After Khaled Hassan, an Egyptian-born convert to Judaism, joined an English-speaking Space on ‘X’ held by Egyptians, Jordanians, and Palestinians, including Gazans, about the war in Gaza, the group then started an Arabic-speaking Space, which Hassan wrote “quickly turned into a verbal October 7.” The participants threatened Hassan’s family with violence and rape. Pride in the massacre of October 7, he claims, is the mindset of many in the Arab world and is fuelled by endemic Egyptian antisemitism: “if something is not done,” he warns, “it won’t be long before the West meets its own October 7.” (With thanks: Edna)
Khaled Hassan:’It won’t be long before the West meets its October 7 ‘
“The moment I joined (the Arabic-speaking Space), it became extremely abusive, the nastiest stuff you can imagine.” This included rape threats against Hassan’s wife and other threats.
Hassan told The Post that this type of behavior is more pronounced with Egyptians, Iraqis, Jordanians, Lebanese, and Palestinians. “The Saudis would never use this kind of violence. They would never swear at a man and threaten to rape his family,” he said.
In Hassan’s view, “Egypt is the root of all problems when it comes to antisemitism [in the Arab world], when it comes to hatred, and people need to know that.” He explained that Egypt dominates in fields such as Arabic-language TV, media, and so forth.
Egypt has, for example, played a prominent role in endorsing and disseminating antisemitic texts such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (endorsed by former Egyptian presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat). The first translation of the Protocols by an Arab Muslim was also published in Cairo.
“Egypt bullies dissenting voices,” Hassan continued. This particularly applies to any dissenting voices around Israel/Palestine, he said, with Cairo standing staunchly on the Palestinians’ side.
“It is part of Egyptian national identity now,” Hassan told The Post. “To even talk to an Israeli is treason. People will insult you, humiliate you. The overwhelming majority of Egyptians believe this fundamentally; it’s part of their identity.”
There is some distinction between the Egyptian people and their government, Hassan explained. While he said, “Egyptians love the Palestinian cause,” the government’s attitude towards the Palestinians is more political than ideological.
“President [Abdel Fattah al-] Sisi’s own survival relies on the cause,” Hassan said. “He comes from the military, and the military is the main driving force behind this antisemitism. For example, when the economy is bad, it’s because ‘the Jews are plotting’.”
“The military has taken no steps to counter this narrative.”
Hassan explained that Sisi often uses the phrase “the people of evil” when discussing problems, which is generally understood to mean ‘Jews.’ It creates a common enemy, which ensures Sisi’s own survival.
“It’s the only thing where the average Egyptian agrees with their government. They agree on almost nothing else,” Hassan told the Post, somewhat humorously.
The liberal-Zionist -turned-anti-Zionist Peter Beinart has called ‘what Israel is doing’ in Gaza ‘a desecration’. The 7 October attacks have not changed his views: he thinks Jews are safer in a system where everyone has equal rights (replacing Israel with a bi-national state for Jews and Palestinians), regardless of whether they are a majority or a minority. But Beinart has never needed Zionism, unlike Jewish refugees such as his Egyptian-born grandmother Adele Pienaar, who was forced out by Arab nationalism. He should have taken on board her experience of vulnerability, argues Lyn Julius in this 2020 article in Fathom:
Peter Beinart:advocates a bi-national state instead of Israel (Photo: Ohad Kab)
How come a liberal like Beinart has bought into such a ‘dangerous delusion? Because he has never needed Zionism and because he appears to have internalised today’s ‘woke’ categories, which see Jews as benefiting from ‘white privilege’. He seems to want to promote, in the words of Einat Wilf, ‘Jewish powerlessness in an effort to restore [Jewish] moral purity.’
In progressive Western circles, Zionism has become decidedly un-cool. Self-declared Zionists, like the writer Bari Weiss, complain of bullying at the New York Times. In the vogue for identity politics, Jews are framed as white oppressors.
