[lit-ideas] Jewish communities in the ME

It has been a subject of contention on this list, whether the vanishingly 
small number of Jews living in predominately Moslem countries in the Middle 
East can be used as an index of their antisemitism. Here is an example of 
this contention:

> > I can provide evidence that they are Jew-hating.
> > Check how many Jews live in those 22 Arab countries.
> > Every single Jew -- every one -- has been evicted, thrown out or killed.
>
>First, it is not true that: "there are simply no Jews in any of those 
>countries."
>And while the communities have shrunk severely after the establishment of
>Israel, it is not true that they have all been been "evicted, thrown out 
>or killed."
>Again, we see that false claims are being made with a straight face, and
>the other side - i.e. me - is supposed to do the work of checking the facts.

I can supply this list with only a few hard facts, which pertain only to 
Iran. During the Khomeni Revolution I happened to be living in an apartment 
building on Bustan street in beautiful downtown Tehran, just above the 
family of a Jewish cloth merchant and just across the street from the local 
masjed (mosque). I vividly remember a night when a fundie Moslem mob was 
howling in the street outside our apartment building, and the head of this 
Jewish family stuck his head out of a window and cursed at them, telling 
them that his family had lived in Iran for six generations and were just as 
Iranian as anybody and, by God, *they were going to stay in their country*. 
My red-headed Iranian landlady, who was married to an IBM worker who was 
receiving double salary, used to go over to the masjed across the street 
each day in her chador, to check the bulletin board there and verify that 
none of her boarders, me included, had as yet been targeted for death, and 
come back across the street and give us the good news that we could relax. 
Later on that year, after the Shahanshah and Shahbanou had fled and the 
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had returned, the tombstones of the Jewish 
cemetery in Tehran were bulldozed. A building has been erected atop the 
graves. Nothing now remains, I am told, to inform anyone that Tehran ever 
had a Jewish population. I remained for some time in postal contact with my 
former landlady (until such postal contact with a USer became too dangerous 
for her), and she reassured me in her fractured English that to the best of 
her understanding, after I had myself fled, when the Jewish family had 
later fled from her apartment building, they had departed at night without 
incident leaving all their furniture behind, and must surely have made it 
safely to the border -- she assured me that I need not be concerned that my 
former neighbors had been killed.

(The treatment awarded to the Bahai has been worse than the treatment 
awarded to the Iranian Jews, since the Moslems consider the Jews to be a 
"People of the Book" and therefore to be tolerated as long as they 
regularly pay their special Jew tax -- whereas the Bahai are considered to 
be apostate Moslems, and are executed with the same freedom as homosexuals.)


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