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PREFACE
Taking Up Brauer’s book after almost fifty years is for me like revisiting the haunts of my youth, like going back in time to a Jerusalem very different from what the city has become in recent years. In the intervening decades not only has Jerusalem become the capital of Israel and its physical appearance greatly changed, but it has developed into a center of manifold and intensive research activity in scholarly fields that were in their infancy in the 1940s. Among them was the study of the Jewish communities, whose number was to be soon thereafter so drastically reduced—tragically by the Nazi holocaust and messianically by their in-gathering in Israel.
In the 1930s Brauer was the only ethnologist (this is how he styled himself) to study any Jewish community; and the time granted him was enough only to complete one book, (on the Jews of Yemen) and to bring close to conclusion a second one (on the Kurdish Jews). It was while he was working on this book that I made his acquaintance; and it was partly, at least, under his influence that my interest shifted from the historical folklore of the biblical and talmudic periods to the anthropology of the modern Middle East in general and its Jewish communities in particular. After his untimely death in 1942,1 felt truly alone in the huge terra incognita of contemporary Jewish anthropology; and it took me some two years before I reached the determination that it was up to me to initiate and organize research in this field. In 1944 I founded the Palestine Institute of Folklore and Ethnology and soon thereafter started to work on the completion and Hebrew translation of the English manuscript of The Jews of Kurdistan left behind by Brauer. Looking back on those years, I feel that one of the most important publications of the institute was this book, which appeared in 1947.1
In the course of the decades that have passed since, various aspects of the life of the Kurdish
Jews have been studied by a dozen or so scholars. A. Ben-Ya‘aqov wrote on their history,2 J. J. Rivlin on their oral poetry,3 Edith Gerson-Kiwi on their musical traditions,4 Irene Garbell on their language,5 Yona Sabar (himself a Kurdistani Jew) on their folk literature* and so on. Yitzhaq Ben-Zevi (patron of the institute and later the second president of Israel) and I both devoted parts of our general, survey-type books to the Kurdish Jews.7 Yet with all these studies, Brauer’s book has not only not been superseded by new research, but it has not even been augmented or duplicated hence the importance of its publication in English, which makes what is still a unique ethnological monograph available to the wider scholarly community and, at the same time, serves as a monument to a scholar whose work has to this day remained largely unknown outside the narrow circle of Hebrew-reading anthropologists.
In my first prefece, written in 1946,1 said what I felt had to be said about the life and work of Erich Brauer and the circumstances in which he wrote his Kurdish book and in which I subsequently completed and published it. In this second preface I feel called to present a few data I consider important for supplementing Brauer’s book and a few observations on how I see today—fifty years after be wrote it—its values and limitations. To begin with, some statistical data on the Kurdish Jews are in place.
Demographic studies, carried out by Abraham Ben-Ya‘aqov, have shown that shortly prior to the establishment of Israel (1948) there existed 187 Kurdish-Jewish communities; of them, 146 were in Iraqi Kurdistan, 19 in the Iranian region, 11 in the Turkish region, and another 11 in the Syrian region and other places. As for population figures, for lack of statistical data, it could only be estimated that their total number was between 25,000 and 30,000. Some statistics of questionable accuracy were available only for Iraq, where, in 1947, 3,109 Jews were said to live in the Irbil (Arbil) province; 4,042 in the Kirkuk; 10,345 in the Mosul; 2,271 in the Sulaymania; and 2,851 in the Diyala provinces a total of 22,618 for the whole of Iraqi Kurdistan. These figures were published in the Encyclopaedia Judaica? (s.v. “Kurdistan”) by Ben-Ya‘aqov, who, however, with H. J. Cohen gives somewhat different figures in the same Encyclopaedia (s.v. “Iraqi”),’ quoting the same official Iraqi statistic. Moreover, Cohen there writes that in 1948 “about 19,000 Kurdish Jews lived in Iraq.” This vacillation as to their number in Iraq, where “official” statistics were available, illustrates the difficulty in estimating the number of Kurdish Jews outside Iraq in the same period.
