Prof. Maurice Samuels

By Cindy Mindell

NEW HAVEN – Among the largest mass migrations in modern history was the displacement of nearly one million Jews from Muslim lands just after the Holocaust. But “this epochal event remains relatively little understood, overshadowed within Jewish historiography by the genocide of European Jews,” says Prof. Maurice Samuels, director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism (YPSA). “And yet, it continues to haunt the relations between Muslims and Jews in both Israel and the Diaspora, and remains a contentious topic for both historians and political leaders.”

YPSA will explore this chapter in Jewish history at a daylong conference “Exodus or Exile? The Departure of Jews from Muslim Countries, 1948-1978” on Friday, Oct. 4.

Samuels, the Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French at Yale, says that the idea for the conference came out of a conversation with a close friend – “a very smart, very educated Jewish friend who had no idea that over 800,000 Jews had been displaced from Muslim countries after 1948,” he says. “He actually didn’t believe it when I told him what I knew about this displacement, which was in many cases an expulsion in which Jews were forced to leave their homes and all their assets behind. He asked, How did the world community allow this violation of human rights to occur after the Holocaust? Then I realized that relatively few scholars had devoted attention to this displacement, that it remains overshadowed for Jewish historians by the Holocaust and the foundation of the state of Israel. I knew I had to organize a conference.”

The program brings together leading scholars from the U.S., Israel, and France. Their presentations cover three main areas of focus that define the conference: “Jews, Arabs, and the Middle East;” “Dilemmas of Identity: The Jews of North Africa;” and “Migration, Diaspora, and Muslim-Jewish Relations.”

Samuels says that there are misperceptions around the factors that motivated Jewish departure from Muslim countries. “For instance, I’ve heard people accuse Israel of having secretly conspired to force the Jews out of Muslim lands in order to increase immigration to Israel,” he says. “I hope that this conference can provide a more complete picture of what happened in the Middle East in these years.”

In addition, Samuels sees the conference as a way to impart a greater understanding of the magnitude of the displacement and of its repercussions for Jews in different Muslim countries. “These were very ancient communities that disappeared:  in many cases, the Jews had lived in these countries before the arrival of Islam,” he says. “I want the audience to understand what factors led to the expulsion and how the situation differed across the region. I also want the audience to reflect on what it meant for the people who left, what memories they took with them, and what memories of the Jews remained behind in the Muslim population. And I want people to get a sense of the concrete difficulties involved in the departure, the often quite difficult process of finding a country of refuge and of the struggles to create new lives elsewhere.”

Samuels also hopes that the program will not only broaden our understanding of Jewish history, and of antisemitism, by focusing greater attention on the Sephardi and Mizrahi experience, but that it will help to put the current conflict in the Middle East into clearer historical perspective.  “Finally, I hope that the theme of ‘exodus or exile’ will encourage people to think about the theme of displacement more broadly,” he says. “It’s a theme that has resonated throughout Jewish history and an experience that has been productive as well as painful.”

“Exodus or Exile? The Departure of Jews from Muslim Countries, 1948-1978:” Friday, Oct. 4, 9 a.m.-4 p.m., Whitney Humanities Center auditorium, 53 Wall St., New Haven | Info: ypsa.yale.edu / (203) 432-5046