ON JUNE 1–2, 1941, as British forces momentarily withdrew from Baghdad, a mob unleashed a systematic slaughter of the city’s ancient Jewish community. Nearly 180 Jews were killed, hundreds more wounded, and thousands of homes and businesses were looted and destroyed. The Farhud — Arabic for “violent dispossession” — was a watershed moment. Yet outside Jewish memory circles, it remains almost entirely unknown.

That must change. And the word Farhud must do more work.

We have Holocaust Remembrance Day, Nakba Day, and genocide memorials for Armenians, Rwandans, and Cambodians. Each name anchors a historical atrocity in public consciousness, demanding that the world say: this happened, it was wrong, and we must not forget.

Mizrahi Jews — those from Arab lands and Iran — have no equivalent day of reckoning for their own catastrophic dispossession. As Lyn Julius, author of Uprooted, has written, this is the story of how “3,000 years of Jewish civilisation in the Arab world vanished overnight” — yet it has no name the world recognises, no date the world marks. Farhud Day, observed on the anniversary of the Baghdad pogrom, should become that day. More than that, it should serve as the umbrella term for the full arc of violence, expulsion, and erasure visited upon Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa.

The arc is long and devastating. Between 1948 and the 1970s, approximately 850,000 Jews were expelled, fled, or were coerced out of Arab states — Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and others. Their property was confiscated. Their citizenship was revoked. Synagogues were burned. In many cases, departure was framed as “voluntary,” but this is the language of perpetrators.

Arab League states had explicitly warned that the establishment of a Jewish state would endanger their Jewish populations, and they made good on that threat. Today, Libya has zero Jews. Yemen has zero Jews. Iraq, which once housed one of the world’s oldest and most vibrant Jewish communities — dating back to the Babylonian exile — has zero Jews. These are not emigrations. They are erasures.

Nor did the violence begin in 1948. The Fez pogrom of 1912 left dozens of Jews dead and an entire mellah — the Jewish quarter — looted and razed.

The 1929 Hebron massacre saw 67 Jews slaughtered by their Arab neighbours in a city Jews had inhabited continuously for centuries. In Tripolitania in 1945, over 130 Jews were killed across multiple days of coordinated mob violence. Each of these events deserves to be named as a Farhud — an act of violent dispossession in a long, connected chain.

Yet the historical memory of this catastrophe has been almost entirely suppressed in mainstream discourse about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Part of the problem is internal: as historian Edwin Black has noted, “in most major Jewish organisations our collective memory is an Ashkenazic collective memory” — leaving Mizrahi narratives perpetually on the margins. To acknowledge this history more broadly would also complicate a narrative in which Jews appear exclusively as colonisers rather than also as refugees — people with millennia-deep roots in the Arab world who were forcibly torn from their homes..

The story does not begin in 1941, either. The first Farhud is described in the foundational texts of Islam itself: the massacre at Khaybar in 628 CE, when the Prophet Muhammad’s forces attacked and subjugated the Jewish tribes of the Hejaz. From this event comes the chant “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya yahud” — a direct threat invoking the slaughter as a warning of what awaits Jews today. This phrase is not a relic. It is chanted at rallies from London to Beirut to Tehran. It is shouted at football matches and protest marches. It is a living incitement, drawing an unbroken line from a seventh-century massacre to contemporary antisemitism. Refusing to name and confront it is a moral failure.

Farhud Day is not about grievance competition. Jewish suffering does not diminish Palestinian suffering, or anyone else’s. But the systematic dispossession of 850,000 people and the annihilation of some of the world’s oldest Jewish communities cannot be consigned to historical footnotes. Naming it matters. Vocabulary is the first act of witness.

Let Farhud do what Nakba, Shoah, and Porajmos do for other peoples: give shape and weight to a catastrophe. Let it remind the world that antisemitism in the Arab world did not begin as a reaction to Zionism — it predates the State of Israel by centuries. And let it serve as a warning: the slogan born at Khaybar still echoes in our streets.

History we refuse to name is history we are doomed to repeat.

Tag: mizrahi