This postmodern conceptual straightjacket perverts historical truths. It dictates that only ‘people of colour’ can be victims, while the oppression of one million Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, resulting in the ethnic cleansing of pre-Islamic Jewish communities, among other minorities, from the Arab Muslim world from the 1940s, the subject of my book Uprooted!, must be passed over in silence.
The long history of oppression of Mizrahi Jews in the Arab Middle East is the key to understanding the main drivers of the conflict with Israel – an Arab and Muslim inability to tolerate difference, to co-exist with minorities, and an abhorrence for any exercise of Jewish power.
Yet in the Western progressive mind, bound tight as it is by the postmodern conceptual straitjacket, only Palestinians can be victims. The Mizrahi Jews are airbrushed out of public discourse. In the current jargon, they are ‘cancelled’. In this topsy-turvy world, merely to draw attention to Arab and Muslim antisemitism invites accusations of racism or ‘Islamophobia’.
Progressive orthodoxy even denies Jewish indigeneity, as one woke Manhattan rabbi recently tried to do, perhaps because it conflicts with the false settler-colonial paradigm which the left habitually applies to Israel. The fact that over 50 per cent of Israeli Jews have roots in the Middle East is simply ignored.Most Israeli Jews found refuge in the only state that would defend them unconditionally from persecution. By empowering Palestinians at the expense of Jewish Israelis, Beinart and other anti-Zionists would once again put Jewish destiny in the hands of others.
Someone who did appreciate the absolute need for Zionism was Peter Beinart’s Egyptian-Jewish grandmother, Adele Pienaar. Born in Alexandria, she was driven out by Arab nationalism. In an 2014 elegy, he wrote: ‘The lessons she drew from her experience of vulnerability and dislocation were straightforward: Jews should be on the lookout for trouble and should take care of each other since no one else would … her nightmare for Israel was that Arab nationalism would imperil its Jews in the way that Arab nationalism had imperilled Alexandria.’
Beinart’s essay, in effect, disparages his grandmother’s ‘tribal’ and instinctive Zionism in order to virtue-signal to a narrow liberal intellectual milieu. It is a tragedy that he thinks the imperilment of Israel is a price worth paying for that, as the ‘vulnerability’ and ‘peril’ his Grandmother knew has not gone from this world. As for the Middle East, only a fool would think the Jews will continue to thrive without a state of their own.
Jews of Sephardic and Mizrahi origins account for 10 percent of the total Jewish population of the United States, their total number approaching 600,000, according to a new national study. Commissioned by the California-based JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa) advocacy group, it found that Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews tend to be more politically conservative, more strongly connected to Israel and Judaism, and less likely to intermarry than Ashkenazi Jews with roots in Eastern Europe.Judy Maltz writes in Haaretz (with thanks: Lily):
The Magen David Syrian synagogue in Brooklyn, NY
The research for this study, titled “Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in the United States: Identities, Experiences and Communities,” was directed by Dr. Mijal Bitton, a visiting scholar at New York University’s Wagner School of Public Policy.
Sephardim are defined as Jews who have descended from Spain and Portugal, while Mizrahim are defined as Jews originating in the Middle East and North Africa, though often the two terms are used interchangeably. Jews of Iberian descent established some of the first colonial-era Sephardic communities in the Western Hemisphere, in cities like Savannah, Georgia and Newport, Rhode Island.
“Historically underrepresented – or worse, misrepresented – in Jewish communal studies and mainstream programs, Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish Americans embody a rich tapestry of traditions, languages, and lived experiences that continue to shape Jewish identity,” wrote JIMENA Executive Director Sarah Levin in the introduction to the report.
“Our Middle Eastern, North African and Mediterranean Jewish heritage, reflected in this report, is a testament to the resilience, family-oriented values, communal commitments, and unwavering pride passed down through generations of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews. This heritage can and should become an integral component of every facet of Jewish life in America.”
Sephardim are defined as Jews who have descended from Spain and Portugal, while Mizrahim are defined as Jews originating in the Middle East and North Africa, though often the two terms are used interchangeably. Jews of Iberian descent established some of the first colonial-era Sephardic communities in the Western Hemisphere, in cities like Savannah, Georgia and Newport, Rhode Island.
