JQ263 - March 2026
Cast Out: The History of the Jews of the Arab Lands
"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 Julius
For 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 quarter 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 today's Middle East.
Lyn Julius was born in the UK and educated at the French Lycée in London and the University of Sussex. The daughter of Jewish refugees from Iraq, she is a journalist and founder of Harif, the UK Association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Huffington Post, The Jewish News, and The Jerusalem Post. She has a regular column in the Times of Israel and JNS News. Her book Uprooted: How 3,000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight has been translated into multiple languages.