Chapter 6 Invisible Immigration

The Scope of Immigration to Palestine from Asia and Africa, 1919–1931

Between 1919 and 1931, approximately 117,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine. Of these, 11,000 (10%) were natives of Africa and Asia, according to the following distribution:

Figure 6.1 shows that 92 percent of the immigrants came from Asia (Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and Afghanistan) and only 8 percent from the Maghreb (Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya) and South Africa. Far fewer Jews arrived in Palestine from Asia and North Africa in the 1920s than from Europe; as stated, they represented only about 10 percent of the total immigrant population. However, the proportion of Jews from Islamic countries who immigrated to Palestine exceeded the proportion of world Jewry immigrating. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were about ten million Jews in the world, of whom 340,000 (3.4%) lived in Islamic countries.6 The Jews’ rate of immigration to Palestine from Asia and North Africa was four times that of the Jewish people as a whole. For comparison’s sake, 90 percent of Jewish people lived in eastern Europe, and barely 1 percent of them came to Palestine.

Jews from Yemen and Iraq generally entered Palestine by land, and most of them continued on to Jerusalem. Some crossed the border at Rosh Hanikra and went to the aliya bureau in Haifa. There they were registered and had to pay the entry tax to Palestine. In some cases, immigrants refused to pay the tax; they were then detained in quarantine or in the disinfection shack, and there was concern that they might be sent back to Baghdad. “On December 17, 1925, seven families of Sephardic immigrants arrived in Haifa by car from Baghdad. The people left their belongings in a garage and went to the coastal office to register there.”7 The Palestine Office representative in Baghdad had not informed them that they would have to pay an entry tax, and they refused to pay. The Haifa aliya bureau refused to pay on their behalf without authorization from the Aliya Department in Jerusalem. The detention of the Iraqi immigrants in Haifa and the concern that they might be deported caused tension between the aliya bureau and the Sephardic community of Haifa, which was outraged by the discrimination against the Jews from Iraq. “As you instructed, we did not agree to pay for them, and after they were handed over to the police to be sent back, we contacted you again in this regard. (Meanwhile, the Sephardic community intervened in the matter with the intent to turn it into a scandal.) We informed you that it had been decided that they had agreed to return to Baghdad and were refusing to pay. And then you authorized us to pay for them and try to collect the money.”8

The Haifa aliya bureau ultimately paid the taxes but did not get its money back because the Iraqi families fled Haifa in the dead of night: “If these immigrants had not gone (or more correctly, fled) that night, we would have tried to collect the money. . . . Presumably, they fled to Jerusalem because they had not been informed that we would pay on their behalf as per our request.”9

The Jerusalem aliya bureau dealt with the immigrants from Islamic countries, assisted them in their first days in the country, and helped them settle in. According to reports sent to the Executive Committee of the General Federation of Jewish Labour, most of them seem to have managed well, without any special difficulties. “It should be noted that until the crisis erupted in full force, Jerusalem excelled in its absorption capacity; the Eastern immigrants demonstrated especially good adjustment here due to their knowledge of the Arabic language and their ways of life, which are well suited to this country. They came up with ways of earning a living by work, trades, and petty peddling. These met their needs, which did not far exceed the general Eastern standard of living.”10

Despite the orientalist generalizations about Eastern Jewish communities making do with little, they did settle in well and fairly smoothly. A report by the Jerusalem aliya bureau for 1925–1926 indicates that 27 percent of the applicants to the bureau were from Iraq, 26 percent were from Kurdistan, and 14 percent were from Iran. Only 5 percent were from Yemen because the Yemenite Jews mostly went to Moshavot Yehuda and Tel Aviv. “So far twenty-seven certificate holders have come to Palestine from Yemen—eighty-four people including their families. Only three of them are single. Most of the immigrants have already settled in the villages: Rishon Lezion, Rehovot, and Kefar Sava. The Kefar Sava agricultural committee has issued wooden shacks on half-dunam fields to ten families and pledged to employ all family members of working age.”11

Substantial differences became evident in the motivations for migration from Africa and Asia. Migration from Iraq, Yemen, Turkey, and Iran resembled migration from Europe in general and Ukraine in particular. There was a great deal of similarity between the Jewish refugees from Ukraine who crowded into Odessa and Constantinople and sought to immigrate to Palestine and the Jewish refugees from the Iranian-Turkish border who fled from the Armenians and waited in Baghdad for aliya authorization that didn’t come. In contrast, Jews from the Maghreb region immigrated for completely different reasons. The Balfour Declaration and rumors of the resumption of immigration to Palestine led to a Zionist awakening in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya. The Jews there started considering the possibility of aliya and requested information from the Zionist Executive in Jerusalem via the local Palestine Offices.

Orumiyeh (Iranian Azerbaijan) and Iraq

Nuri wanted to know more about this Aghassi, who is called Agassi here. Why did he immigrate in the 1920s? One night, after studying a page of Talmud, he told him that he had been born in a small village in Kurdistan and fled to Baghdad, where he found refuge in a synagogue. He worked as a carpenter’s apprentice and studied in a yeshiva. The shamash arranged a match for him with Nona. She didn’t want to be separated from her family and preferred life in the city of sinners over the holy city, but Agassi was impatient to leave and he decided to go.12

