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.
