Let My Peoples Go: the American Jewish Committee and the Baghdad and Leningrad Show

Let My Peoples Go: The American Jewish Committee and the Baghdad and Leningrad Show Trials, 1969-70 Amy Victoria Fedeski Solihull, United Kingdom MPhil American History, Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, 2018 BA(Hons) History and Politics, University of Sheffield, 2017 A Thesis presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Master of Arts Department of History University of Virginia May 2020 1 In January 1969, the Ba’athist regime of Iraq announced it had found fourteen men, nine of whom were Jewish, guilty of treason. Their alleged crime was to have planned and implemented a number of acts of terror while in the pay of the State of Israel, to whom they had been sending Iraqi state secrets. The men had been arrested and tried in secret; the trial was only announced on Baghdad radio shortly after the verdict- death by hanging- had been carried out. Once the hangings were completed, the bodies of the fourteen men were taken to the Iraqi capital’s central Tahrir Square, where a large crowd-- by some estimates upwards of half a million people- assembled to see the bodies. The January executions were the largest and most egregious of a number of show trials directed against the Jewish community which had been conducted by the Ba’athist regime since its accession to power in July 1968. The months following the Ba’athist coup represented a new nadir for the few thousand Jews who had remained in Iraq after the mass emigration of 1948-1951. The community now faced discrimination, poverty, harassment, and isolation, as well as legal restrictions on emigration. Even after the January hangings had taken place, the government continued to arbitrarily arrest, 1 charge, imprison and execute Iraqi Jews. In December 1970, the Soviet government conducted a show trial of its own. The accused were a group of refuseniks- Soviet citizens, mostly Jews, who had been refused permission by the government to emigrate. They had been arrested in June 1970 for allegedly trying to steal an aircraft and escape from the USSR by flying it to the West. Eleven were arrested at Leningrad’s Smolny airport, nine of whom were Soviet Jews; further arrests were made in other locations, bringing the total number of people arrested for the plot to thirty-four. Six months after their 1 Itamar Levin, Locked Doors: The Seizure of Jewish Property in Arab Countries. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2001, 71-75. Harold Troper, The Ransomed of God: The Secret Rescue of the Jews of Syria. First edition, Raincoast Books/Malcolm Lester Books, 1999, 23. 2 arrest, the trial began at the Leningrad City Court. Unlike the Baghdad show trial, the Leningrad show trial was covered in the media; the regime permitted TASS, the Soviet state wire service, and Pravda, the state newspaper, to attend the proceedings. The verdicts in the trial of the eleven key prisoners were announced on 25th December 1970. The plot’s ringleaders, Mark Dymshits and Eduard Kuznetsov, were sentenced to death by firing squad. The others were given sentences 2 of between four and fifteen years’ imprisonment. Across the Atlantic, the leadership of the American Jewish Committee heard news of both trials at its headquarters in New York City. The organization, founded in 1906, had a long history of advocacy for Jewish communities both within and outside the United States. The AJC was led by affluent and well-established American Jews. It had long followed an elite-driven approach to advocacy, preferring private negotiation with world leaders above public protest. The AJC maintained close relationships with the US government, cultivated over decades of engagement on domestic and international issues. Maintaining these relationships was key to the organization’s strategy for quiet, diplomatic advocacy. It used these close ties to elite politics to advocate for its political ideals. These ideals were liberal- for example, the AJC had campaigned for African-American civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s- even sending a delegation to the Selma 3 to Montgomery march. However, the AJC’s leaders favored moderate activism over more radical approaches, such as nonviolent direct action to oppose segregation, which caused the organization's leaders concern that such action might result in violence and negative publicity 4 which would harm the cause of civil rights and reflect poorly on Jewish Americans. Thus, on 2 Gal Beckerman, When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010, 201-213. 3 Michael E Staub. Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, 111. 4 Ibid., 54. 