Deep Ancestry Of Jewish Origins From Ur

 Nadene Goldfoot                                           

                                                                                       

The Jewish people and the Arab Muslims both came from Abram, son of Terah who lived in Ur of the Chaldees which was a city at the mouth of the Euphrates River  that emptied into   the Persian Gulf.  Geneticists have found that we even share a little DNA with the Arabs. "Our recent study of high-resolution microsatellite haplotypes demonstrated that a substantial portion of Y chromosomes of Jews (70%) and of Palestinian Muslim Arabs (82%) belonged to the same chromosome pool." All Jewish groups were found to be genetically closer to each other than to Palestinians and Muslim Kurds. Abram was married to Sarai, and after arriving in Canaan, they used the names of Abraham and Sarah. 

                      gods and goddesses of Mesopotamia

Mesopotamian religion was polytheistic, with followers worshipping several main gods and thousands of minor gods. The three main gods were Ea (Sumerian: Enki), the god of wisdom and magic, Anu (Sumerian: An), the sky god, and Enlil (Ellil), the god of earth, storms and agriculture and the controller of fates.

Where did Abram's father, Terah, come from?  His line went back like this:  Nahor I, to Serug of the Chaldees (Kasite) Sumeria, Mesopotamia, to Reu, to Peleg, to Eber, to Shelah, to Arpachshad, to Shem, to Noah who saved his family and a pair of all the animals on the ark to Lamech, to Methuselah, to Enoch who supposedly had a 365 year lifespan.  The Babylonian calendar of the period also had 365 days of a year.  Some think the story of Enoch was a Babylonian sun-myth, but it may show that our line was originally from Babylonia, and Babylon today sits in Iraq.  Howdy, Iraqis, we may be cousins!                         

               Wooley's book about his dig at Ur, what he found

Ur of the Chaldees was possibly Ur of the Cassites. The Kassites (/ˈkæsaɪts/) were people of the ancient Near East, who controlled Babylonia after the fall of the Old Babylonian Empire c. 1531 BC and until c. 1155 BC (short chronology).

        British archaeologist Leonard Woolley (1880–1960)

 It was an ancient Babylonian city.  Abraham's family lived there before they left for another city, Haran.  Sir Leonard Wooley has done  excavations in Ur (I have his book) and revealed that Ur had a highly  civilized  nature.  He also found evidence of  an extensive flood at an earlier date.  

Abraham had a brother, Haran who was the father of Lot.  Haran had died in Ur.  (Gen.11:26-31).  It was a trading town of NW Mesopotamia AND a center for the moon cult.  Assyrian inscriptions from this period  mention a Habiru (Hebrew)  settlement.  By the 12th century, there still was a small Jewish community living there.  

In most Jewish populations, these male line ancestors appear to have been mainly Middle Eastern. For example, Ashkenazi Jews share more common paternal lineages with other Jewish and Middle Eastern groups than with non-Jewish populations in areas where Jews lived in Eastern Europe, Germany and the Rhine Valley.                        

                                      Iraqi Jews

When the Arabs conquered Iraq in 637, the Jews helped them., because their Sassanid government persecuted Jews.  Then Jews were expelled from Arabia so came and settled in Kufa.  Iraq Jews were the center of the world's Jewish life.  The Turkish conquest in 1534 made life a little better.  By 1917, the British took over Iraq's Jews who lived mainly in Bagdad. Iraqis got their independence in 1932 and  celebrated by persecuting the Jews. Then later they killed hundreds of the Jews in a pogrom during the revolt of Rashid Ali in 1941.  In 1948, Iraqi troops attacked Israel along with other countries.  They've never signed an armistice agreement with Israel.  Israel's Operation Ezra and Nehemiah air lifted Iraqi Jews to Israel. From 1951 to 1952, Operation Ezra and Nehemiah airlifted between 120,000 and 130,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel via Iran and Cyprus. The massive emigration of Iraqi Jews was among the most climactic events of the Jewish exodus from the Muslim World. These Jews lost all their property by leaving as it was all confiscated.  123,500 more Iraqi Jews left for Israel since that first exit in 1948.  .  

