Zakho זָאכּוֹ

Zakho on the Khabur, by today's Iraqi-Turkish border, was from the mid-nineteenth century the chief spiritual centre of Kurdish Jewry and was called "the Jerusalem of Kurdistan." By 1945 some five thousand Jews lived here. It was not a quiet place: the synagogue was burnt in 1891, with more the following year.

Zakho's dialect is Lishana Deni (לשנא דני, "our language"), and of all the Jewish Neo-Aramaic varieties it is closest to the neighbouring Christian ones: the language here is shared with non-Jewish neighbours rather than a mark of difference. It is the Zakho dialect that is best described, above all in the work of Yona Sabar.

Zakho's most valuable legacy is its oral corpus. The scholarship says it plainly: the Jews of Zakho were among the least literate in the diaspora. Hence the consequence: everything other communities wrote down, here they sang and told—midrashim, epic songs, ballads, part of it shared with Muslim Kurdish tradition. And so the Zakho corpus gives what written collections do not: not what the community thought of itself on paper but what it transmitted by voice.

In 1950–51, after the Iraqi denaturalisation law, virtually all of them left. There is no separate figure for the Kurdish Jews in the statistics of Operation Ezra and Nehemiah—and none should be invented: the honest statement is that essentially the whole Jewish population of Iraqi Kurdistan went then, while the Iranian Kurdish communities—Sanandaj, Saqqez, Bijar—and Urmia left separately and more gradually, in the 1950s and again after 1979. In Israel the Kurdish Jews settled above all in Jerusalem and around it—the Katamonim, Qiryat Yovel—in the Haifa area, the Jordan Valley and the Lakhish region, and went into construction labour.