Lyn Julius – författare

For all the attention that conflict in the Middle East attracts, the casting out of almost a million Jews from what is today the Arab world barely registers. -Lyn JuliusFor thousands of years, long before the Arab conquest, the Middle East and North Africa were home to ancient Jewish communities. In cities such as Baghdad, Tunis, Cairo and Casablanca, Jews were a significant presence and constituted as much as a third of the population. Yet, today, the Jews of the Arab lands have almost entirely disappeared.In this groundbreaking essay, Lyn Julius, a journalist who has spent years researching the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa, explores what happened to this vast and diverse Jewish diaspora. What was their status under Islam, and how did the creeping rise of nationalism and antisemitism lead to their expulsion and exodus?Cast Out examines the vanishing of a people and restores an essential but often forgotten piece to the puzzle that makes up todays Middle East.

Who are the Jews from Arab countries? What were relations with Muslims like? What made Jews leave countries where they had been settled for thousands of years? What lessons can we learn from the mass exodus of minorities from the Middle East? Lyn Julius undertakes to answer all these questions and more in Uprooted, the culmination of ten years of work studying these issues. Jews lived continuously in the Middle East and North Africa for almost 3,000 years. Yet, in just 50 years, their indigenous communities outside Palestine almost totally disappeared as more than 99 percent of the Jewish population fled. Those with foreign passports and connections generally left for Europe, Australia, or the Americas. Some 650,000-including a minority of ideological Zionists-went to Israel. Before the Holocaust they constituted ten percent of the world's Jewish population, and now over 50 percent of Israel's Jews are refugees from Arab and Muslim countries, or their descendants. This same process is now repeating in Christian and other minority communities across the Middle East. This book also assesses how well these Jews have integrated into Israel and how their struggles have been politicized. It charts the growing clamour for recognition, redress and memorialization for these Jewish refugees, and looks at how their cause can contribute to peace and reconciliation between Israel and the Muslim world. *** "Lyn Julius provides a riveting account of a fascinating, but disgracefully overlooked subject. Anyone who really wants to understand the Middle East, Israel and world history, should read it." --Tom Gross, former Middle East correspondent, Sunday Telegraph; contributor to The Guardian and Wall Street Journal[Subject: Middle East Studies, Jewish Studies, History, Sociology, Politics]