Mick Hartley

From the Times of Israel, In Erbil, Iraq’s few remaining Jews cling to a fading heritage:

Across Iraq, Jewish roots run deep: Abraham was born in Ur in the southern plains, and the Babylonian Talmud, a central text of Judaism, was compiled in the town of the same name in the present-day Arab state.

Jews once comprised 40 percent of Baghdad’s population, according to a 1917 Ottoman census.

But after the creation of Israel in 1948, regional tensions skyrocketed and anti-Semitic campaigns took hold, pushing most of Iraq’s Jews to flee.

In the north, the Kurdish regional capital of Erbil was once the heart of the ancient kingdom of Adiabene, which converted to Judaism in the 1st century and helped fund the building of the Temple of Jerusalem. […]

The roughly 150,000 Jews still in Iraq in 1948 fled fast: by 1951, 96 percent were gone. Staying meant facing growing discrimination and property expropriation.

Following the US-led invasion of 2003, some Jews were flown to Israel on special evacuation flights while others left during the ensuing years of sectarian warfare.

By 2009, there were only eight Jews left in Baghdad, according to diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks.

The internecine violence did not grip the Kurdish region.

A 2015 law in the zone recognized Judaism as a protected religion and created an official representative, a post now held by 58-year-old Sherko Abdallah.

The law, and the lack of sectarian bloodshed in the zone, created an environment of “more coexistence” compared to federally-run areas in the south, Abdallah said.

Still, of the estimated 400 families of Jewish descent in the Kurdish zone, some have converted to Islam in recent years.

“Most others practice in secret, because admitting you’re Jewish is still a sensitive issue in Iraq,” said Abdallah, adding that his “connections” within the Muslim-majority community had helped keep him safe.

The ties between Jews and the Kurds go way back.

It's misleading, though, to date the decline of the Jews in Iraq to the creation of Israel. The real beginning of the end for Iraqi Jews was the Farhud – “violent dispossession” – of 1941, when a frenzied mob, including Arab neighbors and policemen, murdered approximately 180 Jews in Baghdad and other cities (the exact figure isn't known). Hundreds of children were orphaned, scores of women raped, hundreds wounded, homes and Jewish-owned shops were looted. Although some Arabs did defend their Jewish neighbors, stories abound of pregnant women eviscerated, babies mutilated, and Jewish hospital patients refused treatment or poisoned. The dead were hurriedly buried in a mass grave.

There's some controversy about the extent to which the Nazis were behind this, notably in the person of Fritz Grobba, the German ambassador to Baghdad from 1932.

Back to the Times article:

Baghdad and Washington are in talks to return the Iraqi Jewish Archives, over 2,700 books and tens of thousands of documents whisked away to the US after the invasion.

Such initiatives could save Jewish heritage across the country, including the Baghdad home of Sassoon Eskell, Iraq’s first finance minister under British mandate.

Eskell established Iraq’s first financial system and indexed its currency to gold.

“He was one of the columns in Iraq’s history. You don’t get two men like that,” said Rifaat Abderrazzaq, an expert on Baghdad’s Jewish heritage.

But today, Eskell’s home on the banks of the Tigris River in the capital lies abandoned and partly ruined.

More on the Iraqi-Jewish archives here.

And here's a brief (6 min) film I posted last year on the Jews of Baghdad.