Kurdish Jews

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Kurdish Jewish women around 1905 near Rawanduz (today's Autonomous Region of Kurdistan)
Illuminated manuscript from Kurdistan, mid-19th century. It comprises four liturgical poems, verses from the Book of Esther and blessings that were read to Kurdish Jews during the festival of Purim

Kurdish Jews or Kurdistan Jews ( Hebrew יהדות כורדיסתאן; Yehudot Kurdistan , Kurdish : Kurdên cihû ) are those Jews who have lived in the Kurdistan area since ancient times . Their culture and clothing are similar to those of the Muslim Kurds. Until the mass emigration to Israel in the 1940s and 1950s , they lived self-contained and isolated. The Kurdish Jews are part of the Mizrahim . Today's northern Iraq and western Iran were the main focus of their settlement areas. There was a small Jewish community in Diyarbakır .

history

According to tradition, the first Jews settled after the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom of Israel in the 8th century BC. BC in the Assyrian capital, which was in what is now Kurdistan. In the 1st century BC The kingdom of Adiabene , whose capital is today's Erbil , chose Judaism as its religion. According to the reports of the Jewish travelers Benjamin von Tudela and Petachja from Regensburg from the 12th century, there were around 100 Jewish settlements in Kurdistan. Benjamin of Tudela mentioned a messianic leader named David Alroi who rebelled against the Persian king and wanted to lead the Jews back to Jerusalem . According to the travel reports, the spiritual and economic center of the Kurdish Jews was the city of Mosul . Later, Jewish refugees from Syria and Palestine, who fled the Crusades , settled in Kurdistan and Babylon. The Jews from Mosul enjoyed a certain autonomy at the time.

Between 1590 and 1670 lived the rabbi Asenath Barzani , who taught the Torah , the Talmud and the Kabbalah . She was the first woman to lead a yeshiva . She received the title of Tanna'it. Asenath Barzani was also known for her poetry and works on the Hebrew language . Her works are also important because they are a woman's first poems in modern Hebrew.

The most important Jewish sites in Kurdistan are the tombs of the prophets Nahum in Alqosh , Jonah near Nineveh and Daniel in Kirkuk . There are also some caves that Elijah supposedly visited.

Kurdish Jews were also active in the Zionist movement. Moses Barzani, who emigrated to Jerusalem with his family in the 1920s, was one of the leaders of the Lechi underground organization .

Names

In addition to names adopted from neighboring cultures and general popular Hebrew names, there are also specific Hebrew names that occur more frequently among Kurdish Jews. This includes, for example, the name Binydme, as the Jews of the region see themselves as descendants of the Benjamin tribe . In addition, the names of saints whose shrines and graves are in the region are common. This includes Nahum, whose grave in Alqosh is visited by thousands every year. Other names are Jonah, Nahum, Mordechai, and Esther.

language

Benjamin von Tudela , who toured Kurdistan in the mid-12th century, reported that the Jews living there spoke Aramaic . Your Aramaic contains loan words from Turkish, Persian, Kurdish, Arabic and Hebrew. Today's Kurdish Jews speak a New Aramaic language with several dialects named after their settlement areas:

  • Urmiyah (Lishan Didan) (4,000 speakers)
  • Sanadaj-Kerend (Hulaula) (10,000 speakers)
  • Zachu-Amadiyah (Lishana Deni) (8,000 speakers)
  • Erbil-Koi-Sanjaq (Lishanid Noshan) (2,000 speakers)
  • Bijil (Lishanid Janan, Barzani) (almost extinct)

In the 20th century, urban Jews adopted Arabic as their first language, while Aramaic persisted in the mountainous regions. Since most of the Kurdish Jews from Iraq now live in Israel, their dialects are being displaced there by the official language and the surrounding languages. In Israel there are some settlements and neighborhoods in which Aramaic is still the colloquial language of Jewish groups from Kurdistan (Northern Iraq), according to Ethnologue some neighborhoods in the Tel Aviv and Jerusalem area (including near the Hebrew University ) and in Mewasseret Zion . There are strong ties between Muslim Kurds in Kurdistan and Jews who emigrated to Israel from there. In addition to Aramaic, the Kurdish Jews also speak Kurdish.

Representative

See also

literature

  • Ora Schwartz-Be'eri: The Jews of Kurdistan: Daily Life, Customs, Arts and Crafts . UPNE publishers, Jerusalem 2000, ISBN 965-278-238-6 .
  • Yona Sabar : The Folk Literature of the Kurdistani Jews: An Anthology , Yale University Press, 1982, ISBN 0-300-02698-6 .
  • Matthias Hofmann: Kurdistan from the beginning . Saladin Verlag, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-947765-00-3 .

Individual evidence

  1. Encyclopedia Judaica: Roth C p. 1296-1299 (Keter: Jerusalem 1972).
  2. Encyclopaedia Judaica : Article "Irbil / Arbil"
  3. Ora Schwartz-Be'eri: The Jews of Kurdistan: Daily Life, Customs, Arts and Crafts , UPNE publishers, 2000, ISBN 965-278-238-6 , p. 26
  4. ^ Sally Berkovic, Straight Talk: My Dilemma As an Orthodox Jewish Woman: KTAV Publishing House, 1999, ISBN 0-88125-661-7 , p. 226
  5. Shirley Kaufman, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Tamar Hess: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present: A Bilingual Anthology, Feminist Press, 1999, ISBN 1-55861-224-6 , pp. 7 and 9
  6. ^ Yona Sabar: First Names, Nicknames and Family Names among the Jews of Kurdistan . In The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series , Vol. 65, No. 1 (July 1974), pp. 43-51
  7. ^ Edward Lipiński : Semitic Languages: Outline of a Comparative Grammar (=  Orientalia Lovaniensia analecta . Volume 80 ). 2nd Edition. Peeters, Leuven 2001, ISBN 90-429-0815-7 , pp. 73 ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed August 18, 2015]).
  8. a b c d e Kurdish Jewish Community in Israel. Jerusalem Center for Jewish-Christian Relations, archived from the original on July 28, 2013 ; accessed on August 25, 2015 .
  9. See ethnologue information on Hulaulá , Barzani-Jewish Aramaic , Lishana Deni , Lishán Didán and Lishanid Noshan .
  10. ^ Lazar Berman: Cultural pride, and unlikely guests, at Kurdish Jewish festival. Muslim visitors travel from Syria and Iraq to join their brethren at the annual Saharane celebration in Jerusalem. The Times of Israel, September 30, 2013, accessed August 25, 2015 .