On Wednesday, the 11^th of September 2019, historian Georges Bensoussan was invited to discuss the crucial issue Jewish people from all Arab countries faced. All this was followed by an oriental buffet at the Synagogue Hekhal Haness, in Geneva.

In just one generation, almost all the Jews of the Arab world, a little less than a million people in 1945, left their native lands, dissolving a civilization that was once two millennia old. There is general agreement that the Judeo-Arab conflict in Palestine is the ultimate cause of these departures. While this conflict plays a role, it is clear that the root cause is much deeper and more complex.

First of all, it is due to the condition of the Jew in the Arab-Muslim land, this status that Islam codified in the 7th century for its Jewish and Christian minorities. Moreover, the slow opening to the West, the progress of schooling and colonization gradually dissolved this mental subjection and emancipated the Jewish subject. For the Arab-Muslim imagination, this anthropological liberation remained unthinkable.