Basra בַּצְרָה
The port of southern Iraq: the outlet to the Indian Ocean through which the Baghdadi merchant houses went out—and where Shafiq Ades was hanged in 1948.
All Mesopotamia's connection with the Indian Ocean ran through Basra, which made it the second city of Iraqi Jewry and its commercial gate. Rabbi David d'Beth Hillel counted three hundred households here in 1824; the Iraqi census of 1947 gives 9,921 Jews, about 9.8 per cent of the city.
On 23 September 1948 Shafiq Ades (1900–1948) was hanged in Basra—the city's wealthiest Jewish businessman, Ford's agent in Iraq. He was executed in front of his own house before some twelve thousand spectators, after a three-day military tribunal at which no witness was called; the charge was supplying arms to Israel and aiding the Communist Party.
This was the heaviest single blow to Iraqi Jewish confidence—heavier than the Farhud itself. The reason lies in who Ades was: he was not a Zionist and was as closely tied to the Iraqi state and society as it was possible to be. If he could be hanged, the assimilationist argument—we are Iraqis, and therefore safe—stopped working. Historians of the exodus of 1950–52 name the Ades case as the turning point more often than the Farhud.
By 1968 fewer than three hundred Jews remained in Basra.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Documents of the period
- The Iraqi census of 1947 — 9,921 Jews in Basra, about a tenth of the city
- D. d'Beth Hillel, The Travels of Rabbi David d'Beth Hillel, Madras, 1832 — three hundred households in Basra in 1824
Scholarship
- O. Bashkin, New Babylonians — the Ades case in its public context
Basis: documents and evidence.