The Inconvenient Truth About Jews From Arab Lands: They Were Expelled

[King_David]

Onetime Anti-Israel Radical Comes To Terms With Truth


(Haaretz) — Nathan Weinstock hadn’t planned to write a book about the Jews of Arab lands. But when he looked for information about the modern history of Moroccan or Iraqi Jewry, he was surprised to discover that there was no book in French that told the story of the elimination of the Jewish communities in the Middle East and North Africa in the mid-20th century.

“In the end,” he says, “I decided to write it myself.”

One of the surprising discoveries he made was about the powerful bond with their roots felt by many of the roughly 1 million Jews in North Africa and the Middle East who left their homes in the decade after the creation of Israel.

“The story I knew,” Weinstock relates in a Skype interview from his home in Nice, in the south of France, “was that the Jews were happy to leave the Arab countries the moment they were given the opportunity to do so. We were not told anything about the Jews’ deep connection with Arab culture, for example. It was only later that I learned that Jewish writers were the foundation of Iraqi literature. And that in mid-19th-century Egypt, the man who invented the nationalist slogan ‘Egypt for the Egyptians,’ and was known as ‘the Egyptian Molière,’ was a Jew named Jacob Sanua.

http://m.forward.com/articles/199257/the-inconvenient-truth-about-jews-from-arab-lands/?p=all