There is “a horrible myth” among many Western intellectuals that before the coming of Zionism and the state of Israel, “Jews and Muslims lived together in a paradise setting.”
But Joseph Abdel Wahed, 71, says that is “a gross distortion of history.” And he knows that is true because he lived the reality.
Wahed was born and raised in Egypt, scion of a family that lived there for more than 1,000 years, he said. Yet he and his family were always second-class citizens.
He remembers seeing signs in the streets that read, “The Jews are the dogs of the Arabs.” He also remembered how when he was a child at school, one of his Muslim best friends told him that someday all Jews would have their throats cut.
His father was a jeweler and bullion dealer; among other property he owned six jewelry stores in the Cairo area. In the early 1950s, the then-new Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdul Nasser took over and began arresting Jews on false charges and confiscating their property, including all the Wahed family’s assets.
Wahed’s family ended up stateless in Europe until they came to the U.S. in 1962. And they were hardly the only ones.
As one of the founders of Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA), Wahed now travels the country telling the story of the ethnic cleansing of the Jews of the Arab world and Iran, often called the Mizrahi (eastern) Jews.
Petitioning Congress
Some 1 million Jews from these countries fled or were expelled since Israel’s founding in 1948, Wahed said. Most of them ended up in Israel, but an estimated 200,000 live in the United States, he said.
“There is hardly a trace of us left” in their countries of origin, in some of which Jews had lived for centuries before the Arab-Muslim conquests in the 600s and 700s. “Our sefer Torahs were burned or stolen… our hospitals and community centers taken, our bank assets frozen and our businesses confiscated, our dignity and honor taken away, our cemeteries vandalized.”
Yet when people think of or speak about refugees in the Middle East, they nearly always mean the Palestinians who in 1948 fled what would become Israel. “We are the forgotten refugees,” said Wahed.
Wahed was in Milwaukee Sunday at the invitation of Advocates for Israel of Milwaukee (AIM). He spoke briefly after an afternoon showing of the documentary film in which he appears, “The Forgotten Refugees,” at Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun; and at length at the Radisson Hotel that evening.
Wahed said he and his organization have several missions. One is to tell the story and preserve the memory of Mizrahi culture and history.
And he emphasized that he and JIMENA want to preserve all aspects of that story, good as well as bad. Even amid the injustices there were close friendships and alliances between Jews and Muslims at times, as when one of Wahed’s relatives, an attorney, drafted the constitution of Egypt for one of the pre-Nasser kings, he said.
Moreover, Wahed said JIMENA is seeking to collect personal stories of Jews who fled the Middle East and asked the audience to put such people in contact with the organization.
Another goal is to seek justice for the Mizrahi Jews by publicizing their cause and lobbying for it.
As one example of this work, Wahed gave to the some 15 people who attended each of the events cards to send to the U.S.
Congress. These ask for support of a resolution calling for every U.S. official to make sure that “explicit reference to Palestinian refugees is matched by a similar explicit reference to Jewish and other refugees, as a matter of law and equity.”
In an interview after the second event, Wahed said his family came to the U.S. instead of Israel because his father felt Israel would be “too tough” a place for him.
Wahed was educated in economics at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and the Sorbonne in Paris, though at the latter he had to leave without earning his doctorate.
In the U.S., he and his wife Kathi made their home in San Francisco, and he eventually became chief economist for the Wells Fargo Bank, retiring from that position in 1999. His mother is still alive and at age 91 “is tougher than me,” he said.
He helped created JIMENA in 2001, which now has some 3,000 people on its mailing list, and he said that last year he gave more than 70 talks on its behalf.
He said he has attempted some outreach to the U.S. Arab and Muslim community, but generally has met rebuffs. He also has encountered Arab-Muslim protestors when he speaks at college and university campuses, of which the worst instance was at San Francisco State University in 2002.
At an outdoor event sponsored by the Hillel Foundation there, student protestors tried to shout the speakers down and to climb over the barricades while local police did nothing because no actual violence took place, Wahed said.
Loading ...