My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq

by Ariel Sabar

Tiglath-Pileser advanced the science of warfare with a singular invention: population exchange.

The exiled Jews gave up Hebrew for Aramaic, the common language of the Assyrian empire, but saw themselves as inhabitants of a biblical landscape.

They could claim Abraham as a native son, since the eastern Turkish city of Urfa—ancient Edessa—was very likely the “Ur of the Chaldees” where he was born.

The Babylonian Talmud, drafted just a few hundred miles to the south, makes scant mention of the Kurdish Jews. It’s as if they had just been written off.

A COMPLETE HISTORY of the Jews of Kurdistan is impossible. They never recorded their own story and were too few to rate more than a passing mention by Muslim writers.

In the seventeenth century, Kurdistan’s most illustrious rabbi, Samuel Barzani, a charismatic reformer and yeshiva builder, produces no sons and finds himself unable to continue his line in the usual way. So he drills his beautiful daughter, Asenath Barzani, in Hebrew, Torah, and the Kabbalah. He marries her to his nephew and favorite disciple, Rabbi Jacob, and makes the man swear he’ll never make her do housework. When her father and then Rabbi Jacob die, Asenath is the only one in the family with the training to take over the yeshiva the two men had run in Mosul. She becomes what is thought to be the world’s first female rabbi.

Kurdish storytellers carried a spellbinding oral literature across the generations, but the line between fact, folklore, and fantasy is nearly impossible to discern.

The pinnacle of Kurdish Jewish achievement is not a Hanging Gardens or a revolt against Roman rule. It is something far more simple and poetic: It is the very fact of their survival. It is that after twenty-seven hundred years of being “lost in the Land of Assyria,” one can still speak of something called a Kurdish Jew. It is that twelve hundred years after the rest of Iraq’s Jews switched to Arabic, the Kurdish Jews still spoke Aramaic, the ancient mother tongue of the Jewish diaspora.

To a Kurd the mountain is no less than the embodiment of the deity: mountain is his mother, his refuge, his protector, his home, his farm, his market, his mate, and his only friend. —MEHRDAD R. IZADY, The Kurds: A Concise Handbook, 1992

the Balfour Declaration, the landmark 1917 statement of British support for a Jewish national home in Palestine.

Over the course of several thousand years of Kurdish history—a time long enough for many other ethnic groups to have assimilated entirely into a dominant culture—the Kurds have remained a distinct people. Conversely, almost all who settled among them in the mountains—Scythians, Alans, Arameans, Armenians, Persians, Arabs, Mongols, Turkmens, and Turks—have been kurdified beyond recognition. —MEHRDAD R. IZADY, The Kurds: A Concise Handbook, 1992

KURDISTAN IS A REGION, not a state, and for its religious minorities, that may have been its saving grace. A parabola of mountainous territory at the northern fringe of the Middle East, it spans about two hundred thousand square miles, an area slightly larger than Spain.

But the key to Kurdish identity is not so much a common past, language, racial history, or religion; Kurdistan has seen too much upheaval over the millennia for the textbook bonds of nationhood to apply. Instead, it is the independent character and consciousness forged by hardscrabble lives in the mountains, a frontier mindset where honor and brotherhood count for more than what God you believe in or what language you happen to speak. The identity survived thousands of years of wars and invasions and the division of Kurdish lands into parts of five countries by European powers divvying up the defeated Ottoman Empire after World War I.

In important ways, they were Kurds first and Muslims, Christians, or Jews second. Muslims sent Jews bread and milk as gifts after Passover. They ate matzoh, which they called “holiday bread,” as a delicacy. They sent their Jewish neighbors hot tea during the Sabbath, when Jews were forbidden to light fires. Some Muslims even asked the synagogue keeper to wake them early in the days before Yom Kippur: They viewed early rising on Jewish days of penitence as bringing good luck. And the Jews paid back the respect, forgoing cigarettes, for instance, during the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims may not smoke. In Kurdistan, religions from Islam, Christianity, and Judaism to Sufi mysticism, Bahaism, and Yezidism flourished alongside one another, and extremism was rare. Muslim Kurdish women went out without veils, could buy and sell goods in the markets, and were relatively free to talk with men who were not their husbands. Jewish men wore the same baggy trousers and embroidered tunics as their Muslim brethren.

Christian crusaders had slaughtered thousands of Muslim prisoners, but after his victory, Saladin let Christians exit Jerusalem unmolested.

Iraq’s Kurdish Regional Government added a course on comparative religion to the public-school curriculum, complete with lessons on Judaism and Christianity. “We’re trying to reach the point where all the religions can find common ground,” Fadel Mahmoud, an instructor at the College of Kurdistan in Sulaymānīyah, told a reporter for McClatchy Newspapers in late 2007. “We are not interested in talking about the points of disagreement.” And so Saladin’s legacy lives on.

