The Exiled and the Redeemed [Second ed.]

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THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED BY ITZHAK BEN-ZVI PRESIDENT OF ISRAEL

PHILADELPHIA

5723-1963

THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA

Copyright © 1957, by TIIB JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA All Rights Reserved

New edition, 1961 Second Impression, 1963

TRANSLATED FROM THE HEBREW by Isaac A. Abbady Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 61-11710 Manufactured in the United States of America

FOR RACHEL My Life Companion and Associate in our efforts for the fusion of the Tribes of Israel

". . . . Behold I will take the children of Israel from among the nations, whither they are gone, and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their own land ... and they shall be no more two nations ..." (Ezekiel 37.21-23) "Behold, these shall come from far; and, lo, these from the north " and from the west, and these from the land of Sinim (Isaiah 49.12)

CONTENTS List of Illustrations Preface to the First English Edition Preface to the Second English Edition Introduction

ix

xi xv 3

BOOK ONE Ancient Communities in Moslem Countries I II III IV V VI VII VIII

Yemen North Africa "They That Were Lost in the Land of Assyria" The Mountain Jews of Caucasia The Jews of Georgia The Jews of Bukhara The Krimchaks-Grandeur and Decline The Crypto-Jews in Persia

15 23 30 39 48 54 83 93

BOOK TWO Jewish Sectaries I Samaritans II The Sabbateans of Salonica III Karaites

103 110 129

BOOK THREE Jewish Traditions Among Moslem Tribes I The Jews of Khaibar II Jewish Tribes in the Arabian Desert III Last of the Tribe vii

141 166 173

CONTENTS

viii N V VI VII

Afghan Tribes and the Traditions of Their Origin Gilead in the Persian Diaspora Benjam.ites K.hwarezm and the Khazars

176 192 197 205

BOOK FOUR Oriental Travel Journals I Leaves from a Persian Diary II Four Days with Yemenite Immigrants III Aden Diary

217 231 236

BOOK FIVE Jewish Sovereign States in the Diaspora I II III N V

Types of State Egypt and Mesopotamia Himyar and Ethiopia K.hazaria Surinam Notes Index

241 245 251 256 25 8 263 271

ILLUSTRATIONS Following Page 16

1. 2. 3. 4. S. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

An Israeli of Moroccan origin A Yemenite grandmother A Yemenite girl doing embroidery work A Jewish woman from Tripolitania weaving a carpet A Yemenite family Newcomers from North Africa A Yemenite laborer reading A Moroccan mother and her children Habani Jews in the plane on their way to Israel Two old Yemenites reading Following Page 80

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Habani Jews on the way to Israel A recent immigrant from Persia A Yemenite rabbi Bukharan Jews at study A Yemenite off to work in the field A Moroccan rabbi (Hakham) A Kurdish Jew planting a tree in the Jerusalem hills A Habani Jew A Habani Jew A Bukharan wedding Bukharan women Following Page 144

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

A Yemenite family at home A Kurdish Jew in front of the camera Kurdish Jews on the way from synagogue A Kurdish Jew A Yemenite mother with her child ix

X

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

ILLUSTRATIONS

A Yemenite woman A Kurdish notable Bukharan women participating in a celebration A Persian Jew weaving a carpet Kurdish Jews studying Hebrew Kurdish Jews newly arrived in Israel Habanis and their Torah scroll in its case Following Page 208

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

Yemenite women A Yemenite learning how to plant a tree A Persian family of former marranos A Yemenite A Yemenite wedding A Tripolitan Jew A Jew from Hadramaut A Moroccan Jew who had lived in Paris A Yemenite Jew A Moroccan grandfather with his grandsons A Kurdish family Yemenites sounding the Shofar Kurdish immigrants alighting from the planes in Israel

PREFACE TO THE FIRST ENGLISH EDITION This Book, The Exiled and The Redeemed, is a study of three different categories of Jews: 1. Jews belonging to communities that were originally dis­ persed in Moslem countries. Of these, some remained under Moslem rule; others, like those behind the Iron Curtain, came to live under Christian rule, but all survived. as Jews and pre­ served specific mores, customs and traditions. Cut off as they were in the course of their long history from any regular contact with the main body of the Jewish people, only meager information about them has come to the notice of Jewish historians in Europe. To this group belong the Jews of Yemen, Kurdistan, Iran, Afghan­ istan, India, etc., as well as those of Bukhara, Crimea and the Caucasus. 2. Certain religious sects that consider themselves to this day as belonging to the House of Israel, and whose members continue openly-albeit along patterns that differ from those of the bulk of the Jewish people (who follow the talmudic-rabbinic traditions) -to observe Jewish religious practices in their own way. To this group belong the Samaritans and Karaites who openly profess the Mosaic religion, as well as at least one important sect, the Sab­ bateans, officially Moslems but secretly practicing Jewish rituals, while believing in Sabbatai-Zvi as their messiah. 3. Certain groups of Jewish extraction who were coerced by their Moslem conquerors into adopting the Moslem faith. These Jews lost their specific national characteristics as a result of the loss of their ancestral religion, so that little, if anything, tangible remained of their Jewishness except a few memories, customs and oral traditions. This third group includes several little-known desert tribes, and others, such as those of Khaibar, the Pattanis of Afghanistan and a few other clans and tribes, such as the Ben­ jamites of Kurdistan and Persia, and a number of other groups of whom faint memories remain in historical records, such as the Khazars and the Khwarezmites. I have also included a brief acxi

xii

PREFACE TO THE FIRST ENGLISH ED[TION

count of the life and history of the Persian marranos, and another one on the Sabbateans. The establishment of the State drew to Israel large masses of these forgotten Jewish communities, particularly those included in the first group, who were thus rehabilitated in the land of their ancestors from which they had been expelled centuries ago. Israel today presents a kaleidoscope of this most variegated Jewish communal amalgam. For the communities thus transplanted into our State continue to observe their time-honored character­ istic practices and traditions. What is more, a close study of such practices will enable us the better to appreciate the spiritual and moral values these communities have been cultivating. Indeed, it is only through close observance of, and living with, these long­ forgotten brethren that one can reach a thorough understanding, not only of their ways and customs, but also of the values they represent. The various studies included in this volume were not written at the same time; they are the product of continuous research that took several decades to complete and may be said even now to be far from completion. Over a long period of time the writer had been maintaining the closest possible contact with members of these communities, at first in the lands of their dispersion, and, since their re-settlement, in Israel. As I have said already, re­ search into this far-flung field is continuing, and the writer has not abandoned the hope that it will be vouchsafed him at some future time to supplement the material here submitted in another volume. The author's research and continuous contacts with these com­ munities have cleared the way for the establishment in Israel of a Research Institute whose specific object it is to promote the study of Jewish communities in the Orient and around the Mediterranean basin. This institution, established by the author and now known as The Ben-Zvi Institute of the Hebrew University, affords the author the opportunity to apply much of his spare time to the study of the Jewish communities in the Near and Middle East, in cooperation with a body of experts and researchers. While the form of the essays, as originally written, has been substantially retained, there was of course need to revise much of

PREFACE TO THE FIRST E NGLISH EDITION

xiii

the statistical data they contained. Such revision was called for in view of the constant fluctuations in the demographic structure of the community of Israel and, mainly, the increase of Israel's popu­ lation and the need for the dynamic absorption of new settlers. This will easily explain the considerable changes in number that have taken place since the original publication of these essays (in Hebrew); the author has made every attempt to establish the exact numbers at the time of the preparation of the present edi­ tion. It will be appreciated, however, that, even so, figures are subject to constant fluctuation. At the same time, the author ex­ presses the hope that the description here presented fits the con­ ditions which now prevail. A word should be said about the supplementary chapters, which did not appear in the first Hebrew edition of the book but are now included as Book Five of this edition. The historical survey of Jewish sovereign states which arose occasionally in various parts of the Diaspora must be deemed an integral part of our sur­ vey, because most of these states flourished in lands that fall within the scope of this work. Another chapter has been added on the Samaritans. The author was all the more happy to grant the Jewish Publi­ cation Society of America the right to publish an English edition of Nidhe Yisrael as he was anxious that English readers, too, should gain some insight into the past and present conditions of tribes which had lived for so long in complete isolation from the rest of the Jewish people, and which, having now established them­ selves in Israel, have again merged with the rest of their brethren into one nation, even as they had been one in days gone by. The author wishes to thank Mr. I. A. Abbady for the trouble he took in translating this book from Hebrew into English. He also wishes to express his special appreciation to Mr. Herman Wouk for his kindness in reading the manuscript and making useful sug­ gestions. ITZHAK BEN-ZVI PRESIDENT'S HOUSE

Jerusalem, August 1957

PREFACE TO THE SECOND ENGLISH EDITION The present second edition is, in the main, identical with the first. The English translation of the Hebrew original has been revised here and there, but the substance of the book has been left un­ altered except for the Introduction, for which an essay originally published by the author in 1957 has been substituted. What has been said in the Preface to the First Edition holds good of the present volume too: the numbers and statistics of population­ groups, immigrants etc.-are somewhat out of date and apply partly to the time when the essays making up this book were originally written and partly to the date of the first edition. The liquidation of some centers of the Diaspora has been virtually completed ( e.g., Iraq) and the figures are therefore not likely to change any more. Immigration from other countries has continued; in some cases it has come to a temporary standstill. Israel's dynamic rate of de­ velopment and change makes all statistics liable to become out of date overnight. Add to this our fervent hope that large-scale immi­ gration will be resumed even from countries where it has come to a temporary standstill, and also from countries which were closed to emigration up till now, and the reader will, I hope, appreciate the author's decision to leave the figures and statistics as given in the first edition. The author's thanks are due to Dr. R. J.Zwi Werblowsky, of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, for his assistance in preparing the second edition of this work.

xv

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION THE ISHMAELITE DIASPORA AND THE BUILDING OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL I The various Jewish groups, whose history the present volume tells, are popularly referred to as the "Eastern" or "Oriental" communi­ ties, though I, for one, prefer to speak of the Jews of the Islamic countries or, in more metaphorical language, the "Ishmaelite Dias­ pora." The term "oriental communities" is, at best, an inexact abbreviation. Why, after all, should we describe North African Jewry as Eastern, when their geographical position is more than a thousand miles west of Berlin? In Arabic, too, these parts are known as "el-Maghreb" ( i.e., the "West") and their inhabitants as "Maghrebis." In the same way, Jewish literature from the Middle Ages onwards speaks of the "countries of the West," and of the "Westerners," their inhabiatnts. For similar reasons, the Yemenites should not be called Eastern Jews: Yemen means "south" and not "east." Properly speaking "Oriental," "Occidental" and similar ex­ pressions should indicate the geo-political situation· of a country in relation to the land of Israel, since it was with reference to Eretz Israel that the Jews of the Diaspora described their geographical position. After the destruction of the Second Temple, when Jewish state­ hood came to an end, the large majority of the Jewish people was severed from its land and dispersed among the nations. As a result of exile, the continuity of the nation's normal life was interrupted and precious cultural values were Jost. The various parts of the nation that settled in different countries perforce adapted them­ selves to their new environment. Despite their loyalty to their tradition and to the principles of their religion, they could not help but absorb the culture of the dominant majority. They changed their language and, at times, even their names and their garb. They preserved their religion, their knowledge of the Hebrew language and-characteristically enough-their script. 3

4

T H E E X I L E D AND T H E R E D E E M E D

As is well known, changes in the vernacular had already occurred during the First Exile, when Jews in the Assyrian and Babylonian diaspora adopted the Aramaic language. Next to Hebrew, Aramaic became the language of religion and of everyday life; it was the language of the Talmud and the Midrash. Babylonian Jewry con­ tinued to use Aramaic under the Achaemenids, Parthians and Sassanids right up to the Arab-Islamic conquest. Vestiges of the Aramaic usage of the period have been preserved to this day in Media, in the hills of Kurdistan and Azerbaijan among various com­ munities: Assyrians, Christians, Yazidis, as well as Jews. Thousands of Jews continued to use Aramaic until the day when they left the Diaspora. When the State of Israel was founded, about thirty thou­ sand Aramaic speaking Jews migrated to Israel. It is, in fact, the vernacular (which, at times, also served as a literary vehicle) which makes for the distinct individuality of a Jewish community. The spoken language, it should be noted, never displaced the historical national language, Hebrew, but was super­ added to it. Jews in all countries and in all generations continued to study and to write in the Hebrew medium which united them all. It was the vernacular which distinguished or even isolated them from one another. In this way, German Jewry became singled out as Ashkenazi, because of the Ashkenazic (Yiddish) language spoken by it, just as the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula became known as Sephardim, as a result of the language they adopted. Ex­ posed as were the Jews of North Africa, and subsequently those of the rest of the Moslem world, to the religious and cultural in­ fluence of Spanish Jewry, they acquired a "Sephardic" character in language (Judaeo-Spanish or Ladino) as well as in ritual and method of talmudic study. The communities in Italy and Greece, on the other hand, preserved not only their own vernacular, but also their other characteristics which distinguished them from both the Ashkenazi and the "pure" Sephardi Jews. There is, of course, a profound difference between the "Jewish" language spoken for centuries in the Diaspora, and the languages acquired by Jews in more recent years-as a rule during the last two or three generations. The former group comprises four main languages or dialects as well as a number of lesser languages used by smaller Jewish groups. These will be detailed below. The other

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group includes the "universal" languages, as well as the national idioms of smaller peoples, by which Jews replaced their own dialects during the last few generations. These languages do not exhibit special Jewish sub-forms, and their number equals that of the nations among which Jews were dispersed. In Israel more than seventy such languages have been counted among immigrants. The major languages in which Jews created spheres of their own and which they succeeded in "judaizing" to a certain extent were Yiddish, Ladino, Judaeo-Arabic and Judaeo-Persian. Yiddish, which originated in the mid.le ages in a Jewish-German environ­ ment, remained the distinguishing mark of A shkenazi ( German) Jewry. Judaeo-Spanish ( or Ladino) became the medium of Spanish Jewry and their descendants. Judaeo-Arabic became the language of Jews living in the countries conquered by the Arabs (Asia, Africa, the Iberian Peninsula) . Judaeo-Persian was restricted to the Persian diaspora including Persia, Afghanistan, Bukhara and Azer­ baijan, as well as parts of the Caucasus. Today, the number of speakers of German and Yiddish, on the one hand, and of Ladino and the oriental dialects on the other, is on the decrease. As against that, millions of Jews have been drawn into the orbit of the English, Spanish and French speaking worlds, as well as into that of the Slavic languages. The process has extended to include even the Scandinavian languages. A similar tendency can be observed in the Near East (Turkey and the Balkans) where the intensification of nationalized education resulted in the displacement of Judaeo­ Spanish by the national languages. The main difference between the two aforementioned groups of languages, viz., the specific Jewish dialects and the universal lan­ guages, lies in the fact that while millions of Jews inhabited a spe­ cial niche within the four major and the various lesser languages, developing peculiar and typical grammatical forms as regards vocabulary, syntax, and inclusion of numbers of Hebrew words, phrases and proverbs, etc., this does not apply in the case of the modern languages which served to replace the special Jewish dia­ lects. Unlike the feudal regime of the Middle Ages, modern lan­ guages have no place for a special niche for Jews; they function as powerful melting pots in the process of assimilation. Linguistic assimilation thus appears as a source of danger for the existence of

6

THE E X I L E D AND T H E R E D E E M ED

Jewish minorities in the Diaspora, calling for special efforts on the part of the nationally more conscious individuals to strengthen the unifying elements of Jewry-such as the Hebrew language and Jewish culture and tradition. For the sake of completeness it should be mentioned that in addition to the four abovementioned dialects, which produced a Jewish literature worthy of the name, a number of minor languages produced religious literature of more limited scope, but including piyyutim and pootry written in Hebrew script. Of these languages we should mention the Aramaic of ancient times as well as of later periods; Turkish-Tartaric (among the Krimchaks and Karaites in the Crimea) ; the Berber dialect of the Jews of the South in Tunisia and Morocco; Tatic (among the Romaniotes in Greece) and­ formerly-also the Italian Loaz and French Proveni;al. The Hebrew script was completely forgotten only among the Falasha or "Beit-Israel," as they call themselves. It was replaced by Geez for religious purposes and Amharic for everyday purposes. Malayalam was similarly used by the Jews of Cochin who, how­ ever, have recently reverted to the use of Hebrew for the Bible. Research on Jewish communities means the investigation of all the manifestations of their spiritual and material life. Not the least significant feature of it, in addition to the common national lan­ guage of all generations, was the use of the Hebrew script for the foreign languages and dialects spoken by Jews of different coun­ tries and periods.

II The greater part of the Ishmaelite diaspora has come to Israel in recent years. This unprecedented mass-exodus of Near and Middle Eastern Jewry, immediately following the establishment of the State of Israel, requires some explanation. Nothing quite like it had ever happened throughout the long history of the Jewish peo­ ple. With the destruction, in our time, of European Jewry, the Jews in the Arab world envisaged the possibility of a similar fate. For the last three generations, oriental Jewry had relied on Europe to protect it against the fanaticism and ignorance of the Islamic states. When the European communities were wiped out, oriental Jewry remained without backing; moreover, the breakdown of its other pillar of support, tradition, added to its sense of peril.

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The establishment of the State of Israel was the signal for Jews in the Islamic world that their hour of deliverance had come. In the resurrection of the State, they saw the beginning of the messianic fulfilment for which they had been waiting since time immemorial. At the same time, the hatred against Jews in these countries-as old as Islam itself-gathered momentum. Indeed, persecution of Jews followed immediately upon the victory won by the Israeli Defense Forces; it took the form of confiscation of Jewish property, imprisonment, pogroms, and even executions. To the Jews, these appeared as the fulfilment of the traditionally pre-visioned "birth pangs" of the messianic era. They signaled the beginning of the mass exodus. It is interesting to note that it was Bulgarian Jewry which was the first to leave. Although Bulgaria is a Christian state, Bulgarian Jewry is Turkish in its roots and Spanish-Ottoman by origin, speech and culture. From that country alone, 36,000 Jews emigrated, about 90% of all Bulgarian Jewry; a similar number emigrated from Turkey; about 10,000 from Greece and 8,000 from Yugoslavia. At the same time, the hour of return of the ancient Yemenite diaspora struck. The 50,000 Jews who lived there, at the time of the establishment of the State of Israel, have emigrated, leaving almost none behind. Together with them came most of the Jews of Aden. The Yemenite community in Israel now numbers approx­ imately 100,000. They are the descendants of a diaspora that was settled in the Arabian Peninsula in the days of the Second Temple (their own tradition has them there during the First Temple) and which had a peculiar history of its own. Some scholars hold that they absorbed a very large number of "God-fearing" proselytes, who completely merged with the community. The Jew­ ish kingdom of Himyar and its last king, Joseph Dhu-Nuwas, are well known in the annals of our history. The Babylonian diaspora is the bearer of a tradition of 2,500 years standing that dates from the days of Ezekiel and Daniel. Their historic continuity perpetuates the tradition of Sura and Pumpeditha, the birthplaces of the Babylonian Talmud and the home of the Gaonim. These centers epitomized the flowering of the Babylonian and Persian communities from the earliest times up to the Abbasid caliphs. In later periods, too, they produced emi­ nent scholars and poets, men of the spirit and of action, as well as

THE E X I L E D A N D T H E R E D E E M E D 8 merchant princes, wro dominated international trade as far as Cen­ tral Asia and India, in one direction, and Arabia in the other. They even got as far as China, and in the course of the last century, their descendants provided even Britain with eminent statesmen. Baby­ lonian Jewry was always linked with strong ties to the land of Israel. During the nineteenth century Babylonian Jews founded in Israel places of religious learning and assisted with the redemption of the land and its colonization. They founded the first agricultural settlement in Motsa, Kfar Yehezkel and the Kadoori Agricultural School. From Persia, too, there has been considerable immigration, numbering about 40,000. This number includes the community of marrano Jews from Meshhed, who for 1 10 years lived outwardly as Moslems. To the Persian aliyah we should also reckon the immi­ grants from Persian Kurdistan, who lived in northern Persia and the mountains of Media, and who speak a special Aramaic dialect (Targum), as well as the Jews of Afghanistan, whose language was Persian. The Kurdish Jews today number approximately 35,000, of whom 13,000 come from Persia, 18,000 from Iraq, whereas the rest had already settled in the Land of Israel before the establish­ ment of the State. The Jews of Kurdistan lived in isolation, cut off from other communities by the Kurdish mountains. Many of them were farmers and were among the first to settle and work in Israel. Today, thousands of them are employed as construction workers, porters, stonecutters, etc. The most significant portion of the Ishmaelite diaspora numer­ ically are the Jewries of North Africa : Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. North African Jewry, too, dates back to the days of the Second Temple. They spread to the margin of the desert as far as the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara. Their forefathers, led by the Jewisl;l Queen Dahyah al-Kabina, stood at the head of the Berber tribes in their fight against the Mu'awiyya and the invading Moslem armies. In a later period, they set up an autonomous re­ public in Wadi Dera'a. Their heroic fight against the invading hosts from the Arabian desert is well known. Even better known are the yeshivot of Fez and the names of Maimonides and Alfasi. North African Jewry took a prominent part in the immigration to Israel, which intensified after the expulsion from Spain, and in the

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developing of the country from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards. From the establishment of the State to the end of June, 1957, 1 82,795 immigrants from North Africa were counted; 1 1 3 , 1 28 from Morocco, 33,738 from Tunisia, 32, 1 19 from Libya and 3,661 from Algeria. Turning to the Egyptian diaspora, we should begin by remem­ bering that it developed as far back as the period of the Second Temple and the Ptolemaic kings, and flourished in the orbit of Greek cultural influence. In Egypt, as well as on the islands and in the coastal cities of Greece and Anatolia, there lived large numbers of Greek-speaking Jews to whom were added thousands of prose­ lytes-natives of those regions. The descendants of the Jews whose language was Greek or Byzantine have survived in Greece and Turkey to this day and are known as Romaniotes. Similarly, within the Italian community, the Jews of Rome have not only preserved the tradition of their links with ancient Roman Jewry and the captives from Jersalem, but also kept certain family names as well as the distinct character of their synagogue ritual and prayer book. Turkish Jewry, which includes the Balkan communities, came decisively under the influence of the Spanish exiles, who found refuge in the Ottoman Empire. It was the home and the scene of the activity of great spiritual leaders, legislators and talmudic schol­ ars, such as R. Joseph Karo, author of the Shulhan A rukh, R. Jacob Berab, who strove to renew rabbinic ordination and to re­ establish the Sanhedrin, and many other great talmudists, mystics, poets and men of action, who showed their prowess as builders of cities, in crafts and in industry, on sea and on land (e.g., in Salo­ nica) . Outstanding among the last-mentioned group were Dona Gracia Mendes and the statesman Don Joseph Nasi, who rebuilt Tiberias in the seventeenth century. The scholars of the oriental communities played a prominent role in Jewish culture and literature. Their writings spread to the most distant European communities and are studied to this day by rabbinic scholars. Their halakhic, philosophical and ethical writings testify to their intellectual power and spiritual stature. Both Turkey and Morocco produced poets of considerable merit whose works, of both historical and poetic interest, are only now being re­ discovered.

T H E EXIL E D AND T H E R E D E E M E D

As long as these countries were untouched by European in­ fluence and their Jewish inhabitants remained rooted in their own cultural tradition, their creativeness was unimpaired and they con­ tinued to make considerable contributions to Jewish culture. How­ ever, with the penetration of European culture to which Jews, owing to their difficult economic and political situation, were particularly attracted, this creativeness came to an end during the last century. They abandoned the fountainhead of their own tradition without acquiring a deeper understanding of European culture; their con­ tact with the latter remained superficial and consequently their gen­ eral cultural level dropped. In the absence of a sound, genuine culture, the influence of their Levantine environment invaded the vacuum and they adopted ways of life equally foreign to Judaism and to enlightened Gentile civilization. The lesson of the decline of the oriental communities in their countries of origin should be applied to the present state of affairs in Israel. Immigrants are coming to an entirely different atmosphere and they have to be gradually directed and educated. Rather than allow them to abandon their spiritual heritage, they must be helped to adapt themselves to the level of both the Jewish and the general culture prevailing in Israel. Only then will these communities be able to actually contribute to the strengthening and advancement of the State instead of being a burden to it. They will then also make their mark on the character of the Israeli nation, both to their own advantage and to that of the future generations. The sudden mass immigration from Islamic countries has changed the numerical relation between Jews from the Islamic Orient and the Christian West in Israel. Oriental Jews, who prior to the establishment of the State, constituted only 20% of the Jewish population, now form 35 % , and the proportion will proba­ ably obtain for a long time to come. Out of a total of 1 ,800,000 Jews in Israel, about 600,000 come from the Islamic Orient. By virtue of being among the first arrivals and citizens of the newly established State, they will play an important role in the shaping of things to come. Hence the great significance of this problem for the future character of the State and the nation. We have to acquaint ourselves with these distant Israeli tribes who are suddenly brought near to us from the four corners of the

11 earth, to understand their history and their psychological back­ ground. We shall then realize that the internal differences between immigrants from the various Islamic countries are less decisive than the characteristics which they have in common. Each of the Jewish communities in the Islamic world have preserved certain cultural values and qualities, and has evinced creativeness in various fields. A comparison of these qualities and values should yield a better understanding of the distant historic past common to the entire nation prior to its exile. This understanding is essen­ tial if we want to educate these communities for a national future and independent statehood. As concerns our more immediate subject, i.e., present research on the Jewish communities of the Islamic countries, it may be stated without fear of contradiction that there is no other place outside Israel where the tribes of Israel meet in such large numbers and with such intimacy. The various oriental groups intermingle with each other and with the Ashkenazi community, both in a spiritual and a social sense. They are ceasing to exist as separate tribes and are becoming one nation. No doubt this intermingling is a decisive process from a national point of view. But with reference to our research it also has another consequence : the progressive elimina­ tion of the special characteristics which each tribe had acquired through the ages. We may hope that in the course of one or two generations European immigrants will no longer be different from those hailing from Africa or Asia. Such "merging" need not be regretted either from the national or from the cultural point of view. But this makes it imperative for historians and sociologists to pro­ ceed without delay to a definitive study of the qualities, charac­ teristics and cultural values brought by these tribes from the Dias­ pora. Unfortunately, oriental Jewry (unlike, e.g., Polish Jewry) was never made the object of intense educational efforts. They thus lacked the benefit of national guidance and training for their settlement in Israel. The time has now come to make good this defect. Much work remains to be done, both in their countries of origin, before they come to Israel, and in their camps of transition in Israel. Any edu­ cative process must, however, proceed along humane lines of sympathy and understanding which will emphasize the uniting I N T R ODUCTION

THE EXILED AND THE R E D E E M E D 12 rather than the separating elements. This can be done, not by creating educational "trends," where they do not exist, but by a uniform state education system. We must train them to become free citizens of the State, using one language, and adapting them­ selves to creative effort. We must also train them for leadership. We must bring to the fore their hidden and latent cultural poten­ tial, on which we may all draw to enrich the common treasure of our people as a whole. When this has been done, there is reason to hope that this Jewry will take its responsible share in the re­ construction of our State. To this end special research institutes for the study of oriental Jewry must undoubtedly be encouraged; but the first task is purely educational. The day is not far off when they will rise to their national responsibility alongside the rest of Israel's tribes. Neglect in this field is unpardonable, and any labor now invested in regaining our lost brethren for the common cause of our people will reward us immeasurably in the enhancement of our national good.

BOOK ONE ANCIENT COMMUNITIES IN MOSLEM COUNTRIES

I YEMEN The beginnings of Jewish settlement in Yemen are shrouded in myth. The records of Arab historians and chroniclers on the early days of the Yemenite Jews abound in legends, of which the most common is the story about the Israelite malcontents who flouted the order of Moses to kill all the Amalekites and were therefore driven to Yemen; a second party of Jewish settlers is said to have arrived after Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the Temple, and many more followed when much later the Seljuk rulers persecuted the Jews in the tenth and eleventh centuries of the common era. While historians of that early period were unable to sift the truth from the mass of legend, early Jewish settlement in Yemen may now definitely be traced to the days of the Second Commonwealth and the mass migration from Palestine that ensued upon the de­ struction of the Temple and Hadrian's persecutions of the Jews. After the Bar-Kokhba revolt, many Jews migrated to Yemen, the country that won fame in Graeco-Roman antiquity for her pros­ perous trade, particularly in spices. Both Palestine Jews and Dias­ pora Jews were familiar with the land and sea routes to and from Yemen. Communications and contacts were constant and varied and were not confined to mercantile relations. We know of a battalion of five hundred Jews despatched by King Herod that took part in the march on Yemen which was led by Gaius Gallus. The battalion penetrated into the interior of the country, and although the campaign was abortive and without political consequences, it helped disseminate information on that remote land. Jews must have come to Yemen not from Palestine and adjacent countries only, but also from the Persian dominions to which the great Jewish center of Babylon belonged, and most of these presumably settled in that country. The principal route from that area passed through Bahrein on the Persian Gulf which maintained close contacts with Yemen. Many of the Bahrein Jews settled in Yemen. There had been large Jewish communities in Himyar, as Yemen 15

THE E X I L E D AND T H E R E D E E M E D 16 was known in pre-Islamic days, as early as the third century of the Christian era. This fact was confirmed by the archeological finds in Beth-She'arim. In the course of the excavations in the cen­ tral cemetery of Beth-She'arim (which was used as such until well into the fourth century of the Christian era) , four chambers were discovered containing wooden, stone and leaden sarcophagi, in which the dead were carried from Yemen for re-interment in the land of Palestine. The Yemenite origin of the coffins is borne out by the Greek inscription on the wall-"Of the people of Himyar (Yemen) "-and a monogram in the alphabet of southern Arabia which was deciphered to read "A prince of Himyar." Now, whether or not the dead were carried directly from Yemen -a distance of sixty to seventy days by camel caravan-or from one of the commercial Yemenite colonies which prospered in northern Arabia, or from the Gulf of Elat, the fact remains that the Jews of Yemen went out of their way to bury some of their more distinguished dead in Beth-She'arim. The evidence thus proves not only the existence of a Yemenite community of considerable standing but also that it maintained close relations with the land of Israel. Christian historians affirm that the Christian missionary propa­ ganda, which began to spread in Yemen in the fourth century, was countered by strong resistance on the part of the Jews who wielded considerable influence on the people as well as the royal house. Stone tablets discovered in Yemen are evidence of the process of gradual judaization of the royal household, which reached its climax in the sixth century C.E., when a Jewish king, Yuseph Dhu­ Nuwas, ascended the throne. After Yuseph's tragic death, the Jews were subjected to cruel persecutions, which, however, had no effect on their numerical strength. Their number was still con­ siderable on the advent of Islam in this country, which found the Jews alone clinging heroically to their ancestral faith. Islam stopped the process of judaization among the Yemenite Arabs and obstructed further Jewish migration from other coun­ tries into Yemen. The Jewish community in that country remained a geographically isolated, distinct, Jewish group, though it continued to communicate with other Jewish communities, particularly those of Palestine, Babylon and Egypt. From these centers Yemen Jews

17 drew their spiritual inspiration and sustenance. At the same time they evolved and cultivated strong messianic tendencies, which were an integral part of the spiritual saga of Yemen Jewry until our own day. How many Jews were in Yemen in the early days of Jewish settlement? From whom were they descended? Were they Jews by race as well as religion, or only judaized Arabs? The first two questions are not easy to answer, in view of the largely circumstan­ tial evidence available. While early Christian chroniclers tended to give exaggerated accounts of the number and influence of the Jews, there is no gainsaying the fame that the country won as a Jewish state. The record of Jewish history in this country is itself evidence of the decisive role the Jews played in the life of the Yemen com­ munity. It is, however, by analogy to the fortunes of the Christian church in Yemen, that we are best able to gauge the extent of the power wielded by the Jews. For Yemen Christians, too, constituted an influential and powerful segment of the Himyar population, the more powerful because of the backing it enjoyed from the Byzan­ tine and Ethiopian Christian Powers. Yet for all that mighty back­ ing, it was the Jews who survived to this day in Yemen, while no trace of Christian life has remained. The analogy gives a clue to the second question. We gather from the accounts of Arab chroniclers that Judaism wa_s widespread among Bedouin tribes in southern Arabia, and that under the reign of Yoseph Dhu-Nuwas the movement spread to the ruling circles. Hence the rumors about a mass-conversion of the people of Himyar, which spread far and wide throughout the Christian world, attested to in several accounts of writers and travellers, both con­ temporary and of later periods. Whatever the extent of these conversions, it is obvious that the moving spirit in Yernenite Jewry was that of the immigrants from Palestine and Babylonia, whose numbers must have been con­ siderable. The anti-Jewish persecutions which followed the corning of Islam did not deflect these Jews from their religion. The Jews of southern Arabia fared rather better than those of Hejaz in the north. In contrast to the ruthless treatment meted out by Mohammed and his successors to the Jews of Medina, Khaibar and the other settlements in the north with substantial Jewish popuYEMEK

18

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED

lations, the prophet issued strict orders to the emissaries sent by him to Yemen not to coerce her Jews into adopting Islam, but to content themselves with the collection of the Geziyah (poll tax), which was to be levied on all who belonged to "The People of the Book" (that is, Jews and Christians). In those early days of Moslem expansion several Jews from Yemen migrated to Medina, and there embraced Islam. Their versatility and knowledge of Jewish lore, which was then essentially a body of oral tradition passed on from father to son, made them highly respected recruits to the young Moslem community which turned to them for the elucidation of many obscure passages in the Koran. It was through these converts to Islam that a considerable body of Jewish lore (known by Arabs as lsrailiyat) found its way into the religious literature of Islam; these incorporated elements of Jewish dogma and tradition are evidence of the high cultural standard of the Yemen Jewish com­ munity at the time of the rise of Islam. The expansion of Islam brought about a decline in the political and cultural importance of the Arabian Peninsula generally, par­ ticularly of Yemen, which found itself reduced to the status of an isolated and obscure province in the mighty Moslem Empire. Little or no information leaked out of the country for about four hun­ dred years after Mohammed's conquests and we can learn hardly anything on the life of Yemenite Jews of the period. From the epistles of the Babylonian Gaonim some indirect evidence emerges on the existence of Jewish communities in Sa'adah (northern Yemen), Sana'a (the capital) and elsewhere. Yemen was then ruled by the Imams of the Zaydi sect, which continues to this day as the governing sect. The Zaydis, an offshoot of the Shi'a sect, i.e., those who follow the direct descendants of the prophet, were notorious for their intransigent fanaticism and their intolerance to­ wards all other religions. In Maimonides' Epistle to Yemen, written in the twelfth cen­ tury, there is direct reference to the great suffering of Yemen's Jews. It would appear from it that the Jews of Yemen were in communication with the influential Jewish center of Egypt and in their great distress sought advice and instruction from the eminent leader whose fame had spread to their own country. It was char­ teristic of Maimonides that he was not content with words of

YEMEN

19

encouragement and inspiration, but used his high authority with the powers-that-be to take effective steps for the alleviation of their political and economic disabilities. Further fragmentary information on Yemen's Jews is found in the records and letters of the Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela (twelfth century) and Obadiah of Bertinoro (fifteenth century) whose report is based on informa­ tion he had collected in Jerusalem. It is from the sixteenth century onwards that fuller information 0n the Jews of Yemen has come down to us, primarily through the books of contemporary writers and scholars from Yemen itself. From the poems of Shalom Shabazi, one of the greatest of Yemen's Jewish poets, we gather information on the degradation to which Yemenite Jews were subjected after the advent of the Turkish regime (1546 C.E.). The incessant feuds between the Turkish governors and the Zaydi Imams, the local rulers, aggravated the plight of the Jews who found themselves between the devil and the deep sea. In the second half of the seventeenth century the Zaydi rulers succeeded in expelling the Turkish governors. To mark the event, they decreed the expulsion of all Jews from the capital Sana'a to the coastal region Thema whose harsh climate made it unfit for the habitation of any but Nubians. Their houses were pillaged and requisitioned for the use of Arabs. Even when, after a while, they were allowed to return to Sana'a, their homes were not restored to them, and they were compelled to build for them­ selves a special quarter outside the city boundaries. Shabazi's ( and other poets') mournful elegies on this calamity are recited to this day by the Jews of Yemen, whose long history in the country is an uninterrupted record of physical suffering and civil degradation. Occasionally a few isolated families or individuals may have won the benevolence of their rulers, because of the special services they rendered in the minting of coins, banking transactions or foreign trade. The intervention of such leading figures occasionally brought about temporary respites from persecutions, but such rare interludes were very brief, and the persecutions were invariably resumed with increased fury. The frequent years of drought and famine in Yemen intensified their suffering. Jews, who were for the most part peddlers and artisans, suffered rather more than the rest of the population, whose fate was never enviable in a land of chronic want.

