Zvi Yehuda and Marian Scheuer Sofaer, "The Expulsion of Jews from Iraq, 20th Century: The Agonies of Redemption" (Brill, 2024)
August 15, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readIn 2013, an Iraqi journalist published evidence that the hand grenades thrown at Jewish civilians in Baghdad in 1950 and 1951—bombings long blamed on the newly formed state of Israel and its Zionist agents—were actually thrown by Arab nationalists. For over sixty years, this allegation had poisoned the historical record and the self-understanding of the Iraqi Jewish diaspora. It had even been believed by David Ben-Gurion. The book The Expulsion of Jews from Iraq, 20th Century: The Agonies of Redemption, by the late Dr. Zvi Yehuda, is the culmination of a forty-year search for the documentary proof that would finally overturn that myth. The book argues that the mass departure of Iraq’s ancient Jewish community was not a voluntary Zionist emigration, but a carefully planned state expulsion designed to strip them of their assets.
A Forty-Year Search for Evidence
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:50) **Book Origin and Author's Journey** - The guests explain how the book came to be and who Dr. Zvi Yehuda was.
- 2 (10:30) **The Myth of Unbroken Continuity** - Dr. Yehuda's earlier discovery that the modern Iraqi Jewish community was not a direct, unbroken lineage from the Babylonian exile.
- 3 (12:47) **Linguistic and Social Integration** - A brief look at the unique linguistic landscape of Iraqi Jews.
- 4 (13:24) **A 40-Year Research Methodology** - The exhaustive, multi-lingual, and evidence-driven approach Dr. Yehuda used to write the book.
- 5 (15:14) **Setting the Stage: From Ottoman Empire to Independent Iraq** - The historical and political context that led to the persecution of Iraqi Jews.
- 6 (19:49) **The 1941 Farhud: A Turning Point** - The devastating pogrom that shattered the Jewish community's sense of security.
- 7 (23:02) **Post-1948 Persecution and Nuri al-Said's Plan** - The escalation of state-sponsored persecution after the establishment of Israel.
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Show Notes
In this episode we spoke with Marian Scheuer Sofaer, Esquire, and Dr. Einav Yehuda-Shnaidman about The Expulsion of Jews from Iraq, 20th Century: The Agonies of Redemption (Brill, 2024), by Dr. Zvi Yehuda, and translated by Sofaer.
Dr. Zvi Yehuda, born in Iraq in 1936, immigrated to Israel as a teenager during Operation Ezra and Nehemiah and went on to complete a PhD in History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, later founding and heading the research institute at the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center. He began to write the book in 1984, in a conversation with former Knesset Speaker Shlomo Hillel, and grew into a forty-year project of archival research across Israel, the United Kingdom, France, the United States, and Iraq, conducted in Hebrew, English, French, German and Judeo-Arabic. Yehuda passed away before he could complete editing the English translation; his daughter, Dr. Einav Yehuda-Shnaidman, together with Sofaer, brought the English edition to completion.
The book situates the modern Iraqi Jewish community within a more discontinuous history than is often assumed. Yehuda's research identified a substantial gap, from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries, in which no functioning Jewish community existed in Iraq; the community that flourished into the twentieth century instead descended from waves of immigration beginning after 1740, drawing Jews from Kurdistan, Iran, and Europe, and developing its own distinct Judeo-Arabic dialect.
Following Israel's establishment and victory in 1948,
Sofaer and Yehuda-Shnaidman described the systematic persecution that
followed: mass dismissals of Jews from government employment, punitive
import-export regulations, and new restrictions on real estate and
mortgages. Yehuda-Shnaidman emphasized that Prime Minister Nuri al-Said
was a central architect of this policy, proposing to the United Nations a
plan to force Iraq's Jews to leave within four months, stripped of
citizenship and property—a plan ultimately abandoned only after Jordan
refused to allow the deportation convoys to cross its territory.
Central to Yehuda's research is his conclusion that the expulsion was not, as long assumed, a response to Zionist activity, but a deliberate, state-directed policy to remove Iraq's Jews and seize their assets. The book also overturns the long-standing claim that bombs thrown at Jewish targets in Baghdad in 1950–51 were planted by Zionists to encourage emigration; evidence uncovered only in 2013 by an Iraqi journalist instead implicates Arab extremists, and points to the wrongful execution of Jews framed for the attacks.
Altogether, the book documents the expulsion and dispossession of some 150,000 Jews from Iraq, part of the roughly one million Jews forced from Muslim-majority countries across the twentieth century—a history Yehuda insisted be established o
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