Long before there were Jews in the Rhineland or in Spain, there were Jews in Babylon, in Yemen, in Persia, and across North Africa — communities so ancient that they reach back to the destruction of the First Temple itself. This is their memorial.

The story of the Jewish people is too often told as a European one. But for most of our history, the great centers of Torah lay in the East — in the lands of Islam and beyond. These were among the oldest continuous Jewish communities on earth, and from them came the Talmud, the masorah that fixed the text of the Bible, and a scribal tradition of unmatched precision. In the span of a single generation in the twentieth century, almost all of them came to an end.

בָּבֶל Bavel — the Jews of Iraq

When Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the First Temple in 586 BCE and carried the people to Babylon, he planted what would become one of the longest-lived Jewish communities in history. By the rivers of Babylon they wept — and then they built. Here arose the great academies of Sura and Pumbedita; here the Talmud Bavli, the Babylonian Talmud, was compiled; here the Geonim led world Jewry for centuries. For more than 2,500 years, there were Jews in Iraq.

That world ended in living memory. On the 1st and 2nd of June 1941 — on Shavuos — a Nazi-incited pogrom known as the פַרְהוּד, the Farhud, erupted in Baghdad. Some one hundred eighty Jews were murdered, hundreds more wounded, and Jewish homes, shops, and synagogues were looted and destroyed. It shattered forever the security of a community that had lived in Mesopotamia since the days of the prophets. Within a decade, in Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, some one hundred twenty thousand Iraqi Jews — nearly the entire community — left for the State of Israel, carrying their ancient scrolls with them.

תֵּימָן Teiman — the Jews of Yemen

In the mountains of Yemen lived a community of extraordinary antiquity and devotion, by tradition present since before the destruction of the Second Temple. Isolated for centuries, the Jews of Teiman preserved the Hebrew language and the text of the Torah with a fidelity unmatched anywhere — they have been called “the most Jewish of all Jews,” the ones who guarded the masorah most faithfully of all.

Theirs was a history of both greatness and suffering. In 1172, when they faced forced conversion and the false hopes of a pretender, they turned to the Rambam in Egypt, who wrote them his famous אִגֶּרֶת תֵּימָן — the Epistle to Yemen — to strengthen their faith. So beloved was he that they added a line to their Kaddish praying for his welfare. Then, in 1679, came the most terrible blow: the גָּלוּת מַוְזַע, the Mawza Exile, when the ruler banished nearly all the Jews of Yemen to the barren coastal desert of Mawza. As many as two-thirds perished from hunger, disease, and exposure; synagogues were destroyed, and many of their most ancient manuscripts were lost forever.

In 1949 and 1950, in the airlift known as Operation Magic Carpet — עַל כַּנְפֵי נְשָׁרִים, “On the Wings of Eagles” — nearly the entire community of some fifty thousand Yemenite Jews was carried to Israel. Today only a handful remain in Yemen. Their two-thousand-year-old world lives on in Israel and in their scrolls.

צְפוֹן אַפְרִיקָה The Maghreb — North Africa

Across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya stretched ancient and vibrant Jewish communities, some predating the Arab conquest by centuries, later enriched by the exiles of Sepharad in 1492. They produced great sages and mystics — the world of Fez and Marrakesh, Djerba, Tunis, and Tripoli. They too knew persecution: under the Almohads in the twelfth century, Jews across North Africa and Muslim Spain faced forced conversion or death — it was the Almohad terror that drove the young Rambam and his family from Cordoba into wandering. In the twentieth century, anti-Jewish riots and the upheavals surrounding 1948 brought these communities, too, to an end, as hundreds of thousands departed for Israel and France.

פָּרַס Persia — the Jews of Iran

The Jewish community of Persia is among the most ancient of all, reaching back to the exile and to the days of Esther and Mordechai — the very setting of the Purim story. For 2,500 years Jews lived on the Iranian plateau. They endured forced conversions, most infamously the Allahdad of Mashhad in 1839, when the Jews of that city were compelled to outwardly accept Islam while secretly keeping the Torah for generations. In the twentieth century the great majority left for Israel and the West.

אֲרַם צוֹבָא Syria — Aleppo and Damascus

The communities of Aleppo — אֲרַם צוֹבָא, Aram Tzova — and Damascus were among the most distinguished in the Jewish world, guardians of priceless treasures of Torah. In Aleppo’s great synagogue was kept, for some six hundred years, the most precious manuscript in all of Judaism: the Aleppo Codex, the Keter. When the United Nations voted to establish the State of Israel in November 1947, anti-Jewish riots erupted across the Arab world. In Aleppo, the ancient synagogue was set ablaze; dozens of Torah scrolls were deliberately burned, and the Keter itself was damaged, losing many of its pages. The community that had guarded the text of the Bible for centuries was driven into exile.

The Great Exodus — a world ends

In the years following 1948, the Jewish communities of the Arab and Muslim world — in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Iran — were uprooted almost in their entirety. By most accounts, some 850,000 Jews were forced from or fled lands where their ancestors had lived for two and a half millennia. Property was seized, citizenship revoked, ancient synagogues abandoned. Communities older than Islam itself, older than Christianity, ended within a single generation.

Yet they did not come empty-handed. From Baghdad and Sanaa, from Aleppo and Fez and Mashhad, the Jews of the East carried their Sifrei Torah with them — scrolls hundreds of years old, written in the distinctive hands of their communities, preserving traditions of breathtaking accuracy. These scrolls, gathered now in Israel and around the world, are the living remnant of a vanished civilization.