The Nazis needed oil. The Arabs wanted the Jews and British out of Iraq. The Mufti of Jerusalem forged a far-ranging alliance with Hitler resulting in the June 1941 Farhud, a Nazi-style pogrom in Baghdad that set the stage for the devastation and expulsion of the Iraqi Jews and ultimately almost a million Jews across the Arab world. The Farhud was the beginning of what became a broad Nazi-Arab alliance in the Holocaust. --publisher.

The book deals with the history of the Jews in Baghdad, from the first mention of the place in the Talmud until recent times, and contains additional chapters on customs and usages, superstitions and proverbs, and also chapters on the settlement of Bagdad Jews in India and the Far East. The work describes the internal history of the Jews in Baghdad their communal, social and intellectual life. The work bases itself almost exclusively on Jewish sources these include many manuscripts from the Sassoon collection used here for the first time. The author an eminent scholar, who worked with untiring zeal collecting documents on Jewish history and building up the famous Sassoon collection of manuscripts at Oxford University. We are fortunate to have a short history of the Jews in Baghdad from his pen, a milestone book which laid the foundation stone for future writers on the subject.