Unwitting Zionists: The Jewish Community of Zakho in Iraqi Kurdistan

© 2010 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gavish, Haya.

[Hayinu Tsiyonim. English]

Unwitting Zionists : the Jewish community of Zakho in Iraqi Kurdistan / Haya Gavish.

p. cm. — (Raphael Patai series in Jewish folklore and anthropology)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8143-3366-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8143-3689-2 (e-book)

DS135.I712Z353513 2010

305.892’405672—dc22

2009028350

The Hebrew edition of this book, Hayyinu Zionim, was published by the Ben-Zvi Institute of Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The English edition was translated from the Hebrew by Yohai Goell.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Werner Weinberg Fund of the Hebrew Union College Press and the Ben-Eli Honig Fund at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for support of this book.

Typeset by Maya Rhodes

Composed in Adobe Garamond Pro and Walbaum

Unwitting Zionists

THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF ZAKHO

IN IRAQI KURDISTAN

Haya Gavish

WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS DETROIT

Unwitting Zionists

RAPHAEL PATAI SERIES IN JEWISH FOLKLORE AND ANTHROPOLOGY

General Editor

Dan Ben-Amos

University of Pennsylvania

Advisory Editors

Jane S. Gerber

City University of New York

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

New York University

Aliza Shenhar

University of Haifa

Amnon Shiloah

Hebrew University

Harvey E. Goldberg

Hebrew University

Samuel G. Armistead

University of California, Davis

Contents

Cover

Copyright

Preface

Abbreviations

1. Between Folklore and History

2. Zakho, an Island in the River

3. Religious Attachment to Eretz Israel

4. Rabbinical Emissaries: A Bridge to Eretz Israel

5. Aliyah in the Prestate Period: The Historical Context

6. The British Mandate Period: Aliyah at All Costs

7. Zionism in Zakho: Zionist Cell or Center for Illegal Immigration?

8. Social Upheaval and National Emancipation, 1950–51

Epilogue

Interviewees: Biographies of Members of the Zakho Community

Interviewees: Emissaries to the Zionist Underground in Iraq

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

Toward the end of 1948, the family of Abraham Zaqen hired Jewish raftsmen from Zakho to transport sawed trees down to the river and float them to Mosul, where they were to be sold. A heavy snowstorm delayed them up for a few days in one of the villages, and only on the Sabbath did the sun finally break through the clouds. They dearly wanted to warm themselves, but due to the Sabbath refrained from lighting a fire. And so, they began dancing, in traditional Kurdish fashion: the lead dancer sang tee, tee, tee, waving a kerchief in his free hand, and all the others replied, Israel, referring to the Jews, the People of Israel. That was the tradition among Zakho Jews. Some Kurds also gathered round the enthusiastic dancers, but one of them—a policeman, a soldier, or a drunk—complained to the authorities, accusing the Jews of Zionism. The dancers were arrested, brought to Zakho and from there to Mosul, where four of the oldest among them were freed. The other eleven were taken to Baghdad for trial in a military court and sentenced to imprisonment. From that day on, the Jews of Zakho had their own Prisoners of Zion (Heb. assirei tziyyon, persons who were persecuted because of their Zionist activity or aspirations).

I heard many versions of this story from former Zakho Jews, four of whom were among those imprisoned. Although there was a consensus among all my interviewees about the event itself, for many years they disagreed regarding details and interpretation. Did the raftsmen dance innocently to warm themselves or were they expressing their joy at the establishment of the State of Israel? Did the lead dancer wave a simple kerchief or was it intended to represent the Israeli flag? Was tee, tee, tee, Israel merely a traditional phrase, sung when dancing at weddings and other celebrations, referring to the People of Israel throughout its lengthy history? This episode was a traumatic event for the Jews of Zakho. When their community came to an end in 1951, with the mass immigration to Israel, the prisoners remained behind, in jail. They were released only later and came to Israel with the last emigrants from Iraq.

This episode is indicative of the duality between Jewish tradition and Zionism among the Jews of Zakho. Such duality in Jewish communities the world over, including those in Islamic countries, has been the subject of much research. It is not my intention to define Zionism, but rather to delineate the Zionist consciousness of Jews in this community, as understood and put forward by those whom I interviewed. Though the community of Zakho, a town in northern Iraqi Kurdistan, was geographically remote and far removed from the influence of the Jewish religious leadership in Iraq, it unswervingly preserved its traditional—that is, religious—character. It generally wrestled with its problems by itself and, as the most important community in the region, was sometimes known as the Jerusalem of Kurdistan.

Many articles and books have been devoted to the history of Zionism in Iraq and the immigration of Iraqi Jews to Israel, with special emphasis on Baghdad. I have therefore chosen to throw light on what happened in one community in Iraqi Kurdistan on the assumption that the history of a community reflects both its unique features as well as central developments in the surrounding area. Since almost no academic study has been written about local Jewish communities in Kurdistan, one purpose of this volume is to fill that lacuna. Its objective is to examine the changes undergone by the Jewish community of Zakho as a result of its religious affiliation with the Land of Israel, its exposure to Zionist efforts, and its immigration to Israel—from the late Ottoman period until the end of the community when it immigrated en masse to Israel in 1951. The volume is based on my doctoral dissertation submitted to Haifa University in 1999.

