Reviving the Jewish Memory of Mosul

To protect our future, we must protect our past.

Mosul once held one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, with a continuous presence dating to the eighth century BCE. The community departed during the latter half of the twentieth century — under social, political, and economic pressures whose detailed history is the subject of much of the material gathered here — and the city’s Jewish quarter, the markets that knew its families, and the language and rituals that travelled with it now exist mostly in the keeping of those who left and the documents that survived in archives across Iraq, Israel, France, and the United States.

The Reviving the Jewish Memory of Mosul project, run as part of Mosul Eye’s programme of cultural-heritage documentation and protection, exists to collect and translate that material — oral histories, family archives, photographs, neighbourhood maps, scholarly studies — and to make it accessible to researchers, descendants, and Mosulis themselves.

What the project does

Oral history

Video testimonies from former Mosuli Jews and their descendants — recorded in Iraq, Israel, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The interviews cover daily life in the Jewish quarter, schools, professions, festivals, neighbourly relations with Muslim and Christian Mosulis, and the period of departure.

Archives and documentation

Translated records from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Among the materials brought together by the project: Chamber of Commerce membership records from 1926 onward, naming traditions, neighbourly relations as documented in court records, and the institutional publication Minhat Ashur (Mosuli yeshiva journal), spanning 1989 to 2005. The project also holds historical maps of Mosul from 1905 showing the Jewish quarter and its surroundings.

Studies and translations

Materials in Hebrew, Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and French, translated into English and Arabic where they were not originally written in either. The project’s emphasis is on making cross-language scholarship usable to researchers who may read only one of these.

The Jewish quarter

A reconstructed picture of the neighbourhood: historical maps, photographs of houses and synagogues, family addresses, professions and trades, the streets that bordered it. The quarter overlapped, as it did in many Middle Eastern cities, with markets and institutions shared across communities; the project documents both the distinctness of the Jewish quarter and the shared fabric of Mosul that contained it.

Partners and funding

The project was supported by ALIPH (the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas) and operates under the academic framework of the “Pasts in the Present” cluster of excellence at the University of Paris Nanterre. It is documented in coordination with researchers in France and Israel; descendants of the Mosuli Jewish community in those countries and elsewhere have contributed family records and testimony.

How to engage

• If you are a descendant of the Mosuli Jewish community and have photographs, letters, family records, or recorded family memory you are willing to share, please write to contact@mosul-eye.org. The project is actively collecting.
• If you are a researcher working on the social, economic, or religious history of Iraqi Jewry, or on the broader history of Mosul, the archive is open to academic enquiry by request.
• If you read the original project blog, much of the material referenced above is documented at mosuljewishmemory.wordpress.com — the original web project of the initiative, which Mosul Eye continues to develop in coordination with its academic partners.

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The Mosuli Jewish community is one of several communities whose presence shaped the city: alongside the Muslim majority and a long-standing Christian presence (Chaldean, Syriac Catholic, Syriac Orthodox, Armenian), the city also held Yazidi, Shabak, and Turkmen communities. The Mosul Eye archive treats all of these as integral to the city’s identity. See the essay Space, Time and People for the broader argument about cultural heritage and the visual memory of Mosul.