The Jews Of Iraq

3000 Years Of History And Culture

Nissim Rejwan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367293383
• eBook ISBN: 9781000302790
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book provides an account of the Jews of Iraq, their history, culture and society. It covers the Iraqi Jewish history in three parts: from the Assyrian Captivity to the Arab Conquest (731 bc–ad 641); the encounter with Islam (641–1850); and the last hundred years (1850–1951).

Part One
From the Assyrian Captivity to the Arab Conquest (731 BC–AD 641)

From the Maccabean era to the middle of the eleventh century, when the Babylonian academies fell into oblivion, the development of the Talmud and its elevation to a position of classical authority constitute the most significant achievement of the Jewish people. And this, too, may be added: the intellectual qui vive so characteristic of Jews throughout the Middle Ages despite contumely and persecution was the result of the Talmud.

Judah Goldin ¹

Chapter 1
Roots

For close on four millennia the fortunes of the Jewish people, the growth of their religious beliefs and the shaping of their culture were in one way or other inextricably linked with ‘the land of the twin rivers’, now known as Iraq. At first glance Egypt, the ancient Hebrews’ other close neighbour, would seem to have exercised a more decisive influence, if only because of its geographical proximity to the Land of Israel. However, in the cultural sphere Israel’s contacts with Mesopotamia were far closer than they were with Egypt. Indeed, most of the important outside influences – as reflected in the Bible – came from the direction of Mesopotamia, and much of the contents of the early chapters of Genesis points unmistakably to that land.

The founding Patriarch came from Mesopotamia; he had been bidden to leave that land for the very purpose that is to become the leading theme of the Bible, namely, the quest of an enduring and universally valid way of life. The story of the ages anterior to the period of Abraham should, therefore, bear the distinctive imprint of his original homeland. That it does so in fact is but further proof that the account as a whole is based on genuine traditions instead of being the invention of some imaginative writer, or school of writers.¹

It was thanks to this affinity with Mesopotamia, which goes back far into the past, that the people of Israel was able to go on to its unique and enduring achievement by filling the vast spiritual vacuum that had caused Abraham to leave Mesopotamia and proceed to the Promised Land. ‘That the original promise was fulfilled remains to this day one of the great wonders of history. The credit, however, for giving Israel its all-important start, physically and culturally, belongs to ancient Mesopotamia.’²

The ancestors of the present-day Jews were members of a clan of no clear ethnicity or peoplehood led by Terah, father of the Patriarch Abraham. The clan left Ur of the Chaldees in Sumer, spent some time in Harran in upper Mesopotamia, and finally left for Hebron in the land of Canaan. This emigration, which took place in the year 1850 BC or thereabouts, is invested in the Bible with the character of a religious movement. The Terahites, in leaving Ur, left behind them the kindred Arameans; they also left behind the gods they and their fathers had worshipped. According to the biblical account, Abraham was ‘called’. It was by the grace of prophetic inspiration, in obedience to the divine voice, that he set foot upon a land (Canaan as it was known then, the Land of Israel as it came to be called by the Jews, and Palestine to the Romans) which he received as a promise to be his and his seed’s ‘for ever’.

Early historians of this period, writing before the great archaeological discoveries were made in Mesopotamia, tended to depict Abraham and his fellow migrants from Ur as simple nomads, originating in the desert. Later findings tended to tell a rather different story. Ur, it transpired, was a trading and manufacturing centre whose business extended far afield. Raw materials were imported, some from overseas, to be worked up in the factories of Ur. A bill of lading belonging to a merchant ship which came up the canal from the Persian Gulf to discharge its cargo in Ur details gold, copper ore, hardwoods, ivory, pearls and precious stones. According to Sir Leonard Woolley, who was in charge of a joint Anglo-American archaeological expedition which began its work on the site in 1923, Ur of the Chaldees at the beginning of the second millennium BC was a powerful, prosperous, colourful and busy capital city. ‘We must’, Woolley writes, ‘radically alter our view of the Hebrew Patriarch when we see that his earlier years were passed in such sophisticated surroundings. He was the citizen of a great city and inherited the traditions of an old and highly organized civilization. The houses themselves reveal comfort and even luxury.’³

