Howard Berman: “When the state of Israel was founded in 1948, more than 150,000 Jews lived in Iraq. Iraq was truly a cradle of Jewish…”

“When the state of Israel was founded in 1948, more than 150,000 Jews lived in Iraq. Iraq was truly a cradle of Jewish civilization, a site of Jewish learning from which one of Judaism's holiest books, the Talmud, emerged. For more than two millennia, as history books will attest, Jews also made vital contributions to wider Iraqi society. Indeed, like Jews throughout the Arab world, Iraqi Jews for most of that long era enjoyed a quality of life far better than that of most Jewish communities in Europe. That all changed for good in 1948, and in the years immediately preceding 1948, when the state of Israel declared its independence. Throughout the Arab world, Jews then became the objects of official scorn and often were fired from their jobs en masse. In many places, violence ensued against Jewish communities. Continuing to use Iraq as an example, that 150,000-strong community by 1952 had shrunk to a mere 30,000. The rest, the other 120,000, had effectively been forced out. Overall, approximately 850,000 Jewish residents of the Arab world were expelled or otherwise forced to leave their homes, abandoning possessions and patrimony, in the years following Israel's creation in 1948.”