said to have been Egyptian.

“Remembering The Farhud, The Pogrom That Ended Iraqi Jewish Life
June 01, 2010 12:30 GMT By Karam Mnashe and Charles Recknagel
https://www.rferl.org/a/Remembering_The_Farhud_The_Pogrom_That_Ended_Iraqi_Jewish_Life/2058848.html

Few people in Iraq know what happened in Baghdad exactly 69 years ago.

But on June 1-2, 1941, something previously unthinkable in the city occurred. Mobs attacked the capital’s prosperous and influential Jewish community, killing more than 100 people and looting homes.

By the time the orgy of murder and pillaging was done, the Jewish community was so shaken that it would never recover. Within 10 years, the vast majority would leave the country, leaving behind just the handful of people who tend the capital’s empty synagogue today.

The two days of terror are known in Iraq as the Farhud, the Arabic word for pillaging or looting an enemy. Yet most Iraqis know very little about the event because Iraq’s history books rarely speak of them. Those writers who do mention those days simply explain the violence as the result of the Iraqi Jewish community’s “Zionist activities,” without detailing more.

But people who survived the attacks and remember the events tell another story — like Layer Abudia, who now lives in Israel, who was a child at the time of the pogrom.

“I watched people killing at least four to five Jews in front of me,” Abudia says. “Every car that passed by was stopped by the mob that pulled Jews out and killed them. I heard they killed 20 to 25 people in the airport area.”

Abudia and the others who experienced the two days of horror will never forget standing on the rooftops of their houses as the violence started on the first night.

For many, the first warning was a dull orange glow that appeared over the very heart of the city center where the Jewish and Muslim communities abutted. Then came distant screams and banging, which grew louder as looters moved deeper into the Jewish neighborhoods. Finally, up close, there was the horrifying sight of the neighbors desperately trying to leap with their children to an adjoining rooftop as armed men broke down their doors.

“That night we heard screams coming out of the houses of Jews,” recalls Nassim al-Qazzaz, another survivor who now lives in Israel. “They were killed and their homes were pillaged. This continued for less than 24 hours.”

“The next day, approximately at noon, the regent Abdul Illah issued an order to fire on the mob,” Qazzaz says. “He could have done that the same day of course, before things got worse, but he preferred not to interfere so the mob could release their anger at the Jews.”

Vulnerable Minority

The Farhud was so shocking because, based on most of the 1,000-year history of Jews in Iraq, no one could have expected it.

At the time of the pogrom, Jews made up some 3 percent of the Iraqi population, with some 90,000 living in the capital. Many were successful in business, many worked as officials in the British-mandated government, and many were among the country’s leading intellectual and cultural figures.

But by 1941, several things had happened to make the Iraqi Jews’ position especially vulnerable.

One was the rise of fascism in Europe, followed by the Axis powers’ sweeping successes against Britain in the first years of war. And central to the Nazi ideology was hatred of the Jews. Finally, there was the common cause some Arab Muslim leaders made with Nazism and its hatred of Jews in hopes the Axis powers would propel them to power in the Middle East.

One such leader, who arrived in Iraq in 1939, was Amin Muhammad al-Husayni, the grand mufti of Jerusalem. He had fled British-mandate Palestine after the failure of the Palestinian uprising of 1936-39 against growing Jewish immigration.

Husayni had been a key instigator of violence on the Arab side as the number of Jews jumped from 17 percent of Palestine’s population in 1931 to 30 percent in 1935. Many of the arriving Jews were fleeing Germany and now the Grand Mufti was seeking Berlin’s help to expel both them and the British mandate authorities from the Holy Land.

But it was in Iraq, not Palestine, that the kind of alliance Husayni was proposing got its first test. There, Berlin backed an anti-British coup in April 1941 led by nationalist Rashid Ali al-Gaylani — a Husayni ally — and supported by high-ranking army officers. The coup easily toppled the country’s weak Hashemite monarchy, which was originally from the Hejaz region of Saudi Arabia and widely regarded as London’s puppet.

The coup was soon suppressed with the arrival of British-led Indian and Arab Legion troops, who reached Baghdad by May 29. But the combination of the failed coup amid months of the sort of pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish propaganda espoused by Husayni proved to be fatal for Jewish Baghdadis.