No such study has been conducted with relation to Zakho. I chose to examine these changes and developments in that community. I found that its remoteness was a deficiency that had some advantages because it preserved, in the twentieth century, traditional social patterns that had not undergone modernization or politicizing. It was therefore not difficult to trace the changes undergone by the community when it became exposed to Zionist activity from the moment it began to open up to external influences and outside information after World War I.

I chose to conduct a folkloric-historical study. While my academic approach is historical, the very choice of the Zakho community mandated the sources at my disposal. There is very little written documentation about Zakho; not much is known about the town and little has been written about its Jewish community. This is where the folkloric aspect came to my aid, filling the gap as much as possible. The folktale, in its various genres, is mistakenly considered to be no more than a means of entertainment and diversion. In my study, the folktale serves as part of the oral documentation that reconstructs the individual and collective memory of the community.

Whereas most of the sources I used are folkloric, my analysis of them is historical. The written documentation was studied and examined with an eye to what it could contribute to historical knowledge and insight, and served as the basis upon which I relied for the construction of the chronological continuity. Oral documentation supplied me with a rich mine of information, diverse and fascinating, that was grounded in the memory of former Zakho Jews and their children, and on their storytelling ability. In the Hebrew version of this book, I reproduced the stories told by my interviewees in their authentic vernacular language and have tried as much as possible to preserve their spirit and style when translated into English. By means of the oral documentation, I was able to uncover much of the recent history of the community, reconstruct events, reveal certain episodes, trace changes, and verify and countercheck the information provided by the written sources. Without it, much of this would have been lost forever. By means of the two types of sources of information, I believe that I have been able reconstruct a communal reality and lifestyle of which very little had been known.

This study is based on primary sources—interviews and archival material—and on secondary published works. Such works related to all aspects of Kurdish and Iraqi Jewry in general, including Zionist underground activities in Iraq and immigration to Israel. I also found published material that added somewhat to the information I gleaned from the stories related by my interviewees about the Zakho Jewish community and its lifestyle.

In 1988–89, I conducted an extensive field study during which I interviewed thirty men and women from Zakho of various ages. They included rabbis, secular communal leaders, persons who engaged in various crafts and having different economic status, and persons who emigrated from Zakho at different times. Thus was I able to put together a wide panorama of information and impressions. I have also availed myself of the interviews conducted in 1967 by the Oral History Division of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1993–94, I conducted interviews with an additional twenty-nine persons who had emigrated from Zakho to Israel, and with seven emissaries from Israel to the Zionist underground movement in Iraq that also organized clandestine immigration to Israel. In addition, I was able to consult interviews conducted with former Zakho Jews in 1994 as part of a research seminar on Life Stories, in which I participated, conducted by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

I found historical documents in public archives and private collections. I also found some documents outside of Israel, in the archives of the League of Nations in Geneva and the National Archives in London.

This study would have been impossible without the wonderful cooperation of former Zakho Jews. I am grateful to members of the community who accompanied my research with painstaking interest. Above all, my thanks go out to all the interviewees who consented to be interviewed and lent me their cooperation for several years, and to the members of the Zionist underground movement who were active in Zakho and contributed an important stratum to my study. I have provided some biographical details about the interviewees in the text or at the end of the book. My thanks to Prof. Yona Sabar and Prof. Shalom Sabar for their help in translating some Kurdish words and phrases into English, and thanks to Mr. Ariel Sabar for finding the draft map of unknown origin in the Library of Congress. I am grateful to Dr. Don Rush for his valuable comments and to all those who gave me good advice or tendered other help and whom I have not mentioned by name.

The Hebrew version of this book was published in 2004 by the Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East, Jerusalem. I thank the institute for permission to publish a revised English edition. Finally, I am especially grateful to the translator, Mr. Yohai Goell, who produced a text that is faithful to the spirit of the Hebrew volume and has helped me create an improved and updated version for readers in English.

Zakho, 1938. In the forefront: Sa‘adon Bridge on the Khabur River. Courtesy of University College, London, Sir Aurel Stein Collection, 13996.

Abbreviations

CHAPTER 1

Between Folklore and History

The Jews of Kurdistan, who were believed to be descendants of the lost Ten Tribes of Israel, were the object of much empathy. Itzhak Ben-Zvi, second president of the State of Israel, and Prof. Simha Assaf, a prominent Jewish historian, and others called them those that were lost in the land of Assyria, "ahim nidahim (remote brothers), and nidhei yisrael " (the remote of Israel).¹ Kurdistan’s Jews were isolated from other Jewish communities for many centuries, the earliest mention of them dating from the twelfth century. Zakho’s Jews were probably even more cut off from any tangible connections with the outside world, for they are barely mentioned in travel itineraries, and even such mentions are primarily in the nineteenth century.

I began research on Kurdish Jews in 1978 as part of my studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem after being approached by Prof. Dov Noy, who wanted to conduct field research among the Oriental Jewish communities. Noy pointed to the paucity of folktales of these communities as compared with the abundance of similar folkloric materials whose origin was European Jewry. I was especially attracted to members of the Kurdish ethnic group because in Jerusalem, where I lived, I had Kurdish neighbors and friends. They belonged to an ethnic group so different from my own. My first assignment was with former members of the Jewish community of Arbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan. This undertaking prepared me above all to meet the first methodological challenge in this type of research: how to find interviewees among an ethnic group so different from that of the interviewer.