World War I wreaked destruction and havoc not only in the Jewish communities of eastern Europe but also among the Jews south of the Caucasus. In the mountainous region between Lake Van and Lake Orumiyeh, the Russian and Ottoman armies fought several battles. The city of Orumiyeh, located at the intersection of three powers, was occupied and destroyed during World War I by the Russians, Turks, Kurds, and Assyrians, and its residents suffered from murder, looting, and destruction.13 The Jewish community included Jews of various nationalities: Turkish, Russian, and a few Iranians. Each time Orumiyeh was occupied by another country, the citizens of the other countries were in danger. The Jews tried to help one another: when the Turks entered the city, Turkish Jews hid Russian Jews, and vice versa when the Russians invaded. The Russian army’s victory and its establishment of a presence in the region led to the displacement of residents, Muslims and Jews alike, who fled in fear for their lives.14 When the Bolshevik Revolution broke out, the Russian troops withdrew and handed over control to the Armenians, who attacked the local populace. The residents’ lives were turned upside down, as they found themselves under incessant attack by the Armenians.15

In 1918, Orumiyeh was under Armenian rule for about nine months, during which time there were vicious riots against the local Jews. The Armenians robbed and murdered the community’s dignitaries, and many Jews escaped to Baghdad or Baku (the capital of Azerbaijan). By the late 1920s, only about three hundred Jewish families remained.16 Ovadia Yedidya arrived in Palestine in the early 1920s after fleeing from the Armenians. In his testimony, he recounted the massacre of the Jews of Orumiyeh:

Meanwhile the revolution broke out in Russia. The Russians abandoned the front and left their weapons with the Armenians. The French also supplied them with weapons. The Persians and Armenians fought wars over control of Orumiyeh. After three days of fighting the Persians surrendered. A gang of Armenians murdered and robbed the Jews and Muslims but didn’t touch the Kurds. The Kurds’ leader invited Mr. Shimon, the Assyrian leader, to be his guest in Salmas, and when they had sated themselves with food and drink he shot him and his fellows, some 150 Assyrian Christians who served as his bodyguards. The next day the Christians and Armenians attacked Kurdistan in an all-out war. The Kurds began to flee and many of them were killed. The Jews, about eighty families, gathered in the synagogue in Salmas. The Armenians and Christians surrounded them, searched them, and then set fire to the synagogue with all the men, women, and children inside. The Assyrian leaders rescued the Jews who weren’t in the synagogue. The riots continued for about nine months. When Father came to Uremiyeh we decided to leave the area. This was in 1919. Meanwhile we started hearing news of Palestine and rumors that there was a Jewish government with a Jewish king by the name of Herbert Samuel.17

Alongside the riots and violence, the Jews also suffered from starvation and disease. Maston Ya’akobi recounted in his memoirs, “In 1918–1919, there were typhus and typhoid epidemics in the region. Whoever wasn’t killed in the violence and didn’t starve to death was afflicted by the severe illnesses that spread rapidly, especially in the Christian villages. The villages emptied out, no one was left in them alive, and they remained abandoned for years.”18 A group of young people from Uremiyeh described their harsh living conditions, which in many ways resembled the lives of the survivors of the Ukrainian pogroms.

We, the young people of the Uremiyeh Jewish community, Little Persia, were beset by terrible troubles. The frightful events and the vicissitudes of the times led to high prices. Some men, women, and children died due to the severe famine. Some Jews were so hungry that they swallowed poison and died . . . so as not to see the death of their children. Children were fainting in the streets from hunger; small children begged for bread but there was none. . . . Trouble followed trouble. Our hands were dry and our lips were too mute to talk about the second trouble. An Ishmaelite sheikh rose up against the king of Persia, made war against him, conquered all of Little Persia, and killed and destroyed the two towns of Little Persia—more than five hundred Jews. Several synagogues were burned with their Torah scrolls. And then an Ishmaelite sheikh attacked our city of Uremiyeh. We were under siege for two months. From the outside the Ishmaelite sheikh oppressed us; on the inside Persians slandered us, plundered and robbed us, and killed several Jews every day. Persians are seizing us, attacking us with swords and spears, and taking terrible vengeance on us.19

Starvation and need were rampant in other Iranian cities as well. Ezra Ben-Eliahu recounts in his memoirs that due to the terrible situation in the city of Hamadan, his father was forced to work as a rabbi and ritual slaughterer in the city of Khorramabad—“a distance of almost 40 days’ travel by donkey.” The money that his father sent didn’t reach the family, so Ezra had to support the household. When they heard the news of the Balfour Declaration and rumors that Palestine was opening up to immigration, they decided to migrate. Five families set out from Iran and reached Baghdad, but were expelled from there to Bombay, India. Finally, after extensive difficulties and repeated efforts at persuasion, the British allowed them to sail to Palestine.20 The story of the Ben-Eliahu family represents that of many Jewish families from Iran and the Uremiyeh region. Many Jews became refugees, fleeing to Kirkuk, Basra, and Baghdad. Most of them made their way to Baghdad and found themselves suffering from a precarious financial situation and emotional hardship. They became a burden on the local Jewish community, which tried to help them in part by sending them to Palestine. The British, concerned about an increase in the influx of refugees, sent many of them to India, where they tried to get visas and tickets for ships sailing for Aden and from there, via Egypt, to Palestine.

