History of the Jews in Iraq

Overview

The Jews of Iraq formed one of the oldest continuously established Jewish communities outside the Land of Israel. Their history began with deportations following the Assyrian defeat of the northern tribes of Israel in 722 BCE and the Babylonian conquest of the southern kingdom in 586 BCE. Over subsequent centuries, Jews built communities across Mesopotamia and made Babylonia a leading center of Jewish religious scholarship. Its academies helped produce the Babylonian Talmud, among the foundational works of Judaism. Jewish communities thus existed in the region for centuries before Muslim communities appeared there in the seventh century CE.^[1][2]

Iraqi Jewish life combined intellectual achievement, commerce and participation in public affairs with recurring legal inequality and violence. Under Islamic rule, Jews generally retained communal worship and religious administration as dhimmis, but paid jizya and faced restrictions imposed by particular rulers. In the twentieth century, Jews helped build Iraq’s state institutions and contributed to its economy, schools, literature and music. By the 1940s, about 135,000 lived in Iraq, including roughly 90,000 in Baghdad and 10,000 in Basra.^[2][7]

The Farhud, a two-day assault on Baghdad’s Jews in June 1941, marked a decisive break in their sense of security. Postwar persecution, arrests and executions followed. Laws enacted in 1950 and 1951 stripped emigrating Jews of citizenship and enabled confiscation of their property. Israel brought more than 120,000 Iraqi Jews to safety through Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, ending the presence in Iraq of most members of a community rooted there since antiquity. Iraqi Jewish life continued principally in Israel, while questions of lost citizenship, property and heritage remained unresolved.^[7][9][10]

Origins

Assyria’s conquest of the northern tribes of Israel in 722 BCE brought some Jews into the territory of present-day Iraq. The Babylonian destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE and deportation of Jews from the southern kingdom established a larger community in Babylon and its surroundings. Exile did not end Jewish communal life. Families established enduring institutions in Babylonia, maintained ties to Jewish religious tradition and developed a distinct identity that survived successive changes of empire and government.^[1][2]

Babylonia became central to Jewish learning. The academies of Sura and Pumbedita trained scholars, decided questions of religious law and helped shape the Babylonian Talmud between approximately the fifth and seventh centuries CE. Their influence extended beyond the region: Jewish communities elsewhere addressed questions to Babylonian sages, whose responses connected distant congregations to the academies. The intellectual authority established in this period remained a defining part of Iraqi Jewish history long after political power shifted to new capitals.^[1][2]

Jews of Babylonia experienced persecution under the final rulers of the Persian Sasanid dynasty and welcomed the Arab conquest in the seventh century. Under the new Islamic rulers, their status was that of dhimmis: Jews and Christians could maintain worship and administer communal religious affairs, but occupied a subordinate legal position and paid jizya, a tax imposed on dhimmis under Islamic rule. This arrangement allowed religious institutions to endure without granting equality. The severity of additional restrictions varied across periods and rulers.^[2]

History

Founded in 762 as the Abbasid capital, Baghdad soon became Iraq’s largest Jewish center and the seat of the exilarch, the leader associated with Babylonian Jewish communal authority. Jews lived in a quarter known as Dār al-Yahūd. A bridge leading toward the Karkh quarter bore the name Qanṭarat al-Yahūd, or Bridge of the Jews. By the end of the ninth century, the yeshivot of Sura and Pumbedita had been established in Baghdad. The city contained synagogues, scholarly institutions and communal leadership that linked local life to Jewish communities far beyond Iraq.^[2][3]

Jewish figures also entered scholarly and courtly life. Near the end of Umayyad rule, Māsarjawayh, a Jewish physician from Basra, became known for translating Greek medical works into Arabic. In the first Abbasid generation, the Jewish astrologer Misha b. Abra, known as Māshāallah, served at court. During the tenth century, Baghdad’s Netira and Aaron families exercised influence at the royal court and supported the Jewish community. Isaac ben Moses ibn Sakrī of Spain later served as a Baghdad rosh yeshivah, or head of an academy. These careers illustrate how Jewish learning and professional life developed within the wider culture of Iraq.^[2][3][4]