Genetic studies on Jews are part of the population genetics discipline and are used to analyze the chronology of Jewish migration accompanied by research in other fields, such as history, linguistics, archaeology, and paleontology. 

According to geneticist Doron Behar and colleagues (2010), this is "consistent with a historical formulation of the Jewish people as descending from ancient Hebrew and Israelites of the Levant" and "the dispersion of the people of ancient Israel throughout the Old World". Jewish groups also show genetic proximity to Lebanese, Palestinians, Bedouins, and Druze in addition to Southern European populations, including Cypriots and Italians.  

As far as Jewish men have been tested, we find that approximately 35% to 43% of Jewish men are in the paternal line known as haplogroup J1 (Cohen gene)  and its sub-haplogroups. This haplogroup is particularly present in the Middle East and Southern Europe. 15% to 30% are in haplogroup E1b1b, (or E-M35) and its sub-haplogroups which is common in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southern Europe.  My father was a Q, a smaller group.  

In 1992 G. Lucotte and F. David were the first genetic researchers to have documented a common paternal genetic heritage between Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews. Another study published just a year later suggested the Middle Eastern origin of Jewish paternal lineages.

In 2000, M. Hammer, et al. conducted a study on 1,371 men and definitively established that part of the paternal gene pool of Jewish communities in Europe, North Africa and Middle East came from a common Middle East ancestral population. They suggested that most Jewish communities in the Diaspora remained relatively isolated and endogamous compared to non-Jewish neighbor populations.                         

Because of Iraq being an enemy of the state of Israel, I doubt if we've had had a chance to study the DNA of Iraqis compared to Jews yet.  There is on Family Tree DNA the Iraqi Sada Project group for Iraqis that have had theirDNA test through FTDNA.  However, many do reside in Israel.  

But, studying Iraqi Jewish women in Israel doing the mt haplogroup testing, they found that according to the 2008 study by Behar, 43% of Iraqi Jews are descended from five women. Genetic studies show that Persian and Bukharan Jews descend from a small number of female ancestors.

In (Genesis 17:5) G-d changed Abram's name to Abraham, a contraction representing his new status as av Hamon--father of a multitude---whereas the name Avram represented his former status as only av Aram---father of Aram, his native country.  Aram was used in the Torah for Syria's name.  Iraq's state was simply referred to as Mesopotamia, the country in SW Asia.  Babylonia was top gun then.  

In (Genesis 18:1-8) G-d visited Abram to show him honor for having carried out the commandment and to acknowledge that he had thereby elevated himself to a new spiritual plateau.  As if to show what it was about, the name of Abraham made him so uniquely worthy to be the spiritual father of all mankind, the Torah related what he did on the 3rd day after his circumcision, when the wound is most painful and the patient most weakened.  

The genetic profile of Palestinians has, for the first time, been studied by using human leukocyte antigen (HLA) gene variability and haplotypes. The comparison with other Mediterranean populations by using neighbor-joining dendrograms and correspondence analyses reveal that Palestinians are genetically very close to Jews and other Middle East populations, including Turks (Anatolians), Lebanese, Egyptians, Armenians, and Iranians. Archaeologic and genetic data support that both Jews and Palestinians came from the ancient Canaanites, who extensively mixed with Egyptians, Mesopotamian, and Anatolian peoples in ancient times. Thus, Palestinian-Jewish rivalry is based in cultural and religious, but not in genetic, differences. The relatively close relatedness of both Jews and Palestinians to western Mediterranean populations reflects the continuous circum-Mediterranean cultural and gene flow that have occurred in prehistoric and historic times. This flow overtly contradicts the demic diffusion model of western Mediterranean populations substitution by agriculturalists coming from the Middle East in the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition.

