Baghdadi Jewish

Baghdadi Jews

Prominent Bagdadi Jewish patriarch David Sassoon (seated) and his sons Elias David, Albert (Abdallah) and Sassoon David
Total population
(4,000 (est.))
Regions with significant populations
India 250 (chiefly Mumbai, Madras, Gujarat and Calcutta) Israel, Europe, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Australia, Canada, and the United States.
Languages
Traditionally, Arabic and Persian, now mostly English, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali and Hebrew
Religion
Judaism
Related ethnic groups
Iraqi Jews, Arab Jews, Persian Jews, Syrian Jews

India 250 (chiefly Mumbai, Madras, Gujarat and Calcutta)

Baghdadi Jews, also known as Iraqi Jews, are Jewish emigrants from Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, which not only includes Jews from the Iraqi capital city of Baghdad, but from other areas of Iraq, as well as Jews from Syrian and Yemenite origin. Many of them were merchant traders who settled on trade routes and formed immigrant communities in their new homelands. Baghdad and Iraq in general used to have one of the largest, if not the largest Jewish community in the Middle East and Central Asia, and these new immigrant communities also included Jews as part of the Mughal courtiers. Records of Jewish tradesmen traveling from Baghdad can be found from the early 17th century, and around the mid-19th century a large portion of the community started immigrating to South and Southeast Asia as well as to the west, creating new communities while preserving their unique traditions.

The main Baghdadi Jewish communities in Asia are found in India,Yangon (Rangoon), Singapore, and Shanghai. The majority of Baghdadi Jews lived in the Indian cities of Mumbai (Bombay) and Kolkata (Calcutta). The ethnic Jewish community in Penang is now extinct with the death of its last member in 2011. Some smaller Jewish communities, such as the one in Bangkok, trace their first founders to Baghdadi Jewish traders who worked and settled down in the region. There are only one or two remaining Baghdadi Jews in Bangladesh.

Though there had been significant Persian Jewish communities in India since early Mughal times, the first Arabic-speaking Iraqi Jews arrived in the 18th century. In 1730, Joseph Semah arrived in Surat from Baghdad and established the Surat Synagogue and Cemetery. There was already an established Baghdadi Jew community by then with its center in Surat. Surat was a main trading port in the 16th and 17th centuries; the East India Company used the city as a trade transit point, beginning in 1608. Surat is located in Western India, in Gujarat State, and is the modern commercial capital of Gujarat. Arab Jews came to India as traders in the wake of the Portuguese, Dutch and British. These "Baghdadis," as they came to be known, especially the Sassoons of Bombay and the Ezras of Calcutta, eventually established manufacturing and commercial houses of fabulous wealth. The majority came from Iraq, thus giving the community its name, though smaller groups came from other countries such as Syria and Afghanistan and assimilated into the Baghdadi group. Unlike other Indian Jewish communities, whose oral traditions attest to their presence in India as long as 2000 years ago, the Baghdadi communities were established comparatively recently (in the past few centuries).