My curiosity whetted by the first study, I set out on another undertaking: to interview a Kurdish storyteller from Barazan, who was about ninety years old and had been the childhood friend of Kurdish revolutionary leader Mula Mustafa Barazani, and to study the stories he told me. This I did at a gathering of elderly members of the Kurdish community in Kiryat Malakhi, a town in southern Israel, in preparation for the celebration of the traditional Sehrane festival in 1981.² It was difficult to persuade him, but he finally acceded to my request. Thus, step by step, I prepared the infrastructure that enabled me to write a master’s thesis in Folklore Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on Immigration Stories of the Jews of Zakho, which in turn led to the present study that combines folklore and the documented history of the community of Zakho.

Historians and folklorists adopt different approaches toward the documentary materials available for historical research into a community. The historical approach, which stresses the external perspective, is to compare written and oral source materials. The folkloric approach emphasizes the internal perspective of the community as reflected in oral testimonies. The historical-folkloric approach, which I represent, combines the two: the history of a local community is studied and documented using both written and oral sources. The meeting point between folklore and history is oral documentation. Interviewing witnesses to an event is a means that has always served historians who wrote about their own times. The wide or narrow gap that divides or connects (depending on one’s viewpoint) history based on written sources and oral history has given birth to a unique terminology.³ Oral history is not an independent field but rather a supportive tool in the service of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, whose scholars apply oral life stories, memoirs, anecdotes, and conversations in their specific studies.

Oral documentation, as a field of its own, appeared on the scene after World War II because of the need felt to deal with contemporary history in real time. Awareness of its importance increased with the invention of the tape recorder, enabling the recording of interviews. The audio or audiovisual results of such sessions provided the testimony with a measure of credibility and authenticity.⁴ Extensive use of interviews by an historian began with Prof. Allan Nevins, who in 1948 created an oral documentation program at Columbia University in New York.⁵ His approach was elitist; that is, it focused on interviews with leading personalities who presented a sort of biographical narrative dealing with several fields such as politics, economy, and the arts. Nevins’s approach influenced most oral documentation projects for about two decades, but since then there has been much oral documentation relating to communities, government agencies, and organizations that has become known in the United States as public history.⁶

The credibility of oral traditions and oral documentation is a weighty issue. Some scholars claim that the credibility of written documentation is greater than that of oral sources because the latter tend to change over time; however, both convey a message from the past to the present. Moreover, the two are not interchangeable—oral traditions and documentation do not save the day when written documentation has failed. Important as they are, they are no substitution for historical reconstruction; they are sources that correct other historical perspectives, just as other perspectives correct them.⁷

The question of credibility does not bother folklorists who are engaged in collecting oral testimonies and life stories. They claim that oral history always contains at one and the same time truth that is simultaneously practical, factual, and imaginary. Even if an interviewee lies to an interviewer, the falsehood teaches us something about the interviewee’s culture, society, and psychology.⁸

Folklorists are not tied down to written sources, and therefore factual credibility (i.e., what is true and what is false) does not bother them; they are therefore at some advantage when studying a group about which there is no written documentation. Folklorists and their colleagues, the oral historians, may be contributing to scholarship by collecting information about certain people or a group who would otherwise remain outside the bounds of historical research; in fact, they believe that oral history is the only way to study such populations. This approach is being used by both historians and folklorists in researching local history, though each have their own emphases, viewpoints, and work patterns.⁹

My research on the Zakho Jewish community is a study of its history. Communal histories written by folklorists generally seek out the internal perspective of the community’s members—how they view their community—and do not avail themselves of written documentation.¹⁰ They include in their studies legends and extraordinary stories that are unbelievable, related in the first person, and that the folklorists believe express an internal historical truth. To folklorists, this approach is legitimate. To historians and those engaged in oral history it lacks credibility, because they aspire to write an objective history on the basis of information from memory that is supported by written documentation.¹¹ Members of both schools, folklorists and historians, therefore recommend cooperation between historians and folklorists in researching a communal history. Combination of the two approaches contributes positively to the study of the history of any community. I found it especially vital in research on the Zakho Jewish community because its members were experienced in transmitting oral traditions but had left behind them only very limited archival documentation. When the two research approaches were combined, I found that cross-fertilization was the rule of the day. I took the testimonies of the interviewees at face value, not thinking of the truth but rather of the local history of the group that received and passed on these traditions. In the many stories related by former Zakho Jews there is a hard kernel that does not tell a lie. While I presented the perspective of the interviewees, as an historian I paid attention to variations between versions of the same story and checked to determine whether and how what they related was supported by existing documentation. The historical picture that emerged, therefore, could be likened to a mosaic.

Very important data on the history of the Zakho community can be found in archival sources on the Jews of Kurdistan and Iraq. Although my focus was on Zakho, that community was not isolated from its surroundings and from historical events in Iraq, Baghdad, or even Palestine. What emerged from my study, first of Baghdad and then of Zakho, was the great contrast between these two communities, as though they belonged to different countries. I also touched upon the community in Arbil, another Kurdish city that was an important provincial capital and geographically closer to the center of government in Baghdad. Members of the Zakho community and emissaries who visited it referred to the Arbil community, mentioning in what aspects it was similar to and in what aspects it differed from Zakho. At times I found it necessary to refer also to information concerning other Jewish communities, particularly in North Africa.

