Introduction

INTRODUCTION 0.1. The Jewish communities ofSulemaniyya and lfalabja The town of Sulemaniyya is situated in eastern Iraqi Kurdistan close to the border with Iran (latitude: 35° 32' N, longitude 45° 25' E, altitude 788 metres). It was founded in 1784 by Ibrahim Pasha Baban as the capital of the Kurdish Baban emirate, which controlled the region at that period. The town was named after Biiyiik Siileyman Pasha, who was the Ottoman governor of Baghdad from 1780-1802. Its original name was Sulemani, which is still used in the vernacular dialects of the town. In 1851 the Baban emirate was annexed to the Ottoman province of Mo~ul and an Ot toman governor was installed in the city. I:Ialabja (latitude: 35° 10' N, longitude 45° 58' E, altitude 720 me tres) is located at a distance of about 40 miles to the south east of Sule maniyya in the foothills of the Hawraman Mountains. Up to the end of the nineteenth century it was a small village in the territory of the no madic Jaf tribe of Kurds. At the end of the nineteenth century, Uthman Pasha, a member of the ruling family of the Jaf, took possession of the town and the surrounding territory. He was employed by the Ottoman government to control the border region and was subsequently appointed to the administrative position of Qaim Maqam. In 1895 Uthman Pasha married Adela Khanum ('Lady Justice'), from the aristocratic family of the Persian Ardalan dynasty, and brought her to I:Ialabja. In the early 20th century the town was developed by numerous building works, mostly car ried out by Khanum Adela, who came more and more to govern the town due to the frequent absence of her husband. These included a large cov ered market, which made the town into an important commerical centre. Shortly after the foundation of Sulemaniyya, Jews, Christians and Turkmens from the surrounding region settled in the town. In the first half of the nineteenth century the ruling Kurds constituted, it seems, only a minority of the population. According to one report, out of a thousand houses in Sulemaniyya in 1825, eight hundred were occupied by Jews, Christians and Turkmens. 1 The Kurdish population subsequently ex panded, partly because many Jews and Christians in the nineteenth cen tury converted to Islam due to religious persecutions and married into 1 Soane (1912: 185). 2 INTRODUCTION Kurdish families.2 The Jews became established in a separate quarter in the south of the town. The majority of these came from the village of Qaradax, situated twenty miles to the south, though the settlers included families from several other villages in the area.3 There are travellers' re ports of the presence of a Jewish community in Sulemaniyya from the beginning of the 19th century onwards. A visitor to the town in 1800 found a Jewish community consisting of 200 households. Other sources from various periods in the 19th and early 20th centuries estimate the size of the community as being between 100 and 200 households.4 The musi cologist Abraham Idelsohn reports that in the early 1920s the Jewish community had grown to 500 households.5 This was the size of the com munity when it migrated in its entirety to Israel between 1950 and 1952.6 According to one of my own informants, the community numbered ap proximately 3,500 people at the time of the mass emigration. The dra matic increase in the size of the population in the 1920s was brought about by an influx of Jews into the town from the surrounding villages. Many of these came from the village of Qaradax, when it was destroyed in a dispute between local Kurdish tribes. In 1946 thirty Jewish house holds migrated to the town from the village of Penjwin, which lay thirty miles to the east. 7 One Jew, called Shlomo La<azar, together with his wife and two daughters remained in Sulemaniyya when the community emi grated to Israel. He was subsequently murdered. His wife and daughters converted to Islam and married into Muslim families. 8 At the time of Soane's visit to J:Ialabja at the beginning of the 20th century, the market consisted of fifty shops, a large proportion of which were occupied by Jews. 9 In 1934 the Jewish community of the town was reported to consist of fifty households and in 194 7 it is said to have num bered between sixty and seventy households. 10 These figures are not con sistent with the reports of my own informant from I:Jalabja, who esti mated that there were about 120 Jewish households in the town during the 1940s. The community migrated en masse to Israel at the beginning of the 1950s. 2 Soane(l912: 186). Bar-Amon (1985: 33). 4 Ben-Ya<qov(l981: 111-113). Idelsohn (1932, vol. II: 1). 6 Ben-Ya<qov(l981: addenda53). 7 Ben-Ya'qov (1981: addenda 53). 8 See the account given in the text corpus of this volume (R:155-157). 9 Soane (1912: 231-232). 10 Ben-Ya<qov (1981: 115). .

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