Zalman Shazar wrote further testimony about the refugees from Uremiyeh following the murder of the Jews there and about immigration to Palestine; it was printed in the newspaper Davar. When Shazar was a patient in Beilinson Hospital, a Jew from Uremiyeh named Shlomo Ben-Agajan had the bed next to his. His neighbor told him about the riots and his family’s journey to Palestine: “When the riots broke out in 1918 and Jewish blood was spilled in Uremiyeh like water, when news of the redemption arrived and the aliya of the people of Uremiyeh began—all eyes were lifted to Jerusalem. The roads were dangerous and they had no money, but the Jewish communities in the transit countries supported them and made arrangements for their journey.” They traveled “from Uremiyeh to Shushan, from Shushan to Baghdad, from Baghdad to Bombay, India, from Bombay to Muscat, from Muscat to Aden, from Aden to Qantara, and from Qantara to Jerusalem. This took two years and many people fell ill during the arduous journey; some even died.”21

In early September 1921, the heads of the Mesopotamian Zionist Association—also known as the Zionist Office in Baghdad—wrote to the Zionist Executive in London and expressed interest in sending the refugees from Uremiyeh to Palestine. They requested the help of the central office: “Please do everything you can to obtain certificates for one thousand people in Mesopotamia. . . . The lives of some of them are in danger aside from the danger of starvation. Have mercy on them. . . . Most of them are capable of doing any work, especially working the land and raising livestock. Many of them speak fluent Hebrew.”22 At the time the letter was sent, it was not possible for the Jerusalem aliya bureau to accede to the request. The country had been closed to immigration due to the bloody riots in Jaffa, and the new immigration policy restricted the number of Jews allowed to enter the country. Two months later, the Zionist Office in Baghdad sent another letter, this time asking that the refugees from Iran and Kurdistan who were in Baghdad be brought over: “As we have already informed you, there are close to a thousand people in Mesopotamia waiting every day to immigrate to Palestine. They have escaped from Kurdistan and the villages of Persia, from the oppressor’s sword. And we have heard that many of those who remained there have been killed. If these people were to immigrate, then those would come, too, and not fall victim to the people who are after their money and their lives. We therefore look forward to hearing good news.”23

In February 1922, the Zionists in Baghdad sent a third letter, this time via the Baghdad-based Aziz Ala Na’im, honorary president of the Zionist Organization in Iran. He appealed directly to the Zionist Executive in Jerusalem, pleading for assistance for the Iranian and Kurdish refugees in Baghdad:

Due to the incidents in Jaffa in the past year, the migrants were not permitted to go to Palestine. They have decided to stay in Baghdad until the situation changes [and] they can go to the place they hope and yearn for. While here—due to the high cost of living—they have spent much of what they had at their disposal. The immigrants are now few in number and they have travel papers (visas from the British envoy). They are waiting impatiently to know their fate. But the refugees apparently left behind much of their property and fled for their lives. Many of the refugees . . . became laborers and are currently working in construction to earn a living. By day they do their jobs but at night they are in terrible distress because they have no homes where they can rest and be protected from the cold. Until now they have all been living in the beit midrash . . . but more than a week ago they were evicted from there—reportedly by the Hakham Bashi . . . who is expressing anger and bitterness against Zionism and its adherents. . . . They all want to go to Palestine to work there. Many of them are strong, healthy people who can tolerate hard work and make do with little.24

A January 1922 list of “Persian Jewish immigrants and refugees in Baghdad” confirms the accuracy of Aziz Ala Na’im’s letter to the aliya bureau regarding the profile of the refugees seeking to go to Palestine. Most of these people were between eighteen and thirty-five, were married, and had children. They were listed as farmers and middlemen, with some skilled tradesmen and silversmiths as well. They had been in Baghdad for anywhere from a few months to years. Siman Tov Ben-Yitzhak, for instance, had spent just two months in Baghdad, whereas Amram Ben-Nuriel had been there for four years.25

The aliya bureau’s answer was short and to the point: “Unfortunately, it is impossible to send entry certificates to Palestine for those people who are in Baghdad in view of the current immigration law, which requires that each person have ₤500 or have been offered a particular job.”26

The Mesopotamian Zionist Association’s appeals to the Zionist Executive for help for refugees from Iran and Kurdistan were similar to the appeals to the Palestine Offices in Europe (especially in Warsaw and Constantinople) for aid for the refugees of the Ukrainian civil war. In both cases the large number of refugees in the city made the Palestine Offices’ work difficult, and their directors needed to find a solution. The answers from the aliya bureaus were also similar: they were unable to accede to the requests, whether the prospective immigrants were from Europe or Asia. The Zionist immigration policy in this case was uniform, preferring physically and mentally healthy halutzim over refugees, whoever they might be.

The appeals to the Zionist Executive on behalf of the refugees from Uremiyeh led to the establishment of a Palestine Office in Baghdad. This office was subordinate to the central aliya bureau in London, which was moved after the war to Jerusalem. The office’s representative in Baghdad reported directly to the central aliya bureau. His name was passed on to the British as the official Zionist representative in Baghdad, and he received instructions and information about the immigration procedure: “We have informed the British government that we have appointed you our official representative in Baghdad for matters of immigration to Palestine. No doubt the British government has already notified its representative in Baghdad of your appointment.”27 In addition, the aliya bureau sent the Baghdad representative “a special letter of authorization in English regarding your appointment and, in a separate envelope, we are sending you instructions and three circulars on aliya for the immigrants.”28

Like the aliya bureaus in Europe, the one in Baghdad requested more immigration permits and conducted protracted negotiations with the central aliya bureau over the number of aliya certificates and the kind of immigrants needed to build up the country. The answers given to the representative in Baghdad were identical to those received by his counterparts in Europe. He was asked to send only the wealthy, because poor immigrants would become a burden on the settlement institutions. “From this material, you will see that there are two categories of immigrants: class 1, who lack means, and class 2, who have means.” The representative was instructed to limit class 1 immigrants “in accordance with the country’s capacity for absorbing them and the dire financial situation of the Zionist Organization, which has to support the immigrants in Palestine so long as they have no work.” Class 2 immigrants—that is, those with means—“have no difficulty at all with immigration. Our representatives in each location, when contacted with questions by immigrants in this category, are supposed to assist them as much as possible.” Regarding the number of aliya permits allocated to the office in Baghdad, “we have allocated only twenty-five certificates . . . despite our tremendous desire to allocate more. The Zionist Organization recently apportioned 1,100 certificates to various centers in eastern and central Europe, places where hundreds, even thousands, of halutzim are waiting impatiently for the first opportunity to come to the place of their heart’s desire, after having experienced many trials and tribulations in recent years.”29