Driven From Their Home

Exactly what set off the pogrom is not known, but it may have been the Jewish community’s celebration of its annual harvest festival, Shavuot, on June 1. The sight of Jews celebrating became a pretext for fascists to portray them as welcoming the coup’s failure. And the chance to act came as British troops waited outside Baghdad so that royalist Iraqi soldiers could enter first, creating a power vacuum in the city.

Survivor Qazzaz says that even today he doesn’t know what happened to his father in the pogrom. But he says after such violence, most Iraqi Jews felt they had no option but to emigrate.

“Since then we have not heard anything about the fate of my father and his companion. Some 180 Jews were killed in this massacre. Scores of houses and shops were looted and plundered, women violated and murdered,” Qazzaz says. “That was the Farhud. In my opinion it was one of the main reasons that drove Jews to leave Iraq.”

Most of the exodus took place in the early 1950s, after tensions over the 1948 Arab-Israeli war isolated the Jewish community even further. The Iraqi government declared “those who want to leave can leave” and some 100,000 left for Israel.

Today the Farhud — Baghdad’s Krystallnacht — remains significant not only for breaking the spirit of Baghdad’s once thriving Jewish community. It also proved how powerful the fusion of fascism and radical Islam could be.

That fusion would develop further as Husayni spent the rest of the war in Nazi Germany and broadcast messages across a sizable segment of the Middle East via a powerful radio located in Bari, Italy.

His messages were a continuous call for uprisings to evict the allies. But he reserved his greatest invective for Jews, saying their “spilled blood pleases Allah, our history, and religion,” and proclaiming “if America and England win the war, the Jews will dominate the world.”

At the same time, he vigorously recruited European Muslims for the Wehrmacht and for special Waffen SS units, especially in the former Yugoslavia. And he actively lobbied against any deportation of Jews to Palestine from Romania and Hungary, urging they be sent to Poland — where the Nazis operated death camps* — instead.

Arab Independence

Throughout, what Husayni wanted from Hitler and finally got in 1942 remained the same. It was a letter sent by the German and Italian foreign ministers to him and a fellow exile in Nazi Germany, al-Gaylani, promising three things: Axis support for the independence of the Arab states from British and French colonial rule; the right of the independent Arab states to form a union; and the right of Arab authorities in Palestine to eliminate the proposed Jewish homeland there.

Husayni was always accorded the respect due a head of state in Berlin, leading many historians to speculate he may have hoped to be the Axis’ fuhrer of the Middle East, had it won the war. But it didn’t, and as Germany surrendered, Husayni was arrested by the French.

Astonishingly, however, the French too treated Husayni with deference as a Grand Mufti with influence in the Muslim world. He was placed under house arrest in Paris and, when it became clear he might be indicted for war crimes based on testimony emerging at the Nuremburg trials, he secured an invitation from Egypt’s King Farouk and fled to Cairo.

Husayni went on to serve for decades in Egypt as a central member and ideological inspiration of the Muslim Brotherhood. His ideas have since passed on to generations of radical Islamists, far outlasting his own death in Syria in 1974 at the age of about 80.

What is the ultimate message of Husayni that was also so brutally expressed 69 years ago in the Farhud?

In its simplest terms, it is that the Near East is an Arab Sunni Muslim world that must be violently purged of all other elements.

The argument flies in the face of history in a region that has always been home to many religions and ethnicities. But it continues to be a justification for intimidation and attacks as fundamentalist groups today try to cleanse their home countries of “others” just as the Nazis once did in Europe.

* CLARIFICATION: This story has been amended from the original version to specify that Nazis were operating death camps in Poland.