Resource;

Torah

Tanakh-Stone Edition of ArtScroll Series

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopediahttps://reference.jrank.org/biography-2/Woolley_Leonard.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_on_Jews#:~:text=In%20most%20Jewish%20populations%2C%20these,Germany%20and%20the%20Rhine%20Valley.

https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-middle-east/mesopotamia#:~:text=Mesopotamian%20religion%20was%20polytheistic%2C%20with,and%20the%20controller%20of%20fates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_on_Jews#:~:text=%22Our%20recent%20study%20of%20high,to%20Palestinians%20and%20Muslim%20Kurds.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11543891/

The Mesopotamian "Iraqi" Mizrachi Jews, Where Babylonia lies, Home of Abraham

 

The Mesopotamian "Iraqi" Jews, From the Land of Shinar

 Nadene Goldfoot                                    

Iraq was originally  called Mesopotamia. It's where Babylonia lies.  In the Torah it was also known as the land of Shinar or of Kasdim (Chaldees), as in Ur of the Chaldees-the city that Abraham was from.    Jews of Iraq are the Mizrachi Jews.  There are the Ashkenazim of Europe, originally of Germany, and the Sephardim of Spain and Portugal, and the Mizrachim of the Middle East.  Jews had gone or stayed as the Mizrachim did after 70 CE and the Roman destruction.  

The Torah says it was the cradle of humanity and also the scene of man's 1st revolt against G-d as we read about the Tower of Babel.  Many stories found in our Tanakh are found also in Babylonian literature such as the Flood story with Noah and his  Ark.                                                     

Abraham had migrated from the big city of Ur to Canaan where he later fought against Amraphel, king of Shinar (Gen. 14).  Babylon, another great city, had a bad reputation with our prophets, known as sin city and a symbol of insolent pagan tyranny.  The Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar II (604-56BCE) inherited the Assyrian empire, and after his conquest of Judah in (597-and 586 BCE) exiled many Jews to Babylon as slaves.  

They in turn ran into the members of the Ten northern population of Israel who had been abducted 200 years earlier by the Assyrians.  Now there were a very large population of Jews living there against their will.  Many acclimated and of course, some of the younger generations knew very little about their history of why they were there, living in all Jewish cities such as Nehardea, Nisibis, and Mahoza.                                

Since the destruction of the First Temple there was a connection between Babylonian exiles and the Land of Israel. According to the Al-Yahudu Tablets, a collection of tablets from the sixth century BCE, multiple Jews were given names reflecting their families desire to return to Zion.  The Al-Yahudu tablets are a collection of about 200 clay tablets from the sixth and fifth centuries BCE on the exiled Judean community in Babylonia following the destruction of the First Temple. They contain information on the physical condition of the exiles from Judah and their financial condition in Babylon. The tablets are named after the central settlement mentioned in the documents, al-Yahudu (Akkadian: The city of Judah).

               Yemenite Jews

The earliest document in the collection dates back to 572 BCE, about 15 years after the destruction of the Temple, during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II. The most recent tablet dates back to 477 BCE, during the reign of Xerxes I, about 60 years after the Return to Zion began and about 20 years before the rise of Ezra the Scribe.

The Jews were allowed to return to Jerusalem in 538 BCE, , but not all chose to leave as the 1st thing that the leadership wanted to do was to rebuild Solomon's Temple that Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed.  They would have to start the city from it's beginnings again, and in fact it was already re-populated by Samaritans and others that had been brought in by their captors, an exchange of population.  They got rid of slaves they were tired of and were hoping for a better batch of workers who were work-oriented, such as the northern tribes, they thought.   

However, there were Jews there who did remember, and they were able to keep in touch with Jews back in Judah and even supplied some of their leaders like Hillel.  

During the Roman occupation, the Babylonian Jews rose against the emperor, Trajan, the revolt being bloodily suppressed by his commander, Lucius Quietus in 116.  Under both Persian and Parthian rule, the Jews of Babylon enjoyed an extensive measure of internal autonomy, being headed by an Exilarch of Davidic descent who was the king's representative, while the community was governed by a council of elders.  

The Jews of Babylon created the Babylonian Talmud that was rated higher than the Jerusalem Talmud.  It reflected a society mainly based on agriculture and crafts.  They were learned students in their Jewish studies and had produced works of literary merit by such people as Ezekiel, Daniel and  Tobit.  

By the beginning of the 3rd century, Babylon became the main center of rabbinic studies.  They had academies that were founded by Samuel at Nehardea and by Rav at Sura, while in the later 3rd century, the academy of Purnbedita was founded to replace that at Hehardea which was destroyed in 261.  These schools were most important as they saw the abolition of the Palestinian patriarchate in 425 when Babylon became the spiritual center for all Jewry in the Middle East and possible even Europe as well, like Rome is for Catholicism.