20

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED

Having lived, as they did, for so long under virtually intolerable conditions, the Jews of Yemen always bad a profound longing for redemption and an unshaken faith in the coming of the Messiah which often assumed the dimensions of a popular messianic move­ ment. In his Epistle to Yemen Maimonides refers to the appear­ ance of a messiah in Yemen who had won a large following and whose failure caused deep and widespread disappointment. Shabazi himself (seventeenth century) was the object of such messianic vene­ ration, and many believed that he was either himself the Messiah or at least the harbinger of his coming. In the middle of the nine­ teenth century, Yehuda Bar-Shalom, better known as Shukir Kuhail, won fame as a messiah. Several travellers who visited Yemen in the nineteenth century, notably Jacob Sappir, report on the emo­ tional crisis which his appearance caused in the Yemenite Jewish community. Some of the Himyarites (Yemenite Arabs) who embraced Judaism in pre-Islamic days may have found the threats and per­ secutions of the Moslem zealot rulers too much for them, and adopted Islam. The same process recurred later in another part of the Middle East when the Khazars, upon the collapse of their kingdom, assimilated to their environment because there was no Jewish hinterland to support their Jewish life. Nevertheless, the Jews of Yemen survived as a distinct tribal entity within the Jewish people, a branch of a tree that was never dried up, but maintained its vitality from the days of Mohammed to ours. That "tribe" has never given up its independence or the hope for its national redemption. When, therefore, the hour struck for the ingathering of all the exiles into the land of Israel, Yemenite Jews were among the first to leave the land of their dispersion and transplant themselves wholly into the national homeland. In Yemen they had maintained their national and religious char­ acteristics as a distinct ethnic entity. That status, on the one hand, and the backwardness of the tribes of Southern Arabia, on the other, enabled them to maintain their full internal autonomy. To reverse the well-known phrase of the Jewish essayist and philoso­ pher, Abad Ha-Am, they managed amidst the hostile social climate of Yemen to maintain something like "freedom within serfdom." Their distinctness as a compact group found its expression in

21 several aspects of their communal and social life, but nowhere more strikingly than in their educational system. Most children received a religious education, which included the Bible, the prayer book and religious observances. They attended no other schools but the tra­ ditional heder with the mori as rabbinical instructor. Here they learned by heart the prayers and the Torah, which were to be memorized almost mechanically by them. At a later stage a single book served the whole classroom, and the children became used to reading it sideways or upside down, without difficulty. Apart from the Scriptures, which they memorized from infancy in their distinct Yemenite diction and intonation, they also memorized both the Aramaic translation (Targum) of Onkelos and the Arabic translation of Saadia Gaon (Taj). They also studied Mishnah and Jewish law as codified in Maimonides' Mishneh Torah and in the Shulhan A rukh. Some of them were versed in poetry as well. Yemenite manuscripts contain the divans (compendia) of Spanish­ Jewish as well as of Yemenite poets, such as Shalom Shabazi, Zacharia AI-Dahari, Abraham Halfon and others. They had their distinct dances: two or three men dancing in the middle with the spectators seated around them supporting their efforts with ap­ plause. Women sat apart. The first Jews from Yemen settled in Palestine in the eighties of the last century, almost immediately after the arrival of the first Hovevei Zion and Bilu immigrants from Russia, as if to fulfill scripture: "Awake O north wind; and come thou south" (Cant. 4.16). The first immigrants from Yemen to settle in Jerusalem found employment as artisans and, with the help of a local society founded by I. D. Frumkin, established a special artisans quarter in the Arab village of Silwan. For about three decades after that early settlement, trickles of immigrants from Yemen continued to arrive and settle in the country. The second large wave of immi­ grants from Yemen was mainly the result of the work of Samuel Yavneeli who spent about two years in Yemen before World War I, conveying to her Jews first-hand accounts on the agricultura1ists in Palestine. The second wave numbered many thousands who now came to Jaffa, Tel-Aviv and the Jewish agricultural settlements and laid solid foundations for an agricultural settlement of their own. Throughout the mandatory regime they increased in numbers YEMEK

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED 22 and struck deep roots in the country, until their community totalled 35,000. The immigration of Yemenite Jews since the establishment of the State, organized in the first instance by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, assumed the dimensions of a vast exodus. "Operation Magic Carpet" brought to Israel hundreds of Yemenite Jewish settlers each week, raising the number of Yemen's Jews at present in Israel to well over 90,000, * or more than the strength of the whole Jewish population in Yemen at any time before World War I. Their integration into the Jewish social pattern of Israel is proceeding rapidly and is certain to prove a blessing to all concerned. • Thu figure relates to 1953.

II NORTH AFRICA In Hebrew, as in Arabic, the group of countries now loosely known as North Africa ( other than Egypt) was known as "The Occident" (Maghreb). The Arab occupation of North Africa was a purely military affair: it provided a class of Arab rulers but failed to alter the peculiar ethnic composition of the population, which continued as before to consist of the Berbers, Moors and Nubians who had been inhabiting these lands from time immemorial. To them were added in the course of time the Phoenician colonists, that is, the navigators from Tyre and Sidon who, in their maritime adventures in sailing boats along the Mediterranean coasts, had "discovered" these lands in the days of Ahab, King of Israel, and established permanent colonies which survived over a thousand years. After them came the Greeks, contributing further to the racial admix­ ture; these were followed by the Romans and, lastly, by the Arabs. The Arab conquerors neither ousted the existing population, nor replaced it by an Arab community, but merely added a new layer to the existing demographic structure. Arab rule was not based on a majority in the population, but solely on its military power and on the religion of Islam. The Phoenicians' speech was close to Hebrew. The Punic and neo-Punic civilizations of Old and New Carthage were essentially Hebraic-or rather were built by that original stock from which both the Hebrew and Canaanite languages derived. Until the Arab conquest at the beginning of the eighth century, that particular neo-Punic dialect was current in North Africa. The cursive Canaan­ ite script also appeared on many tombstones and other memorial relics until the Arab conquest. Thereafter the countries of North Africa became Moslem by religion and basically Arab in speech. That the speech, however, is not wholly and invariably Arabic is borne out by the fact that different Berber dialects, which are of Hamitic-Semitic derivation, are spoken in the region. Thus, in Morocco, a majority of the population uses Berber, while the per23

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED 24 centage of the Berber-speaking people in Libya ( over eighty per cent) is even higher. Racially too, the hybrid character of the population is noticeable, as a majority of the people are Berbers. The Jewish communities in North Africa can look back on a long history of over 2,000 years. A variety of historical records enables us to trace its course: excavations, Jewish literary docu­ ments, and the records of Roman chroniclers and Church Fathers. While the authenticity of the traditions current among the Jews of North Africa, tracing their early settlement in these countries to the days preceding the destruction of the Second Temple, is open to doubt, we may note some occasional references in the Bible which suggest that such a possibility need not be ruled out. Of course the traditions current among the Jews of Libya, Al­ geria, Tunisia and Morocco about their early settlement in these countries cannot be accepted as adequate historical evidence; but we have it on the authority of more reliable records that the sea­ faring tribes of Israel, such as the sons of Zebulon, took an active part in the maritime adventures and expeditions of the ancient Phoenicians. This fact would provide a basis for the belief that in the early days of the establishment of maritime colonies, Carthage and 'Ayat, there were also some Israelites among the colonists. In any event, there is no doubt that in the Punic period and long before the Roman conquest, there were Jewish settlements in North Africa. Another source of supply of Jewish colonists in North Africa was the large community of Jews carried by Ptolemy I (Lagos) into Egypt, from which they spread westwards to all adjacent countries. The great Jewish revolution of 117 C.E. in Cyrene is evidence of the weight and influence of the Jewish population in Cyrenaica in the days of Emperor Trajan. The rebellion was ruth­ lessly suppressed and many of the Jewish communities were totally exterminated. Some individuals survived and bided their time until they could regain their strength and build up the community anew. Others emigrated westwards to areas which had not yet been conquered by Rome. There are references to that early period both in the Talmud and in the New Testament. Characteristic is the saying in the Talmud (Menahot 110 a) attributed to Rabbi Hisda: "From Tyre to Carthage all know Israel and their Father in Heaven."

NORTH A F RI C A

25

When Christianity became the dominant religion in the Roman Empire, the persecution of Jews became general policy of the land, but the Jewish communities along the north coast of Africa held their own. At times their influence with the Berber tribes was so strong that some of them embraced the Jewish religion. There were Jewish governors, too, who succccJed in rallying several of these Berber tribes under their leadersi.ip, and in mustering their forces, centuries later, in a defensive war against the Arab invaders. We know of a Jewish Berber queen, Dahyah al-Kabina (Dahya "the Priestess," or "the Prophetess" ) who roused the Berbers in the Atlas Mountains to war against the Moslem invaders and who was killed in battle in 707 C.E. These judaized rulers were regarded by the Christians as no better than "Jewish heretics"; but the Jews, too, viewed them with ill­ will as undesirable aliens, even as they had once before (in the third century C.E. ) viewed Queen Zenobia of Palmyra who reigned in another part of the world. It is said of the latter that she had adopted the Jewish faith; the rabbis nevertheless viewed her with misgiving. From Moslem historians, too, we have evidence that at the time of the Arab invasion, in the seventh and eighth centuries C.E., there were several Berber tribes who persisted in their adherence to the Jewish religion and resisted the Arab con­ querors. Prof. N. Slouschz, who made a special study: of the Jewish Berber tribes in North Africa, has reported the existence of several of them in the vicinity of Fez. A number of these ultimately allied themselves with the Arab invaders and actively helped them con­ quer Mauritania (Morocco ) , later taking an active part in the conquest of Spain, where the Visigoth rulers had persecuted the Jews. The position of the Jews improved somewhat after the Arab conquest. In the mighty struggle in this part of the world between Islam and Christianity, which all Moslems deemed the arch­ enemy of their religion, the Jews had to suffer considerably. The victorious Moslem hordes in North Africa completely extirpated Christianity, but did not spare the Jews either. They were subjected to exorbitant taxes and other discriminatory measures, designed to perpetuate their inferior status, and also to put an end to the infiltration of Judaism into the Berber tribes.

26

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED

A t the end of the eighth century, Idris, a descendant of Ali, severed western North Africa (Maghreb) from the Abbasid cali-­ phate and founded an independent kingdom with its capital in Fez. The Jews of Tunisia and Morocco were split into two factions: the one remained loyal to the Abbasid dynasty, the other supported Idris. When Idris emerged victorious, he inflicted heavy penalties on those Jews who had favored the house of Abbas, including op­ pressive taxes and the obligation to supply annually twenty-four virgins to his harem. Under his successors Jews had a spell of relative peace, but when the last of the house of Idris died, Fez was conquered (in 1032 C.E. ) by an emir of the sons of Afran, who murdered 6,000 Jews and robbed the survivors of their prop­ erty and their womenfolk. Following that massacre, Fez began to decline in importance as a Jewish center. In the eleventh century, a Jewish government was set up in Wadi Dera'a which lasted over a hundred years. We know three of these Jewish kings by name: Yuseph (Abu Jacub) , Jacob and his son Samuel. The Almoravid dynasty (an order of Moslem ascetics who established a kingdom named for them that lasted from 106 1 to 1146 C.E., and built the city of Marrakesh) were rather more tolerant towards the Jews of North Africa. Several Jews held high office in the courts of the Almoravid caliphs and it was only after the fanatical Muwahhidun (Almohades) sect usurped power in the state that the Jews of North Africa were subjected once again to cruel persecutions. All non-Moslems were presented with the alternative of adopting Islam or leaving the country. It was then that Maimonides wrote his famous Iggeret ha-Shmad ("Epistle on Perse­ cutions" ) .1 Even the Crypto-Moslem marranos were not immune from suspicion and were ordered to wear special clothes : a black overcoat and a yellow turban. Actual persecutions lasted about a hundred years, but hatred of and contempt for the Jews has re­ mained deep in the hearts of North African Moslems ever since. During the brief interludes of freedom from persecutions, the arts and scholarship flourished in the Jewish communities. In the days of the well-known traveller Eldad the Danite the religious colleges (yeshivot) of Kairuwan and Fez became great centers of learning and talmudical erudition. The decline of the religious

27 centers of Babylon lent special significance to the institutions of learning which developed in the west of North Africa. Secular subjects and sciences too were cultivated. North African Jewry produced a galaxy of illustrious men of learning in several fields of the humanities and natural sciences-mathematicians, logicians and natural scientists; there were grammarians and philologists who engaged in polemics against the Karaites, and who continued the tradition of the schools of Tiberias in the days of the Gaonim. Philologists and grammarians like Yehuda ben Kuraish (800 to 870 C.E.) and Dunash ben Labrat, and eminent talmudical jurists like Yitzhak Alfasi (born 1 0 1 3 C.E.) were active in North Africa. After the Spanish Expulsion, many of the exiles from Spain found their way into North Africa and settled on the coast. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, all the countries of North Africa other than Morocco came under Turkish rule. That government, however, lacked stability and strength in these areas which were so far removed from the center of Turkish power in western Asia. Their shaky hold on the country made the rise of independent local governments inevitable. The status of the Jews under such political conditions fluctuated according to their capacity to pay their over­ lords the bribes and penal taxation imposed on them. Communities that could afford the oppressive tributes were not molested. These restrictions did not exclude, but supplemented, all the degradation!. and discriminatory decrees that had once been imposed by Caliph Omar and which were enforced in North Africa in all their rigor : special garments; the prohibition against riding an animal or walk­ ing erect in a non-Jewish district; the prohibition against wearing shoes with heels or covering the feet with socks in the summer; the obligation to dwell in special quarters (Hara in Tripoli and Algeria, Mel/ah in Morocco). On the other hand, the wealthier traders who came from Spain and, in the seventeenth century, from Italy, enjoyed special privileges. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the rulers of Mo­ rocco were quick to take advantage of the experience, skill and commercial capabilities of these traders, from among whom thc'y appointed their diplomatic and consular representatives in Holh"lnd, England, Italy and Turkey. But the very few favored courtiers could not bring about a material change for the better in the posiNORTH AF RICA

28

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED

tion of the mass of Jews, and the few influential ministers could not mitigate the hostility of their overlords to the Jewish dwellers of the ghettos. It was that constant state of degradation, more than any other cause, that prompted the Jews of North Africa to emigrate to Palestine. Parties of immigrants to Palestine from among North African Jews were known to have been fairly well organized in early medieval days. Some of them are referred to in the accounts of the Hebrew poet Al-Harizi ( 1 1 87 C.E.). In those days a Moroccan Jewish community was already in existence in Jerusalem. Immigration from North Africa continued throughout the days of the Mamelukes and the Turkish regime. Indeed, most Jewish immigrants to Palestine before the Spanish Expulsion were from Morocco, and it was they who reinforced and consolidated the Yishuv in Jerusalem and Safed, and later in Haifa, Tiberias and Jaffa. Some of them settled in smaller towns-Hebron, Shfar'am, Zor (Tyre) and Sidon; others in the Lebanon-Beirut, Deir el-Kamar and Hasbiyah. The arrival of French colonists in North Africa early in the nineteenth century, who established themselves first in Algeria, later in Tunisia and finally in Morocco, brought about a change in the treatment of the Jews. With the coming of the French the Alliance Israelite Universelle began its work for North African Jewry. Through its schools it did much to raise the standard of education among the masses, but on the other hand, it also promoted a shallow levantinism and a weaken­ ing of national consciousness which made for assimilation and feelings of inferiority. North African Jewry may be divided into four basic groups: I. Jews of Berber descent whose vernacular, the "Shilhy," has a very distinct Berber flavor; II. Arabic-speaking Jews, including descendants of Sephardic refugees from Moslem-ruled Spain; III. Sephardim whose ancestors came from Christian Spain and who settled along the coast. These are distinguishable by their Judaeo-Castilian dialect. IV. Late settlers who arrived in the nineteenth and twentieth cen­ turies.

NORTH A F RI C A

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In view of this fourfold division, and the oppressive social and economic conditions under which the majority of the Jews of North Africa have lived, North African Jewry, though a composite body of Jews, is not comparable to Yemen Jewry as a distinct group within the Jewish people. The Jews of North Africa were not suf­ ficiently removed geographically from the other centers of Jewry to crystallize into a monolithic unit with its own specific traits and character, like those evolved by the Yemenite Jews in the course of their long history. The great centers of learning that flourished in North Africa (Kairuwan, Fez, Marrakesh, etc.) influenced the laws of other lands even as they were, in tum, influenced by the latter. lfltimately, however, the twofold pressure of Moslem rulers, on the one hand, and the pull of French cultural standards in the larger coastal towns, on the other, combined to have a deteriorating effect on North African Jewry and remove it from its erstwhile dominance. Certainly, it is not North Africa's Jewry that is to blame for adverse social conditions that call for proper treatment and reparation. At present the most important of the North African territories, from the Jewish point of view, is Morocco, with her 286,000 Jews; Algeria with 130,000, Tunisia with 70,000 and Libya with about 30,000 follow in order.* Thus, North Africa has a total Jewish population of well over half a million. Of these 58,000 have emi­ grated to Israel since the establishment of the State, including 25,000 from Libya, or the great bulk of her Jewish population. Of those who remained behind, many are anxious to join the ranks of those who have gone to Israel. For generations they have fostered the love of the land of Israel. The establishment of the independent State of Israel has given them the practical opportunity to free themselves of any further subjection to Moslem rule. * Figures for 1960 are: French Morocco, 270,000; Spanish Morocco 15,000; Algeria 135,000; Tunisia 77,000; Libya 3,000.

III "THEY THAT WERE LOST IN THE LAND OF ASSYRIA"* ". . . And ye shall be gathered one by one, 0 ye children of Israel . . . And it shall come to pass in that day that the great trumpet shall be blown and they shall come which were lost in the land of Assyria, and they that were dispersed in the land of Egypt, and they shall worship the Lord in the holy mountain at Jerusalem." (Isaiah 27.12-13)

The ingathering of Jewish exiles into the land of Israel, from all the four comers of the world, brings a second prophetic vision to fulfilment. The repatriates now include "those that were lost in Assyria." They are members of the forlorn Jewish tribe in the isolated, moun­ tainous region of Kurdistan. Their ancestors were the exiles from Samaria, whose ranks were reinforced in the course of time by the J udaean exiles carried from Jerusalem by King Nebuchadnezzar. Those two groups of exiles constituted the first Jewish settlement in Assyria. We have biblical authority for that deportation and settlement in the brief reference to the dispersion of Israel to "Halath, Habor and the cities of the Medes." The biblical account is further corroborated by the verbal tradition current among both Jews and non-Jews in this territory-the Nestorian Assyrians and the Armenians. The Aramaic vernacular still spoken by these Jews is substantially the same language that was used by the compilers of the Talmud and the Gaonim, and continued to be spoken by them under the Per­ sian regime. That vernacular is evidence of the ancient character of the Jewish settlement in these territories. Indeed, the Jews of Assyria and Armenia are among the few tribes of Israel that have continuously preserved their ancestral tradition for the long period • The transliteration of names of Kurdish origin in this chapter is largely arbitrary because of the erratic spelling of such names in the original lan­ guage (l.B.Z).

30

31 of twenty-seven hundred years. In this respect they may well be regarded as a faint shadow of the Jewish people as it was at the end of the period of the First Temple. The traveller Benjamin of Tudela, who visited them in the second half of the twelfth century, states explicitly that: " THEY THAT WERE L O S T , • •"

. . . in the hills of Nisbur there are four tribes of Israel, namely the tribes of Zebulun, Dan, Asher and Naphtali, all de­ scendants of the first exiles who were carried to this country by Shalmaneser king of Assyria. Benjamin was the first explorer to give a first-hand report on the life of these hardy mountaineers, whom he described as "militant and independent warriors, subjected to no king or minister of the Gentiles, only to a single Jewish minister." But long before Benja­ min, in the days of the Second Commonwealth, there was refer­ ence in the opening chapters of the apocryphal Book of Tobias to several families belonging to the tribe of Naphtali who lived among the cities of the Medes. Shortly before Benjamin's visit to Amadiyah, where the traveller found 2,000 Jewish families, the political leader David Alroy was organizing his messianic-political campaign to deliver all Jews from the yoke of the Gentiles by force of arms. The Jewish revolt against the P.:rsians was suppressed and David Alroy was killed, but the armed insurrection of Jews against their oppressors left a deep impression throughout the Jewish dispersion, and not least in Persia and Kurdistan. It was a heroic episode in the otherwise dark annals of the Jews and one that found noble and forceful expression in English literature in Disraeli's historical novel The Wondrous Tale of Alroy. Otherwise, little has come down to us about the fate of thc�e Jews throughout the centuries. From time to time chronicler:; :md travellers preserved some bits of information as, e.g., the letters ... nd reports of the poet Al-Harizi (in the twelfth century ) , Yahyah al-Dahiry (in the sixteenth ) , and the later Palestinian emissaries who often risked their lives to penetrate the mountain fastnesses of savage tribes in order to carry to their brethren the message of comfort and messianic hope. In the rabbinical responsa of the post­ Spanish period too, there are occasional references to these scat-

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED 32 tered brethren. They are described as a valiant and heroic people, subsisting, under conditions of virtual slavery, in a feudal regime. In general, their condition continues unchanged to this day. With the improvement of communications and security in the nineteenth century, several European travellers, some of them Jews, were able to visit Kurdistan and bring back fuller accounts of the life of Kurdish Jews. Special mention should be made of three well-known nineteenth-century travellers : David de-Beth­ Hillel (of Jerusalem ) , Israel Benjamin and Ephraim Neumark. Somehow the message of return to Zion found its way even to the Kurdish mountains, and already at the time of the first aliyah, a number of Kurdish Jews were to be found in Palestine. They en­ gaged in hard physical labor, including porterage, masonry, stone­ cutting, quarrying and similar manual trades. Used to hard labor under all conditions, they were inured to the hardships of their new environment. Most of them settled in Jerusalem where they built for themselves special quarters, but some turned to other towns and settlements, including Jaffa, Tiberias, Safed and Beth-shean. Some took up agricultural work which was not unfamiliar to them in their country of origin. Kurdistan is perhaps the only Jewish diaspora with a large agricultural population, for there were several wholly Jewish farming villages in Kurdistan, such as Sindur, Akra, Bita­ nura and others. Early in this century an attempt was made to settle groups of Kurdish Jews on the land. The first families of farmers were settled in the Galilean colony Sedjera by the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (PICA) . Some of them lived in the mud huts of the Arab fellaheen and ploughed the land; others did guard duty jointly with the first Hashomer watchmen. Kurdish Jews were also among the agricultural settlers of Kfar Baruch, and there was a wholly Kurdish village named after David Alroy, the famous Jewish hero of Amadiyah. Since the founding of the State of Israel, Kurdish Jews of Jerusalem have established several additional Kurdish settle­ ments, including Kfar Azaria, near Mishmar Eilon. There were other sporadic attempts at agricultural settlement by Kurdish Jews. Soon after Iraq won its independence ( 1 921 ) , outbursts of ag­ gressive nationalism against all minorities occurred in the Iraq­ controlled provinces of Kurdistan. They reached a climax in the

" THEY THAT WERE L O S T • • •"

33

massacre of the Nestorian Assyrians organized by Moslem Kurds and Arabs. Simultaneously with that essentially anti-Christian movement, the Moslem Arabs singled out the Kurds, Moslems themselves, for very special racial and national persecutions. But the Kurds proved a much harder nut to crack for the Arabs, who found themselves compelled to change their attitude to the Kurdish problem. All this boded ill for the future of the Jews, and though no large-scale pogroms against them were organized, the murder of Jews in broad daylight was common. The Jews of Kurdistan saw the writing on the wall, and took steps in good time to seek their physical salvation. Emigration to Palestine was intensified, and in the mid-thirties the number of immigrants from Kurdistan was estimated at 2,500 who, with their brethren from Kurdistan already established in the country, increased the community of Kurdish Jews in Palestine to over 8,000. Increased emigration and the consolidation of the Jewish National Home intensified anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist measures in Kurdistan. With the establishment of the State of Israel Kurdish Jews found themselves in grave and imminent danger. At the same time, reports from Israel fanned their enthusiasm and deep­ ened their conviction that the time had come for them to escape from their dispersion and subjugation. Steps were taken by their leaders for the total liquidation of the Jewish community in Kur­ distan. The history of Kurdistan is an uninterrupted record of warfare between Kurdish tribes and the Turkish-Mongol tribes who thrust from time to time from the far eastern steppes into Caucasian cities and hamlets. Kurdistan herself never attained political unity or sovereignty; she was powerless to resist the onrush of the con­ querors from the East, who ultimately left their political and cul­ tural imprint on the country. At various stages in Middle Eastern history some Kurds oc­ casionally played prominent roles in war as in peace. Two great historical figures come to mind: Sultan Nur-Al-Din, and even more so, his son Saladin, known in history for his victory over the cru­ saders in the Hittin battle which put an end to crusader rule in Palestine. Their fame and achievement, however, were always con-

34

THE E X I L E D AND T H E R E D E E M E D

sidered a n expression o f general Moslem (Arab o r Turkish) valor, never of specific Kurdish nationalism. Kurds have never been able to forge a specific Kurdish civilization or to establish anything like a sovereign Kurdish kingdom. Under the Ottomon Empire, the major part of Kurdistan was a Turkish province peopled by several tribes and religious sects, including Christians (such as Armenians and Georgians) and Jews. The mountains of Kurdistan were a bone of contention between Turkey and Persia, both of which left traces of their in­ influence on the country and her people. Kurdistan was split into two parts: Persian Kurdistan to the east, and Turkish Kurdistan to the west. When, after World War I, Iraq became independent, a considerable area of Turkish Kurdistan was politically integrated with it, while eastern Kurdistan continued to be ruled by the Ira­ nians. This political split could not fail to have far-reaching effects on the fate and welfare of the Kurdish Jews. The majority of them came under Iraqi rule, a minority continued to be ruled by Iran, and only a disproportionately small number fell under Turkish rule. Jews in Kurdistan were no better than slaves to the feudal Kurd­ ish chieftains (Begs), even though occasionally some of the Begs protected a few of them against the depredations of other Begs. In the absence of a unified political system in the country, there could be no uniform and general policy for the extermination of the Jews. In the Kurdish provinces of Iraq, the situation was worse. Iraq's hostile attitude towards minorities generally and the de­ fenseless Jewish minority particularly, and the remoteness and isolation of Kurdistan from the outside world, gave outside Jews strong reason to fear for the safety of Kurdish Jews under Iraq rule. The first Kurdish Jews to immigrate to Palestine came from the Iraqi provinces whose total Jewish population numbered 1 8,000. Most immigrants came from cities with a mixed population, such as Mosul (which Jewish tradition identified as "Ashur" of the Bible ) ; some came from isolated localities, such as Amadiyah, Zakho, and the villages Sindur (a well-known wholly-Jewish vil­ lage), Akra, Dahouk, Bitanura, etc. Many sold their farms and properties at reduced prices and marched to the great centers of Mosul and Baghdad, where they waited for their immigration papers. Others took the devious and long road to Persia, where

" THEY THAT WERE L O S T

35

they lived under unbearable conditions o f congestion i n the court­ yards of synagogues and in cemeteries, until their tum came for immigration. No exact figures are available on the number of those who reached their destination and of those still engaged in the vast treks, but it is reliably estimated that half the Jews of Iraqi Kur­ distan have left their villages and hamlets. The following were the most important centers of Kurdish Jews in Iraq until their exodus to Israel: MOSUL ARBEEL

KIRKUK

SINDUR ZAKHO

AMADIYAH

(with the ruins of Nineveh across the river)-7,000. 2,000-2,500. Not far from Arbeel, there is a tomb which local tradition believes to be that of the Prophet Jonah. about 300 families. 250 families (wholly Jewish). is an important center with a community of 5,000 Jews. (The Jews of Zakho were the first Kurdish Jews to settle in Jerusalem, and to establish there several quarters of Kurdish Jews. ) about 400 Jews. There is an ancient synagogue in this town, and several villages in its vicinity, some mixed Jewish and non-Jewish, others wholly Jewish. The more important of these are : Barazany (200 Jews), Akra (250 families), Tel Khaibar near Zakho, Dahouk ( 100-1 40 families ) . There are also farms in Rovandees, Bitanura, Shandukha, Shakia and Karda, a total of about 250 families of farmers. They grew wheat and barley, rice, lentils and tobacco, but there were also some vine-growers and cattle breeders.

