The Last Jews of Libya

On June 9^th, a few days after Obama made his appeal to Muslims worldwide from Cairo, André Aciman wrote an op-ed piece in the N.Y. Times that tried to balance the expulsion of Palestinians with that of Jews from Arab countries:

The president never said a word about me. Or, for that matter, about any of the other 800,000 or so Jews born in the Middle East who fled the Arab and Muslim world or who were summarily expelled for being Jewish in the 20th century. With all his references to the history of Islam and to its (questionable) “proud tradition of tolerance” of other faiths, Mr. Obama never said anything about those Jews whose ancestors had been living in Arab lands long before the advent of Islam but were its first victims once rampant nationalism swept over the Arab world.

Nor did he bother to mention that with this flight and expulsion, Jewish assets were — let’s call it by its proper name — looted. Mr. Obama never mentioned the belongings I still own in Egypt and will never recover. My mother’s house, my father’s factory, our life in Egypt, our friends, our books, our cars, my bicycle. We are, each one of us, not just defined by the arrangement of protein molecules in our cells, but also by the things we call our own. Take away our things and something in us dies. Losing his wealth, his home, the life he had built, killed my father. He didn’t die right away; it took four decades of exile to finish him off.

Although it is entirely plausible that such things happened to Egyptian Jews, they did not happen to the Jews of Morocco in exactly the same way, at least based on the plot line of “Where are you going, Moshe?”, a movie I reviewed on December 12^th. Despite the fact that the movie was directed by an Arab, there was no attempt to cover up for hostile acts against Jews that dovetailed with Zionist attempts to lure them to Israel. I wrote:

Moroccan director Hassan Benjelloun describes how Jews were pressured by Zionists into emigrating to Israel in 1963, two years after the death of King Mohammed V left the country in an uncertain state. His film is set in the small village of Bejjad, where the Jews enjoy warm and cordial relations with their Muslim neighbors. The only threat to their well-being comes from an ascendant group of fundamentalists who are anxious to close down the only bar in town that is run by Mustapha, an easy-going Muslim who enjoys serving alcohol to his patrons while they enjoy musical performances by local talent, including Moshe, an elderly Jew who plays the oud and sings in his native language: Arabic.

After Mustapha is hauled before the local sharia, he defends himself by referring to a Moroccan law that allows the sale of alcohol to non-Muslims, which Bejjad has in ample number at least for the time being. However, as each busload of Jews departs for Israel, Mustapha’s anxiety increases. His only hope is to convince Moshe to remain in Bejjad, a feasible project given the oud player’s affection for his Muslim friends and neighbors.

I was motivated to delve deeper into this subject since I had noticed more and more that the expulsion of the Jews had become a talking point of the hard-core Zionist right. They liken the “transfer” of Arab and Jewish populations to that which occurred after Turkish independence when Greeks were driven from Izmir (Alexandria) and Turks were driven from Greece. Or the division of India and Pakistan. Of course, what is missing from this formula is any recognition that Palestinians had no homeland like Greece or Pakistan that was the equivalent of Israel. Instead, they ended up in refugee camps. In a feeble attempt to engage with this reality, the Zionists blame the Arab countries for not “accepting” them.

For a movie that adheres to the Aciman and Zionist establishment analysis, you can watch “The Last Jews of Libya”, which is available for $36 from Brandeis University, although I doubt that many of my readers will want to spend that kind of money for propaganda.

This 50 minute documentary is shown occasionally on the Sundance cable channel and I first caught about 15 minutes or so of it a couple of months ago. I found it so off-putting that I switched to the Cooking Network. But after reading the NY Times op-ed piece, I resolved to borrow this movie from the Columbia University library and watch it to the bitter end in order to help me prepare this post.

I have also had a look at a book titled “Jewish Property Claims Against Arab Countries” by Michael Fischbach that helps put the question of Jewish expulsion from Arab countries into historical context, and particularly how this played out in Libya. I strongly recommend Fischbach’s book, which can be read in sizable extracts on Google.

In his introduction, Fischbach distinguishes between two sharply opposed interpretations of the Jewish experience in Arab countries. The first has been referred to as the “myth of the interfaith utopia” by Mark Cohen in his “Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages”. While I am generally opposed to utopian schemas, there is something to be said for how Arabs treated Jews historically, especially in comparison to Christian Europe as I tried to point out in my article “Under Andalusian Skies”.

Diametrically opposed to the “interfaith utopia” is one that describes Jewish life in Arab countries as perpetually plagued by anti-Semitism, a view that might be likened to Daniel Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” in which the persecution of the Jews is reduced to some sort of essentialist narrative that can only be relieved by the creation of a heavily armed Jewish state.

As it turns out, one of the primary exponents of this reductionist view that Cohen calls the “neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history” is Maurice Roumani, the Libyan Jew who is the principal interviewee in “The Last Jews of Libya”, whose family history constitutes the bulk of the documentary directed by his sister Vivienne Roumani-Denn. The script was based on their mother’s memoir.

