On 1-2 June 1941, in the days between the collapse of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani's government and the entry of British-backed forces into Baghdad, crowds joined by police and soldiers attacked Jewish quarters of the city in the pogrom known as the Farhud; an Iraqi commission of inquiry counted 179 dead, and other estimates run higher. After 1948 Zionism was made a criminal offence, Jews were dismissed from public employment and some were tried and executed, and in March 1950 Law 1 allowed Jews to emigrate on condition of renouncing Iraqi nationality; Law 5 of March 1951 froze the property of those who had left. Between 1950 and 1952 some 120,000-130,000 Iraqi Jews were flown to Israel in Operations Ezra and Nehemiah, ending a community of more than two millennia. A series of bombings of Jewish targets in Baghdad in 1950-51 accelerated departures; responsibility remains disputed, with Iraqi courts convicting Zionist activists and other accounts attributing them to Iraqi nationalists, and the question has never been settled. This entry sits alongside the atlas's regional entry on the exodus of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries and treats the specifically Iraqi legal machinery.
Rioters and elements of the Iraqi security forces attacked Baghdad's Jews in 1941; the Iraqi state later stripped Jews who emigrated of citizenship and froze their property
Iraq's census of 1947 recorded 118,000 Jews; community and Israeli estimates for 1948 run from 135,000 to 150,000, the difference reflecting undercounting of unregistered residents. About 120,000-130,000 left under the 1950 denaturalisation law and Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, leaving a few thousand by 1952.
The low figure is the Iraqi government commission of inquiry's count of Jews killed in the Farhud; the high figure comes from later Jewish community and historical estimates that include victims buried in mass graves and those who died of injuries. The denaturalisation and airlift of 1950-52 were not accompanied by mass killing.
The Iraqi commission of inquiry of 1941, survivor testimony collected by the USHMM and the texts of Laws 1 of 1950 and 5 of 1951 document the killings, rapes, looting and the stripping of nationality.
Iraq, Israel