There is an interesting story about the ancient synagogue in Amadiyah, one of the most ancient in the country, which was told to the author of this book by Rabbi Alwan Abidany, a Kurdish rabbi in Jerusalem. Tradition has it that the synagogue was built in 1 249 C.E. and named after the Prophet Ezekiel. The building, with its columns and women's galleries, was patterned on the Temple as described in the Book of Ezekiel. Rabbi Abidany went on to say with deep emotion: "When the time came for the Jews of Amadiyah to leave the city and emigrate to Palestine, they them-

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED 36 selves took the structure apart, stone by stone. It is a great pity that that ancient house of worship met such an end, and that no architects were on hand to leave blueprints of its structure that could be taken as a model for the construction of our Temple on Mt. Moriah speedily in our days." In Iraqi-Kurdistan, as in so many parts of Iraq, there are nu­ merous monuments and tombs to which Jews used to go on pil­ grimage. There is little evidence to substantiate the belief in the ancient character of these tombs, but the tradition of their holiness has continued uninterruptedly since the early days of Islam. To this day the Jews of Kurdistan point-as did the travellers Benja­ min of Tudela and Petahyah of Regensburg in more remote medi­ eval days-to the tombs of the Prophet Nahum the Elkoshite, the Prophet Jonah in Kirkuk and the Prophets Daniel, Hananiah, Mi­ shael and Azariah in Nineveh and Mosul. There are fixed days in the year for pilgrimages to these tombs, in which Moslem worship­ pers (who share the belief in their genuine character) have often also taken part. In Turkish-controlled Kurdistan (incidentally, the very name Kurdistan is banned in Turkey for political reasons) the principal Jewish communities were those of Diarbakir, Urfa, Sewerk and Jermuk. These localities, too, have been largely evacuated by their Jewish residents. We have more accurate information on the Jews of Persian Kurdistan who too are on the move. One of them, Mr. Shalom Kammany, who was in charge of an emigrant camp in Teheran, prepared a memorandum for the Jewish Agency, giving a fairly full list of their former Kurdish settlements, and their number be­ fore and after emigration. These are his figures, courtesy of the Jewish Agency: SAKIZ

DANNA BUCHAN

had a Jewish population of 1 ,350 of whom 1 ,030 have already settled in Israel; 200 are awaiting their turn in Teheran transit camps; only 1 30 remain. had a Jewish population of 350; all of them have left. had a Jewish population of 400, of whom 240 have immigrated and 1 60 remain.

" T H E Y THAT W E R E LOST • • •" SENANDAGH

SHAHINDAGH BIJAR

TIKAB

RIZAYEH-URMIA

NAKDAH ASHNUH HABAD ZUNRUD KAMIAN DAWAB

37

had a Jewish population of 4,000 of whom 1 ,000 have left, 600 are still on the way and the rest are in camps in Persia. had a Jewish population of 360. All of them have left; half of these are still in transit camps. had a Jewish population of 650. A hundred have settled in Israel and the rest are in Teheran camps. had a Jewish population of 800 of whom 360 have immigrated and 240 are on the way; 200 remain. (Shapur) had a Jewish population of 800 of whom one half is in Israel and 150 are on the way. had 150, of whom 55 have immigrated and an­ other 70 are on the way. had I 00; 90 have left, 55 of them are already in Israel. had 320; 55 are in Israel ; 160 are on the way. had 250, of whom 72 are in Israel and 185 are on the way. had 700, of whom 285 are in Israel and 215 are on the way.

The total Jewish population in Turkish-Kurdistan before their emigration was 10,330, of whom 6,200, or sixty per cent, have already left: 3 ,635 of them have settled in Israel, and 2,565 are still in camps. The memorandum concludes : 4, 1 30 Jews remain behind in Kurdistan ; but there are 2,565 in­ mates in two camps in Teheran who are waiting impatiently for their opportunity to come to the land of their forefathers and You are no doubt aware that the Jews of kiss her soil. Kurdistan who lived in border villages have long been trained in all manner of agricultural work and they would be capable and willing to contribute their share to the upbuilding of our land. . . .2 The Jews of Kurdistan are the only Jewish "tribe" that has preserved throughout the ages a substantial and continuous agricul­ tural tradition. The skill and experience that Kurdish Jews have gained in various occupations of a primarily agricultural order

38

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED

qualifies them rather better than most Jews for the physical toil involved in work on the land, a consideration that should weigh in their favor in laying down the agricultural settlement schedule. There is no justification for retaining them in any sort of transit camp, when the barren hills of western Galilee are clamoring for hands and the expanses of the Negev are in urgent need of workers of its soil. Kurdish immigrants should be removed directly from the airport to the barren fields of the countrv.

IV THE MOUNTAIN JEWS OF CAUCASIA 1. Jewish Settlements in Daghestan We have hardly any reliable information on the present con­ dition of the two and a half million Jews of Soviet Russia-their cultural and emotional life, the ideals and goals of their youth, their attitude to Zionism and the political re-birth of our nation. We lack even elementary demographic data on the structure and com­ position of Jewry in the U.S.S.R.-the marriage and intermarriage statistics and other vital statistics that would give us a true picture of Russian Jewry. We know even less about the condition of the "exotic" Jewish tribes of Turkestan, Kazakhistan, Georgia and the Northern Caucasus. The Jews of these territories use vernaculars all their own, which have nothing in common with the Yiddish of the mass of Ashkenazic Jews. Their dialects are many and varied: the Judaeo-Persian dialect, spoken by the Jews of Bukhara, and the "Tatti" dialect of Daghestan; the Turkish-Tataric dialect spoken by the Krimchak Jews and the Georgian patois used by the people of Georgia. Their linguistic distinctions may have been the principal source of their attraction to Soviet researchers who have published their findings in Russian learned journals. Soviet scholars, however, have rarely dealt with the present, having con­ centrated almost exclusively on the study of the past history of these Jewish groups. A special study is devoted to the Jews of Daghestan by J. M. Shilling3 in one of the publications of the Ethnographic Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The writer divides the population of the area surveyed by his expedition into several classes and groups according to their re­ spective languages. In the passages dealing with the Ands, Nawars and Tsiz he dwells on the Jewish and Armenian elements which find full confirmation in the ethnogenic traditions of the Ands. Shilling writes : 39

40

T H E E X I L E D AND T H E R E D E E M E D

Ethnographic observations prove that the mountain Jews, known by their speech as Tatti Jews, were once a '!'uch larger nation, which was dispersed not only along the Caspian Sea, but also in the hill country as far as and including the western half of Daghestan. Popular traditions in Avaryah and relics of monu­ ments there are evidence of Jewish elements in several settle­ ments such as Arakani, the Shotuta quarter in Khunzach, Rugudja, Coroda and Salta. A glance at the map will show that the abovementioned group of settlements was not established at random or without an orderly plan. On the contrary, the chain of Jewish settlements was well-planned as a Jewish "enclave," planted in this area in ancient days in geographical order from East to West, from the coastal valley to the heart of the hills, a strip that cut roughly through eastern and central Avaryah, and whose extreme western settlement was the Andy village Mony. This would explain the Andy tradition of the Jewish descent of Mony itself, and the further penetration north of Jewish tribes from here. The views of the people of Mony on the three most ancient Daghestani villages, two of which-Mony and Coroda­ are no more than links in the Jewish chain or enclave mentioned above, merely confirm the ancient date of the process in which that enclave integrated itself into its Avary-Andy hinterland. Shilling's theory is convincing and finds confirmation in Jewish traditions and sources. From the evidence of Rabbi Jacob Yitzhaky, the late Rabbi of the Dcrbend community, it would appear that there are to this day in Caucasia auls ( villages ) of Moslem moun­ taineers who have it from very ancient traditions, passed from father to son for several generations, that their forefathers were coerced into adopting the Moslem faith. This tradition is corrobo­ rated by inscriptions on tombstones in the ancient cemeteries sur­ rounding those Moslem villages. Our present interest in history and archeology is subsidiary to our concern for the living Jews of Daghestan. Hitler's hordes, who exterminated six million Jews, did not get as far as Caucasia and could not perpetrate their outrages on this Jewish "tribe." There is no record of pogroms or massacres of Caucasian Jews on the scale perpetrated on Ukranian and Crimean Jews. The Jews of Caucasia remained in their settlements. It is therefore puzzling that the Soviet explorers, who devoted such close attention to the minutest fractions of insignificant ethnic groups scattered through-

T H E MOUNTAIN .J EWS OF CAUCASIA

41

out the vast domains of the Soviet Union, should not have men­ tioned those living Jewish mountaineers. In 1912 Dr. Aaron Benjaminy published a comprehensive study on the Mountains Jews of Caucasia, among whom he grew up in his childhood, before he studied medicine in Constantinople and settled in Palestine as a physician. The study which was published in several instalments in the Hebrew labor weekly Achduth (Nos. 38-48, 1912) shortly before the outbreak of World War I, con­ tains reliable data on that community. There were then twenty-five thousand of them, most of them city-dwellers, though a fair number was scattered in the Caucasian auls. Of the village-dwellers, many engaged in agriculture, raising cereals and planting fruit trees. The largest towns were Derbend with a Jewish mountaineer population of 6,000, and Kuba (in the Baku province) with a Jewish population of 10,000. The remainder were scattered as follows: Kuban province--100 families, or 500 individuals, most of whom engaged in agriculture; Tery province-2,500 individ­ uals; Daghestan province, 1,845; Kay-Tag province, Tabsir, 1,000, of whom about 100 were agriculturists (Myndir); Kyorny province contained over ten villages whose entire Jewish population of 4,000 engaged in agriculture. There was also one wholly Jewish village, Agleby. Altogether Dr. Benjaminy could enumerate some 26,000 Mountain Jews. We may perhaps assume that since that survey was made over forty years ago, the Jewish population of that area, so far from having dwindled, has constantly grown. Caucasian Jews are known for their high birth rate, and there was little emigration from the country. Their present number should perhaps be put at 35 to 40 thousand. In the early days of the Zionist effort in Palestine, Caucasia gave this country several young pioneers in addition to the older men who settled in Jerusalem and established there a special quarter. One of these older immigrants was the eminent scholar Rabbi Jacob Yitzhaky, the Rabbi of Derbend, founder of the Beer-Jacob colony named for him. Others, like Yehezkel Nissanoff and his brothers Zvi and Judah, were among the most daring watchmen and members of Hashomer in Galilean settlements. Yehezkel, who was one of the founders of Hashomer, lost his life in a battle with

42

THE EXILED AND THE R E D E E M E D

Arab marauders. The immigrants, however, were very few, and most Caucasian Jews remained in their mountain retreats. For thousands of years that forlorn Jewish tribe in the Caucasian hills preserved its distinct individuality. What happened to it under Soviet rule? What happened to the stalwart villagers and farmers? Did they adapt and adjust themselves to Soviet rule, as did their Moslem neighbors, or did they maintain their loyalty to their own Jewish people? What of their nostalgic longing for their ancient historic homeland? And what of their solicitude for the fortunes of the State of Israel? 2. The Extended Family Household and Patronymy among Caucasian Jews Dim echoes of the present life and conditions of Caucasian Jews reach us through a study by J. J. Ichileff in a comparatviely recent issue of Soviet Ethnography.4 In a volume containing thirty-one articles and notes (240 pages ) on various aspects of Soviet ethnog­ raphy, only a single article of four pages is devoted to the explora­ tion of Jewish mountaineers. The arithmetical proportion is as disappointing as the substance of the study. Nevertheless, even from that little we may attempt to extract information not hitherto accessible to the rest of the world. In 1 947-48 a Soviet expedition toured part of the hill country of Daghestan and the plains of Kaytaga, Maghryam, Kent and Derbend, gathering material on the "Extended Family" among Daghestan Jews. In spite of the author's apparent anxiety not to go beyond the narrow scope of his subject matter, the study is not without value. It is not clear from the account whether it refers to czarist days, or to the beginning of the present regime, or to a period much closer to us; only by inference and from a comparison of dates will the reader gather that the expedition toured the country in 1 948. The account would appear therefore to apply to comparatively recent days. The date of the study has material relevance to our understanding of the life of this Jewish "tribe" in that it enables us to draw safe conclusions on the impact of the Soviet regime on the process of adjustment of a distinct racial group, after thirty years of Soviet rule. The study does not make it clear whether the "large household"

T H E M OU N T A I N J EW S OF C A U C A S I A

43

is a specifically Jewish or a more general social feature in the Cau­ casus. Its extent in the country generally cannot be gauged from the result of what is, after all, no more than a "sample study," seeing that the expedition could not cover more than a sampling of five to six representative settlements. The number of their Jewish in­ habitants (persons or families) is not given even for the villages, whether small or large, surveyed by the Soviet explorers. Their survey covered the following villages : Kala'a, Hinjal, Mejliss (Kay­ taga district) , Mamaratch, Derbend, Mahatch-Kala'a. The bare enumeration of these hamlets and towns in a short and dry report is not calculated to add to the knowledge of the student who is not sufficiently familiar with topographical and geopolitical conditions in the Caucasus. When this has been said, one important fact emerges from the study: the widespread prevalence of the "extended family" or "large household" as a regular demographic feature. The Caucasian Jew­ ish household contained from about thirty-two to at times as many as seventy members, all of whom normally lived together in one large and well-fenced courtyard in the village ( sometimes sur­ rounded by a thick security wall ) ; a group of three to five such large households constituted an entire village, which also formed a distinct religious community. Here we are apparently dealing with a wholly Jewish village. In the cities, such a group of households would form a special quarter or mahallah (the name is still used for such urban units in Persia and other Moslem countries) . The social pattern of the household had continued unchanged genera­ tion after generation. Its male head was the father or grandfather whom all respectfully addressed as "Baba," while th2 matriarch was addressed as "Dada." The basic property of the household and working implements were in the common ownership of all its mem­ bers, though personal effects destined for daily use belonged to the individual. Each family lived in a small house or hut, but there was a common refectory where all its members foregathered for their meals pursuant to their rule : "All work for the same house­ hold and get their food from a common dish." Such was the condi­ tion in the villages of Daghestan, which contained the bulk of the Jewish mountain population, the majority of whom were farmers. As the family expanded, the village and its lands became too

44

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED

congested. The area of land cultivated by the household was in­ adequate to produce food for all, and many had to tum to the city to find employment, from which after a while they returned to join their village community. While in city employment Daghestan workmen remitted their earnings to the general community purse. In their absence their children and womenfolk were cared for by the patriarch of the household. The author condemns the patriarchal regime of the large house­ hold as a virtually hermetic unit that lived in isolation from the rest of the people and thereby obstructed the unification of the "nation."5 His strictures are directed as much against the czarist regime, for refusing to grant autonomy (national schools) , as against the clergy and the "national bourgeoisie," all dubbed "ene­ mies of the toiling mountain population." One of the most backward tribes before the revolution were the Jews of the hill country, as their lives were dominated by religion. Before World War I most of them lived in the hill country of Daghestan and other parts of the Northern Caucasus. They were concentrated in auls (villages) which were isolated from other mountain settlements by local geographical conditions. During the 1 9 1 8-1 920 Civil War, a whole chain of such Jewish auls was completely destroyed and the Jewish villagers dispersed to the valleys of Daghestan and other provinces in the Northern Caucasus. . These culturally and economically backward mountain Jews carried with them to the valleys their obsolete and antiquated customs, such as life in a collective family unit, polyg­ amy, Kalim ( payment of ransom for the wife ) , blood feud and religion. This complex of backward customs and usages which was historically created was not changed, except under the im­ pact of our socialist reality.

According to the survey, the dissolution of the "large household"

(Kala Kaffot) of the mountain Jews began long before that "social­

ist reality," and was the outcome of causes that had little to do with socialism : imperialistic and capitalistic elements, military in­ tervention, influx of foreign capital, and the general expansion of trade and industry. These factors combined to undermine the primitive social pattern and destroy its basic unit-the large house­ hold. No mention is made of the positive traits of the household sys-

T H E M O U N T AI N J E W S O F C A U CASIA

45

tern that consisted, in essence, of primary organizational cells of the Jewish communities in that backward and remote diaspora, which carried on their precarious existence for so long in a hostile en­ vironment of Moslem fanaticism. Indeed, the large families were a pillar of strength, both materially and spiritually, for the Jews in general; they alone defended them against the pressure of Moslems as well as Christians. It was the large family that safeguarded them against assimilation, cultivated the national Jewish tradition, and fostered faith in their survival as Jews. The Georgian and Da­ ghestani Yevseks (Jewish Communist Youth) could hardly be ex­ pected to evince understanding for those fundamentals in the proc­ ess of Jewish survival and growth. At any rate, it appears that the process of dissolution of the large household, which began in czarist days with the influx of capital into the Caucasian retreats, was accelerated by the civil war and the intervention of foreign armies. The increased cost of land tenancy and the recurrent acts of murder and pillage brought about mass emigration from the villages into the valley of Daghe­ stan; and this undermined the "Great Household." The "household" was not restored, and no new joint dwellings were established. But, we are told by the author, families continued to segregate them­ selves either in one quarter or in one street even after their re­ moval to urban and suburban areas. In "Notes on the Ethnography of the Caucasus" ( 1 946, 2, p. 1 1 9 ) , M. A. Kashan, one of the editors of the aforementioned periodical, Soviet Ethnography, writes : The partnership in that patronymic extended family is ex­ pressed through the control and use by the large families of lands and homesteads on a collective basis. The unity of the large "household" is also expressed by the proximity of the homesteads of the families belonging to the household which thus form a distinct quarter. The household commemorates the name of the common patriarch and all the members of the household are deemed "sons of one man," and continue to consider themselves as such as long as the partnership and unity of the large house­ hold is sustained.

Ichileff mentions the large families Pinhasoff, Eliyahouyeff and Rubinoff in Derbend, and the household of Gabrieloff consisting

46

THE E X I L ED AND THE REDE EMED

of seven families ( thirty members) "all of whom work in the 'millionaire' Jewish Kolkhoz named after Molotov." The reference to the existence of a Jewish Kolkhoz in those days is instructive. We also gather that the household functioned on a basis of mutual aid, and that its members still celebrated Jewish holidays. Until this survey few of us knew that, as late as the sum­ mer of 1947, the Jews of Derbend celebrated Jewish holidays. Their mutual aid is described as follows: "Tailors sew clothes for all members of the household, shoemakers make shoes for all; others supply fuel to all free of charge." The expedition reported these facts after touring Boynaksuk, Khasouyurt and Grozny in the summer of 1947, a fact which clearly indicated that until then the large households continued to exist. There were other celebrations : In Mahatch-Kala'a all members of the family attended the marriage celebration of one of them, pre­ sumably according to the Jewish ritual, a fact that no Soviet ex­ plorer could specifically state. There is also a detailed description of the celebration of Passover which would appear to show that the Passover Eve ritual, known as Seder, was still the same in communist, as in capitalist, countries. Thus we read that: The Matzah is prepared with the participation of aIJ the mem­ bers of the household. They gathered the wheat together and ground it in one mill. In the course cf its preparation :111 men worked together in the kneading of the dough, while women rolled the thin loaves of unleavened bread and the most aged and venerable woman sat by the oven. The younger boys ind girls carried the water, flour and fuel. Matzot were distributed according to the number of the members of each family of the household. Such also was the distribution of meat, wine and rice. In the first two days of Passover, each family contributed its share of foodstuffs and jointly celebrated the holiday at a com­ mon table in the house of the elder brother. Seating at table was according to seniority of age, not of families. Funerals, too, were attended by aIJ the members of the household, each of whom contributed his share to the ritual : the mourning women recruited from all the families of the household; the men wearing a mourn­ ing armband ( Yass) . The dead were buried in one family Jewish burial place.

In conclusion we are told that although the "large household" still existed, it was being gradually superseded by the smaller

T H E M O U N T A I N J E W S OF C A U CASIA

47

family. The inclusive designation Tehum, which had formerly ap­ plied to a large household, has been narrowed down to persons bearing the same family name, such as the members of the Hanu­ kaieff in Derbend, numbering 200. But the family no longer lived the same full life which was formerly led by the household, and was constantly declining in significance and losing much of its original character.

V THE JEWS OF GEORGIA Among the Jewish tribes scattered in the mountainous region of Caucasia the tradition is current that they all descended from the Ten Tribes exiled by Shalmaneser, king of Assyria, to "Halah and Habor by the river of Gozan and in the cities ( or mountains) of the Medes." The social pattern of the various communities in that extensive area is not uniform, and there are pronounced differences between the Jews of Georgia, Daghestan, Azerbaijan and Armenia. But for all the disparities in speech, in physique and in their gen­ eral way of life, all the Jews adhere to the above tradition as to their common descent. Explorers and ethnographers incline to the belief that there is a core of historical truth in that tradition. It is believed that the exiles from Samaria, carried (about 7 1 9 B.C.E.) to Assyria and the "cities of Medes," spread from there to the Ararat region and penetrated into the most remote passes of Caucasia, reaching as far as Daghestan and Azerbaijan. These first exiles were later joined and reinforced by the exiles from Judaea and still later, in the days of the Second Commonwealth, by large groups of im­ migrants from Persia and Media as well as from Kurdistan and the Jewish kingdom of Adiabene. Confirmation of that tradition can be found in several references in post-biblical literature. One passage in the Talmud (Yerushalmi, Gittin V, 7 ) actually mentions a "Rabbi Jacob of Armenia" in whose name a ruling is quoted by R. Nahman. Josephus Flavius speaks of an Armenian king Tigranes, a de­ scendant of Herod, who reigned in Armenia in about the year 10 C.E., and under whose reign large numbers of Jews, soldiers as well as civilians, settled there. In subsequent records of the fourth century we are told that their number increased considerably and reached several hundreds of thousands in the days of Shapur II (3 10-380 C.E. ) . This Persian king is known to have repatriated 48

T H E .J E WS O F G E O RG I A

49

to Persia some 50,000 Jewish families, but many more Jews must have remained in the Caucasus area. Some no doubt assimilated in course of time with the Armenians and the indigenous Georgians -there are many families which, to this day, take pride in their Israelite descent-but the bulk of them remain steadfastly loyal to their Jewish national and religious tradition. Georgian antiquities include monuments and inscriptions, bear­ ing witness to the existence of an uninterrupted Jewish settlement in medieval days (e.g., the so-called Mzhet Inscription, kept in the Jewish museum of Tiflis). These are corroborated by valuable literary records ( e.g., the chronicle of the Karaite sect in Tiflis) which point to the existence of a Jewish community in Tiflis in the tenth century. The travellers Petahyah of Regensburg and Ben­ jamin of Tudela also mention these outlying communities which came within the jurisdiction of the Jewish Exilarch of Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasids in their day. Benjamin of Tudela writes: Throughout the empire of Togarma, including Georgan (Georgia) whose people lived on the Gihon River known as "Girgashi" (Georgians) , who profess the Christian faith, and as far as Samarkand, Tibet and India, Jewish communities are under the authority of the Rosh Hagola ( Exilarch) who appoints their heads; these are subject to the Exilarch's jurisdiction, re­ ceive their authority from him and carry to him presents and tribute.

A peculiar, if much later, report comes from the seventeenth century when a Spaniard, Don Juan of Seglas, is said to have pro­ posed to the authorities of Constantinople a plan for the establish­ ment of a Jewish state in the areas populated by Jews in southern Caucasia. There is ground for believing that the judaization of the Khazars (first of Bulan and his royal house, later most of the ruling class in Khazarland) took place under the influence of Persian Jews passing through Caucasia. All these incidental historical records are, however, but dim echoes of an ancient heroic age. Little has survived in the way of a continuous historical chronicle. Even so, there is no reason to doubt the existence of a continuous Jewish settlement in both the north and the south of Caucasia, whose roots

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED 50 were laid in very ancient times-perhaps as early as the days of the Second Temple, perhaps even earlier. The differentiating traits between the various Jewish tribes, par­ ticularly between the mountain Jews of North Caucasia and the Georgian population of Transcaucasia, deserve some further dis­ cussion. The vernacular of the Jews of Georgia differs from that of their brethren in Daghestan; while the latter speak Tatti, Georgian Jews speak the same Georgian language that is spoken by their Christian neighbors. More surprising is the fact that they adopted the Geor­ gian script in communications among themselves as well, namely, a script from left to right. Herein they differed from all other Jews, in Europe as well as Asia, who used the Hebraic script in com­ munications among themselves, even when writing in the languages of their respective countries, for example, Judaeo-Arabic, Judaeo­ Spanish or Ladino, Judaeo-German or Yiddish, Judaeo-Persian or Judaeo-Turkish (in Crimea). Another striking divergent trait is seen in the family names, all of which are typically Georgian and many of which are common to them and their Christian neighbors. These specific traits point to a long process of ancient cultural and linguistic assimilation and to the deep roots which the Jews have struck in the social climate of Georgia. All this, however, did not deflect them from their loyalty to their Jewish religion and tra­ dition, while the knowledge of the Hebrew language among them at no time ceased. Since ancient times they had been visited by emissaries from Jewish congregations in other oriental lands, particularly from Persia. Upon the annexation of the area to the Russian empire, Ashkenazi emissaries from Poland and Lithuania paid occasional visits of short duration. Some of them were urged to remain, and received appointments as rabbis, ritual-slaughterers (shohetim) and circumcisers (mohalim). These religious instructors spread the knowledge of Hebrew and laid the foundations of a traditional Jewish education among Georgian Jews. They have no literature or written traditions; but their oral tra­ dition, passed from father to son, has it that they descend from Israelite or Judaean stock. Jewish penetration into Armenia and Georgia came mainly from the Parthian-Jewish kingdom of Adia-

T H E J E W S OF G E ORGIA

51

bene, whose King Monobaz and Queen Helena adopted the Jewish faith in the days of the Second Commonwealth. The communities of many a Christian village in Caucasia take pride in their Jewish descent. Characteristic is the Kartelly rural community whose an­ cestors, according to their tradition, came from "Tillaby," that is, the Tel-Aviv of Ezekiel's day. Unlike the Circassian mountain-Jews of northern Caucasia, many of whom engage in agriculture and other rural occupations, the Jews of Georgia led an essentially urban life, and engaged mainly in commerce. Their adage : "The Jewish child is born with a merchants' ell" proved to be as true as it was fraught with tragic consequences for them. At the outbreak of the Bolshevik revolu­ tion, early communist leaders singled out Georgian Jews for very special persecution, in keeping with their policy of treating all traders and peddlers as undesirable "bourgeois" elements. Under the impact of communism there began a disorderly and panicky exodus of Jews from Georgia. A substantial colony of expatriate Georgian Jews established itself in Constantinople and others fled to other countries. Although essentially urban, Georgian Jews were sufficiently at home in agricultural work to raise vegetables and tend fruit trees. Some, like the villagers of Shinwaly, owned ex­ tensive plantations. There were Jewish shepherds, too, as in the village of Carillo. Of imposing, indeed majestic, physique, the hardy Georgian Jews paid scant attention to the cultivation of spiritual values; nevertheless, they produced some rabbis and scholars and established a tradition of local Georgian-Jewish learning of :-arts that made for a certain continuity of spiritual life. The first Georgian Jewish settlers arrived in Palestine in the sixties of last century, and thus preceded the organized movement of the Hovevei Zion. As early as 1 863 there was a fairly well or­ ganized Georgian Jewish community in Jerusalem. Michael Levy, who settled in the Old City in 1 872, established a synagogue which was named after him. There was a Georgian Jewish yeslzivah (Religious College), known as Mekor Hayim, under the direction of Rabbi Ephraim-Shvilly (whose brother still officiates as Rabbi of Sochum, in Georgia). Altogether, they established six syna­ gogues in Jerusalem, with religious schools attached to them in which the language of instruction was Hebrew. In 1 879 they estab-

52

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED

lished a Georgian-Jewish quarter in Jerusalem just outside the Damascus Gate. Some of them settled as agricultural workmen in rural settlements. Their total number on the eve of World War I was 500; but the war wrought havoc in their community, as most of the men, being enemy subjects, had to leave the country. They migrated first to Egypt, where the Russian consul insisted on their compulsory repatriation to Russia for military service; a very few of them who adopted Ottoman nationality were allowed to remain in Palestine. Most of these, old and ill, were without any financial means, and during World War I suffered great want. Immigration to Palestine, particularly from southern Caucasia, was resumed shortly after the termination of hostilities. The newly arrived Georgian Jewish immigrants swelled the number of the established community to an estimated 1 ,700, most of whom settled in Jerusalem and only a few in Tel-Aviv, Petah-Tiqva and else­ where in the country. The Georgian quarter of Jerusalem, adjacent to the most populous and fanatical Arab center, suffered severe damage in the riots of 1 9 2 1 -22 and was completely destroyed in the riots of I 929. Its synagogue was gutted and its houses were abandoned. The social and political upheaval in Russia following the rise of the Bolshevik regime deeply affected the structure and compo­ sition of the Georgian Jewish communities in Palestine. Communi­ cation with Caucasia was interrupted, and immigration from that country ceased altogether. Incidental information occasionally leaked through Istanbul from which it was possible to conclude that the remaining communities in Georgia were fighting for their survival against overwhelming odds. Miraculously, they were still publishing a Jewish journal in Russian which appeared fairly regu­ larly for over two years after the suspension of all public Jewish activity. The specifically anti-Zionist measures were apparently late in arriving in Caucasia, but they came at last and, through Yevsek ( the Jewish section of the Communist Party) intervention, all Zionist publication was completely stopped. The stoppage of all such activity definitely put both Armenia and Georgia into the class of countries from which no Jewish im­ migration to Israel could possibly flow. The outside Jewish world now had to depend on tendentious information flowing mainly from

53 Yevsek sources. But even the Yevseks could not destroy the historic past of Georgian Jewry, or wipe out their longing for redemption in their national Jewish homeland. We have very meager information on the present status and conditions of Georgian Jews. The latest Soviet statistics date from 1 926, when 2 1 , 1 05 Georgian Jews were numbered in Caucasia. Assuming that natural increase since then roughly approximated fifty per cent, the present strength of the community may be esti­ mated at 30,000, unless unknown circumstances (such as mass deportation to areas beyond Caucasia) have diminished their num­ ber since. In an article by A. Krikhely in the Russian journal, Soviet Ethnography ( 1940, p. 2 16) there is some information based on the work of Jewish and non-Jewish scholars who studied the history of the Georgian Jews. 6 Of Jewish sources, Chorney, Kasdai and Weissenberg are referred to. Among non-Jewish authorities, N. I. Marr ("The Racial Composition of Caucasia's Population"), Hak­ hanoff, Chinadze, the ethnographer Hizanishvilly, and the authors Porcelladze, Chabchadja, A. Zeretelli, I. Gugbashvilly and others are mentioned. Reference is also made to Georgian journals con­ taining valuable material on Georgian Jews, most of it by non­ Jewish scholars. In 1 933 a museum was established in Tiflis devoted to the his­ tory and ethnography of Georgian Jews on which a report by its director, A. Krikhely, was published in Soviet Ethnography (1 946, p. 2 1 9). Much historical and archeological material was col­ lected by this museum and published in a large three-volume com­ pendium containing extensive studies on all aspects of Georgian­ Jewish history. The seven thousand items in its catalogue contain many ancient books and incunabula as well as manuscripts. T H E J EWS O F G E ORGIA

VI THE JEWS OF BUKHARA 1 . Their Origin: Legend and History The Jews of Bukhara belong to that branch of oriental Jewry that has been using the Persian vernacular for generations past. To this group belong, above all, the Jews of Persia (Iran) who, until their mass migration to Israel, numbered more than 100,000, and the Jews of Afghanistan whose number at no time exceeded 8,000. Until World War II the Jews of Bukhara and Turkestan numbered some 60,000. If we add to these the Jews of Daghestan, who speak a special Persian dialect, the so-called Tatti, we arrive at a total of two hundred thousand Jews using the Persian vernacular or its derivatives. To these should be added the 1 5,000 Persian-speaking Jews who migrated to Palestine during the mandatory period or earlier. There is a tradition current among Bukharan Jews that they are direct descendants of the Ten Tribes. While the veracity of this belief still awaits historical confirmation, it cannot be said that it lacks all historical basis, since the Jewry of the land of the Persians and Medes, from whom Bukharan Jewry certainly descends, has undoubtedly absorbed the "Assyrian dispersion." Before saying more on this subject, mention must be made of a closely related tradition regarding their Persian-Babylonian origin. Their vernacu­ lar, the Judaeo-Persian-or Tadjiki, as it is known in Bukhara­ is common to them and the Jews of Persia; their prayers, although influenced in course of time by the Sephardic ritual, were originally derived from the Persian-Babylonian version of the prayer book. Neither Bukharan nor Persian Jews have ever used the Arabic script which is still in general use throughout Iran; they use either the square Hebrew or the Rashi script. It is noteworthy that, even as European Jews have adapted the Hebrew script to the Yiddish language, the Sephardim to the use of Ladino, and the Jews in Arabian lands to Arabic, so did Bukharan and Persian Jews adapt 54

55 the Hebrew script to suit the phonetic character of the Persian language. They have even devised special diacritical points which go a long way to facilitate the exact transliteration of Persian words written in Hebrew script. Judaeo-Persian literature, particularly the liturgical and religious works, including commentaries, midrashim and transcriptions into Hebrew script of Persian literary works, was familiar to Bukharan Jews, especially to those of the older generations. Perhaps the most important of their poetic works, the so-called Shaheen-Torah, was edited and published by Simeon Hakham, a Bukharan scholar resi­ dent in Jerusalem. This was a work originally written in the lan­ guage of its Shirazi author, Shaheen, who flourished in the fourteenth century. It is a religious saga in rhyme, with a com­ mentary, the Musa-Name, both in the dialect then in vogue among the Jews of Bukhara. For generations this work was the principal spiritual sustenance of Bukharan Jews, serving at once as a text book and as reading material of a lighter kind for Bukharan and Persian Jews in their countries of origin, as well as for those of them who came to settle in Palestine. Persia and Bukhara were closely linked in ancient times--cer­ tainly since the reign of the Achaemenids who ruled in Bukhara; probably even before them. Ethnically, the people of Bukhara are a mixed Irano-Mongolian race, while the languages in vogue among them are both the Uzbeki-Turkmenish and the Tadjiki-Persian. The Persian language was for generations the dominant one in the country; it was used by officials and by the urban population, while the rural and nomad populations used the Uzbeki dialect. As an urban element that had dealings with both the governing authorities and the townspeople generally, the Jews quite naturally continued to use the Persian vernacular which they had spoken in their coun­ try of origin. For religious and liturgical purposes they, like the Jews of Persia, used Hebrew. At the same time, they were fairly well versed in the common Turkish dialect which they employed in their dealings, as peddlers and traders, with the villagers and the Uzbeki tribes. When did the Jews first appear in Central Asia? While we have no definite historical data on their first appear­ ance in this area, there is sufficient evidence to enable us to deduce

T H E J EW S OF B U KHARA

THE EXILED AN D THE RBDE EMED 56 that the exiles from Judah and Israel settled in all parts of the king­ dom of the Persians and the Medes. This is borne out by the fact that both the exiles of Israel who were carried away by the As­ syrians, and the exiles of Judah who were carried away by the Babylonians, eventually came under Persian rule. Undoubtedly the Jews subsequently spread throughout the Persian Empire which extended to Bactria, to Khwarezm-Khiva7 as well as to Bukhara and Afghanistan. We have an account of these migrations in the biblical Book of Esther, composed in the Achaemenid period (559-331 B.C.E. ) , which clearly speaks of the despatch of letters on behalf of Esther and Mordecai to the Jews of Persia scattered throughout the Persian dominions, far and near.

