Kurdish Jews - Historiography

Historiography

One of the main problems in the history and historiography of the Jews of Kurdistan was the lack of written history and the lack of documents and historical records. During the 1930s, a German-Jewish Ethnographer, Erich Brauer, began interviewing members of the community. His assistant, Raphael Patai, published the results of his research in Hebrew. The book, Yehude Kurditan: mehqar ethnographi (Jerusalem, 1940), was translated into English in the 1990s. Israeli scholar Mordechai Zaken wrote an important book using written, archival and oral sources that traces the relations between the Jews and the Kurdish masters or chieftains (Aghas). He interviewed 56 Kurdish Jews from six towns (Zahko, Aqrah, Amadiya, Dohuk, Sulaimaniya and Shinno/Ushno/Ushnoviyya), as well as dozens of villages, mostly in the region of Bahdinan. Zaken's Book, Jewish Subjects and their Tribal Chieftains in Kurdistan, is based strongly on oral history sources, and it unveils the personal experience of urban and rural Jews during the first half of the 20th century.