“They were neither allowed to ride on horseback nor on a mule, and even to ride on a donkey was forbidden them except outside the town; they had then to dismount at the gates, and walk in the middle of the street, so as not to be in the way of Arabs. If they had to pass the ‘Kasba,’ they had first to fall on their knees as a sign of submission, and then to walk on with lowered head; before coming to a mosque they were obliged to take the slippers off their feet, and had to pass the holy edifice without looking at it….It was worse even in their intercourse with Mussulmans; if one of these fancied himself insulted by a Jew, he stabbed him at once, and had only to pay a fine to the state, by way of punishment….
“The Prime Minister down to the common soldier took every opportunity to oppress and rob the Jews. They need only hear that this one or the other possessed great wealth to be after him at once for the purpose of confiscating his fortune for the paltriest of reasons, or to extort as many thousand piastres as they thought he was worth?” (Chevalier de Hesse-Wartegg, Tunis: The Land and People, quoted in Norman A. Stillman, The Jews in Arab Lands.)
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the importation of such Western ideas as socialism, capitalism, secularism, and the idea of the modern nation state into what was basically an agrarian, religiously oriented, clan-based and feudal society. The concomitant rise of Zionism among the despised Jews served to further aggravate the dislocation felt in much of the Arabo-Islamic world and served as a lightning rod to galvanize the Muslim masses.
Vicious attacks were launched against all Jews, including those of non or even anti-Zionist persuasion. The ferocious Hebron pogrom of 1929, in which the mostly Orthodox Jewish community was slaughtered to a man, accompanied by savage mutilations of both the living and the dead, was an extreme example of the new Arab behavior.
The rise of Italian fascism and German National Socialism was greeted with applause by many Arab intellectuals, who felt an acute kinship with both ideologies for their anti-British and anti-Semitic elements. Copies of both the Czarist-era forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf were issued in numerous Arabic language editions.
Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the British-appointed grand mufti of Jerusalem, became a prominent Muslim activist on behalf of the Axis cause. After fleeing the Middle East for Berlin, he broadcast rabidly anti-Semitic propaganda for the Nazis’ Arabic radio service as well as organizing Bosnian Muslim SS units for active use on the battlefront.
Future Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was a strong admirer of Hitler and kept a portrait of the Fuhrer in his private office as late as the early nineteen fifties. The Egyptian ‘Green Shirts’ attempted to emulate their radical European counterparts by instituting an economic boycott of Jewish businesses and committing random bombings of private homes of wealthy Jews.
In 1941, Yunis al-Sabawi, the head of Iraq’s fascist-influenced militias, ordered all Jews to remain in their homes in preparation for a secret massacre planned to occur during the two days of Shavuot. While Sabawi was deported to the Iranian border and hence unable to follow through with his project, a more or less spontaneous mass slaughter did take place in Baghdad under the watchful eyes of the British army.
The post-World War II period witnessed the end of the millennia-old history of Jewish life in the Near East. Across this huge area dictators arose who emphasized the purely Arab character of their countries, thus automatically excluding the Jews from the nation-building process.
