Jews Were Never From Here

The canard

“Jews never really lived in Arab or Muslim countries, and they aren't Middle Eastern.”

The receipts

Jews have lived across the Middle East and North Africa continuously for over 2,500 years — in Iraq since the Babylonian exile of 586 BCE, and in Egypt, Iran, Yemen, and the Maghreb since antiquity, centuries before Islam. Out of a pre-1948 population of roughly 851,000, about 820,000 left or were pressured out of Arab and Muslim countries between 1948 and the early 1970s. Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews are indigenous to the region.

1. 1

   Jewish life in Iraq is older than Islam itself. Judeans exiled to Babylon after Jerusalem fell in 586 BCE built a community that endured roughly 2,600 years and became the heartland of Jewish scholarship — home to the Babylonian Talmud and the great geonic academies of Sura and Pumbedita. As the US Holocaust Memorial Museum states, 'Jewish communities had existed in this region since the 6th century BCE, hundreds of years before Muslim communities established a presence in Iraq during the 7th century.' Around 120,000-130,000 Iraqi Jews (some 75% of the community) left for Israel in 1950-1952.[1][2]

2. 2

   In Egypt, Aramaic papyri document a Jewish garrison community with its own temple to the God of Israel on Elephantine Island near Aswan in the 5th century BCE — including a petition dated 407 BCE asking the Persian governor for permission to rebuild it. That is documentary proof of Jews living in the Nile Valley more than a thousand years before the Arab conquest.[3]

3. 3

   Iran is home to one of the oldest Jewish diasporas on earth: a continuous presence since at least Cyrus the Great, who freed the Babylonian exiles after conquering Babylon in 539 BCE. Many chose to stay, and the community remained substantial well into the 20th century — roughly 100,000-150,000 people lived in Iran at the time Israel was founded in 1948.[4][5]

4. 4

   Jews were woven into pre-Islamic Arabia. In Yemen, the rulers of the powerful Himyarite kingdom adopted Judaism in the late 4th century CE (c. 375-400, under King Malkikarib Yuhamin) — more than two centuries before Islam emerged. Yemen's Jewish community then endured for well over a millennium, until almost all of it (about 50,000 people) was airlifted to Israel in 1949-1950 during Operation Magic Carpet.[6][8]

5. 5

   North Africa's Jewish roots run just as deep. On the Tunisian island of Djerba, the El Ghriba synagogue is, by tradition, traced to priests fleeing the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE, and is reckoned among the oldest synagogues anywhere. In 2023 Djerba was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, recognizing the island's centuries-old multi-faith settlement — including its Jewish community and the El Ghriba synagogue. Morocco alone was home to roughly 250,000-265,000 Jews in 1948.[7][8]

6. 6

   These millennia-old communities largely vanished within a generation: out of a pre-1948 population of roughly 851,000, about 820,000 Jews left or were driven out of Arab and Muslim countries between 1948 and the early 1970s, after violence such as the Farhud pogrom in Baghdad (1-2 June 1941, in which at least 128 Jews were killed according to the official report, and 150-180 by community estimates). Far from being foreign, peer-reviewed genome-wide studies trace most Jewish communities' origins to the Levant: Behar et al. (2010) found the main Jewish genetic cluster overlies Druze and Cypriot samples, while Atzmon et al. (2010) found Iranian, Iraqi, and Syrian Jews falling alongside Druze, Bedouin, and Palestinians in a north-to-south Middle Eastern distribution. Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews are indigenous to the region, not strangers to it.[8][1][9][10]

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