The Fate of Indigenous and Soviet Central Asian Jews in Afghanistan, 1933–1951

Starting in 1933 the government of Afghanistan began excluding Jews from trade, forced them to move from frontiers to the main cities, and declared a policy of forcing all Jews to leave the country. British, British Indian, and American records, including decoded Afghan, German, Japanese, Italian, and Soviet communications, shed light on the stated security rationale for the new practices. While Afghanistan treated other minorities arbitrarily, Afghan Jews and Jewish refugees from Soviet Central Asia suffered the most sustained persecution. The author argues that while Nazi ideology, example, and propaganda had some influence on a key minister, the predominant drivers of policy were an ingrained antisemitism and the assumption that many Soviet Jews who sought refuge in Afghanistan were “Bolshevik” agents; hostility was accentuated from the late 1930s by a sense of Muslim solidarity on Palestine. The author has uncovered evidence that can help us understand why, after 1945, British, British Indian, and American officials neither influenced Kabul to treat its Jewish minority more humanely, nor enabled the emigration of beleaguered and impoverished Jewish communities.