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FOREWORD
This book, published now in English nearly two decades after its first publication in Hebrew, describes field research on the material culture of the Jews of Kurdistan, revealing a community rich in tradition and heritage. The original Hebrew catalogue accompanied a 1981 exhibition at the Israel Museum, the first in a series of field studies on the cultures of the ethnic communities of the Jewish world which comprise Israel's multifaceted population.
The 1981 exhibition grew out of a committee convened in the early 1970s by the then head of the Museum's Department of Jewish Ethnography, Ms. Aviva Muller-Lancet, to discuss the study of Jewish ethnic communities whose cultures were rapidly disappearing. The subsequent research, conducted largely through home visits to community members and through the painstaking collation of typical everyday and ritual objects, has been of paramount importance for the preservation of age-old Jewish cultures and traditions which have in many instances disappeared forever through integration into the Israeli cultural mainstream.
Research on the Kurdish Jewish community, which began in 1974, extended over five years, as the pilot project of the Department of Jewish Ethnography. When work began, its outcome was uncertain, since the material culture of Kurdistan was until then shrouded in mystery, and research was starting nearly 25 years after the last Kurdish immigrant had arrived in Israel.
And, even in the 1970s, the Kurdish way of life was fast disappearing, and Kurdish Jews had already blended into the prevailing culture of the country. The subsequent success of this project, including the 1981 exhibition and catalogue, paved the way for research on other ethnic communities, and this important work continues to be the cornerstone of the Museum's Julia and Leo Forchheimer Department of Jewish Ethnography. This year, in the year 2000 and with the exhibition and publication of "The Yemenites: Two Thousand Years of Jewish Culture," the Department has completed remarkably its definitive work on several such Jewish communities of the world, each of which is now a part of the fabric of contemporary life in Israel.
We want to acknowledge here collectively the numerous members of the Kurdish community in Israel who graciously agreed through their knowledge, expertise, and generous lending of ideas, information, and objects, to support over so many years our efforts of research, exhibition, publication, and now re-publication. Their generosity, hospitality, commitment, and enthusiasm for this project will long be remembered.
Ora Shwartz-Be'eri and her colleagues in the Department of Jewish Ethnography deserve our supreme gratitude for their continuing commitment to a long-standing mission of the Department and to the exemplary realization of this project.
Finally, this book is dedicated to the memory of Dita Morawetz, one of the founders of the Israel Museum's Volunteer Organization. For Dita, the study of the culture of Jewish communities was of central importance. She placed herself and her resources at the Museum's disposal during the research on this project, enabling the expansion of work in the field far beyond the confines of Jerusalem and its environs.
James S. Snyder
Anne and Jerome Fisher Director
Introduction
With the publication of the English edition of "The Jews of Kurdistan," I wish to take the opportunity to include a description of the research work I carried out among the Jewish Kurdistan community, the results of which appear in this book, as well as in the original 1981-1982 exhibition at the Israel Museum, and some of the findings that arose from my work then and continue to this day.
Nearly two decades have elapsed since the exhibition and publication of the Hebrew book. During this period, the culture of the Jews of Kurdistan has become largely integrated into mainstream Israeli culture. However, evidence of it can be found in exhibitions and books, in student dissertations, in artistic creativity and in a heightened sense of awareness of their heritage among younger members of the Jewish Kurdish community. This has encouraged us in our efforts in researching the culture of other Jewish communities.
The Jewish population of Israel is made up of communities from tens of countries all of whom brought with them their own cultures, often including unique traditions and ways of life followed for hundreds of years. It is important to understand the material culture of these communities, whether of a daily character or for religious purposes. Finding and collecting artifacts, identifying them, preserving, exhibiting and researching them, is a means of understanding the culture being formed in Israel from a mosaic of varied communal traditions.
The more information we gather, the richer will be our local culture. Such knowledge can be of particular importance to second-generation members of the community who were born in Israel, and can serve as a bridge between generations and between communities.
The research on the Jews of Kurdistan was the first field research programme undertaken by the Department of Jewish Ethnography of the Israel Museum. Previously, collections of artifacts from different Jewish communities had been assembled from Bukhara, Morocco and Yemen that had been brought by immigrants for trading purposes, or objects which had been acquired by ethnographers in the countries concerned. When the supply of such objects and factual information dwindled, new methods had to be sought to facilitate the continuation of research and this led us to seek out members of the communities now living in Israel, in their homes
Field research methods were tried out for the first time in a challenge such as this and were developed as we worked. We had no previous experience, nor was there anyone from whom we could learn. From the field work to actually mounting an exhibit, the way was tortuous.
Beginning with sporadic discoveries, divorced from context, and continuing with objects long discarded in sheds and yards, often broken or converted for a secondary use, or buried away in cupboards or under mattresses, we had to breathe new life and reconstruct all but forgotten ways of life and traditions. The task of the field researcher was akin to an inverted prism, so that on one side we collected isolated items and on the other, tried to recreate them as part of the overall culture, for exhibition and publication. An additional problem in interviews was that the owners of objects or the artisans often found it difficult to explain theoretical processes when they were no longer themselves actually involved in their creation.
At the beginning of the work on Kurdish Jewry, knowing as we did, little of their material culture, we mistakenly assumed that we would be able to compete the research …
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