What is going on?

Nobody can pretend that these restored sites are ever going to be working synagogues. Like Hitler’s project for a Jewish Museum in Prague, they are monuments, perhaps not to an extinct race – most Jews escaped from these countries with their lives – but an extinct Jewish civilisation and way of life in Arab countries, predating Islam by a thousand years. Once spruced up, these synagogues will be nothing more than symbols. They will never again become the beating heart of a revived Jewish community. Fewer than 50 Jews live in the whole of Egypt; mostly old ladies married to Muslims or Christians. Ditto in Lebanon, the home of Hezbollah and Bourj al-Barajneh, where anyone openly identifying as a Jew risks life and limb.

There are two main reasons why Arab countries might suddenly show an interest in their Jewish heritage.

First, synagogues are good public relations for the regime in power. The unsuccessful candidate to head UNESCO, Egyptian culture minister Farouk Hosni, played on the restoration of the Maimonides synagogue to distract from his antisemitic slips-of-the-tongue about burning ‘Israeli’ books.

No matter if the country has no more Jews, a synagogue restoration project advertises ‘Arab tolerance’ and pays lip service to pluralism. "Look, we even have Jews here!" it proclaims. "Tolerance of Jewish cultural remains can be exchanged for Western goodwill and aid without necessitating any messy engagement with actual Israelis," as one journalist puts it.

The second reason is that Jewish sites bring in tourist dollars. Money spent on the Maimonides synagogue will be money well spent: Maimonides is set to become a top Cairo attraction, alongside the Ben Ezra synagogue, home of the famous Geniza.

The Spanish, who unceremoniously rid themselves of their Jews 500 years ago, have already cottoned on to the fact that a Jewish heritage can be a nice little revenue earner. Jewish centres, with very little about them that is Jewish except the odd weatherbeaten Hebrew tombstone and star of David, seem to have sprung up in almost every town in Spain.

There is something rather cynical in the fact that Arab governments who threw their Jews out, stole their assets and destroyed their cultural and religious sites – or let them go to rack and ruin – are ready to make money out of a Jewish heritage they consider belongs to them. And the height of chutzpa, it seems to me, is that they are prepared to go cap in hand to Jewish communities abroad asking them to fund restoration projects out of their own pockets.

In fairness, the Egyptian authorities are sinking substantial public funds into the Maimonides synagogue. But this project is exceptional. A Jewish philanthropist in Geneva donated one million dollars for the restoration of the Art Deco Cairo synagogue in Adly Street. The Egyptian Antiquities authorities only contributed a small sum towards a facelift for the synagogue’s 100th anniversary. Another one million dollars was given by a Jewish donor in the US to pay for the restoration of the Ben Ezra synagogue.

Lebanese developers are only contributing ten percent of the cost of renovating the Maghen Avraham synagogue – the rest must come from private Jewish donors.

I once argued with a well-known British journalist that donations from Jews to restore synagogues in Arab lands were a kind of modern-day jizya or poll tax, extracted from dhimmis by their overlords. She retorted that, jizya or no, it was better that a synagogue building should testify to the fact that a Jewish community once existed – and often thrived – in these countries. If synagogues were not restored, she said, there would be nothing to tell people that Jews ever lived there.

For every restored synagogue, dozens have fallen into disrepair, are being used as gyms or offices, or are being converted to mosques.

At the end of the day, I suppose she is right.

