Bassora

Basra — al-Baṣra in Arabic, Baṣra in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic sources — occupies a singular place in the geography of the Jewish world. Located at the southern tip of Mesopotamia, near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (the Shatt al-Arab) and at the threshold of the Persian Gulf, the city was, for more than a millennium, one of the junction points between ancient Talmudic Babylonia and the maritime routes of the Indian Ocean. The notice opening this volume describes it as a "great Jewish port of southern Iraq, linked to the trade of the Indian Ocean": this formulation, sound in principle, deserves to be unfolded and nuanced.

For Basra was never, unlike Baghdad, the seat of the great rabbinic academies that made the glory of Babylonian Judaism. Its vocation was different: it was a threshold, a gateway, a point of embarkation. It was from here, or through here, that Arabic-speaking Jewish merchants reached India from the eighteenth century onward, giving rise to the so-called "Baghdadi" diaspora that spread to Surat, Bombay, and Calcutta. Arabic-speaking Jews came to India as traders in the wake of the Portuguese, Dutch and British, and these "Baghdadis" — especially the Sassoons of Bombay and the Ezras of Calcutta — eventually established manufacturing enterprises. The present volume traces this history: from Geonic Babylonia to modern commercial networks, from the Ottoman port to the near-total disappearance of the community in the mid-twentieth century.

Iraq was, during Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the heart of world Judaism. It was on Mesopotamian soil that the Babylonian Talmud was compiled, and it was there that the religious authorities known as geonim held sway after the amoraim. The geonim directed the renowned academies of Soura and Poumbedita; the term designates the heads of the Talmudic academies of Babylonia, who constituted the religious authority accepted by a great part of the Jewish people throughout the early Middle Ages. Bassora, founded by the Arabs in 638, was not home to one of these great institutions, but it lay within the cultural and economic orbit of that same Babylonian Jewish world.

Its geographic situation made it an outer port from very early on. During the Abbasid and then the Ottoman periods, Bassora served as the maritime outlet for Baghdad and all of lower Mesopotamia. Jewish merchants found there a point of articulation between overland trade — caravans toward Syria, Anatolia, and Iran — and maritime commerce toward the Gulf and beyond. Iraq retained, long after the decline of the academies, a continuous and dense Jewish life; the Jewish community of Iraq ranks among the oldest in the world, its presence dating back to Antiquity. Within this broader whole, Bassora was less a center of religious authority than an outpost, facing outward toward the open sea.

Under Ottoman dominion, from the sixteenth century onward, Bassora became a vilayet and a strategic trading port, contested between the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Persia for control of access to the gulf. The Jewish community lived there within a plural society — Sunni and Shia Arabs, Christians, Persian and Indian merchants — in which commerce was the dominant activity. The Jews of Bassora, like those of Bagdad, spoke a distinct Judeo-Arabic dialect and maintained close ties of family and business with the community of the capital.

It was precisely Bassora's function as a port that gave it its historical role. The city was one of the obligatory staging points between inland Mesopotamia and the ports of the Persian Gulf such as Bouchehr (Bushire). An echo of this can be found in the family history of the Sassoon, the most illustrious dynasty to emerge from that world: the patriarch Sheikh Sason ben Salih became the nasi — the leader — of the Jewish community of Bagdad, then, falling under suspicion from those in power, fled Bagdad for Bassora, before making his way to the port of Bouchehr on the Persian Gulf. Bassora appears here in its precise role: not a point of origin, but a relay on the route to the gulf and to India.

The major turning point in the history of Jewish Bassora unfolds at the end of the eighteenth century, when Jewish merchants from Mesopotamia and Persia began making their way to India. At the end of the eighteenth century, Jews from Arab lands and Iran arrived in India; collectively called "Baghdadi Jews," most did indeed come from Bagdad, but among them were Jews from Syria, Iran, Yemen, and other parts of Iraq. Bassora, a port of embarkation toward the Gulf and the Indian Ocean, was one of the waypoints of this migration.

The motives were twofold. The Baghdadis came to India on account of religious persecution in their countries of origin, but also for commercial reasons. They were often already established merchants: most of the Baghdadis were major traders and businessmen before their arrival in India, and they settled in the country's principal trading cities — first in Surate, then in Bombay and Calcutta as commercial importance shifted to those centers. The momentum was sustained by the British presence: encouraged by the British to travel to India in order to extend trade eastward, they formed a vast commercial diaspora stretching from Europe to Asia; in India, the Baghdadis settled first in Surate, then in Calcutta and Bombay. Thus Bassora became, by virtue of its position, one of the pivots of a transoceanic merchant network linking Mesopotamia to the Indian subcontinent.

