The Jews of Zakho

In 2008 it was reported that the Turkish army maintained four bases in the Zakho district, under an agreement concluded with the Iraqi government in the 1990s. The 2011 Dohuk riots which targeted Assyrian-owned businesses were sparked by Muslim clerics in the town. 


Pictured | Traditional men's clothing from the (former) Ottoman Arabic regions. Jews from Kurdistan. Nothern Iraq, late-Ottoman era, ca. 1900.

Mavi Boncuk |

The town of Zakho was known to the ancient Greeks. In 1844. the traveller William Francis Ainsworth commented: "The appearance of Zakho in the present day coincides in a remarkable manner with what it was described to be in the time of Xenophon."

Gertrude Bell was convinced that Zakho was same place as the ancient town of Hasaniyeh. She also reported that the first Christian missionary to the region, the Dominican monk Poldo Soldini, was buried there in 1779. His grave was still a pilgrimage destination in the 1950s.

Zakho was formerly known for its synagogues and large, ancient Jewish community and was known as "The Jerusalem of Assyria". The Jews spoke the Aramaic of their ancestors. The banks of the nearby Khabur River are mentioned in the Bible as one of the places to which the Israelites were exiled (1 Chronicles, 5:26, 2 Kings 17:6, 2 Kings 18:11).

There were serious attacks on the Jews in 1891, when one of the synagogues was burnt down. The troubles intensified in 1892, with heavy taxes being imposed, outbreaks of looting and Jews being arrested, tortured and ransomed. Jews from Zakho were among the first to emigrate to Palestine after 1920. Most of the others relocated to Israel in the 1950s.

While the Jews of Zakho were among the least literate in the Jewish diaspora, they had a unique and rich oral tradition, known for its legends, epics and ballads, whose heroes came from both Jewish and Muslim traditions.

Kurdish jews of Erbil 

A remarkable memoir of one Kurdish Jewish family from Zakho is "My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search  for his Father’s Past"  by Ariel Sabar.  Saber’s book discusses his family’s integration in Israel. Noteworthy is the chronicle of  Saber’s father  who earned  degrees at both Hebrew and Yale Universities becoming a  full professor at UCLA and world recognized expert in the lingua franca spoken by Kurdish Jews, neo-Aramaic.


While heretofore little was known about the Kurdish Jews who arrived in Israel in 1951, more became known as the descendants of this wave of enforced emigration after arriving in Israel. It is estimated that Israel has more than 200,000 citizens of Kurdish Jewish origins, with 100,000 living in greater Jerusalem, alone. 


Pictured | Kurdish Jews in Rawanduz, northern Iraq, 1905. Mizrahi Jews or Mizrahim (Hebrew: מזרחים‎), also referred to as Adot HaMizrach (עֲדוֹת-הַמִּזְרָח) (Communities of the East; Mizrahi Hebrew: ʿAdot(h) Ha(m)Mizraḥ), are Jews descended from local Jewish communities of the Middle East (as opposed to those from Europe). The term Mizrahi is most commonly used in Israel to refer to Jews who trace their roots back to Muslim-majority countries.