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Aside from assuming that the Palestinians must be the true natives because they look authentically ‘brown’, the colonialism myth supports another myth: Jews are not a people, deserving of the right to self-determination, but a religion. Thus anti-Zionists habitually talk about of US citizens of the Jewish faith, Germans of the Jewish faith and even Arabs of the Jewish faith.  At the time of the French Revolution, Clermont-Tonnerre said of the emancipation of Jews: "We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals." The Jewish community would somehow disappear, leaving only French citizens of Jewish religion or ancestry. Lately, the notion that Jews are not one people but a motley collection of converts has been given a boost by Tel Aviv Professor Shlomo Sand, whose bestselling book, The Invention of the Jewish People, is now out in English. Sand’s theories build on the work of Arthur Koestler, who popularised the idea that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Turkic tribe, the Khazars. Both men undermine the legitimacy of Israel by inferring that Jews have no link to Palestine.  Genetic studies, however, discredit Koestler’s theory: they find that Jews from East and West have more in common with each other, and are genetically closer to non-Jews of Middle eastern origin – the Kurds in particular – than they are to the non-Jewish populations they lived amongst. Last June President Obama articulated another myth: Israel was created as a penance for the Holocaust in Europe. This myth obscures the truth that every Arab state is equally a creation of western colonialism. It also ignores the fact that the institutions of a Jewish state-in-waiting were established decades before Ben Gurion read out Israel’s declaration of independence. We often hear or read about Israel being populated by pork-munching non-Jewish Russians and settlers from Brooklyn. But these groups are marginal. You almost never hear that 40 percent of Israel’s Jews trace their ancestry from Muslim and Arab lands. The vast majority of these Jews merely moved from one corner of the ‘Arab’ world to that Middle Eastern coastal sliver known as Israel. Until their expulsion 50 years ago, Jews had been settled in Iraq, for example, since the Babylonians exiled Jews from Jerusalem almost 3,000 years ago. In the early 20th century, Baghdad was the most Jewish city in the world, after Salonica and Jerusalem. The Jews can be said to have as legitimate a claim on Baghdad as Palestinians on Jerusalem. The Arabs are relative newcomers to the region; the ‘Arab’ world is a misnomer. By the time the Arabs had conquered land largely inhabited by Jews and Christians in the 7th century, the Jews had been settled there for 1,000 years. People in the West tend to apply a common misconception to all Jews,  borrowing the Christian notion that Jews have been punished to wander from land to land with no country to call their own. But not only have Jews always lived in Palestine,  there was continuity of Jewish settlement in the Middle East and North Africa for 2,000 years.   If only native inhabitants are titled to political rights, the Jews are as indigenous as any people living in the Middle East can be.   That Jewish presence came to an end in the last 50 years. The Arab League determined to wreak revenge on defenceless Jewish citizens in Arab lands if the partition of Palestine went ahead. On the day when five Arab armies invaded the new Jewish state, the Arab League secretary, Azzam Pasha announced: "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."

The Arab governments actually declared two wars in 1948. The military war against the fledgling Jewish state of Israel they lost, but they declared a second war, against a million Jewish citizens. This war they won easily, through a policy of intimidation, repression, persecution and sporadic outbreaks of violence. The result is that only 4,500 Jews are left in Arab countries. Jews ‘stealing Arab land’ is an offensive inversion of reality. Jews in 10 Arab countries were stripped of their rights and in most cases dispossessed of their property. The World Organisation of Jews from Arab Countries estimates that Jews in Arab countries lost many more billions of assets as the Palestinians, and four times as much land as the size of Israel itself. 

Seen in these terms, Arab antisemitism created Israel no less than the Holocaust. The Arabs owe the Jews big time. It’s time the world stopped viewing the conflict through a distorted, Eurocentric lens.

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Given that there are no more than 20 Jews in Lebanon, and these are too frightened to reveal themselves as Jews, even Binkovitz’s cautious optimism seems misplaced. The Jewish community in Lebanon is finished. A profusion of armed Islamic groups targets Jews and Israelis simply for being Jews. Until there is peace between Arabs and Israelis, there is no guarantee that Jews will ever feel safe in Lebanon. It may take a very long time indeed before the few beleaguered Jews in Lebanon are emboldened to come out of the closet, let alone identify openly as Jews within the precincts of the Maghen Avraham synagogue. While Binkovitz is ready to admit that Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews of Arab lands were nearly universally expelled, and large Jewish communities in Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, Iraq, Yemen and Syria were violently uprooted – curiously, he idealises Lebanon.

Lebanese Jews remained largely undisturbed through these decades, despite Lebanon’s 1958 civil unrest and American intervention. In fact, Lebanon’s 24,000-member Jewish community in 1948 actually grew as it absorbed Jews fleeing other Arab countries. This growth continued until the start of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975.