Then were the king's scribes called at that time in the third month, that is, the month Sivan . . . and it was written according to all that Mordecai commanded unto the Jews, and to the lieutenants and the deputies and rulers of the provinces which are from India unto Ethiopia, an hundred twenty and seven prov­ inces, unto each province according to the writing thereof, and unto every people after their language and to the Jews according to their writing and according to their language (Esther 8.9) .

Again: And Mordecai wrote these things and sent letters unto all the Jews that were in all the provinces of the king Ahasuerus, both nigh and far (Esther 9.20) .

The reference to Ahasuerus' one hundred and twenty-seven provinces or dominions is repeated elsewhere in this chapter. The recurrent emphasis on this number of the Persian king's dominions obviously suggests the widest possible dispersion of the Jews over an extensive territory, as far east as Bukhara. From the above­ quoted passages, moreover, the inference can be drawn that the Persian Jews, like the other citizens of that great empire, used their own language. Hebrew or Aramaic were the languages used by the Jews in Assyria and Babylonia, and later in Persia, until well into the ninth century, the period of the Gaonim. Aramaic is still used to this day as the common vernacular of certain Jewish com­ munities in Kurdistan.

THE JEWS O F B U KHARA

57

According to Bukharan tradition, their ancestors, i.e., the de­ scendants of the Ten Tribes, came partly through Merv, and partly through Khiva. Some of these migrants pushed farther East, and there is reason to believe that the Jews of Kai-feng-fu, in China, too, are direct descendants of the Jews of Bukhara who had com­ mercial relations with the Far East. The persecution of the Jews under the kings of the Sassanid dynasty (227-65 1 C.E.), par­ ticularly under the reign of Yezdegerd II and Firuz, in the fifth century, probably caused mass migration from these countries. Some of the refugees may have sought refuge from the fanaticism of the Magi in pre-Islamic days in border-provinces where the priesthood was less active. At any rate, this wave of migration seems to have brought a considerable increase in Persian and Babylonian Jews in Central Asia and Bukhara. All these facts taken together lend credence to the Bukharan­ Jewish tradition as to their descent from the Ten Tribes. They were not alone in adhering to this belief, which was shared by several Moslem Turkoman tribes. The Jews of the land of the Medes and the Persians professed themselves descendants, not only of the exiles of Judah and Benjamin, but also of the exiles of Samaria who had been carried off by Shalmaneser, king of Assyria, to his own country. There is little doubt that the Jews of Media descend from both Judaean and Samarian exiles; and so do the Jews of Bukhara. There is an implicit reference to the existence of a Jewish settle­ ment in Khiva, Bukhara and Afghanistan (Balkh), after the Mos­ lem expansion, in a passage in the Kuzari, Judah Halevy's philo­ sophical book. At the beginning of the second chapter we read that : "He should seek in the hills of Khorassan the action desired by God. They came as far as the cave in which Jewish men used to celebrate the Sabbath." From the polemics between Saadia Gaon and Hiwy of Balkh, who lived in the ninth century, we learn of the existence of a Jewish settlement in Balkh, Afghanistan. We have no subsequent infor­ mation on the Jewish community there, which seems to have perished. In the days of Benjamin of Tudela, the well-known medie­ val traveller, there were some 7,000 Jews in Khiva (Khwarezm) and no less than 50,000 Jews, including prosperous businessmen

58

THE EXILED AN D THE RED E E MED

and eminent scholars, under their Nasi (exilarch) Obadiah, in Samarkand.8 The country was flourishing at the time, thanks largely to a highly developed system of irrigation which was responsible for a progressive agricultural economy. The geographical position be­ tween the Middle East and the Far East made the region a busy crossroads of communication in days when trade depended mainly on caravan routes, and maritime sea routes were as yet undeveloped. The many thousands of Jewish refugees who estab­ lished themselves here, contributed substantially to the economic development of the area as a whole. But the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century brought that process of economic and cul­ tural consolidation to an abrupt end. The invaders destroyed the flourishing Central Asian culture; the system of irrigation was com­ pletely wrecked, and agriculture, industry and commerce were utterly paralyzed. Genghis Khan's legions wrought havoc in the cities, killing their people or selling them as slaves. The cultural centers of Khiva (Khwarezm) and Samarkand (Bukhara ) were entirely destroyed9 The Mongol invasion brought in its wake the physical and spiritual collapse of Central Asian and East-Russian Jewry. His­ torians have not as yet adequately appraised the extent of the destruction wrought by the Turko-Mongol invaders on the Jews. They brought about the total collapse of the Khazar Jewish king­ dom on the Volga, whose refugees found safety in Crimea, Daghe­ stan and Caucasia, particularly in Derbend, the so-called "Jewish Fortress." Genghis Khan's work of destruction was continued by his suc­ cessors, the Tatar-Mongol rulers, long after they adopted Islam. Tamerlane, a Moslem ruler, laid waste the lands he conquered and, with utmost ruthlessness, forced their pagan as well as their Jewish residents to adopt Islam. Those who refused to submit to his decrees were either killed or taken prisoner. From his capital, Samarkand, Tamerlane extended his sway to Persia, Babylonia and the lands of Central Asia. In a letter to A. Druyanoff ( 1914), the distinguished explorer

T H E .J E W S OF B U KHARA

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of Jewish folklore, the traditional account of Bukharan-Jewish history is related by Samuel Komissaroff, of Bukhara : According to the tradition preserved by the old Jews of Bukhara, there reigned in Bukhara fifteen hundred years ago a great Khan (ruler) who also ruled over several smaller states. While in a good mood, that ruler said unto his ministers: "My land is large, and all I need is Jews; I had better send a courier to Persia to bring me ten Jews therefrom." He did so, and in­ stalled the ten Jews in the king's houses in close proximity to the royal palace, issuing strict orders to his subjects not to molest them. That quarter is called to this day "the Jewish quarter," even though not a single Jew lives there. For many years Jews resided therein enjoying full equality with the rest of the people of the country. But 500 years ago, the Khan, responding to ma­ licious incitement against the Jews, issued several restrictive de­ crees against them such as the prohibition to don the Tshalma, the order to fasten their jackets with a rope, the prohibition to ride a horse or a donkey, etc. . . .

According to another tradition current among the Jews of Buk­ hara, the emirs sought to bring the Jews back into their dominions after Tamerlane's death and the partition of his kingdom. It would appear, however, that the Jews were not quick in responding to the invitation. Only when one of the emirs made himself responsible for the safety of the Jews to the Emir of Bukhara did they begin to come in small numbers. The re-establishment of a Jewish com­ munity in Bukhara took place at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The migrants came from Babylonia and Persia, whence they also brought their speech and their religious customs. The return of the Jews to Bukhara recalls an interesting process which recurs in Jewish history. No sooner are the effects of a first destruction obliterated, than the Jews begin to return in small trickles to rebuild their former communal life. Sometimes they live through yet another destructive catastrophe which all but sweeps away the communal life. While we have no exact details of what happened under Mongol khans, there is enough information to show that, at all events, Jewish life did not cease altogether. It is certain that as soon as conditions improved, Jewish settlement was revived. Thus, according to one tradition the Jews came to Bukhara from Sabsavar ( a distance of about two days from Meshhed) ,

THE EXI L ED AND THE REDEEMED 60 whence they were deported, or fled, in the days of Genghis Khan (1220), finding refuge in Balkh and Samarkand. It appears there­ fore that a Jewish settlement existed there soon after the Mongol invasion. Much later, in 1598, in the days of Bab Mohammad Khan, who overpowered Shah Abbas, the community of Samar­ kand was again destroyed, and its Jews fled to Bukhara City whose small community was much strengthened by their arrival. After its re-establishment in the fourteenth century, the Jewish Bukharan community produced a number of writers and poets, fragments of whose works have come down to us. Solomon Ben Samuel, who wrote a Judaeo-Persian dictionary, flourished in Gurgang, on Bukhara's western border, at the beginning of that century. To that period (about 1 420) belonged also Moshe Ben David, a poet who wrote in both Hebrew and Persian. The fame of Joseph Yehudy, or Joseph the Poet (died in 1755), spread at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century with his poem The Seven Brothers (that is, Hannah and her seven sons). Less famous, but equally prolific Uzbek poets were: Elisha Raghib, author of The Prince and the Monk; and Shelomo. Their poems in both Hebrew and Persian won widespread popularity among Jews and Moslems. It is significant that these poets did not confine themselves to biblical and midrashic themes, but produced also valuable translations, both from classical Persian works into Hebrew and from Hebrew classical works into their Persian ver­ nacular, and composed original works of their own on contempo­ rary themes. To the first category belong the translations of the work of Nizam and Hafiz, which the translators also transcribed into Hebrew script for the benefit of the Jews who were not familiar with the Persian script. Of the works of Hebrew poets translated into Persian, mention must be made, above all, of the Persian ver­ sions of the poems of Israel Najara. No less important were the Hebrew renderings of the work of Babay Ben Lutf, of Kashan, whose historical poems describe the persecution of Jews in Shiraz, Kashan, Ispahan and Ramadan in the days of Abbas I (died 1 628) and Abbas II (died 1666), and the works of Babay Ben Farhad. The works of these two poets were popular throughout the Persian dominions and served as a source of inspiration to the Jews of Bukhara as well. As late as the nineteenth century there was a

THE JEWS OF B U KHARA

61

Jewish poet in Bukhara who composed an elegy on the martyr Nathaniel Hodeidad who was put to death by Emir Ma'asum of Bukhara, because of his refusal to adopt Islam. It was when the Jews of Bukhara came into contact with emis­ saries from old established Jewish communities overseas that a real spiritual transformation set in in their life. One of the first and best­ known of these emissaries was Joseph Maman of Tetuan who ar­ rived from Safed in 1 793. Rebh-Maman was a Palestinian who in his wanderings reached as far as Bukhara. He tells a sad tale of spiritual degeneration and ignorance which, he says, moved him to settle among them and assume the spiritual leadership of the community. He spent many years in that capacity and succeeded in thoroughly transforming the spiritual shape of Bukharan Jewry. A recent historian describes his work in the following words : Until his arrival the Jews of Bukhara said their prayers ac­ cording to the rite of the Persian Jews, based on the prayer book of Saadia Gaon, and there was a tradition current among them that they were descendants of the Ten Tribes. But the emissary told them that they were descendants of the Spanish exiles, and introduced the Spanish prayer book (Livorno edition) in their communities, intending thereby to extricate them from their spiritual isolation, and link them more closely with their brethren in the rest of the Diaspora.10 It was mainly due to Joseph Maman's efforts that relations were established between Bukharan Jewry and the rest of the Diaspora. Joseph Wolf, a missionary, who visited Bukhara in the thirties of the last century, reports the following in the name of Maman's son-in-law, Rabbi Pinhas son of Solomon : The Jews of Bukhara were living in utter ignorance of religious commands, even eating meat slaughtered by Moslems. They had no rabbi to instruct them in the law of Moses and the prophets and teach them to distinguish between the ritually per­ mitted and the ritually forbidden. But when Joseph of Tetuan arrived among them, he took them severely to task for their ignorance. For six months he refused to partake of their food, instructed them in the laws of shehita and ablution, and prompted them to send their representatives to the communities of Vilna, Livomo and Capust, there to buy books for study. He brought down a scribe to write the Torah on a parchment. Later, he

62

THE EXILED AND THE REDE EMED formed a group of students among them whom he i �structed in religious literature, until Bukhara became, as the saymg went amono0 Bukharan Jews, "a Little Jerusalem." He lived sixty-one years among them, reaching the ripe old age of eighty-one. His death was bitterly mourned by the Jews of Bukhara who la­ mented in him "The Light of Israel." He destroyed the New Testament copies sent from Orenburg. He was versed in arith­ metic as well as astronomy. Two sons and a daughter were born to him in Bukhara. The people of Bukhara regarded him with awe as a great mullah. He proved to them that Jews believed in the divine origin of the Torah; and this saved Bukharan Jews from slavery.

In 1 802 an interesting correspondence was exchanged between the Jews of Bukhara and the Jewish community of Shklow, in Lithuania. The letters proved, on the one hand, the anxiety of Buk­ haran Jews to cultivate closer relations with the Jews of Russia, and, on the other hand, the nostalgic sentiments roused in Russian Jewry when they discovered the existence in far-away lands of remnants of "the exiles of Ariel." The news about the existence of the Bukharan community raised high expectations among all classes of Russian Jewry that the discovery of the Ten Tribes and the heralding of national redemption were impending. Thanks to the inspiration of Joseph Maman, the first Jews from Bukhara, a father and his son, both Maman's pupils, migrated in 1 827 to Palestine. Thereafter small parties of Bukharan Jews un­ dertook to settle in Palestine. Upon the annexation, in 1 865-66, of Bukhara to czarist Russia, the Russian authorities maintained Bukhara's self-government with an emir of its own. For a while the Jews consequently enjoyed full equality before the law and were exempted from all those restrictions which applied to Russian Jews in Russia itself. The Jews were the major factor in the development of Russian Turkestan, for they developed trade in Russian goods and products while putting large areas under cotton plantation. A new market, within Russia, was thereby opened up for the pur­ chase of cotton, and a fillip was given to the Russian textile industry. But early in this century, in 1 900- 1 3 , the policy of Jewish disfranchisement was introduced in Bukhara : Jews were deported from the principal cities-Tashkent, Samarkand, Ko­ kand-and Jews who were Bukharan subjects were forbidden to

TH E J E WS O F B U KH A RA

63

reside in other towns of Turkestan, outside the emirate of Bu­ khara, an exception being made only in the case of those Jews who had resided there prior to the Russian occupation. These were allowed to remain thanks to the emir's intervention. 11

The annexation of Turkestan opened up to the Jews of Bukhara the gates to Russia and Russian Jewry, as well as a new roundabout route to Palestine through Russia. In 1 868 the first prospective Bukharan immigrant to Palestine happened to be in Odessa, where he met Alexander Zederbaum, the editor of the Russian Hebrew paper Ha-Me/itz, to whom he gave first-hand information on the Jews of Bukhara for publication in his paper. According to his re­ port the number of Bukharan Jews at the time ( 1 868) was 7,000, most of whom resided in Bukhara City. Smaller communities ex­ isted in Karachi, Hissyar and Kermin. Their main occupation was the trade in and manufacture of silk. According to their tax assessment they were classified as: ( 1 ) the poor, who paid a poll tax of three roubles; (2) the middle-class, who paid a head tax of six roubles, and ( 3 ) the rich, who paid a tax of twelve roubles per capita. It was the accepted custom for tax collectors to acknowledge the collection of the tax by giving the Jewish taxpayer a slap in the face. The reigning emir, Muzaffar al Din issued a decree prohibiting the sale of any real estate by Bukharans to Jews. In the Russo-Bukharan war of 1 875 the Bukharan forces first had the upper hand, and the Russian Governor-General Kuropatkin and General Skobeleff fled to Kokand. Kirgisian forces are said to have pursued them. A story is current among Bukharan Jews that it was a Jew who saved these two Russian officers from death, whereupon they gave a written undertaking that they would never again deprive Jews of their civil rights, as was done in Russia, nor draft Bukharan Jews for military service. While this story is prob­ ably pure fantasy, the fact is that the Jews of Bukhara enjoyed preferential treatment, as compared with their Ashkenazi brothers in the Russian Pale, at least until the revolution of 1 905. In 19 1 1 a decree of deportation was issued by General Samsonoff who or­ dered all Jews residing in Turkestan, outside the emirate's borders, to return to Bukhara. In those days the rich Bukharan Jews main­ tained extensive trade relations with countries near and far, and their business turnover was estimated at four million roubles a

64

THE EXILED AND T HE REDE E M ED

year. Nevertheless, it was with great effort that they could obtain permission to reside in Samarkand, Kokand and Margelan. The Jews of Bukhara attained the peak of their prosperity at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, a number of them amassing considerable fortunes. Their economic progress did not, however, lead to any marked advancement in mat­ ters spiritual. The traditional heders, in which unqualified instruc­ tors taught the rudiments of Jewish knowledge, continued to be the foundation of their educational system, while their girls did not even obtain such an elementary education. As contacts with the outside world, especially Palestine, increased, that primitive elementary educational system gave way to better organized and somewhat more modem heders in which instruction was in keeping with the spirit of the times, and where better qualified instructors from Palestine imparted the knowledge of modern Hebrew. The arrival of qualified teachers from centers with a deeper Jew­ ish consciousness contributed to an intensification of the national Jewish spirit and went a long way to overhauling the entire educa­ tional system. Special schools were opened for the native children of Turkestan in which the language of instruction was Hebrew. The advent of the Soviet regime brought about a complete trans­ formation in the quasi-autonomous status of Bukharan Jewry, and its effects were nowhere more noticeable than in the cultural life of the community. The change was a concomitant of the cultural policy of the Soviet rulers. In the early days of Soviet rule Jewish leaders could still repre­ sent to the new authorities that the Tadjiki jargon in vogue among the Jews of Bukhara was not a civilized language, that Hebrew was the national language of the Jews and that, therefore, the Jews of Bukhara were entitled to an educational system in their own lan­ guage. The Soviet authorities at first acquiesced in that request, and opened special schools for the Jews in which the language of in­ struction was Hebrew. Even a special geography textbook in Hebrew was published under government auspices for use in schools. This comparatively happy interlude, in the cultural sense, did not last long. In 1 921 the long arm of the Yevsek (the Jewish section of the Communist Party) extended to Bukhara, with the result that

THE J E W S OF BUKHARA

65

Bukharan Jews, too, were made to experience the same anti-Jewish restrictions that applied to all Jews. Under Yevsek pressure the Hebrew language was ousted from its dominant place in the schools and was superseded by Tadjiki, in Hebrew characters. Later, on the introduction of the Latin alphabet as the approved script for all Asian peoples, the Jews too were forced to use that script. One of the reasons advanced by the Soviet script reformers was that the difficult Arabic characters were too complicated for use by simple-minded people, and the Arabic alphabet therefore increased illiteracy and ignorance. The reasoning was irrelevant to the Jews who had learned their script and language for genera­ tions past. There is little doubt that the official intention in this case was to cut the Jews off from the sources of their national culture.

2. Social and Economic Condition of Bukharan Jewry* Under the rule of the fanatical Moslem khans who persecuted all non-Moslems, Bukharan Jews, too, were discriminated against, particularly by being made to bear an excessively onerous burden of taxation. In the course of time, Bukharan Jews adapted them­ selves to their Moslem environment, first under compulsion, later willingly, to a point where any one of them refusing to fall in with the general Moslem-like deportment of the community was con­ demned as a renegade. In dress as in other points of external ap­ pearance Bukharan Jews looked exactly like the Moslems of Bu­ khara. They shaved their heads clean, save for very short earlocks. Their headgear in summer as well as in winter was a caracul hat * The tightening of all forms of censorship in the Asiatic possessions of

the U.S.S.R. has virtually ruled out a11y possibility of obtaining alllhoritative information on the fortunes of Bukharan Jewry under the Soviet regime. But inasmuch as the Jewry of Bukhura represented, until the tightening of the Iron Curtain, a very special segment of the Jewry of the world, wit/, its own traditions, folklore, speech, habits and even ritual customs, and the writer has made a study of it in the light of the information which was then available, he has seen fit to include in this book an account of the social, econvmic and demographic condition of this Jewry, as be knew it, that is, during the period ending approximately in the thirties of this century. Beyond this, all information on that Jewry is conjectural. Some of the occasional infvrmation that has leaked out of Soviet-ruled Bukhara has been embodied into this account, but in essence it reflects the condition of that Jewry as it was, not as it is today.

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED under which they wore the usual cap worn by all orthodox Jews, which protruded from under their hats. Their womenfolk, like Moslem women generally, confined themselves to their domestic chores. Men did all shopping for the home, including the buying of the dresses and the jewelry for the women. On the rare occasions when women "went out," as when they went to visit a friend or a neighbor, they were usually veiled, like all Moslem women. Their speech was the Tadjiki or ancient Persian, which was still used in the courts of the emirs as well as in government offices. All official acts and documents, bills, title deeds and the like were drawn up in this language which was still the lingua franca of the intelligentsia and the merchant class of the country. On the other hand, the lan­ guage of the rural population is a Turkoman dialect closely akin to Tataric or ordinary Turkish. While most Bukharan Jews had a command of that second rural language, they all considered ancient Persian as their own language. They also bad a fair command of Hebrew which they enunciated in their own peculiar Bukharan diction. When a Jew visited a Moslem at his home, he squatted on the floor, clasped his hands, offered his blessings to the host, ending with "Amen" in their language, to which the host replied in Arabic, still in partial use in religious services, A llah Akbar (God is Su­ preme) . The food of Buhkaran Jews was very much the same as that of Moslems; they ate no bread of the European loaf type, but only thin rolls of various sizes. Like the Moslems, they chewed tobacco. The women smoked the large water pipes known in Bu­ khara as Kilim, which are similar to the Narghileh smoked else­ where in the Middle East. Although the Koran prohibits the con­ sumption of liquor, that ban was not enforced on the Jews who brewed their own grapewine ( or liquor) for their own domestic purposes. The law prohibited only the sale of intoxicating liquor to Moslems. The impact of Moslem influence was felt also in the synagogue, both in its appointments and structure and in the divine service itself. The synagogue floor was invariably covered with precious rugs. On entering, the congregants took off their shoes; they prayed in a squatting position, standing up only for those portions of the service which had to he chanted while standing. Friends were ad-

THE JEW S OF B U KHARA

67

dressed by their family name with the addition of the title of en­ dearment like "brother" or "uncle," while the more learned among them were called Mullah, and if they were scholars from Palestine or abroad-for example, Russia, Afghanistan or Persia-they were addressed by the Hebrew title Hakham (Rabbi) . In spite of the strong external resemblance to the average Moslem type in Bu­ khara, there was no mistaking the specifically Hebraic or Semitic traits in the Bukharan Jew. The number of Jews in Bukhara City in the days of the emir's reign was approximately seven thousand; smaller Jewish communi­ ties, totalling some eight hundred, existed in Chardjclly, Shahri­ sawaz, Karchy, Kermin and Hattirji, and another five hundred Jews lived in the rural hinterland of these cities and towns. There was also an unspecified number of casual residents in other towns, that is, men whose wives and children lived in the cities, but who conducted their businesses away from home. The community in Bukhara City was the center of all Jewish life in the country. Generally speaking, the economic position of the Bukharan Jews was always satisfactory in the sense that they were never either too rich or too poor, only one per cent of the com­ munity, or seventy individuals, having been at any time on its social welfare rolls as recipients of relief doles. Relief "campaigns" were organized twice a year on a characteristically Buhkaran pattern : leaders of the community went out to raise money, or collect rice and old clothes, and distribute them among the needy to meet their requirements for six months. Bukharan Jews never had to tackle a pauper problem among them. Able traders with a special knack for business, big and small, they established for themselves an envi­ able reputation as merchants with whom it was profitable to do business. The Bukharan Jew was trained for his business career from infancy. Before the boy attained the age of ten, his father fitted him out with a yardstick and installed him in his shop to take charge of customers and conduct with them the tortuous bargain­ ing deals. There were no agriculturists among the Bukharan Jews. Although by the laws of Bukhara, they were not debarred from holding land, social conditions were such as to make it impos�ible for them to engage in agriculture. A very few Bukharan Jews

68

THE E X I L E D AND T H E R E DE E M E D

owned fairly large agricultural estates near Bukhara City, but these were worked by farmer-tenants who received for their labor half the estates' crop. There were a very few artisans, including a hun­ dred tailors with one or more sewing machines each; no shoemakers, carpenters or foundry workers; one watchmaker (who learned his trade from a Russian Ashkenazi Jew); one hatmaker; several thread-dyers; one dealer in precious stones and jewelry; about thirty butchers; about ten office employees in European firms and a small number of instructors, synagogue beadles, ritual slaughter­ ers and a cantor. The practice of "medicine" during the period under review was still in its most primitive stages, with a pre­ ponderance of quacks who had recourse to sorcery and the applica­ tion of a mixture of superstitious formulae and quaint remedies. Jewish as well as non-Jewish patients consulted them profes­ sionally and paid for such services. There were no professional mu­ sicians among the Jews, even as there were none among the Moslems, with the exception of one singer who sang Bukharan songs to large and appreciative audiences, and was often called upon to give command concerts in the court of the emir. It was difficult to gauge their financial standing from their external living conditions. They were great bargainers and quite stingy. They lived a secluded life, in houses which were far from comfortable, indeed, even congested, in homes almost bare of furniture. The two principal objects of trade in Bukhara were: ( 1) cotton, mostly concentrated in the hands of Europeans, Christians and Jews; (2) caracul-lamb hides, which was also concentrated in th.e hands of the non-Moslem element of the community. Bukharan Jews were never made to suffer any hostility on the part of the native population towards them as Jews; on the con­ trary, on more than one occasion, the ruling princes went out of their way to demonstrate friendliness to them, especially after the press had reported that the Jews had shown special sympathy for Turkey. While lawsuits of Bukharan Jews, like those of other sub­ jects of Bukhara, were tried in the courts according to Moslem Shari'a laws, Bukharan Jews also submitted to the rulings of their own communal head, a civic Jewish leader appointed by the Prime Minister, whose special responsibility it was to collect the head tax. There were no civil servants among them, and they were ex-

THE JEWS O F

B U KHARA

69

cused from military service, being in this respect no different from Jews under ancient Moslem governments. Very few of them could read or write the language of the country. Their educational and general cultural standard was low. Their heder bore great similarity to the primitive Moslem kuttab, with the instructor squatting on the floor before his squatting pupils and imparting to them a mechan­ ical knowledge of the alphabet and its diacritical points. Such "edu­ cation" usually lasted until the boy was eight years old, when he was taken by his father into his shop and briefed in the intricacies of his business. Apart from the common biblical names, which are used by Jews everywhere, Bukharan Jews were also the bearers of a number of rather uncommon biblical names, as the following abridged list will show: Abba, Abner, Ari, Elizaphan, Bezalel, Gadiel, Gabriel, Gilead, Gamaliel, Hananyah, Hezekiah, Hiyah, Jonathan, Amram, Nissim, Levy, Mishael, Mashiah, Jessachar, Nathaniel, Johanan, Immanuel, Putiel, Zevi-Zion, Siman-Tov, Ezra, Katan, Rabbi, Rahamim, Shammai. Among women: Bulur, Berukha, Batyah, Mazal, Yafa, Shoshanah, Malkah, Simha, Mica!, Abigail, Yeshua, Nehama, Martha. Moslem names, which were in use among the men of the older generation, were completely abandoned during the years immediately preceding the Soviet regime. Here are some of those names which Jews bore: Ibrahim, Mirza, Abed, Yunes, Murad, Jurah, Fauzallah, Abd-El-Rahman, Yoseph. 3. Legal Status of Bukharan Jews during the Period of Transition:* The legal disabilities which were imposed on Bukharan Jews under the independent emirate continued long after the establishment

* The information in his section is largely drawn from the Russian book on "The Legal Status of Jews in Central Asia," Samarkand, 1 931 (Ocherk Pravov byta Sredneaziatskikh yevreyev) by S. L. Amitin-Slwpiro, a com­ munist communal leader who spent many years in Bukhara and Turkestan, and had acted there as Hebrew teacher under the Czarist regime. During the first years of the Bukharan sovereign republic, the Hebrew language was recognized as a language of instruction in Hebrew schools, in which not only the religious, but also the general subjects were taught in Hebrew. The author himself wrote a general textbook of geography in Hebrew which was used in the Hebrew schools. But upon the abolition of the independent Emirate of Buk/zara and the annexation of the country to Uzbekistan, the so-called Hebrew regime in the Jewish schools, too, ended, largely as a result of the hostility of Jewish communists to the Jewish religion, Zionism

70

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED

of the Russian regime in the country. As in most Moslem coun­ tries, Jews were officially regarded as dhimmy ( non-Moslems), yet were granted certain privileges of self-government in their domestic affairs. As second-rate citizens, they were subjected to several degrading disabilities. They were not drafted into the armed services, but were liable to the payment of the Geziyah (poll tax) from which Moslems were exempt. On the other hand, they enjoyed the pro­ tection of the law of the land as to both their person and their property. Here is a list of some of the special disabilities suffered by the Jews : ( 1 ) They were compelled to live in separate quarters, often being debarred from the occupation of new buildings, even within the confines of their own special ghettos, and they were definitely forbidden to acquire a Moslem house within the ghetto. It is only fair to add that confinement to the ghetto was not im­ posed on them solely by outside compulsion. Very often it was their own choice; Jews preferred to live segregated, and thus be better protected against the fanatical outbursts of the Moslem mob, which were not uncommon. In some cases Jews petitioned the Grand Emir for permission to build quarters of their own. ( 2 ) They were ordered to carry a special badge, in the form of a rope tied over their outer garment. ( 3 ) They were forbidden to enter the city after sunset. ( 4) They were forbidden to ride a horse, sometimes even a donkey, through the streets of the city, being only permitted to ride behind a Mos!em rider, where the two mounted the same animal. and the Hebrew language. The author who was a fanatical communist of the most assimilated Yevsek type, was among those responsible for the abolition of Hebrew and the substitution of the Tadiiki dialect as the lan­ guage of instruction. The author does not conceal his joy at this change of language and at the enforcement of Friday, the weekly day of rest of the Moslems, instead of Saturday. He regards both measures as signs of real progress in the march towards communism. A !though Amitin's description is admittedly tendentious, I could find no aources of information which I could consider any more objective. I was tl1erefore compelled to reconstruct the story of the position of the Jew, iuring the period of transitio11 from accounts in that book, supplemented by verbal expositions given me by several Bukharan Jews who had managed to settle in Israel and had direct and first-hand knowledge of the position of Jews in Bukhara.

THE JEWS OF B U KHARA

71

( 5 ) They were forbidden to wear the Chalma, a cap, being only allowed to wear a hat of very special design and material. ( 6) They were ordered to hoist rags over their houses, to mark them as distinct from houses of Moslems. ( 7 ) The house of a Jew had to be lower than that of a Moslem. ( 8 ) At times they were forbidden to wear any but black robes. ( 9 ) When squatting in their shops, only their head, and not t:1cir body, could be exposed to the eye of the Moslem customer. The shop itself had to be one step lower than that of the Moslem. ( 1 0) They had to pay a poll tax ( Geziyah) for every adult Jew. ( 1 1 ) The evidence of a Jew was inadmissible in the case of a Moslem, even where such evidence was in favor of the Moslem litigant. ( 1 2 ) They were forbidden to build a new synagogue, and could only repair existing synagogues.

