Nadene Goldfoot
There are also many Kurds among the Kurdish diaspora and in Red Kurdistan. Kurds also live in Israel today.
We find through DNA testing that the Kurds are the closest people to the Jews. Besides DNA, they are also a people who lost their native land, Kurdistan, just like the Jews had lost their Judah to the Romans in 70 CE.
Kurds from Iraq (Dohuk and Erbil Area, North Iraq) have been analyzed for HLA genes. Their HLA genetic profile has been compared with that of other Kurd groups from Iran and Tbilisi (Georgia, Caucasus) and also Worldwide populations. A total of 7,746 HLA chromosomes have been used. Genetic distances, NJ dendrograms and correspondence analyses have been carried out. Haplotype HLA-B*52—DRB1*15 is present in all three analyzed Kurd populations. HLA-A*02-B*51-DRB1*11 is present in Iraq and Georgia Kurds. Haplotypes common to Iran and Iraq Kurds are HLA DRB1*11—DQB1*03, HLA DRB1*03—DQB1*02 and others in a lower frequency. Our HLA study conclusions are that Kurds most probably belong to an ancient Mediterranean / Middle East / Caucasian genetic substratum and that present results and those previously obtained by us in Kurds may be useful for Medicine in future Kurd transplantation programs, HLA Epidemiology (HLA linked diseases) and Pharmacogenomics (HLA-associated drug side effects) and also for Anthropology. It is discussed that one of the most ancient Kurd ancestor groups is in Hurrians (Horites) (2,000 years BC). Horites originated S of the Caucasian mountains, who invaded Syria and Eretz Yisrael/Canaan in the 17th century BCE. They lived near Mt. Seir in Abraham's time (1948 BCE) but their territory was conquered by the Edomites. Scholars have identified the Haru (Eretz Yisrael from Egyptian documents of 16th century; before known as "Rutenu."with the Horites and believe that they were pushed back by the Amorites and Canaanites to Mt Seir, whence they were later driven by the Edomites. As usual, opposites attract, and there existed interbreeding among the people. HLA is the most polymorphic genetic system described in man. It contains several linked loci which encode for cell surface proteins that have an important function in activating immune response after antigenic presentation. I have never heard of the haplotype of HLA . Evidently they are close to Kuwait people.
"Presently, Iraqi Kurdistan first gained autonomous status in a 1970 agreement with the Iraqi government, and its status was re-confirmed as the autonomous Kurdistan Region within the federal Iraqi republic in 2005. There is also a Kurdistan Province in Iran, but it is not self-ruled. Kurds fighting in the Syrian Civil War were able to take control of large sections of northern Syria and establish self-governing regions in an Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, where they call for autonomy in a federal Syria after the war.
The Times of Israel reported on September 30, 2013: "Today, there are almost 200,000 Kurdish Jews in Israel, about half of whom live in Jerusalem. There are also over 30 agricultural villages throughout the country that were founded by Kurdish Jews." Today, the large majority of the Jews of "Kurdistan" and their descendants live in Israel.
Kurdish Jews in Israel are immigrants and descendants of the immigrants of the Kurdish Jewish communities, who now, in 2021, reside within the state of Israel. They number between 200,000 to 300,000.
At one time in history, Kurds and Jews got together, as our DNA proves. When did this happen?
We Jews were in Kurdistan long ago. According to the memoirs of Benjamin of Tudela and Pethahiah of Regensburg, there were about 100 Jewish settlements and substantial Jewish population in Kurdistan in the 12th century. Benjamin of Tudela also gives the account of David Alroi, the messianic leader from central Kurdistan, who rebelled against the Persian Seljuk Sultan Muktafi and had plans to lead the Jews back to Jerusalem.
These travellers also report of well-established and wealthy Jewish communities in Mosul, which was the commercial and spiritual center of Kurdistan. Mosul is a major city in northern Iraq, serving as the capital of Nineveh Governorate. Approximately 400 km north of Baghdad, Mosul lies on the Tigris river. (So interesting because Abraham had come from UR on the Euphrates River.) Many Jews fearful of approaching crusaders, had fled from Syria and Palestine to Babylonia and Kurdistan. The Jews of Mosul enjoyed some degree of autonomy in managing their own community. We even know of family histories from Mosul.
Tanna'it Asenath Barzani, who lived in Mosul from 1590 to 1670, was the daughter of Rabbi Samuel Barzani of Kurdistan. She later married Jacob Mizrahi Rabbi of Amadiyah (in Iraqi Kurdistan) who lectured at a yeshiva. So there were Jewish Kurds.
Immigration of Kurdish Jews to the Land of Israel initiated during the late 16th century, with a community of rabbinic scholars arriving to Safed, Galilee, and a Kurdish Jewish quarter had been established there as a result. The thriving period of Safed however ended in 1660, with Druze power struggles in the region and an economic decline.