Recording Personal Memories

The oral documentation upon which my study is based is a collection of memory narratives or personal narratives. It also contains a few that are of the life history genre. Some scholars tend to treat the three in a similar manner,¹² but above all one should differentiate between memory narrative or personal narrative and life history. The first type, memory narrative, is a short story that focuses on a certain event that the narrator tends to relate time and again on different occasions during his or her lifetime. The life history, on the other hand, is the reconstruction of a longer period in the life of the narrator, so that oral documentation in this case is more like an attempt to create a biography.

Some researchers tend to adopt existing terminology, whereas others prefer to create a new term, based on existing ones, that better serves their purpose.¹³ In my study I chose to create the term personal memory narrative that stems from both memory narrative and personal narrative. I did this because I believe that history is connected to both personal and collective memory, and my study focuses on the study of narratives in their historical context. My efforts were intended to show what was characteristic of the patterns of the Zakho Jews’ collective memory in connection with their emotional relationship to Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel) and to immigration to Israel (hereafter aliyah),¹⁴ this on the basis of personal memory narratives, though I did not overlook variations in the individual testimonies. Personal and onetime diversities in testimonies, too, are worthy of recording.

The stories I heard were related to me as personal narratives, personal testimony, whether the narrator was an eyewitness to the event—one who experienced certain events—or provided testimony that was only a reaction to events and phenomena, even as hearsay evidence. Most of those I recorded were eyewitness accounts, whereas only a few of them were based on hearsay. These were personal narratives delivered from the viewpoint of the narrator, who accepted responsibility for what he or she told me. The narratives of Zakho’s Jews are also life stories because the events narrated played an important role in the lives of the narrators, especially one historic event with momentous implications for their lives—aliyah. That, and the religious affiliation with Eretz Israel that preceded it, programmed the lives of the individuals and the community such that the personal memory narratives were divided into two groups: those relating to life in Zakho and those bearing upon their life in Israel.

The persons I interviewed were motivated by a strong desire to document. They sensed the break between past and present and were conscious of what differentiated between them. I was happy to see that many were aware of the moral value involved in preserving the past and wished to give permanent shape to their image of the past through memory narratives. They wanted to preserve the past and the image of the social group to which they belonged because from childhood they had lived in collective social groupings such as extended families, the heder (traditional religious school), and the community, all of which shaped their collective memory. By means of their personal memory narrative they reconstructed the past in the form they wished, and some among them may have wanted to create a new identity for themselves and their community.¹⁵ A value system was transferred in the same manner.¹⁶ Thus was the personal memory narrative afforded a role for both the individual and the community, and simple persons were able to express themselves, for otherwise they would not have had a forum in which to tell their tale.¹⁷

In research interviews such as those I conducted much importance is attached to the narrator-listener or interviewer-interviewee relationship. The narrative is not an objective product; it changes in accordance with its listeners.¹⁸ Some experts maintain that narration of the story is more effective when the interviewer and the interviewee have a common ethnic background or something else in common, such as gender, age, profession, and status, or are closely acquainted.¹⁹ Others believe that good, important narratives can be gained if the interviewer adopts the tactic of open interview that enables the interviewees to express themselves freely and without interference, since it is only natural that they want to express themselves in a free-flowing story and only later be asked specific questions.²⁰ That is the method I adopted for all the interviews I conducted; as a result I collected important and significant stories from which I believe my research benefited. It could very well be that in this manner we participated in the creation of an historical product.²¹

In the personal memory narrative, the narrator sets out from some point in the present to describe a past event or experience and ends up returning to the present. This, of course, influences the shaping of the narrative. The listener gives the narrator an opportunity to return to the past and perhaps even to rehabilitate it. Like historians, narrators are in need of some distance in time to consider anew their past experiences in relation to the present. The text of the personal memory narrative combines fact and fiction and the ideal with reality. The drama of real life fuels the stories, which in their turn influence life; in other words, there is a continuum between life and the narrative. But the stories do not objectively reflect real life because the narrators shaped them in accordance with their own objectives and evaluations, which their narrative interprets. Yet, the stories are more than mere artistic fantasies; they are grounded in real life and influence the creation of new experiences.²²

In addition to the recommended criteria for evaluating the authenticity and value of the narratives, during the interviews I tried to check the credibility of the narrator as he or she related the story to me as a listener. Whenever there was a great discrepancy between the facts or interpretation of the narrator and what I already knew about the events, I tried to verify this through the narratives of others or written documentation. Quite often, the narrators used me as a sounding board through which they imparted their stories to members of the immediate family, especially children and grandchildren, thus creating an indirect link between themselves and the other listeners.

