History of the Jews in Bahrain

Talmudic sources refer to ports and islands on the Persian Gulf, indicating that Jews may have already settled in this region.

In the 12th century, the Jewish traveler-adventurer Benjamin of Tudela mentions 500 Jews living in Qays, and 5,000 in Al-Qatîf, involved in pearl fishery.

Arabic sources state that Jews lived in Hajar, the capital of Bahrain, in 630 CE and refused to convert to Islam when Muhammad sent an army to occupy the territory.

[9] Most members of Bahrain's Jewish community abandoned their properties and evacuated to Bombay, later settling in Israel, many of them in the town of Pardes Hanna-Karkur; others went to the United Kingdom.

Some 500-600 remained, but after riots broke out in the aftermath of the Six-Day War in 1967, Bahraini Jewry emigrated en masse.

A Jewish businessman, Ebrahim Daoud Nonoo, sat on the appointed upper house of the Bahraini Parliament's Shura Council.

Since 2004, Ms. Nonoo also headed the Bahrain Human Rights Watch Society[12] which has campaigned against the reintroduction of the death penalty in the tiny kingdom.

[7] At that time, the tolerance extended to the island's Jewish community is the result of the policy of its leader, King Hamad ibn Isa Al Khalifa.

[14] In 2008, Bahrain's king nominated Houda Nonoo, a Jewish woman who served in the nation's 40-member upper house of Parliament, as its ambassador to the United States.

[20] It was formally signed on September 15, 2020, at the White House in Washington, D.C.,[21] and made Bahrain the fourth Arab state to recognize Israel and the second within a month.