Timur in Baghdad: the real end of the Babylonian community

In 1401 Timur sacked Baghdad. The Jewish refugees from the surrounding villages who had sheltered in the city perished with it. This, and not 1258, is the demographic end of the Jewry that descended from the Babylonian academies.

What followed is best seen in the figures. The Portuguese traveller Pedro Teixeira in the early seventeenth century found Baghdad a city of twenty to thirty thousand houses, of which two or three hundred were Jewish. That is seventy years after the Ottoman capture of the city by Suleiman in 1534: 1534, then, produced no immediate revival, and Baghdad long remained a minor Jewish town. The recovery is a seventeenth-century phenomenon, consolidated only after 1743, when a head was sent from Aleppo following the plague.

Hence the largest correction to the whole Iraqi chapter, and it belongs to Zvi Yehuda. The community destroyed in the twentieth century was not continuous from the Babylonian exile. After the Geonic decline and the fourteenth-century destructions, Babylonian Jewry collapsed: most emigrated to Persia, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, North Africa, Spain and Europe, and the fifteenth century is a documentary "black hole." A new diaspora took shape from the sixteenth century through in-migration from Persia, Kurdistan, Syria and elsewhere—and, Yehuda's sharpest claim, few members of the modern Baghdadi community were directly descended from the ancient Babylonian Jews. A hard corroboration: no Baghdadi Jewish family possesses a genealogy reaching back beyond the end of the seventeenth century.

So the phrase "a community of two thousand six hundred years," habitual in press pieces on the Farhud and on the Iraqi Jewish Archive, is communal memory, not demography. The exact formulation: Jews lived in Mesopotamia from the sixth century BCE; but the community destroyed in the twentieth century was largely a new formation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, built on the ruins of the older one.