My paper studies the Farhud, a series of urban riots directed against Baghdadi Jews during which nearly 180 were killed. The word Farhud means looting or robbing, but it came to designate specifically the killing, wounding, and robbing of Jews in Baghdad on the first two days of June 1941 and the looting of Jewish property in Basra the previous month. The Farhud, I argue, was a direct result of politicized sectarianism, the violence of which reached epidemic proportions. At this time Iraqi Jews were attacked by their fellow citizens, and more importantly, came to realize that elements in the Arab-Iraqi nation-state, to which they had pledged their loyalty, had betrayed them. The Farhud, however, was also a moment of intercommunal solidarity. It was a time when countless Muslims risked their lives in order to protect their Jewish friends, neighbors, and business partners and when friendship, loyalty, and religious and tribal notions concerning protection of the peoples of the book overcame nationalist xenophobia. My paper will attempt at challenging both Iraqi and Zionist national memories which have silenced important aspects of the Farhud. While acknowledging that the army and the police should have been held accountable for their actions, the Iraqi state made little mention of the participation of the urban poor in the riots, since doing so would have meant acknowledging its failed social policies. Zionist historiography has highlighted the Farhud as a watershed in the history of the Iraqi-Jewish community. From the Zionist standpoint, the Farhud was viewed as having galvanized the Zionist movement in Iraq and ultimately as causing Iraq’s Jews to recognize that their country had rejected their attempts at integration. My paper, in contrast, will investigate the socioeconomic realities that influenced the Farhud, and will demonstrate that generation of Iraqi Jewish intellectuals, who considered themselves as Arab nationalists and Iraqi patriots remained loyal to their visions of Arab and Iraqi society and to their critique of Zionism, even after the Farhud. Finally, my paper will consider how participants in the event itself experienced the Farhud and how Iraqi Jews represented the trauma in their writings at the time. The paper is based on British and Zionist accounts from this period, as well as on Arabic and Hebrew autobiographies and the contemporary Iraqi press.

The historiography of Syria during the first half of the twentieth century fixates on the problem of nationalism. The best-known occasions of popular resistance to the imposition of French rule, including the Hananu revolt, the Hama uprising and the Great Syrian Revolt have been integrated into nationalist narratives with relative ease, although recent work has shed light on the complex formation of nationalist discourse. The Shaykh Salih al-?Ali revolt (1919-1920) was one of these popular insurrections that sprouted up against the French occupation of Greater Syria; its leader and namesake was an influential landed ?Alawi notable, often alternatively represented in the literature as a “tribal chieftain.” By contrast with more canonical moments of anti-colonial resistance, Salih ?Ali and “Salih al-?Ali”—as a metaphor—were neither smoothly assimilated into nationalist politics and discourse, respectively, nor were they rejected wholesale even as certain ?Alawi intellectuals and historians would claim the revolt as an expression of local patriotism and even religious or tribal particularism. More than just an important sequence of events during the chaotic transition from Ottoman to French Mandate rule in Syria, therefore, over time the revolt became a stubborn node of ideological and historiographical contestation and refashioning. Indeed, one of the enduring tensions in the historiography of modern and contemporary Syria lies at the intersection of questions of nationalism, tribalism and sectarianism. In this paper, I consider the episode as both historical event and historiographical echo. I will be concerned less with the specific details of the short-lived revolt itself, which are relatively straightforward; by comparison with the other popular uprisings mentioned above, its consequences were less far-reaching. Ideologically policed categories of collaboration and resistance—both past and present—were elevated to the level of common sense over the course of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, the stakes of the revolt in Syrian history and memory would become much more sensitive in light of the demands and dictates of Orientalist, nationalist, and what I will call “sectarianist” historiography. The emerging contest of narratives surrounding and succeeding Shaykh Salih al-?Ali raises questions about the relationships among ?Alawi identity, sectarianism and nationalism in twentieth-century Syria, a topic that many considered (and still consider) taboo. My paper addresses the themes of the panel through an overview of historical writing and polemic about this symbolically overdetermined event in early national Syrian history.

In this paper, I propose to examine two different instances of politicized violence directed against Jews and Armenians respectively during the late nineteenth century. Comparing a major riot and siege of a Jewish neighborhood of Istanbul in the 1880s with the Armenian massacres in the same city a decade later, I seek to think comparatively about violence perpetrated against Jews and Christians in the late Ottoman imperial capital and to survey the varied responses of members of different religious communities to each event. In both cases, the sudden eruption of violence on the streets of the Ottoman capital caused tensions not only between members of each religious community but also within each community. When elite Christians and Jews found that their coreligionists were among the rioters, they sought to dissociate themselves from those who engaged in violent attacks toward their neighbors of other faiths. In doing so, elites of various confessions attempted to preserve the status quo and also manage the image of their own community, which—they claimed—was betrayed by the violent among them. Yet despite the best efforts of communal leaders, their rioting coreligionists posed a threat to their own religious establishment. In each case, Jewish and Christian leaders publicly refuted the rumors that circulated throughout their city in the midst of the violence. Perhaps not surprisingly, their refutations did not quell the rumors that continued to fuel the violence, since--as Jean-Noël Kapferer has noted-- “rumors often arise from distrust of official versions” of events. In this sense, both the rumors and those who believed them challenged the officials who strove to control narratives told about and accepted by their own communities. During the two moments of anti-Jewish and anti-Armenian violence that will be the focus of my paper, communal leaders temporarily lost control of their flock. In each case, as mobs from one religious group attacked or pillaged from members of another group, the elites and popular classes from each community engaged in their own battle over the right to define the truth and to offer an appropriate code of conduct for their coreligionists.

On April 9th, 2003, footage of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad’s Firdous Square brought down by American soldiers was aired time and again on all news channels. The streets around the Firdous Square were almost empty except for US tanks and a few hundred Iraqis standing in the square. The US soldier who reached the head of the 12-meter statue and fastened a chain around its neck before covering its face with the US flag seemed to set up an execution scene: the chains became a noose and the US flag was the hood covering the head of the victim at the moment of execution. For a short while, the Iraqi flag replaced the US flag before the head was bare again, with the chains around the neck. An American tank tied to the statue pulled back slowly. In a few seconds, the statue was brought down. American commentators and state figures hailed the fall of the statue as the triumph of the US army in ending Saddam Hussein’s regime. Rather than dismissing the fall of the statue as an event manipulated by the media, my paper examines its implication for the American army, and for Iraqis. On the one hand, I endeavor to understand the significance of the toppling of the statue by an occupying force, and the type of violence it involved. Indeed, the destruction of the statue by the American troops, and the triumphalist discourse accompanying it, was an act of revenge and of illegal lynching. One the other hand, I explore how the fall of the statue indicated an act of transgression as far as Iraqis were concerned in that a public embodiment of Saddam Hussein was destroyed publically, and how the immediate defacement of the statue can be seen an act of revenge by Iraqis against the tyrant. By dwelling upon the fall of Saddam’s statue, I address questions of violence, revenge, occupation and transgression.