About two years ago, Hebrew University professor Shmuel Moreh wrote a book for an Arab-speaking audience that appeared online. It was titled The Jews of Iraq, Concerns and Hopes, and it looked at the contribution made by the country’s Jews to Iraqi society in the 1930s and ’40s, when Moreh was growing up there.

The book spawned plenty of comments and responses from readers, and Mordechai Kedar, a scholar of Middle Eastern cultures at Bar-Ilan University,  made a point of reading them all.

What he saw wasn’t pretty,

They could be broken down into two categories, he said.

“One group was saying, ‘Look at those Zionist Jews. They went to Palestine, kicked out the Palestinians and now they have a vicious, racist state. That exposes the real face of those Jews who lived with us for thousands of years. Good thing we kicked them out, and inshallah we’ll go up to Palestine and kill them all.’”

The other group lamented the loss of the Jews, seeing them as important to the fabric of the nation. They say, “We didn’t treat them nicely. They went to their homeland and we’re left with jihadists who kill us day and night. We wish they would return to bring some normalcy to our lives,” said Kedar.

Of course, Jews are in no hurry to return to the Arab world, though at one point, almost one million made their homes there. But beginning in the late 1940s, country after country, from Morocco to Iraq, made life intolerable for Jews, leading to a mass exodus. Only a few thousand remain.

Kedar will speak on the untold story of the expulsion of the Jews at Congregation Darchei Noam on Saturday, Jan. 25, at 7:30 p.m. His lecture is Part 2 of a five-part series presented by the synagogue on “The Jewish Exodus from Arab Lands.”

The expulsion of nearly one million Jews is linked directly to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and is attributable to a cultural flaw prevalent in the region, Kedar said in a telephone interview from Israel.

“There is a basic problem in the Middle East about ‘the other,’ the ‘big O,’ whomever it is,” he said. “It could be from another tribe, ethnic group, religion or sect.”

Unlike individualistic western societies that have integrated people from all around the world, “the group is the basic unit of [Arab] society,” he said.

Since the Middle East is largely arid, water resources are scarce “and if you don’t fight, you’re a dead man, because another tribe will come and take your spring or well. This culture is engraved with that, and in the culture of the region, the other is always the enemy,” he said.

“Jews have lived in these societies as a small group, so they were not viewed as a threat. But once they had a state, they were viewed as people with power, and this is when they became dangerous in the eyes of the Middle East.”

That meshes with “the Islamic view that Jews have no right to a state, to be independent… That is whey they cannot and will not recognize Israel as a Jewish state,” he added.

Kedar, who served for 25 years in Israeli military intelligence, pointed out that Haj Amin al-Husseini, the leader of the Palestinian national movement in the 1940s, “was actually a friend of Adolf Hitler who went to the Balkans to recruit Muslims from Bosnia to serve as soldiers to guard bridges of trains that took Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. Husseini was part of the German Nazi extermination machine.”

Palestinian nationalists “sent messages across the Arab and Islamic world to incite them against Zionists, to collect money and to buy weapons and to bring in fighters,” he added.

The result was the forced exodus of nearly one million Jews. Though the vast majority were settled in Israel, their story remained largely untold, as the Palestinian narrative grabbed the public’s attention. The fact is that more Jews left their homes and they left behind vastly more property than the Palestinians, Kedar said.

In recent years, however, advocacy organizations have publicized the Jews’ plight, with the U.S. Congress taking up their cause. Late last year, the foreign affairs committee of the House of Commons issued a report, Recognizing Jewish Refugees From the Middle East and North Africa, that in part called on the federal government to raise the issue of Jewish refugees when Middle East refugees are discussed in international forums.

For its part, Israel largely ignored the issue for years.

“We Israelis did not make an issue of it, because to a large extent we took the line that we are building a new life in Israel, the life of a free people and we turned our back on the miserable history which we had. Even the Holocaust… We tried to shape a new mentality of a Jew who is detached from the misery of exile. This is why we didn’t make the miseries into a public discourse,” said Kedar.