“Historically underrepresented – or worse, misrepresented – in Jewish communal studies and mainstream programs, Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish Americans embody a rich tapestry of traditions, languages, and lived experiences that continue to shape Jewish identity,” wrote JIMENA Executive Director Sarah Levin in the introduction to the report.
“Our Middle Eastern, North African and Mediterranean Jewish heritage, reflected in this report, is a testament to the resilience, family-oriented values, communal commitments, and unwavering pride passed down through generations of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews. This heritage can and should become an integral component of every facet of Jewish life in America.”
Two US Jews visiting Syria have been accused of both supporting the previous Assad regime and the present al-Sheraa government when they were pictured allegedly posing on or beside military vehicles belonging to both regimes. Moshe Klein, who Syrians falsely claimed was a rabbi and an Israeli when the photos went viral, has set himself the challenge of visiting every country in the world. During his three-day sojourn in Syria he met Bakhour Shemtob, the so-calledleader of the ‘community’ of five Syrian Jews. YNet News has the story:
Klein and his friend in Damascus (Photo:courtesy)
Klein, who lives in New York and visited Syria with his friend, told Ynet: “I am not a rabbi and not an Israeli, I am an American Jew. I have visited more than 100 countries around the world, including Arab Muslim states. My friend is also a very experienced traveler. We came to Syria because it recently opened up to tourism. It was harder to get there in the past. We were in Damascus, in Aleppo, in Christian villages. We walked around, saw the country, spoke with people. Overall, it was a nice experience. Good people.
He added a caveat: “Of course, some treated us well and some less so. We didn’t go around telling everyone we were Jews or Americans, but some people knew. We came as tourists. If someone asked, I said so. I am never ashamed of my background—neither of being Jewish nor of being a U.S. citizen.”
Commenting on the photo in which he appears, Klein said: “In many places we visited, there were vehicles from the old Syrian army. In the middle of the desert, people climb on them and take pictures.” He stressed that this was not unusual, and added that no regime officials accompanied him or his friend. He also noted Syria is not at all a cheap destination: “We had guides, a driver. We were only there three days and wanted to see as much as possible. It’s not a place people often visit. It’s relatively expensive to get there, flights are costly. We came via Jordan but left from Aleppo Airport.”
In a side event jointly organised on 8 September by Justice for Jews from Arab Countries and B’nai B’rith, the results of a five-year study into lost Jewish assets in Arab countries and Iran, valued at $263 billion, were announced for the first time at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, reports the Jerusalem Post. (On 10 September, the organisers will be able to present their case to the UNHRC plenary.)
The UNHRC headquarters at the Palais des Nations, Geneva
Jewish refugees from 11 Middle Eastern countries lost an estimated $263 billion in assets due to persecution, ethnic cleansing, and violence, researchers explained at a Monday United Nations side event for the opening sessions of the UN Human Rights Council.
The reports on 10 Arab polities and Iran, created by Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC), were presented at the “Seeking Truth, Justice and Reconciliation: Jewish Refugees from the Middle East” panel. The event, a joint initiative with B’nai B’rith International, hopes to promote understanding of the scope of loss endured by Middle Eastern Jews in the largely unaddressed 20th-century refugee crisis.
The 12-day war between Israel and Iran in June 2025 has led to arrests of Jews as alleged spies for Israel. It has fuelled a surge in antisemitism and bolstered the regime’s world view, argues Ahmad Hashemi writing on Middle East Forum:
Jews studying in a Tehran synagogue
Tehran’s treatment of its Jewish population is paradoxical. On one hand, the regime brutalizes them as spies for Israel, and on the other, it exploits them for anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli propaganda and as a tool to vilify Israel. For example, Homayoun Sameyah, the Jewish representative in the Iranian parliament, has claimed that Israel’s attacks on Iran destroyed homes belonging to Iranian Jews.