Other cities had substantial communities. Basra’s Jews maintained close ties to the Sura academy and contributed 300 dinars annually. After Sura closed in the tenth century, its last Gaon, Joseph ben Jacob, settled in Basra. Until about 1150, Basra’s Jews continued sending religious questions to Baghdad’s yeshivah, particularly to Sherira Gaon and Hai Gaon. Around 1170, the traveler Benjamin of Tudela recorded approximately 10,000 Jews in Basra, among them wealthy residents and religious scholars. Basra also had both Rabbanite and Karaite communities.^[4]

A Jewish community lived in Mosul by the mid-seventh century, in a quarter called Mahallat al-Yahūd. The Jewish philosopher Ibn Abi Saʿīd ibn Uthmān Saʿīd al-Mawṣilī lived there in the mid-tenth century. Mosul’s community grew during the first half of the twelfth century under the principality of Atabeg Zangī and his sons. Benjamin of Tudela found approximately 7,000 Jews there before 1170, led by R. Zakkai and R. Joseph. About a decade later, Pethahiah of Regensburg found more than 6,000. Such accounts show that Iraqi Jewish life extended well beyond Baghdad.^[5]

Baghdad’s community reached a peak of prosperity during the tenure of Samuel ben Ali ha-Levi as rosh yeshivah, approximately 1164–1194. He raised Torah study to a high level, while Jews of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries worked as physicians, perfumers, shopkeepers, goldsmiths and moneychangers. The exilarch Daniel ben Ḥasdai held such prestige that Arabs called him “Our lord, the son of David.” These periods of influence coexisted with vulnerability. During Buwayhid rule from 945 to 1055, Jews and Christians faced persecution, and Jewish autonomy over collection of the jizya was abolished. Caliph al-Muqtadi imposed heavy taxes and discriminatory decrees during his reign from 1075 to 1094.^[2][3]

Later conquests brought further destruction. During Tamerlane’s conquest of Mesopotamia in 1393, many Jews in Basra were killed and every synagogue in the town was destroyed. Under the Ottoman Empire, conditions again changed with political control. Baghdad’s Jews faced oppression under Persian rule during the Ottoman–Safavid struggle for Iraq and received fairer treatment under Ottoman rule. Ottoman government treatment nevertheless grew harsher in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Economic opportunity persisted: the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 shifted Europe–India trade toward maritime routes, strengthened Basra’s port economy and helped raise the economic standing of Baghdad’s Jews.^[2][3][4]

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, about 200 Jewish families lived in a separate quarter of Kirkuk. Jewish migration from northern to southern Iraq enlarged Basra’s community from the mid-nineteenth century. Modern Jewish schooling also expanded. The Alliance Israélite Universelle opened a boys’ school in Mosul in 1906, a girls’ school there in 1912 and an elementary school in Kirkuk in 1913. The Kirkuk school closed when World War I began. In Baghdad, religious academies operated alongside newer schools that taught languages and prepared students for commerce, public employment and professional work.^[2][4][5][6]

World War I brought severe disruption. The Ottoman Army drafted several thousand Iraqi Jews and sent them to distant fronts, from which many never returned. In Baghdad in 1917, Ottoman authorities blamed Jews for currency devaluation and subjected members of the community to extortion, torture and execution. When British forces captured Kirkuk in May 1918, local Jewish residents had helped them; Turkish forces retook the town two weeks later and persecuted Jews who had been unable to leave. These events exposed communities already strained by war to direct punishment and loss.^[1][2][6]

The Iraqi state established under the British Mandate in 1921 granted Jews citizenship, voting rights and eligibility for elected office. Heskel Sassoon became the state’s first minister of finance and helped build its institutions. Jewish representatives held between four and six seats in Parliament and one in the Senate during the mandate era. Jews served in government, finance and the professions, while communal institutions continued to manage religious and secular affairs. Iraq’s 1936 directory counted about 120,000 members of the Israelite community and listed Hebrew among the country’s six languages.^[2][7]

