History of the Jews in Syria
Modern scholarship locates Aram Zoba in Lebanon and the far south of Syria: the identification with Aleppo is not found in rabbinic literature prior to the 11th century.
[5] Around 7 BCE, King Herod of Judaea relocated Zamaris, a Jew from Babylonia, and his 500 mounted archers to Bathyra in Batanea, giving them tax exemptions to defend the area from Trachonite brigands and protect Jewish pilgrims heading to Jerusalem.
[citation needed] This irritated the Jewish ethnarch to such a degree that he attempted to arrest Paul; the latter's friends only saved his life by lowering him in a basket out of a window built into the wall of the city.
[12] Later, Damascus, as the coins show, obtained the title of metropolis, and under Alexander Severus, when the city was a Christian colony, it became the seat of a bishop, who enjoyed a rank next to that of the Patriarch of Antioch.
In the 5th century, under the rule of the Byzantine Empire, being the Talmudic time, Jews were living at Damascus for the rabbi Rafram bar Pappa went to pray in the synagogue of Jobar.
[14] Also in the 5th century, Jerome reports the presence in Beroea (Aleppo) of a congregation of Nazarenes (Jewish Christians) using a Hebrew gospel similar to that of Matthew.
The Jewish community continued, and certainly existed in 970; "for," says a historian, "Joseph ben Abitur of Cordoba, having lost all hope of becoming the chief rabbi of that city, went to Palestine in that year, and settled at Damascus".
)[17] According to Edelmann,[18] Judah ha-Levi composed his famous poem on Zion in this city; but Harkavy[19] has shown that "ash-Sham" here designates Palestine and not Damascus.
Maimonides, in his letter to the rabbis of Lunel, speaks of Aleppo as being the only community in Syria where some Torah learning survived, though the effort devoted to it was in his opinion less than impressive.
[33] Benjamin of Tudela visited Aleppo in 1173, where he found a Jewish community of 1,500 (or on another reading 5,000) souls with three noteworthy rabbis attending to their spiritual needs: Moses Alconstantini, Israel, and Seth.
In particular, the Damascus community was strongly influenced by the Safed Kabbalistic school of Isaac Luria, and contributed several notable personalities, including ִHayim Vital and Israel Najara.
He speaks of the large number of Jews there; but makes the singular confusion of placing in this city the events connected with the famous Ahmad Shaitan of Egypt.
The most celebrated rabbis of the 17th century were Josiah Pinto, a pupil of Jacob Abulafia, and author of the "Kesef-Nibִhar",[47] and his son-in-law, Samuel Vital, who transcribed and circulated a large number of his father's Kabbalistic manuscripts.
The libel resulted in the arrest and torture of senior members of the Jewish community, as well as the kidnapping of 63 children ages three to ten in an attempt to coerce a confession from their parents.
The condemned Jews were saved only by the official intervention of Fuad Pasha himself; that of the Prussian consul, Dr. Johann G. Wetzstein; of Sir Moses Montefiore of London, and of the bankers Abraham Salomon Camondo of Constantinople and Shemaya Angel of Damascus.
Prominent Aleppo rabbis include Eliahu Shamah, Abraham Antebi and Mordechai Labaton in the 19th century, Jacob Saul Dwek who died in 1919, followed by Ezra Hamwi and Moses Mizrahi who was prepared to be burnt with the Torah Scrolls but was removed by the Arab mob from the Jamilieh Synagogue during the pogrom of 1947.
[55] After independence, the Syrian government banned Jewish emigration to Palestine, and those caught trying to leave faced the death penalty or imprisonment with hard labor.
The December 1947 pogrom in Aleppo in particular left the community devastated; 75 Jews were killed, hundreds were injured, and more than 200 Jewish homes, shops, and synagogues were destroyed.
The anti-Semitic attitude of Syria's government was displayed to the world when it provided shelter for Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner, an aide to Adolf Eichmann.
This ended when the Syrian government began confiscating the passports of Jews, and Lebanon announced that it could not allow persons through its borders without travel documents.
In 1958, when Syria joined the United Arab Republic, Jewish emigration was temporarily permitted again, again on condition that those leaving relinquish all their property, but it was soon prohibited again.
Judy Feld Carr, a Canadian-Jewish activist, helped smuggle 3,228 Jews out of Syria to Israel, the United States, Canada, and Latin America.
Often with the help of smugglers, escapees attempted to sneak across the border into Lebanon or Turkey, where they were met and assisted by undercover Israeli agents or local Jewish communities.
[56][65][66] In 1970, the Israeli government began receiving intelligence of the situation Jews faced in Syria, and the efforts of many Jewish youths to flee in spite of the danger.
Their bodies were discovered by border police in a cave in the Zabdani Mountains northwest of Damascus along with the remains of two Jewish boys, Natan Shaya, 18 and Kassem Abadi 20, victims of an earlier massacre.
[70] In 1975, President Hafez al-Assad explained why he refused to allow Jewish emigration: "I cannot let them go, because if I let them go how can I stop the Soviet Union sending its Jews to Israel, where they will strengthen my enemy?
During the 1991 Madrid peace conference, the United States pressured Syria to ease restriction on its Jewish population following heavy lobbying from Americans of Syrian-Jewish descent.
[76]In 2013, the BBC revealed that the largest Jewish cemetery in Syria in Damascus had been demolished in favor of an ISIS regional headquarters while desecrating the dignity of the dead.
[86] On December 17, 2024, following the fall of the Assad regime and a transitional government taking power, the Times of Israel reported that Jewish relics from the Jobar Synagogue would be returned to Syria.
It was also announced that a delegation of Syrian Jewish business leaders from abroad would visit the country in a tour led by Israeli-American philanthropist Mordechai Kahana, with the intention of restoring the Jobar Synagogue.
