Pakistan’s Jewish Ghosts: According to the state’s election commission, there are 800 registered Jewish voters. That’s bogus (Liel Leibovitz, April 4, 2013)
According to a recent history by Hebrew University anthropologist Shalva Weil, as Pakistan slouched toward independence, it had a number of minuscule but thriving Jewish communities in Karachi, Peshawar, Quetta, and Lahore. Some of Pakistan’s Jews belonged to India’s Bene Israel community, others were brought on by the British to fill a host of administrative positions, and still others had trickled in from Afghanistan. By 1941, a government census recorded 1,199 Jews nationwide, sufficiently at home for one of them, a local leader named Abraham Reuben, to become the first Jew elected to Karachi’s city council.
All that soon changed. As India was partitioned in 1947, Mohajir, or Muslim refugees, filed into the newly minted Dominion of Pakistan, often ransacking Jewish synagogues and prayer halls on their way. Many of Pakistan’s Jews, in turn, fled in the opposite direction, settling in India. The following year, with Israel having declared its independence, things grew even tenser when rioters burnt down a Karachi synagogue to protest Harry Truman’s diplomatic recognition of the Jewish state. Wasting little time, Pakistan’s Jews soon began their exodus, scurrying to Israel and elsewhere.
The Road from Mecca: Muhammad Asad (Martin Kramer, 1999)