The Zionist representative in Baghdad protested giving preference to halutzim from Europe just because they had undergone “trials and tribulations.” A refugee is a refugee, he said. There was no difference between a Ukrainian Jew and a Kurdish Jew, whether their homes had been burned and their property looted by the troops of Denikin and Petliura or by the Armenians. The aliya bureau confirmed that it had received the letter of complaint “regarding the immigrants and refugees from Persia who are now in Baghdad . . . but unfortunately the immigration laws have not changed for the better since we last wrote to you.”30 The issue remained on the agenda in Baghdad, with the Zionist representative continuing to pressure the aliya bureau to help bring the refugees to Palestine: “Enclosed is a copy of the telegram that we sent regarding immigrants in several places in Mesopotamia that are unsuitable for settlement. There are about a thousand such persons. One must have mercy on their health. Several children have already died from the heat of the sun.”31

Additionally, some Iraqi Jews went to Palestine as tourists or immigrants and settled there. In the 1920s, the route from Baghdad to Jerusalem was safer and more accessible than before. “Even when the journey from Baghdad to Palestine was so long—fifty days from Baghdad to Jerusalem and dangerous due to robbers—Easterners would go to prostrate themselves at the tombs of saints, as the Jews of the East do. Now that it has become so short—three days . . . and the cost so low . . . the yearning for the Land of Israel has grown.”32 Middle-class families who had not received immigration certificates bypassed the British immigration policy by entering the country on tourist visas. Obstacles were posed by the Iraqi government, which insisted on a financial bond for each Jewish tourist who set out for Palestine. “Many wealthy families were planning to go to Palestine to celebrate the Sukkot festival. . . . The new decree by the local government blocked their way. Because who would agree to post bond for a tourist. . . . The huge sum that the government is demanding of tourists—more than 70 pounds sterling—denies the middle class the opportunity to go and visit the tombs of the saints.”33

Middle-class Iraqi Jews had difficulty affording the taxes imposed by the Iraqi government and coping with the hostility of the surrounding society. Other economic factors also spurred them to emigrate:

Recently extraordinary fervor for emigrating to Palestine has been felt among members of our community, especially the middle class. The dreadful commercial crisis . . . the heavy taxes imposed on merchants and industrialists practically steal the Jews’ bread . . . and one after another they are having to close their shops. And woe to the Jew who has a home of his own. He has to pay a municipal tax that is five or even eight times that paid by his Muslim neighbor. . . . The hatred of the Jews being spread among the neighbors by the press, the Jews’ bitter enemy, is what has tipped the scales in favor of Zion.34

The special correspondent for Haaretz in Baghdad noted two additional motivations for emigration: opposition to the Westernization that had altered the traditional character of the Baghdad Jewish community and favorable reports from those who had already gone to Palestine:

A clever Jew who feels things keenly senses his precarious situation in the toxic environment in which he lives. Day after day, he witnesses distressing events inside and outside. The advocates of assimilation, unwilling to give up their status, rule over the community by force. Our community is losing its traditional character and mimicking the “civilization” that is entering via the Alliance. Most of our young people who are educated there learn heretical ways from their teachers, such as smoking on the Sabbath and eating forbidden foods. . . . The encouraging reports from those who have already managed to settle in Palestine have effected a revolution among the masses. More and more tourists, including merchants and industrialists, are going to Palestine to tour the country and investigate economic and commercial conditions there.35

If we replace the Iraqi Jew described in this chapter with a Polish Jew, Baghdad with Warsaw, the starving people in Uremiyeh with the starving people from Bolshevik Russia, and the survivors of the pogroms in Iranian Azerbaijan with the survivors of the pogroms in Ukraine, we see that the motivations for migration from Iraq in the 1920s were identical to the motivations for migration from Poland and Ukraine in those same years. More than sixty-seven hundred Jews went to Palestine in the 1920s from Iraq, Iran, and Turkey. The establishment of an aliya bureau in Baghdad and the appointment of an official Zionist movement representative there to handle aliya arrangements made the city a major junction for refugees and immigrants hoping to go on to Palestine.

The Maghreb

The motivations for immigration from North Africa were different from the motivations for immigration from Iraq, Iran, and Kurdistan. In Yemen and the Maghreb there were no pogroms, and Jewish refugees were not a burden on the Jewish communities. The Balfour Declaration and word of the establishment of the Mandatory government in Palestine triggered the resumption of immigration to Palestine for ideological reasons—religious, Zionist, and sometimes a combination of the two—and not due to political persecution or economic hardship.36

According to data from the Jerusalem aliya bureau, fewer than two hundred Jews went to Palestine in the 1920s from Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and Algeria.37 Despite the small scale of migration, aliya bureaus were established in these countries, usually headed by a community member who was given all the necessary information. For the most part, the aliya bureaus were established in the major cities, and they handled applications from the entire region. The town of Sefrou, about twenty-five kilometers from Fez, was home to a small, affluent Jewish community whose members decided in the early 1920s to go to Palestine. The Zionist association in Fez contacted the Zionist Organization in London and reported that most of the Jews of Sefrou had liquidated their businesses and wanted to migrate. They wished to appoint Yosef Levi—a merchant and Alliance school alumnus who was opposed to the Western reformist ideology of the French education system and who supported Zionism—as the Zionist movement’s representative in Fez.38