Persecution and survival

Legal inequality had a much longer history than modern Zionism. Under Caliph Omar II, who ruled from 717 to 720, Jews and other dhimmis faced restrictions on public employment and dress. Caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd imposed heavy taxes and restrictions on Jewish dress and commerce during his reign from 786 to 809. In 850, Caliph al-Mutawakkil ordered Jews and other non-Muslims to wear yellow head coverings or visible yellow patches. Iraqi Jews nevertheless sustained scholarship, trade and communal institutions across these periods. Prosperity and personal ties with neighbors were real features of their history, as were subordinate status and documented persecution.^[2][13]

During the 1930s, Nazi propaganda reached Iraq through Arabic-language broadcasts from Berlin. An Arabic translation of Mein Kampf appeared in a Baghdad newspaper in 1933–1934. Rashid Ali al-Kailani seized power on April 2, 1941, with support from the Golden Square officers and Jerusalem’s former mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husayni. The pro-Nazi coup intensified threats to Iraq’s Jews. On June 1–2, amid the collapse of the coup government, mobs attacked Jews in Baghdad in the Farhud, a pogrom whose Arabic name conveys violent dispossession.^[7]

The Farhud killed Jews, wounded many more and devastated homes and businesses. A government commission counted at least 240 Jews wounded, 586 Jewish businesses pillaged and 99 Jewish homes burned. The Jewish community’s investigative committee estimated property losses at approximately 680,000 pounds. Accounts differ in their casualty totals, but the attack’s effect on Baghdad’s Jews was unmistakable. It shook confidence that longstanding residence, civic participation or personal relationships could guarantee their safety.^[7][8][15]

A wartime commercial boom helped Baghdad’s Jewish business community recover economically after the Farhud. Recovery did not erase the pogrom. Many Jews remained deeply shaken and questioned their place in the city’s society. Hostility from Arab nationalists increased Jewish leaders’ dependence on Iraq’s pro-British regime. Leaders discouraged activists from actions they feared would provoke further hostility; Jewish members of Parliament did not publicly defend Jewish minority rights and did not vote against the government. The community’s restored commercial activity therefore coexisted with lasting insecurity.^[7][8]

After World War II, public violence and state restrictions made Jewish life increasingly dangerous. Iraq prohibited immigration to Israel in 1947 and later made Zionism a capital offense. After Israel’s establishment in 1948, Jews faced dismissals from public service, limits on travel and property transactions, arrests and accusations that treated Jewish identity as evidence of disloyalty. The state executed Basra businessman Shafiq Adas after falsely accusing him of being a Zionist and communist agent. Such measures struck a community whose members had helped build Iraq’s modern economy and government.^[2][9]

Iraq’s monarchy enacted Law No. 1 in 1950 and Law No. 12 in 1951. Together, the measures stripped Jews of citizenship and enabled state confiscation of their property and money. About 50,000 registered to emigrate within one month; the registration list reached 90,000 two months later. Jews permitted to leave in 1951 had to sell property and businesses and could carry no more than $140, 66 pounds of luggage and no jewelry. On March 10, 1951, confiscation of Jewish assets left about 120,000 Iraqi Jews stripped of their wealth.^[2][8][10]

Israel organized Operation Ezra and Nehemiah to bring Iraqi Jews to safety. Its first flights traveled through Cyprus; later flights carried passengers directly from Baghdad to Israel’s Lod airport. Over the operation, more than 120,000 Jews were airlifted. Most of Iraq’s Jewish community departed, leaving only about 6,000 in the country. The migration was shaped by violence, criminalization, loss of citizenship and confiscation, as well as by the possibility of building new lives in Israel. It preserved lives while bringing an ancient Iraqi community’s broad presence in its homeland of exile to an end.^[2][9][14]

In 1952, Iraq barred Jewish emigration and publicly hanged two Jews after falsely accusing them of bombing the U.S. Information Agency office in Baghdad. Jews who remained faced renewed restrictions after the 1967 Six-Day War: Iraq barred them from universities, employment by non-Jews and ownership of new businesses. Under Baʿath rule, persecution intensified. Public hangings in Baghdad in 1969 became a stark symbol of the danger; between January 1969 and January 1970, thirteen Jews were hanged. Others were imprisoned, murdered, kidnapped or disappeared in the following years.^[2]