Yehezkel Kaufmann, a biblical scholar of the first rank and a prominent historian of ancient Israel, indirectly confirms Woolley’s verdict. ‘The Biblical story’, he writes, ‘which has the family of Abraham wander north, then southwest – from Ur of the Chaldees to Harran, then to Canaan – is … important because it confutes the notion that the Israelite tribes were desert barbarians with a low culture and religion at the time of the Exodus and Conquest.’⁴ Enumerating some of the contributions made by Babylonian civilization to the culture of early Israel, Kaufmann continues:

Israeli traditions regarding the Creation, the Antediluvians, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel have striking parallels in Babylonian literature which show that the [Hebrew] tribes were influenced by Mesopotamian culture during their stay in that area. The social and legal backgrounds of the patriarchal narratives likewise reveal cultural contacts with Mesopotamian legal traditions. Elements of Israel’s hymnal and wisdom literature, along with certain cultic practices, also stem from the period of the tribes’ stay in the land between Ur and Harran.⁵

Our story starts with a cataclysm. A Sumerian lamentation over the fall of Ur, situated half-way between Baghdad and the head of the Persian Gulf, was discovered at Nippur in the year 1900. With a population of between 250,000 and 500,000 engaged in agriculture, handicraft and commerce, Ur’s glory was not to last. Sweeping down from their mountain fastness across the Persian Gulf, Elamite hordes attacked Sumeria, and in the year 1960 BC Ur went down in disaster and shame. The Sumerian lamentation describes ‘the all-annihilating destruction’ wrought by the invaders. The city’s walls were razed to the ground, its buildings reduced to ashes, and its gates filled with bodies of the slain. Both weak and strong perished by famine or were overtaken in their houses by fire, while those who managed to survive were scattered far and wide. Families were broken up. Parents abandoned their children, and husbands their wives.

It is generally assumed that among those who escaped the cataclysm was Terah, the head of an Aramean nomadic family whose original home had been at Harran, in north-west Mesopotamia, but who for some time had taken up residence in the capital city of Ur. Terah, together with his sons and kinsmen, made their way back to Harran, which he intended to be a temporary halting-place, on the way to the far safer land of Canaan. Terah, however, died in Harran and the succession fell to his eldest son, Abram. Abram had a different approach to things, and different ideas from his father’s. Unlike his father, a polytheist worshipping a congeries of idols, Abram was a monotheist; upon succession to the family headship, he promptly broke with idolatory and turned to the service of the one and only God whom he recognized as the creator of heaven and earth. Abram’s one God, moreover, differed from the deities recognized and worshipped in other contemporary religions – such as the Sumerian high-god Anu and the Babylonian universal-god Shamash – in that He was not a nature god, nor was He a territorial god restricted to a particular locality or country. Abram’s god, as the creator of heaven and earth, was independent of nature and of any geographical limitations. Furthermore, unlike the other known deities, Abram’s God was essentially an ethical god to whom justice and righteousness was of supreme concern.

There is reason to believe that round about this time Abram became convinced that he was to become the founder of a new nation – a nation which was to bring the knowledge of God to the world. Detaching himself and his wife and household from the heathen environment of Harran, Abram thus resumed the family trek to Canaan, which he thought would be eminently suitable for the fulfilment of the destiny to which he believed himself to have been appointed. Proceeding south along the eastern bank of the Jordan, he crossed the river into Canaan and reached Shechem, some twenty-seven miles north of Jerusalem, and there he learned in a revelation that the land he had entered and chosen as his new home was the very land which had been predetermined in the counsels of God to be given to him and his descendants. Coming as they did from the other side of the river Euphrates, Abram and his family became known in their new surroundings as ‘Hebrews’, a term derived from a root, ’eber, meaning ‘the other side’.

