The Jews of Balkh

Introduction

Arab geographers called Balkh Umm al-Bilad, أم البلاد, “the mother of cities”. It was Bactra to the Greeks and Bahlika in Sanskrit, the capital of a fertile country between the Hindu Kush and the Oxus. Its monastery, the Nava Vihara, gave the Abbasid caliphs their Barmakid viziers, as The Kingdom at the End of Time describes. Later Zoroastrian tradition remembered it as the court where Zoroaster found his royal patron, and as the city where he died.

Balkh also had one of the oldest Jewish communities in the east, and the traditions about it reach back to the exiles of Israel and Judah.

The exiles

The Hebrew Bible records two deportations. In 722 BCE Assyria took Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom.

And the king of Assyria did carry away Israel unto Assyria, and put them in Halah and in Habor by the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes.

2 Kings 18:11, KJV

In 586 BCE Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and carried Judah to Babylon.

Persian and Muslim traditions tie both events to Balkh. They say the city was founded after the fall of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, who settled exiled Jews there. Muslim tradition adds that the prophet Jeremiah fled to Balkh and that Ezekiel was buried there. Al-Tabari tells of another Jewish prophet, whose name his manuscripts give only as SMY, who debated with Zoroaster at Balkh (Fischel 2008).

None of this can be checked against the ground. Scholars place the Halah and Habor of Kings in northern Mesopotamia, where the Habor is the Khabur river, a tributary of the Euphrates. Ezekiel’s best-known tomb is at al-Kifl in Iraq. But most Jewish communities of Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan dated their beginnings to the Assyrian or the Babylonian exile, and the community of Balkh was among the most important of them. In the early Middle Ages the main Jewish centres of the region were Merv, Balkh, Ghazni, Herat, Kabul and Nishapur (Matalon 1997).

The Jewish quarter

The Arab geographers knew a Bab al-Yahud, the Gate of the Jews, at Balkh. They also knew a town nearby called al-Yahudiyya, “the Jewish one”, or al-Yahudan al-Kubra, “the great Jewry”, which was later given the more auspicious name of al-Maymana (Fischel 2008).

In the ninth century Balkh produced one of the boldest Jewish thinkers of the age, Hiwi al-Balkhi. He wrote some two hundred objections to the Hebrew Bible, questioning its miracles and its picture of God, and they survive mostly through the replies of Saadia Gaon, who thought them dangerous enough to answer at length.

The community lived under special obligations. Its members were made to keep up a public garden. In the 1030s, under the Ghaznavid rulers, a special tax was laid on the Jews of the town, with the condition that no more than five hundred dirhams be taken from them. The community was still there in the thirteenth century, when a Jewish merchant of Balkh, Khwaja Rashid al-Din al-Hakim, travelled from Khurasan to India. In 1220 Genghis Khan took Balkh, killed its people and levelled every building that could be defended, and the old community ended with the city (Fischel 2008).

A land east of Eden

In 1832 the missionary Joseph Wolff crossed the Oxus to Balkh. Wolff was a rabbi’s son from Bavaria who had become a Christian, and he travelled Central Asia looking for the lost tribes of Israel. He returned in 1843 to discover the fate of two British officers, Stoddart and Conolly, who had been executed at Bukhara. His Narrative of a Mission to Bokhara records what the Jews and the Muslims of the region told him.

The chief rabbi assured me that Bokhara is the Habor, and Balkh the Halah, of the 2nd Kings, xvii. 6; but that in the reign of Ghengis Khan they lost all their written accounts. At Balkh the Mussulman mullahs assured me that it was built by a son of Adam, that its first name had been Hanakh, and afterwards Halah, though later writers called it Balakh, or Balkh. The Jews, both of Balkh and Samarcand, assert that Turkistaun is the land of Nod, and Balkh where Nod once stood.

Joseph Wolff, Narrative of a Mission to Bokhara (1845)

Each piece of that has a Hebrew root. Halah, חֲלַח, is the place of exile in Kings. Nod, נוֹד, is where Cain went after he killed Abel:

And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden. And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch.

Genesis 4:16 to 17, KJV

The mullahs’ Hanakh is close to Hanokh, the Hebrew form of Enoch. The first name of Balkh, on their account, was the name of the first city in Genesis.

The geography of Eden reached the Oxus too. Arabic writers called the river Jayhun, جيحون, from Gihon, גִּיחוֹן, one of the four rivers that flow out of Eden in Genesis 2.

Wolff found the Jews of Bukhara, about ten thousand of them, made to wear a mark “in order that no Mussulman may give them Salaam”. In his reading, the land of Cain had put a mark on the Jews. He credited the revival of their religious life to a rabbi from North Africa, Joseph Maman, who had come to Bukhara at the end of the eighteenth century and restored customs they had nearly lost.

He also heard the Afghan tradition of Israelite descent. Some Afghans told him they came from Afghana, a nephew of Asaph son of Berachiah, who in their telling built Solomon’s temple, and that their ancestors had been carried to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar and settled in the mountains of Ghor before they became Muslims. A Persian history of the Afghans compiled in 1612, the Makhzan-i Afghani, tells a version of the same story, with Afghana as a grandson of King Saul.

The last Jews of Afghanistan

A Jewish presence returned to Balkh in modern times, small and closely watched. After the assassination of King Nadir Shah in 1933, a campaign against the Jews began. They were banished from some towns and forbidden to leave a town without a permit. At Balkh they lived in their own quarter and closed its gates at night. About five thousand Jews lived in Afghanistan in 1948, mostly in Kabul, Balkh and Herat. Government service and government schools were closed to them, and until 1950 they could not leave the country. Between 1948 and 1950, 459 Afghan Jews reached Israel, most of them having escaped earlier through Iran or India, and emigration was allowed from the end of 1951 (Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Afghanistan”).

The community emptied over the following decades. Its last member, Zablon Simintov, kept the synagogue in Kabul through the Taliban years and left the country in September 2021.

Works consulted

• Encyclopaedia Judaica. “Afghanistan.” 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2007.
• Fischel, Walter J. “Balkh.” In Encyclopaedia Judaica, via the Jewish Virtual Library, 2008.
• Matalon, Guy. Article on the Jewish communities of Afghanistan. Mardom Nama-e Bakhter, August 1997.
• Okar Research. “Judaism & Ancient Bactria/Balkh (586 BC).”
• The Holy Bible, King James Version.
• Wolff, Joseph. Narrative of a Mission to Bokhara, in the Years 1843 to 1845. London: J. W. Parker, 1845.