The Interviewees

Though each person interviewed is a world unto his or her own, and despite differences in age, profession, and status, some attributes are characteristic of them all. The first is the quality of the interviewee chosen: I did not choose them randomly but rather, on the basis of the knowledge I had accrued from the written sources, picked men and women who could contribute stories or information to my research. It was on the basis of those sources that I prepared a questionnaire that helped me choose narrators, but it was not given to them. As the study progressed, changes were incorporated into the questionnaire according to the narratives and information that had already accumulated. The second attribute is that the interviewees were on a list of names I received from a friend that included members of the Zakho communal elite whom it was believed could contribute to my research even if they had not filled key roles in the community. These interviewees also opened the way to interviews with others who were connected to the stories I heard, and thus was created a diverse, yet inclusive, sample of former Zakho Jews.

The historical aspect of my study influenced the choice of interviewees. Some had been mentioned in stories collected in the past and were now interviewed a second time to verify facts or to compare and supplement the information in hand. Others were chosen because of their connection to material I had located in archives. Finally, I interviewed emissaries of the Zionist underground movement whose names had come up in some narratives or whose involvement with the Zakho community emerged from the archival material.

The interviews created an intimate and friendly atmosphere. There were cases in which wives decided to tell their stories after they heard their husbands’ testimonies delivered in their homes. In contrast to some scholars who believed that a research framework is not conducive to storytelling,²³ I found that the amicable atmosphere was conducive to the telling of unexpected and moving stories. As one of the interviewees said, We lived on stories.

Some maintain that the key problem in oral history lies in the gap between interviewer and interviewee—differences in background, communication patterns, and dress. At least two perspectives are involved in oral history: that of the social climate of the interviewer and that of the social climate of the interviewee.²⁴ One of those whom I interviewed repeatedly maintained that there were talented people back in Zakho who could have been university professors in Israel had they received a proper education; a second emphatically declared that his decision to quit studying in the heder, the synagogue school, is to his detriment to this very day. And then there was the case of the interviewee who delayed opening the session with me for an hour so that I would have to wait for him, even though we had agreed beforehand on the time of the interview. Such behavior, though vary rare, was demonstrated by interviewees who today hold important positions in various fields. This, however, was not detrimental to my research, for already in the first meeting the sense of social difference and alienation quickly evaporated, and at times we even created a mutual long-term friendship.

It also seems that there was some significance to my being a woman, though I cannot pinpoint any concrete evidence of this. Most of those I interviewed were middle-aged or elderly men who were raised in a patriarchal society ruled by men, one in which there was absolute differentiation between the genders in many areas of daily life. Even if most of them have lived in Israel for many years, their former lifestyle still exerted a great influence. I sensed that, paradoxically, there was even some advantage in my being a woman; in their view I was less of a competitor, less of a threat. For a researcher, being an outsider who is not involved in the internal squabbles of the community under study is an advantage; however, noninvolvement may also prove to be a disadvantage since important details may be missed. My study benefited from my being an outsider. There are very close relationships within the community of former Zakho Jews, perhaps because it is relatively small, with many intracommunal marriage ties; however, there is also no lack of conflict and tension. Thus, there were interviewees who told me that they were prepared to talk to me and tell me their stories, but not tell them to other members of the community. Some who had been interviewed previously by persons of Jewish Kurdish descent frankly informed me that they told me more than they had been willing to reveal to the previous interviewer. And then there were those who agreed to be interviewed by me precisely because I was an outsider, because they wanted an objective academic person to preserve and record for posterity their personal biography and communal history. This was never expressed outright but always incidentally, sometimes not even verbally.

It is only natural that this was simultaneously advantageous and disadvantageous because it influenced the interviewees’ choice of stories and their content, how they related them, and what details they omitted so as to create a favorable impression upon the interviewer and thus become part of history in the most positive manner. This is often the case with research based on oral history. To overcome this drawback I did the utmost to match the stories with written documentation and did not accept what interviewees told me at face value. Moreover, as an outsider I was free of ethnic or tribal obligations, unlike an interviewer from within who might be hampered by such obligations.

Most of my interviewees were interviewed several times at various times; sometimes I even interviewed additional members of their families. I made an effort to note their manner of speech and body language in addition to the conditions under which the narration was conducted, including such external aspects as where it took place, the outward appearance of the interviewee, and his or her willingness to be interviewed. It is my impression that former Zakho Jews have undergone a process of Israelization that has left its mark upon them in several spheres, and most probably that was the major cause of their willingness to lend me their cooperation. This process was also expressed in the language in which they told their narratives: all of the former Zakho Jews I interviewed spoke in Hebrew, and most of them intertwined idioms and phrases translated from their original language.²⁵ Their acculturation in Israel also influenced the close relationships that developed between the interviewees and myself despite the differences between us. After the ice was broken, the atmosphere was one of conciliation, identification, and involvement with my project. What happened between us was a gradual removal of the barriers between interviewer and interviewee, between someone who came from the academic world to sit at the feet of persons of a different social and cultural status in order to learn from them.

Memory, Memory . . .