The 5th century of the 400s was the start of much persecution against Jews which led to the Jewish revolt under Mar Zutra II who held out for 7 years, but was finally captured and killed. Mar-Zutra II was a Jewish Exilarch who led a revolt against the Sasanian rulers in 495 CE and achieved seven years of political independence in Mahoza. Mar-Zutra II became Exilarch of the Jewish community in Babylon at the age of fifteen in 483 CE, twelve years before the revolt. Wikipedia                 

 This was when the Talmud was concluded about this period.  Jewish position in the world continued to be difficult until the Arab conquest in the 7th century after Mohammad had died in 632.  Can you imagine?  It was Arabs who ended the anti-Semitism of the others, coming to the Jews' rescue. The Jews had assisted the Arabs in the take-over of Babylonia in the hope that it would deliver them from Sassanid persecution.  After the Arab occupation, what happened to the Jews in Arabia?  Strangely, the Jews there, making up several tribes, were expelled, so they settled in Kufa.  

For centuries, the land of today's Iraq continued to be the center of Jewish life.  The Exilarch and the Gaon (Jewish leadership) was recognized throughout the Diaspora (the world).  Jews wherever they lived would submit their religious questions to the Geonim whose answers were accepted as binding.  There was internal Jewish problems due to newly-founded sects of Issawites and Yudganites, and especially by the rise of Kasraism.  

Then by 1040, their 2 famous academies were closed and Iraq lost her central position in the Jewish world, although Geonim are recorded in Baghdad as late as the 13th century.  The Jewish leader (Exilarchate) was suspended in 1040, and then restored 2 centuries later for a short period.  

Jews suffered from restrictions laid down by Caliph Umar/Omar but weren't strictly observed by the Arab leadership.  Caliph Al-Muktadir in 908 allowed Jews to 2 state offices as physicians and bankers.  There were Jewish physicians, scientists and scholars among the Arab population. 

 Umar initially opposed Muhammad, his distant Qurayshite kinsman and later son-in-law. Following his conversion to Islam in 616, he became the first Muslim to openly pray at the Kaaba. Umar participated in almost all battles and expeditions under Muhammad, who bestowed the title al-Faruq ('the Distinguisher') upon Umar, for his judgements. After Muhammad's death in June 632, Umar pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr (r. 632–634) as the first caliph and served as the closest adviser to the latter until August 634, when the dying Abu Bakr nominated Umar as his successor.

On his orders, this 2nd Caliph ruled for 10 years and conquered Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia.  Most of the Jews were expelled from N. Arabia, and also asked for more taxation from the Jews.  Omar set up the temporary structure situated on the traditional site of Mt. Moriah before the modern Mosque of Omar was built by Caliph Abd al-Malik in 738.  

Because of heavy taxation on cultivated land, Jews left agriculture and concentrated in the larger towns, especially Baghdad, Basra and Mosul, where they mostly became traders and craftsmen.  Some were financiers or participated in international commerce.  

                        Mongol Invaders

Benjamin of Tudela visited Iraq in 1170 and reported places with up to15,000 Jewish people.  Then the Mongols invaded the land in the 2nd half of the 13th century who were free from religious prejudice, the the Jewish position of being considered 2nd class citizens (Dhimmis) improved as they were no longer discriminated against because they were Jews, and even the highest state offices were now open to them.  But....

Mongol rulers became converted to Islam!  Then they introduced those old discriminating laws.  In 1291, the Jewish administrator and physician, Saad ad-Daula, was assassinated, and this was  followed by a general attack on the Jews of Iraq.  Nobody heard from them for  several centuries.

The city of Timur was invaded at the end of the 14th century and Jews suffered along with the rest of the population, and then along come the Turks and their conquest of Iraq in 1534 which bettered everyone economically.  The Turkish domination was of the Ottoman Empire, and it didn't take much for Jews to be treated badly by them.

                                   from Zeyad al-Ahmed

Many Iraqi Jews were doctors, pharmacists and journalists. The first Hebrew newspaper in the country, Hadover (“speaker” or “spokesman”), was printed by the first Hebrew printing press, established in 1863 by Musa Baruch Mizrahi. The Jews of Iraq had an Arabic dialect of their own, and they wrote books in Judeo-Arabic, written in Hebrew letters.. 