Karam Mnashe is a correspondent for RFE/RL’s Radio Free Iraq. Charles Recknagel is a senior correspondent for RFE/RL in Prague Copyright (c)2010/2024 RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036” https://www.rferl.org/a/Remembering_The_Farhud_The_Pogrom_That_Ended_Iraqi_Jewish_Life/2058848.html
Photo: “The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. (1941). With the Reich Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop in attendance, the Fuhrer received the Iraqi Prime Minister Rashid Ali al-Gaylani. The interview took place in the spirit of friendship that the German people feel toward the Arab peoples: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/b22fc0d7-157d-4eed-e040-e00a180606a5

Recall that “Egypt Made Hitler’s Grand Mufti Ally President of Gaza Strip (1948); Gaza “Hitler 2” Clothing Store (2015); Israel Bombs “Hitler 2” Store (2023) The Grand Mufti was from the Husayni family, a land-owning elite family who dominated politics in Jerusalem, along with their competitors, the Nashashibi of Kurdish-Circassian origin”. (The name is transliterated as Amin al-Husseini, al-Ḥusainī, al-Hussaini, al-Husayni). https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Amin_al-Husseini ) https://miningawareness.wordpress.com/2023/12/24/egypt-made-hitlers-grand-mufti-ally-president-of-gaza-strip-1948-gaza-hitler-2-clothing-store-2015-israel-bombs-hitler-2-store-2023/

This video includes testimony by an elderly Iraqi Jewish man, and how he and his family survived the Farhud due to the help of an Arab neighbor:
“War is Coming 🇵🇸 – My Iraqi Jewish Family is NOT ready… 🇮🇱” – https://youtu.be/z1Rs-3MqHmk

From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-farhud
“THE FARHUD
By Author: Esther Meir-Glitzenstein

The outbreak of mob violence against Baghdad Jewry known as the Farhud (Farhud is an Arabic term best translated as “pogrom” or “violent dispossession”) erupted on June 1, 1941. It was a turning point in the history of the Jews in Iraq.

In the 1940s about 135,000 Jews lived in Iraq (nearly 3 percent of the total population), with about 90,000 in Baghdad, 10,000 in Basra, and the remainder scattered throughout many small towns and villages. Jewish communities had existed in this region since the 6th century BCE, hundreds of years before Muslim communities established a presence in Iraq during the 7th century. The Jews shared the Arab culture with their Muslim and Christian neighbors, but they lived in separate communities. Jewish assimilation into Muslim society was rare.

With the establishment of the Iraqi state under the British Mandate in 1921, Jews became full-fledged citizens and enjoyed the right to vote and hold elected office. The Jewish community had between four and six representatives in the Parliament and one member in the Senate. The community was headed by a president, Rabbi Sasson Khedhuri (1933-1949; 1954-1971), an elected council of 60 members, and two executive committees—the spiritual committee for religious issues and the secular committee for managing the secular affairs of the community organizations. Its elite included also high-ranking officials, prominent attorneys and dignitaries, and wealthy merchants. This status of the Jews did not change in 1932, when Iraq gained independence under British informal rule.

In the spring of 1941, Britain was enduring one of its worst periods in World War II. Most of Europe had fallen to the Axis forces, German planes were bombing British cities in the Blitz, and German submarines were exacting a tremendous toll on British shipping. Having driven the British out of Libya, the Afrika Korps under General Erwin Rommel was camped along the Egyptian border and poised to thrust eastward to the Suez Canal. The German Wehrmacht (armed forces) had driven the British out of Greece and Crete, eliminating their last beachhead on continental Europe. British chances of winning the war appeared slim.

Such catastrophic setbacks severely impacted Britain’s presence in the Middle East. Since June 1940, the Vichy government had controlled Syria and Lebanon, and pro-Axis sentiment was prevalent among Egypt’s indigenous government bureaucracy.

In this context, Rashid ‘Ali al-Kailani, an anti-British nationalist politician from one of the leading families in Baghdad, carried out a military coup against the pro-British government in Iraq on April 2, 1941. He was supported by four high-ranking army officers nicknamed the “Golden Square,” and by the former Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/narrative/11104/en

Since his arrival in Baghdad in October 1939 as a refugee from the failed Palestinian revolt (1936-1939), al-Husayni had been at the forefront of anti-British activity. Following the coup, the supporters of the deposed pro-British rule, headed by the Regent, Abd al-Ilah, and foreign minister, Nuri al-Said, fled to Transjordan. In Iraq, Rashid ‘Ali al-Kailani formed a pro-German government, winning the support of the Iraqi Army and administration. He hoped an Axis victory in the war would facilitate full independence for Iraq.