When I interviewed former Zakho Jews, I became aware of the issue of memory—its forms and sources. Memory takes the form of a paradigm that is influenced by the historical and cultural milieu in which a person develops. Moreover, memory is organized along the lines of models or literary forms such as events, activities, and places that play an important role in the autobiographical memory of a person.²⁶ The recollections of my interviewees from Zakho focused on two different paradigms: one relating to life in Kurdistan and the other to their new lives in Israel. One of the preconditions for good memory is a link to traumatic or dramatic events. Such were the events in Iraq and Kurdistan following World War I, and such was the condition of the Jews in Iraq after the establishment of Israel. Aliyah and all the activity connected with migration from one place to another definitely filled this criterion because they became social drama.²⁷ My questions regarding aliyah and the events that preceded and followed it aroused and stimulated the memory of my interviewees. I also availed myself of artifacts because a person is unable to preserve the past in the same way as he or she holds on to objects.²⁸ The idea of using objects generally came from the interviewees themselves, who showed me household artifacts, amulets, and family photographs, generally taken on the eve of aliyah. There were those who showed me an Iraqi identity card that expressly stated that the holder may leave Iraq, but is forbidden to return.

Another characteristic of the memory paradigms of former Zakho Jews is what scholars who have engaged in the study of communities call a layered memory. This is a term that expresses the complexity of memory and its subjective and selective basis, because not everything can be remembered. Memory is a combination of the private and public aspects, brings together the past and the present. It blends everyday local matters with universal elements in which the person who is called upon to remember finds a common denominator and therefore bridges the gap between them and reconciles them. All that is layered memory.²⁹ This blend of different levels of memory is also characteristic of the Jews of Zakho, in whose minds there is no conflict among the various elements but rather conciliation among them, except in a few exceptional cases. It may well be that one of the reasons for this is the nature of the community—small and culturally isolated, whose members did not have many opportunities to identify with other social groups. Each individual has remained loyal to his or her spiritual and cultural sources, while in their collective memory a nexus has been created between the life of the individual and parallel public events. The memories of individuals, therefore, include simultaneously both private and social elements relating to the same event.

A silver pendant woman’s amulet from Zakho, engraved with the eight-letter name of God, comprised of the two forms of the Tetragrammaton. Courtesy of Batya Ben-Aharon.

From the perspective of folklore, memory is not obligated to reconstruct an exact reality or to express factual accuracy; it is enough if it expresses the view from inside the individual or the group. What is most important from the folkloric viewpoint is the literary or narrative ability to impart the memory, with all its complexity, to the listener, and this with consistency and internal logic. Much importance is attached to the orderly development of a sense of the past, present, and future in the life span of an individual in order to create a personal identity.³⁰ However, consistency and internal logic do not have to be too watertight and absolute, because life and history are not organized along absolute lines.³¹

Of the interviewees from Zakho it may be said that most were talented storytellers, despite the natural personal differences among them. This can be attributed to three major reasons: (a) The topics about which they were interviewed focused on a central event in their lives—aliyah and all that surrounded it—which encouraged and stimulated them to tell their stories. (b) The choice of interviewees was not random but based on their perceived ability to contribute to the research from historical or folkloric aspects. (c) Warm, friendly relations between interviewer and interviewee, once the ice was broken, encouraged the interviewees to tell their stories. I was impressed by the various interviewees’ excellent recall of the facts, even though many years had passed since the event. Instrumental in this was that the first round of persons interviewed was comprised of key figures in the community—rabbis and other leaders—who were centrally involved in communal life and participated in decision making. There were certainly cases of omission of facts and selective presentation of information—of which I became aware when I cross-checked the narratives with written documentation. These, though, did not stem from forgetfulness but from a tendency that is quite common in oral history to relate positive matters and omit negative ones, and to tend toward conformity. That is what led me to compare the reports from one individual with those from others.³²

The others interviewed, who in my study represented other strata of former Zakho Jews, also exhibited an excellent memory because they, too, were not chosen at random; they were either connected to narratives related by other interviewees or were chosen because I knew they could make an appreciable contribution to my research. This was very important particularly because, for certain topics, they were my only source of information. Thus, for example, in contrast to an abundance of historical source material on aliyah from Iraq in the 1950s, there is very little comparable material on aliyah from Kurdistan, in general, and Zakho, in particular. Therefore, what my interviewees recalled filled a gap in the historical data.

Most of those whom I interviewed were middle-aged or elderly, although a few were greatly advanced in years. Scholars who dealt with the recollections of such elderly persons have emphasized the tendency to recall information selectively that focuses on the distant past.³³ In the interviews I conducted, I found that memory that focused on the past was advantageous and contributed positively to my study from both the historical and the folkloric aspects. On the level of folklore, the majority of the interviewees very much wanted to relate their stories and displayed a good ability to organize their recollections in an orderly narrative so as to present their lives as being significant in relation to the history of the community. On the historical level, concentration on the past led to very positive results in all that related to factual accuracy, and this precisely among the very old interviewees. The eldest of them, ninety-six years old at the time, quoted from memory sections of a document to whose drafting he had been partner about seventy years earlier.

CHAPTER 2

Zakho, an Island in the River

Jews lived in Zakho for many generations. Knowledge of this community’s way of life in its natural setting is a key to understanding the factors that shaped the spiritual world of Zakho’s Jews. It is also a basic element in any analysis of the changes undergone by the community that influenced its attachment to Eretz Israel.