Many Kurdish Jews, especially the ones who hail from Iraq, went through a Sephardic Jewish blending during the 18th century.
Since the early 20th century, some Kurdish Jews had been active in the Zionist movement. One of the most famous members of Lehi (Freedom Fighters of Israel) was Moshe Barazani, whose family immigrated from Iraq and settled in Jerusalem in the late 1920s. In 1939, there were 4,369 in Jerusalem, growing to 30,000 in 1972.
The vast majority of Kurdish Jews were forced out by Iraqi authorities, being evacuated to Israel in the early 1950s, together with other Iraqi Jewish community. The vast majority of the Kurdish Jews of Iranian Kurdistan relocated mostly to Israel as well, in the 1950s.
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. Brauer on left and Patai on right.
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 a Ph.D. dissertation and a book, using written, archival and oral sources that traces and reconstructs the relationships between the Jews and their Kurdish masters or chieftains also known as Aghas). He interviewed 56 Kurdish Jews altogether conducting hundreds of interviews, thus saving their memoires from being lost forever. He interviewed Kurdish Jews mainly from six towns: (Zahko, Aqrah, Amadiya, Dohuk, Sulaimaniya and Shinno/Ushno/Ushnoviyya), as well as from dozens of villages, mostly in the region of Bahdinan. His study unveils new sources, reports and vivid tales that form a new set of historical records on the Jews and the tribal Kurdish society. His PhD thesis was commented by members of the PhD judicial committee and along with the book upon which it has been translated into several Middle Eastern languages, including Arabic, Sorani Kurmanji, as well as French.
The Kurdish people are believed to be of heterogeneous origins combining a number of earlier tribal or ethnic groups including Lullubi, Guti, Cyrtians, Carduchi.
Some of them have also absorbed some elements from Semitic, Turkic and Armenian people.
Kurds are an Iranian people, and the first known Indo-Iranians in the region were the Mitanni, who established a kingdom in northern Syria five centuries after the fall of Gutium. The Mitanni are believed to have spoken an Indo-Aryan language, or perhaps a pre-split Indo-Iranian language. The current view is that the separation of Iranian peoples from Indo-Aryans occurred between 1800 and 1600 BCE, which makes it nearly impossible for the Gutians to have been linguistically or culturally Kurdish, although it is possible that they still contributed to the Kurdish ethnogenesis to an extent, if at the very least genetically.
The Kurds are a people of Indo-European origin. They speak an Iranian language known as Kurdish, and comprise the majority of the population of the region – however, included therein are Arab, Armenian, Assyrian, Azerbaijani, Jewish, Ossetian, Persian, and Turkish communities. Most inhabitants are Muslim, but adherents to other religions are present as well – including Yarsanism, Yazidis, Alevis, Christians, and in the past, Jews, most of whom emigrated to Israel.
Two years ago, on October 8, 2019, President Donald Trump cast his decision to abandon Kurdish fighters in Syria as fulfilling a campaign promise to withdraw from “endless war” in the Middle East, even as Republican critics and others said he was sacrificing a U.S. ally and undermining American credibility. Biden recently did the same thing to Afghanistan, leaving in a lurch allowing the terrorists to take the country.
Trump declared U.S. troops would step aside for an expected Turkish attack on the
Kurds, who have fought alongside Americans for years, but he then
threatened to destroy the Turks’ economy if they went too far. (Turkey’s unfolding economic crisis has deepened further after Donald Trump announced he was
doubling US import tariffs on Turkish steel and aluminium, stoking the country’s currency freefall and rattling financial markets.)
The Turkish lira plunged by more than 20% against the dollar after the president announced the move, amid a widening dispute between Washington and Ankara over the imprisonment of the US pastor Andrew Brunson.
Even Trump’s staunchest Republican congressional allies expressed outrage at the prospect of abandoning Syrian Kurds who had fought the Islamic State group with American arms and advice. It was the latest example of Trump’s approach to foreign
policy that critics condemn as impulsive, that he sometimes reverses and that
frequently is untethered to the advice of his national security aides.
A staunch defender of the Kurds that need their own Kurdistan back is Victor Sharpe,
Jewish author: February 19, 2012
Who Truly Deserves a State? The Kurds or the Palestinians?
By Victor Sharpe https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2012/02/who_truly_deserves_a_state_the_kurds_or_the_palestinians.html Top Articles By American Thinker
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Kurdistan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Kurds
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-syria-ap-top-news-international-news-politics-ac3115b4eb564288a03a5b8be868d2e5
https://www.reuters.com/news/picture/turkey-attacks-kurds-in-northeast-syria-idUSRTX76VOB
https://www.karger.com/Article/Fulltext/499593
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurdish_population
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