Far from today’s reality, the Arab world of only a century ago was home to multicultural communities of Jews dating back millennia. From the Jews of cosmopolitan Baghdad, who spoke their own distinctive dialect of Arabic, to the Jewish villagers who lived and worshipped alongside their Berber neighbors in rural Libya, the Arab world’s perhaps most controversial religious group made its cultural mark on the region in ways that are now largely forgotten.
A few traces of Jewish life still remain active in places like Tunisia, where the El Ghriba synagogue still stands as the site of an annual pilgrimage, and in urban Egypt, where a couple synagogues remain as reminders of once-thriving Jewish neighborhoods.
Still, the establishment of Israel and subsequent migration of most of the Arab World’s Jews – known as mizrahim - to the then newly-founded Jewish state means most remaining monuments to the region’s Jewish life lie abandoned, in disrepair, or altogether destroyed. Even the few Jews who still live in Arab countries are mostly too old to emigrate elsewhere, too afraid to live publicly as Jews, or simply too small in number to reverse their rapidly dwindling numbers.