The rise of this pro-German government threatened the Jews in Iraq. Nazi influence and antisemitism already were widespread in Iraq, due in large part to the German legation’s presence in Baghdad as well as influential Nazi propaganda, which took the form of Arabic-language radio broadcasts from Berlin. Mein Kampf had been translated into Arabic by Yunis al-Sab’awi, and was published in a local newspaper, Al Alam al Arabi (The Arab World), in Baghdad during 1933-1934. Yunis al-Sab’awi also headed the Futtuwa, a pre-military youth movement influenced by the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) in Germany. After the coup d’etat, al-Sab’awi became a minister in the new Iraqi government.

Concerned that Iraq, as a pro-Axis bridgehead in the Middle East, would inspire other Arab nations, and increasingly worried that their access to oil supplies as well as their communications and transportation routes to India were now seriously threatened, the British decided to occupy the country. On April 19, British Army units from India landed in Basra while the British-led Arab Legion troops (Habforce) moved east into Iraq from Transjordan. By the end of May, the Iraqi regime collapsed and its leaders fled first to Iran and from there to German-occupied Europe.

Because the British did not wish to appear to be intervening in Iraq’s internal affairs, they preferred Iraqi troops, who were loyal to Regent Abd al-Ilah, to be the first to enter Iraq’s cities. British authorities also hoped to transfer control of Iraq directly to the Regent and his government. After occupying Basra in the middle of May, the British refused to enter the city and, as a consequence, there occurred widespread looting of goods in the shops in the bazaars, many of which were owned by Jews. Arab notables sent night watchmen to protect Jewish possessions and many gave asylum in their homes to Jews.

In Baghdad the results of this policy were much more severe. On the afternoon of June 1, 1941, when the Regent and his entourage returned to Baghdad and British troops surrounded the city, the Jews believed that the danger from the pro-Nazi regime had passed. They ventured out to celebrate the traditional Jewish harvest festival holiday of Shavuot. Riots broke out, targeting the Jews of Baghdad. These riots, known as the Farhud, lasted for two days, ending on June 2, 1941.

Iraqi soldiers and policemen who had supported Rashid Ali al-Gailani’s coup d’etat in April and Futtuwa youths who were sympathetic to the Axis incited and led the riots. Unlike in previous incidents, rioters focused on killing. Many civilians in Baghdad and Bedouins from the city’s outskirts joined the rioters, taking part in the violence and helping themselves to a share in the booty. During the two days of violence, rioters murdered between 150 and 180 Jews, injured 600 others, and raped an undetermined number of women. They also looted some 1,500 stores and homes. The community leaders estimated that about 2,500 families—15 percent of the Jewish community in Baghdad—suffered directly from the pogrom.

According to the official report of the commission investigating the incident, 128 Jews were killed, 210 were injured, and over 1,500 businesses and homes were damaged. Rioting ended at midday on Monday, June 2, 1941, when Iraqi troops entered Baghdad, killed some hundreds of the mob in the streets and reestablished order in Baghdad.

The causes of the Farhud were political and ideological. On the one hand, the leaders of this pogrom identified the Jews as collaborators with the British authorities and justified violence against Jewish civilians by linking it to the struggle of the Iraqi national movement against British colonialism. Other Arab nationalists also perceived the Baghdad Jews as Zionists or Zionist sympathizers and justified the attacks as a response to Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine. Nevertheless, killing helpless Jews, including women and children, was an unprecedented phenomenon that contradicted Muslim law. In this situation, antisemitic ideology, derived in part from Nazi propaganda, helped to legitimize murdering Jews in Iraq.

The consequences of this pogrom stunned the Jewish community in Baghdad. Generally unarmed and lacking military training and self-defense skills, Baghdad Jews felt vulnerable and helpless. Many decided to leave Iraq. Hundreds fled to Iran, others went to Beirut, Lebanon, and some even obtained temporary visas for India. A few hundred Jews tried to reach Palestine, but most of them were forced to stop at some point on the way, either by the Iraqi police, which did not allow Jews to immigrate to Palestine, or by Palestinian police, enforcing strict immigration quotas (the White Paper of 1939). Most of the refugees, however, returned to Baghdad after the political situation had stabilized and the Iraqi economy had begun to prosper again.

