Cemetery at Sohar, Oman

Professor Aviva Klein-Franke "visited Oman twice to investigate the Jewish cemetery at Sohar. I took many photographs of the site and documented the names which are written on the bricks of the Memorial Wall. Under the rule of the Persians the port of Sohar was built, Merchants from Persia founded colonies along the eastern shore of the Arabian Gulf. Sohar became a famous port. Trade Agencies from overseas settled at Sohar and traded with goods from China and Japan, Persia and Iraq, India and Yemen, Ethiopia and Egypt. Sohar became what the port of Aden had been, a place for exchanging goods. In the mercantile society of Sohar there also lived Jews originating from Persia and Iraq. From the size of the Jewish cemetery at Sohar we can assume that in the past there was a big Jewish community at Sohar. The Jewish cemetery at Sohar was mentioned in a few works by scholars and travellers. Wellsted in 1835 found only 20 Jewish families living at Sohar, who had a synagogue and owned a few buildings. P. Costa mentioned Bayt Yahudi, which still stand as evidence of the past Jewish community of Sohar, but actually the important physical evidence is the Jewish cemetery of Sohar. In 1958 Wendell Phillips and Alexander Honeyman measured the cemetery and investigated a few tombs out of two hundred. Paolo Costa illustrated the subject with many historical and ethnographic details. In 1980 he counted 95 graves in the cemetery. From year to year the number of graves decreased. In my visit at Sohar in the year 2005 I could count only 12 full tombs and another 5 half-open tombs. All over the ground there are bones scattered. The tombs have an unusual ellipse form, built of bricks and mortar in the form of steps of 5-7 rows; the higher the row, the shorter the ellipse. In the front of the cemetery there is a massive memorial wall from Bricks. Many Hebrew names are engraved into the bricks on the four sides of the wall. Until today the names have not been documented. I copied most of them and took the measure of the wall. I went through the Hebrew sources dealing with Arabia and commerce in the Middle East in mediaeval times, I went through the 'Cairo Geniza' documents as well as Jewish and travellers´ sources and found some interesting related information about the Jews of Arabia as Traders."