The disappearance of the Jews

THE pope's pilgrimage in the steps of St Paul was widely seen as a success, even if it did not elicit an apology to the Muslim world for the medieval crusades. Syria's president, Bashar Assad, basked in international praise for his religious tolerance. But, notably, this tolerance was not extended to Judaism.

Welcoming John Paul, Mr Assad compared the suffering of the Palestinians to that of Jesus Christ. The Jews, he said, “tried to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality in which they betrayed Jesus Christ and the same way they tried to betray and kill the Prophet Muhammad.” The pope was taken on a detour to the town of Quneitra, flattened by the Israelis in their partial withdrawal from the Golan Heights, and called upon to bless the president's vision of a Christian-Islamic alliance to vanquish the common threat of colonising Jews.

Damascus's Jewish quarter lies off the Street Called Straight but was left unvisited by the popemobile. Ten years ago it was a thriving community of 6,000 Jews, the Arab world's largest Jewish community; today it is a derelict ghost town inhabited by 40 men, 10 women and 13 children. All others have fled.

Bashar's father, the late Hafez Assad, could be merciless, but he belonged to an age when Arab Jews were part of the landscape. Damascus had 20 functioning synagogues, and he pampered certain Jewish leaders. Today the Torah scrolls from these synagogues lie piled in a heap on the empty pews of the last one to remain open, its doors guarded by the secret police.

Syria remains, on the whole, a reasonably tolerant multi-religious society. When Holocaust revisionists tried last month to hold a conference in Beirut, intellectuals in the region signed a protest, forcing its cancellation. A just cause, they said, had no need of neo-Nazi support. But Bashar Assad's crude words add to the trends that continue to separate Jew from Arab in the Middle East.