The Jews of Syria, seen through the looking glass

A consequence  of the fall of the Assad regime and the takeover by the HTS rebels, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, is that the press and social media suddenly discovered that Jews lived in Syria. But the average consumer of news has been stepping  through the looking glass into a world of misinformation and distortion.

We now know that only nine Jews live in the entire country, the community having been the victims of a most successful ethnic cleansing.

Sometimes, the numbers are exaggerated: BBC reporter Lyse Doucet thought that the Jewish quarter of Damascus was full of Jews — when, in reality, none has been there for 30 years.

An Associated Press report called the Syrian Jewish community one of the larger ones in the Arab world — with 100,000 members. But that is false: the community dwindled steadily, from the early 20th century. In 1948, it numbered only 30,000.

A further distortion is to pretend that Jewish sites exist when they do not.

The Associated Press purported to show a video of the so-called head of the community, Bakhour Chamntoub, visiting the Jobar synagogue, which was founded 750 years before the Christian era. The piece maintains the fiction that the Jobar synagogue, a casualty of the Syrian civil war, was only partly destroyed. One news report claimed that a delegation from abroad was preparing to visit the site and return to it a Torah scroll that once belonged to the synagogue.

In fact, above ground, the synagogue no longer exists. It is a bomb site. The video itself does not lie. There are bare walls and rubble. The synagogue was stripped of its chandeliers and its furniture and artefacts looted. Yet we are supposed to consider it a mark of the regime’s tolerance that Jews are permitted to visit.

Media reports are also guilty of whitewashing antisemitism in Syria, in order to blame the creation of Israel for the flight of most Jews. The majority had already left Syria by the time Israel was established. As a new JJAC report states, the rise of pro-Nazi sentiment in Syria throughout the 1930s, and the Aleppo anti-Jewish riots BEFORE Israel’s establishment, caused all but a small number to leave the city.

It is true that community members were prevented from travelling outside the country to stop them from going to Israel until the early 1990s. Not mentioned is that they were prevented from travelling outside their own cities and were under the constant surveillance of the secret police. They  had to carry ID cards marked “Mussawi,” meaning descendants of Moses. They could be thrown into jail and tortured on the slightest pretext.

The widely-circulated Associated Press piece tied the mass exodus of the remaining Jews to “Arab-Israeli peace talks,” but Syria has never  been a party to peace talks with Israel.

In fact, Judy Feld Carr smuggled desperate Jews out of Syria in the 1970s and ’80s, and later, the fall of the Soviet Union, Syria’s major patron, led the regime to agree to release 4,500 Jews in 1992.

Already the new regime is attempting to exploit the tiny community to project an image of tolerance and security for Western consumption. Even Israel-based news agencies toe the regime line uncritically.

In a video published on social media recently, a representative of the new regime in Syria has a stilted conversation with Bakhour Chamntoub, the self-described head of the tiny Jewish community. The representative promises “peace and security,” and even calls on Syrian Jews abroad to return to Syria.

“Good evening, everyone, from Damascus, from the home of the head of the Jewish community in Damascus, Bakhour. Reassure us that you’re alright,” Mohammad Badarieh, the representative of the new regime, said in the video.

“Thank God, all is well,” replied Chamntoub.

When asked, “How are things in the country?” Chamntoub replied, “They couldn’t be better — there’s stability.”

No matter that there are only nine Jews left, the expression “ethnic cleansing” is never used by Western media. It does not matter that the other 29,9991 Jews fled in the years since 1948. The token Jew in Syria says it is safe and stable.