History of The Jews in Afghanistan - History

History

Records of a Jewish population in Afghanistan go back to the 7th century, with the Tabqat-i-Nasiri mentioning a people called Bani Israel settling in Ghor. Among the Pashtun people some believe in a legend that they descended from one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. DNA evidence, however, excludes this possibility.

It is claimed that the name Kabul is derived from Cain and Abel, and the name Afghanistan from Afghana, a grandson of King Saul. According to historians V. Minorsky, W.K. Frazier Tyler and M.C. Gillet, the name "Afghan" appears in a 982 CE book called Hudud-al-Alam, where a reference is made to:

Saul, a pleasant village on a mountain. In it lives Afghans.

The village of Saul probably was located somewhere near Gardez, which is just east of Ghazni in Afghanistan. The book also tells about a village near modern Jalalabad where the local king used to have many Hindu, Muslim and Afghan wives.

In 1080, Moses ibn Ezra mentions 40,000 Jews paying tribute to Ghazni, and Benjamin of Tudela in the 12th century counts 80,000 Jews.

In the course of Genghis Khan's 1222 invasion, the Jewish communities were reduced to isolated pockets. Only in 1839, the population increased again, swelled by refugees from Persia, reaching some 40,000.

The similarities between Muslim and Jewish Afghans were striking. The rabbis' beards, turbans and gowns made them almost indistinguishable from their Muslim scholars, while both were referred to by the title of mullah. The community shared with the rest of society a profound mistrust of state interference in family affairs, rejecting secular education and military service. In the 1920s, Jewish rabbis famously protested against Kabul's attempt to enlist Jewish children to state school. Much like the rest of society, the family structure was patriarchal. Jewish women married young, were deprived of education and led domestic lives away from the public eye. When leaving home, they covered themselves just like their Muslim counterparts. Such resistance to change meant that the community remained conspicuously traditional and closely knit together, marrying only among themselves.

Like the rest of the population, the Jews of Afghanistan were simultaneously local and transnational, rooted to the Afghan soil by birth and burial but connected to a global faith through religion. Like Afghan Hindus and Muslims, their sacred sites, too, were located in faraway, hard-to-reach places while their holy language was not the official language of the nation. Such similarities were ultimately why a peaceful coexistence was possible between Jewish and Muslim Afghans. The Jewish community being cut off from global political trends meant that ordinary Afghans were untouched by the raging, European-led, antisemitism of the early 20th century. Even at the height of the Nazi influence in Kabul of the 1930s.

By 1948, about 5,000 Jews existed in Afghanistan, and after they were allowed to emigrate in 1951, most of them moved to Israel and the United States. Afghanistan was the only Muslim country that allowed Jewish families to immigrate without revoking their citizenship first. Afghan Jews left the country en masse in the 1960s, their exile to New York and Tel Aviv was motivated by a search for a better life but not because of religious persecution. By 1969, some 300 remained, and most of these left after the Soviet invasion of 1979, leaving 10 Afghan Jews in 1996, most of them in Kabul. More than 10,000 Jews of Afghan descent presently live in Israel. Over 200 families of Afghan Jews live in New York City in USA.