The Zionist Executive agreed to let Levi represent the residents of Fez and outlined what he would have to do as the aliya representative of the Zionist Organization: “This representative must take responsibility for his actions, be decent, have goodwill, and not show favoritism, and he must act strictly in accordance with the immigration instructions.” Moreover, they explained, he would be required to send to Palestine only those capable of working: “Strong people, people who have the means to survive for at least one year. Or those who have a trade such as carpenters or blacksmiths. In brief, those who can contribute to the development of the state.” Levi was asked not to recommend “people who have only enough for the travel expenses and will have to go begging when they arrive.”39

From Levi’s letter, we see he indeed enforced the Zionist immigration policy and looked for candidates for aliya who had the financial means and occupational skills needed to settle in Palestine:

For your information, I have long been spreading word that those who lack the necessary means will not be able to obtain a visa for their passport. There are single people who want to serve under the Zionist flag but unfortunately do not have enough money to pay the travel costs. I beg them to be patient. Then there are laborers. I am well aware that before we can send them we have to wait for the country to call for them, which will first require fundraising and a consequent increase in product, the development of big public works companies, and so on. It should be kept in mind that in my work on Zionist campaigns in Fez, Sefrou, Meknes, Rabat, and Jedda in the last three years, I have only recruited comrades associated with the French Zionist Federation.40

Similar letters arrived from Marrakesh, from Agudat Zion in Tripoli, and from the Tunisian Zionist Federation.41 The aliya bureau’s responses to the Jews of Sefrou, Marrakesh, Tripoli, and Tunisia resembled those sent to the Zionist representatives in the European aliya bureaus: at that point the economic situation in Palestine precluded the admission of Jews lacking economic means, and they would have to wait until things improved.42 In a letter to Rabbi Pinhas Halifa Cohen Azour of Marrakesh, the aliya bureau said that immigration to Palestine had been halted “due to the distressing events in Jaffa.” After “vigorous [efforts] by the [Zionist] General Council and by the Zionist Commission for Palestine the decree was revoked” and immigration to Palestine resumed, but priority would be given to those already en route, whose entry had been barred due to the riots: “Aliya depends even now, and perhaps even more than before, solely on the financial means that our organization can devote to the employment of the immigrants in Palestine. The Zionist Commission stresses in all its telegrams to us that employing just the laborers who are en route will require tremendous sums of money. . . . From these details, you will understand on your own that the admission of new halutzim will not be possible until those immigrants who were stopped on the way due to the distressing events have entered the country.”43

The Zionist Executive’s replies were not always received with understanding, and the disappointment was compounded by a sense of discrimination on ethnic grounds. The Tunisian Zionist Federation complained of discrimination in the distribution of aliya permits and about the fact that their request for ten to fifteen aliya permits had been rejected. Y. Beiteli, secretary of the Aliya Department in Jerusalem, replied that the certificates were distributed fairly based on requests received from the countries of origin and that no orderly request had been received from Tunisia. Furthermore, Beiteli added, the distribution of the semiannual quota had already been completed and only a few aliya certificates remained for skilled construction workers. He explained that due to the great demand for certificates and doubt about whether there were experts in the required trade in Tunisia, the Aliya Department had decided to allocate them only three certificates for qualified candidates.

Sometimes the sense of being unwanted was caused by immigrants telling their relatives about having suffered discrimination. The case of Albert Cohen, who left Tunisia in late 1920, demonstrates the sensitivity of the Maghreb Jewish community in matters affecting their fellows in Palestine. In January 1921, Agudat Zion in Tunisia complained about the antagonistic, unfriendly attitude of the settlement institutions toward a man from Tunis by the name of Albert Cohen. The organization told the Zionist Executive in London that Cohen had complained to his relatives in Tunisia about the problems he was having settling in Palestine and his difficulty finding work. Cohen, they said, had alleged that his difficulties were due to his Tunisian origins. Rather than rejecting the complaint out of hand, the executive asked the Zionist Commission to display sensitivity and see to his needs so that his distress would not appear to stem from ethnic motivations: “It should be noted that the complaints by the Sephardim that they are neglected and even persecuted as Sephardim are general ones. If only to prevent unnecessary grumbling and to ease the minds of our brethren in Tunis regarding the young man in question, it is worth seeing him and getting him a job.”44

The Zionist Commission absolutely rejected all allegations of discrimination against North African immigrants as well as Albert Cohen’s claim. In its reply to the Zionist Executive in London, the commission noted that there was difficulty “regarding our Sephardic brethren. They come as individuals rather than in a group. They do not know Hebrew, they go straight to the cities, especially Jerusalem, and they look for work on their own.” The Zionist Commission noted further, “Most of the people coming from these countries are petty merchants and luftmenschen for whom it is hard to find work. We treat all immigrants coming to Palestine with the same attention and goodwill. In fact, because the Sephardim are liable to complain that they are being neglected, we try very hard not to give them any grounds for complaint.” As for Cohen, the Zionist Commission reported that in the meantime he had found work to his satisfaction.45

The case of Albert Cohen was not singular. Jews from North Africa complained on numerous occasions of ethnic discrimination in medical care, jobs, and even admission into the workers’ kitchens. Their letters to their communities triggered grievances and anger vis-à-vis the Zionist establishment’s attitude toward Sephardim. These stories and rumors presumably made an impression on people who were considering aliya, deterring them from going ahead with it. The complaints were also sent to the Zionist Executive in London, which passed them on to the Zionist Commission with instructions to review their veracity. The commission conducted an in-depth investigation of every complaint and concluded, “A significant number of Sephardim have entered the country and all of them have received exactly the same treatment and the same assistance in finding work.” Spot checks of individual cases found no truth to the complaints: “They complain that they were asked in Rothschild Hospital whether they were Sephardic or Ashkenazi [but] they were told that the questions were solely for statistical purposes. Absolutely no distinction is made between Jews in how they are treated; the same can be said about non-Jewish patients, a small number of whom come to the hospital. As for the food provided to the Hapoel Hatzair house, the kitchen manager, Mrs. Chana Meisel, stated that there is no distinction between Sephardim and Ashkenazim. All immigrants receive exactly the same food.”46

