page_title: Baghdadi Jews
section_title: Precolonial origins
hierarchical_section_title: Baghdadi Jews / Precolonial origins
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Kaart van de Malabarkust. Descriptio Nova Imperii Malabar Canara, Decan, et Aliarum Provinciarum. In de kaart zijn enkele mensen en dieren ingetekend. English: Map of the Malabar Coast. Descriptio Nova Imperii Malabar Canara, Decan, et Aliarum Provinciarum. The chart features several figures and animals.
context_page_description: The former communities of Jewish migrants and their descendants from Baghdad and elsewhere in the Middle East are traditionally called Baghdadi Jews or Indo-Iraqi Jews. They settled primarily in the ports and along the trade routes around the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.
  Beginning under the Mughal Empire in the 18th century, merchant traders from Baghdad and Aleppo established originally Judeo-Arabic speaking Jewish communities in India, then in a trading network across Asia, following Mizrahi Jewish customs. These flourished under the British Empire in the 19th century, growing to be English-speaking and British oriented.
  These grew into a tight trading and kinship network across Asia with smaller Baghdadi communities being established beyond India in the mid-nineteenth century in Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Baghdadi trading outposts were established across colonial Asia with families settling in Malaysia, Japan, Indonesia and Australia. Until the Second World War, these communities attracted a modest flow of Jewish emigrants from Iraq, with smaller numbers hailing from Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Iran, and Turkey.
context_section_description: Though Jewish traders from the Middle East had crossed the Indian Ocean since ancient Rome, sources from the Mughal Empire first mention Jewish merchants from Baghdad trading with India in the 17th century.
  India was far from unknown to the Jewish merchants of the Middle East. Since ancient Rome the caravan route from India had ended in Aleppo and the spice trade had tied Basra, Yemen and Cairo to the Malabar Coast. However, it was Persian-speaking Jewish merchants, close trading allies of the Jews of Baghdad, Basra and Aleppo Jews who first struck into the Indian heartland.
  As adventurers, mystics and merchants, they had been venturing to India since the Middle Ages on the back of invasions of the subcontinent launched by Persian speaking rulers from what is now Iran and Afghanistan. Both Persian and Mughal sources record Jewish traders following the 16th century Mughal invasion of India launched by Emperor Babur.
  They rose to be traders and courtiers of the Mughals. Jewish advisors at the Court of Akbar the Great in Agra played a significant role in Akbar's liberal religious policies. In Delhi, the syncretic Jewish mystic Sarmad Khasani was tutor to the Crown Prince Dara Shikoh before both were executed by Aurangzeb. There were sufficient Jews in Mughal lands for British travelers to report that synagogues had been established there, but of which no trace or Jewish record remains. These handful of Jews never established a permanent community but left legends and pathways for future settlers from
  Arabic speaking lands.
  Records of Jewish tradesmen traveling from Baghdad can be found from the early 17th century. These trading outposts and emerging migrant communities also saw Jews become courtiers to Mughal rulers. These merchants wandered widely across the subcontinent. Shalom Cohen, who would found the Calcutta community, was the court jeweller to the Nawab of Awadh and travelled to Punjab where he held the same title as the court of Ranjit Singh the leader of the Sikh Empire. Cohen, the Calcutta community would later recall, was even given the honour of riding with the Nawab of Awadh in his personal elephant.
  The first permanent Baghdadi merchant colony in India was established in 1730 in Surat, after the British East India Company had begun trading with Basra in 1723. In the early 18th century, trade between Basra and Surat grew whilst the Indian port was the main base of the British East India Company until it decamped to Bombay. Joseph Seemah from Baghdad opened the Surat synagogue and cemetery in 1730. The Baghdadi community in Surat grew and by the end of the 18th century, as many as 100 Jews from Baghdad, Aleppo and Basra made up the Judeo-Arabic speaking merchant colony of Surat. This was to become the first of a string of Baghdadi communities stretching from Bombay to Kobe be established in Asia.
  But it was around the early 19th century, in response to the tyrannical rule of Dawud Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Baghdad, who persecuted, extorted and imprisoned the leading Jewish families of the city, that whole clans started crossing the Indian Ocean to seek safety and fortune in Asia. Dawud Pasha's misrule was when Baghdadi immigration towards Bombay and Calcutta became strong with the leading Sassoon, Ezra and Judah families departing for India. This episode of persecution was the beginning of the Baghdadi Jewish diaspora with records of whole clans departing the city for Bombay, Calcutta, Aleppo, Alexandria and Sydney.
  Jewish life in the ancient communities of the Middle East, had taken a turn for the worse in the mid 19th century. The pogrom and forced conversion of the Jews of Mashhad in 1839, the fear sown by three blood libels in Aleppo between 1841 and 1860, and the outbreak of plague, first striking Baghdad in 1831, then returning with vengeance to Basra and Baghdad in 1841, encouraged Jewish clans in the declining Ottoman Empire to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
caption: Map of the Malabar Coast, circa 1672.
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