In another instance, security forces allegedly forced the Anjoman-e Kalimiyan-e Iran, the official representative body of the Jewish community in Iran, to send threatening text messages to its members warning that any contact with people outside the country is “forbidden” and that community members are responsible for any social media activities, including comments, reposts, or likes related to the Twelve-Day War.
According to various reports, following Israeli strikes on Iran’s military and nuclear sites, the Islamic Republic has forced some rabbis and Jewish conscripts to participate in anti-Israel rallies, including at a rally held in Tehran’s Abrishami Synagogue, while wearing their military uniforms and kippahs. The regime also has forced them to attend public displays of loyalty to the Islamic Republic and its supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.
In using antisemitic tropes such as Jewish power and control, some Iranian officials and religious figures have even claimed that Israel has control over supernatural forces.
The twelve-day conflict with Israel has fueled a surge in antisemitism in Iran and bolstered the regime’s apocalyptic worldview. In using antisemitic tropes such as Jewish power and control, some Iranian officials and religious figures have even claimed that Israel has control over supernatural forces, and uses “Jinns and Hebrew talismans” as weapons of war. Similarly, one Shahid Beheshti University Professor claimed “New York Jewry” orchestrated the June war. He explained that Jewish real estate interests have sway over President Donald Trump.
The belief in the Mahdi, a messianic figure Twelver Shi’a believe will return to usher in a period of just and divine Islamic rule on Earth, informs Iran’s foreign policy and its relationship with Israel and the Jewish people.
At the opening of the UN Human Rights Council session in Geneva on 8 September, 11 detailed reports documenting the fate of Jewish communities in the Middle East and North Africa will be presented for the first time. The reports, prepared by the international organization Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC), expose the scale of devastation: the dramatic decline and, in many cases, the complete disappearance of Jewish communities thousands of years old, accompanied by massive property losses estimated to total 263 billion dollars. Israel Hayom reports (with thanks: Imre)
Jewish refugees from Arab countries in a ma’abara (transit camp) in Israel, 1950
The reports record the losses of Jewish refugees from Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen and Aden. They were compiled over five years by JJAC, drawing on personal testimonies, statistical data, and archival material from 22 archives in Israel, Canada, France, Switzerland, Britain and the US.
Each of the 11 reports traces the story of ancient Jewish communities that lived in the Middle East and North Africa for millennia, some 1,000 years before the rise of Islam. They endured centuries under Muslim rule as dhimmis, a subordinate legal status for non-Muslims, lived through Ottoman and colonial rule, and later suffered persecution under Arab nationalism and Islamism, before fleeing, immigrating, or being expelled.
The research, to be presented at the UN for the first time, will be unveiled during a dedicated panel on the opening day of the Human Rights Council session, under the title: “Seeking Truth, Justice & Reconciliation – Jewish Refugees from the Middle East.” The panel will be held on September 8 in Geneva.
The forthcoming U.N. discussion, with opening remarks and moderation by B’nai B’rith U.N. and Intercommunal Affairs Director David Michaels, will feature presentations by Sylvain Abitbol, JJAC co-president; Henry Green, professor of religious studies at the University of Miami and director of Sephardi Voices; Levana Zamir, president of the International Organization of Jews from Egypt; and Stanley Urman, JJAC executive vice president.
JJAC also been given permission to address the entire United Nations Human Rights Council on Wednesday 10 September.. Levana Zamir will be giving a 90 -second intervention, speaking live and direct to the delegates from 140 nations who make up the UNHRC.
It will be taped and available after for screening.
Why is it that ‘native’ Canadian tribes are considered indigenous, despite their small numbers, while Jews living continuously in Palestine are not? Jacob Sivak demonstrates the contradictions in this argument in an article in The Algemeiner:
The Abohav synagogue in Safed. Jews had lived in the city for centuries but were forced out by plagues and pogroms
In 1834, Jews represented half of the inhabitants of the town of Safed (Tzfat) in Galilee. That same year however, the land that is now Israel was caught between Egyptian and Ottoman rivalries — and local Arabs took it out on the Jews of Hebron and Safed.
