Aleppo Returns Jewish Property. Karachi Still Lives with Erasure

 

Syria’s transitional authorities have quietly approved the return of Jewish-owned properties confiscated decades ago. They have also announced plans to restore historic synagogues, particularly in Aleppo, once home to one of the oldest and most influential Jewish communities in the Middle East.

This is not a story about Jews returning to Syria. That is unlikely.
It is a story about what states do after minorities are gone.

A bureaucratic move with moral weight

The Syrian decision is modest on paper. Property records. Legal acknowledgements. Restoration plans. No ceremonies, no reconciliation commissions, no grand speeches about coexistence.

And yet, in this region, that modesty is precisely what makes it unusual.

Returning property deeds is not reconciliation. It is recognition. It admits that confiscation occurred, that ownership existed, and that erasure was not accidental. It separates Jewish history from contemporary geopolitics and, crucially, from the Israel–Palestine conflict that has long been used to flatten all Jewish presence into a single political identity.

Aleppo’s Jews were not outsiders. For centuries, they were traders, artisans, doctors, and neighbours. They were woven into the city’s economy and daily life. Their departure in the mid-20th century followed regional wars, state suspicion, and the slow closing of civic space for minorities. Buildings remained. People disappeared. Memory thinned.

Now, decades later, Syria is choosing to name what was taken.

Why this matters beyond Syria

Across much of the Middle East and South Asia, minority disappearance has followed a familiar pattern. People leave under pressure or fear. Properties are absorbed, repurposed, or quietly reassigned. Over time, the story shifts from “they left” to “they were never really here.”

What Syria is doing disrupts that comfort. It insists on a paper trail where amnesia would have been easier.

This is not about tolerance. It is about legitimacy. Post-war states rebuild not only infrastructure but narratives. Deciding whose history counts is part of that reconstruction.

A Karachi parallel we rarely articulate

I have written before about Karachi’s Jewish community—how it lived, shrank, and then vanished not only from the city but from its public memory. Homes changed hands. Institutions dissolved. Cemeteries survived quietly. Even the word “Jew” became awkward, then suspect, then avoidable.

Karachi is not unique. But it is instructive.

When minorities left Karachi, the city did not debate what to do with their properties. It simply adapted. Buildings acquired new names. Neighbourhoods acquired new stories. Silence did the rest.

The contrast with Aleppo is uncomfortable. Aleppo is restoring synagogues not because Jews are returning, but because history is harder to erase than people. Karachi perfected the opposite skill: living comfortably inside inherited silence.

There is no accusation here, only observation. States inherit assets more easily than they inherit accountability.

Paperwork as a form of honesty

There are two ways cities deal with uncomfortable pasts. One is denial. The other is paperwork.

Paperwork is dull, legalistic, and slow. It does not offer emotional closure. But it forces specificity. Names. Addresses. Dates. Ownership. It resists myth.

By choosing paperwork, Syria is acknowledging that Jewish absence did not occur in a vacuum. That acknowledgement costs little materially, but it costs something politically. It complicates clean national stories.

Karachi, like many cities, chose the cheaper option.

What remains when return is impossible

None of this guarantees justice. Aleppo’s Jews may never return. Karachi’s probably will not either. Time, trauma, and new lives elsewhere have settled that question.

What remains is a quieter one: what does a city owe to the truth once the people are gone?

Syria’s move suggests one answer. It is incomplete, cautious, and self-interested. But it exists.

The alternative is what many cities chose instead—inheritance without memory, ownership without acknowledgment, buildings without names.

Cities, like states, are remembered not only for whom they welcomed back, but for whom they were willing to remember when no one was left to ask.

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Related reading:
For a detailed account of Karachi’s Jewish community, its disappearance, and the mechanics of forgetting, see my earlier piece: The Jews of Karachi: From Coexistence to Erasure.