In a report on Aliya Department activities between March and June 1923, the Zionist Executive addressed the issue of Sephardic immigrants, and the impression given is that there was a condescending attitude toward them. “We want to devote a few words to the type of immigrants coming from Eastern countries (Iran, Yemen, Mesopotamia, Algeria, Morocco, Afghanistan, and so on), who in that period numbered approximately 1,400.” On the one hand, such a Jew has “an advantage in aliya because he knows the language of the country (the language of our neighbors), is familiar with their customs and way of life, lives by manual labor, and makes do with little. But on the other hand some of them are having a hard time adjusting psychologically to the conditions of building the country, to life as part of groups based on cooperative foundations.”47 This statement was supposed to be indicative of an egalitarian perspective among the Yishuv leadership based solely on pertinent facts. However, it demonstrates orientalist stereotypes originating in preconceived notions: the immigrants from Islamic countries were perceived as different from the rest of the immigrant population and from the majority society. According to the report, the Jews of Eastern countries made do with little and were familiar with the local customs. This assertion had no basis in fact. Many of the Jews from Islamic countries were unfamiliar with conditions in Palestine, and their encounter with the country was just as complex and difficult as it was for the immigrants from Europe. Some of them had never been accustomed to making do with little; on the contrary, many of them had belonged to the middle class in their countries of origin and had never experienced hardship or lack. The same report also mentioned another category of immigrants:

Included in this category of immigrant are some who, where they come from, have heard fantastic descriptions of life in Palestine. They have heard the footsteps of the approaching Messiah. They have been told of the Jewish king dwelling on Mt. Zion and bringing about the return to Zion; this Jewish king would meet the immigrants coming to Jerusalem, and so on. These immigrants come to see this with their own eyes, and when they encounter the bitter reality, they sometimes sink into despair and send letters to their countries, spreading untrue reports about the situation and denying everything that exists in Palestine. They complain without justification about being treated differently as immigrants from the East, about Western immigrants (Ashkenazim) being given preference, and so on. Unfortunately, some people believe the false rumors and we have had to refute them with facts and figures. We have informed our representatives in those countries; we have demanded that they describe the situation clearly and warn those spreading the propaganda not to fire up the people with artificial-fantastic fervor that will be doused an hour after it develops, potentially causing a catastrophe for our work. But our representatives have not always been successful in this task. In some cases the listeners called them spies. They didn’t want to hear when the situation was made clear to them. They came anyway. Our aliya bureaus gave them assistance of a different sort, just as they give it to every immigrant who comes to Palestine, in addition to financial support, the cost of transportation to the workplace, and sometimes the disembarkation expenses and the government tax. They were given loans to cover rent, work tools, commerce, and so on. It should be noted that the Jerusalem aliya bureau offered assistance this Passover to about one thousand Eastern immigrants.48

The report stresses the disparity between the image of Palestine and the reality that immigrants encountered after their arrival. A few of them came to Palestine for Messianic reasons and expected to be welcomed by the Jewish king. According to scholar Yaron Tsur, the Balfour Declaration and word of the establishment of the Jewish home did elicit religious fervor among the Jews of the Maghreb. However, the correspondence between the Zionist representatives in the Maghreb and the Zionist Executive in Jerusalem and London shows no evidence of aliya for Messianic reasons but rather attempts to find candidates who shared the Zionist worldview.49 Perhaps some immigrants from the Maghreb were disappointed, but so were the halutzim of the Third Aliya. Many of them, too, left the country or chose to put an end to their lives.50 In this respect, there is an interesting similarity between eastern European immigrants and those from Islamic countries: both were disillusioned with the country they had yearned to reach, and both libeled the country in letters to relatives or slandered it when they returned to their countries of origin.

Despite the feeling of discrimination among Jewish immigrants from North Africa, it seems that the Zionist movement’s attitude toward prospective olim in the 1920s was egalitarian. The North African Zionist associations received answers to their questions, and the Zionist Executive tried to explain the objective difficulties in aliya. In its response to a request for information on aliya from Agudat Zion in Tripoli, for instance, the Zionist Commission expressed a positive attitude toward aliya from Libya and satisfaction with the ties formed with the Jews of Tripoli, who were then under Italian rule. “We received your letter of June 9 and are delighted that in your city, too, ties have been established with the Zionist center in London and with us. We will very willingly answer your questions about immigration from time to time. We have delayed our reply to your letter all this time due to the recent events in Palestine, which have brought about fundamental changes in immigration matters.”51

Further evidence of the Zionist Executive’s positive attitude toward aliya from North Africa is its repeated, persistent request that the French authorities stop demanding a financial bond of one thousand francs from every Jew seeking to visit or immigrate to Palestine. Efforts were also made to encourage immigration to Palestine by healthy, productive young people who could participate in building up the country. However, despite the Zionist Executive’s favorable attitude toward the awakening of Zionism in the Maghreb, the number of immigrants from there remained low for several reasons: The economic and political situation of the Jews of the Maghreb was relatively good. Unlike the Jews of Iran and Uremiyeh, who arrived in Baghdad as refugees, the Jews of the Maghreb did not suffer from persecution and pogroms. Moreover, Zionist propaganda was banned in North Africa, and the bond demanded of Jews and the limited allocation of aliya permits precluded immigration by more than a few hundred people.