The situation in Safed was particularly dire. Safed’s Jews experienced a month-long pogrom of looting, raping, and killing by local Arabs. Five hundred Jewish inhabitants were killed. (A second and equally devastating pogrom befell the Jewish community of Safed in 1838, this one instigated by Druze rebels.)
In 1837, a severe earthquake, with an epicenter near Safed, and felt strongly from Beirut to Jerusalem, destroyed the entire Jewish Quarter of Safed and many Jewish homes in Tiberius, killing and injuring many thousands. This was not only a Jewish calamity, but the effect on the Jewish community was especially devastating because Jewish areas were the quake’s primary foci.
Can it get worse? Yes. Cholera epidemics plagued the Holy land throughout the 1800s but especially after 1831, when steamships made it easier for Muslim pilgrims to travel back and forth to Mecca. While the disease affected all the inhabitants in the land, the densely populated urban Jewish centers were very vulnerable. Fear of cholera was a primary reason for building housing units beyond Jerusalem’s city walls during the 1860s.
The Jews in Palestine of the 19th century did not have to deal with the nightmare of residential schools, as did the First Nations of Canada. (Jews in Russia and Yemen did.) But they did face Ottoman immigration restrictions and this meant that the majority were elderly and not gainfully employed. Their impoverishment made them susceptible to the missionizing efforts of a variety of Protestant organizations, such as the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews.
So yes, Jewish population numbers were low in the Land of Israel during the mid-1800s. But there were extenuating circumstances. In the final analysis, the Jewish people never abandoned the Land of Israel, neither physically nor spiritually. They are not colonial settlers. They are indigenous. In 1939, Martin Buber wrote a letter to Mahatma Gandhi contesting Gandhi’s view that Palestine belongs to the Arabs. Buber said “By what means did the Arabs attain ownership in Palestine? Surely by conquest and, in fact, a conquest by settlement.” Who are the colonialists?
It was only by reading ‘The Rabbi’s Cat,’ the comic strip set in Algeria by Johann Sfar, that Ewa Tartakowsky, writing in ‘K,’ realised how centered on Ashkenazi history Jewish studies were at her Polish university. The French in Algeria had sought to ‘regenerate’ the oppressed dhimmi Jews of North Africa, while introducing new cleavages between communities. (With thanks: Edna)
Its story does not ‘simply’ take place in a Jewish world: it tells the story of Maghrebi Jewishness.
For the Voltairean cat, atheist and in love with his mistress Zlabya, the rabbi’s daughter, lives in an Algiers that doesn’t always say its name, but which reveals itself through its buildings and monuments: from the very first pages of the book, you can make out the great synagogue of Algiers, the Jamaa al-Jdid fishing mosque, the Place Randon and the statue of the Duke of Orleans. It’s a Jewish world with North African references, drawn and told with a tenderness that’s often tinged with irony. Zlabya, whose name evokes an Algerian pastry sweetened with cardamom, loves – if the score on her piano is anything to go by – the tunes of Lili Labassi, the interpreter and musician of Andalusian songs. The rabbi invites guests to help themselves to “berbouche“, a dish made from thick-grain semolina or crumbled bread. It is not unusual for him to speak in several Maghreb languages, as when he meets his cousin the Malka, when he “throws himself into his cousin’s arms and says blessings in Arabic, Ladino and Pataouète.” The Malka also prays “In Aramaic. In Ladino. In Judeo-Arabic, in Kabyle. In Hebrew. In Spanish […]. He sings in Arabic. Neither stuffed carp nor Yiddish are on the table, nor is the game of Eastern European imperial domination in which the “polar Jews, to use Sfar’s expression, evolve as best they can.
His graphic narrative, meanwhile, reveals other forms of domination. It depicts the social reality of a colonial universe that immediately compartmentalizes and determines social groups and communities. Inherited from the pre-colonial period, ethno-religious identifications are fully operational. Indeed, before French domination, Jews were dhimmi, an Arabic term referring to the special, dominated status of Jews and Christians in Islamic countries. Historian Charles-André Julien underlines “the contempt in which they were held by all other groups and the avanities of which they were constantly the victims, which led them to a resignation that had no other compensation than trust in God and the hope of better days.”
