Ezra Menahem Daniel

Origins and early life

Ezra Menahem Daniel was born in Baghdad in 1874, the son of the senator Menahem Saleh Daniel, who has his own fiche here, in a Jewish landowning family of Iraq that never left the faith. He was educated in Baghdad and in England, read law, and managed the family estates while serving the Jewish community of Baghdad, which numbered some hundred thousand people and had lived in Mesopotamia since the Babylonian exile.

Work and career

On his father's death in 1940 he succeeded him in the Iraqi Senate, holding the seat reserved for the Jewish community, and he was thus its official voice through the worst years: the pro-Nazi coup of Rashid Ali and the Farhud pogrom of June 1941, in which some 180 Jews of Baghdad were murdered and thousands robbed; the anti-Jewish legislation that followed the war; and finally the denaturalization law of 1950 under which nearly the whole community left for Israel.

This fiche records plainly the episode for which he is remembered: in 1946, before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine, the Iraqi government pressed him to testify as a Jew against Zionism and for the Arab position, and he refused to give the statement demanded of him, declining to have the community used as a witness against itself. He stayed in Baghdad after 1951, one of the few thousand Jews who remained when the airlift had emptied the community, and died there in 1952.

He gave much of his land and money to schools and hospitals open to all, and the family name is still attached to institutions in Iraq.