A town in northern Kurdistan, near where the borders of Iraq, Turkey, and Syria converge, Zakho was a rural center and a regional marketplace. It also served as the religious and spiritual center for the Jews dispersed throughout nearby villages. Due to geographic conditions, combined with Ottoman rule, the area remained backward. This was also true of Kurdishpopulated areas in eastern Turkey and northern Syria that are close to Zakho. Even after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the British Mandate over Iraq, a step that sparked modernization, economic development, and advances in education and culture, the marks of progress almost altogether skipped over Kurdistan, especially the area near the northern border. The fact that Zakho’s Jews, like the rest of Kurdish Jewry, lived among Muslim Kurds as a minority within a minority added to the sense of isolation of its Jewish community.

Observance of religious practices and tradition was characteristic of the community’s lifestyle. Its members punctually observed religious commandments and customs and throughout the years were careful not to assimilate with non-Jewish society. Religious life focused round the synagogue; festivals and their attendant precepts were strictly observed; all the important rites of passage in a person’s lifetime were performed—those connected with marriage, giving birth, Bar Mitzvah, burial, and mourning; and the rules governing kosher food were strictly followed. It was common practice to turn to talismans, folk beliefs, and faith healing.

This description should not lead to the conclusion that life in Zakho was ideal. Like any society, there were always problems, tensions, and internal strife, but the local leadership was usually able to settle differences of opinion or keep them under cover so as to preserve social order in the community.

There were few changes in the lifestyle of Zakho’s Jews, the social hierarchy and the professions followed by most of them generally remaining unchanged. While all these elements did serve to maintain the communal structure over the centuries, they also created a sense of treading water that would change only as a result of strong external influences: the arrival of rabbinical emissaries from Eretz Israel to collect funds, World War I, contact with Zionist emissaries, and the establishment of and immigration to the State of Israel.

The Zakho Community in the Written Sources

In his study of the poetry of the Kurdish Jews, Joseph Rivlin wrote, No other of the diasporas of Israel has left such a meager imprint on Jewish history as the Kurdish diaspora.¹ This is too authoritative a conclusion, for Rivlin’s study was preceded by other, albeit more general, ones not devoted to a specific community but providing information on various communities in Kurdistan, including that of Zakho.

Over the years since Rivlin published his book, it was followed by others.² The Zakho community has apparently been the subject of more research than any other Kurdish community, probably because of the concentration of former Zakho Jews in Jerusalem, which enabled them to preserve their communal characteristics. The contribution made by Donna Shai’s 1975 doctoral dissertation was primarily to the field of the traditional folk literature of the Jews of Zakho. Her work was based on materials collected in Israel and analysis of the changes incurred under the influence of Israeli culture. Her approach was a sociocultural one par excellence, without any discussion of the historical dimension. Shai’s dissertation did not touch upon the personal memory narrative genre, nor did it refer to the emotional and religious affiliation with and aliyah to Eretz Israel.

In addition to this dissertation, other diverse primary and secondary sources can be divided into five groups: (a) Letters dating from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries. (b) Descriptions included in travel itineraries of Jews and Christians who visited Zakho from about the beginning of the nineteenth century until the 1940s. (c) The research published by Erich Brauer (1948, 1993) and Abraham Ben-Ya‘acov (1961, 1981). (d) Books by members of the community during the second half of the twentieth century. (e) Hithadshut, a periodical published irregularly, beginning in 1973, by the Kurdish community in Israel.

Letters from Kurdistan

Jacob Mann and Simha Assaf have published letters that illuminate spiritual and social aspects of life in Kurdish Jewish communities, especially from the sixteenth until the eighteenth centuries. Walter J. Fischel did the same for letters of a later period, the first decades of the twentieth century.³ These letters, as noted, contain important information on the spiritual and social life of Kurdish Jews, their attachment to Eretz Israel and ties with Kurdish Jews in the Holy Land. However, only a few of these letters deal specifically with Zakho, and they contain but scant information.

Travel Literature

Depictions of Zakho in the travel literature written by Jews and Christians are generally brief and fragmentary. However, they are an important source because they do provide us with information about the city, particularly during the nineteenth century.⁴ Of course, one must treat this information carefully, for it is difficult for a passerby to gain a deep and credible understanding of the life patterns one sees fleetingly.⁵ Yet, when all the information supplied by travelers is collected, it does enable a comparative discussion that adds to our knowledge about Zakho.

Studies by Brauer and Ben-Ya‘acob

Although these studies are an important basis for research on Kurdish Jewry, they include little discussion of Zakho. Erich Brauer conducted an ethnological study of Kurdistan, including a historical survey of its Jews.⁶ In several chapters he does record a few details about the traditions and customs of the Zakho community. The major deficiency of Brauer’s book is that he conducted and completed his study in the late 1930s on the basis of information he collected in Palestine, at a time when the majority of Kurdish Jews were still in Kurdistan.

In The Jewish Communities of Kurdistan, Abraham Ben-Ya‘acob described the Jewish communities in the Kurdish regions of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey. This is an important work because it summarizes the written evidence.⁷ Among the sources he used were the travel descriptions left by Jewish travelers who visited Zakho in the nineteenth century. Ben-Ya‘acob’s short survey of that city includes information on several aspects of Jewish life there, but this information is short and encyclopedic in nature and does not enable a proper analysis to be conducted.

