They lived in small communities, did not isolate themselves from their Moslem (and Christian neighbors), but were totally and completely isolated from the rest of the world, maintained their own customs and language (a dialect of Aramaic, now called by some Neo-Aramaic, to distinguish it from the Aramaic of Kol Nidre, the Kaddish, and Jesus.
Their world was very stable – until the founding of the state of Israel, and the burgeoning anti-Semitism in Iraq and other parts of the middle east. Virtually the entire community moved to Israel. Sabar’s family settled in Jerusalem (it was 1951), and he and his siblings all became educated Israeli citizens, but Yona Sabar, the oldest sibling with the strongest memories of Kurdistan, could not pull himself from his roots, and (complete with a Ph.D. from Yale) has devoted himself to the preservation of the community’s language and culture.
His son, Ariel, growing up in the Los Angeles of the 1980s, was not interested, and in fact was more than a little embarrassed by his father’s background. He wanted nothing to do with it, and became a journalist, writing for the Christian Science Monitor and the Baltimore Sun. But, with the birth of his first son, he says that he realized that he was not the end of a chain, but a link within it, and decided to learn what he could, to pass it along to future generations.
One of the main problems in the history and historiography of the Jews of Kurdistan was the lack of written history and the lack of documents and historical records.
During the 1930s a Jewish Ethnographer from Germany named Erich Brauer made an important contribution by placing the foundations for the social and ethnographic history of the Jews of Kurdistan. One of the methods he used was oral history while interviewing informants from the Jewish Kurdish community. Unfortunately, he did not complete his work, and it was his assistant, Raphael Patai, who prepared his book for publication in Hebrew, Yehude Kurditan: mehqar ethnographi (Jerusalem, 1940). Fifty years later, while in the United States, Patai published an English version of this book and exposed the subject of the Jews of Kurdistan to the world's English readers.
Recently, an important book came out by the Israeli scholar Mordechai Zaken, who used written, archival and oral sources in his work to bring to life the relations between the Jews and their Kurdish masters or chieftains(Aghas)through hundreds of vivid accounts and stories that are spread along the book, of the fifty-six oral sources from 6 Kurdish towns:
- Zahko
- Aqra
- Amadia/Amadiya,
- Dohuk
- Sulaimaniya and
- Shinno/Ushno/Ushnoviyya)
Thus, this book, which is apparently mainly a family story, but necessarily as well a story of the history of the Kurdish Jews, a branch of Judaism which did not record its own history and whose past is quite sketchy until recent times.
The presentation was excellent, I thought, and was supplemented by a series of terrific questions from the large audience. The lecture was part of the Jewish Literature Festival at the JCC.
