(Reviewer: Gary Selikow, Vol. 66, #3, Chanukah 2011)
Edwin Black’s The Farhud: Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust is a penetrating and insightful look into the Islamic-Nazi alliance of World War II, the bloody pogrom of Jews by Arab mobs in Baghdad in June, 1941, the background to these events and the relevance of oil, ideology and Islam to them.
Islam had a long history of contempt for and subjugation of the Jews, who in Islamic countries were reduced to the status of humiliated and subjugated second class citizens. Their position is summed up by the term dhimmitude, defined by Wikipaedia as “denoting an attitude of concession, surrender and appeasement towards Islamic demands”.
Dhimmis were barred from building any structure higher than a Muslim’s, could not ride horses but only donkeys without saddles, could not build any new houses of worship or repair existing ones and were forbidden from making any noises that would attract attention to their worship or the burial of their dead. They had to wear distinctive clothes to identify them. Jews had to wear yellow, and the mandatory yellow patch which was forced upon the Jews by the Nazis had its origins in Baghdad, and not in Medieval Europe as is commonly believed.
The idea of Jews in the Middle East being sovereign in an independent State, and not subjugated to Muslim rule and humiliated under Dhimmi status is what was intolerable to the Arabs. These are the roots of the violent Arab rejection of the state of Israel, and before that of migration of Jews into the Land of Israel.
From 1920, attacks against Jews spread like wildfire in the Land of Israel, instigated by the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al Husseini, a rabid Jew-hater. The bloody 1929 pogroms and massacres of Jews that spread throughout Israel were sparked in September the previous year by Jews at the Western Wall contravening the dhimmi laws by erecting benches to sit on and partitions to separate men from women. Killings of Jews began first in Jerusalem, and in due course led to the horrific pogrom against the ancient Jewish community of Hebron:
House to house they went bursting into every room looking for hiding Jews. Religious scrolls or books were burned or torn to shreds. The defenceless Jews were variously beheaded, castrated, their breasts and fingers sliced off, and in some cases their eyes plucked from their sockets. Infants and adults, men and women, it mattered not. The carnage went on for hours, with the Arab policemen standing down. Blood ran in streamlets down the narrow stone staircases outside the buildings house by house, room by room the savagery was repeated.
This was followed by the Arab pogroms of 1936, the emergence of an Arab-Nazi Alliance and the spread of the Holocaust to Iraq, where Jews were massacred in Baghdad by pro-Nazi Arab mobs. This last is an event which the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has refused to acknowledge, perhaps out of a politically correct determination not to blacken the names of the Arabs or create an association of the Arab radicals with the Nazis.
The book goes onto to highlight how traditional Islamic anti-Jewish attitudes found a willing ally in Nazi Germany, with the instrumental role played by Husseini. The latter met with Hitler, worked closely with Eichmann, and wrote letters top Axis governments preventing the transportations of thousands of Jewish children from Bulgaria and Hungary to safety in the Holy Land. Hungarian Jewry instead was sent in large numbers to the death camps.
Iraq gained independence in 1932, and Nazi infiltration followed within a year. The Christian owned daily al Aram-al-Arabi (The Arab World) published daily extracts from the Arabic edition of Mein Kampf.
As German influence strengthened a pro-Nazi society, al Muthana, was set up in Basra and Mosul in 1935. It was led by a well-known Jewhater Dr Saib Shawkat, director of the Royal hospital in Baghdad and whose brother, fellow medical doctor Sami Shawkat, founded the antiBritish and anti-Jewish Futuwa youth brigades.
Hitler’s ambassador to Baghdad, Fritz Grobba, played the lead role in Iraq in disseminating antiJewish and anti-Zionist propaganda, and his provocations were covered in newspapers of the day from Palestine to Great Britain. He claimed that 85% of commerce in Iraq was in Jewish hands and that Jews were not true Iraqis but a foul species apart. Dozens of Iraqi Jews were killed in attacks by pro-Nazi Iraqis. In a report to Berlin on 6 June, 1939, Grobba railed: “The Jews are the source of propaganda against the Italians and Germans in Iraq”. He threatened a bloody massacre of Jews in Iraq: “If the Jews continue to make it difficult for Iraq with their deeds, a day will come when the anger of the masses erupt and the result will be a massacre of Jews. When an oriental people’s feelings erupt, all restraint disappears: The want to see blood”.
The central event referred to in the book is the Farhud, the orgy of violence on 1-2 June 1941 the Jewish holiday of Shavuot – in which Arab Nazi sympathisers went on a rampage of murder, rape and pillaging against the 2600 year-old Jewish community. The riots occurred in a power vacuum following the collapse of the pro-Nazi government of Rashid Ali, when the city was in a state of instability. Before British and Transjordanian forces intervened, over 600 Jews had been killed and thousands injured, and thousands of Jewish homes had been destroyed.
Harrowing eye-witness testimonies are recounted by the author:
Infants were viciously bashed to death against the pavement and were thrown lifeless into the Tigris. Jewish women – hundreds of them – were mercilessly and openly raped in front of their husbands, in front of their parents, in front of their children, in front of wild Muslim mobs. If the women was pregnant, sometimes she was first raped, and then sliced open to destroy the unborn baby; only then was she killed. Men who defended their women and children were killed and their homes plundered.
The original plans for the 1941 anti-Jewish terror on 1-2 June had been to mimic Nazi extermination camps in Europe. Lists of Jews were compiled using the familiar approach the Nazis and their allies had employed.
It is important to realize that the Farhud was a mass movement, not the actions of a gang or a few errant officers. By 1951 110 000 Jews – 80% of Iraqi Jewry – had emigrated from the country, mostly to Israel. The Farhud has been called the “forgotten pogrom of the Holocaust” and “the beginning of the end of the Jewish community of Iraq”.
One common denominator characterizing the Nazi-Arab confluence was the joint conviction that Jews constituted a menace by their very existence, and had to be exterminated. The book covers the SS and Wehrmacht units of Bosnian Muslims that worked with the bloodthirsty Croatian Ustasha in killing millions of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies in Yugoslavia. It goes on to document the spreading of the Holocaust to North Africa, where local Arabs, sponsored by the Nazis, murdered thousands of North African Jews. The Arab-Nazi collaboration puts the lie to the Islamic claim that the Arabs had nothing to do with the Holocaust and therefore should not suffer the indignity of tolerating a Jewish entity in their midst.
In the last chapter, the author also describes the continuation of the Arab support for Nazi ideology after the Holocaust, and the refuge given by Egypt to such Nazi war criminals as Aribert Heim, Alfred Zingler and Johan Von Leers.
The Farhud is essential reading for those seeking to understand the roots of Arab hatred for Israel and Jews. It has particular resonance today, at a time when the Jews of the Middle East are threatened with another Holocaust, and when the ideologies of the mufti, the Farhud and the ArabNazi alliance live again in the ideologies of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Islamic Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and the Kahamenei-Ahmadinejad regime in Iran.
The Farhud: Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust by Edwin Black, Dialog Press, 2010, 464pp.
Gary Selikow is a researcher and media activist. His reviews of books of Jewish and Middle East interest appear regularly in Jewish Affairs, online and elsewhere.
