End of Story? Remnants of Kurdistan’s Jews in the 21st Century

Thomas Schmidinger

Jan 2025 · Transnational Press London

About this ebook

For more than 2,600 years, Jews lived in the region now mainly inhabited by Kurds and for the past several centuries referred to as Kurdistan. Over time, many of these Jewish communities had developed strong cultural similarities with their Kurdish and Christian neighbours and, in addition to their own dialects of Northeastern Neo-Aramaic, also spoke Kurdish and, depending on the region, Arabic, Persian and Turkish.

Almost all of these communities were crushed in the Middle East conflict in the course of the 20th century. Based on extensive fieldwork this book documents what material culture remains of these communities in the 21st century and what discourses have developed in the various parts of Kurdistan about this part of the region’s historical heritage. It focusses on Iraqi Kurdistan, where most of the Jewish communities existed, but also includes the remains of the communities in the Iranian, Syrian and Turkish part of Kurdistan.

About the author

Thomas Schmidinger is Associate Professor at the University of Kurdistan Hewlêr (UKH) in Erbil and also teaches at the University of Vienna (Austria) and is a Research Associate at the Nelson Mandela University in South Africa. He co-edits the Vienna Yearbook of Kurdish Studies and serves on the editorial board of the Iraqi Journal for Political Science.