Much, if not most, of this
information has been passed to me via Mizgin,
whose blog about Kurdish and current events in the
middle east is highly recommended. Be prepared to have
your comfortable theses challenged there!
The history of
Judaism in Kurdistan is ancient. The Talmud holds
that Jewish deportees were settled in Kurdistan 2800
years ago by the Assyrian king Shalmaneser Ill (r.
858-824 BC). As indicated in the Talmud, the Jews
eventually were given permission by the rabbinic
authorities to convert local Kurds. They were
exceptionally successful in their endeavor.
[...]
Jews remained a populous group in Kurdistan until
the middle of the present century and the creation
of the state of Israel. At home and in the
synagogues, Kurdish Jews speak a form of ancient
Aramaic ... and in commerce and the larger society
they speak Kurdish. Many aspects of Kurdish
and Jewish life and culture have become so
intertwined that some of the most popular folk
stories accounting for Kurdish ethnic origins
connect them with the Jews. Some maintain that the
Kurds sprang from one of the lost tribes of Israel,
while others assert that the Kurds emerged through
an episode involving King Solomon and the genies
under his command (see Folklore & Folk
Tales).
The relative freedom of Kurdish women among the
Kurdish Jews led in the 17th century to the
ordination of the first woman rabbi, Rabbi Asenath
Bârzâni, the daughter of the illustrious Rabbi
Samuel Bârzâni (d. ca. 1630), who founded many
Judaic schools and seminaries in Kurdistan. For her
was coined the term tanna'ith, the feminine form for
a Talmudic scholar. Eventually, MAMA ("Lady")
Asenath became the head of the prestigious Judaic
academy at Mosul (Mann 1932).
Read more at Kurdistanica
Those of you into contemporary Iraqi events will
note the name "Bârzâni", an old and illustrious name in
the area even today!
The following excerpt of an article by Josh Goodman of
Yale provides more background in relation to Kurdish
Jews and also investigates the relationship between
Israel and Kurdistan today:
A Fading Generation: The Jews of
Kurdistan
By the early 1950s,
virtually the entire Jewish community of Kurdistan—a
rugged, mostly mountainous region comprising parts
of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and the Caucasus,
where Jews had lived since antiquity—had been
completely relocated to Israel. The vast majority of
Kurdish Jews, who were primarily concentrated in
northern Iraq, left Kurdistan in the mass aliyah (immigration
to Israel) of 1950-51, which brought almost all
Iraqi Jews to Israel and signaled the end of
thousands of years of Jewish history in the lands
once known as Assyria and Babylon.
In general, the native language of the Jews of
Kurdistan was neither Arabic—like most Iraqi Jews—nor
Kurdish. Instead, the Jews (and Christians) of
Kurdistan spoke dialects of Aramaic—a Semitic
language, similar to Hebrew. Aramaic, the
language of the Talmud and parts of the Bible, was
the international language of trade and commerce in
the ancient Middle East with a status similar to
that of English in the modern world. The
Kurdish Jews spoke their own unique dialects of the
language, however, which possessed many words
borrowed from Kurdish.3
The Kurdish Jews in Israel, along
with a small number of Assyrian Christians, are
among the last remaining Aramaic speakers in the
world; many scholars believe the language will
disappear as a spoken language within a generation.4
History
of Judaism in Kurdistan
