Chapter 11
JEWS
JEWS IN IRAQI SOCIETY
The Jews were the oldest organized religious community in Iraq. As
such, it was only natural that their communal attitudes and forms of
organization served as prototypes for other communities in the sixth
and seventh centuries and even later. Consequently, it is important to
identify precedents among the Jews of Sasanian Iraq in order to de-
termine the extent to which the institutions of such communities and
religious communal barriers already existed in the late Sasanian period.
This will make it possible to decide to what extent the existence of
Jewish institutions in the Islamic period was a matter of continuity or
change. It will also facilitate the comparison of Jewish institutions
with those of other religious communities at a later period and provide
at leas.t circumstantial evidence for continuity through transmission.
The main questions which must be considered, apart from the physical
location of the Jews in Iraq, concern the nature of the Jewish com-
munity, the way it was organized, and its relationship to the state in
both periods. Since the Jews were the best-organized subject minority,
their relations with the Sasanian government are a most important
precedent for dhimmt status in Islamic society. Internal developments
in the Jewish community center on the change in the position of the
exilarch, the rise of the gaonate, and the outbreak of Messianic move-
ments in the seventh century.
The Jewish population of Iraq originated from a combination of
resettlement and conversion. One of the most significant and least
understood transformations in the history of Iraq is the way the de-
scendants of the Judaean captives who were transported to Babylon
in the sixth century B.C. ultimately displaced the local native pagan
population there. This change appears to have been occurring in the
late Parthian and early Sasanian periods when the last pagan temple
complexes disappeared and were replaced by synogogues, and when
J udaism spread among the native Aramaean population. This process
was most likely the result of a demographic increase among the de-