Jewish Exodus From Arab and Muslim Countries

The Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries (Arabic: التهجير الجماعي لليهود من الدول العربية والإسلامية‎ at-tahjīr al-jamāʻī lil-yahūd min ad-duwal al-ʻArabīyah wal-Islāmīyah) was a mass departure, flight and expulsion of Jews, primarily of Sephardi and Mizrahi background, from Arab and Muslim countries, from 1948 until the early 1970s. Though Jewish migration from Middle Eastern and North African communities began in the late 19th century, and Jews began leaving some Arab countries in the 1930s and early 1940s, it did not become significant until the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. From the onset of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War until the early 1970s, 800,000–1,000,000 Jews left, fled, or were expelled from their homes in Arab countries; 260,000 of them reached Israel between 1948 and 1951 and amounted for 56% of the total immigration to the newly founded State of Israel. 600,000 Jews from Arab and Muslim countries had reached Israel by 1972. By the Yom Kippur War of 1973, most of the Jewish communities throughout the Arab World, as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan, were practically non-existent.

The reasons for the exodus included push factors, such as persecution, antisemitism, political instability and expulsion; together with pull factors, such as the desire to fulfill Zionist yearnings or find a better economic status and secured home in Europe or the Americas. A significant proportion of Jews left due to political insecurity and the rise of Arab nationalism, and later also due to policies of some Arab governments, who sought to present the expulsion of Jews as a crowd-driven retaliatory act for the exodus of Arab refugees from Palestine. Most Libyan Jews fled to Israel by 1951, while the citizenship of the rest was revoked in 1961, and the community remnants were finally evacuated to Italy following the Six Day War. Almost all of Yemeni and Adeni Jews, were evacuated during 1949–1950 in fear of their security. Iraqi and Kurdish Jews were encouraged to leave in 1950 by the Iraqi Government, which had eventually ordered in 1951 "the expulsion of Jews who refused to sign a statement of anti-Zionism". The Jews of Egypt began fleeing the country in 1948, and most of the remaining, some 21,000, were expelled in 1956. Algerian Jews were deprived of their citizenship in 1962 and as a result immediately abandoned the country for France and Israel. Moroccan Jews began leaving for Israel as a result of the 1948 pogroms, with most of the community leaving in 1960s. Many Jews were required to sell, abandon, or smuggle their property out of the countries they were fleeing.

Lebanon was the only Arab country to see a temporary increase in its Jewish population after 1948, which was due to an influx of refugees from other Arab countries. However, by mid-1970s the Jewish community of Lebanon also dwindled due to hostilities of the Lebanese Civil War. By 2002 Jews from Arab countries and their descendants constituted almost half of Israel's population. Among the non-Arab Muslim countries, the exodus of Iranian Jews peaked following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when around 80% of Iranian Jews left the war-torn country for US and Israel. Turkish Jewry had mostly immigrated due to economic reasons and Zionist aspirations, but since the 1990s increasing terrorist attacks against Jews caused security concerns, with the result that many Jews left for Israel.