chapter 6 The (Farhud) of 1941, Reexamination

The pogrom of Pentecost (Shavu’ot) festival, 1–2 , known as the farhud, was not documented by the main forces that were responsible for its occur- rence, the British government and monarchic . The involved governments in fact did all in their power to prevent any information about the attacks on the from reaching the public in Iraq and abroad, downplaying their sever- ity and trying to ignore them. In the present study we shall reexamine impor- tant issues in the study of the pogrom of Pentecost 1941 and its denial, in light of new sources and including archival material ignored by researchers, new testimonies which were dictated to us by witnesses to the pogrom, and mem- oirs, mostly by Iraqi Jews, some published and some still in manuscript form.1

Research on the Farhud

Studies of the pogrom published in the last fifty years have therefore had to rely on sources located in the Central Zionist Archive in Jerusalem, including testimonies taken by employees of the Jewish Agency from Iraqi Jews who came to Palestine shortly after the pogrom; and on documentation, mostly in- direct, found in archives in England and the United States. To these we may add contemporary news reports as well as memoirs and testimonies published in the last twenty years. The first study of the farhud was published in English by Prof. Hayyim J. Cohen in 1966.2 Cohen’s work contains a description of the events, their back- ground and aftermath, a presentation of the main questions which they raised, and an attempt to answer them using contemporary press reports, documents

1 Zvi Yehuda, “Selected Documents on the Pogrom (Farhud),” in Al-Farhūd. The 1941 Pogrom in Iraq, eds. S. Moreh and Z. Yehuda (Jerusalem 2010), 256–367. This is an edited and updated ar- ticle of Zvi Yehuda, “The Pogrom (Farhud) of 1941 in Light of New Sources,” in Al-Farhud. The 1941 Pogrom in Iraq. Eds. S. Moreh and Z. Yehuda. Published within the book series of The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of , The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and The Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center (Magnes Press, Jerusalem 1910), 9–25, 250–6. 2 Hayyim J. Cohen, “The Anti-Jewish Farhud in 1941.” Middle Eastern Studies 3, no. 1 (Oct. 1966): 2–17.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004354012_008 250 Chapter 6 from the Central Zionist Archive in Jerusalem, and testimonies which Iraqi Jews in Israel dictated to the author. Cohen did not examine documents lo- cated outside Israel, but still succeeded in arriving at important conclusions concerning the British view on the pogrom. The relevant documents in British archives, which deal more directly with Rashid ‘Ali al-Kaylani’s rebellion and its suppression, formed the basis of Prof. Elie Kedourie’s comprehensive work in English on the pogrom, which was pub- lished eight years after that of Cohen.3 Kedourie made an extensive analysis of British policy towards Rashid ‘Ali’s rebellion and the farhud as articulated by the British military in the Middle East and India and British policy-makers in Iraq, India, and Britain. He highlighted the contradictions in that policy and the differences in the way policy makers in the British government and the British officials in Iraq assessed the situation and in the actions which they proposed. Kedourie did not have access to the documents on the pogrom in the U.S. National Archives in Washington D.C., which contain reports that American officials in Baghdad sent to the American State Department. These documents were examined by Prof. Harold Luks in a study published in English (1977).4 However, because his study dealt with a very long period of time, from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of World War II, and because of the scant amount of American documents dealing with the pogrom, his brief overview of the pogrom adds nothing to what Cohen and Kedourie put into their works. None of the above-mentioned publications used the many memoirs composed by Iraqi Jews. These are discussed in a comprehensive work by Prof. Shmuel Moreh.5 Another study by the same scholar discusses Palestinian incitement before the pogrom and the attitudes of Arab intellectuals towards the farhud in light of memoirs and other writings composed by Iraqi and Palestinian Arab politicians and writers at the time.6 Dr. Yehuda Taggar also wrote a study in which he presented the quite scarce mentions of the pogrom by Arab writers.7 The pogrom of Pentecost 1941 has also been discussed as one topic among others in studies dealing with various aspects of the history of Iraqi Jewry

3 Kedourie, “Sack of .” 4 Harold Paul Luks, “Iraqi Jews During World War II,” Wiener Library Bulletin 30, no. 43/44 (1977): 30–39. 5 Shmuel Moreh, “The Pogrom of June 1941 in the Literature of Iraqi Jews in Israel,” in Al-Farhūd. The 1941 Pogrom in Iraq, eds. S. Moreh and Z. Yehuda (Jerusalem 2010), 207–49. 6 Idem, “The Role of the Palestinian Incitement and the Attitude of Arab Intellectuals to the Farhud,” in ibid., 119–50. 7 Yehuda Tagger, “The Farhud in the Writings of Iraqi Statesmen and Writers” [in Hebrew], Pe’amim 8 (1981): 38–45.