Yemen

About a quarter of the Jewish immigrants from Islamic countries in the first decade of the Mandate arrived from Yemen. Their motivations were similar to those of the immigrants from eastern Europe, Iran, and Kurdistan. In the 1920s, the Jews of Yemen were a persecuted minority among a majority Muslim society. After the riots of 1921 in Jaffa, Imam al-Mutawakkil Yahya banned emigration to Palestine. In 1926, he captured the port city of Hudaydah and blocked the main migration route to Palestine via the Red Sea. In this period, the economic and social position of Yemenite Jewry was undermined, and many sought to leave. Some succeeded in getting out of Yemen and reached Palestine after a long, grueling journey.52

In March 1921, the Presidium of the Jewish National Council wrote to the high commissioner asking for his assistance in bringing the Jews of Yemen to Palestine. “If we may be so bold, the Jewish National Council requests that Your Excellency intercede with the British government to ease the living conditions of the Jews in Yemen, as they are in distress . . . there, and also take the necessary steps to ease the restrictions so as to bring them to Palestine.” They noted the dire situation of the Jews in Yemen and the decrees imposed by Imam Yahya on the Jews: “This imam’s officers have now dredged up from the depths of oblivion an old, foreign, cruel religious edict that even the Turkish government never knew: all Jewish orphans are required to convert. Through force and various acts of violence, they make the Jewish orphans accept the other religion, and if they refrain from doing so and run away from the harassing officers, the heads of the Jewish community are jailed. This occurred in the city of Dhamar, where the community leaders have been held in jail for five months on the charge of helping orphans escape.”53

From a political standpoint, the situation of the Jews in Yemen was no different from that in Uremiyeh and Ukraine. In all these places, an intolerant regime persecuted the Jews and made their lives unbearable. Because no aliya bureaus were established in Yemen, it is hard to track the motivations and societal composition of the Yemenite migrants or the aliya bureau’s attitude toward them. Our limited information comes from the Association of Yemenites, which took care of the immigrants in their first days in the country and helped them settle in. According to this data, 694 Jews came to Palestine from Yemen in 1925 and 1926. Most had families; only twenty-two were single. Eighty-two were farmers, twelve were builders, ten were ritual slaughterers, nine were peddlers, and four were teachers; the rest were laborers with no specific occupation.54

In the absence of a Palestine Office in Yemen, the migration of the Yemenite Jews was complicated. They had no one to guide them, make arrangements on their behalf, and, most importantly, see to their welfare during the journey. Yosef Shalom Habara recounts in his memoirs Bi-Tela’ot Teiman vi-Yerushalayim (The tribulations of Yemen and Jerusalem) that it took him about five months to reach Palestine after he failed in his first attempt and was forced to return from Aden to Sanaa. “I reached Jerusalem on Rosh Hodesh Elul 5684 [August 30–31, 1924], thereby concluding my journey from Asmara via Massawa, Port Sudan, Khartoum, and Cairo. The journey took about five months. And although I felt great joy over having finally fulfilled my dream, my joy was not complete because I remembered my wife and three children whom I had left in exile; moreover, my wife was pregnant.”55 Two years after he arrived in Jerusalem, Habara managed to bring his family over via Aden, where they had been waiting for entry visas for Palestine. “My family was delayed in Aden until the end of the month of Kislev for a simple reason: they had no one to accompany them on the ship due to the decree about aliya, and my wife and children could not travel alone. After a long wait in Aden, they were able to resume their journey, and they arrived in Jerusalem—thank God—hale and hearty.”56

Eliyahu Dobkin, one of the leaders of Hechalutz in Poland, found interesting similarities between the halutzim and the Yemenites, especially with respect to the difficulties they experienced and the obstacles they encountered on their way to Palestine. “There are specific political, legal, and financial barriers to immigration from Russia. We have not fulfilled our obligation with regard to immigration from Russia. The Congress must therefore decide to charge the Zionist Executive with using all means to remove the obstacles from our path and boost immigration from Russia. And the same is true of immigration from Yemen. There, too, the Jews are being tortured and persecuted unbearably and want to immigrate to Palestine. And Jewish means must be seized with respect to this aliya, too.”57

The Zionist Executive was aware of the difficulties facing the Yemenite immigrants. In a meeting with Avraham Tabib, Avraham Sarum, and Zecharia Gluska, representatives of the Yemenite Jewish community, the decision was made to try to establish an aliya bureau in Yemen. “About a month ago, at a meeting of the Zionist Executive, Prof. Pick, Mr. Y. Sprinzak, [the British army officer] Kisch, and representatives of the Yemenites discussed enabling the immigration of the orphan refugees in Yemen, who are suffering terribly there economically, spiritually, and politically.” Following the meeting, the General Conference of Yemenites in Palestine convened for a serious discussion of immigration from Yemen. It passed several resolutions: “The Conference elected its executive board and charged it with negotiating with the Zionist Executive and the Jewish National Council regarding arrangements for aliya from Yemen.”58