Illustration from Rabbi’s Cat
Sfar’s comic strip echoes this with the rabbi’s comment: “I’m talking about a time when the Jews of Algeria were not yet French. Over there, there were the French, the Arabs and the Berbers, and us right underneath. Well, even among us, we were the least considered in Algeria.
Jews didn’t live in the same neighborhoods as Muslims. Hence the cat’s astonishment when one of the rabbi’s disciples ventures into the Arab quarter: “What’s he doing there? Does he want us to find his head on a stick or what!” A little Berber boy, listening to the Malka’s stories, exclaims: “But even so, we don’t like Jews” and Muslim Soliman considers that “the [Jewish] prayers don’t go far. If you want to please me, embrace the faith of the Prophet Mohammed.”
The dispute over a planned Muslim prayer at the synagogue, following the flooding of the mosque, even led to a street demonstration: “Everyone must stay at home,” “Everyone at their home and let’s cultivate our differences.”
These animosities obviously resonate with what I know about Central and Eastern Europe, even if there, in that other East, coexistence sometimes takes more violent forms. For a time, Jews there were protected by princes and kings, but things took a turn for the worse from the 18th century onwards: discrimination, multiple prohibitions and violence culminating in pogroms punctuated the history of Eastern European Jews.
In Algeria, the discrimination suffered by Jews was used as one of the arguments to justify their “regeneration” project. This program was promoted by metropolitan Jews for their Algerian co-religionists. Following a study trip to Algeria, Jacques-Isaac Altaras and Joseph Cohen wrote a report arguing in favor of granting French nationality to the Jews of Algeria: “[…] the Israelite element seems destined in these various respects to serve as a point of contact between the French and the former dominators of the soil, [. …] among them there is an admirable ability to assimilate the principles of civilization brought to them, an intelligence which, aroused by persecution and by the difficulties of maintaining itself under the iron yoke of the Arabs, has almost always taken on a marvellous development. The project culminated in 1870 with the Crémieux decree, which granted French citizenship to Algerian Jews as a group.
Badriah Shatah is one of five Jews who remain in Damascus. She would like to leave, but the US will not let her in. Meanwhile, Henry Hamra, who lives in the States, would like to return to Syria. He has received official assurances that Jewish homes taken over by squatters would be restored to their rightful owners. JTA delves into the complexities:
Inside Damascus’s Jewish quarter
DAMASCUS, Syria — “This was a Jewish home, and so was that. These were all Jewish homes,” Badriyah Mousa Shatah said as she walked through Damascus’s historic Jewish Quarter, or the “Harat al-Yahud” as it is known in Arabic.
Shatah, who was born in Damascus and has lived in the city all her life, is one of the last Jews left in the country. According to her, there are only four others who remain.
Shatah, 56, has watched the Jewish community she knew and loved crumble before her eyes. As we walked in the Jewish Quarter, she pointed to buildings she recalled from her childhood — the Jewish school, Ibn al-Mamoun, once had 850 to 950 students in attendance. There were kosher butchers, Judaica stores, and synagogues — anything and everything needed to sustain a thriving Jewish community. Now, the Jewish Quarter sits mostly empty, with locks on doors and shutters in windows a testament to those who fled.
The remarkable changes in Syria in the last nine months — the fall of its dictatorial regime, the installation of former Islamist insurgents as the new government, once unthinkable diplomacy with the United States and even Israel — have some in the Syrian Jewish diaspora optimistic about a future where Jews flourish again in Syria. But so far, such a scenario remains a distant dream. Fearing sectarian violence, Shatah agreed to guide a visitor around Harat al-Yahud only on the condition that she not be photographed.
This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, of the Middle East and North Africa, documenting the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution.
Point of No Return
Jewish Refugees from Arab and Muslim Countries
One-stop blog on the Middle East's forgotten Jewish refugees - updated daily.
