Jewish communities have lived in Kurdistan for a very long time, possibly since the Assyrian exile of the eighth century BCE. By the twentieth century, tens of thousands of Jews were scattered across Kurdish towns and villages, from Mosul and Zakho (Zaxo) in what is now Iraq, to Sine (Sanandaj) and Urmiye (Urmia) in Iran, and further north into parts of Anatolia. They spoke Kurdish dialects alongside their own Jewish Aramaic languages, traded in Kurdish markets, and in many places grew close enough to their neighbours that the boundary between Kurdish and Jewish culture became genuinely blurred. Then, within a few years in the early 1950s, almost all of them left.
Life in Kurdish towns
In cities like Hewlêr (Erbil) and Zaxo, Jewish families had lived for generations as part of the fabric of local life. They were merchants, craftsmen, silversmiths and moneylenders. In some towns they had their own quarters, as was common across the Middle East, but they shared the bazaars, the roads and the rhythms of Kurdish rural and urban life with Muslim and Christian neighbours. Many spoke Kurmanji or Sorani as naturally as they spoke their own community languages. Jewish women in Kurdish areas wore versions of Kurdish dress. Kurdish folk melodies found their way into Jewish liturgical singing. The overlap was not accidental. It came from centuries of proximity and everyday exchange.
Relations between Kurdish Jews and their Muslim neighbours were not always simple. Like any minority living under shifting political conditions, Kurdish Jews experienced periods of tolerance and periods of pressure. But many oral accounts from Kurdish Jewish families recall genuine warmth with Kurdish neighbours, and there are well-documented cases of Kurds sheltering or assisting Jewish families during difficult times.
The departure
The creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and the wars that followed, changed everything across the Middle East. In Iraq, the position of the Jewish community became increasingly uncomfortable. In 1950 and 1951, the Iraqi government allowed Jews to emigrate on the condition that they give up their Iraqi citizenship, and the vast majority chose to go. Most of Iraqi Kurdistan’s Jewish population left in those years as part of a broader wave that brought well over a hundred thousand Iraqi Jews to Israel. Jewish communities in Iran left more gradually, with a significant acceleration after the 1979 revolution.
The departures were often painful. Families left behind property, graves, languages and friendships that could not be packed into a suitcase. Some left in a matter of weeks. The communities that had existed for possibly two millennia were effectively gone within a generation.
Kurdish Jews in Israel
Today, a substantial community of Kurdish Jewish descent lives in Israel, concentrated in cities like Netanya and in various towns and neighbourhoods across the country. They brought their languages, their music and their food with them. The Jewish Aramaic dialects spoken in Kurdistan, sometimes called Lishana Deni or Jewish Neo-Aramaic depending on the region, were maintained for decades in Israel, though they are now spoken mainly by older generations. Kurdish Jewish music has had a distinct presence in Israeli cultural life, drawing on the same modal traditions and emotional directness that anyone familiar with Kurdish music will recognise.
Kurdish Jewish identity in Israel is layered. Many families identify strongly as Israeli, as Jewish, and as Kurdish, without feeling any contradiction between those things. Community associations have worked to preserve memories of Zaxo, of Akre (Aqrah), of Duhok and of smaller villages whose Jewish life is now only in photographs and stories. Some descendants have visited the towns their grandparents came from, and a handful of documented encounters between Kurdish Jewish visitors and the Kurdish families who remembered their former neighbours have been genuinely moving.
Memory and connection
What survives is a thread of shared culture that neither side entirely let go of. Kurdish Jewish recipes, wedding songs and place names are kept alive in Israel by families who still feel the pull of a landscape most of them have never seen. In Kurdistan itself, older people in Zaxo and other towns sometimes speak of their former Jewish neighbours with a fondness that has outlasted the political upheavals of the twentieth century. The connection is quiet now, but it is real.
At Kurdistan.fm, we are always interested in the many threads that make up Kurdish culture and history across the world. If your family has a story connected to Kurdish Jewish life, or if you know of music, poetry or memories that deserve a wider hearing, we would love to hear from you.