Can Jews be Arabs? Identity and Crisis for the Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times

3 Credits

For centuries, Jews inhabited the Islamic lands of the Middle East and North Africa. Their population has dropped from nearly one million a century ago to several tens of thousands today, mostly in Turkey and Iran. The vibrant and ancient Jewish communities of Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and several other countries were practically gone by 1970. One popular explanation for this exodus is that an "age-old schism between Jews and Muslims," in the words of the prominent historian Martin Gilbert, drove Jewish men and women to leave their historic homelands in the years following the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948. However, recent research into these communities offers a more complex picture of their lives in Islamic lands in the 19th and 20th centuries and subsequent departure.