JEWSscendants of the exiles, the conversion of their neighbors and slaves,
and possibly intermarriage. Its circumstances are reflected in the con-
cern about purity of descent among Iraqi Jews in the Sasanian period,
in the Talmudic story of how Abraham broke the idols, and in the
legacy of indigenous pagan demonology in Jewish magic.
By the middle of the Sasanian period, the Aramaean population in
the districts of Veh-Artakhshatr and of Veh-Kavat was almost entirely
Jewish. Major Jewish settlements existed at Pumbaditha,1 Nehardea,2
Mahoza^3 (the city of Veh-Artakhshatr), Kutha, Sura, and Neresh.^4 In
the surrounding countryside the peasants were mainly Jewish.
Outside of this region where they were concentrated, small groups
of Jews were to be found as resident minorities throughout the rest
of Iraq. There were Jews on the periphery of this region at Hira^5 and
Nippur.^6 Jews of mixed descent lived at a place called Harpania near
Maysan and in Maysan itself.? There were Jews east of the Tigris at
Daskarta (Dastagird)8 and Jewish communities in upper Iraq at Sin-
jar,9 and a cluster of Jewish settlements around the confluence of the
Greater Zab and the Tigris in Adiabene at Nineveh,IO Haditha,11 and
across the river from Nineveh at the future site of Mawsil.^12 There
had been an important Jewish community at Nasibin in the first cen-
1 Pumbaditha was on the Euphrates below Anbar and within the territorial jurisdiction
of Nehardea. See Berliner Geographie, p. 57; Obermeyer, Landschaft Babylonien, pp.
215-43; and A. Neubauer, La geographie du Talmud (Paris, 1868), p. 349. Le Strange
(Lands, p. 54) located it at Qanatir, twenty-eight miles north of Kufa at the mouth of
the Badat canal, but Newman (Agricultural Life, p. 7) located it at the mouth of the
Nahr Isa.
2 Nehardea was at the mouth of the Nahr al-Malik (Obermeyer, Landschaft Baby-
lonien, pp. 244-62).
3 Berliner, Geographie, pp. 39-43; Obermeyer, Landschaft Babylonien, pp. 161-77.
4 Naresh was near Sura, possibly at the mouth of the Nahr Nars (Neubauer, Geo-
graphie, p. 365; Obermeyer, Landschaft Babylonien, pp. 306-10).
5 Rodkinson, Talmud, Ill, "Erubin," 147.
6 Montgomery, Incantation Texts, p. 113.
7 Obermeyer, Landschaft Babylonien, p. 201; Neubauer, Geographie, p. 352; New-
man, Agricultural Life, p. 170. Obermeyer located Harpania near Wasit but Newman
preferred a location further west on the Nil canal.
8 Rodkinson, Talmud, XI, "Baba Metzia," 116.- Corluy, "Acta Sancti Abdu'l Masich," AB 5 (1886), 9-10; Peeters, "'Abd al-Ma-
sih," p. 294.
10 Budge, Rabban Hormizd, I, 172; 11, 261; Rodkinson, Talmud, VIII, "Taanith,"
- 11 Scher, "Histoire nestorienne," 11(2),473.
12 Baladhurl, Futulj, p. 332.