Exiled from Familiar Lands: Arab Jews & Igbos
The Marginalization & Resilience of Arab Jews, with Parallels to the Igbo Hebrews
For centuries, Arab Jews lived as integral communities across the Middle East and North Africa. They were indigenous to lands stretching from Iraq and Yemen to Morocco and Tunisia, maintaining Jewish religious identity while speaking Arabic, shaping culture, and contributing to the intellectual and economic life of Arab societies. These were not immigrant communities. Arab Jews were natives of the region—scholars, merchants, poets, and neighbors. Their exile, marginalization, and eventual cultural erasure mark one of the most underrecognized traumas of the modern Jewish world.
The historical journey of Arab Jews—marked by forced migration, cultural suppression, and identity reconstruction—mirrors, in essential ways, the experience of the Igbo Hebrews of West Africa, who also faced colonial disruption, renaming, and the suppression of a Hebrew-rooted identity. These parallels are not incidental; they reflect broader patterns of what happens when rooted peoples are denied the right to define themselves.
Arab Jews: Natives in the Arab World
Arab Jews are the descendants of Jewish communities that thrived in Arabic-speaking lands long before modern nationalism and geopolitical conflict distorted their presence. In Iraq, they spoke Judeo-Arabic, lived in Baghdad’s Jewish Quarter, and produced leaders like Saadia Gaon, Hai Gaon, and David Sassoon. In Egypt, they served in courts, traded along the Nile, and left behind the legendary Cairo Geniza, a thousand-year record of Judeo-Arabic life. In Morocco and Yemen, they created vibrant religious, musical, and legal traditions entirely in Arabic, while observing Torah law. They were Arab in language and culture, Jewish in faith and tradition. Their identity was complex, local, and deeply historical. That history was violently interrupted in the mid-20th century.
Dispossession & Exile
Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Arab regimes began expelling or pressuring their Jewish citizens under suspicion of Zionist loyalty, even though most Arab Jews had no involvement in the politics of Zionism. Pogroms erupted in Iraq and Egypt. Jewish businesses were looted or seized. Families were stripped of citizenship. Over 850,000 Arab Jews fled or were expelled between 1948 and the 1970s, leaving behind millennia-old communities.
This sudden rupture mirrors the forced displacement of the Igbo people during the Biafran War (1967–1970)—a war that saw over a million Igbo lives lost through starvation, blockades, and military aggression. Like Arab Jews, the Igbo were punished in their own land for asserting a distinct identity, subjected to political betrayal and systemic violence.
Erasure Through Renaming & Reclassification
Once in exile, particularly in Israel, Arab Jews faced cultural suppression and renaming. They were no longer “Iraqi,” “Tunisian,” or “Yemeni” Jews. They were classified under the imposed label “Mizrahi”—a vague, catch-all term meaning “Eastern” that erased centuries of specific Arab cultural and linguistic heritage.
They were pressured to abandon Arabic, change their names, and assimilate into a European-centered Israeli society that privileged Ashkenazi customs and language. Arabic—the language of their prayers, poetry, and everyday speech—was shunned in public and demonized in the media. The same Arabic that once flowed from the mouths of Jewish sages and paytanim was now seen as foreign, backward, and even dangerous.
The Igbo Hebrews experienced a similar reclassification under British colonial rule. Indigenous Hebrew-aligned customs were dismissed as “pagan,” and Igbo identity was forcibly reshaped through Christian missionary education. Ancestral names were replaced. Oral history was questioned. Spiritual practices rooted in the Hebrew tradition were erased or misinterpreted. The parallels reflect a shared struggle: the denial of the right to name oneself.
Loss of Language & Cultural Continuity
One of the most painful legacies of Arab Jewish exile is the loss of Judeo-Arabic—the spoken and written language of Arab Jewish life for over a thousand years. In Israel, few efforts were made to preserve it. Children were educated in modern Hebrew, and older generations were shamed into silence. Libraries and institutions ignored Arab Jewish literature, and synagogues gradually abandoned Arabic piyyutim and liturgy. This echoes the loss of Igbo fluency and ritual language caused by colonial education systems and the dominance of English in Nigeria. Both peoples saw ancestral languages systematically devalued, breaking intergenerational transmission of history, song, and sacred meaning.
Resilience, Revival & Reclamation
Despite systematic marginalization, Arab Jews have not vanished. In recent decades, scholars, artists, and community leaders have initiated a cultural reclamation:
Younger Arab Jews are embracing the term “Arab Jew” to challenge the notion that Arab and Jew are opposites.
Judeo-Arabic texts are being recovered and studied.
Musicians are reviving the Andalusian and Iraqi maqam traditions.
Writers and filmmakers are demanding historical acknowledgment for their families’ trauma and contributions.
Similarly, Igbo Hebrews are reclaiming their heritage, reviving Hebrew-rooted traditions, engaging in scholarship that affirms their ancestry, and reconnecting with the global Hebrew community. These movements are not nostalgia—they are resistance. They are acts of preservation against erasure, of naming against misnaming.
A Shared History of Survival
Arab Jews were not immigrants in Arab lands—they were indigenous Hebrews who spoke Arabic and lived as part of Arab society for centuries. Their expulsion and erasure are historic injustices that must be fully acknowledged, not only by the states that exiled them but by the broader Jewish and global communities.
The Igbo Hebrew experience, while distinct in geography and detail, reflects a parallel path—one where identity is challenged, yet never extinguished; where cultural roots are denied by outsiders but remembered by descendants. Both the Arab Jews and the Igbo Hebrews carry the legacy of ancient Israel not as a metaphor, but as an enduring reality. They prove that exile does not erase origin, and marginalization does not cancel truth. Their stories demand recognition—not only of suffering, but of strength