Fischbach cites a World Health Organization pamphlet by Maurice Roumani that traces Arab anti-Semitism back to the 7^th century with the origins of the Muslim religion:

What then are the roots of anti-Jewish discrimination in traditional Islam? We must begin with the founder of Islam, with Muhammad…Arab oppression of Jews is not, therefore, a post-1948 phenomenon.

One of the most striking things about “The Last Jews of Libya” is its open Eurocentrism. Over and over again, the Roumani family is depicted as identifying with European culture and a feeling of alienation from Arab society. It is especially jarring to see this expressed as a fondness for the Italians who made Libya a colony during WWI, and all the more so when the fondness continues under Mussolini’s rule. Mussolini is depicted in the movie as not all that bad until he teamed up with Hitler who pressured Mussolini to toe the anti-Semitic line.

Large parts of Maurice Roumani’s “The Jews of Libya: coexistence, persecution, resettlement” can be read on Google and I would refer you to the chapter titled “Mussolini, Fascism and Libyan Jews” to get a sense of the film’s outlook on Mussolini (Maurice Roumani served as historical consultant on the movie). It describes the attitude of the Jewish community in Libya as one that provided a “warm welcome” to the occupying powers and that has this startling description of the relationship of Italian Jews, to whom the Libyan Jews were closely linked with culturally and politically, to Italian fascism:

When Mussolini first established the nucleus of his Fascist Party Facci di combattimento on March 23, 1919, Jews already made up a significant portion of his support base. In fact, for over one hundred years, Jews stood staunchly behind the Italian Nationalist movement because they traditionally belonged to the bourgeoisie and anti-socialist movements.

Although “The Last Jews of Libya” makes no reference to Arab resistance to the Italian occupation, one can only surmise that the Roumanis would have cheered on the Italian army’s efforts to stamp out the revolt led by Mukhtar Omar that was dramatized in the movie “Lion of the Desert” (which can now be seen online). In my review, I noted:

The Italians colonized Libya, Somalia and Ethiopia as part of an attempt to get up to speed with their more “advanced” Western European rivals who had a toehold in Africa for some time. Mukhtar was a leader of the Senusi people who lived in the Cyrenaica region in Eastern Libya before it had become a modern state. Described as Bedouin in the film, they appear to have the same kind of fiercely independent streak as the Algerian Kabyle (Berbers) who challenged the French in Algeria in the 1950s.

When we first meet Mukhtar Omar in the film, he is giving lessons in the Quran to young boys in a Senusi village. Throughout the film, the character’s religious faith goes hand in hand with his determination to resist the occupation. His Islamic beliefs in the brotherhood of man also lead him to avoid treating Italian prisoners with the same kind of cruelty that his own fighters endured.

His main adversary in the film is Gen. Rodolfo Graziani (Oliver Reed), who was hand-picked by Mussolini to quash the Senusi rebellion and who eventually succeeded. His methods included herding the Senusi into concentration camps and erecting a long barbed-wire fence between Libya and Egypt in order to cut off supplies. Historians estimate that between 30,000 and 70,000 Senusis were killed by the occupiers. With a population numbering about 185,000 in 1923, we are talking about a slaughter of epic proportions.

It is shocking to think that people such as the Roumanis would have felt an affinity with Italian fascism in light of these crimes. It certainly undermines Maurice Roumani’s attempt to portray the Jews as the exclusive victims of Italian fascism in Libya once Mussolini had linked up with Hitler.

From the standpoint of the makers of “The Last Jews of Libya”, the only evil worth considering is that which has been done to the Jews. While acknowledging the crimes carried out against them in Arab countries after 1948, we must return to Fischbach’s chronicle for the details of what actually took place in Libya. In late 1948 the American consul in Tripoli Orray Taft Jr. reported to Washington:

There is reason to believe that the Jewish Community has become more aggressive as the result of the Jewish victories in Palestine. There is also reason to believe that the community here is receiving instructions and guidance from the State of Israel. Whether or not the change in attitude is the result of instructions or a progressive aggressiveness is hard to determine. Even with the aggressiveness or perhaps because of it, both Jewish and Arab leaders inform me that the inter-racial relations are better now than they have been for several years and that understanding, tolerance and cooperation are present at any top level meeting between the leaders of the two communities.

After Libya became independent in 1950 the nationalist aspirations of the country exploded and rapidly became identified with the Nasserism. Continuing conflicts between Egypt and Israel were reflected in Libya where the small but wealthy Jewish community decided that it was best to pull up stakes and emigrate, either to the U.S. or to Israel.

The Roumani family moved to the U.S., a country that the young Maurice Roumani felt a strong identification with. The movie reveals that he sought employment opportunities at the Agency for International Development but was turned down only because Libya blocked Jewish employment there. Finally, he took a job in the personnel department at the American Embassy and made regular visits to the U.S. Cultural Center where he found himself mesmerized by Life Magazine and American movies. He entered Brandeis University in 1960 and soon helped the rest of his family relocate to his beloved new country. In a note that is understandably given short shrift in the movie, we learn that his father feels alienated by American society and returns for a while to Libya.

Maurice Roumani emigrated to Israel in 1972 where he is very active in Zionist affairs.

