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Old Jewish Neighborhood, Mosul, Iraq

Description

The city of Mosul lies on the Tigris River, and its outskirts are located on the remains of the ancient city of Nineveh, the former capital of the Assyrian Empire.[1] According to the Old Testament, Nineveh was visited by the Prophet Jonah, sent on a divinely-ordained mission to the ancient city.[2] Situated in modern-day Iraq, between Syria and Iran, Mosul served as a trade hub between these two regions in Mesopotamia until the advent of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century.[3] Today, Mosul is home to over 1.7 million residents,[4] and has a rich Jewish history spanning millennia.

Mosul’s predecessor, Nineveh, was first mentioned in the Book of Genesis,[5] and was later featured in the Books of Jonah and Nahum. The purported tombs of both Jonah and Nahum were and continue to be pilgrimage sites, attracting Jewish, Christian, and Muslim visitors and worshippers.[6]

The Jewish community was first established in the ancient city of Nineveh in the eighth century BCE. In neighboring Mosul, Jews primarily lived in its Jewish quarter, mahallat al-yahud, beginning in the third century CE. The Jewish quarter hosted a variety of Jewish community sites, including a cemetery, multiple synagogues, including the Sassoon and Midrash synagogues, and a sixteenth-century yeshiva (school for high-level religious learning).[7] They remained in the city during a multitude of regime changes, including the Islamic conquest of the region from the Sasanian Empire in the seventh century and during the advent of the Ottoman Empire in 1535.[8] The local Jewish community maintained close ties with the Baghdadi Jewish community, which was 400 kilometers south of Mosul, and both populations were led by the Babylonian exilarchs[9] as the spiritual and religious culture of both cities flourished.[10]

By the early nineteenth century, the Jews of Mosul were primarily merchants and bankers in the local economy, like many Ottoman Jews of the time.[11] While some Jews in Mosul amassed significant wealth, the majority of the Jewish community remained poor.[12]

By the mid-1800s, Mosul’s Jewish population stood at 450 households, and by the end of the nineteenth century, the population numbered over 4,000 individuals, including both the city and the surrounding countryside.[13]

Photos of Mosul's Sassoon Synagogue can be found here

In 1906, the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) opened a school in Mosul in order to serve its Jewish population, which numbered around 7,000 individuals in 1919.[14]

World War II brought increasing conflicts to Iraq, as German military leadership considered Britain’s two military bases in Iraq to be a threat and subsequently began broadcasting antisemitic and anti-British sentiments on Radio Berlin in Arabic.[15] As a result, antisemitism intensified in Mosul throughout the course of the war (1939-1945).

On June 1,1941, Jews were attacked by Muslim mobs in Baghdad in what became known as the Farhud, in response to the failure of a coup that would have installed a pro-Axis Prime Minister during World War II.[16] The news reached Mosul by telegram, where a Jewish postal worker named Habib Salah Shaoul was able to intercept it and warn Mosul’s Jewish community, which was able to prepare and defend itself from a similar attack once the news reached the rest of the city and stirred antisemitic sentiments.[17]

By the 1950s, the Jews of Mosul had almost entirely left the city, with the majority of the population heading towards the newly established State of Israel.[18]

Mosul, Iraq

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