The vast majority of Lebanese Jews – and the numbers seem to be closer to 10 – 14,000 than 24,000 – actually fled the repercussions of the Israel-Arab conflict, notably after the Six Day War in 1967, and not after the civil war of 1975. A revisionist history by Kirsten E Schulze, the author of Jews of Lebanon, the only book about Lebanon’s Jews to be published in English in the last few years, tries to present all Lebanese, whatever their religion, as victims of the 1975 civil war. But while all sects were depleted through war and exodus, Schulze does not explain why the Jewish community was the only one to be wiped out. One of the prime movers behind the project to rebuild Maghen Avraham synagogue is a Shi’a Muslim named Aaron-Micael Beydoun. Beydoun started a website called the Jews of Lebanon. Visitors to the site were under the misleading impression that it was by and for Jews of Lebanon, whereas it represented only the thoughts of Beydoun himself. In fact Lebanese Jews in the diaspora have given Beydoun and his website a wide berth. Beydoun has a political agenda. His aim to exploit the Jews to project the illusion that the multi-confessional system still exists. Yet thousands of Lebanese have left Lebanon, southern Lebanon is a stronghold of Hezbollah, and the influx of Palestinian Arab refugees in 1970 and the 1975 civil war has upset its delicate political and population balance between Maronite and Greek Orthodox Christians, Shi’a Muslim, Sunni and Druze. Lately, Beydoun, who has even been quoted by journalists as a spokesman for the Jewish Community Council, has closed down his website and channelled his efforts into getting the synagogue rebuilt. For Maghen Avraham to rise from the rubble would be the perfect advertisement for Lebanese pluralism. It would enable Lebanon to boast its tolerance of religious minorities – " look, we even have Jews in Lebanon!" Expatriate Lebanese Jews are reported to have pledged donations towards the restoration work. But other reports say that the donors have not followed through on their promises. Perhaps they have now realised that the synagogue will never again be at the heart of Jewish communal life. And although the reconstruction is said to be proceeding with Hezbollah’s blessing, there is no guarantee that the synagogue might not be shelled by some militia or other in the future. Beydoun’s other purpose is to drive a wedge between Lebanon’s Jews and Israel. This synagogue is being rebuilt to show that ‘ good’ Jews, untainted by any association with Israel, coexist with other minorities in Lebanon, and have a future there. In her book Schulze also portrays Lebanese Jews as Lebanese of the Jewish faith, with little attachment to Israel. She conveniently ignores the fact that just under half of Lebanon’s Jews – 4,000 – fled to the Jewish state. It is true that between 1948 and 1967 Lebanon was unique, being the only Arab country where the Jewish community increased in size, swollen by Jews from Syria and Iraq fleeing persecution. But what Schulze does not say is that even Jews born in Lebanon of Syrian extraction were denied Lebanese citizenship. I learned from an Iraqi Jew that he moved to Lebanon in the late 1950s because the only countries open to him and his family were Kuwait and Lebanon. As Kuwait has not had a Jewish community since the 1920s, moving to Lebanon was a no-brainer. Unlike Jews in other Arab countries the rights of the Jews of Lebanon were constitutionally safeguarded by a confessional system where each religious community’s ‘inalienable rights’ were acknowledged under Le Reglement – a set of rules written after the 1860 Civil War. This established a system of power-sharing in which all the major religious communities were represented. The Lebanese Jews were one of 17, the largest of six minor religious communities. It is true that unlike other countries Jews were free to emigrate. It is also true that their property was never confiscated, unlike other Arab countries. However, although the government did try to protect the Jews, it could not prevent Jews in 1948 being arrested and interned as Zionist spies, antisemitic incidents such as the bombing of the Alliance Israelite school in the 1950s, rioting and incitement. So is the rebuilding of the Beirut synagogue symbolic of the survival of the Jews? Or will it be a monument to an extinct race? Sadly, I feel it is the latter.

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