During this time, the Temple in Jerusalem was rebuilt, significant changes in Jewish religious tradition were made, and the Judeans were led by individuals who had returned from Babylonia, such as Zerubbabel, Ezra and Nehemiah.

)The earliest accounts of the Jews exiled to Babylonia are furnished only by scanty biblical details, although a number of archaeological discoveries (such as the Al-Yahudu Tablets) shed light into the social lives of the deportees;[26] certain sources seek to supply this deficiency from the realms of legend and tradition.

Thus, the so-called "Small Chronicle" (Seder Olam Zutta) endeavors to preserve historic continuity by providing a genealogy of the exilarchs ("Reshe Galuta") back to King Jeconiah.

When the allied armies defeated the Parthians (129 BCE) at the Great Zab (Lycus), the king ordered a halt of two days on account of the Jewish Sabbath and Feast of Weeks.

Philo speaks of the large number of Jews resident in that country, a population which was no doubt considerably swelled by new immigrants after the First Jewish-Roman War (66–73 CE).

[31][27] That said, the influence was to some extent mutual: a number of early notable rabbis including Hillel the Elder, Nahum the Mede, and Nathan the Babylonian had ancestry in Babylonia or further east.

This in turn led to greater wealth and international influence, as well as a more cosmopolitan outlook from Jewish thinkers such as Saadiah Gaon, who now deeply engaged with Western philosophy for the first time.

In 850, al-Rashid's grandson al-Muttawakil issued a decree according to which all dhimmis (including the Jews) would need to wear in addition to the already established zunnar an honey-coloured outer garment and badge-like patches on their servant's clothing, by which he begun the long tradition of differentiation by colour.

The situation grew dire for the Jewish community as Muslim chronicler Abbas al-’Azzawi recorded: "These events which befell the Jews after they had attained a high standing in the state caused them to lower their voices.

According to historian Zvi Yehuda, the fifteenth century sees no reports on Jews in Baghdad or in its surroundings, in Basra, Hilla, Kifil, ‘Ana, Kurdistan, even in Persia and the Persian Gulf.

After various changes of fortune, Mesopotamia and Iraq came into the hands of the Ottoman Turks, when Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in 1534 took Tabriz and Baghdad from the Persians, leading to an improvement in the life of the Jews.

[48] These Judeo-Arabic speaking communities, following mostly Iraqi Jewish customs, would be formed along the so-called opium route between India and China, including in Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai.

"[50] One distinguishing feature of the communities of Baghdad and Basra remarked upon by Ashkenazi travelers was the extreme young age of marriage: between eight and twelve years old for girls to men usually eighteen to twenty.

[55][66] The newly restored pro-Allied monarchist regime quickly implemented measures to prevent the outbreak of similar anti-Jewish violence and established a committee of enquiry on June 7 "to examine the facts and find who was culpable.

"[67] Before the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine vote, Iraq's prime minister Nuri al-Said informed British diplomat Douglas Busk "that he had nothing against Iraqi Jews who were a long established and useful community.

In a speech at the United Nations General Assembly Hall at Flushing Meadow, New York, on Friday, November 28, 1947, Iraq's Foreign Minister, Muhammad Fadhel al-Jamali, included the following statement: Partition imposed against the will of the majority of the people will jeopardize peace and harmony in the Middle East.

[70] Hoping to stem the flow of assets from the country, in March 1950 Iraq passed a law of one-year duration allowing Jews to emigrate on condition of relinquishing their Iraqi citizenship.

In addition to continuing arrests and the dismissal of Jews from their jobs, this exodus was encouraged by a series of bombings starting in April 1950 that resulted in a number of injuries and a few deaths.

[70] On September 18, 1950, Nuri al-Said summoned a representative of the Jewish community and claimed Israel was behind the emigration delay, threatening to "take them to the borders" and forcibly expel the Jews.

[70] In Baghdad, the daily spectacle of Jews carrying nothing but their clothes and a bag of their remaining possessions being loaded onto trucks for transport to the airport caused public jubilation.

[84][10][70][88] In 1952, emigration to Israel was again banned, and the Iraqi government publicly hanged two Jews who had been falsely charged with throwing a bomb at the Baghdad office of the U.S. Information Agency.

A secret Israeli inquiry in 1960 found no evidence that they were ordered by Israel or any motive that would have explained the attack, though it did find out that most of the witnesses believed that Jews had been responsible for the bombings.

[94] Gat reports that much of the previous literature "reflects the universal conviction that the bombings had a tremendous impact on the large-scale exodus of the Jews... To be more precise it is suggested that the Zionist emissaries committed these brutal acts in order to uproot the prosperous Iraqi Jewish community and bring it to Israel".

[93][96]Many years later, the widow of the Zionist emissary Yehuda Tager stated that while the main bombings were carried out by the Muslim Brotherhood, later smaller attacks were staged by Yosef Beit-Halahmi, on his own initiative, in an attempt to make it seem as if the activists on trial were not the perpetrators.

[97][94] In Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew, Avi Shlaim unveils what he argues is "undeniable proof of Zionist involvement in the terrorist attacks" which prompted a mass exodus of Jews from Iraq between 1950 and 1951.

[98][99][94] The historian based his conclusion that most of the bombings against Jews in Iraq were the work of Mossad on two pieces of evidence: one draws on the recollections given to Shlaim by an elderly former member of the Zionist undergroundi.

[89] Anwar Shaul, a Jewish professor and lawyer, was invited twice to appear in literary seminars on Iraqi television, and President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr sent him a bouquet of flowers when he entered a hospital for treatment.

[141] He compared the Jewish experience in Iraq to "living in a prison," reporting that most Jews stayed in their homes "out of fear of kidnapping or execution" amid ongoing sectarian violence.

[173] A poll by the popular Facebook page Al-Khuwwa al-Nathifa (‘The Clean Brotherhood,’ over 1.7 million followers) recently showed that 77% of 62,000 respondents were in favor of the return of Jewish Iraqis.

[172] A recent video was uploaded on the website of the Iraqi media outlet Yalla showing a Jewish man, dressed in black with sidelocks and a hat, walking through the streets of Basra holding a map and looking for the house his grandfather left in the 1950s.