The Farhud

The word al-farhūd (الفرهود) in Judaeo-Arabic means violent dispossession, plundering.

The course of events. 1 April 1941—the coup of the pro-Axis "Golden Square" officers under Rashīd ʿAlī al-Gaylānī; the Regent ʿAbd al-Ilāh flees. 2–31 May—the Anglo-Iraqi War. 29–30 May—Rashīd ʿAlī and the officers flee via Iran to Germany, and British-led forces reach the outskirts of Baghdad—and do not enter the city. 31 May—armistice; the Regent prepares to return. 1 June, on Shavuot, a Jewish delegation returning from greeting the Regent at Baghdad airport is attacked by defeated Iraqi soldiers and police; the pogrom begins in the afternoon and spreads through the Jewish quarters—al-Ruṣāfa, Abu Sifyan, Ṭaʿṭaran, Hanuni. 2 June the rioting intensifies, Bedouin from outside the city join in; in the afternoon martial law and shoot-on-sight orders are issued, and Iraqi troops put the mob down. 7 June the restored government appoints a committee of inquiry.

The figures, with who counted them. The official Iraqi commission: 110 dead (in some renderings 130)—Jews and Muslims together, undifferentiated, with the Muslim deaths unexplained; this is a systematic undercount, and the refusal to differentiate is itself evidence of bad faith. The community's own count: 179 Jews murdered—from burial and communal registers; scholarship treats this figure as reliable. The conventional scholarly figure is "about 180" or "nearly 200"; the Encyclopaedia Judaica gives "120 to 180 Jews, including women, elderly people and children." The injured: from a thousand on a conservative count to over two thousand. Orphans: 242 children. 586 shops looted; between 586 and 911 homes damaged or destroyed. The property loss: about £680,000 or a million dinars—two independent estimates in different units, not two figures for the same thing, and they must not be averaged. Rioters killed in the suppression: 300–400: the British ambassador estimated that Iraqi troops killed as many rioters as the rioters killed Jews.

The claim of "six hundred in a mass grave" must not be printed as fact: it derives from a single institution—the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center—and has no contemporary documentary support.

What caused it. The immediate spark was the attack on the delegation on 1 June. Behind it: years of Nazi propaganda through Fritz Grobba's German legation and Radio Berlin's Arabic service; the presence in Baghdad from October 1939 of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Ḥājj Amīn al-Ḥusaynī; the paramilitary youth movements al-Futuwwa and the Kata'ib al-Shabāb, whose members were among the rioters alongside soldiers, police and schoolchildren—and the vacuum of authority between 30 May and 2 June.

Three corrections. The Farhud was probably not spontaneous: Zvi Yehuda argues for premeditation and points to anti-Jewish preaching at the Jāmiʿ al-Gaylānī mosque as the trigger, rejecting the "spontaneous outburst" account. The British stood outside the city and did not intervene for some forty-eight hours: Ambassador Sir Kinahan Cornwallis did not immediately execute Foreign Office instructions and initially refused permission to British military and civil officers on the scene to act against the mobs. Whether this was calculation or paralysis is disputed; but the fact of the two-day non-intervention is not. And the Farhud did not end Iraqi Jewry: the headline formula "the massacre that ended a 2,600-year-old community" is wrong in both halves—the community grew after 1941 and lived another decade, its institutions, schools and press were at their peak in the mid-1940s, and Orit Bashkin has shown extensive Jewish participation in Iraqi public and literary life after 1941. Historiography is divided: Esther Meir-Glitzenstein treats the Farhud as a "significant turning point," while others locate the real watershed in 1948–51—the hanging of Shafiq Ades, the establishment of Israel, the denaturalisation law. Bashkin adds something to remember particularly: the pogrom was neighbourhood-specific—in mixed neighbourhoods Jews survived at markedly higher rates, because there was a "good neighbour" who sheltered them; this is present in almost all survivor accounts and is incompatible with a picture of undifferentiated Muslim hostility.