Jewish ethnic divisions - Nash Didan (Thread)
“Nash Didan” - ‘our people’ is the name of Jews who lived near the lake in Urmia, in Iranian Azerbaijan. They spoke an Aramaic-Jewish language. The community was founded more than 2,000 years ago when Assyria conquered the Kingdom of Israel and exiled its inhabitants to the area.
About 200 years later, the rest of the Jewish population in the Kingdom of Judah was exiled to Babylon. There in Urmia more Jews settled and didn’t returned to Judea/Israel as many Jews did after Cyrus’s edict.
The Jews of Urmia were isolated from other Jewish communities in the area (Persian Jews/Kurdish Jews/Iraqi Jews). Although they were completely isolated and detached they still maintained their Jewish customs and suffered harassment as a result.
The community was forbidden from writing in their special language and therefore there’s hardly any documentation of historical texts about their history, tradition and prayers, in addition most of them didn’t know how to write and read at that time.
The Jews were buried with an Aramaic inscription on their tombstone and with the Star of David or Menorah emblem. The community that numbered about 500 families in the 20th century no longer exists due to the many wars that prevailed in the area.
In the 1920s, about 300 families left and immigrated to Land of Israel, following the murder of the Armenian people and riots against the Jewish community by the Turks. After Israel’s establishment the entire community immigrated to Israel and few to the US.
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