Who is afraid of the Jews of Lebanon

Lebanon’s claim to be a refuge must be measured by its ability to protect the right of all its citizens to live freely, without concealing their identity, justifying their presence or repeatedly proving their loyalty. When a community leaves because its members can no longer imagine a safe future at home, Lebanon loses part of its meaning and its capacity to accommodate difference. Rhetoric about diversity and coexistence cannot compensate for that failure.

These questions shaped the discussion of Nada Abdel Samad’s book, When the Jewish Balconies of Wadi Abu Jamil Went Dark, at the American University of Beirut, organized by the Department of History and Archaeology and the History and Archaeology Student Society. The gathering confronted what we often prefer not to see: how a Jewish neighborhood disappeared from public memory, and how a Lebanese community’s departure became a footnote, despite what it reveals about our society, our state and our political discourse.

At this moment, AUB may be one of the few places in Lebanon, perhaps the only one, capable of hosting such a discussion. It offers an academic space where sensitive questions can be examined without being reduced to slogans or political alignments, and where studying Lebanese Jewish history need not itself become grounds for suspicion. Bringing students, historians and the public together around this subject reaffirms the university’s role in protecting freedom of thought. As independent debate becomes more difficult, hosting such a discussion becomes a cultural and national responsibility.

Abdel Samad reconstructs a social world through testimony, memory and everyday detail, without relying on nostalgia for Beirut’s supposed golden age. Her book asks how people lived, how their neighbors saw them, and how a community’s ordinary presence became unfamiliar or unspoken. These were Lebanese citizens who belonged to the country’s neighborhoods, schools, markets and professions. They shared friendships, livelihoods and love with their neighbors, alongside their own disagreements and ambitions. Lebanon held their memories and their families’ graves. The doctor who treated local families, the shopkeeper who opened each morning and the neighbor whose balcony went dark emerge as people whom political discourse later reduced to categories.

During the discussion, one audience member recounted her family’s memories of a Jewish doctor who had treated relatives. A memory this close to us can nevertheless feel like a discovery. When the existence of Lebanese Jews comes as a surprise, we must ask what we have done to our history, and what kind of political education has made fellow citizens appear alien to their country. We speak of diversity while erasing the communities that made it tangible and real.

The book also confronts forms of antisemitism that some who call themselves Lebanese still harbor or excuse. They appear in jokes, in challenges to the Lebanese identity of Jews, in assumptions that a Jew must be an agent or a Zionist, and in claims that discussing this history serves Israel. They also take more explicit forms: denying Jews the right to belong or holding them collectively responsible for the policies of a state that does not necessarily represent them.

These attitudes conflate Judaism, Zionism and Israel, turning religion or origin into evidence of political guilt. They reproduce a dangerous premise on which Zionism itself draws: that Jews share a single political destiny, regardless of their different positions, allegiances and experiences. Refusing to recognize a Lebanese Jew as Lebanese unwittingly endorses the claim that Jews have no homeland except Israel. A Lebanese Jew does not become Israeli by virtue of religion, nor can that person’s political choices be reduced to Zionism.

We must defend Palestinian rights and Lebanese sovereignty and resist occupation without making Jews collectively responsible for a state’s actions. Confronting antisemitism does not require us to overlook Palestinian suffering or absolve Israel of its crimes. Defending Palestine does not require hatred of Jews or denial of their history. A struggle for justice gains strength through its rejection of racism and its distinction between criticizing a state and judging individuals by religion or origin.

The question “Why talk about Lebanon’s Jews now?” exposes a failure to understand our responsibility toward our history. Such inquiry requires no permission from those who trade in slogans, nor must wars end before it becomes legitimate. A university must raise questions others would close down, scrutinize prevailing narratives and recover experiences absent from public memory. Giving the doctor a name and the family a history challenges stereotypes through lived experience. Making research itself suspect leaves ignorance unchallenged and allows fear to police knowledge.

Recovering this history also requires us to distinguish memory from nostalgia and documentation from justification. It does not mean absolving the past of its contradictions. It means asking why we failed to recognize the departure of Lebanese Jews as a national loss, and how that failure shaped our understanding of belonging. The responsibility falls on the historian and the writer, but also on readers and citizens who accept the omissions in our public memory.

That inquiry must acknowledge the variety of experiences and reasons for departure. Jews left in successive waves, under different circumstances and for different destinations. Some insisted on staying. These experiences cannot be folded into a single narrative, nor can every departure be described as direct expulsion. Equally, we cannot deny the political and social pressures that made staying increasingly difficult. The absence of a formal expulsion order does not establish that coexistence succeeded. A citizen may retain rights on paper while losing any sense of a future at home.

The test lies in people’s lives. Can they exercise their freedoms without fear? Does the state protect them as citizens? Can they differ without becoming suspects? Someone required to prove their loyalty every day has already been denied full citizenship. When people fear revealing their religion, background or opinions, we must confront the conditions that make concealing oneself necessary for safety.

The loss of so many Lebanese Jews weakened the country’s diversity and exposed the fragility of relationships left at the mercy of sectarian mobilization. Neighborly ties need institutions to protect them, fair laws and an education that encourages critical thought. Nostalgia means little if the mechanisms of exclusion remain intact. Protecting diversity is no favor a majority may grant or withdraw. It protects Lebanon itself. Every community pushed to leave impoverishes the country’s memory, skills and relationships; every identity forced into silence narrows public life for everyone.

Today, whenever a Lebanese citizen feels that their freedom, way of life or right to speak is threatened, and searches for somewhere they can live as themselves, the same question returns. The circumstances and those responsible may differ, but the loss affects the whole country. What have we done to make a citizen feel that the future is safer outside the homeland than within it? People leave with their expertise and relationships, leaving behind a society less able to accommodate difference.

People migrate for economic, professional and family reasons, and leaving can be a free and legitimate choice. But among the cruelest experiences is to love one’s country, wish to remain and still be unable to imagine a free and secure life there. Success abroad should prompt us to ask what prevented people from building their lives at home. Celebrating emigrants’ achievements must not conceal our responsibility for the conditions that drove them away.

Those of us who stayed must ask what we lost when our neighbors left, and what we did as their place in the country became more precarious. The silence surrounding departure can last for years, sustained by explanations that ease our consciences. Recovering these stories forces us to confront the fear that separated citizens from their homeland, and the indifference that made their loss seem ordinary.

Abdel Samad’s book refuses to confine that loss to the past. Reading about Wadi Abu Jamil forces us to consider other balconies that may be going dark today. Communities do not disappear in a single moment. The process begins when their presence becomes suspect, when citizenship becomes conditional on proving loyalty, and when people must continually demonstrate that they are not what others imagine them to be.

The Lebanon we want needs a state that protects its citizens’ freedoms, and citizens who refuse to make their neighbors’ right to remain negotiable. It needs a public memory unafraid of complexity, and an education that explains how everyday relationships connected communities whose histories cannot be understood in isolation. Diversity is a condition of the country’s vitality.

When the Jewish balconies went dark, Lebanon lost part of itself. Abdel Samad’s book returns that loss to us as a question about the present and the future. Protecting what remains begins with a clear recognition: this country belongs to all its people. Their belonging is a right that requires no one’s permission. Defending their diversity is a defense of Lebanon itself.