 In 1914, the first Zionist organization was founded by Menashe Hakim, Maurice Fattal and Raphael Horesh under the name "Zionist Association of Baghdad", to promote the Zionist cause in Mesopotamia. The short-lived organization collapsed in November of that year when the Ottoman Empire declared  war on Britain.   

Jews were appointed to high government offices and some served in the Iraqi army.  In 1932, Iraq gained their independence.   and this brought out persecution of the Jews.  At the time, Jewish leaders were speaking with the League of Nations in making Palestine the Jewish Homeland.       

Rashid Ali al-Gaylani and Haj Amin al-Husseini, speaking at the anniversary of the 1941 Iraqi coup in Berlin-right.  

  Prime Minister of Iraq, Rashid Ali  He is chiefly remembered as an ardent Arab nationalist who attempted to remove the British influence from Iraq by starting a coup against the government in 1941. During his brief tenures as Prime Minister in 1940 and 1941, he attempted to negotiate settlements with the Axis powers (Hitler) during World War II in order to counter British influence in Iraq.  WWII wasn't over until 1945.   Hundreds of Baghdad Jews were killed and wounded in a pogrom during the revolt of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani in 1941.

  Iraqi troops participated in the 1948 attack on Israel on the central front. Despite their defeat, Iraq never concluded an armistice agreement with Israel.  the great majority of Iraqi Jews left the country, chiefly for Israel in Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, and their property in Iraq was confiscated, so they were left penniless.

      123,000 Iraqi Jews reached Israel since 1948.  Those that remained were subject to severe restrictions, especially after the Six Day War of 1967 when the treatment of Iraqi Jews led to international protests.  The Jewish population in 1991 was 150 who had remained, chiefly in Baghdad, where one synagogue still operates. Egyptian Jews experienced the same situation, with a few remaining to caretake the synagogue and cemeteries. 

Iraqi Jews in Israel, also known as the Bavlim (Hebrew for "Babylonians"), are immigrants and descendants of the immigrants of the Iraqi Jewish communities, who now reside within the state of Israel. They number around 450,000.  They live mostly in Or Yehuda, Givatayim and  Kiryat Gat.                                             

 Moshe Levi, IDF Chief of Staff (Hebrew: משה לוי, April 18, 1936 – January 8, 2008) was an Israeli military commander and the 12th Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). He served in this position from 1983 to 1987, towards the end of the first Lebanon war and the establishment of the South Lebanon Security Belt. He was the first Chief of Staff of Mizrahi origin.  Levi, born in Tel Aviv to an Iraqi-Jewish family, was known by his army nickname Moshe VaHetzi (Hebrew: משה וחצי ("Moshe and a half") because of his towering height, which was about 1.96 metres (6 ft 5 in).  While serving as Chief of Staff and after retiring from the army, Levy lived in Kibbutz Beit Alfa in northern Israel. In his last years, he was the founding chairperson of the supervisory board of Highway 6, also known as the Trans-Israel Highway.

Resource:

Updated 7/19/22;  8/2/22

https://jewishfactsfromportland.blogspot.com/2014/02/could-iraqis-have-jewish-roots.html

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashid_Ali_al-Gaylani

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_Jews_in_Israel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moshe_Levi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Yahudu_Tablets

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-archaeology-babylon/ancient-tablets-reveal-life-of-jews-in-nebuchadnezzars-babylon-idUSKBN0L71EK20150203

https://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2013/nr13-96.html

 https://www.jns.org/opinion/iraqi-jews-share-a-deeply-rooted-heritage/?gclid=CjwKCAjwrNmWBhA4EiwAHbjEQFL1vDJM-MbFjsky1-zFvau0m6K1eX4FHPTK2vkS3b-FVaTEI8K_aRoCsS4QAvD_BwE

 

