Kurdistan כורדיסתאן
Mountain communities where Aramaic remained the speech of the house into the twentieth century. From here came Asnat Barzani, a woman at the head of a yeshiva; and from here nearly all the Jews went up to Israel in 1950–51.
Kurdistan is not a country on the map but the mountains where present-day Iraq, Turkey and Iran meet, and Jewish communities sat here very long: they trace their beginning to the exiles of Assyrian times, while the verifiable thread runs through medieval letters and colophons.
Their chief mark is the language. While the Jewish world spoke Yiddish, Ladino, Arabic and Persian, here the speech of the house remained Aramaic—the direct descendant of the language of the Talmud. In it they sang, expounded the Torah and kept accounts; scholars were still recording its dialects in the twentieth century.
Learning was held by families of teachers. The house of Barzani gave Rabbi Shmuel, and through him Asnat, the only woman of her century at the head of a yeshiva. Nearby Zakho, Amadiya and Mosul were the knots of that net.
The end came fast: in 1950–51 nearly all of Kurdish Jewry went up to Israel. The communities emptied in two years, and the language went with them.
Related
Sources
Documents of the period
- The colophons and letters of the Kurdish communities — the net of yeshivas, the house of Barzani, living Aramaic
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — the exodus of 1950–51; the recording of the Aramaic dialects
Basis: documents and evidence.