Antisemitism in Iraq

Iraqi Jewish history reaches back to ancient Babylonia. Under later empires, communities lived within changing systems of protection and inequality; the modern kingdom offered citizenship and participation.

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A deeply rooted people are recast as strangers

Iraqi Jewish history reaches back to ancient Babylonia. Under later empires, communities lived within changing systems of protection and inequality; the modern kingdom offered citizenship and participation. In the 1930s and 1940s, nationalist accusations and Nazi propaganda increasingly portrayed Jews as a foreign enemy. The Farhud of 1941 made that hostility deadly. Later regional conflict and Iraqi state measures narrowed rights, enabled mass departure and subjected those who remained to repression.

Before 1921

Babylonian roots · The community predates the modern state

A history reaching back to Babylonia contradicts the later claim that Iraqi Jews were strangers.

An ancient local history

Jewish life in Mesopotamia reached back many centuries before the creation of modern Iraq. Baghdad and other places developed religious, commercial and cultural institutions. Later nationalist accusations of foreignness ignored this depth of local life and replaced it with a political category.

Belonging within unequal orders

Under different empires, Jewish communities experienced both communal continuity and legal limits. Religious protection was not the same as modern equal citizenship. Changing rulers and policies shaped security, while Jews continued to build families and institutions. The long history was neither uninterrupted harmony nor uninterrupted persecution.

Ordinary life before the rupture

Iraqi Jewish records include schooling, prayer, business and communal requests. They reveal people negotiating daily needs within their society. This matters to the later persecution: the targeted population had its own civic and cultural lives, rather than the uniform foreign identity imagined by its opponents.

1921–1941

Citizenship & scapegoating · Citizens are described as a foreign threat

Nationalist rhetoric and Nazi influence narrowed a promising place in the new kingdom.

A place in the kingdom

The Iraqi kingdom established in 1921 included Jews as citizens. Jewish residents participated in commerce, professions and public life. Their involvement belonged to a wider Iraqi society, and their political views differed. Citizenship offered a basis for belonging that later persecutors tried to override.

Propaganda connects local fears to a global enemy

During the 1930s and early 1940s, Nazi propaganda and relationships with Iraqi nationalist actors helped spread anti-Jewish claims. Those imported messages interacted with local politics and regional tensions. Baghdad’s history cannot be explained by copying a European sequence without examining who adopted the claims and why.

The accusation ignores citizenship

Antisemitic rhetoric portrayed Jews as agents of hostile outside interests. That collective story made established citizens appear foreign despite their local roots. It replaced evidence about individuals with an imagined shared allegiance, preparing a justification for exclusion when political conditions deteriorated.

1941–1951

Pogrom & mass departure · The festival becomes a moment of terror

The Farhud and later state measures ruptured a community’s security and citizenship.

The Farhud, June 1941

On 1–2 June 1941, during Shavuot, violence struck Baghdad’s Jews after a pro-Axis political crisis and the collapse of immediate authority. Jews were killed, wounded and robbed. Anti-Jewish incitement helped make the community a target, while some Muslim neighbours intervened to protect people.

Citizenship becomes the price of leaving

In 1950, Iraq permitted Jews to emigrate if they relinquished citizenship. Many registered to leave amid insecurity and pressure. The decision was not an ordinary move between countries: departing people gave up the legal membership through which they had belonged to their home.

Assets are frozen

In 1951, the state froze the assets of Jews who had relinquished citizenship. Large-scale departure transformed Iraqi Jewish life. Loss of property and legal status followed people beyond the journey itself. The Farhud and the departure laws were separate events whose combined consequences narrowed the possibility of a future in Iraq.

1969–2003 and after

Repression & surviving lives · The state targets those who remain

Later repression reduced a small community further, while its surviving records preserve what persecution obscured.

The executions of 1969

In 1969, the Baathist regime publicly hanged people accused of spying for Israel, including nine Jews. The spectacle intensified fear in the remaining community. A state security accusation again reached beyond the individual defendants, making Jewish identity vulnerable to a claim of foreign allegiance.

Communal life continues under pressure

Some Jews remained in Iraq and sustained religious and communal activity despite repression and departures. Their records complicate a history that ends with the mass emigration of 1950–1951. The continued lives were real, even as the scale and security of the community changed profoundly.

What the surviving pages tell us

Jewish books and communal records recovered in Baghdad in 2003 documented schooling, worship and administration alongside persecution. Their historical value lies in the lives they reveal. They challenge the outsider accusation by showing people conducting ordinary communal affairs in a country that had long been their home.

2023–present

October 7 & today · October 7 & today

Nationalist conspiracy, state anti-normalization law and communist and militia support for Hamas met in a country with little Jewish life left.

The neighbours who had already disappeared

Baghdad once held a large Jewish community with deep roots in Iraqi life. The Farhud of 1941 showed how quickly neighbours could be recast as an enemy. Later repression and mass departure transformed that world.

By the time of October 7, only a tiny Jewish presence remained. That changes what the aftermath looks like: there was no large community whose experience could be captured by an incident total. The earlier loss of Jewish life was itself part of the setting in which new hostility was voiced.

A political enemy becomes an eternal conspiracy

The Farhud had brought nationalist hostility and Nazi propaganda into violence against Baghdad’s Jews. Later repression and departure left little public Jewish life, but the image of the disloyal Jewish enemy survived. Iraq’s 2022 anti-normalization law gave hostility to Israel institutional reach, including punishment for promoting Zionist ideas.

Religious politics added its own history of accusation. In 2023, militia leader Qais al-Khazali portrayed Jews as agents of evil and imagined a Jewish lobby behind deaths in early Islam. After October 7, secular communists praised the Hamas operation as anti-imperialist resistance, while Iran-aligned militias mobilized behind Hamas. Different traditions converged on the same enemy. Here anti-Zionism could carry an older Jewish conspiracy even where few Jews remained to answer the accusation.

Militias turn the moment into action

After October 7, the Iran-aligned militia Kata’ib Hizballah supported Hamas and escalated attacks on American forces in Iraq and Syria, according to the US Treasury. The Iraqi Communist Party also praised the October 7 operation as resistance, although that statement does not establish coordination with the militias.

For Iraq’s few remaining Jews, this was a hostile political environment layered over an already restricted life. Religious-freedom reporting describes people hiding their Jewish identity and facing exclusion from public employment. The story is one of deepened insecurity, rather than evidence of a newly measured wave of attacks on Iraqi Jews.