NAMES The Middle East Has Gone By and Their Relations to Jews

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                   

For  400 years the Middle East had been a part of the Ottoman Empire 1299-1917.  Osman I (1299-1326) was the first Ottoman Sultan.  The Muslim caliphate and the Byzantine Empire were in almost a continuous struggle.  Turkish soldiers were the effective advance guard for Islam.  After 1492, when Jews had to leave Spain or convert to Christianity, the sultans of the Ottoman Empire opened their gates generously to the refugees, and later to the Portuguese Jewish refugees.  The Jews were favored as a valuable trading and artisan community and also as a counterpoise to the disloyal Christian minorities.  Jews in Palestine were a part of the Ottoman Empire.  from 1517 as were Egypt, Yemen, Iraq, etc.  After the 16th century things were not as good for the Jews and anti-Jewish restrictions were laid down.  The Ottoman Empire held the 3rd largest population of Jews in the world after Russia and Austro-Hungary having about 350,000 in 1900.  The Empire teamed up with the Germans in WWI and of course they lost the war and the Ottoman Empire was dismantled.

" Controlling much of Southeast Europe, Western Asia, the Caucasus, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa, the Ottoman Empire had 28 million people in 1914.  Of those, 15.5 million were in Turkey, 4.5 million in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine-what would cover Israel and Jordan, and 2.5 million in Iraq.   At the beginning of the 17th century the empire contained 32 provinces and numerous vassal states. Some of these were later absorbed into the empire, while others were granted various types of autonomy during the course of centuries."   By 1453  it became an empire.  

Mesopotamia is the old name for IRAQ.  It became a Moslem country in 637.    Mohammad had died in 632.  Before  that it was a part of Babylonia.  Back in the days of being Mesopotamia, the large and ancient Jewish community favored and even assisted the Arab advance in the hope that it would afford them deliverance from the terrible Sassanid persecution.

Sassanid Empire: were the Persians (Iran) before Islam entered their empire.Persia only became Iran in 1935.  They lasted from 224 to 651 CE.   They had been known as the Eranshahr and the Erah long ago.  "The Sasanian Empire, which succeeded the Parthian Empire, was recognized as one of the main powers in the MIddle East , alongside the Roman–Byzantine Empire, for a period of more than 400 years."   These Sasanids of Iran dominated the  area from the Tigris to the Indus and from the Persian Gulf to the Cauacasus and the Urals.  They fought against the Byzantine Empire who had control of Asia Minor, most of the Fertile Crescent, Egypt and North Africa, and ruled from Constantinople.  Both fought what would be a tie, and in fighting had weakened themselves so much that they became easy prey to the Arabs of the desert.  

Safavids of Persia (Iran) 1500 to 1736)  A 1,000 years later, we see the Ottomans fighting against the Safavids in Persia.  They had also fought to a tie, and now these newer fighters  helped the Europeans take over.  Their leaders were Shahs.  The Safavids unified Persia for the 1st time since the Arab conquest and expanded its boundaries to what they were under the Sasanids.  The Safavids saved Iran from being incorporated into the Ottoman Empire.  they made Shi'ism the state religion and imposed it on the population.  They prevented the free exchange of ideas and stifled innovation in many fields of endeavor.  

Babylonia was an ancient state in the Middle East, also known in Bible days as the land of Shinar or of the Kasdim (Chaldees).  In Genesis, it states that it was the cradle of humanity and the scene of the "Tower of Babel."  The story of the Flood in Genesis is also found in Babylonian literature.  Abraham was born in Ur of the Chaldeans, but migrated to Eretz Yisrael where he later fought against Amraphel, King of Shinar (Gen. 14).  The great Babylonian lawgiver was Hammurabi.  The Babylonian, Nebuchadnezzar II (604-561 BCE) inherited the Assyrian Empire.  He overran and took over Judah in 597 and 586 BCE.  Then he exiled many Jews to Babylonia.  There they probably met up with Jews of the 10 lost tribes  previously exiled by the Assyrians who now were living in Babylonia.  King Cyrus had permitted Jews to return to Jerusalem, but some did not, and they had remained.

