On May 15, many in the Arab world and elsewhere mark the Nakba, or the “Catastrophe,” mourning the displacement of the Palestinian Arabs during the 1948 war with Israel. This year, as always, the commemoration will obscure the collapse at the same time of a different Arab society that few remember.
I have spent a great deal of time in the past four years interviewing people born and raised in Aleppo, Syria. Some of these people, most of whom are now in their eighties, are descended from families with roots in Aleppo going back more than two millennia, to Roman times. None of them lives there now.

----------------------------------------------------

Picture -- The Baghdadis, a Jewish family in Aleppo, Syria, around 1940. In Aleppo, and in other cities and towns across north Africa and the Middle East, some 850,000 Jews were pushed out of their homes beginning in the mid-20th century. (Courtesy of Asher Ron)