The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times

Stillman's fine 1979 book, The Jews of Arab Lands, provided an authoritative but brief history of Arabic-speaking Jews until 1800, followed by an extensive collection of documents. The present volume brings his account up to date, again relying on the formula of brief history and profuse documentation. Again, the mix works well; Stillman's two volumes should remain the basic source on their subject for years to come.

The key question Stillman attempts to answer concerns the rapid and nearly complete evacuation of Jews from the Arab countries. In 1948, these numbered 800,000; twenty years later, 98 percent of them had left, mostly to Israel and France, but also to the Americas. The Muslim Middle East, in short, lost its Jewish population about as thoroughly as Central and Eastern Europe had a few years earlier. In part, this emigration had to do with the creation of Israel; but Stillman correctly locates its deeper reasons in the tensions arising from colonialism and modernization, when Jews made the most of the opportunities that opened before them. As the British and French authorities retreated after World War II, Jews found themselves exposed and their status intolerable, so they left too. (This connection was clearest in Algeria, where all but 3,000 of the 140,000 Jews fled contemporaneously with the French colonizers in 1962.) With them ended some two thousand years of history.

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