Religion and culture

The religious institutions of Iraqi Jewry connected local worship to a far-reaching tradition of scholarship. Babylonian academies produced and transmitted interpretations of Jewish law that shaped communities across the diaspora. Baghdad’s exilarch and yeshivot exercised authority, while scholars in Basra, Mosul and other towns contributed questions, funds and learning. Synagogues and schools sustained communal identity through changes of dynasty, language and state. The long life of these institutions explains why the destruction of the community in the twentieth century was also a loss of religious and cultural continuity.^[1][2][3][4]

Iraqi Jews participated in the Arabic-speaking society around them while retaining Jewish religious practices and communal organization. Their work included medicine, translation, trade, banking, public administration and crafts. In the late Ottoman and mandate periods, new schools added Arabic and foreign languages to traditional study. By the twentieth century, Jewish intellectuals, authors and poets contributed to Arabic literature. Jews also played a major role in Iraqi music; they formed most of Iraq’s ensemble at the 1932 First International Congress of Arabic Music in Cairo.^[2][13]

Communal life encompassed more than the capital. Basra linked scholars and merchants to Baghdad and to maritime trade. Mosul maintained its own Jewish quarter and leaders, while Kirkuk’s families sustained a smaller community with local commerce and schooling. In Baghdad, communal councils, religious leaders and charitable institutions supported education and welfare. The community’s strength came from this network of households, synagogues, schools and occupations, as well as from the celebrated academies of earlier centuries.^{[2][4][5][6][7]}

Most Iraqi Jewish families carried these traditions into Israel after the airlift. Their departure formed part of the wider Jewish exodus from the Muslim world, in which longstanding Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa were sharply reduced. Iraqi Jewish memories include successful careers, friendships and attachment to Iraqi culture alongside the Farhud, discriminatory laws and forced loss of property. These experiences together form the community’s historical record.^[9][13][14]

Present day

Only a small number of Jews remained in Iraq after the mass exodus, and their numbers declined further in later decades. A 2008 U.S. diplomatic cable described nine Jews in Baghdad who concealed their identities amid threats to their safety. Some remained because they were too old to leave or feared beginning life in an unfamiliar country. One woman relied for years on a Christian neighbor who helped her move around the city and offered protection. The account illustrates both personal solidarity and the insecurity faced by the remnant community.^[12]

Citizenship and property remain unresolved issues for displaced Iraqi Jews and their descendants. Iraq’s 2005 constitution promised a route to restore citizenship withdrawn for political, racist or sectarian reasons, yet the anti-Jewish citizenship laws enacted in 1950 and 1951 remained in force. Claims also concern homes, businesses, money and communal property confiscated during the exodus. Legal efforts to recover rights face the contradiction between constitutional promises of equal citizenship and the continued effect of measures directed at Jews.^[10]

Preservation of Iraqi Jewish heritage has also become urgent. In 2008, original communal documents remained in a former Baghdad community center, while Torah scrolls were dispersed around the city. The survival of manuscripts, records, synagogues and other objects matters to the history of Iraq as well as to the families who left. On September 24, 2021, 312 Iraqi religious and civil society leaders gathered in Erbil to call for reconciliation with displaced Iraqi Jews and peace with Israel. The gathering drew criticism from the Iraqi government but showed continuing Iraqi interest in the country’s Jewish past.^[2][11]

Jewish cultural and religious ties to the region have continued even where permanent communities have nearly disappeared. In December 2019, Jews from the Kurdistan Region and abroad gathered in Al-Qosh in the Nineveh Plains to celebrate Hanukkah. Such gatherings, heritage work and efforts to restore citizenship keep Iraqi Jewish history visible. They also underscore the scale of the change: a community that shaped Babylonian scholarship and modern Iraqi public life for more than two millennia now lives overwhelmingly outside Iraq.^[2][11]