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Baghdad was a Jewish capital long before it was an Iraqi capital. From the founding of the Abbasid city in 762 CE, built on the ruins of older Babylonian Jewish settlements, through the Geonic academies, the medieval merchant networks, the Ottoman Hakham Bashi era and into the early 20th century, Baghdad held one of the wealthiest, most learned, most influential Jewish communities on Earth. By the 1917 Ottoman census roughly 40% of Baghdad was Jewish. By 1948 the community numbered ~150,000. This lesson covers its golden age, Sassoon merchants, the Ben Ish Hai, the al-Kuwaiti brothers who built modern Iraqi music, and the Mahalat al-Yahud quarter that was once the cultural center of Mesopotamia.
Historical note, The Babylonian Jewish community is the OLDEST continuous diaspora, older than European Jewry by ~1500 years, going back to the destruction of the First Temple (586 BCE). When Caliph al-Mansur founded Baghdad in 762, he chose a site already densely Jewish. The Geonim of Sura and Pumbedita relocated to Baghdad and ran world Jewry by responsa for ~400 years. The Babylonian Talmud, the standard Talmud for all Jews today, was edited there. Iraqi Jews are not "Mizrahi immigrants", they are the Jewish people of the original exile, the ones who never left.
Abbasid & Medieval Baghdad
Hakham Bashi Leadership
Notable Iraqi Rabbis (post-Geonim)
Wealthy Merchants & Industrialists
Music, Cinema & Cultural Influence
Mahalat al-Yahud: The Jewish Quarter
A walk through the heart of Jewish Baghdad in 1920, synagogues, schools, markets, the Tigris waterfront. The peak of a 2,500-year continuous community, just years before the Farhud (1941) shattered it.