Assyrian Empire:  Assyria was an ancient state in the Middle East and its people were Semites.  They had an aggressive kingdom in the 20th century BCE which expanded rapidly in the 13th and 10th centuries.  King David of Israel and his son, King Solomon had many successes against the Aramean states in Mesopotamia and Syria.  This probably contributed to Assyria's recovery.  Asshurbanipal II (king from 883 to 59 BCE) had a tactical revolution in the Assyrian army, and overran Syria and the Phoenician cities in 876 BCE.  Then, in 853 BCE, Shalmaneser III attacked Ben-Hadadd II of Damascus and King Ahab of Israel supported him in the indecisive battle of Karkar.  Shalmaneser led a 2nd attack in 848 and failed, but caused Kind Ahab's reign to fall in 842 BCE.  The Assyrian decline was ended by Tiglath-Pileser III in 745 BCE to 27 BCE who overthrew the Syrian confederacy.

Syria  was and still is a Middle East country and in the Bible was called Aram.   The people were the Arameans.  They had intermarried with the Israelites.  " Isaac had married Rebekah, the sister of Laban the Syrian.  Jacob married his daughters (Gen 24:29)  The period when the Arameans first appeared in Syia is uncertain, but was probably later than 2000 BCE.  When Abraham came from Haran, Damascus was already occupied (Gen 15:2), and this may have been the oldest settlement of the Arameans in Syria proper.

The kings of Aram didn't succeed in creating a homogeneous state.  The coastal strip was settled by the Phoenicians.  The Bible in Kings I and II tell of constant friction with the kingdoms of Israel and Judah until the 8th century when Syria was overrun by the Assyrians.  It had a Jewish population , especially at Antioch, that was of importance in the Seleucid era but suffered from the hostility of the Greeks.   Syria became a Roman (later Byzantine) province  in 64 BCE.   The largest Jewish communities in Syria in the 12th century, according to Benjamin of Tudelea, were at Aleppo with 5,000 Jews; Damascus with 3,000 Jews, and Palmyra with 2,000.  The Jewish settlement was increased after 1492 by refugees from Spain and Sicily and became an important center of trade between Europe and Asia.

Byzantine Empire/Byzantium was the Eastern Roman Empire with its capital in Constantinople (today is Istanbul, Turkey) and extended over a changing geographical area up to the year 637, including Palestine. "Constantinople was the capital city of the Roman, Byzantine, Latin, and Ottoman empires. It was reinaugurated in 324 AD at ancient Byzantium, as the new capital of the Roman Empire by Constantine the Great, after whom it was named, and dedicated on 11 May 330 In the 12th century.  The city was the largest and wealthiest European city."   As the Eastern emperors developed their specific  religious  attitudes about the position of the Jews, especially about their religious life,  relations with the Byzantine deteriorated.  They came up with elaborate anti-Jewish laws and issued a decree in 553 which interfered with the conduct of the synagogue services.  In 614 they issued an edict ordering the conversion of Jews.  Judaism was formally forbidden by their successive emperors; by Leo in 721; Basil I in 873-4; Romanus Lucapenus in 932-6, etc.  Even so, Jews reestablished themselves and Benjamin of Tudela in 1170 found communities throughout the Empire, but in Constantinople they were treated with contempt.  The empire was conquered by the Turks in 1453.

Hittite Empire were ancient people in the Middle East from the 15th century BCE with power extended towards Syria.  After the main kingdom fell in 1200 BCE, small Hittite kingdoms continued to flourish in northern Syria and in the vicinity of the Euphrates.  These states were overrun by the Armenians and the Assyrians.  They were connected to the Canaanites (Gen. 10:15) and some lived in Eretz Yisrael  at an early period.  Abraham bought the cave at Machpelah from Hittites.  Esau took wives from among them.  They were one of 7 peoples from whom the Israelites conquered Canaan.  Later, King David had Hittite warriors, and King Solomon had Hittite wives, so they were integrated into the society of Israel.

Reference: 2nd edition of Middle East Past &I Present by Yahya Armajani and Thomas M. Ricks
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasanian_Empire
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Empire
The Settlers by Meyer Levin, telling of condition of Palestine from 1880 on under the Ottoman Empire for Jews and Arabs.
Messages from a Syrian Jew Trapped in Egypt-tells about the Blood Libel in Damascus in the 1800's.
http://www.iranchamber.com/geography/articles/persia_became_iran.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantinople
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Syrian_history
http://www.bible-history.com/isbe/S/SYRIANS/
update: http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sassanid_Empire; dates