The Jewish community in Baghdad experienced a rapid return to economic prosperity under British occupation during the remainder of the war years. Wealthy Baghdad Jews and the remittances of Iraqi Jewish émigrés contributed significantly to the reestablishment of commerce and restoration of property. As a further incentive to returning refugees, the Iraqi government paid compensation to the victims of the community in the sum of 20,000 dinars. The emotional and psychological wounds following the Farhud, however, were not so easily healed. Many members of the community remained in a state of profound shock that undermined their sense of security and stability, eventually prompting them to question their place within Baghdad’s society.

Following the Farhud, Jewish leaders also faced a difficult political dilemma. The Farhud had demonstrated that Jews were perceived by many in the Arab nationalist movement and the religious and conservative right as collaborators with and beneficiaries of British colonialism and its alleged Iraqi puppets. On the other hand, Jewish leaders were in fact well-integrated in urban society in Baghdad. Some held public office, others were prominent in economic life, and many had friendly relations with politicians and leaders. Moreover, the hostility of the Arab nationalists toward the Jews only increased their dependence on the pro-British regime. Jewish leaders therefore chose to downplay the potential for danger and tended to dissuade community activists from steps that might have incited an Arab nationalist response. Jewish leaders preferred quiet, personal, indirect diplomacy to overt political activism. The Jews in Parliament adopted the same policy: they never voted against the Iraqi government and never publicly defended the rights of the Jewish minority.

The middle-class intelligentsia in the Jewish community also faced a profound political and cultural crisis. Educated, generally well-to-do, and active as journalists, authors, and poets, Jewish intellectuals in Baghdad had perceived themselves as partners in creating Iraqi culture; they now felt rejected and betrayed. Their faith in the prospect of Jewish integration in Iraqi society had suffered a severe shock. More profound still was the sense of disillusionment among the youth. The bloodshed prompted many of them to reject the cautious policies of the traditional leadership and to respond in a radical fashion. The nationalists among them were attracted to the Zionist movement; young Jewish socialists sought meaning in the Communist party. While the former envisioned the future in Palestine, the latter imagined a just and socialist order for all people with the triumph of socialism in Iraq. Young people who did not identify with either camp sought to emigrate to the United States, England, France, Canada, and elsewhere in the West. In Iraq itself, a few groups of young people formed self-defense organizations and sought to arm themselves. These organizations had been the basis of the ‘Haganah’ (defense) Organization in Iraq, which functioned until 1951.

The Farhud ultimately intensified anxiety among Baghdad’s Jews, who now worried about Axis victories in the war, escalating violence in Palestine, growing Iraqi nationalist opposition, and the departure of the British from Iraq. The Farhud also marked a new era of Muslim-Jewish relations in Iraq, when discrimination and humiliation became further compounded by concerns about a direct physical threat to Jews’ survival.

Among Arabs the whole event was repressed and nearly forgotten. Arab writers of the time mentioned the Farhud only vaguely, and explained it as a consequence of Zionist activity in the Middle East. In contrast, Iraq’s Jews now perceived that threats to Jewish lives existed not only in Europe but also in the Middle East. In 1943, because of both the ongoing murder of European Jewry as well as antisemitism in Arab countries, Iraq’s Jewish communities were included in Zionist plans for immigration and establishing the Jewish state.

By 1951, ten years after the Farhud, most of the Iraqi Jewish community (about 124,000 Jews out of 135,000) had immigrated to the State of Israel.
Author(s): Esther Meir-Glitzenstein

FURTHER READING
Cohen, Hayyim, “The Anti-Jewish Farhud in Baghdad, 1941.” Middle Eastern Studies, October 1966, pp. 2-17.
Kedouri Elie, “The Sack of Basra and the Farhud in Baghdad,” Arabic Political Memoirs. London, 1974, pp. 283-314.
Meir-Glitzenstein Esther, Zionism in an Arab Country: Jews in Iraq in the 1940s. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum” https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-farhud
Emphasis our own.