Immigration of Kurdisb Jews to Palestine began in the sixteenth century and was directed to Safed in the Galilee, which at the time was the most important Kabbalistic center. For three centuries thereafter no information of any Jewish movement from Kurdistan to Palestine is available. Then, between 1900 and 1926, there was a Kurdish immigration to Palestine of about 1,900 Jews and in 1935 of another 2,500. The establishment of Israel was followed by the arrest of hundreds of Kurdish Jews in Iraq but subsequently, the Iraqi authorities relented and permitted Jewish emigration. As is well known, in 1950-51 practically the entire Iraqi Jewish community—some 125,000 strong—was airlifted to Israel, including almost all the Jews of Iraqi Kurdistan. Therewith the entire Iraqi (originally Assyrian and Babylonian) diaspora was liquidated, and the twenty-six centuries of Jewish history in Mesopotamia came to an end.
Once in Israel, the rapid assimilation of the Kurdish Jews to Israeli life and conditions began; and their specific type of Jewish culture, which had its origin in biblical and talmudic times started to disintegrate. Because of these developments (which could, of course, not be foreseen in the early 1940s), Brauer’s book, which at the time of its writing was devoted to a vibrant and highly individual Jewish community became, within a few years, a monument—the only existing monument—to a community that has survived physically but only at the price of losing its remarkable cultural specificity.
What can we learn from Brauer’s book on the Jews of Kurdistan? Above all, the student of Jewish life in the Middle East is struck by the intensity of the interrelationship between the Targum-speaking Jews and their Muslim neighbors in the villages and towns of Kurdistan. The accounts gathered by Brauer from the mouth of Kurdish Jews in Jerusalem about their life in Kurdistan prior to World War II show with great clarity that there was a lively participation by the Muslim Kurds in the folk life of the Kurdish Jews, including, in the first place, the popular Jewish religious observances. His book contains many examples showing that the Muslim Kurds attended Jewish folk rites—often even actively participating in them—and that there were numerous Jewish rituals in which such participation by the Muslim Kurds, including their headmen (the aga and the pish-mire) was either expected or required. The Muslim Kurds, for their part, considered such participation desirable because they were convinced of the beneficial effects of the religious folk rites performed by the Jews and believed that they, too, would derive benefits from them. Elsewhere I had occasion to point out that such religious cooperation between Muslims and Jews existed in Morocco.10 From the present book it appears that a similar mutuality existed also between the Jews and the Muslims in Kurdistan.
This, of course, does not mean that in either Morocco or Kurdistan the Jews were not subordinated to the Muslims; nor does it mean that there were not (occasionally at least) indignities, exploitations, and even atrocities inflicted by the Muslims on the Jews. But my impression is that on the whole, the Jews and the Muslims got along reasonably well and that the former found ways in which they could hold their own vis-a-vis the latter.
Brauer’s informants (as well as mine some five years later) convey the definite impression that the Kurdish Jews were, in the period preceding World War II, a rough, rude lot, given to violent behavior toward each other, whether in earnest or in jest. Beatings of weaker persons by stronger ones—inferiors by superiors, weak men by strong men, children by teachers and parents, women (wives) by men, those guilty of crimes by those who had jurisdiction over them—were the order of the day. Thievery, often sanctioned by folk custom, and sabotage were nothing out of the ordinary. The humor of Kurdish Jews tended to be sexual and scatological. Some of these character traits were carried over by the immigrants to Israel, where many stories circulated about the violence and recklessness—but also the bravery and physical strength— of the Kurdish Jews.
What was not pointed out either by Brauer or by me in the supplementary notes I gathered for the book in the mid-1940s was that in all these character traits the Kurdish Jews closely resembled the Kurdish Muslims. Since the Jews were few and the Muslims many, we would have been led to the conclusion that the presence of these traits among the Kurdish Jews was the result of cultural-environmental influences absorbed by the Jewish minority from the Muslim majority. The fact that the Jews, despite having found a modus vivendi with the Muslims, were definitely dependent on them for their survival, also points to influences emanating from the mores of the Muslim majority and making themselves felt in the behavioral and attitudinal patterns of the Jewish minority. In other words, we have here a Jewish community that absorbed these traits (rather unusual among Jews) from the non-Jewish social environment in which they had lived for more than two millennia.
More remarkable is the fact that the Jews of Kurdistan succeeded in retaining so many typically Jewish traits that continued to distinguish them down to the days of their emigration to Israel. One of these was literacy. Although the literacy of the Kurdish Jews was not as high as that of the Yemenite or even of the Moroccan Jews, they mere a literate population element in the midst of a largely illiterate majority population. To send a child to school, and to make him learn to read Hebrew and (to a lesser extent) also to write it was a matter of course for the Kurdish Jews, while nothing comparable existed among the Muslims. Likewise, it was a Jewish, but not a Muslim, trait to insist on the observance of many religious precepts. This was never easy; and in the case of the small and isolated Jewish groups in the Kurdish villages, it was quite difficult. The similarities and differences between the Kurdish Jews and the Kurdish Muslims is a broad subject with many ramifications, but we must leave it here.