The process of the Hebrews’ settlement in the land of Canaan was a slow one. Fresh kindred groups followed from the Aramean borderland of the desert. Abram (whose name now appears in the Bible as Abraham) pitched his tents around Hebron; his son Isaac dwelt in Gerar and the Negev; Isaac’s son Jacob, also named Israel, dwelt in Shechem. The Israelites, the Children of Israel, now counted twelve tribes. Two chief divisions marked themselves off according to descent from Leah or Rachel, the two wives of the ancestor Israel: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar and Zebulun claimed descendency from Leah, while Joseph and Benjamin were the sons of Rachel. Two other groups were considered of somewhat inferior lineage as the children of concubines – Gad and Asher, and Dan and Naphtali. However, they all knew themselves to be united in blood, the children of one father.

It was in the Hyksos period (1700–1580 BC) that Joseph, Israel’s favourite son, was reportedly sold by his jealous brothers to an Ishmaelite caravan as it passed through on the way to Egypt. For at least four centuries following this forced migration, the Israelites lived, multiplied and prospered in the Nile delta – until they were driven out by a Pharaoh ‘whose heart the Lord had hardened’ (thought by historians to be Rameses 11, 1290–1224 BC). It was at this juncture that the first great religious reformer in the history of mankind, a man of supreme intelligence and powerful personality, made his appearance. Moses was born at a time when the tyrannical Pharaoh had ordered all new-born male children of the Hebrews to be cast into the river, but Moses was said to have been saved by the ruler’s own daughter. It was Moses who managed to unite the Israelites around the cult of a unique and universal God, and led their long march across the Sinai peninsula; he died just as they were on the threshold of the Promised Land.

After the death of Moses, leadership of the Israelites passed on to Joshua, who led them to victory in the conquest of Canaan. In reality, however, victory was achieved by each of the twelve tribes fighting for its own territory under elected chiefs, or ‘Judges’, and may have taken up to a hundred years to complete. The establishment of an Israelite kingdom under Saul, and the victories of David (1010–955 BC) over the Philistines, Canaanites and the states lying to the east of the Jordan (Amon, Edom and Moab), finally consecrated the supremacy in Palestine of Abraham’s progeny. David, and Solomon after him, succeeded in building a veritable empire, and according to biblical sources the reign of the latter was a period of considerable glory for the new nation. Indeed, for the first time in history Palestine came to obey one ruler whose authority extended from Dan in the north to Beersheba in the south. Jerusalem, formerly a small and unimportant town, became a capital city, and it is said that scores of thousands of workmen took part in the building of its Temple. The Israelite army was armed with weapons of iron and was well provided with horses and chariots. From Etzion-Geber near Akaba (now known as Eilat) Solomon’s ships sailed down the Red Sea and returned from Arabia and Ethiopia loaded with gold. The King himself, who was credited with proverbial wisdom, lived in a sumptuous palace among ‘seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines’. It appears, however, that such pomp and extravagance was more than this small and austere nation could stand, both financially and morally. Solomon’s glorious reign ended in revolution, and after his death in 935 BC the kingdom was divided by plebiscite into two parts: the Kingdom of Israel in the north, with Samaria as its capital, and the Kingdom of Judah in the south, its capital continuing to be Jerusalem; the period of united monarchy had lasted somewhat less than a hundred years.

After over a century of unrest and tribulation, and recurrent wars with neighbours from north, east and south, the first half of the eighth century BC witnessed a return of prosperity and peace in Israel, and both Hebrew kingdoms were free of outside molestation. The Aramean kingdom of Damascus was too weak, after her defeats at the hands of the Assyrians, to renew her aggression; the Egyptians were too busy to interfere or just not sufficiently interested; and the frequent palace revolts which had shaken the kingdoms ceased. In the year 745 BC, however, Tiglath-pileser in became King of Assyria and inaugurated a campaign of imperial conquest which in less than a quarter of a century brought an end to the existence of the Kingdom of Israel and to the independence of the Kingdom of Judah. What happened at first was that King Menahem of Israel (c. 745–737 BC) paid tribute to Tiglath-pileser, but his successor Pekah pursued an anti-Assyrian policy, allying himself for this purpose with Damascus. Whereupon the Assyrian conqueror took Damascus, abolished the monarchy and proclaimed the territory an Assyrian province. The northern and Transjordanian regions of the Kingdom of Israel were also detached and made into Assyrian provinces. The upper strata of the population of these areas were deported and replaced by immigrants from other parts of the Assyrian Empire.