Books Written by Former Zakho Jews

In the introductions to their books, the authors generally write that they are relying on the works of Brauer and Ben-Ya‘acob but are adding details and comments from what they remember personally. These memoirs provide information of various aspects that are over and above descriptions of the city. The anthology published by Yona Sabar documents traditional folklore among Zakho Jews;⁸ Meir Alfiya’s book on the Kabbalah opens with a lengthy survey of the community of Zakho and its legends and a biography of his father;⁹ the volume by Mordechai Yona includes a map of Jewish landmarks in Zakho prepared from memory by Meir Zaqen.¹⁰

Hithadshut

Hithadshut is an organ of the Kurdish Jewish community in Israel.¹¹ The authors have no pretensions to academic research, and the importance of the articles lies in testimony provided by witnesses to the events or secondhand evidence the authors heard from their parents or other former Zakho Jews.

On the basis of this survey of the written documentation about Zakho, we can only conclude that it is very poor and has no bearing on the present study, which focuses on folkloric and historical materials that provide the background for the community’s emotional affiliation with Eretz Israel and the aliyah of its members in the twentieth century. In contrast to the aforementioned research, our study is founded on archival documents that have not been used in a suitable context and a large collection of oral testimonies by members of the community or the Zionist underground emissaries whom I interviewed.

This information is of special value, more than that gleaned from routine research, because it reconstructs a community that no longer exists and whose members did not set down much in writing. In certain areas, the interviewees were the sole source of information. These testimonies do not supplement the written documentation; the opposite is true: the little written documentation supplements the oral testimonies.

In chapter 1, I dwelt extensively upon the issue of the reliability and the nature of the interviewees’ memories. Here I should like to emphasize that, in depicting Jewish life in Zakho, my interviewees made every effort to be as realistic as possible, to concentrate on the facts and not be swept away into nostalgic and idealistic memories. Mazliah Kol told me that the interview excited him almost to the point of pain. When I asked him, Why? Because it is impossible to return to Zakho? he replied, No. I have seen more beautiful places. Then why? Because we didn’t know how to leave it earlier.¹²

Mazliah Kol was not alone in not yearning for the past. In an interview conducted in 1987, Meir Zaqen, when referring to the exodus from Zakho in 1950, said,

What property [i.e., Jewish property and homes] did they [i.e., the Kurds and Iraqis] get? A plague is what they got! They got a desolate city whose commerce collapsed after we left. They got our homes? A few years later all of Iraq was in trouble. This happened after we left. They killed the king and killed one another. There was one revolution and then another revolution. There were Barazani’s wars which shook Iraq. I read a newspaper report about how the Kurds gave themselves up to the Iraqi authorities in Zakho. Barazani came to Zakho and handed over his weapons and that of his fighters. That is where he surrendered. About a year and two months ago I was in Turkey. I went to those areas that are near Zakho. The Kurds there, who fled from Zakho, completely forgot their origin. A long time has passed. What am I trying to tell you? That the situation has changed.¹³

Other interviewees, who managed to secretly visit Kurdistan and Zakho in the past few years, sought their roots there, but not one of them clung nostalgically to their past, to the low level of education they had received, or the economic difficulties and the insecurity that had been their lot. They remembered a small town and found that it had become a big city that had received Kurdish refugees persecuted by the regime of Saddam Hussein. They remembered a Jewish quarter and found that it had been destroyed. This gap between memories of the past and the reality of the present generally caused them great disappointment and strengthened their belief in the good luck that had extricated them at the right time from that city.¹⁴

Zakho: An Island in the Sea and a Community of Jews among Lofty Mountains

We were well aware of the existence of large communities of Jews in Kirkuk, Arbil, and Mosul, but only by chance did I learn that Jews lived in the Kurdish villages in the lofty mountains. So wrote historian Walter Fischel in his impressions of a visit to Kurdistan in 1930.¹⁵

The city of Zakho is located in northern Iraq, at the far end of the main road used to administrate the region that leads from Baghdad through the district capital of Mosul to where the borders of Iraq, Turkey, and Syria meet. Zakho is about ten kilometers from the Turkish border and some thirty kilometers from that of Syria. It is located in a valley, on an island in the middle of the Khabur River, a tributary of the Tigris. Northwest of the city, in Turkish territory, the Judi mountains rise to a height of over 2,000 meters, and further north are the mountains of Hakari and Armenia, over 3,000 meters high. In the winter these mountain ranges are covered with snow, which melts in the spring, providing water for the region’s springs and perennial streams.¹⁶ The Khabur flows from the east through a twisting gorge and spills into the Zakho Valley until it finally joins the Tigris. The Bēkhēr Ridge and the White Mountain (Jebel Abiad), which rise to a height of 1,200 meters, close off Zakho from the south. The road leading from the city of Mosul and the village of Dohok to Zakho runs through these hills in a mountain pass that is difficult to traverse and easy to block.¹⁷

Zakho’s unique geographic conditions in the northern mountainous region of Iraq—that is, its distance from the center of economic, administrative, and religious life in Baghdad and the difficulty of reaching it by land and, in certain seasons, by the river—had a decisive effect on turning Zakho into a small and remote town, even though it did serve as a central marketplace for villages in the north because of its strategic location near the convergence of the three international borders. The impression left by the wild mountain country is reflected in the narratives