I think I am justified in saying that this book is a historical document, on two counts. First, it presents a picture of Kurdish Jewish life and culture prior to World War II. Brauer’s work on the book was cut short by his death in 1942. In the interviews I conducted with Kurdish Jews in Jerusalem in 1944 46 my informants were individuals who had left Kurdistan before the outbreak of the war, so that whatever data they supplied pertained to the same prewar period. In 1950-51, with the mass immigration of Kurdish Jews to Israel, their world as it had existed before the war suddenly ceased to exist. Hence, this book is a unique historical record of the life and culture of a Jewish community that has since disappeared from the country it had inhabited from antiquity, and has undergone a total transformation after its settlement in Israel.
Second, this book is a historical document because it presents the results of an ethnological method of investigation and interpretation / that itself has been superseded by more modern anthropological approaches. As I point out in the Preface to the Hebrew Edition, written in 1946, Brauer was an adherent of the Kulturkreis school, which has since completely disappeared from the horizon of anthropological research. Although he referred in the body of the book only rarely to “culture circles,” still, the scope (and the limitations) of his interest in the community he studied reflects the approach of his masters Luschan, Weule, Graebner, and others. Hence, the book as it stands is a monument to what a “Kulturkreisist” was able to do in studying a community from a distance, without ever having visited it.
Looking at the Brauer book fifty years after it was written, one cannot help noticing several omissions. One is the absence of a chapter on language. Although the book contains a profusion of linguistic materials (single terms, compound expressions, phrases, sayings, etc.) richly illustrative of the colloquial as spoken by the Jews of Kurdistan, there is no attempt in it at giving a general analysis and characterization of their language. This being the case, the reader gets no overview of the various language elements that had gone into shaping the Tar-gum of the Kurdish Jews: the neo-Aramaic base, enriched by Kurdish (Kurmanji), Arabic, Turkish, Old Aramaic, and Hebrew expressions. It would have been interesting and valuable to investigate, in addition, the types of concepts covered by vocabularies derived from each of these languages.
In this connection, a comment must be made on the problems connected with the transliteration into Latin characters of words in the Targum language of the Kurdish Jews. Since Targum is a purely oral language, which was never written, the student had to rely on his ear in listening to the way it was pronounced and then try to render it phonetically as best he could. This was the method used by Brauer, by me when working on the completion of the book and interviewing Kurdish Jews, by Joseph J. Rivlin when he collected and put in writing the orally preserved poetry of the Kurdish Jews,11 and by others. This is more difficult than it sounds for several reasons. First of all, there are variations in pronunciation between people from different areas, as well as inconsistencies in the speech of one and the same person, such as ghuldmalkhuldm (slave); hitna/khitna (bridegroom); semkal smaka/samkisa (pregnancy); susita/sisita (braid); chdla/shdla/shala/shalo (trousers); chehil/chilke/chilqe/cheli (forty); and seba‘ta/'suboieta/suwdtha (dyeing).
Next, there are divergences from old Aramaic that the student is inclined to mishear, such as Targum khevrdye from Old Aramaic hevraye, Targum ‘eda from Old Aramaic ‘eda and Targum z’aora or zora from Old Aramaic z era. The linguistically educated student knows that in these words there should be a het or an ‘ayin, and may hear it even if, because in the course of centuries the phonemes in question have disappeared, the informant does not pronounce it.
Even with regard to place names, there are variations. For example, one and the same town is pronounced (and written by travelers and mapmakers) Arbil, Arbela, Erbil, and Irbil. Similar examples are Zakho/Zakhu, Nusaybin/Nesibin/Nisibin/Nisebin, Dehok/Dohuk/ Duhok, Ravanduz/Rawanduz/Rowanduz/Rawandiz. Added to all this are the considerable variations between the Iraqi and the Iranian usage and between one locality and the other, as becomes evident on practically every page in the book.
Dr. Brauer had no time to prepare a glossary for this book; feeling that it would be useful, I have prepared the glossary that appears at the end of the book.
