The Jews of Iraq were the oldest Jewish community outside the Land of Israel. Exiled to Babylon in the 6th century BCE, they built the academies that produced the Babylonian Talmud, and around 1900 they made up a quarter or more of Baghdad. Almost all left in 1950–1951, most of them in the airlift to Israel known as Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. Iraqi Jews are usually counted among the Mizrahi communities; many follow Sephardi law and liturgy, though few have Iberian ancestry. See also Kurdish Jews and Iranian Jews.
Origins
The community began with the Babylonian exile: the first deportations from Judah took place in 597 BCE. Many exiles stayed in Babylonia after the return to Zion was allowed, and the community grew into the largest center of Jewish life outside the Land of Israel. Its rabbis led the academies of Sura, Nehardea and Pumbedita, and the Babylonian Talmud, completed in the 6th century CE, became the central text of Jewish law everywhere.
Under Muslim rule the community was led by the Exilarch, the Resh Galuta, and by the Geonim, the heads of the academies, whose rulings were sent across the Jewish world from the 6th to the 11th century. The academies declined after 1038. Baghdad’s Jews survived the Mongol conquest of 1258 and lived under Ottoman rule from 1534 to 1917.
The Sephardi connection
Iraq received few exiles from Spain, and its Jews kept their own Babylonian customs. Over the centuries, though, they adopted Sephardi law as codified in Joseph Karo’s Shulchan Aruch and prayed in a Sephardi rite with distinct Baghdadi melodies and customs. In 19th-century Baghdad the rabbinic academy Bet Zilkha trained rabbis for communities as far as India, and Rabbi Joseph Hayyim, the Ben Ish Hai, wrote the guide to daily law that many Sephardi and Mizrahi families still follow; see also Abdallah Somekh.
Modern era and departure
- Baghdad’s Jews. Baghdad had about 6,000 Jews in the early 19th century and 50,000 by 1900, a quarter or more of the city. Baghdadi merchant families such as the Sassoons built trading houses in India and East Asia; see Indian Jews.
- The kingdom. Under the British mandate and the Kingdom of Iraq, Sassoon Eskell became the country’s first minister of finance in 1921, and Jews were prominent in commerce, the professions and music.
- The Farhud. On June 1–2, 1941, during Shavuot, after the collapse of the pro-Nazi government of Rashid Ali, mobs in Baghdad killed about 180 Jews by most counts, with some estimates far higher, and injured hundreds more.
- 1948–1951. After Israel’s founding, Jews were dismissed from government posts, and in 1948 the businessman Shafiq Ades was hanged in Basra. A law of March 1950 allowed Jews to leave if they gave up their citizenship, and in March 1951 the government froze the assets of those who had registered. Between 120,000 and 130,000 Iraqi Jews reached Israel by early 1952, most of them in Operation Ezra and Nehemiah.
- After 1952. A few thousand Jews remained. In January 1969 the government publicly hanged nine Jews in Baghdad on charges of spying. Almost all of the rest left in the 1970s.
Religious life
Baghdadi Jews pray in a Sephardi rite with their own melodies and customs, shaped by the Ben Ish Hai and by kabbalists such as Hakham Yehudah Fetaya. Pilgrimages to the tombs of biblical figures in Iraq, among them the prophet Ezekiel at al-Kifl, were part of communal life.
Language, music and food
Iraqi Jews spoke Judeo-Arabic, with a Baghdadi dialect of their own, and many learned French and English in the Alliance and community schools. Jewish musicians were central to modern Iraqi music: the brothers Saleh and Daoud al-Kuwaity composed songs that Iraqi radio kept playing even after 1948. Hear Rabbi Haim Ovadia’s recordings of Iraqi Jewish songs. The kitchen includes tbit (chicken and rice cooked overnight for Shabbat), kubba and sabich, the eggplant-and-egg sandwich Iraqi Jews brought to Israel. See our Sephardic recipes.
The community today
Only a handful of Jews remain in Iraq. Most Iraqi Jews and their descendants live in Israel, with communities in London, New York and elsewhere.
Notable people
- Sassoon Eskell 1860–1932 · Baghdad Iraq’s first minister of finance (1921–1925); called the “father of parliament.”
- Joseph Hayyim (Ben Ish Hai) d. 1909 · Baghdad Rabbi and kabbalist; his Ben Ish Hai arranges daily law by the weekly Torah portion.
- Saleh and Daoud al-Kuwaity 1908–1986 and 1910–1976 · Kuwait Composers and musicians of Baghdad; Saleh is called the father of modern Iraqi song.
- Naim Dangoor 1914–2015 · Baghdad Businessman and philanthropist in London; founded The Scribe and the Exilarch’s Foundation.
- Sami Michael 1926–2024 · Baghdad Israeli novelist; author of Victoria and A Trumpet in the Wadi.
Sources and further reading
- Orit Bashkin, New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford University Press, 2012).
- Nissim Rejwan, The Jews of Iraq: 3000 Years of History and Culture (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985).
- Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, Zionism in an Arab Country: Jews in Iraq in the 1940s (Routledge, 2004).
- “History of the Jews in Iraq”, “Farhud” and “Operation Ezra and Nehemiah”, Wikipedia.
Revised October 2026 to correct errors in an earlier version of this page.
