The present volume is being published on the sixty-ninth anniversary of the Farhūd, the pogrom committed by religious and nationalist Arabs against the Jews of Iraq on the Jewish holiday of Pentecost (Shavu‘ot), 1–2 June 1941
The Hebrew edition of this book was published in 1992 by the Research Institute of Babylonian Jewry in Or Yehuda, Israel. This volume is a revised version of the Hebrew edition. It consists of papers on the pogrom and on the events leading up to it which were originally published in English, others which were written in Hebrew and now appear in English for the first time, and documents which have not been previously published, including an updated list of the names of victims of the Farhūd and a map indicating the places in Baghdad where rioters attacked Jews. The book thus provides the English reader with comprehensive and updated information on the Farhūd and constitutes a memorial to the innocent victims killed during these pogroms and whose only crime was that they were Jews