Although there is no recognition in “The Last Jews of Libya” of the social forces that led a Maurice Roumani (or an André Aciman for that matter) to embark on a latter-day exodus, there is little doubt that Arab nationalism in its less admirable aspects was partly to blame. However, even if the Arab states had acted in a saintly fashion, it was likely that an exodus of the most privileged layers of the Jewish population would have occurred nonetheless as Fischbach, a Jew himself, pointed out:

Other sectors, populations, and regions in the Middle East and North Africa fared less well from the spread of modernity from Europe and the West eastward and southward into the region during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Traditional weavers could no longer compete with the cheap, machine-made European cloth now being imported into the Middle East. Merchants in inland cities like Aleppo suffered when the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 shifted trade patterns. Muslim businessmen tried to compete with Christian and Jewish colleagues who had special access to European businessmen, possessed European citizenship, or received protections via the Capitulations [treaties that allowed non-Muslims to be exempt from local law.] The traditional intelligentsia—the clergy (in all religions)—was threatened by the growth of a new, Western-educated, secular class of intellectuals and bureaucrats. Traditional Muslims were upset by the emancipation of former second-class minorities like Christians and Jews, religious communities that sometimes were benefiting from, and being “protected” by, the very intrusive Western forces that were creating such systemic change to the wider socioeconomic, political, and cultural milieu of the region.

This makes more sense to me than blaming whatever Mohammad said or did in the 7^th century.

Fortunately for the state of Israel, the backwardness of the Arab governments helped make it easier for the Zionists to stampede the Arab Jews into wholesale flight from their homelands. By 1967, there were no Jews left in Libya, for example. With over 800,000 Jews in Arab countries, their migration to Israel was essential to the Zionist project in light of the Judeocide taking place in Europe.

Once the Arab Jews settled in Israel, they found themselves subject to discrimination from fellow Ashkenazi Jews that in some ways was worse than what they had ever endured from Arabs. Israeli journalist Arye Gelbaum wrote:

This is the immigration of a race we have not yet known in the country. We are dealing with people whose primitivism is at a peak, whose level of knowledge is one of virtually absolute ignorance and, worse, who have little talent for understanding anything intellectual. Generally, they are only slightly better than the general level of the Arabs, Negroes, and Berbers in the same regions. In any case, they are at an even lower level than what we know with regard to the former Arabs of Israel. These Jews also lack roots in Judaism, as they are totally subordinated to savage and primitive instincts. As with Africans you will find among them gambling, drunkenness, and prostitution … chronic laziness and hatred for work; there is nothing safe about this asocial element. [Even] the kibbutzim will not hear of their absorption.

So pronounced was the racism directed against Arab (or Mizrahi in Hebrew, the term for Eastern) that it produced a radical movement in Israel during the 1970s that named itself after the American Black Panther Party.

The movement began early in 1971 in the Musrara neighborhood of Jerusalem, in reaction to perceived discrimination against Mizrahi Jews, which they considered to have existed since the establishment of the state. The Black Panthers felt that this discrimination could be seen in the different attitude of the Ashkenazi Establishment towards the olim from the Soviet Union. The movement’s founders protested “ignorance from the establishment for the hard social problems”, and wanted to fight for a different future.

At the beginning of March 1971, the Israel Police denied the Black Panthers a permit for a demonstration; the Panthers ignored this decision and proceeded with the demonstration illegally, protesting the distress of the poverty, the gap between poor and rich in Israel, and the ethnic tensions within Jewish Israeli society. The movement successfully built a base of supporters, both in the public and in the media.

On 18 May 1971, “The Night of the Panthers”, between 5,000 and 7,000 demonstrators gathered in Zion Square in Jerusalem in a militant protest against the racial discrimination. The demonstrators even demanded to change the name of the square to Kikar Yehadut HaMizrah (Eastern Jewry Square). This demonstration was also held without police permission. The security forces which came to disperse the demonstration encountered an angry mob who threw stones and Molotov cocktails. Both police and demonstrators were injured in the clash; 20 were hospitalized, and 74 demonstrators were arrested by the police.

Prior to the demonstration, representatives of the Panthers had met with Prime Minister Golda Meir on 13 April, who characterized them as “not nice people”. She saw the leaders of the movement as lawbreakers and refused to recognize them as a social movement. The violent protest of 18 May brought the government to discuss seriously the Panthers’ claims and a public committee was established to find a solution.

Unfortunately, this movement died off just as it did elsewhere, including the U.S. Given the bleak political situation in Israel, where progressive voices seem virtually extinct, it is too much to hope for any kind of revival any time soon. Most Israelis who are fed up with the system generally vote with their feet and move to a less brutal environment like New York City.

In the best of all worlds, the social transformation that ultimately will relegate capitalism to the dustbin of history will make it possible for Arabs and Jews to go through another “exchange”, one in which the Jews of Libya, Morocco, Egypt and elsewhere can live in the lands where they have a 2000 year history while the Palestinians return to their homeland as well. Any measures short of this will certainly prove to be of a transitory nature.