3 the eve of the show trials, the AJC was an organization at the heart of the American Jewish establishment, keen to maintain its strong links to the US government, to other Western governments, and to the UN. It was also an organization inclined toward quiet, backroom 5 diplomacy over public protest. This paper seeks to compare the American Jewish Committee’s reaction to the Leningrad and Baghdad show trials. In doing so, it will consider two core research questions: firstly, on an empirical level, how did the organization’s response to the two trials differ? Secondly, what do those different responses reveal about the nature of American Jewish internationalism and transnational advocacy in the crucial period between the end of World War II and the rise of the 1970s human rights movement? By examining the organization’s archival material on the two trials, both internal documentation and external communications efforts, this paper explores how the American Jewish leadership viewed the trials in the context of their organization’s wider work both in Iraq and the Soviet Union and more generally. A close examination of the AJC’s decision-making process in turn speaks to a number of broader research questions: How did Jewish American politics produce a systematic understanding of international crises in the 1960s? How did non-governmental organizations in this period come to develop new political advocacy strategies? What does the American Jewish response to human rights crises in the Middle East and Europe reveal about the still poorly understood story of later Cold War Jewish migration? 5 See Marianne R. Sanua, Let Us Prove Strong: The American Jewish Committee, 1945-2006. Waltham, Mass: Brandeis University Press, 2007; Naomi W. Cohen, Not Free to Desist: The American Jewish Committee, 1906-1966. The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1972; Michael N. Barnett, The Star and the Stripes: A History of the Foreign Policies of American Jews. Princeton University Press, 2016. James Loeffler. Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. 4 Two major waves of Jewish migration took place in the decades between the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991: the first, from the Middle East and North Africa, saw some 800,000 Jews leave their countries of origin; the second, from the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, resulted in the migration of around 6 750,000 Soviet Jews. These waves were roughly equal in size; both groups went predominantly to Israel, though minorities (substantial in the Soviet case) settled in other countries such as France, Canada and the USA. Both left behind lands with centuries of Jewish history due in large part to antisemitic prejudices in those lands, and both experienced legal or practical barriers to emigration. Both waves have sparked debates- among policy makers, historians, and the migrants and their descendants- concerning whether the migrants could or should be described as ‘refugees’. Yet, despite all these similarities, the migration of Soviet Jews prompted a much greater contemporary international political reaction. The international Soviet Jewry movement campaigned for almost thirty years across dozens of countries; its protests attracted hundreds of thousands of attendees, its activists met world leaders and successfully campaigned for new legislation designed to promote emigration. The cause of Middle Eastern and North African Jews, on the other hand, attracted significantly less attention. There was no ‘MENA Jewry movement’; no protests with hundreds of thousands of participants; no photo opportunities with global leaders; no Jackson-Vanik amendment for these emigrants. In examining one key organization’s response to two show trials, one in the USSR and one in the Middle East, this paper seeks to answer why these two Jewish communities received such disparate international 6 Michael R. Fischbach, Jewish Property Claims against Arab Countries, Columbia University Press, 2008, 3; Pauline Peretz. Let My People Go: The Transnational Politics of Soviet Jewish Emigration During the Cold War. New Brunswick, N.J: Transaction Publishers, 2015, 344. 5 attention. The two trials- Baghdad in 1969 and Leningrad in 1970- took place within under two years of each other. Both saw totalitarian, anti-Zionist governments prosecute groups of their own citizens against a backdrop of aggressive antisemitic discrimination. That the events were similar in so many ways allows for a suggestive comparative approach to the AJC’s response to these two waves of migration. Did Jewish Americans simply care less about the cause of Jewish migrants from the Middle East than they did about the cause of Soviet Jews, perhaps because of a feeling of shared identity with the Ashkenazi Jews of the USSR over the more culturally unfamiliar Mizrahim? Or, was the Jewish American response shaped by wider contextual factors, such as domestic politics, the Cold War context, or access to information about the two cases? Literature on MENA Jewish migration politics has almost without exception focused on the process of migration itself, considering the treatment of MENA Jews in their countries of origin, how, when, and why communities decided to leave, and their experience upon arrival in 7 Israel and elsewhere.

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