Here’s a movie dealing with the subject of the departure of the Jews from Arab and Moslem lands in which they had lived for centuries–and, in some cases, millennia.

If you scroll down, you will read an interesting piece by Magdi Allam (Allam, as best I can tell from perusing several articles automatically translated from the Italian–which means that reading them is somewhat like reading tea leaves–is a Coptic Christian Egyptian journalist who writes in Italy and Italian). Allam’s thesis is that Arab communities lost a good deal of their own previous identity when their Jewish populations fled:

Seeing Pierre Rehov’s documentary film ‘The Silent Exodus’ about the expulsion and flight of a million Sephardi Jews helped me gain a better understanding of the tragedy of a community that was integral and fundamental to Arab society. Above all it has revealed to me the very essence of the catastrophe that befell it, a catastrophe which the mythical Arab nation has never once called into question. In a flash of insight I could see that the tragedy of the Jews and the catastrophe of the Arabs are two facets of the same coin. By expelling the Jews who were settled on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean centuries before they were arabised and islamised, the Arabs have in fact begun the lethal process of mutilating their own identity and despoiling their own history. By losing their Jews the Arabs have lost their roots and have ended up by losing themselves.

As has often happened in history, the Jews were the first victims of hatred and intolerance. All the “others” had their turn soon enough, specifically the Christians and other religious minorities, heretical and secular Muslims and finally, those Muslims who do not fit exactly into the ideological framework of the extreme nationalists and Islamists. There has not been a single instance in this murky period of our history when the Arab states have been ready to condemn the steady exodus of Christians, ethnic-religious minorities, enlightened and ordinary Muslims, while Muslims plain and simple have become the primary victims of Islamic terror.