The tax levied on Jews was: 12 tangas for every poor male Jew; 24 tangas for every middle-class Jew; 48 tangas for every rich Jew. The collection of the tax was accompanied by two slaps in the face of the Jewish taxpayer, as a sign of degradation. The Jews of Bukhara City thus contributed to the Bukharan exchequer two thousand tillos a year. (A til/o was worth three gold roubles.) The assessment was made by the government. In the middle of the nineteenth century twelve tax collectors were appointed who col­ lected the assessment in the synagogues in the presence of the Kush-Bagi (tax commissioner). Beggars and children below the age of thirteen were exempt from the tax. Apart from the twelve (Jewish) tax collectors, there was also a presiding tax collector, who was nominated by the community, with the approval of the emir. A rabbi and two deputy-rabbis (known as "The White­ Bearded") were also elected in each quarter to deal with tax collec­ tion. In course of time, however, this duty came to be entirely separated from the functions of these official rabbis. The emir usually signified his approval of the appointment of the "Presiding Tax Collector" in writing, and the letter of approval was fastened for three days to his cap, when he was the recipient of congratula­ tions on his good fortune in securing this appointment. Much valuable supplementary information on the legal status of Bukharan Jewish communities during the period of transition is

THE EXI LED AND T HE REDEEMED 72 gleaned from a newspaper report published in the Ha-Carmel (nos. 37-39 of 1 864) . We gather from that report that Jewish courts had jurisdiction in miscellaneous civil disputes, family disputes and other trivial offenses. But criminal offenses and dis­ putes between Jews and Moslems were tried by the courts of the land according to Shari'a law. Jewish courts enforced Jewish laws; and where litigants failed to bow to their decisions, the government proceeded against them. Family disputes and disputes resulting from testamentary dis­ positions were tried by the rabbi and his Beth Din (religious court) alone, but in important civil matters the principal tax col­ lector (Kolontar) and his deputy also sat in the court. Notwith­ standing the legal degradation of the Jews generally, the Kolontar was a highly respected dignitary who was also held in high esteem by the emir, even though that high regard cost very considerable sums of tribute which were ultimately borne by the community as a whole. From the account of the missionary Wolf, we gather that Emir Nashrallah ( 1826- 1 860) was a frequent visitor at the home of the rabbi who combined with his rabbinical duties those of the Kolontar, thereby enhancing the prestige of that particular office in the eyes of the community. Sometimes the Kadi (religious Moslem judge) would sentence to imprisonment the defaulting Jewish party disobeying the judgment of the rabbi; but the mass of the Jewish people much preferred their own rabbinical tribunal to the emir's court, for the simple reason that there was little hope for a Jew to obtain justice in a Moslem court. According to that newspaper report there were a few Jewish agriculturists among them. There is no information as to any or­ ganization of Bukharan Jews functioning in those days, and there was no trace--or need-for organized charity in the community.

4. Bukharan Jews after the Bolshevik Revolution Amitin-Shapiro's fanatical communism, although leading the writer to much political distortion, does not appear to have biased him to the extent of warping his demographic data : we gather that in 1 9 17-18, shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, there were 1 5 ,000 Jews in Bukhara City. The emir then proclaimed a constitu­ tional regime. At the demonstration which was held by the Jedidi

THE J E W S O F B U KHARA

73

(Neo-Bukharans or Young Bukharans) to celebrate the occasion, Bukharan Jews, too, participated with their own banners and He­ brew slogans. The Jews generally viewed the Young Bukharans sympathetically and, regarding the revolution as the beginning of their civil emancipation, were quick to discard the degrading "cord" ( or badge) , not without murmurs and protests from the older men of the community who deemed that action premature. But before long reaction set in, and the Jedidi leaders, including many Jews, were persecuted and forced to escape. Among those apprehended and sentenced to death by the emir were a few Jews of the Yunossoff family. Persecution of Jews continued until the collapse of the emir's rule, that is, until the establishment of the Bukharan Soviet Republic in 1 920. The revolution brought in its wake substantial changes in the organization of the community, and the autocratic rule of the Kolontar gave way to a seven-man commission which included the rabbi; schools, kindergartens and other training courses were opened. Instruction in the Jewish re­ ligion and the Hebrew language was included in the curriculum. That communal organization was maintained until 1925, when the Soviet Bukharan sovereign republic was dissolved and inte­ grated into the Soviet Uzbeki Republic. The Statutes of that communal organization provided for: 1 . A national council of seven members, namely, the chairman and his deputy, the rabbi, the manager of the Burial Society, the secretary, the treasurer and the gate-keeper (functioning also as process-server of the court ) . The chairman and his deputy were elected by the Jewish community; the other members were appointed by the chairman. 2. In Kareky (Jewish population 600) , Chargoy, Shahrisawaz, Kermin, Bakhatirjy, community councils of three m�mbers ( the chairman, his deputy and the rabbi ) were elected. Where such local community councils were constituted, the mukhtars (Ak­ Sakaly) were subject to their authority. 3. The Councils had jurisdiction in the following matters : The establishment of Jewish public schools, libraries, Jewish theaters, hospitals etc.; the collection and distribution of communal chari­ ties and contributions designed for the maintenance of syna-

74

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED

gogues and ritual functionaries, the control of all social welfare activities, burial societies, the defense of Jewish interests, the allocation of funds for the maintenance of communal services, the dissemination of information in favor of the new regime to members of the community, and propaganda in favor of the reforms and measures of the Soviet government. 4. The Council and all its departments were financed out of public funds ( of the general exchequer) , their staff benefited from all rights accorded to public servants, under estimates ap­ proved by the Council of the People's Viziers, and formed part of the estimates of the Commissariat for Internal Affairs. 5. Funds collected by the Council from members of the Jewish community were applied directly for the purposes for which they were raised, and could not be expended for other purposes, communal or general. 6. In all matters falling within its jurisdiction the Jewish Council maintained contact with the competent administrative organs of the republic. The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, by whom it was constituted, was responsible for its activities.

In the early days of the revolution few Bukharan Jews joined the Communist Party officially, but the full annexation of Bukhara resulted in a radical change. In the 30s the communal affairs of the Jews were under the full control of party organs or trade unions. Indeed, as early as 1928 the rabbinical court had already ceased to function, having been superseded by a Jewish People's Court, which conducted its proceedings not in Hebrew, but in the local vernac­ ular. The Jewish Kolkhozes and Artels were organized with the active cooperation of the OSE (The Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jews) . Education was in charge of Soviet peda­ gogues and all subjects were taught in the local vernacular. The rabbi's functions were much curtailed, being strictly confined to synagogue activities. The position was not much different in Samarkand, the capital of Turkestan with its fairly large ( 12,000) Jewish population. In the early days of the revolution ( 1 9 1 7 ) there was organized in this city a "Society of Native Jewish Working Men" with an enroll­ ment of 600 members. The great majority of these members had

THE JEWS O F B U KHARA

75

belonged to the "right" wing of the social-revolutionaries, and later shifted to the "left" wing. Still later, they moved farther left; and from these constant shifts there sprang the Jewish Communist Party, known as "The Fourth Section of the Samarkand Organiza­ tion of the Communist Party of Turkestan." A resolution passed by that society on June 5, 1 9 1 7, throws much light on the occupational structure of Samarkand Jews. It read that: "Barbers, tailors, clerks and small shopkeepers may be admitted as members of the so­ ciety," with the characteristic reservation in the case of the last­ named which said that "these are not to receive their flour ration, which should be given to the working people!" The communist author deplores the inadequate communist zeal of the members of the society who, deep in their hearts, re­ mained religious, and had therefore not abolished the offices of the rabbi and the Kolontar (Principal Tax-Collector). The society strengthened its hold on Jewish affairs by establishing Councils for (general) Jewish affairs, synagogues, the burial society, kashruth, schools and economic affairs, as, we are told, "the masses were still ardent adherents of religion and religious customs, so much that they could not sever their ties with their bourgeois way of life." The society also supplied matwt flour to its members, and instructed its representatives in the Ittifaki-Islam party to coordi­ nate action in all religious matters with the rabbi, on the ground that "party members, too, intervened in all religious questions." The society was, of course, active in economic affairs : it estab­ lished cooperatives of contractors and consumers; lack of funds, however, dictated its participation in the "Zion" Consumers' Co­ operative which was established by the bourgeois elements. In the cultural field, it published in the vernacular the program of the Social-Revolutionary Party and opened schools for its members. The author regretfully adds that there was little or no substantial change in the spirit of the new schools which continued to teach the children Hebrew and the Jewish religion. The class struggle was definitely within the scope of the society. In conformity with its spirit, it decided to expel from the school all children of rich parents, thereby creating vacancies for the sons of the poor. There was a characteristic rider to that decision which read: "Learning gives bread; the rich, who have money, need no

THE E X I L E D AND T H E R E D E E M E D 76 bread; but the poor, who have no money, need education and in­ struction, which give money." The author has something to report on strictly Zionist activity: The "right" wing of the Zionist organization, known as the General Zionist Organization, with which bourgeois elements among Sam­ arkand Jews were affiliated, was still functioning in the early days of the revolution. The organization was disloyal; not the least of its sins was its struggle for the enforcement of Hebrew as the language of instruction in the schools, instead of the Tadjiki ver­ nacular. Even this tendentious reporter admits by implication that the society did not lightly abandon its struggle for the Hebrew language, and only threw up its hands in face of the firm opposition of the government. The society survived until 1920, when it was dissolved and its members absorbed into other societies. Power in the land gradually became vested in the communists, that is, the official members of the party, while religious affairs continued to be administered by the "bourgeois" elements. In 1 920 the Yevobschizum and the Komsomol (Communist Youth Leagues) were established. Many Jews served and fought in the Red Army, mainly to overthrow the emir. In a report submitted by Mr. Jacob Pinhasi to the World Jewish Congress in 1948 we read a somewhat different account on the cultural struggle of Bukharan Jews:

After the revolution schools were opened for the Jews of Turkestan, in which Hebrew was the language of instruction. Jewish leaders pleaded with much force that the Bukharan-Jewish jargon (Tadjiki) is not their cultural language, and the Soviet authorities, accepting this contention, agreed to maintain these schools in Hebrew. It was only in 1921 that Hebrew was discon­ tinued as the language of instruction in the Jewish schools of Bukhara, and that under pressure of the Yevseks from Moscow.1 2 Since that order Jewish schools introduced Tadjiki as the language of instruction, first in the square Hebrew characters, later, upon the Latinization of the script in all Central Asian territories, in Latin characters. The Latinization reform was to the non-Jewish population an indispensable improvement in methodology, seeing that they had hitherto used the awkward

THE JEWS OF BUKHARA

77

Arabic characters which their masses found difficult to master, for either writing or reading purposes, and which were therefore the cause of the mass illiteracy among them. Not so the Jews, most of whom could read and write. The real object of the re­ form in their case was, of course, to cut them off from the sources of their national culture. Fortunately, the Jews remained faithful to the Hebrew character and the Hebrew language.

Amitin-Shapiro's book, published in 1930, ends on the follow­ ing "optimistic" note as to the "happy" state of the Jews of Bukhara and Turkestan, as a result of these reforms : In Bukhara and Samarkand the machinery of Jewish self­ government was adjusted to that of the Soviet regime by adopting their own "mother-tongue." The Judge and the Prosecutor ap­ pear as true spokesmen of the interests of the working masses ( a reference to the abolition of the Jewish religious courts of law ) . The militia consisting exclusively of Jews also functions in that mother tongue which is understood by the masses. The Chief Militiaman has succeeded the Kolontar and discharges his duties. Similarly the Zages, who performs an increasingly important function, in lieu of the religious marriage ceremony, also func­ tions in that language. Jews cooperate in the cooperative ma­ chinery which serves the eastern quarter of the city. The OZE, too, does its work in that language, in which all cultural ac­ tivity is conducted-clubs, kindergartens, schools, etc.

This appears to be the official Jewish communist version of the total sovietization of Bukhara Jewry. From Jewish sources, however, different facts emerge. Here is a first-hand description of what happened as conveyed to the writer by a Jewish leader in those days, Mr. Isaac Yehudayetf: Zevi Hefetz, a young Bukharan Zionist, who had settled in Jerusalem long before the outbreak of World War I and was there active in the cultural and educational life of the city, was expelled at the outbreak of the war as an enemy alien. He re­ turned to Bukhara and visited Kokand and Samarkand, where he became active in reorganizing the Zionist movement. In Bu­ khara the movement was banned, but there was much under­ ground Zionist activity. His close associates in this work were Harzfeld, Fusailofl and Issacharoff. It was obvious that Hefetz's long residence in Palestine and his close contacts with the new Yishuv had given him proper training for his new Zionist activity in his native country. Aided

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by Russian Zionists, an enthusiastic band of native young Bu­ kharan Zionists did not hesitate to flout the law and conduct Zionist propaganda in broad daylight, complete with banners, bands and demonstrations calling upon the Jews of Bukhara to take an active part in the elections to the Zionist Congress.

In the urban centers of Turkestan this could still be done, even under the law, strictly speaking, for it was only within the confines of the emir's rule that Zionism was definitely banned. The report proceeds : In Turkestan the revolution broke out in the winter of 1 9 1 71918. We then organized Tarbuth, a Youth League, as a cover for continued Zionist activity in Central Asia. The headquarters was in Tashkent, and there were branch offices in Kokand, Samarkand, Margelan, Bandjan and Panch-Shenba. Under the banner of Tarbuth the whole youth was organized. In Kokand we even succeeded in forming a dramatic company which toured the country, producing Jewish plays to large and appreciative audiences. At that time the Jewish community was established and we made close contact with it. We continued our struggle against the Yevsekzia for the maintenance of our cultural auton­ omy until 1921. In the middle of 1920 heavy pressure was brought to bear on our youth, who were prevailed upon to cut off their relations with us. Communists had meanwhile been given lucrative gov­ ernment appointments, a tempting bait to youth. They then established the Jewish Department (Yevsekzia) whose first achievement was the liquidation of Hebrew by representing to the authorities that Tadjiki, not Hebrew, was our official national language. At our annual conference, which took place early in 192 1 , several Yevsek leaders took part; they openly attacked our policy and moved that Tarbuth be liquidated and its members ordered to join the Yevsekzia. But we firmly held to our course, to a point where they informed against us of counter-revolutionary speeches. A personal friend, himself a member of the Com­ munist Party, then sent me, as I was presiding, a secret note warning me that four of us, including myself, would shortly be arrested. Heeding that warning, I immediately took my three colleagues out of the hall, and all of us managed to escape, on a coal-carrying train, in time to Bukhara, Samarkand and Mos­ cow. Indeed, the police arrived on the scene within the hour, besieged the building, made a thorough search for us, and then broke up the meetin,e-.

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In conclusion Mr. Yehudayeff said that, although Hebrew was then discarded as a language of instruction, the new Soviet rulers had not as yet dared to dislodge religion from its place in the life of the community. In Bukhara my informant was offered the direc­ tion of the Jewish section in the Commissariat of Internal Affairs. He accepted the offer and remained at his post for nine months. In that city Jews had an orphanage, a social center, and several schools staffed by teachers from abroad. Yehudayeff also recalled the work of a scientific expedition from Russia which then gathered much historical and archeological material in Central Asia, all of which was taken to Moscow. The estimated Jewish population in Central Asia at the time he left Bukhara, in 1921, was 45,000, and it may well be assumed that in the thirty years that have since elapsed their number has increased. On the situation in Tashkent also there are at hand reports from eyewitnesses, former residents of that city who arrived in Palestine in 193 3 : there were then 10,000 Jews in the city, of whom 6,000 were native Bukharans and 4,000 Ashkenazim. Rabbi Kirshner, an Ashkenazi and a former rabbi of the community, was the editor of a Russian paper, Turkestanskiy Kray; he was succeeded in the rabbinate by the Sephardic rabbi, Solomon Tager. The Tashkent branch of Tarbuth, which had a membership of 6,000, opened a Jewish technical school in which some three hun­ dred Bukharan Jews received technical instruction. The instruction was wholly in Hebrew. The school existed until I 926. Even as late as 1926 the food supplied to the inmates of the school (there was a boarding school attached to it) was kasher food. The authorities of the school were given non-kasher rations by the government, but they exchanged them for kasher rations on payment of the difference in price. Until 1926 the Sabbath was observed in the school as a day of rest, but that year the extreme Jewish (Bukharan) com­ munists urged the commissariat to abandon the Sabbath as a day of rest, whereupon an order was issued to continue instruction on the Sabbath, and adopt Friday, the Moslem day of rest, as the school's day of rest. The government then replaced the entire teach­ ing staff of the school, and Tadjiki was substituted for Hebrew. The last annual rally of Tarbuth societies in Central Asia was

THE EXI LED AND THE REDEEMED 80 held in 1922, when all who took part in it were arrested. The only Zionist newspaper in Tadjiki, Rahamim, was closed down, and Jewish communists published in its place Bayraki Hurriyat (Banner of Freedom) , a communist paper in Hebrew characters which continued publication until 1933, the year of our informant's de­ parture from the city. There were three synagogues in the city. In 1 925-26 the com­ munists closed down the large Ashkenazic synagogue, whose con­ gregants then had to pray in the only large Bukharan synagogue which remained open, at least until 1 929, when communists closed that down too. The Jews appealed this decision, but were told by the commissariat that the action was taken not on government initi­ ative, but on the urging of the Bukharan Jewish communists them­ selves. The synagogue building was turned into a printing shop. Our informant gave some interesting information on the attitude of Jewish communists to the Jewish religion:

Je,,arish communists in Tashkent did not generally circumcise their children; but occasionally, at the insistence of the mother, a surgeon was asked to perform the operation. There was a ritual bath in the Great Synagogue, which, however, was abandoned when the synagogue was closed down. Women in need of ritual bath facilities had to walk a long way to the Old City. The water in the synagogue of the Old City was very cold; and Jews had to heat it at their expense. Marriages were at first celebrated in the civil registry of the government; later the parties went through a religious ceremony at home. Several communists had to bow to the wishes of re­ ligiously minded families in this respect. There was only one burial place for all Jews, communists as well as non-communists, and the last rites were according to Jewish ritual. Matzot (un­ leavened bread) were baked by Jews in their own home. There were several communists who attended the Seder in the homes of orthodox families.

5. Bukharans in Palestine The first Bukharan Jews immigrated to Palestine in 1 868. They were moved both by purely religious motives, the love of Zion, and by a desire to establish a Bukharan Jewish center in the Land of Israel. These early pioneers succeeded in 1 892 in implementing their plan by establishing a spacious and commodious Jewish Bu-

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kharan quarter in Jerusalem, known as Rehovoth, which exists to this day. It was distinguished both for the comparative modernity of the living quarters and for its wide streets; it housed a number of Bukharan public institutions including a synagogue, a school for children and adults, a social club and the like. These newly arrived Bukharans thus organized themselves as a separate communal unit in Jerusalem and exerted their influence on their brethren in the diaspora to bring their families and fortunes to the country. Most Bukharan immigrants brought some capital, but they failed to create for themselves new sources of livelihood. Unlike Russian Jews who went to the settlements to work on the land, Bukharan Jews contented themselves with the building of houses in Jerusalem for rent. Some of them left their children in the schools in Pales­ tine, while they returned to Bukhara to carry on their business there. Their number in the country grew gradually until by the outbreak of World War I it reached 1,500. Bukharan Jews thus established something like a real spiritual center in the country; no other section of oriental Jewry has so significant an achievement to its credit. There were several men of learning in the Bukharan community and they set out systematically to supply literature to their breth­ ren in the diaspora. Some concentrated on collecting books and manuscripts and established valuable Jewish libraries. The library of Shlomo Mussayeff contained hundreds of manuscripts and thou­ sands of printed volumes, including incunabula. Others, like Simeon Hakham and his disciples, launched publishing ventures in their Judaeo-Persian vernacular as well as in Hebrew. No less than one hundred and seventy volumes were published by Bukharan Jews in the country during a period of seventy years. Most of the books were of a ritual and religious character, but special importance attaches to the Bible commentaries (Ta/seer), which are Judaeo­ Persian renderings of midrashim in the classical poetical meter of Persian poets. There were also works of fiction, translations of Persian poetry and of the early Hebrew writers, and some text­ books, including Hebrew-Judaeo-Persian dictionaries, the annual reports of the Bukharan committee, and letters to the Diaspora. Such extensive cultural activity was the unique achievement of the Bukharan Jewish community and cannot be said to have been ap­ proximated by any other section of oriental Jewry.

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED 82 World War I spelled economic disaster to the Bukharans in Jeru­ salem. They lost most of their possessions, and what little was left was confiscated by the Ottoman authorities who requisitioned their houses for army quarters and stables. At the outbreak of the war most of the men left the country; only the aged, the women and the children remained behind. Poverty and disease combined to deci­ mate their numbers, and it is estimated that no less than 700 of them died of starvation or the effects of malnutrition. All Bukharan Jews in Bukhara were impoverished as the result of the revolution. The richer among them lost all they had, return­ ing in a state of destitution to Palestine. All that was left to them was their Jerusalem properties which thus constituted their only source of livelihood. Until quite recently most of them engaged in petty trade, though there were a few manual workers and artisans. At the end of World War I contacts between Bukharan Jewry in Bukhara and their Palestinian brethren were intensified, and in the first six years of the mandatory regime some two hundred new Bukharan immigrants arrived in the country bringing their total by 1936 to 2,500. Half of the new immigrants settled in Jerusalem and other cities (Tel-Aviv, Haifa), but some proceeded to the land and took up more productive occupations. A very radical change in the occupational structure of Bukharan refugees arriving from Iran and Afghanistan has occurred recently. Hundreds of them went to agricultural settlements to work on the soil, and an appreciable number took up industrial employment in the Tel-Aviv industrial plants. They have organized themselves into a distinct society of workers (300 members) within the Gen­ eral Federation of Jewish Labor.

VII THE KRIMCHAKS-GRANDEUR AND DECLINE 1. Origiru An abandoned tribe of Jews lives, not in remote and inaccessible regions of our world, but on the continent of Europe, at an inter­ continental crossroads much trodden throughout the history of mankind: the Crimean Peninsula. Nevertheless, with the possible exception of some Russian Jews, few educated Jews knew of their existence. Few scholars paid them adequate attention, and hardly anyone knows all the facts about their tragic fate at the hands of the Nazis in the last World War. Soviet official publications which have dealt with every aspect of the life of the one hundred and seventy racial and ethnic groups in the vast expanses of the Soviet Union have supplied little or no reliable information on them. Equally little is known of the fate of the Crimean Karaites, and the writer's efforts to obtain reliable information on them have produced no results. The records of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials and the judg­ ments given at Nuremberg on April 8, 9 and 10, 1948, have mean­ while come to hand. From the evidence given at Nuremberg it was established that the Germans had organized mass murder with unprecedented ruthlessness and that they had loosed their mµrder­ ous barbarities with special fury on the Jews they found in Crimea, including the Krimchaks. Further material on the fate of the Krim­ chaks was made available to the writer by Moshe Varukhoff, a former chairman of the Association of Crimean Jews in Israel; it consists of letters he received from friends and relatives during the last few years. From all that fragmentary information, a more or less complete picture emerges of the tragic fate of the Krimchaks. The name "Krimchak" is relatively new, no more than a hundred years old. Until 1859 there is no mention of it either in Jewish sources or in official Russian records. It was in that year that "Krimchaki" settlers were removed from their agricultural colony 83

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Rogatlik near Eupatoria to Karasu-Bazaar. But even if the desig­ nation is of relatively recent usage, the residence of Jews in the peninsula has been of long standing, indeed, of ancient origin. The history of Jewish settlement in the Crimea may be divided into five distinct periods: its origin may be traced to the days of the Second Commonwealth. Ancient chroniclers report that King Mithridates of Persia deported Jews in the second century B.C.E. to the Cimerian Bosphorus shore, south of Kerch. One of the hills in that area is known to this day as the Mithridath Hill. These early Jewish settlers were recruited from the large Hellenistic diaspora, which at one time numbered about three million Jews. Hellenistic Jewry was an interesting, culturally homogeneous group within the Jewish people. Religiously and socially an integral part of the body of the Jewish people, they had a cultural and spiritual legacy all their own. They drew their spiritual sustenance from sources and works that were typical products of Hellenistic civilization, such as the Septuagint, the Letters of Aristeas, the works of Philo of Alex­ andria and similar works. Much of this literature was conceived with a missionary purpose, having been designed mainly to carry the message of Judaism to the pagan world. There are extant to this day architectural relics and inscriptions of those judaized Greeks. They were simple, pious folk who worshipped one supreme God; half Jews, half Greeks, they subscribed to the tenets and commands of Judaism, insofar as they knew them, and they observed them with utmost loyalty. These early migrants were joined in course of time, particularly after the destruction of the Temple, by new arrivals from Byzantine provinces, including Judaea, Babylonia and Persia. As a result of this influx, Jewish communal life in the Crimea gradually adjusted itself to the traditional talmudical pattern and became no different from Jewish life in the rest of the Diaspora. The Jews of Crimea struck root in their new country, establishing there towns and villages of their own. Their aptitude for commerce made them dominant in the economic life of a country the geo­ graphical position of which rendered it a busy entrepot of trade with adjacent Slavic and Khazar tribes. Theirs was a strong spiritual influence, too: the expansion of Islam in that vast area was coun­ tered by a fairly strong Jewish influence along the northern sea-

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board of the Black Sea. Crimean Jews probably became active helpers in the missionizing activities of the Persian Jews which extended to northern Caucasus. There is little doubt but that Per­ sian Jews were primarily responsible for the adoption of the Jew­ ish faith in 732 (or, as some believe, 740 C.E.) by King Bulan of the Khazars and his ministers. Army commanders and civil leaders followed in embracing the Jewish faith and thereby set an example to the rest of the people. The religion of Israel became dominant in the eighth century in the land of the Khazars, even as several cen­ turies before, in another territory in western Asia, the royal house of Adiabene in the Parthian Empire had become judaized. At the end of the ninth and the beginning of the tenth century, when the Khazars conquered Crimea, Crimean Jewry became an integral part of the Jewish society of the Khazarland. The Khazar kingdom was defeated in battle by the Russian princes at the beginning of the eleventh century. Its former center on the Don River was destroyed; but vestiges of Khazar reign in Daghestan, the northern Caucasus, and even in Crimea remained. It has recently been established, moreover, that the Jewish-Khazar kingdom in this basin continued intact until the arrival in the thirteenth century of the Mongol hordes, who swept through all the countries of Central Asia and eastern Europe. These ele­ mental forces not only obliterated all trace of Khazar rule in the northern Caucasus and Crimea and physically crushed the Khazars, but also put an end to the Russian principalities, which became subjugated to the new invaders. These developments mark the end of the second chapter of Jew­ ish history in the Crimea, under Jewish-Khazar rule. The Mongol­ Tatar rule which lasted about three hundred years constitutes the third period. It was during this period that the invading armies of the Republic of Genoa established themselves in Keffa, the present Theodosia. The days of Genoese occupation were days of prosper­ ity for the Jews who ensconced themselves as the principal carriers of international trade between Europe and the Mongol dominions. Their success is the more surprising because all lines of direct com­ munication between Asia and western Europe were virtually para­ lyzed in those days. John Shildberg, a traveller in the fifteenth cen-

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tury, reports that he found four thousand Jewish "houses" in Keffa. The great majority of the Jews were traders, but some engaged in agriculture and there were a few artisans. Jewish commercial trav­ ellers reached as far as Kiev, Lwow and Moscow to the west, and Damascus and the Levant to the south. Crimean Jews evinced a remarkable aptitude for cultural and linguistic readjustment; they adopted the Tatar vernacular instead of the Greek (spoken in By­ zantium) which they and their ancestors had long used. Their linguistic readjustment had far-reaching consequences: on the one hand, they were cut off from the body of Byzantine and European Judaism; on the other hand, they developed a distinct Judaeo­ Tatar way of life, complete with a Tatar vernacular all their own, which replaced Greek and Aramaic. Just as the German dialect became thoroughly transformed, as Yiddish, into a Jewish speech, and in the Moslem countries the Spanish language turned into Ladino, and in Persia there were distinct Judaeo-Persian dialects, so here, too, a distinct Jewish idiom found its birth. Crimean Jews, although adopting Tatar speech, preserved their Jewish patrimony to an even greater degree than Turkish Jews. They not only ob­ served Jewish religious traditions and customs, but also preserved Hebrew script for their new Tatar speech. In the fourth, the Turkish period, which began with the occupa­ tion of most of the peninsula by Ottomans, the center for all trade between Byzantium and the Levant shifted from the Black Sea coastline to the Mediterranean basin and the beaten tracks of desert routes. Crimea was left outside the major arteries of international trade. She declined in value and importance, and Crimean Jews suffered equally with the rest of the population from that decline, but their struggle for economic survival continued for many cen­ turies. Under Turkish rule, when Crimean khans were trbiutary to the Ottoman sultans, Jews had still held high positions in the courts of the ruling khans. Although "Big Business" had passed from their hands to those of the new immigrants from Byzantium, the Karaites, they continued to be active in local commerce. Ivan III concluded a treaty with the Mongol Khan Giray through the mediation of the Jew Jose (possibly Joseph) Cocos, who was

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a minister at the court of the khan. The Russian prince requested Cocos, through his emissary Nicita in Kalmisheff, to obtain from him a special yarlik (royal charter). He also asked that any dis­ patches sent to him (in 1474) should not be written "Jidowskim pismom" (in Jewish script), but in Russian or "Moslem" (Tatar) script. That special request would indicate that former communica­ tions addressed to him by the Jewish minister were written either in Hebrew or in Hebrew characters. We know, too, of scholars who communicated on points of Jewish law with the rabbis of Constantinople (about 1500), such as Abraham Kirimi, author of S'fat ha'emet ("Language of Truth"), Rabbi Moses, an exile from Kiev, and others. During the terrible massacre of Jews in the Ukraine in the seventeenth century, the Jewish population of the Crimea was reinforced by the arrival of a new element-immigrants from the Ukraine and Poland , who had been taken prisoner by the Tatars and carried to the Crimea. Here they were ransomed by the Crimean Jews. This would explain the many distinctly Ashkenazi family-names borne by Crimean Jews, such as "Ashkenazi," and "Lekhno" (from the Turkish root Liakh, which means "Polish"). The scholarly works of David Lekhno indicate a revival of Hebrew and Jewish studies after the Turkish occupation. He was the author of several religious books and some secular works, such as the unique chronicle Dvar Sefatayim (a history of Crimean kings and the Jews), a book on Hebrew grammar and an introduction to the Crimean Mahwr Kefa (a prayer book). 2. Under Russian and German Rule The beginning of the Russian occupation opened a dark chapter for the Crimean Jews. Under Tatar and Turkish rule they enjoyed relative freedom. They were not, it is true, immune from oc­ casional persecutions and oppressive taxation which weighed as heavily on them as they did on the rest of the population, but they were not subjected to special anti-Jewish discrimination. They were free to trade at will, and the highest offices of state in the courts of the khans were open to them. A few of them rose as high as Kings' Counsellors, and were appointed to foreign embassies. 13 Their position changed radically when Potemkin's armies oc-

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cupied the peninsula in 1783. The czarist governor passed dis­ criminatory legislation which applied to all Russian subjects in the vast Russian dominions, including the so-called "talrnudical" Jews of Crimea; from that designation we must conclude that Karaite Jews were exempted by the Russian rulers from all restrictions. Ever since then, Karaites tended to hold themselves aloof from the rest of the Jews, designating themselves as "Russian Karaites" (with the emphasis on the word "Russian"). The decline of Crimean Jewry coincides with the beginning of the Russian occupation. We gather from the official report presented to Potemkin that there were ninety-three Jewish homes in Karasu­ Bazaar, and ninety-seven Jewish homes in Giozlovo-Eupatoria. The Jews of Baghchi-Sarai, mainly Karaites, were concentrated in Chufut-Kale (Rock of the Jews). From Voronzoff's report of 1841 we gather that Jews were active in several trades, such as hat­ making, cotton work, leather work, and the like. In 1843, a hundred and forty men were registered for agricultural settlement and established the village of Rogatlik which was, however, com­ pletely destroyed in the Crimean War (1856-57). When, at the end of the war, the Jews asked for the restoration of the village, the government refused their request and gave their land to Russian immigrants. The Jewish farmers were forcibly returned to their urban occupations and sent back to Karasu-Bazaar. In the census of 1897, 4,000 Jews were counted; in 19127,500, and in 1926-6,328. The last census, taken in 1939, yielded no more than 3,000, but was not apparently as accurate as the preceding census. Thus, according to the 1939 census, Simferopol had a Jewish population of only 500, while it is known that three years later no less than 2,500 Jews were butchered in the massacres organized by Hitler's hordes in 1942. Rabbi Hayyirn Hezekiah Medini of Jerusalem, author of Sdei Hemed (an encyclopedic work of rabbinical responsa), who was appointed to the Chief Rabbinate of Karasu-Bazaar (1866), did more than any other leader for the spiritual improvement of the Crimean Jewish community. He approached his task with single­ minded devotion. He laid down regulations governing the religious deportment of the members of the community and combated il­ literacy by positive educational measures; he established a religious

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college whose students carried on his good work after he returned to Palestine; he printed religious books and other textbooks together with a Tatar translation. Among others active in the literary and educational fields, mention should be made of Nissim Zahazir, Raphael Labok and Abraham Nissitn Ashkenazi, who were authors and editors of books of Midrash, religion, poetry and of a Hebrew­ Tatar dictionary. Rabbi Medini also composed special books of religious instruction, and liturgical poetry for the benefit of the members of the community, and imbued his audiences with the love of Palestine. A number of Crimean Jews emigrated to Palestine at an early date, most of them settling in Jerusalem where a small community of Crimean Jews was established. There are now about a hundred families (or five hundred individuals) of Crimean Jews who mix with their Ashkenazi brethren more freely than other oriental Jews. Hitler's hordes reached Crimea at an early stage of the war. His special firing squads were ordered to exterminate all Jews. Con­ fronted with both Krimchaks and Karaites, they did not know what to do and asked for further instructions from Berlin. These did not fail to come : Karaites, who adhered to the laws of Moses but were not direct descendants of the Hebrew Patriarchs, were spared; but Krimchaks, who stated without hesitation that they were Jews racially as well as by religion, were to be executed en masse, men, women and children. The order was promptly carried out. "From November 16th to December 1 5th, 194 1, 1 7,645 Jews (Ashkenazi Jews), 2,504 Krimchaks, 842 gypsies, 2 1 2 Communists and Partisans were shot dead." (Report No. 1 50 of January 2, 1942.) In a subsequent report (No. 1 53 of January 9, 1942) it was stated that during the week under review, 3, 1 76 Jews were murdered in Simferopol alone. It was not stated how many of them were Krimchaks. The report concludes with the words : "In Simferopol the question of the Krimchak Jews was solved." 14 The following extracts from private letters shed light on the extent of the tragedy that befell the Jews of Crimea : 1) A letter in Russian from Kerch dated June 22, 1945 : A terrible fate befell all Jews, Ashkenazim and Krimchaks,

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who did not leave the city in time. Over four thousand Ashkenazi Jews and five hundred Krimchaks perished. The same fate befell all the Ashkenazim and Krimchaks in the Crimea, including those in Simferopol, Odessa, Karasu-Bazaar and Sebastopol. Only a few members of the family of Moshe Ben Pinhas managed to escape to Central Asian provinces and were saved. Others of the same family fell in battle in the service of the Red Army in the defense of Perekop. The writer of the letter was one of those who returned to Kerch after the war. The pre-war Krimchak population in Kerch was a hundred and fifty families, or seven hundred and fifty persons. In Simferopol, the capital of Crimea, there were two thousand Krimchaks, apart from a number of refugees from other places who joined the community in the emergency; in Karasu-Bazaar some six hundred families, or two thousand and five hundred persons; in Sebastopol fifty families, or two hundred and fifty persons, and in Theodosia seven hundred persons. 2 ) Extract from a letter from Kerch, dated October 5, 1946 : . . . you would not recognize Kerch. The Germans have turned it into a shambles. Our house was totally destroyed and our possessions robbed. I can no longer live in this town. 3 ) Extracts from letters from Kerch, dated March 2 and June 14, 1947 : Lazar Ben David, his wife and two children were murdered in July 1 942. The others survived thanks to their evacuation in good time. Others who served on the front (in the Red Army) returned safely though some of them as invalids. There are now in Kercb fifty Krimchak families, all of whom live peacefully together. The writer continues: . If you wish and if it would help historical knowledge, I will write you fuller details on bow the people were saved and on the tragedy of the Krimchaks in Simferopol, Theodosia, Sebastopol, Eupatoria. . When I returned with my family to Kerch last year, I found my house in ruins. I am now em• ployed in a big factory, and Shura does domestic work.

