The 1947 anti-Jewish riots in Aleppo were an attack on
Syrian Jews
Syrian Jews ( he, יהודי סוריה ''Yehudey Surya'', ar, الْيَهُود السُّورِيُّون ''al-Yahūd as-Sūriyyūn'', colloquially called SYs in the United States) are Jews who lived in the region of the modern state of Syri ...
in
Aleppo
)), is an adjective which means "white-colored mixed with black".
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Syria
Syria ( ar, سُورِيَا or سُورِيَة, translit=Sūriyā), officially the Syrian Arab Republic ( ar, الجمهورية العربية السورية, al-Jumhūrīyah al-ʻArabīyah as-Sūrīyah), is a Western Asian country loc ...
in December 1947, following the
United Nations vote in favour of partitioning Palestine. The attack, a part of an anti-Jewish wave of unrest across the Middle East and North Africa, resulted in some 75 Jews murdered and several hundred wounded.
In the aftermath of the riots, half the city's Jewish population fled the city.
History
Syria gained independence from France in April 1946. The
Haganah
Haganah ( he, הַהֲגָנָה, lit. ''The Defence'') was the main Zionist paramilitary organization of the Jewish population ("Yishuv") in Mandatory Palestine between 1920 and its disestablishment in 1948, when it became the core of the ...
's
illegal immigration
Illegal immigration is the migration of people into a country in violation of the immigration laws of that country or the continued residence without the legal right to live in that country. Illegal immigration tends to be financially upwar ...
operative Akiva Feinstein wrote in 1947 that the new Syrian government then commenced persecuting the Jewish minority,
that all Jewish clerks working for the French bureaucracy were fired, and the government tried to stifle Jewish businesses.
At the time of the United Nations vote on November 29, 1947, the Jewish community in Aleppo numbered around 10,000 and went back around two thousand years.
After the vote in favour of the
partition of Palestine
The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine was a proposal by the United Nations, which recommended a partition of Mandatory Palestine at the end of the British Mandate. On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted the Plan as Re ...
, the government abetted and organised Aleppo's Arab inhabitants to attack the city's Jewish population.
The exact number of those killed remains unknown, but estimates are put at around 75, with several hundred wounded.
[Daniel Pipes]
Greater Syria: The History of an Ambition
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) p. 57, records 75 victims of the Aleppo massacre. Ten synagogues, five schools, an orphanage and a youth club, along with several Jewish shops and 150 houses were set ablaze and destroyed.
Damaged property was estimated to be valued at US$2.5m.
During the pogrom the
Aleppo Codex
The Aleppo Codex ( he, כֶּתֶר אֲרָם צוֹבָא, romanized: , lit. 'Crown of Aleppo') is a medieval bound manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. The codex was written in the city of Tiberias in the tenth century CE (circa 920) under the ...
, an important medieval manuscript of the
Torah
The Torah (; hbo, ''Tōrā'', "Instruction", "Teaching" or "Law") is the compilation of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, namely the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. In that sense, Torah means the s ...
, was lost and feared destroyed. The book reappeared (with most pages missing) in Israel in 1958.
Following the attack, the Jewish community went into a steep decline. Wealthy Jews escaped the day after the pogrom and many more fled in small groups in subsequent months.
Their property was forfeited and on December 22 the Syrian Government enacted a law forbidding Jews from selling their property.
As of 2012, no Jews live in Aleppo.
See also
*
1945 Tripoli pogrom
The 1945 Anti-Jewish riots in Tripolitania was the most violent rioting against Jews in North Africa in modern times. From November 5 to November 7, 1945, more than 140 Jews were killed and many more injured in a pogrom in British-military-contro ...
*
Farhud
''Farhud'' ( ar, الفرهود) was the pogrom or "violent dispossession" carried out against the Jewish population of Baghdad, Iraq, on June 1–2, 1941, immediately following the British victory in the Anglo-Iraqi War. The riots occurred in a ...
*
Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries
The Jewish exodus from the Muslim world was the departure, flight, expulsion, evacuation and migration of around 900,000 Jews from Arab countries and Iran, mainly from 1948 to the early 1970s, though with one final exodus from Iran in 1979– ...
*
Menarsha synagogue attack
*
Killings and massacres during the 1948 Palestine war
Killings and massacres during the 1948 Palestine war resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians and unarmed soldiers.Morris 2008, pp. 404-06.
The historiography of the events has been revisited by the New Historians, starting in the 1980s a ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Aleppo
Anti-Jewish pogroms by Muslims
Anti-Jewish pogroms by Muslims 1941-49
Ethnic riots
Mass murder in 1947
1947 in Syria
Antisemitism in Syria
Jewish Syrian history
Jews and Judaism in Aleppo
History of Aleppo
1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine
December 1947 events in Asia
1947 riots
1947 in Judaism
Massacres in 1947