At the end of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire set out to recruit new soldiers to join its army, including thousands of young Jewish men who lived in Baghdad.
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Instead of sending their men to join the imperial forces, the Jewish community paid authorities to get them exempt. Prominent leader at the time, Rabbi Shelomo Bekhor Ḥutzin, documented the names of everyone who received an exemption.
In the decades to follow, many of those names morphed or disappeared as the Jews living there dispersed across the world. But Hutzin's documents survived and are now stored and are available to the public in The National Library of Israel.
Foreign Ministry diplomat Jacob Rosen-Koenigsbuch has taken it upon himself to read and translate all 3,500 names on the list.
He has dedicated years of his life to researching Middle Eastern Jewish surnames that have been lost over the generations. Rosen-Koenigsbuch has published lists of family names from Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, and Alexandria. The four lists have been combined into this searchable database.
Rosen-Koenigsbuch, who used to be an Israeli ambassador to Jordan between 2006 and 2009, began researching Jewish surnames common to the 19th-century Middle East after exploring his family history in Poland.
"My parents were Holocaust survivors," he said. "And they didn't speak. My father was completely silent."
He began lecturing on what he learned from researching his heritage, and audience members kept approaching him to find out about their own family history.
"I would hear this mantra," he said. "We don't know anything about our families because we left Egypt or Syria or Iraq in a hurry. We left everything behind and the archives are closed. We came out alive from those countries, but the documents are not with us. In Europe, most of the Jews were annihilated but the archives are open.'"
Rosen-Koenigsbuch was fluent in Arabic, so he began to research documents from the area, despite limited access to archives. He decided to focus on family names in particular and discovered thousands of them in journals, directories, circumcision records, and court documents.
"There are many limitations, but we have to try to gather the history because we still have among us people in their 70s, early 80s and in 10 years there will be no one to talk to," Rosen-Koenigsbuch said. "If we will not hurry they will be gone. It's a very important message to encourage people to start thinking about this."
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