The emblematic figure of this world was David Sassoon, whose destiny illustrates the trajectory connecting Bagdad, Bassora, the Gulf, and India. Born into a notable family of Bagdad and forced into exile by political upheaval, he rebuilt his fortune through trade before settling in Bombay. David Sassoon was regarded as the most prosperous of the Baghdadi Jewish merchants of the diaspora; he and his family single-handedly shaped the Jewish community of Bombay, building the Magen David synagogue in 1861 — which housed a home and a Talmudic school — as well as hospitals, and employing numerous Ottoman Jews in his vast textile industry.

The pattern repeated itself elsewhere across the network. In Calcutta, other dynasties took over: the community of Calcutta, led by Moses Dwek ha-Cohen, was likewise a center of industry and rested upon a handful of very wealthy families, notably the Ezras and the Elias, who funded schools, employment, and the organization of worship. These families maintained a dual cultural identity, faithful to their Mesopotamian origins while adopting the customs of the British Empire: the Baghdadi Jewish community of India was unique; its members remained attached to Iraqi or Syrian traditions and customs while embracing an English way of life and education. Bassora, as a port and as a place of origin for some of these families, remained one of the geographical nodes of this diaspora's Memory and affairs.

At the heart of the Iraqi Jewish world, Bassora shared with Baghdad a common heritage: the Judeo-Arabic language, the Eastern Sephardic liturgy, and a tight network of communal institutions — synagogues, schools, rabbinical courts, and charitable societies. The diaspora that emerged from it was prolific on the cultural front. In the nineteenth century, the Baghdadis launched newspapers in Judeo-Arabic, followed by periodicals in English from the 1930s through the 1950s. This output bears witness to a dynamic intellectual life, straddling the Orient and the British colonial order.

Education occupied a central place in the reproduction of the community. The great families founded establishments where religious instruction combined with modern education: the Jacob Sassoon free school, established in Bombay at the turn of the century, offered instruction in English and Hebrew to Baghdadi children and virtually guaranteed employment for its graduates — and even for students who left before completing their studies — in the Sassoon textile firms. In Bassora itself, as throughout the Iraqi community, attachment to Orthodox tradition remained strong, and family ties ensured the circulation of men, capital, and knowledge between the port city and the trading posts of the Indian Ocean.

The history of Jewish Bassora closes in the mid-twentieth century, along with the whole of Iraqi Judaism. The community had known a long continuity, but the political upheavals of the first half of the century — the rise of Arab nationalism, the Arab-Israeli conflict, discriminatory measures and violence — precipitated its departure. Almost the entire Jewish community of Iraq emigrated, with the bulk of this population making its way to Israel in the early 1950s.

Bassora, the port from which merchants had once set sail for India, thus saw its last Jews depart. The great wave of emigration emptied, within the space of a few years, a presence spanning several millennia; one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, whose roots stretched back to Antiquity, disappeared almost entirely in this mass migration. What survives today of Jewish Bassora belongs above all to Memory and the archive: the names of scattered families from Bombay to London, the synagogues of India founded by descendants of Mesopotamian merchants, and the documentary collections held in Jewish institutions. The port city remains, in the History of the Jewish world, the symbol of a threshold crossed — the one that led from the ancient Babylonian homeland to the shores of the Indian Ocean.

The Jewish history of Bassora cannot be reduced to that of a great academy or a rabbinical center: it is the history of a threshold. Situated on the border between Talmudic Babylonia and the Indian Ocean, the city was a point of articulation between the caravan trade of Mesopotamia and the maritime commerce of the Persian Gulf. It was through this gateway that, at the end of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth, the migration of Arabic-speaking Jewish merchants toward India took place, giving birth to the Baghdadi diaspora and to dynasties such as the Sassoon, whose influence extended from Bombay and Calcutta all the way to London.

The initial entry — "a great Jewish port in southern Iraq, connected to the trade of the Indian Ocean" — is thus confirmed in its substance, provided its meaning is clarified: Bassora was less a seat of learning than a nexus of exchange, a relay along the routes of men and merchandise. With the exodus of the mid-twentieth century, this presence was almost entirely extinguished, leaving behind a diasporic Memory and a rich body of archives. To restore this history is to recall that Iraqi Judaism was, until its final century, a world open to the seas.