Actual Conditions For Jews Less Than A Year Ago in The Iraqi Kurdistan Paradise: Past As Prologue

Turkish Anatolia during the mid-19^th through early 20^th centuries which led to their liquidation by massacre, pillage, and flight.

MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY KURDISTAN [Jews as “property”, i.e., slaves of the Muslim Kurds]

The Jews scattered here and there [in Kurdistan], and forced to remain at the places assigned to them, are in the true sense of the word, surrounded by tribes of savages. One often finds five, ten, or even twenty Jewish families the property of one Kurd, by whom they are burdened with imposts, and subject to ill treatment. Heavy taxes are imposed upon them, which for the poorest, amount annually to 500 piastres. Finally, they are compelled at different periods of the year to perform serf-service, to cultivate their master’s field, without receiving or being

entitled to demand the smallest compensation for their labor. This is really an awful state of affairs and with heart and soul do we sympathize with our distressed coreligionists and we felt deeply grieved that it was not in our power to help them. . . . The [Kurdish] master has absolute power of life and death over his [Jewish] slaves; at his will he can sell them to another master, either in whole families or individually. [p. 658, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism]

Late 19^th/early 20^th century Kurdish depredations against Jews rendering Kurdish areas of Turkey effectively Judenrein

(From p. 108, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism) [A]ccording to the American Jewish Yearbook, almost eight thousand Jews emigrated from Turkey to the United States between 1899 and 1912. The Alliance reports further indicate that Jews living in rural eastern Anatolia suffered severely throughout this period due primarily to Muslim Kurdish depredations:

In Diyarbarkir, Urfa, Siverek, Mardin, and several other cities of this region, Kurds continuously attacked Jewish communities, forcing them to pay taxes and contributions in addition to those already exacted by the Turkish authorities. The slightest tendency to resist was immediately suppressed with blood. Jews were crushed with scorn and had to accept all sorts of humiliations. Thus, for instance, when rains were delayed in spring or late in autumn, Kurds went to Jewish graveyards, dug up newly buried corpses, cut off the heads and threw them in the river to appease Heaven’s wrath and bring on rain. In spite of the complaints of Jews to Turkish authorities, the perpetrators of such misdeeds remained, as was to be expected, undiscovered. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the insecurity of the Kurd[ish] country was so great that Jewish peddlers could no longer venture outside the cities. The communities of the vilayet [province] of Diyarbarkir fell into misery and diminished year after year. Thus, whilst in 1874 the town of Siverek situated on the Urfa road counted about fifty Jewish families, three decades later Joseph Niego, entrusted with a mission in Asia Minor by the Jewish Colonization Association, found only twenty-six household, totaling about 100 persons. Similarly, the 500 Jews who, according to Vital Cuinet, constituted the community of Mardin toward the end of the nineteenth century, were all gone by 1906. At that time, there remained in this town only one Jew, who had the task of guarding the synagogue.