No aliya bureau was established in Yemen in the 1920s, despite repeated requests from the leadership of the Yemenite Jewish community in Palestine. In 1929, Gluska, chair of the central committee of the Association of Yemenites, accused the Zionist Executive of helplessness with respect to rescuing Yemenite Jewry. He alleged that it was disregarding resolutions of Zionist Congresses and was insensitive to the distress of the Yemenite Jews. “Much has been written and said regarding this question for the past seven years, from the day the dreadful persecutions of our brethren in Yemen resumed.” Gluska noted that the 14th Zionist Congress (1925) had already resolved “to open a special aliya office in Aden, but the previous Zionist Executive, loyal to its path, namely, disdain for the Yemenites, ignored this resolution by the Congress, too, and the office in Aden has still not been opened.” Meanwhile, conditions in Yemen became worse and “were reported in Palestine and abroad. The decrees of forced apostasy and malicious oppression shocked all of Jewry.” Only the Zionist Executive’s Aliya Department was not shocked. “[Not] only did it not make any effort to save our tormented, persecuted brethren; it also scorned the resolutions of the Congress: it did not open the aliya office on the Yemeni coast and did not give it the certificates that we had requested to rescue those families that had managed to escape from their tormentors. This disgraceful, inhuman attitude has caused the lives of dozens of families to be cut short on the shores of the Red Sea.”59

Gluska’s accusations regarding the Zionist Executive’s attitude toward the persecuted Jews of Yemen are identical to the allegations directed at Zionist policy and the attitude of the Zionist institutions vis-à-vis the refugees of the Ukrainian civil war. In the 1920s, priority in aliya was given to members of the Zionist youth movements over refugees from Ukraine, Kurdistan, Iran, and Yemen. The Yemenite Jews’ criticism of the Zionist Executive was accurate, but that Zionist policy was applied uniformly to all communities. Sometimes the deciding factor was not how much the refugees were suffering—something they all had in common—but how many refugees were thronging the aliya bureaus in Europe and how much pressure was being exerted on Zionist and non-Zionist aid organizations to bring people to Palestine. Like the heads of the European aliya bureaus, Gluska defined the plight of the Jews in Yemen and their motivations for immigration as follows: “We have before us a lot of work and we must be prepared to do it. First and foremost, we must resolve the question of immigration from Yemen, the rescue of our persecuted, tormented brethren who still survive in a remote corner of Yemen.”60 From his perspective they were not olim or even immigrants but survivors seeking to remain alive by escaping from Yemen to Palestine.

Only in 1929, after almost a decade of talk and in full agreement with the leaders of the Yemenite Jewish community in Palestine, did the Zionist Executive dispatch aliya bureau representatives to organize aliya from Yemen.

With respect to the resumption of aliya, the Zionist Executive expressed its opinion on the appointment of a representative in Aden to organize the immigration of Yemenite Jewry. Based on the investigation of the issue in Aden by R. D. Kesselman, who visited Aden in the winter of 1928, having been given this job by the Zionist Executive, Mr. Ben Zion M. Aharoni, one of the dignitaries of the Jews of Aden, was named the Zionist Executive’s official representative on aliya matters vis-à-vis the British commission in Aden. Regarding the certificates given to Mr. Aharoni, it should be noted that the desired order was made in sending the immigrants, the medical inspection, and so on.61

Focusing on immigrants from Islamic countries gives us a unique perspective on immigration to Palestine and a context for comparing aliya from various Jewish communities in Palestine and abroad. It is impossible to understand the Third Aliya and Fourth Aliya without addressing the entire range of immigrants who arrived in those years, including those from Islamic countries. Immigration from Asia and North Africa in the 1920s was not uniform. Some of the newcomers were refugees from Iran and Kurdistan who had fled the Armenians and reached Baghdad. In Baghdad, they became a burden on the local Jewish community, which attempted to assist them and send them to Palestine. Others were middle-class Iraqi Jews who went to Palestine to better their financial situation after having fallen on hard times. In North Africa, in contrast, where the Jewish communities had been exposed to Zionism, the immigrants were motivated by Zionist ideology.

From the correspondence between the Palestine Offices in the Maghreb and the Zionist Executive in London and Jerusalem, we see the disparity between the Zionist movement’s attitude toward prospective immigrants and the expectations of the applicants themselves. The aliya bureau’s replies show that in the first decade of the Mandate, candidates from the Maghreb were being carefully selected and that, as in Europe, the Zionist movement preferred the physically and mentally fit who could adapt to the conditions and needs of the country. However, we can discern a condescending attitude in the Yishuv toward Jews from Islamic countries, which eastern European immigrants did not suffer. Jews from Islamic countries voiced complaints in Palestine, and associations of immigrants from particular towns or regions, like the eastern European landsmanshaften, were formed to contend with the discrimination and condescension.

The causes of migration from North Africa were different from the causes of migration from Yemen and Iran. In the absence of real push factors (political or economic), the Jews of the Maghreb were in no rush to leave for Palestine in the early years of the Mandate. In this sense, the North African Jewish communities were no different from Jewish communities in western and central Europe, who did not migrate to Palestine in large numbers because they were doing well financially, enjoyed equal rights, and had struck roots in the surrounding society. In contrast, we see similarities between the Jewish refugees from Uremiyeh who fled to Baghdad and the Jewish refugees from Ukraine who fled to Odessa and Constantinople. Both refugee populations were products of pogroms and severe manifestations of violence following the breakdown of the old political order during and after World War I.

The Palestine Offices in Iraq and the Maghreb were established at the same time as the ones in Europe, and they assumed responsibility for organizing immigration to Palestine. From the correspondence and requests, we see that the aliya bureaus in London and Jerusalem did not discriminate against Jews from Islamic countries. The answers given to the representatives and applicants were similar; the heads of the Palestine Offices were expected to find young, fit, healthy candidates to build up the country. Certificates were not distributed equally to the various Palestine Offices: eastern European Jews received more than Jews from Asia and Africa. The Palestine Office in Baghdad complained about this because it saw no difference between the refugee populations. The disparity was due to heavier, more extensive pressure exerted on the aliya bureaus by the Ukrainian Jewish refugees.