About ten years after this first deportation of Jews at the hands of the Assyrians, Hoshea, the last king of what remained of the Kingdom of Israel, withheld payment of tribute from Assyria at the instigation of Egypt. Whereupon he was imprisoned and Samaria, his capital, was stormed after a three years’ siege and was made the seat of government of the Assyrian province of Samaria. A second deportation took place, involving – according to Assyrian records – 27,290 people, and again foreign settlers were sent to take their place. This took place in the year 721 BC and the exiles were despatched to places in Syria, Assyria and Babylonia.

The fate of Judah, the smaller of the two Hebrew kingdoms, proved to be no better than that of Israel, although the end came 133 years later. Trouble seems to have started in the year 605 BC, with the defeat of the Egyptian forces at Carchemish by the powerful Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar. Judah had for some time been under Egyptian rule, and with the Egyptians’ defeat this rule was superseded by that of Babylon. However, King Jehoiakim of Judah, who had been chosen by the Egyptians to replace his brother Jehoahaz, staged a rebellion at the instigation of Egypt not long after Nebuchadnezzar established Babylonian supremacy in the kingdom. Retribution came rather swiftly: Nebuchadnezzar laid siege on Jerusalem, and the city fell on 16 March 597 BC, Jehoiakim’s young son and successor Jehoiachin (who, in the meantime, had assumed authority) was taken in captivity together with the flower of Judah’s inhabitants. Zedekiah, an uncle of Jehoiachin’s, was then appointed king of the enfeebled state under an oath of allegiance to Nebuchadnezzar. But he too, deluded by Egyptian promises and encouraged by the false prophets, rebelled – and after a desperate siege lasting two years, Nebuchadnezzar stormed Jerusalem again, this time razing it to the ground in August 586 BC. Judah ceased to exist as a sovereign state and became a colony, and the majority of its inhabitants were deported, with only a remnant of ‘vinedressers and husbandmen’ being left behind.

It was the third major deportation of Jews to the land of the twin rivers – and the most crucial and surprising in its ultimate consequences. Commenting on the end of Judah, Rabbi Isidore Epstein writes:

Thus did Judah share the fate of the Ten Tribes – captivity. But whilst the other tribes vanished and merged with their conquerors, Judah alone survived. But that is not all. Out of the crucible of exile and affliction, Judah emerged, purged and purified, into a new people – the Jews. Spreading quickly throughout the earth, the Jews carried wherever they settled a new message – Judaism. Shaped and nurtured by a faith which was impervious to change of circumstance and environment, Judaism in captivity not only survived but also developed a dynamic which in turn was destined to captivate the world.⁶

A fascinating but tricky problem faces the historian here – a problem which will probably remain unsolved. Babylonia had for thousands of years been a highly developed, relatively prosperous and densely populated country. Why then should Nebuchadnezzar have chosen for settlement by the Jews what Josephus describes as ‘the most proper places of Babylonia’, which the region around Nippur, one of the largest cities in the Empire, certainly was? According to Salo W. Baron, this might have something to do with the fate and places of settlement of the earlier waves of Jewish arrivals in Mesopotamia; it is possible, he writes, that some Jewish – or rather Israelitic – settlements had been established in these regions prior to the deportations of 597 and 586 BC.

Under Assyria, he explains, the cities of Babylon and Nippur were less focal centres, and foreign mass se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• PREFACE
• Part One: From the Assyrian Captivity to the Arab Conquest (731 BC-AD 641)
• Part Two: The Encounter with Islam (641–1850)
• Part Three: A Century of Radical Change (1850–1951)
• APPENDIX: THE ORGANIZATION OF THE COMMUNITY
• CHRONOLOGY
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• SOURCE NOTES
• INDEX