The musical traditions of the Kurdisb Jews are yet another area not touched upon in Brauer’s book. True, be speaks of their musical instruments, of the occasions when the muturbaye performed, and the like; but nothing is said about the music itself, the melodies, the so-called “musical dialects,” the melodic styles of the renditions of Targum texts. These, as Edith Gerson-Kiwi subsequently found, are distinct from the general Oriental-Sephardi style used in the presentation of Hebrew texts, so that the Kurdish hazanim (cantors) tended to be musically bilingual.1- She has also established that in Iraqi Kurdistan (for example) there were no less than four musical styles current among the Jews, each associated with one language: (1) Hebrew for the liturgical synagogue music; (2) neo-Aramaic (Targum) for the religious and paraliturgical music of the school (midrash), the yeshiva, and some rituals connected with the studies, translation, and paraphrasing of the sacred texts; (3) Kurdish for the folk traditions, including epics, ballads, and dances; and (4) Arabic for secular songs, taken over from popular and urban art music serving purely social gatherings.13
Yet another subject not dealt with in the book is the belief system of the Kurdish Jews. Brauer has recorded much on religious rituals (both their official and popular varieties) that accompany the feasts of the religious year and the life cycle. But he said almost nothing, except for a few occasional remarks, about the beliefs that underlay the religious ceremonies, rites, and customs. What features were contained in the Kurdish Jewish God concept? What was the attitude to the Holy One Blessed Be He? What were the beliefs in angels, in demons, in spirits, in the evil Lilith?14 We learn nothing of this important aspect of the Kurdish Jewish religious beliefs; and by now, I am afraid, it is probably too late to fill this lacuna.
Finally, no chapter in the book is devoted to the Kurdish Jews’ self-image or their views of the Muslim Kurds and their Nestorian Christian neighbors. True, Brauer provides a very large number of details about the actual relationship between the Jews and the non-Jews; but we miss a summary analytical presentation of how the Jews saw the non-Jews with whom they had such close contact and how they evaluated themselves in relation to them. It would, for instance, have been most interesting to know whether the traditional East European contempt for the goy, who was stereotypically considered ignorant, stupid, brutal, and a lush, had any kind of counterpart in the Kurdish Jews’ image of the Kurdish Muslim and Nestorian.
Perhaps had Brauer lived to complete his book, he would have added chapters devoted to these subjects. I consider it equally regrettable that when I worked on the completion of the book, I made no attempt to supply such.
Finally, a few technical details. I left Brauer’s text untouched, except for minor stylistic changes. All the additions I made to the original uncompleted manuscript are placed in square brackets. I substituted my English translation for all the foreign language quotations given by Brauer in their original Arabic, Hebrew, French, German, and so on. If I found that English translations of the works quoted by Brauer were available, I used them instead of making my own. All these translations are likewise put between square brackets. Where I had reason to retain quotations in the Hebrew original, I substituted English transliteration for the Hebrew characters. In many places, where Brauer gave Hebrew, Targum, or Arabic words and phrases in his own transliteration in Latin characters, I found it necessary to substitute a transliteration with which the English reader can be assumed to be more familiar.
Only in a very few exceptional cases did I find myself in disagreement with what Brauer wrote. If so, I expressed my view in a note, in square brackets.
Forest Hills
January 1993
Raphael Patai
1
Ethnological
Research
The natural seclusion of the Kurdish highlands, which discourages traffic and communication, the political confusion prevailing there, and the rough character of the inhabitants have been a serious hindrance to all attempts at a scientific study of the country. Thus, the geographer Carl Ritter declared that prior to the journeys of C. R. Rich (ca. 1820) Kurdistan proper was literally terra incognita.1 And strictly speaking, our knowledge of Kurdistan even today is confined to the environs of its trade routes and is very limited in extent.
All this applies to the inhabitants of the country even more than to its physical features. We do not yet possess any methodical ethnological study of the Kurds. The situation is somewhat better as regards the Christians. But the Kurdish Jews are among the least known of Jewish groups, the descriptions given in the meager accounts of travelers being of the vaguest. Travelers rarely came into contact with the Jews of this area; and most of them, in consequence, omit all mention of the Jews in their reports. Hence, many travel books, otherwise among the most important, find no place in a history of research in our field.~ None of the travelers remained in the country long enough to gam a close acquaintance with the Kurdish Jews; and no work corresponding, for instance, to that of Saphir on the Jews of Yemen, exists on the Jews of Kurdistan.
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