What did the Iraqis do to the Jews?

Answer 1

fired scud missiles at them during the 1st Gulf War.

The question as posed is difficult to answer since Jews had lived in Mesopotamia from around 586 B.C.E. until the mid-1980s. (There are still a nominal number of Jews in Iraq, but for all intents and purposes there is no real community.) Therefore, Iraqis and the administrators of the Iraq region did numerous things to Jews. For most of that period, relations between the dominant Iraqi political/religious group (Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and Turks) were satisfactory. Jews were almost always second-class citizens if citizens at all. During the Arab and Turkish periods, Jews were considered Ahl-AlKitaab or Dhimmi, meaning that they had the privilege of not being murdered provided that they pay certain taxes such as the jizya (a flat-rate tax for not being Muslim) and the kharaj (a land tax that non-Muslims who owned land were required to pay) and others. On account of the kharaj, most Jews moved into cities in order to not go broke.

During the 20th century, the British Mandate's organizational system fundamentally changed the Arab-Jewish relationship in Iraq. The British treated all Iraqis the same way and thus, for the first time in Iraq's history, Jews, Christians, and other minorities were not second-class citizens, but equal citizens. Jews and Christians, additionally, became educated thanks to foreign educational initiatives that these minorities took advantage of. Therefore, Iraqi Jews and Christians became a fundamental part of the British colonial apparatus and were reviled by the Muslim majority which remained largely uneducated and unwilling to modernize.

When Arab Nationalism took root in Iraq, its decidedly anti-colonial tone lumped Jews in with the colonizers. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Al-Husseini (and other Imams) began to preach virulent Anti-Semitism and this inexorably led to pogroms across Iraq. Himmler (one of Hitler's right hand-men) visited Iraq in the early 1940s and congratulated Al-Husseini on his Anti-Semitic initiatives. In 1941, a massacre occurred in Baghdad called the Farhud where 200 Jews were killed and numerous others displaced during the Jewish holiday of Shavuot. Although that was the biggest attack, it was by no means the only one. In 1943, there was an Iraqi coup d'état and the new country immediately joined the Axis Powers and attempted to eliminate its Jewish population. However, given Iraq's serious lack of infrastructure or national unity, this objective was not at all achieved. In the post-war climate, especially as Israel was beginning to come into its own, Iraqi Jews were considered traitors to the state, had their businesses seized, and had several leading members of their community executed on trumped up charges. In 1950, Iraq permitted its Jews to leave and forfeit their Iraqi citizenship. Between 1950 and 1952, 80% of Iraqi Jews fled, most to Israel, but some to the United Kingdom, Canada, United States, and Latin America. As the situation in Iraq worsened in the 1960s and 1970s, most remaining Jews fled to Iran where they could then be free to go to Israel (Iran was an ally of Israel's until the Shah fell.) When Saddam Hussein eventually came to power, he tried to exterminate the last Jews of Iraq, but by that point there were so few, that he did not even need to make it the primary item on the agenda.