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4 ) Extract from a Russian letter written by a woman from Kerch on April 8, 1947 : . . • We must be thankful to the Soviet Government which has transferred us here and we (women and children) have thus re­ mained alive. The writer continues to give details on the atrocities perpetrated under German occupation: one member of her family was shot dead in Kerch in July 1942, and another in March 1943. 5) Letter from a woman in the Krasnodar province, dated April 8, 1947. The writer gives an account of the trials of the family under Nazi occupation: All the survivors have now returned. Pavil returned as an in­ valid; Eissig married a Russian girl when he was in the Red Army and can no longer help the family in any way. The particulars promised in letter No. 3 have never been received. It must be remembered that since 1 948 no regular cor­ respondence can be received from these countries. 6) From Rebecca L. of Kerch, in a letter to her brother dated March 14, 1946: . . . Isaac, his wife and his son were shot by the "fascists" (i.e., Nazis) in 1 944. My elder son fell in battle, and so did my grandson. Zakai, too, had to die at an advanced age at the hands of the Nazi murderers, and my son-in-law, Moshe Patik, was murdered by them. It is difficult for me to write of all those who perished. Very few of us Krimchaks remained alive and all of us live in peace and amity together. During the war we were all evacuated and thereafter repatriated to various places. We have begun to reconstruct our lives anew, but it is painful that our men are not with us. The elder daughter, Shulamith, lives in Yalta. 7) From A. L. ( the same date) : . . . Not a single one of my sisters or their husbands has sur­ vived. All were shot by the German barbarians. My only comfort is that my wife and five children are with me. I myself was severely wounded at the front in 1944, lost my left hand and remained with a broken jaw and no teeth. I feel well and re­ ceive a pension . . • •

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8) From Eva A. of Dniepropetrowsk to her uncle Jacob in Tel­ Aviv (February 16, 1950) : . . I am the only survivor of the large family. The accursed fascists exterminated all my relations and destroyed all our homes and nothing, not even their photographs, remains. Please send me their photographs so that I may find comfort by looking at them. December 1 1 , 1949, was the anniversary of their death, for they were shot eight years ago on this day. This is to us all a grievous memorial day, and we all go to the slope of the hill where they were taken to be butchered. But what is the good of crying and tearing clothes? My only comfort is that my husband and daughter who remained alive are with me and they sustain me in my grief.

VIII THE CRYPTO-JEWS IN PERSIA 1. The Mass A postasy of 1839

It was a hundred years almost to the day, before the outbreak of World War II, that an amazing, tragic episode, amazing even for Jews tried in tragedy, took place in the city of Meshhed in Persia. The entire Jewish community--complete with their old men, women and children, and their pious rabbis-was forced to embrace Islam. But the fact that throughout the long period of a century, with its many vicissitudes, the whole of that community continued to observe the commandments of the Jewish faith, and cultivate in their children a love of their people, is no less amazing, especially in these days of mass barbarities and outrages. Meshhed is a large fortified city in the Khorassan province on the Afghan border and the most important religious center of the Shi'ite sect in Persia. Her Jewish community was of comparatively recent origin, having been established by Nadhir-Shah in 1734. Meshhed Jews originated from Kazwin, Dalman, Bizad, Kashan and other places. Meshhed Jews in Jerusalem gave the author a firsthand account of the circumstances of the mass conversion of their forefathers, which may be summed up as follows : On Moharram 10, 1255 A.H., a day of fast and mourning for Shi'ite Moslems, a Jewish woman stricken with leprosy sought medical help from one of the many Persian quacks who practice medicine. The "doctor" prescribed killing a dog and bathing in his blood. The patient promptly complied by asking an urchin to kill the dog in her own house. There was a violent dispute with the urchin over his wage, and he ran through the streets of the city proclaiming that Jews killed a dog on the fast day sacred to the Shi'ites and, to show their contempt for Moslems, called him Hus­ sein. An infuriated mob, congregating for worship on that day in the Imam Ridha Mosque, stormed the Jewish quarter, broke into 93

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED 94 Jewish homes, set fire to the synagogue and murdered thirty-two of the community of four hundred persons. The massacre may have lasted more than one day, for in the manuscript records of the Meshhed community of Jerusalem the date is given as Nissan 12, 599 (Jewish calendar), which fell that year on Moharram 10, 1255, namely, on the second, not the first, day of the Shi'ite holiday (March 27, 1839). The tragic story did not end with the massacre of the thirty-two innocent Jews, for on Nissan 12 all Jews were compelled, under threat of the wholesale massacre of all of them, to declare their willingness to embrace Islam. The tragedy which shook Persian Jewry to its depth was not known by the Jews of Europe for a long time. These Moslem mar­ ranos have been known ever since as Jedid el I slam (Neo-Moslems), and the year of the mass apostasy was known by the marranos themselves as Allah-Dad (Divine Visitation). Like the marranos of Spain and Portugal, Meshhed marranos, too, have ever since lived a life of religious dualism. Their relations with the main body of Jewry have, however, been much closer, and their own Judaism much deeper, than those of the marranos of the Spanish inquisition. The Jedid el Islam are Moslems in appearance only, for they ob­ serve all the commands of the Jewish religion, often at the risk of their lives. In the course of that century-old dual existence, and particularly in recent years, there were sporadic attempts by groups of these marranos to break away from this intolerable life and join the ranks of their own people. Some migrated to Bukhara and Afghanistan; others escaped much farther, eastward to India and westward to England; but the majority of the emigrants were destined for Palestine. Unlike most Jews coming from Central Asian provinces, who were largely of the merchant and peddler class, many Meshhed marranos had special skills for manual tabor, including agriculture, and proved to be a useful and con­ structive element of high manpower value. About a thousand Meshhed marranos, or fully one half of the entire Moslem marrano community in Meshhed, have already settled in Israel. There are divergent accounts from several travellers and ex­ plorers, Jews and non-Jews, on the circumstances of that tragedy. Professor Walter Fischel of Berkeley University, one of the last

THE CRY PTO-JEWS IN PERSIA

9S

to visit Meshhed for the purpose of establishing the facts on the spot, collected in his study on Meshhed marranos15 all the sources and accounts dealing with the subject. Of these, Travels of Israel, by Israel Ben-Joseph Benjamin, which was written eleven years after the event (in 1850), is by far the most authoritative. Among the incidents he recalls 16 there is one about a ritual slaughterer (shohet) who performed his duties secretly, at the risk of his life, by killing poultry according to Jewish ritual laws. When the Moslems got to know of it, they murdered him and organized another pogrom of all Neo-Moslems, destroying all their houses of worship.17 There is an account in rhyme of the destruction of the community in Nissan 1839. The account contains an historical survey of the establishment of the community by the Kazwin emigrants in the days of Nadhir-Shah, but there are no facts concerning the mass apostasy. Such information as we have is based on oral tradition passed from father to son which is necessarily deficient in historical accuracy. But a document that the present writer succeeded in obtaining sheds clear light on the event. It was written in Meshhed two months after the event, and there is no doubt as to its authentic­ ity. The document sets out the precise date (Nissan 11, 599, ac­ cording to the Jewish calendar, which corresponds to Moharram 1 1, 1255 A.H.) and gives the number of the Jewish victims killed in the massacre as thirty-two. The document is written in black ink in the inside flyleaf of the red leather binding of a prayer book. There are two blank sheets between the binding, and the text of the document was probably fastened to the binding and hidden from any "evil eye." The in­ scription is written diagonally, beginning with very short lines of three letters which gradually expand to seven or eight words or thirty letters, the widest line, from which the lines begin to contract once again. The book is an Amsterdam edition of the service for Hosha'ana Rabba, printed in 547 (Jewish calendar) or fifty-two years before the event. At the end of the text are thirty pages of addenda in a beautiful hand. Before the title page, these lines are written: A prayer to be fittingly recited on Hosha'ana Rabba, on p. 1 14 b, composed by me, Jacob son of Elijah of blessed memory. From Dalman they came to Kazwin.

96

THE EXI LED A N D T HE REDEEMED

The last line suggests that the said Jacob originated from Dalman when they moved to Kazwin. We have already learned from other sources that the founders of the Meshhed community came from Kazwin. The prayer book is the same as had been in use by the community long before their mass apostasy. It is one of the few books to have been rescued from the conflagration, seeing that the Moslems confiscated all ritual books and objects such as prayer shawls and phylacteries, all of which are said to be kept to this day in the Ali Ridha Mosque in that city. The crypto-Jews preserved the little book with its valuable information in singular devotion and self-sacrifice; they kept it hidden in cellars, using it as a secret textbook for the study of Hebrew by their children and for a whole century passed it from father to son. The writing is the same cursive Hebrew script used by Persian Jews, and the language is Persian with some Arabic admixture, or the same vernacular used by Persian Jews. A few words are erroneously spelled. The special value of the document derives from the fact that it was written on the scene of action by an eyewitness two months after the event. It reflects the despondency of a wretched com­ munity of four hundred Jews who, under threat of mass extermina­ tion, were compelled to embrace Islam. The writer sincerely states that their only hope is that Almighty God might send them the Messiah to rescue them from their dispersion among the Ishmaelites and also, somewhat surprisingly, in the arrival of the British. Here is a literal translation of the Persian text: For remembrance : In the year 1 839, wicked people spread false accusations against Israel. On the 12th day of Nissan they attacked the community of Israel, killing thirty-two of them. The remainder were forced by them to become apostates, for other­ wise they would have killed them all, Israelites, Cohens and Levites. All of us said "No."18 Now we have no hope other than, first, the grace of the Almighty, secondly the arrival of the Mes­ siah, thirdly the arrival of the British who will keep us alive, treat us compassionately and save us from this exile in Ishmael. Written by Samuel, in the month of Sivan, 1 839.

2. Marranos in Herat The second document coming from the same source does not deal directly with the Meshhed marranos, but with those refugees

T H E C R Y P T O - .J E W S IN P E RSIA

97

among them who managed to escape from Persia and settle in adjacent Afghanistan. The Afghans speak the Persian language, but are Sunnis by religion, and the marranos could therefore live openly as Jews in Herat and elsewhere in Afghanistan and there pursue their businesses without fear of molestation. The bitter fate of Persian Jews followed them, however, into their new settlement. Eighteen years after the mass conversion in Meshhed, a new catastrophe befell the Meshhed refugees and other Jews of Heral when the city was occupied by the Persians, who ordered the deportation of all Jews. The order was given in the year 617 (1 856) and was ruthlessly carried out in the winter of 1857. First they were transferred to Maslah, later forcibly sent back to Meshhed, the same town from which their ancestors had fled, where they were interned in a large concentration camp in Baba­ Kordad, close by the cemetery of the marranos. Here they suffered indescribable hardships and were doomed to die of hunger and cold. Their internment lasted two years, until they were returned to Herat in the winter of 619 ( 1858) .19 All these events are narrated in a document attached to a printed copy of the Book of Deuteronomy which is kept as a sacred book in the vaults of the synagogue of the Meshhed marranos in Jerusalem, named after Haji Adoniyahu. The following is a literal translation of the second inscription as copied by the writer: During the Feast of Tablernacles in 617, the enemy conquered Herat. Because of our sins he ordered on Shebat 1 5, 6 1 7, that all the children of Israel in Herat, whether originally coming from Meshhed or elsewhere, should be deported and carried to Maslah which is as bad as Sodom and Gomorrah. On the 1 9th Shebat, we left Maslah under great hardships. It was snowing heavily. Even strangers sympathized with us and cried over our fate. There were many invalids who died on the road of cold and starvation and the fear of the soldiers. Like our ancestors who were expelled from Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and Hadrian we, too, suffered indescribable hardship and contempt. The march to Meshhed lasted twenty days. At last we arrived in Baba­ Kordad where we were interned for two years and suffered hunger and disease and the degradation of slaves. But we must thank the Almighty that after two years He graciously redeemed and released us from this Egyptian slavery and captivity, and we left

98

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED as free men. On Monday, Tevet 1 3, 619, we marched from here, arriving in Herat on Shebat 25. May it please the Almighty not to surrender Herat to the enemy until the arrival of the redeemer, and until it is vouchsafed to us to go to the Holy City of Jerusalem and share in the joy of the House of our Lord. (Written by Benjamin Gani)

3. The Persecutions in Salmas We have another document which is of very special significance because it sheds light on an unknown event in the life of the com­ munity of Salmas. The Jewish community in that city (then known as Dalman) was of ancient origin. According to some documents, the first Jews of Meshhed came from Kazwin although they had lived earlier in Dalman, that is, Salmas. Nadhir-Shah, an opponent of the Shi'ites, was the first ruler who was not afraid to settle Jews in Meshhed, although the city was so sacred to Shi'ites that all non-Shi'ites were barred from it. The Jews began to move to Meshhed in the thirties of the eighteenth century, and their residence there lasted about a hundred years more, till 1839. Salmas-now known as Shapur­ is a town in the north of Persia which should properly have been part of Persian Azerbaijan. There are no Jews living in it today, but early nineteenth century travellers reported the existence there of a substantial community. Geographical proximity resulted in contacts with Urmia, so that when accusations and persecutions were suffered by the latter, the Jews of Salmas suffered simultane­ ously. The document which relates the events in Salmas was written by Abraham hen Moshe, an emissary of the Salmas community to Italy. He entered his account of the events in the Book of Letters of Rabbi Mordecai Samuel Girondi, Rabbi of Padua ( under no. 1 161, p. 56, sections 1-2). The manuscript, which is numbered 893 in the Montefiore collection, was photographed by M. Benayahu of the Ben-Zvi Institute for the Research of Middle Eastern Jewish Communities at the Hebrew University. David de-Beth Hillel, who mentioned this community in 1 822, said that it contained one hundred families, had a synagogue of its own and had to suffer from the effects of the false accusations against the community of Urmia (the present-day Rizayeh). He

99 had been told in Georgia that there were 300,000 Jews in the provinces of Shirwan, Taki and Daghestan who spoke their lan­ guage (that is, Persian). A reference to this community is to be found also in one of the bulletins of the missionaries of the thirties of the last century, where it is reported that the Christian missionaries were requested to lend their protection, but refused because they were sent for mis­ sionary work among the Nestorians only and were not interested in Jews. This fact is confirmed by Dr. A. Braver. We know from other travellers that there was a group of four hundred families in this city, called by the Jews Amalekites (Armenians? ) whose language resembles that of the Jews. R. Gottheil20 has published a special study on this Jewish-Aramaic dialect of Salmas. Subsequent travellers, too, reported the existence of Jews in the course of the nineteenth century, but no trace is left of them today. The abovementioned document dates from the year 605 A.H. (1845), in the reign of Mohamed Shah Kashgari whose name was mentioned in connection with the persecutions in Meshhed. All the characteristic circumstances of a persecution organized in Persia are there : the murder of a Moslem child by Moslem assassins and the accusation of Jews of this crime in order the easier to squeeze money out of them; the killing of six rabbis by order of the governor, Abdallah Han, and the help given the Jews by Yekutiel, a Jewish convert to Islam. We have no clues as to whether this Yekutiel was a voluntary convert to Islam or a marrano, but from the fact that even after his conversion he was still held in esteem by his own community, whom he willingly helped, it would appear that he was one of the marranos. He was originally a Bukharan Jew, and for this intervention in behalf of the Jews of Salmas he is gratefully remembered to this day. T H E C R Y P T O - .J E W S IN P ERSIA

B O O K TWO JEWISH SECTARIES

I SAMARITANS Origin and, History. According to the Bible, the Samaritans are the descendants of the settlers transferred and settled by the Assyrian conquerors of Palestine in the territories formerly occupied by the Ten Tribes who had been exiled to Assyria.1 The settlers included people from Kuth or Kutah (Cuthah) after which name the Samaritans were called "Kuthim" in Jewish sources. The Samaritans regard this appellation as degrading to themselves; in rabbinical literature, how­ ever, this is the usual one. The Bible further narrates that the King of Assyria settled in Samaria people from Babylon, Awa, Hamath and Sepharvaim. This transfer of populations took place after the conquest of Shomron (Samaria) in 722 B.C. According to the Sargon inscription, the number of those whom that king led into captivity was 27,000. 2 On the other hand, in accordance with biblical data, the number of ( Israelitish) land owners alone may be estimated at 60,0003 at the time of the As­ syrian conquest. We may therefore conclude that the King of Assyria exiled only a small part of the Israelite population of the country, and that the majority remained behind in their lands and exercised some in­ fluence on the settlers, both racially and culturally. The Samaritans are now divided, according to their origin, into the following three large clans : the children of Ephraim, the children of Manasseh, and the Priests (Kohanim), today's Levites. During the Fatimid period, and later, there were also Samaritans in Gaza who claimed descent from the tribe of Benjamin, but none of these survives today. There is evidence for the intrusion of foreign elements into the community of Samaria also at a later period. The Asenapper (Ashurbanipal ) list includes the names of Persian officials, and persons from Erekh, Babylon, Susa and Elam. This, of course, 103

1 04

THE E X I L E D AND T H E R E D E E M E D

relates to a much later period than that of Sargon. But even thos e racial mixtures could not fundamentally change the Israelitish character of the Samaritan race, just as the mixture of Canaanite elements with the tribes of Israel did not change the character of the Israelite-Judaean race. The arrival of the Samaritans, their amalgamation with the Judaeo-Israelite element, played a decisive part in their religious outlook, inasmuch as it strengthened the monotheistic conception as against the pagan worship which the foreign races introduced into Samaria. According to their origin the present Samaritans are distinguished as follows : 1. The Danafite family (Hamulat al-Danafi) and the M ufarajiya (Marhib), which claim descent from Ephra im s on of Joseph. 2. The Sabahiya families which claim descent from Manasseh. 3. As for the priests-the Samaritan chronicle tells us that in 1033 (1624 C.E.) the priestly house descended from Aaron be­ came extinct, and that since then their sacred functions devolved upon the Levites. The person who styles himself the "High Priest" is really not a descendant of Aaron, but of Uzziel, son of Kohath, son of Levi. The last mention of the Samaritans as a national unit dates back to the Byzantine period, when in their revolts against the Byzantines during the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries C.E. they fought their own battles. However, there is a record of the existence of large Samaritan settlements in the seventh century too; thus at Caesarea and its neighborhood there were, according to Jaqut, 80,000 Samaritans, or according to Baladhuri (on the authority of Al­ Waqidi), 30,000. Under Moslem rule, the Samaritans gradually declined, and from a great nation, they became a mere sect. During the reign of Harun al Rashid there were still thousands of Samaritan peasants, especial ly in the neighborhood of Ramleh, Lydda, Yabneh and Arsuf. However, by the time of the Crusades, the number of Samari­ tans had already diminis hed to such a degree that the Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela counted only about 1 , 000 men (or families) at Shechem, which, according to other sources, possessed at that time about half the total Samaritan population of Palestine

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SAMARITANS

and Syria. At the end of the thirteenth century, the total number of Shechem's Samaritan inhabitants did ont exceed 1,000, while their number in other towns and villages also approximated 1 ,000. During the Mameluke period, the Samaritans were considered part of the Jewish community at whose head was a Jewish Exilarch who resided in Egypt. Rabbi Obadiah of Bertinoro ( 1 488 C.E.) states that, according to Samaritan sources of information, there were then in existence not more than 500 Samaritan families, that is, 2,500 souls, of which five hundred were in Egypt, and the rest in Damascus, Shechem, Gaza and other Palestinian localities. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Shechem again be­ came the center of the Samaritan community, while Gaza and Jaffa also had small settlements. The latter, however, were com­ pletely extinguished by the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Only at Shechem a small Samaritan community continued to survive. When Robinson visited Shechem in 1838 he found there ap­ proximately a hundred and fifty Samaritan souls-of whom thirty were tax-paying male adults. During the last century only few changes occurred. Some eighteen years after Robinson's visit, Ludwig August Fraenkel also quotes, on the authority of the High Priest Salamah, one hundred and fifty as representing the total Samaritan population of Shechem. According to the Survey of Western Palestine of the Palestine Exploration Fund (II, p. 2 1 9 ) , the number of the Samaritans of Shechem increased from a hundred and thirty-five to one hundred and sixty during the decade preced­ ing 1 882. Forty years later, the official census gives their number as one hundred and forty-seven at Shechcm and sixteen in other towns, totalling a hundred and sixty-three. During 1900- 193 1, the following changes are noted : SAMARITAN POPULATION OF PALESTINE

Year

1901 1909 1 922 1 931

Source

Males

Females

Total

97 97 83 93

55

152 173 163 182

....................

Professor Kahle Census Census

76 80 89

THE E X I L E D A N D T H E R E D E E M E D

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TIIE SAMARITAN POPULATION OP SHECHEM

Source

Year

1922 1931

Census Census

Males

Females

Total

74 79

73 81

1 47 1604

It will be seen that, during the last century, there has been only a slight increase in the total Samaritan population of Palestine (21 per cent); but there has been a marked adjustment in the proportion of the female element to the male. Forty years ago the percentage of the female element in the total Samaritan population was only 36.2 per cent, while at present it is 49 per cent-which is a normal proportion. There are two fundamental differences between the Samaritans and the Jews: ( 1 ) The Samaritans acknowledge as God's chosen place of worship not Jerusalem and Mount Moriah, but Mount Gerizim near Shechem (Nablus). In this respect they differ, not only from the Jews, but also from the Christians and Moslems, who uphold the sanctity of Jerusalem, and do not recognize the sanctity of Mount Gerizim. In general, the Samaritans believe that all the ancient prophecies and tradi­ tions regarding the "chosen place," e.g., the sacrifice of Isaac and the prophecies of Moses, refer to Mount Gerizim. (2) The Samaritans do not acknowledge the prophets of Israel and reject the Prophets and Hagiographa, i.e., all the books of the Old Testament with the exception of the Five Books of Moses. In this respect, too, they are at variance, not only with the Jews, but also with the Karaites (who acknowledge the Old Testament in its entirety) and the Christians. They do not, of course, accept the oral tradition of the Jews, namely, the Talmud, instead of which they have a tradition of their own, which is different from that of both Jews and Karaites. Even in respect of the Torah itself, the Samaritan text presents numerous variants from the traditional Hebrew text. The principal

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difference lies in the insertion in the Samaritan text (following im­ mediately upon the Ten Commandments) of a passage relating to the erection of the Altar on Mount Gerizim, a passage non-existent in the Hebrew text or the later Jewish and Christian versions of the Ten Commandments. There are also some 6,000 minor textual variants which have been studied in connection with the textual criticism of the Bible. The Samaritan script, too, differs from that employed by Jews. It is of greater antiquity than the Hebrew square script, and resembles the ancient Hebrew (Phoenician) script; there are, how­ ever, slight differences between the two. Other points of difference between Samaritans and Jews may be traced from the above fundamental differences. Thus, at the ceremony of circumcision, or when slaughtering animals, the Samaritans call upon the name of Mount Gerizim; also during prayers, they tum their faces not toward Jerusalem, but toward their sacred mount. The Samaritan calendar, too, differs from the Jewish one in certain respects. Thus, they have other rules governing the intercala­ tion of years, and these sometimes cause a difference of one month as between the date of the Jewish and the Samaritan Passover and other feasts. Moreover, owing to differences in the mode of deter­ mining the appearance of the new moon, there is sometimes a dif­ ference of a day or two between the date of the Jewish and Samaritan feasts. The main difference, however, lies in fixing the day of Pentecost. According to the Samaritan interpretation of the Mosaic text, this feast must invariably fall on a Sunday; for they always begin counting the seven weeks on the morrow of the first Sabbath following the first day of Passover. In religious practice, the Samaritans endeavor to adhere to the plain meaning of the ancient laws. They consequently arc very strict in their interpretation of the laws relating to the observance of the Sabbath. Not only do they abstain from kindling any fire on that day, but they also refrain from using any light kindled even on the Sabbath eve, and from eating any hot food-restrictions not found among the Jews. The Samaritans take great care, even at present, in the ob­ servance of the levitical rules of purity and impurity, and are very

T HE EXI LED AND T H E REDEEMED 108 strict about the prescribed treatment of women during their menstruation. To prevent any communication between the women and the rest of the household, a stone screen is set up and special utensils are placed at their disposal. On Passover eve (1 4th of Nissan), the Samaritans still sacrifice the Passover on Mount Gerizim, and they eat it, in haste, standing, with their loins girded and their shoes on their feet, as is written in the Torah. It should, however, be observed, that, notwithstanding their effort to limit themselves in religious matters to the written text of the Torah, the Samaritans have not been able to withstand the in­ fluence of various conceptions which have found their way into traditional Judaism as developed after the period of the Second Temple. The present Samaritans believe, just as the Jews do, in the coming of the Messiah (whom they call "Taheb" or "Shaheb"), in the rebuilding of the Temple, the Day of Judgment, divine reward and punishment, and the resurrection of the dead. Influenced by Christianity, Islam and Jewish Cabala, they also believe in angels and evil spirits. Their confession of faith is :

My faith is in Thee, Shema (i.e., the Tetragrammaton) , and in Moses, son of Amram, Thy Servant; and in the Holy Law; and in Mount Gerizim, Beth-El; and in the Day of Vengeance and Recompense.fi

Before the Israel War of Independence the entire Samaritan community lived in Nablus (Shechem), and the few families that occasionally resided in Jaffa were the exception. On the outbreak of the war of liberation those resident in Jaffa were cut off from the main body of their "nation" in Jordan, so that the Samaritan community was actually divided into two parts living under dif­ ferent political allegiances. The small group living in Jaffa, how­ ever, was reinforced in course of time by new arrivals who joined the Israeli section of the Samaritan "nation." The government of Israel extended to these newcomers the benefits of the "Repatriation Law" (that authorizes every Jew to immigrate into Israel) and the Samaritans from Nablus were quick to take advantage of this op­ portunity. The present Israeli Samaritan community is 100 strong.

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109

The young among them of military age have enlisted in the Israel army and fought bravely and loyally. Samaritans in Israel share to the full all the rights enjoyed by Israel citizens, and the government provides allocations from public funds to meet their social and cultu1•,il requirements. A special plot for a Samaritan quarter has been reserved and a Samaritan synagogue will shortly be built there, the first Samaritan synagogue outside Nablus. * At Passover all the Israeli Samaritans go on pilgrimage to Mount Gerizim to celebrate the holiday as had been their custom of old. Within the borders of the kingdom of Jordan there remain some 240 Samaritans, all concentrated in the new quarter on the slopes of Mount Gerizim, near Nablus, called by the Samaritans the "Mount of Blessing."

* Meanwhile, tire housing scheme has been completed and now forms the Samaritan quarter in Ho/on, near Tel-A viv. The foundation stone of the Samaritan synagogue was laid in 1959.

II THE SABBATEANS OF SALONICA 1 . Sources of Inforntation For two hundred and fifty years the Sabbateans (in Turkish, "Donmes") lived, like all marranos, a dual life. Behind the thick Chinese wall of aloofness which they erected amidst the wholly Moslem environment of Salonica, they hid a religious life very different from that which was immediately apparent. Appearing to be devout Moslems, they cultivated underground their secret religion, their specific traditions, their literature and poetry, their customs and their strange communal rites. Something like an independent republic of marranos came into being whose undeclared citizens conspired to guard their secrets, observe the mysteries of their faith and practice the quaint religious rituals they held could only be cultivated in private and under conditions of absolute secrecy. In vain did scholars and explorers, Jews and non-Jews, endeavor to uncover their secrets and to study their "heretical" writings. Throughout the two and a half centuries of their survival as a separate sect under Moslem guise, little of importance has come to light on the internal life of the Sabbateans or on their peculiar history since their collective conversion to Islam. Fragmentary information has been supplied from time to time by the few European travellers who visited Salonica on their tours of exploration in the Middle East. The Danish traveller Carsten Niebuhr, who visited Salonica in 1774, reported six hundred families ( that is, about three thousand persons), or double the number of those who had adopted Islam at the time of their mass conversion in 16 8 3 ( ninety years before Niebuhr's days). A hundred and thirty years later Sephardic authorities (J. Nehama and S. Rosanes) could enumerate no less than ten thousand Sabbateans, and thus register a more than threefold increase. The English traveller Theodor Bennett, who visited Salonica in the 80s of last century, contributed to Longman's Magazine an 1 10

THE SAB BATEANS OF SALON I C A

111

account of his impressions of that visit in which he reported several talks he had with some native Salonicans, including Sabbateans. Bennett gave a brief exposition of the articles of their faith and their peculiar customs. According to his estimate they then numbered a thousand families, or eight thousand persons. Among Jewish scholars the historian H. Graetz and the traveller Ludwig August Fraenkel attempted to study the Sabbateans' peculiar customs and rites, but so far from revealing anything new or original, they were often misled into giving credence to past errors. 6 Other Jewish scholars in Europe had investigated the religious system of the Frankist sect, an off-shoot of the Sabbateans, and something like their counterpart among the Jews of Europe. The comprehensive studies on the Frankist movement-written by Sokolov, Professor Balaban, D. Kahana and S. Shazar (Rubashow) --did not, however, enrich our knowledge of the Sabbateans in Salonica. Most of these Jewish authorities (and a few non-Jewish explorers) were passing visitors to Salonica, and could make no more than casual acquaintance with members of the sect. On the other hand, the Jews of Salonica had dismissed their next-door neighbors as traitors and apostates, and were not interested in their mysterious religious rites. But at the turn of the century Jewish scholars in Turkey began to make a serious study of that Jewish-Moslem sect and it is to them that we owe what little authentic information is now available on the doctrines and practices of the Sabbateans. It was obvious that none but Sephardic Jewish scholars could hope to achieve any tangible results from an immediate study of the Sabbatean move­ ment and cult, for few other scholars were better qualified to undertake so formidable a task of research. Not only were the Sephardic scholars geographically close to the centers of the Sab­ batean life, but they also had special spiritual affinity with those of their brethren who, under special historical circumstances, had had to embrace another faith, at least outwardly. Moreover, their com­ mand of the Hebrew, Ladino and Turkish languages enabled them to decipher much that was puzzling, and to disclose some of the hitherto well-kept secrets of the sect. The foremost of these Sephardic explorers was Abraham Danon

1 12

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED

of Adrianople, who revealed the eighteen regulations of Sabbatai Zvi, containing the principal dogmas of the sect, their religious customs and holidays, all of which they observed strictly as a code binding on all members. Danon published this material in its original Ladino language, and added Hebrew and French translations to the text.7 Joseph Nehama, a former headmaster of the Alliance School in Salonica, obtained from his Sabbatean townsmen some authentic information on their faith which he published in the French Bulletin of the Alliance.8 But Solomon Rosanes was the only scholar to have penetrated into their innermost sanctum and read their ancient books and manuscripts, of which he published a detailed Iist.9 Pro­ fessor Abraham Galante added much interesting material, par­ ticularly of a later period, when some of their secrets began to come to public notice as the indirect result of a series of polemical articles published in the Turkish press on their rites and religious practices. 1 0 More material was gatherd by Isaac Molho and A. S. Amarillo, both natives of Salonica, now residents of Israel. Their material was collected directly from their Sabbatean friends in Salonica.11 Additional light on the dogmas and customs of the Sabbateans was shed in recent years in letters and articles published in the Turkish press, some of them by Sabbateans. Most of this material was compiled and edited by Professor Galante in his French book on the Sabbateans, by Gordalevsky in /slamica and by Ibrahim A. Govsa in his Turkish book on Sabbatai Zvi.12 Professor G. Scholem, of the Hebrew University, the distinguished authority on Jewish mysticism, has made a thorough analysis of the life and religious system of Sabbatai Zvi as well as the subsequent development of the sect in a number of valuable studies.* * Since this chapter was written there appeared G. Scholem's compendious study in Hebrew on Sabbatai Zvi and the Sabbatean Movement in His Life­ time (2 vols., A m Oved, 1957). This work is the most thorough and compre­ hensive study so far on the founder of the Sabbatean sect and a basic contribution to Jewish historiography. In a more recent article, Prof. Scholem has also summed up the present state of research and knowledge on the Donme; see G. Scholem, "Die kryptojiidische Sekte der Donme (Sabbatianer) in der Tiirkei," Numen, vol. VII, fasc. 2-3 (Dec. 1 960), pp. 93-122. Addi­ tional material from Salonica manuscripts, preserved in the collection of A braham Amarillo, will be published shortly by the Ben-Zvi Institute of the Hebrew University.