The Kurds lacked so much as a common set of physical traits. Centuries of invasions and migrations by everyone from the Indo-European-speaking Aryans and Scythians to Mongols, Persians, and Turks had turned the Kurdish population into an ethnic kaleidoscope. Blond, blue-eyed Kurds with semi-Nordic features walked among the brown eyed and the dark skinned.

As far as ordinary Iraqis were concerned, there was no longer a difference between Zionist and Jew.

On May 14, 1948, as the last British high commissioner left Palestine, David Ben-Gurion stood beneath a portrait of Theodor Herzl at the Tel Aviv Museum and proclaimed Israel’s statehood to an electrified nation.

“Palestine is that way, do you understand me?” Abd al-Karim Agha cut him off, furious at the man’s effrontery. “This is Zakho. If you don’t leave now, it won’t be our Jews who will kill you. It will be me.”

The flights from Iraq would be one of the largest human airlifts in history, ferrying some 120,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel in less than a year.

Language lives. It inhales culture and history. It sprouts new limbs, sloughs off old ones. It goes through cycles of rapid growth, unremarkable periods of stable maturity, decay, and sometimes, as with Hebrew, miraculous rebirth.

“As long as these countries were untouched by European influence and their Jewish inhabitants remained rooted in their own cultural tradition, their creativeness was unimpaired and they continued to make considerable contributions to Jewish culture,” he wrote in 1960. “However, with the penetration of European culture, to which Jews, owing to their difficult economic and political situation, were particularly attached, this creativeness came to an end during the last century. [Middle Eastern Jews] abandoned the fountainhead of their own tradition without acquiring a deeper understanding of European culture; their contact with the latter remained superficial and consequently their general cultural level dropped. In the absence of a sound, genuine culture, they were influenced by their Levantine environment and they adopted ways of life equally foreign to Judaism and to enlightened Gentile civilization.”

The more a society advances in a technical and material way, the more its people grow complicated and distant from one another.

Sarah, you have no idea how good it is to have parents, a warm home, brothers and sisters. Most of the people in America are sad, mostly because their family life is wrecked and irreparable.

one Reverend Benjamin Labaree wrote in 1899 in the American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures. “It is almost a Babel of dialects one meets in passing between Urumiah and the Tigris, presenting many difficult problems.

“A memorial candle,” he had typed in Hebrew above the preface, “for my grandfather Ephraim and the rabbis of Kurdistan, who kept the embers of the torah from being extinguished among those ‘Lost in the land of Assyria.’”

He had thought that he could take his past with him, box it up, and replant it in fresh soil.

As he deliberated, an old Iraqi expression kept coming to mind: “Titi went to the well and came back with an empty pail.”

Psalm 137, which he would recite in Hebrew: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. . . . How shall we sing God’s song in a strange land?”

Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Happiness is like a butterfly. The more you chase it, the more it will elude you. But if you turn your attention to other things, it comes and softly sits on your shoulder.”

“Part of his culture is not to expose yourself too much,” she said. “It’s part of his modesty. You battle the devils in private. Otherwise, it’s considered exhibitionism. Western culture is geared to success, rewarding people with money, power, and prestige. In Middle Eastern culture, it’s about being loved.”

messiah returns to redeem his people. I had mostly forgotten mine.

He had made it this far by keeping his head down. You don’t stick out. You don’t make a spectacle of yourself. You don’t ask for too much. You don’t show off. But quietly, when no one is looking, you work harder than anyone else. And quietly, you get ahead.

Teaching Aramaic in America, I came to see, was how he sang God’s song in a strange land.

Each time a language dies, another flame goes out, another sound goes silent. When the whispers of Aramaic and Dama and Plains Miwok are at last drowned out by the shouts, what do we do? We should pause to mourn. But then we must tell our stories in a new tongue, so at least the stories may survive.

If Zakho’s Muslims ate Passover matzo (“holiday bread,” they called it) with Jews, why couldn’t a Kurdish Jew take Communion with Los Angeles Catholics?

There is a counterpoint to the familiar immigrant story of opportunities won: It is the story, less often told, of cultures lost. Its trope is not “a better life for our children” but broken bonds to ancestors, land, identity, and history. For many immigrants, the past is painful and best forgotten; it is the reason they left. But for my father, it was where the best part of himself resided. It was a place where life could still be glimpsed through a child’s eyes.

Jews had carried a flame into the hills of Kurdistan, and they carried it out, still burning, 2,700 years later. My father touched another candle to it and brought it across continents. I didn’t want it to die with me. If my children ever feel adrift, unsure of who they are, I want that candle to still be burning.