113 In the course of my first visit to Salonica in 1909, I met some of the leading Sabbateans in the city, and thereupon published a full account of my impressions in a Hebrew essay on the Salonica Jews. Those were the Donmes' golden days under Ottoman rule. I have since had several further occasions to observe Sabbatean life in Salonica as well as in Istanbul and Smyma. 13 The great changes-political, spiritual and religious-which have taken place in the Middle East, could not fail to make an impact on the social and economic status of the Sabbateans, and even on their spiritual outlook. A case in point was the Graeco-Turkish exchange of populations which was enforced under the Lausanne Treaty of July 2, 1923. Sabbateans, along with other Turks, were directly affected when masses of Turks were dislodged from their residences and transplanted to Anatolia. With that population transfer practically all the Sabbateans of Salonica were scattered to various towns in Turkey. The compulsory migration had the effect, not only of liquidating their main spiritual and communal center, but also of putting an end to their survival as a self-sufficient religious group. They now became absorbed and assimilated within the new Turkish environment into which they were thrown. Their traditional organization shrank beyond recognition and their secret books, which had hitherto formed a compact body of sacred litera­ ture, were distributed among several families which have since become the repositories of any Sabbatean literature still extant. The descendants of the Founding Fathers of the sect, having lost all contact with their ancestral tradition, naturally ceased to respect such tradition and were no longer bent on guarding those secrets which bad been the cherished treasure of their ancestors. So long as most of the Sabbateans were concentrated in Salonica, the learned and educated among them had opportunities to study the Hebrew language from qualified Hebrew teachers. Until quite recently Hebrew was not unknown to them; some of them expressly reported to the writer that their parents could read Hebrew. At least a few Sabbateans could read the Zohar, the cabalists' classic, in its original, until about thirty years ago. Many more were fa­ miliar with Ladino, which was current in Salonica not among Jews alone, but also among many of its Greek and Turkish population. 1 4 Sabbateans, too, used it for public readings (even as it was used THE SABBATEANS OF SALONICA

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T HE EXI LED AND T HE REDEEMED

by many of the Christians), not only in its printed, cursive and "Rashi" script, but also in the specific Ladino script which was in vogue among the Jews of Romelia and Anatolia. Among the docu­ ments obtained by the writer from Sabbateans in Smyrna (includ­ ing the late Dr. Ismail Eden) were several Ladino pamphlets, principally translations of excerpts from the Zohar, which were pre­ pared by Jewish scholars on order of Sabbateans. Those who com­ missioned such translations must have been sufficiently familiar both with the Ladino language and the Hebrew script in which it was written. 15 Sabbateans must have used the Hebrew script until well into the end of the nineteenth century, possibly until their exile from Salonica. They even used the Hebrew script for the transcription of Turkish expressions, sometimes even of complete poems. There is reason to believe that for several generations after their mass conversion, the Ladino language was a living language among them, both in their family circle and on more solemn, social or religious, occasions. It was the language of their liturgical and secular poetry, of their ballads and romances, their sermons and pronouncements, in brief-the language that dominated their life, even as it dominated the life of the mass of Sephardic Jewry in Turkey from which they held so rigidly aloof. This led to a curious result : having forgotten and almost completely abandoned the use of Hebrew and adopted Ladino as their vernacular, the Sabbateans took to memorizing in a mechanical way all the ancient Jewish prayers which were originally composed in Hebrew and Aramaic; they could recite the words of that liturgy without understanding any of its content. To preserve the ancient enunciation they tran­ scribed the Hebrew text in the same Spanish phonetical script in which Ladino was generally transcribed. The Sabbatean prayer book published by Professor Scholem is in that transcription, as are all the Hebrew words in the manuscripts. 16 After their transfer to Turkey the Sabbatean "Believers" were caught up in the great cultural revolution (involving the abandon­ ment of the Arabic script for Turkish writing and its replacement by Latin script) which was enforced as part of Ataturk's radical measures of political and social reform.17 The Sabbateans, from whose intelligentsia came some of the most active leaders of the revolution, now took to using the Latin script for their own Ladino texts, in accordance with the rules of modern Turkish phonetics.

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Perhaps the most irreplaceable loss to scholarship resulting from the disintegration of the Sabbatean center, was the loss of their ancient library with its valuable manuscripts. Many of these were scattered to odd comers and expo�ed to the elements. Sabbatean research owes a debt of gratitude to the late Gabriel Button, a principal of the Smyrna Talmud Torah and a native of Salonica, for obtaining from the Sabbateans of Smyrna, themselves natives of Salonica, several Sabbatean pamphlets which he made available to the Hebrew University Library in Jerusalem. These manuscripts formed the basis of Professor Scholem's edition of the Sabbatean prayer book. In 1 9 15, S. Rosanes, the distinguished historian of Turkish Jewry, visited the Sabbateans' religious hideout in Salonica, where he could peruse their hidden archives;18 he then published a list of the books and manuscripts which he found there. The Ladino manuscripts included forty copies of one text, containing some inferior doggerel written by simple folk without knowledge of even the elementary rules of poetry. In these poems the Sabbatean "Be­ lievers" are extolled as the genuine Jews, and the advent of the messiah Sabbatai Zvi is glorified. The "poems" were meant to be sung to Turkish melodies and, indeed, there is reason to believe that they were so used in community singing in their synagogue. If the pamphlets perused by Rosanes bear any resemblance to the bundle of pamphlets in the possession of the Jerusalem Uni­ versity Library, Rosanes' appraisal of their literary quality, or their value as liturgy, was wide off the mark. For while several of the rhymes are of poor literary quality as reading material, they are of the utmost value to scholars concerned with Sabbatean ritual and dogma and with the folklore of Sephardic Jewry generally. Perhaps their greatest value derives from the fact that they were composed by believers and for believers, that their authors wrote them for "personal consumption" as it were, and were thus free to give vent to their innermost feelings and emotions and made no apology for such unfettered self-expression. On the other hand, Rosanes is undoubtedly right in holding that the poems were sung by the Sabbateans meeting at prayer or other meetings. 19 Poetry of this kind must have been the treasured posession of a very few selected households, who kept it for use by their members or de­ posited it in the communal archives. The archives examined by

T H E E X I L ED AND T H E R EDE EMED 1 16 Rosanes in 1915 were destroyed in the great fire of Salonica in 19 17.20

2. Communal Structure and Organization The general mass of Sabbateans are known by Turks as "Donmes," that is, "converts" or "apostates"; but Sabbateans call themselves "Believers," while Jews refer to them simply as "here­ tics." When they embraced Islam in 1 683, they all entered upon a life of the most flagrant dualism. The example was set for them by their messiah's conversion to Islam; and the disciples loyally abided by that example. Their duality was complete : they attended Moslem divine worship in mosques, observed all the tenets of Islam, and occasionally joined the caravans of Raj pilgrims to the Moslem shrines; all that-in public. In private, however, they con­ tinued to observe several Jewish ritual customs and much of the Jewish liturgy, including the reading of psalms, the Zohar and other cabalistic works, and kept the Jewish holidays according to the rules laid down for them by their messiah. The general pattern of religious belief and observance briefly described above is the com­ mon legacy of all Sabbateans. Nevertheless, they divided in course of time into three very distinct sub-sects, which have developed into separate communities holding completely aloof from one an­ other, even to the extent of avoiding intermarriage.21 The absence of reliable documentary material renders a system­ atic analysis of these sects extremely difficult, and research into that field has hitherto been erratic and chaotic. The multiplicity of titles and designations by which the various sects have been known makes definite identifications almost impossible. Most scholars accept the classification of the sect into these groups: Jacobean, Smyrnaite and Coniozo. Professor Galante, however, perhaps the foremost contemporary authority on Sabbatean affairs, prefers the designations : Jacobeans, Karakashis and Capanjis, and argues that the term "Smyrnaites" was no longer in use. 22 (a) The Jacobeans are the oldest established sub-sect; it is named after its founder, Jacob Querido. In Ladino they are also known as Arapados (the clean-shaven) because of their custom of shaving their scalps clean, like the devout Moslems of other

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days. They do, however, grow beards, while the members of the Karakashi sub-sect, who also grow beards, do not shave their heads. On the other hand, the Capanjis shave their beards but not their heads. Among the Turks, the Jaco�ans are also known as "wearers of Tarbush," because they adopted this Turkish headgear (Fez) . Of all the Sabbateans, they are perhaps closest to the Turkish way of life and have a much better command of the Turkish language than all the others. They are of frail physique and can be easily identified by their thin, sharp noses. Numerically they are the largest Sabbatean sub-sect.23 Their spiritual leader and founder, Jacob Querido, brother-in­ law (brother of his second wife, Jochebed ) of Sabbatai Zvi, was Sabbatai's first successor. In 1680, he settled in Salonica with his sister, his father Joseph Philosoph, Solomon Florentin and a band of converts to Islam, all of whom followed in the footsteps of the founder of their religion, thus making Salonica the headquarters of the Sabbatean movement. Shortly afterwards, Jacob Querido presented himself to his flock as Jacob Zvi (a pseudonym he took over from the founder of the movement Sabbatai Zvi) and toured various communities, campaigning energetically for the mass con­ version of Jews to Islam. In 1683 his missionary activity resulted in a mass conversion unique in the history of the conversion of Jews, in that never before had such considerable numbers of Jews embraced another faith without compulsion. No less than three hundred families abandoned Judaism publicly and were converted to Islam, thereby cutting themselves off from the main body of the Jewish people. Paradoxically, the movement was also accompanied by a movement in reverse since it provided the shock-treatment which made many hesitant Neo-Sabbateans tum their backs on the sect and return to traditional Judaism. None the less, many outwardly Jewish crypto-Sabbateans must have continued to live in Salonica where they could cultivate contacts with both local and other Donmes. But domestic peace did not last long in the new Sabbatean community. An open rift broke out in 1 690 be­ tween Jacob Querido and one of his converted disciples, Mustapha Chelebi, who, as a Jew, was known as Haham Baruch Konio or Barukhia. Some believe he was the clerk of the Jewish religious court ( Beth Din), others that he was its presiding judge. He was

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED 118 a competent scholar and cabalist and evolved a new and extreme system of Sabbatean doctrine.24 With the exception of forty-three families of the community of converts who remained loyal to Querido, the majority of the community followed Mustapha, who proclaimed a new candidate, Othman Baba, as successor to the messiah. Querido died in Alexandria on his way to Mecca as a Haj pil­ grim. His successor as leader of the sect was his son-in-law, Hus­ sein Effendi. The Jacobeans remained a separate sub-sect within the Sabbatean community. Outwardly they observed rigidly all the laws of Islam and obeyed literally all the orders and injunctions of their spiritual head. They concentrated particularly on charity, communal and individual. Relief funds were collected by the head of the community in person or by treasurers appointed by him. A numerically small group, they too were sub-divided into two dis­ tinct classes : the rich and the poor, who hardly mixed with one another and did not intermarry. The Jacobeans were also known as Hamdy Beylar, after Hamdy-Bey, one of their later leaders.25

(b) The Coniozos or Karakashlars (Karakashis) are dissidents who seceded from the Querido group under the leadership of Mus­ tapha Chelebi. The first to disavow Querido professed themselves faithful disciples of Sabbatai Zvi only, and called themselves Smyr­ naites, after the native city of their messiah. For over twenty years Mustapha led the community of Smymaites, but still did not pro­ claim himself a messiah, anointing to that succession the son of a staunch follower who came to be known in course of time as Othman Baba or Othman Agha. Othman was an ignoramus and an epileptic. Barukhia Konio defended his ascendancy on the ground that he had been born nine months after the messiah's death. His followers acquiesced, and organized themselves into a second community within the Sabbatean sect, designating them­ selves, after their new leader, as Othman Babalars, Karakashlars or Coniozos. Their opponents called them derisively Onyulu, that is, "men of the ten tricks."26 Professor Scholem, discussing the identity of Othman, suggests two possible theories : ( 1 ) that he was the son of Barukhia or (2) that he was the son of Abdul Rahman, a loyal follower of Barukhia's doctrine. The members of this sub-sect were for the most part craftsmen

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and artisans ( shoemakers and barbers) , but there were also butchers and auctioneers among them. At present, they are scat­ tered all over Turkey. In their prayers they mention in the same breath both Sabbatai, the founder of the sect, and Barukhia, the spiritual leader of their sub-sect, their prayers being addressed simultaneously to the two messiahs. 27 Thus came into being the first two sub-sects, both of which are not only completely sepa­ rated from each other, but also separated alike from Moslems and Jews; yet both are devout believers in the faith established by Sabbatai. Upon the death of Othman Baba (ea. 1 720) a new rift occurred between his successors. As a result, a third sub-sect, the Capanjis, came to be established. Othman's immediate successor was his son Abdul Rahman, who in tum was succeeded by Darwish Effendi, who was both a "mystic" and something of a social reformer. Darwish Effendi flourished in the middle of the eighteenth century, at a time when another Sabbatean, Jacob Frank, was making his mark far away from Turkey, in Poland. Darwish Effendi intro­ duced community of women basing his reform on obscure passages in cabalistic books and the Zohar, which he distorted and mis­ interpreted to suit his purposes. His "reform" did not succeed in establishing itself as a permanent social institution, but something of it survived in the form of an annual religious orgy, on the "Night of the Lamb."28 Othman Baba's successors were called, like the successors to the founder of the Moslem religion, "Caliphs" or "Sahibs." Their "priests" carry a green banner; other families (such as the Russos, Florentines, Girons) carry a red-white ban­ ner. One of Darwish Effendi's successors, Ambargi, ruled his com­ munity despotically in the middle of the nineteenth century. Although blind and a cripple, he was a blood-thirf.ty despot, who led his community with a ruthlessness that earned him the desig­ nation "Temurlenk" (Tamerlane), after the Tatar Khan who, too, was a cripple and was notorious for his cruelty. ( c) The third sub-sect is the Capanjis, which grew out of a rift within the ranks of the Coniozos in the twenties of the eighteenth century (and not, as Graetz believed, in Napoleon's days) shortly after the death of Othman Baba. Insisting that they alone were the faithful disciples of Sabbatai Zvi, the Capanjis rejected Querido

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and denied the messianic character of Othman Baba. Recognizing no other messiah but Sabbatai Zvi, they assumed the designation ''Smyrnaites," after the native city of the messiah, by way of as­ serting the greater purity and genuineness of their Sabbateanism. The Capanjis were also known after one of their leaders, Ibrahim Agalar, or as Papular, that is, the "old" or "true" believers. Con­ sidering themselves the aristocracy of the Sabbatean community, they took the name Cavaglieros (knights) . They were also the intelligentsia and enjoyed greater prosperity than all the rest, as teachers, doctors, engineers, veterinary surgeons and members of the liberal professions. For a long time the members of the two sects who seceded from the Smymaites lived in their own quarter, entirely separate from the Jacobean quarter. Relations between the two sub-sects were better than between them and the Jacobeans. 29 3. Their Liturgy We turn once more to their book of liturgy.30 Most of its poetry bears the character of hymns; but they are not merely Jewish hymns with a Sabbatean flavor (such as those published by Scholem in his Sabbatean prayer book) . The hymns in this peculiar compendium are in a class apart. They were composed by believers in the Sabbatean cult and are based on Sabbatean doctrine. Here and there are interwoven passages from the scriptures and quo­ tations from traditional Jewish religious poetry. But the authors of the rhymes took great liberties with established texts, and diverged sharply from acknowledged traditional versions. Most of the liturgy was composed for communal worship. This is clear from the eighth prayer in which the word "Amen" recurs twelve times and the sixth prayer in which the refrain "The Lord is God" recurs twenty-five times. Most of the hymns were probably intended for religious assemblies in their secret synagogues, or for community singing at the private parties in the homes of the faithful. Their reference to "the master of the community" ( as in number eight) appears to indicate an organized congregation with a head or gabbai. Another class of poetry is the elegy and memorial prayer de­ voted to dead persons whose names are unknown to us, men and women who were held in veneration by the community as a whole

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or whose memory was dear to the members of their immediate families. The bards of the community dedicated special elegies to their memory, having been commissioned to do so by the bereaved members of their families. Characteristically, most of their names recall those of the patriarchs or other heroes of biblical history. In which of the Sabbatean sub-sects did these hymns and elegies originate? We cannot know for certain, but it seems reasonable to assume that they were not composed by the Jacobeans since not one of the two hundred and thirty-nine pieces of poetry is dedicated to, or mentions in any way, Jacob Querido, the central figure in the Jacobean sub-sect after Sabbatai Zvi. His name never occurs in the collection, expressly or by implication. Nor does a second col­ lection, which has come from the same source, make mention of Querido in any of its 101 pieces of poetry. This singular omission of the name of the founder of the Jacobean sub-sect suggests that the pamphlet in question contains the liturgy of one of the two sub-sects which came into being after the rift of 1690, either the Karakashis, or the Capanjis-Smymaites. Which of these two was responsible for the manuscript? The writer is inclined to attribute it to the Coniozos ( Karakashis), on the strength of the verbal explanations given to him by Dr. Ismail Eden-Assael from whom the pamphlet comes. (The Assael family is mentioned five times in it.) Dr. Eden himself traces his family tree to the disciples of Darwish Effendi, one of Othman Baba's successors, a significant fact weighting the scales in favor of the Coniozo authorship of the anthology of prayers. 4. Sabbateans in Modern Turkey

In the course of a visit to Smyrna in 1943, the writer had occa­ sion to note that public opinion in Turkey followed with keen interest the fortunes of the Donmes, the descendants of Sabbatai Zvi's early disciples who had embraced Islam in the seventeenth century but continued to regard themselves as Jews by race. Originally, as we have seen, the great majority of them were residents of Salonica. The Greek occupation of Salonica in 19 12 acted as a ferment within the small community. Some left the city and emigrated with some of the Moslems to other Turkish towns; a few emigrated to Europe; but the great majority remained where

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they were and continued their communal life as before-Moslems outwardly but Sabbateans at home. At that time there were some twelve or thirteen thousand of them, some with established po­ sitions in the economic life of the community-in trade, industry and in the civil service. Some of them achieved fame in the political life of Turkey. Per­ haps the best known of these was Mohammed Djavid Bey, one of the leaders of the "Young Turk" movement, who for a while was Prime Minister of Turkey. Less famous than Djavid Bey, and per­ haps with a more dubious claim to Sabbatean descent, were Nazhat Fayek (another former Prime Minister) , Mustapha Aref (a former Minister of the Interior) , and Musleh al-Din Adel, a Deputy Min­ ister of Education. Leading Donmes were deputies in the Turkish Chamber, university professors, writers and poets, lawyers and distinguished surgeons. But the mass of the community were traders, merchants, manufacturers and bankers. Their conversion to Islam did not materially alter their occupational structure which was no different from that of the rest of Turkish Jewry. But as a result of the exchange of populations which followed the Lausanne Treaty (July 23, 1 923) , the economic fortunes of the small com­ munity were thoroughly reversed. All Moslems, including the Sab­ bateans, were compelled to leave Salonica and migrate to other parts of Turkey. That mass migration created in the new places of their residence a Sabbatean problem which had never existed be­ fore. In 1943 they were estimated to number some 1 5,000; and among them are many in high and privileged positions in the social and economic life of their country. Notwithstanding their high eco­ nomic standing, however, they are viewed with misgiving by both Jews and Turks. To the Jews they appear as half marranos-half Turks; to the Turks they seem equally suspicious. Although out­ wardly Moslem in religion and Turkish in language and customs, they keep to themselves, cultivating an irritating social aloofness, refraining from intermarrying with others, and therefore suspected by the mass of the Turks as being Jews who still cling to under­ ground associations with their former religion. The more prominent their role in the life of the community, the thicker the atmosphere of suspicion that surrounds them. The paradoxical effect of their dual life was that in the modern Turkish State, which has success­ fully implemented a complete separation from the established Mos-

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lem religion, there live Turks who are held in suspicion by the mass of the community solely because they are deemed to be dubi­ ous Moslems. Some new information can be gleaned from a small book ( 100 pages) on Sabbatai Zvi and his movement, by a Turkish writer, Alah Al-Din Govsa.31 On the title page the founder of the move­ ment is shown holding an open Hebrew Bible. To his left is an inscription reading: "Joel 3, Ezekiel 33." The book is in essence a reproduction of Professor A. Galante's French book, but contains two valuable new features : first, the quotations from original Turk­ ish texts; second, modem polemical literature, embodying the con­ troversies between Donme writers and Turkish journalists. The controversy sheds new light on the Donmes after their emigration from their former center, Salonica, and their dispersion through several Turkish towns. This unique polemical exchange is something of a post-mortem analysis. For the first time we find a journalist who is a member of the sect publicly admitting the fact that they were a distinct sect with their own religious and cultural associations and tra­ ditions, even though he states in the same breath that the whole matter is past history and is no more. He asserts the determination of the sect to be completely assimilated and integrated into the body politic of the Turkish people. The author of this series of articles, which appeared in the well-known Turkish newspaper Watan, published and run by members of the Donme community, was Karakash Zadeh Muhammed Rushdi,32 a member of one of the three sub-sects, probably the one known as Karakashlars. The series of ten articles which appeared in 1 924, under the inclusive heading, "A Secret Page of History" drew a fiercely con­ troversial reply. It came from a Turkish writer and appeared in another Turkish paper, Wakit. At the time of the writer's visit in Salonica, some twenty years had elapsed since the polemical ex­ change originally took place. But that long interval did not prevent the author, Ibrahim Govsa, from republishing the series in a special edition in book form. The author quotes copiously from an article by another Sab­ batean author, Rushdi, whose views he rejects. He is particularly critical of the unfounded contention that the Sabbatean movement

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED 124 was a thing of the past. His counter-arguments are interesting. The Sabbatean movement cannot be a thing of the past, seeing that every Sabbatean, from the cradle to the grave, differs in many re­ spects from all other Turks-a fact that no observer of Sabbatean life can deny. The differing traits and features he enumerates in­ clude special prayers, special burial places, a special faith, old­ established special customs and, last but not least, the rigid ban on intermarriage with Turks and with Moslems generally. Rushdi had maintained that these old established customs had come into being largely as a result of external pressure, which had bred confusion fostered by a well-known "charlatan" of the seven­ teenth century. Govsa strongly contests Rushdi's view and accuses him of suppressing the truth, namely, that after turning their backs on Judaism, the Sabbateans had evolved a religious system of their own which was neither Jewish nor Moslem. Govsa quotes Sab­ batai Zvi's eighteen rules, stressing the seventeenth of them, which reads :

Do not mix with other people; marry only among yourselves. Of the customs of others you should adopt only those that are visible so as to blind the eyes of those who see you. Could such rules be explained away as the outcome of external pressure? No court of justice would admit such an argument. Ac­ cording to Rushdi's views, the accepted Donme practice of endog­ amy was due to the influence of the older generation and to the primitive forms of marriage which prevailed in the old Ottoman Empire. Rejecting this argument, the Turkish author contends that the ban against intermarriage still persisted and was rigidly enforced. He refutes with equal force and vehemence the further con­ tention that the Sabbateans' specific social and religious services were kept up only by men of the older generation, and adduces interesting evidence to the contrary. While serving as headmaster of a Girls' Boarding School in the Sabbatean quarter Makri Koy in Istanbul, he found one of the girls holding a pamphlet contain­ ing one of those prayers that the parents taught their children. It read : Besami Barohya ile (n) Sabbatay Sevi es Sabbatay Sevi etno Dolos Mondos. The fact that girls of seven or eight years were still taught to recite such prayers proved that the ritual customs of the

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Sabbateans were not the practices of men and women of the older generation only.38 The Turkish writer is equally contemptuous of Rushdi's con­ tention that the special burial places were merely "a silly custom." Rushdi suggested that it was ridiculous to treat as a secret associa­ tion the three sects that had been living in Salonica for generations, organized as an ordinary Moslem order. The Turkish critic's cate­ gorical reply is: "There is no such order in Islam or in the political history of Turkey." The Sabbatean movement was a religious sys­ tem separate alike from Judaism and Islam, and it would be best to admit this openly. Rushdi also dwelt on the advantages of en­ dogamy. For several generations the sect had been notably free from criminals and other undesirable characters, who were fewer among them than in any other similar community. That low rate of criminality was the result of a greater communal cohesion and a keen sense of social justice which placed charity and mutual aid under public control and on a high pedestal. Most societies sought to exert control on the individual, to ward off any danger of his becoming a menace to the community. But these arguments carried no conviction to the Turkish author, who contended that there was no connection between ordinary public societies and that sect, seeing that mutual aid facilities were available not only among the Sabbateans, but also among Jews, Greeks and Armenians. He therefore concludes that the Donmes could not be regarded as a closed private corporation or as a re­ ligious order, but rather as a separate community patterned on the same lines as all other non-Moslem communities in Turkey. In the controversy between the Turkish writer and the Sabbatean apologist it is not difficult to see where the truth lies. Apart from the facts adduced by the Turkish writer, additional evidence is available in support of his argument for the distinctiveness of the community as a whole. A prominent leader of the Donmes in Smyrna, in conversation with the writer, flatly denied the survival of their organization, saying that "Our movement is dead and exists no longer. My ancestors were Sabbateans, but I content myself with the reading of the Koran; I retain nothing from my past." But against this there were other statements and evidence which con-

THE EXI LED AND THE REDEEMEI> 126 flicted with that elder's categorical disclaimer. For example, Donmes still had double names-Turkish and Hebrew. The Turk­ ish name was intended for everyday use in their lives; the Jewish name was for the Hereafter. There were not only personal names, too, for purely internal usage, such as Samuel, Ruth and the like, but even some of the old Jewish family names which, although no longer in use, were still remembered, e.g., Giron, Russo, Cohen, Florentine, Assael, and others. There were rumors about the ex­ istence of a secret Sabbatean synagogue in Istanbul ; the Donme womenfolk were also believed to make arrangements in secret for the provision of matzot for Passover. According to Galante, some of the Sabbateans continued to observe fast days. In Sabbatean manuscripts obtained by the writer in Smyrna, there was a prayer for the observance of a fast, similar to that in the Sabbatean prayer book published by Scholem. Moreover, although none of them had command of Hebrew or even of the cursive Ladino script, there were some young Sab­ bateans who took Hebrew lessons from Jewish teachers. These lessons were taken in strict privacy. There were also some special cemeteries; the maintenance of these cemeteries, as of the syna­ gogues, was connected with a specific Sabbatean cult and with worship in Hebrew or in Ladino. As regards the rigidity of the ban against intermarriage, there may have been some recent breaches, but generally speaking, it appears to be still enforced. In Moslem eyes, this was probably the most irritating trait of that community. Lastly, there is the fact of the existence of special institutions and services for mutual aid, medical treatment, and the like, which were accessible to none but the members of the sect. Indeed, each of the three separate sub-sects ( Jacobeans, Karakashis and Cap­ anjis), maintained its own social and religious services. There were other customs and practices to which the Turkish author referred, on the authority of Professor Galante, for example: ( 1) The cus­ tom of eating mutton on the first day of the Jewish New Year, in memory of Abraham's ram; ( 2) the Jacobean men's practice of shaving their heads and the practice of the women to separate their hair into thin curls ; ( 3) the growing of a beard, regarded as a com­ pulsory religious observance; ( 4) the ban on the consumption of mutton prior to a certain service held each year; ( 5) the prohi,

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bition against greeting a non-believer first; ( 6) the custom of going to the seashore and waiting for the advent of Sabbatai Zvi after proclaiming aloud in the old Spanish Ladino, Esperamo a-te (for thee we wait) , etc.84 There is no doubt that the migration of Sabbateans from Sa­ lonica to Turkey has resulted in a considerable weakening of their organizational structure. In Salonica all of them had been familiar with the old Spanish-Ladino which they spoke and read, and were consequently familiar with the Hebrew script as well. Knowledge of that script has diminished and all but vanished. In the past they had used the Turkish (Arabic) script to transcribe their prayers, both Hebrew and Ladino, but since the latinization of the script in Turkey (by order dated August 8, 1928), the Donmes, too, have begun to use the Latin script. Galante reports two interesting cases of attempts by some Sa­ lonica Donmes openly to return to traditional Judaism. These as­ pirants made a formal application to the Salonica Rabbinate to admit them to the Jewish fold, but their application was rejected on the ground of the suspicion of illegitimacy among their children and the allegation that, during the ceremony of extinguishing the lights or "Feast of the Lamb," they exchanged wives. The writer had occasion to hear from a leading Donme a partial admission of this charge. He admitted that within his own sect there was sometimes both communal ownership of property and communal family life, and that in behaving thus they were acting on the express directions of their leader Darwish Effendi, one of the successors to Othman Baba. From other sources, too, comes evidence about Darwish Effendi, who was a mystic, having in­ troduced among his disciples ( on the strength of certain excerpts from the Zohar) a sort of community married life. The Sabbatean elder expressed to the writer his belief that the practice had existed in his sect for about sixty years, that is, until the days of Sultan Abdul Aziz (the seventies of the nineteenth century) , but had then fallen into desuetude. Yet another attempt to return openly to Judaism dates from the days at the end of World War I ( 19 18), when the Allies occupied Istanbul and appointed members of the minorities to certain po­ sitions in the Allied Headquarters. Several of the Donmes then

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applied for employment, basing their applications on the fact that they were Jews. Their application was rejected, but the Turks re­ membered these two incidents with bitterness. A further specific case came to the knowledge of the writer. Enver Bey, a young Donme, was on friendly terms with the Jewish Palestinian students at the University of Constantinople. He was won over to Zionism and himself immigrated to Palestine in 1914. He was appointed to teach Turkish at the Herzlia High School in Tel-Aviv, but at the beginning of the war was deported from the country by Jamal Pasha. The original intention of some of the Donmes to return to Ju­ daism openly had to be abandoned. Now that all of them again live under Moslem rule, no such intentions are entertained. Indeed, the atmosphere of suspicion that surrounds them has bred strange reactions ( for one, a fear which makes them deny their existence). Economically and numerically they have been much strengthened in the last few decades. As Moslems they enjoy all rights enjoyed by the Turks in the Civil Service, fiscal exemptions, trade, and the like. In these circumstances a greater rapprochement between them and the Jews-who are deemed a minority and treated as such­ is inconceivable. What of their future? While it is impossible to predict, one may nevertheless venture the guess that they will continue to survive as believers in the doctrine of Sabbatai Zvi. The social climate in Turkey, however, is so unpredictable as to render surprising de­ velopments possible. Modem Turkey has freed herself from the burden of minorities. Of her earlier three million members of mi­ norities, only about two hundred thousand remain. Armenians, Greeks and Jews are minorities within the general population; but there are also minorities within the Moslem community, the most notable of which are the Donmes. No one can predict their future in the decisive movement of racial and political integration now in process in Turkey. If the lessons of Jewish history are any guide, one may be permitted to envisage a state of affairs in which the Donmes, like many similar Jewish groups in the past, may have to choose between their complete and total assimilation within their Turkish environment and their full return to the national Jewish fold of their people.

III KARAITES 1 . Karaite Communities The rebirth of Israel brought about the ingathering of several off­ shoots that had been cut off from the main trunk of the Jewish people for over a thousand years. For the first time in the modem period, Karaites from neighboring countries betook themselves to the ancient national homeland, to become part of the society of Israel, adopt its citizenship and enjoy its political protection. Israel in turn gave these fugitives the same help and protection, in coloni­ zation and otherwise, that were given to all the other tribes of our people. Since the establishment of the State about 1,500 members of the largest Karaite community, that of Cairo, emigrated to Israel. More than half of them were settled on the land in a Karaite agricultural settlement, Masliah, named after the Karaite scholar Sabal Ben-Masliah. The settlement, which is situated near Ramleh on the road to Tel-Aviv, has a hundred hutments and a population of five hundred Karaites all of whom work on the land. There is a synagogue, a school and other communal institutions. Another two hundred Karaites settled in Rannen. The second largest community of Karaites in the Middle East to have moved to Israel was the small community of Hit in Iraq, most of whose members settled near Beersheba. The other com­ munities of Karaites, principally those in Istanbul and Poland, have remained unmoved by the great events of the Jewish national re­ birth and have not yet made arrangements for immigration to Israel. The fact that large numbers of Karaites were quick to take ad­ vantage of the establishment of Israel and to seek its protection by settling in the country is in itself confirmation of the close histori­ cal links that have tied the members of this sect to the main body of the Jewish people, and belies the declarations of disassociation 129

T HE EXI LED AND THE REDEEMED 1 30 which have been made so often by some of the Karaite leaders in Poland and Russia. One of those who have categorically denied the Karaites' Jewish descent is Sheraya Shebshal, a former Karaite Chief Rabbi who was a native of Crimea and an authority on oriental languages. Appointed at one time by the Persian Shah as an instructor of Turkish and a tutor to his children, he held, under Czar Nicolas, a government position in the Russian civil service. When on the outbreak of the first Russian revolution he was ordered to leave Russia, he emigrated to Troki in Poland, where he was appointed Chief Rabbi (Hakham ) of the Polish Karaites. This Hakham has repeatedly expressed his view that ethnically the Karaites were not of Jewish descent; they were proselytes, de­ scendants of the Khazars who had accepted the law of Moses but had rejected all talmudical and rabbinical laws. Shebshal was not the first to advance this theory. He had been preceded by Eben Reshef and others. The Semitic descent of the Karaites of the Moslem countries seems to be beyond doubt. Those who lived under Ottoman rule exhibited distinctly Semitic features without any trace of Slav or Tatar admixture. This was particularly notice­ able in the four thousand Karaites of Egypt, the largest Karaite community in the world. The seventy Karaites of Istanbul (whose leader was the physician Dr. Isaac Kirimi) and the small com­ munity of Hit (Iraq) belong to the same group who may be said to be of unquestionably Semitic stock. Early in the thirties an expedition of Italian scholars toured the Karaite communities of Lithuania, Poland and Russia. Dr. Gil (now Deputy Director of the Department of Statistics in the Gov­ ernment of Israel) was a member of that expedition. These ex­ plorers established that the Crimean Karaites showed a high ad­ mixture of Jewish and Tatar physiognomic traits; the Karaites on the Volga, who exhibited decisive Slavonic traits, were probably proselytes of Russian descent. The only Karaites who had no Rus­ sian, but definite Tatar and Khazar traits, were those of Poland who had migrated in the fourteenth century from their native Crimea. The explorers reached the conclusion that some of the Karaites in eastern European countries were originally people of non-Semitic stock who adopted the Jewish faith, and in course of

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time mixed and intermarried with the Karaites of Jewish racial descent. But these facts and deductions are not in themselves suf­ ficient to rule out the Jewish descent of the mass of Karaites. We now tum to their religious beliefs and observances. Responsi­ ble Karaites have never denied that they were Jews by religion and observed the injunctions of the "Written Law" of the Jewish people, namely, the Holy Scriptures. Their Bible is still the Jewish Bible intact, without a single deviation from the established and traditional Jewish text, save that Karaite interpretation differs on occasion from that of Jewish tradition. Very often they are them­ selves divided as to the correct interpretation and definition of the law, as in the case of the determination of dates of Jewish holidays and the beginning of the Jewish month. Cases have been known of Karaites of the same community fixing (as well as celebrating) a given Jewish holiday on a certain day, while others observe it on another day, according to the visibility of the moon and the testi­ mony of different witnesses. Under Mameluke rule in Egypt one Jewish civil head and ec­ clesiastical court were the recognized authority of the three groups of the Jewish community-"rabbanite" Jews, Karaites and Samari­ tans. Marriage between "rabbanite" and Karaite Jews took place with the approval of rabbinic courts. To be sure, there were troubles and rifts from time to time which resulted in bans of excommunication by eminent rabbis against the Karaites, and strict prohibition of intermarriage. Such incidents were not, however, too frequent and the bans were mainly intended as punishment in­ flicted by the Jewish authorities on Karaites for treacherous acts of denunciation against "rabbanite" Jews. On the other hand, Rabbi Joshua Hanagid, a great-grandson of Maimonides, once gave a legal decision permitting admittance of the entire community of Karaites into the Jewish fold. It can be noted that relations between the Karaites of Egypt and the rest of the Egyptian Jews have always been very cordial. Many Karaite leaders have often extended valuable help to Zionism, and a number of them were active members of the Zionist Club of Cairo, and as such served the Zionist cause with singular devotion. During World War II, Karaites, like Egyptian Jews, extended gen­ erous hospitality to members of the Jewish Brigade, a unit of the

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British forces, then stationed in Egypt. No question of their racial origin could possibly arise in connection with their immigration to the country. Israel has accepted with open arms the new Jewish proselytes from San Niccandro in Italy, even as she had earlier admitted the Russian Subotniks and others. The immigraion to Israel of Karaites, particularly of those coming from Egypt and Iraq, is symptomatic of the movement of return of even the most estranged tribes, and of the regeneration of even the dried-up branches of the eternal trunk of the Jewish people. 2. The Karaites and Soviet Scholarship In the Soviet ethnographical journal, Sovetskaya Ethnografia, ( volume I, I 948, p. 228), there appeared an interesting study by G. Feodoroff on the "Karaite Historical-Ethnographical Museum" of Vilna, capital of the Soviet Republic of Lithuania. The article contains valuable information of that small and isolated community. Until World War II there were fourteen thousand Karaites in the world, of whom ten thousand lived in Russia, one thousand in Poland and some three thousand in the East. The review offers no reliable statistics or estimates of the Karaite population in the U.S.S.R. or Poland, or indeed on the Karaites of Egypt, Istanbul or elsewhere. Notwithstanding their small number and their isolation from the rest of Jewry, the Karaites of Russia, Lithuania and Poland con­ tinued to use their own vernacular with hardly a single change. That peculiar language contained a considerable number of roots and words adapted from the language of the Polovzes or Kopchaks of which there is no trace in any other language. The author of the article in the Soviet ethnographical journal, himself an authority in oriental languages, was naturally deeply interested in that unique linguistic phenomenon. It is all the more surprising, therefore, that he should have omitted to point out that the vernacular of the Karaites was no other than the language of the Tatars of the Crimea. One cannot help but regard this as a studied omission, possibly due to the fact that the Crimean Tatars were not viewed with favor by the Soviet regime. Not so the Polovzes against whom there was not-and could not be-any official Soviet grudge. Nor is any mention made of the special place that the Hebrew language occu-

KARAI T E S

1 33

pied in the communal and religi ous life of the Karaites who used it. not for prayers alone, but also for a variety of secular pu rposes. No less surprising is the writer's failure to give any informati on on the fate of the Karaites of the Crimea after its occupaion by the Germans, or to mention the deportation of the Tatars from the Crimea because of their treacherous behavior towards the Soviet regime during that German occu pation, when the Nazis extermi­ nated all the Jews of the Crimea and the Ukraine. Feodoroff mentions the rest of the Karaite communities in the world in the following order: Syria, Palestine, Trans-Jordan, Tur­ key and Egypt. The list is something of an anachronism regarding Syria, as there have been no Karaites in Syria for the last 1 5 0 years. Further, there is not now, and there never has been, a single Karaite in Trans-Jordan. The largest single Karaite community of the world, numbering about three thousand, has survived in Egypt. To these should have been added the seventy families in Istanbul and the few families of Hit in Iraq, the great majority of whom have already immigrated to Israel. I t is not clear why the writer, who received his information from the Karaite scholar Shebshal, should have omitted mention of the other Karaites of Lithuania and Poland, especially those of Warsaw, Luck, Ponibesh, and the s mall agri­ cultural community of Halish. There was grave alarm during the war over the fate of the Karaites of the Crimea and Poland. Many feared that they had been exterminated by the Nazis, who did not bother about the niceties of "Mosaic" and "Rabbinical" Law and the distinctions between their respective adherents. But the Nazis did distinguish on racial grounds between various ty pes of Jews, i.e. , between full Jews who carried with pride the banner of their people, religiously as well as nationally, and those who at a time of national catastrophe did not perhaps deny their religion, but denied their racial descent. The Nazis apparently acted on such distinctions not only in Poland and Lithuania, in which they found Karaites, but also in the Crimea, the historical homeland of the two types of "Krimchaks "-both those who adhered to the tal­ mudical tradition and those who rejected it. In the Crimea, as else­ where, they singled out the former for extermination, but spared the latter. Feodoroff describes the religion of the Karaites as a synthetic

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED 1 34 one that reflected the composite ethnic structure of the Karaites and the impact of two civilizations-the Jewish and the Moslem. The Soviet writer thus considers "influence" as the only connection of Judaism with the Karaite community, which he treated as a med­ ley of various races. Even in his references to Anan son of David, the founder of the sect, be appears to ignore the fact that Anan was the son of the Jewish exilarch of Babylon and that all his dis­ ciples and supporters were Jews. There is much else in the article of the Soviet writer that must puzzle the student in quest of impartial information on the Kara­ ites: his references to "the influence of Judaism" on a heterodox Jewish sect who, while diverging from the main body of Jewish tra­ dition, have merely formed a pattern of Judaism of their own, make strange reading-rather like references to "the influence of Islam" on a Moslem sect that had merely diverged from Sunni or Shi'ite doctrine. Altogether, the exaggerated emphasis on the hybrid racial composition of the Karaites is wide off the mark, and was apparently intended to rule out the Karaites as a purely Jewish sect. The account given by the Soviet author is probably influenced by Professor Shebshal's extreme assimilationist views. It is regrettable that these tendentious and erroneous views were accepted un­ critically and without a single reservation by the Soviet Academy and by the editors of Soviet Ethnography.

3. The End of the Communities At the time of writing the first two parts of this chapter no infor­ mation was available to the writer on the ultimate fate of the Polish Karaites, particularly those of Halish. Efforts to secure such infor­ mation from Egyptian Karaites, or from the head of the Karaite community of Istanbul, Dr. Kirimi, whom the writer visited in September 195 1 , were equally unsuccessful. Meanwhile, Mr. Philip Friedman's study on Polish Karaites36 has come to hand, which contains the testimony of eyewitnesses to the effect that all these Karaites survived the Nazi massacre. The controversy as to the Karaites' racial descent has long been a one-sided controversy between Jewish and Karaite scholars : Jew­ ish scholars (like Professor Balaban and others) denying, and Karaite scholars (like Hananyah Zajasczkowski, A. Markovitz, S.

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Firkovitz, A. Shishman and Sheraya Shebshal) affirming, that Karaites were of Mongol descent. Under the Nazi occupation, that presumably purely theoretical controversy assumed a grimly vital significance. The writer in Soviet Ethnography reported that at the beginning of 1942 the Nazi occupation authorities ordered Dr. L. Landau to prepare a memorandum on the racial origin of the Karaites. He consulted Mr. Friedman and both agreed that an objective report on the Jewish origin of the Karaites would mean death to the whole community. Dr. Shall composed the memoran­ dum in which, against his better judgment as a student of history, he presented and confirmed the view according to which the Karaites were of Turkish and Mongol descent. At a later date Mr. Friedman learned that Balaban and I. Shiffer in Warsaw and Kalmanowitz in Vilna had been commissioned by the Nazi authorities to prepare a similar memorandum. In the (typewritten) memoirs of Dr. Michael Weichert, the government­ appointed director of Jewish relief, there is a report on the assign­ ment given by the Nazi authorities to Professor Balaban and Dr. I. Shiffer, while the assignment to Kalmanowitz is referred to by Dvor­ etzky in his Struggle and Fall of Vilna, Paris, 1948. All these scholars confirmed the Turkish descent of the Karaites-for the same reasons. The author of the report on Polish Karaites had no information as to the precise action taken on the memorandum, but he confirms the fact that the Nazis did not treat the Karaites as racial Jews, and that they were consequently saved from persecution and exter­ mination. Friedman, who knew the Karaites of Halish, testifies from per­ sonal knowledge that, unlike the Jews, they were not persecuted, but were given full freedom to continue their normal life. The Karaites, for their part, refrained from any social contacts with the Jews, so as not to rouse German suspicions. On the liberation in 1 944 of Poland, Halish Karaites ( and probably all other Karaites elsewhere in Poland ) were safe and in possession of their property. An examination of war and post-war conditions in Troki and Crimea leads to the conclusion that there, too, Karaites were dealt with favorably and enjoyed better treatment than the Jews. It would appear that the Nazis accepted the theory that Karaites were not

THE E X I L E D AND T H E R E D E E M E D 136 descendants of the sons of Israel, but of proselytes of non-Jewish stock who at one time adopted the Mosaic faith. Not being "racial" Jews, they were spared. After the war and the Nazi defeat, a substantial immigration of Egyptian Karaites began to flow toward Palestine and Israel, but not a single Karaite came from Russia and Poland. This immigra­ tion and the simultaneous exodus of Iraqi Jews put an end to the only surviving Karaite community in Iraq, that of Hit. The whole of this small community of thirteen families, or sixty-seven persons, immigrated to Israel. A single family remained behind, but that family too is contemplating immigration. Although most of them were artisans (mainly silversmiths), a good many of them took up agricultural work in Israel. Hit was one of the many ancient com­ munities of Babylon still flourishing in the tenth century. It is mentioned in the writings of the Karaite authority Salman Ben­ Yeruham. A certain Aaron of Hit is mentioned in God's Staff of Moshe Bishyazi, and there are references to the community as late as the eighteenth century. Jakob Obermeyer, who visited Hit in 1869, found there twenty families; but their number has since dwindled. The immigration to Palestine of the weaker sections of the lost tribes of Israel is a social phenomenon that deserves attention. The Babylonian Karaites were the last survivors of a great movement that originated in Babylon in the days of the Gaonim. The decline of the community was so complete that few outside Babylon even knew of its existence. When a few years ago their ancient syna­ gogue was demolished, even urgent repair work was beyond their means. They had no school or teachers, and their young generation grew up in ignorance of Judaism. Upon the destruction of their synagogue, the Iraqi government confiscated their ancient Scroll of the Law which had been preserved by them for centuries. Hit Karaites were completely isolated from any center of Jewish or even Karaite life, and the news of Israel's rebirth reached them through Arab channels. But Israel's War of Independence intensified Arab hatred against them, too. Some of them reported to the writer that three yo1Jng Karaites who crossed the desert on business were killed by Bedouin raiders. The murderers were apprehended, tried after eleven months and sentenced to death; but on the day

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of final judgment the news of Israel's war reached Iraq, and the court set the murderers free. To the Babylonian Karaites, as to so many forlorn tribes, emi­ gration to Israel meant an eleventh-hour miraculous escape from certain physical extermination.

B O O K TH REE JEWISH TRADITIONS AMONG MOSLEM TRIBES

I THE JEWS OF KHAIBAR 1 . Origin

Between the land (and the people) of Israel and the land (and the people) of the Arabian Peninsula direct and constant relations have existed since very ancient times. The beginnings of such con­ tacts are traceable to the days of the conquest of Canaan by the Israelite tribes. One aspect of that close relationship is described in the biblical accounts of the marriage of Moses to a daughter of Jethro, the priest of Midian in northern Arabia. Jethro's influence on the leader and legislator of Israel must have left its mark on some of the laws of the Israelites. S. I. Rappaport,1 one of the nineteenth-century pioneers of Jew­ ish historical research, sought an etymological connection between "Heber the Kenite," father-in-law of Moses, and Khaibar-on the one hand, and between Khaibar and "the Rechabites"-on the other. Taking his theory a step further, Rappaport sought in the passage on "the city of palm trees," the seat of the Kenites, an allu­ sion not to Jericho, as most Bible commentators hitherto under­ stood that expression, but to Khaibar, the city of palm trees. Since these conjectural theories advanced in the early days of oriental research in the last century, much progress has been made in establishing the exact location of biblical places. Most explorers and commentators now identify the "city of palm trees" in Judges 1 . 1 6 as Tamar in the Negev, a city which was inhabited by the Kenites and is repeatedly mentioned in the Scriptures (e.g., Ezekiel 47. 1 9, and elsewhere) as a border town in the south of the land of Israel. Some identify it as Hazazon-Tamar (of Genesis 1 4.7), although in the context in which this last-named town appears in II Chronicles 20.2, its location more closely approximates that of Ain-Gedi. With the Tamar of the south of Palestine we are familiar through the Medeba Relief Map, Eusebius ( Onomastikon 8,8) , Ptolemy 141

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(V,15) and other sources. A. Alt2 identified it with Kasr-al-Ge­ henna, on the highway from Hebron to Sela and Elat through the Araba, and from the southwestern coast of the Dead Sea. That identification appears to conform to the description in Judges ( 1.16) "the south of Arad." The pattern of communications and contacts between the land of Israel and the Arabian Peninsula, in the days of the First Com­ monwealth, was one of great diversity, for there was as much raiding as there was trading between tribes on both sides of the "border." Most active on the side of Israel were the tribes whose habitat bordered on the desert-the sons of Reuben, Gad and half the tribe of Manasseh who (we are told in I Chronicles 5.9) "made war with the Hagarites" and ". . took away their camels fifty thousand"; such raiding "relations" were equally constant between the sons of the tribe of Simeon and Arabian territory, for the Sirneonites ". . . went to Mount Seir." Such crossings between the contiguous territories were just as frequent in the days of the Second Commonwealth. While contacts until then consisted almost exclusively of an incessant series of raids, the constant improvement of communications brought about more peaceful relations and trade between the people north and south, so that by the time of the Second Commonwealth Arabia and Palestine (and Syria) became the two poles of a busy trade route. Nevertheless, we have no evidence of an organized Jewish set­ tlement in northern Arabia till after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. After a long period of irregular infiltration of Israelites into the north and south of Arabia, a permanent Jewish settlement established itself. We have no reliable historical evidence that would enable us to date the first establishment of a Jewish settlement. Jewish "colonies" were established gradually. The city of Teimah was known to the prophets by that name, and may perhaps be said to have been the first city in Arabia in which some­ thing like a Jewish community had existed in ancient biblical times. From here Jewish settlements spread to Faddak, Wadi al Kurah, Yathreb (Medina) and other places in northern Arabia. The spirit­ ual influence of the Israelites on the tribes of Yoktan (Kahtan) and Adnan was always very strong, and proselytization, partial or total,

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was not uncommon among Bedouin tribes long before the emer­ gence of Islam. The persecution of the Jews of Palestine, first under Hellenic, later under Roman rule, resulted in a steady stream of migrants in the direction of northern Arabia. Among the migrants were raiding tribes who lived as shepherds; others became farmers and vine growers; and a large number of Jews settled in and around Yathreb, in whose civil and economic life they soon took an in­ creasingly active part until they came virtually to dominate it. Until the arrival of the Jews settled agriculture in the north of Arabia was not widespread. The Jews, who came from a fairly flourishing agrarian community, revolutionized the agricultural economy of their adopted land with their skills and experience. They drained the marshes of Wadi al Kurah and Khaibar, planted trees, raised new varieties of cereals, and generally diversified its agriculure. The native inhabitants of Hejaz were quick to emulate their example. Equally substantial was their contribution to the trade of the land. They thoroughly reformed the primitive and unremunerative com­ mercial operations of a desert economy by introducing the more modern and lucrative processes of international trade which they carried on with the Levant through camel caravans. We have records of a number of tribes who were either them­ selves Hebraic or of Hebraic origin: Bani Karama, Bani Ta'aleba, Bani Mahmar, Bani Za'urah, Bani Zaid, Bani Nadhir, Bani Ku­ raitha, Bani Bahdal, Bani 'Auf and Bani Kasis, and lastly, the re­ doubtable Bani Kainuka'. In the city of Yathreb there were no less than twenty purely Jewish clan-communities. From the tops of their fortified mansions the Jews could successfully defend them­ selves against any aggression from raiding Arab tribes. The land of Khaibar was by far the most progressive and fertile of all Arab lands. It was the granary of the rest of Arabia and was famed for its sweet waters and juicy fruits. In its three prov­ inces-Nattah, Shak and Kuteiba-there was a wide network of fortified places which protected its wholly Jewish population against covetous raiding tribes. Wadi al Kurah, which stretches between Yathreb and Teimah was the most fertile region in the north of Arabia. Along one of its caravan routes to the north lay the Jewish

THE E X I L E D AND T H E R E D E E M E D 144 settlement o f Faddak, i n the vicinity o f which Jewish relics have been preserved to this day. Near Teimah was the famous fort, Al­ Ablak-al-Fard, of the Arab-Jewish poet and hero Samuel ibn'Adaya, and the whole province was under the sway of the Jewish tribe Sharamat. Jewish influence came to be strongly felt among several Arab tribes in pre-Islamic northern Arabia. Some wholly accepted the Jewish faith with all its practical observances; others did no more than discard the pagan cult and embrace the belief in one God. There were yet others, like the Hanafiyah Arabs, who intro­ duced · circumcision into their pagan way of life. The partial or total proselytization of several of the Arab tribes considerably strengthened Jewish influence in the life of the country. The judaization of northern Arabia must not be confused with the much later conversion to Judaism of the royal house and people of Himyar, in the south. This latter Jewish kingdom is mentioned here only because of its indirect relevance to our pres­ ent reference. For without the collapse and destruction of Himyar in the sixth century, and the consequent general deterioration of the Jewish position in the Arabic Peninsula, it is doubtful whether the end of Khaibar Jewry in the early seventh century would have been as tragic as, in fact, it was.

2. The Destruction of the Arabian Communities The destruction, under dramatic and tragic circumstances, in the sixth year of the Mohammedan era (628 C.E.), of the Jewish political center of Khaibar, recalls similar disasters in Jewish his­ tory. The disappearance of Khaibar as a Jewish political center seems like a miniature version of the destruction of the Judaean kingdom, first by the Chaldeans, and then by the Romans. Like their ancestors, the Khaibar Jews defended their forts and mansions with signal heroism, and like Nebuchadnezzar, Mohammed, the Prophet of Islam, visited upon his beaten enemy inhuman atroci­ ties. Nevertheless, the complete extermination of the two Arabian­ Jewish tribes, the Nadhir and Kainuka', by the mass massacre of their men, women and children, was a tragedy for which no parallel can be found in Jewish history until our own day, except in the heroic siege of Massada. A detailed account of the battles for their survival fought by

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the Jewish tribes in the heart of Arabia is found in Dr.Israel Ben­ Zeev's remarkable book Jews in Arabia, in which the long struggle of the Khaibar Jews is summed up in the following graphic words: The consequences of the war were catastrophic.For centuries the Jews of Khaibar had led a life of freedom, peace, labor and trade; now they had to bow under the yoke of slavery and de­ gradation. They had prided themselves on the purity of their family life; now their women and daughters were distributed among and carried away by the conquerors.3 Dr. Ben-Zeev quotes a tradition reported by the Arab historian, Al-Waqidy, who lived in the ninth century, which gives a gloomy picture of conditions in Khaibar after the expulsion of Jews from the country. A notable of Medina who toured the country at the end of the hostilities described it in the following words: Before the Moslem occupation, whenever there was a famine in the land, people would go to Khaibar, Faddak and Teimah. The Jews always had fruit, and their springs yielded a plentiful supply of water. After the conquest of Khaibar, the Jews were said to design evil schemes against the Moslems. But hunger pressed us to go to their fields. When I toured the land with several companions, we found the landscape completely changed. We met none of the rich Khaibar landowners, but only destitute farmers everywhere....When we moved on to Kuteiba we felt much relieved. After the war, only a very few Jewish survivors remained in Khaibar. Enslaved to the Arabs, and in perpetual danger from marauding Bedouins, they eked out a precarious existence.Excel­ lent farmers, they were indispensable to the economy of the country. But when the extension of Moslem conquests added a sufficient number of farmers to the Moslem population, the Caliph Omar (in year 13 of the Mohammedan era, or 635 C.E.) decreed the deportation from the Arabian Peninsula of the few Jews who still remained in Khaibar, and of all the Jews of Faddak. Omar based his decree on the Prophet's utterance: "Let not two religions co­ exist within the Arabian Peninsula." Omar deported all those Jews who could produce no "Letters" of privilege signed by the Prophet. It would appear, therefore, that not all Khaibar and Faddak Jews were deported under Omar's de-

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED 146 cree and that the Jews of Wadi al Kurah and Teimah who could produce letters of protection and treaties signed by or on behalf of the Prophet were allowed to remain in their places. Among the privileged, mention is made by Moslem sources of the widespread clan of Hanina (or Habiba), some of whose members undoubtedly remained in Khaibar and Wadi al Kurah long after Omar's decree of expulsion. Some of the Jewish deportees of Khaibar, who had letters from the Prophet, were probably allowed, after Omar's death, to return to their homeland in which they renewed their Jewish communal existence and continued for a long time their specific Jewish communal life. The Italian explorer Caitani reports the existence of Jewish communities in Wadi al Kurah in the days of Abd el-Malek (685-705 C.E.) and there is reason to believe that these surviving Jewish communities were maintained intact until the twelfth century.

3. The Scattered Remnants

Information available to us from a variety of sources4 reveals that some of the Khaibar Jewish exiles settled in Teimah, while a number settled in Palestine, primarily in Jericho, together with Jews from other tribes, including the Nadhir. The Kainuka' exiles settled mainly in Trans-Jordan, especially in Dera'a. The existence in the seventh century of a Jewish community in Jericho, strength­ ened, or perhaps founded, by the exiles from Khaibar, is reported in Waqidy's records, the chronicles of Bukhary, and the travel journal of Mujir Eddin al-Hinbaly. There are also other references to Jewish communal life in Jericho as late as the ninth century. Some believe that the Bedouin tribe now known as Anserat, whose habitat is near Jericho, is no other than the Jewish tribe of Nadhir who were deported under the Prophet's decree together with the people of Faddak and Khaibar. These tribesmen are regarded with a kind of religious respect by other Bedouin tribes who often, when in distress, come to them for advice or medicine. Their position in the general Bedouin community may be said to be comparable to that of the Levites among the ancient people of Israel. Joseph Braslawsky has drawn attention to the locality known as Tel Khaibar, east of Samaria. The name suggests that exiled Jewish tribes from Arabia may have settled in the heart of the country in the seventh century. This is somewhat substantiated by a tradition

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current among the Arabs of Yutta, in the Hebron district, which assumes their descent from Khaibar Jews. The "infiltration" of Arabian Jewish exiles thus seems to have reached as far as the hills of Hebron. Of other Jewish exiles, the Kainuka' migrated to Dera'a, west of Salkhad which, in fact, abounds in relics, including caves, of an ancient Jewish settlement. The exiles from Kainuka' probably found there an already long-established Jewish community. Arabian Jews were drawn mainly to the rich pastures in the vicinity of Dera'a, but in course of time they intermarried with the settled Jewish population and thereby proved to be a valuable accretion to it. Without such strengthening from outside, the Jewish settle­ ments which were so far removed from the Diaspora centers could hardly have survived as Jewish communities for hundreds of years. Rabbinic sources contain references to the twin communities of Dera'a and Salkhad. Thus, Estori Farhi ( 14th century) in his Ka/tor va-Ferah discusses the validity of bills of divorce in which these cities were stated to be part of Palestine. Gilead, or Ajlun, is mentioned in the travel diary of Benjamin of Tudela (at the end of the twelfth century) as containing "a Jewish community of sixty families whose leaders are Zaddok, Isaac and Solomon; it is a large place surrounded by rich waters and orchards; it is half a day from there to Salkhad." Yet another unidentified place in which a small Jewish community existed in the days of Farhi was Harim, believed to be a small village west of Ajlun. The Jews of that place, like the Jews of the Diaspora, celebrated every Jewish festival for two days, whereas the people of Ajlun celebrated for only one day in accord­ ance with the Palestinian rite. The question of whether Gilead-Ajlun should be accounted part of Palestine or not, for purposes of ritual observance, because once more the subject of controversy towards the end of the sixteenth century. Rabbi Yorn Tob Tsahalon ruled that the Jewish com­ munity there should be considered as Palestinian, and should therefore celebrate one day only. His ruling shows that several contemporary scholars regarded that community as successor to an ancient Jewish settlement there. Hamadan, or Amatus, in northern Transjordan, a city famed for its palms, had a Jewish community as late as the eleventh cen­ tury, of the existence of which we have records.

THE EXILED AND THE REDEEMED 148 To this day there are dolmens not far from Dera'a which are known to the Arabs as "Tombs of the Jews." Dera'a is the center of the Aneze tribesmen, themselves descendants of the Wuld Ali clan which was known to have roamed the expanses of Khaibar. Students of Bedouin affairs have long believed in a close relation­ ship between these Transjordanian Bedouins and the Arabian Jew­ ish tribes who had been exiled by the Prophet or his disciples from Hejaz. Not all Jews were deported; some remained, especially in Wadi al Kurah, where we have evidence of continued Jewish communal existence until the end of the twelfth century. The Arab historian Baladhuri reports the existence of Jews there in the days of Yazid I ( 680-683). Even from the exaggerated account of the traveller Eldad the Danite to the rabbis of Kairuwan there emerge a few incontestable facts regarding the existence of Jewish tribes in the Arabian desert. According to Mukaddasi, Jews constituted as late as the tenth century a majority of the population of Wadi al Kurah. At about the same time, the community of Wadi al Kurah applied to the two Babylonian Gaonim, Sherira and Hay, for a legal ruling on questions of succession in land property. In their reply the rabbinical authorities quote a talmudic text dealing with the cultiva­ tion of dates, a branch of agriculture which was familiar to Khaibar Jews. In a Geniza document dating from the eleventh century reference is made to two letters addressed from Tyre containing an inquiry about a certain Isaac of Wadi al Kurah who, some four years previously, had abandoned his wife in Rabbat-Ammon. These documents provide valuable evidence to the effect that in the days immediately preceding the Crusades there were constant contacts between the Jews of Wadi al Kurah and those of Trans­ jordania and Palestine. They also confirm the uninterrupted exist­ ence of a Jewish settlement in the Arabian Peninsula, especially in Wadi al Kurah, throughout that long period.5

4. Jews of Arabia during the Era of the Crusades

There is little reliable information on the life of Jewish tribes in the Arabian deserts in the accounts of the traveller Eldad the Danite. Benjamin of Tudela, who returned from his travels in

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1173, is certainly a more reliable witness. But even his reports, though generally lucid, suffer from much confusion and contradic­ tion when they deal with the Jewish tribes of the Arabian desert. It is, however, clear from Benjamin's accounts that he did not himself visit the settlements of Jews in Arabia, but only reported what he heard at second hand in Palestine, Egypt or Babylon. Here is the main passage dealing with Arabian Jews: Thence is it five days to Hillah. From this place it is a journey of twenty-one days by way of the deserts to the land of Saba [Sheba], which is called the land Al-Yemen, lying at the side of the land of Shinar [Babylonia] which is towards the north. There dwell the Jews called Kheibar [Khaibar], the men of Teima [Teimah]. And Teima is their seat of government where R. Hanan the Nasi rules over them. It is a great city, and the extent of their land is sixteen days' journey. It is surrounded by mountains of the north. The Jews own many, many large fortified cities. The yoke of the Gentiles is not upon them. They go forth to pillage and to capture booty from distant lands in conjunction with the Arabs, their neighbors and allies. These Arabs dwell in tents, and their home is in the way of the desert. They own no houses, and they go forth to pillage and to capture booty in the land of Shinar and Al-Yemen. All the neighbors of these Jews go in fear of them. Among them are husbandmen and owners of cattle; their land is extensive, and they have in their midst learned and wise men. They give the tithe of all they possess unto the scholars who sit in the house of learning, also to poor Israelites and to the recluses, who are the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem, and who do not eat meat nor taste wine, and sit clad in garments of black. They dwell in caves or underground houses, and fast each day with the exception of the Sabbaths and Festivals, and implore mercy of the Holy One, blessed be He, on account of the exile of Israel, praying that He may take pity upon them, and upon all the Jews, the men of Teima, for the sake of His great Name, also upon Tilmas [Telemas] the great city, in which there are about 100,000 Jews. At this place lives Salmon the Nasi, the brother of Hanan the Nasi; and the land belongs to the two brothers, who are of the seed of David, for they have their pedi­ gree in writing. They address many questions unto the Head of the Captivity-their Kinsman in Baghdad-and they fast forty days in the year for the Jews that dwell in exile. There are here about forty large town and 200 hamlets and villages. The principal city is Tanae [Tanai], and in all the districts together there are about 300,000 Jews. The city of Tanae is well fortified and in the midst thereof the people sow and reap.

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It is fifteen miles in extent. Here is the palace of the Nasi called Salmon. And in Teima dwells Hanan the Nasi, his brother. It is a beautiful city, and contains gardens and plantations. And Tilmas is likewise a great city; it contains about 100,000 Jews. It is well fortified, and is situated between two high mountains. There are wise, discreet, and rich men amongst the inhabitants. From Tilmas to Kheibar it is three days' journey. People say they belong to the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and the half-tribe of Manasseh, whom Shalmaneser king of Assyria, led hither into captivity. They have built strongly-fortified