Patrick Comerford
My hasty furtive rush through the airport in Muscat in the early hours of Friday morning got me to Gate C6 just three minutes before boarding began. Looking back on it all at the end of the day after, it is an experience I am glad to have behind me.
On our way through Muscat two weeks earlier, the airport was much calmer and more peaceful, with enough time to have coffee and a modest breakfast. The atmosphere has changed so dramatically since then and so unexpectedly.
Oman sits on the strategic Straits of Hormuz, a mere 29 km from Iran at its choke point. in normal times, 30 per cent of the world’s liquified natural gas and 25 per cent of the world’s oil pass through it on tankers. It is the most strategic spot on all of the world’s oceans, which explains why Oman is at the centre of the political and military tsunami that has overwhelmed the world in the past week.
But Oman has long played a quiet role as mediator between countries in the Gulf that have accepted it as an honest broker, which explains how it has come to be a safe place to many thousands of people trying to get away from the present crises.
Oman has a reputation for being gentle, friendly and warmly welcoming, while Dubai in the neighbouring United Arab Emirates is known as being brash, noisy, full of bling, supercars and temptations, and the people of Abu Dhabi are regarded as more conservative, and less brazen and expressive.
I had hoped when we were booking these flights that I might have had more time in Muscat to learn about the religious traditions of Oman, including the history of Jews and Christians in Oman as well as its Ibadi Muslim community, which is neither Sunni nor Shia.
Oman does not provide official statistics on religious affiliation, but it seems Muslims are 85.9 per cent of the population. They predominantly follow the Ibadi school of Islam, with smaller numbers following the Shafi’i school of Sunni Islam and the Twelver school of Shia Islam. Most non-Muslims in Oman are foreign workers, and the religious minorities include Christians (6.4 percent), Hindus (5.7 per cent), Buddhists (0.8 per cent), Jains, Parsees and Sikhs. The Christian communities, mainly in Muscat, Sohar and Salalah, include Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and others, and are organised along linguistic and ethnic lines.
Although there is no longer a Jewish community in Oman, the history of the Jews in Oman dates centuries. The grave of the prophet Job is said to be 45 miles from Salalah, in the south of Oman and close to the border with Yemen. But this is only one of three supposed gravesites of Job: another is in the village of Deir Ayyoub near Ramle, and a third is in Istanbul.
The Jewish presence in Oman probably dates back to the ninth century, with a Jewish presence for many centuries, mainly in Muscat and Sohar.
Ishaq bin Yahuda, a ninth century merchant, lived in Sohar and sailed to China between the years of 882 and 912 CE after an argument with a Jewish colleague. He made a great fortune, returned to Sohar and sailed for China again. But his ship was seized and bin Yahuda was murdered in Sumatra.
The traveller Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela mentioned a community in Muscat in the 12th century. He undertook a journey from 1165 to 1173 to visit far-flung Jewish communities that also brought him to the area that is modern Oman. His journey began as a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, although his travels may also have had a commercial motive. He was the first known European traveller to approach the frontiers of China and his account of his journey throws light on the lives of Jews and Jewish communities in Europe and Asia in the 12th century.
Benjamin of Tudela tried to catalogue the Jewish communities on the route to the Holy Land as a way of providing a guide to where Jews might hospitality. He often gave a count of Jews in the towns and countries he visited, and he reported a Jewish community in Muscat in the northern part of the Arabian Peninsula.
Later, in the 17th century, travellers reported the presence of Jews in Muscat in 1625 when the port was under Portuguese control, and a synagogue was built there in 1673.
The Jewish community in Oman grew with the arrival of refugees from Baghdad in the 1820s. A British naval officer, Lieutenant James Raymond Wellsted (1805-1842), documented the Jews of Muscat in his memoirs Travels in Arabia. He recorded ‘a few Jews in Muskat (sic), who mostly arrived there in 1828, being driven from Baghdad … by the cruelties and extortions of the Pacha Daud.’
Dawūd Pasha of Baghdad (1767-1851), was born Davit Manvelashvili in Tbilisi, Georgia, and was the last Mamluk ruler of Iraq (1816-1831). Under his rule, the Jews of Baghdad were grievously persecuted resulting, and many of the leading Baghdadi Jewish families such as the Sassoon and Judah families, fled to India.
Wellsted noted that Jews were not discriminated against in Oman, unlike other Arab countries. They did not have to live in ghettos, nor were they forced to publicly identify themselves as Jews, nor walk in the road if a Muslim was walking on the same street, as was the case in Yemen.
By the mid-19th century, Oman had as many as 350 Jewish families, many of them the descendants of Iraqi or Baghdadi Jews and Yemeni Jews. The merchant society in Sohar included Jews originating from Persia and Iraq. They worked mostly in making silver objects, trade, finance and selling liquor. Between 1830 and 1860 they represented British interests, as in the port of Aden. Wellsted also found 20 Jewish families in Sohar, where they had a synagogue and owned a few buildings.
By the early 20th century, the Jewish community in Muscat was in decline, many had left and some had converted to Islam. During World War II, a Jewish American army enlist, Emanuel Glick, met a small community of Omani Jews in Muscat, but this community consisted mostly of recent migrants from Yemen.
The last native-born member of the community is thought to have been Sulayman al-Yehudi. He left at the time of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and it is said his children and grandchildren converted to Islam.
Oman does not have any formal relations with Israel, but the two countries had exchange offices from 1996 to 2000. A series of visits by Israeli leaders have visited Oman in recent years, including Yitzhak Rabin in 1994, Shimon Peres in 1996, and the Omani foreign minister visited Jerusalem in 1995.
Diplomatic were cut off from 2000 at the start of the second intifada. But Tsipi Livni, then Israel’s foreign minister, visited Oman in 2008, and the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited in 2021, to the surprise of the international media at the time.
The surviving 19th-century Jewish cemetery in Sohar is known locally as Qumbaz Al-Yahud, the cemetery of the Jews. It has brick-built graves with Hebrew characters, and its size indicates how large the Jewish community in Sohar once was.
Wendell Phillips (1922-1975) and the archaeologist Alexander Honeyman (1907-1988), Professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages at the University of St Andrews and once described as the ‘real India Jones,’ measured the cemetery in 1958 and they investigated a few of the then surviving 200 tombs.
But many of those graves have been lost over the years. The Italian archaeologist, Professor Paolo M Costa (1932-2019), recorded 95 graves or tombs in the cemetery in 1980.
Dr Aviva Klein-Franke has been a Senior Lecturer and Assistant Professor at the University of Köln in Germany, specialising in the history and cultural heritage of Yemenite Jews, Middle Eastern minorities, and Diaspora communities. She visited Oman twice to visit the Jewish cemetery in Sohar. There she took many photographs and documented the names written on the bricks of the Memorial Wall.
In her visit to Sohar in 2005, she could count only 12 full tombs and another five half-open tombs, and found bones were strewn across the ground. She copied many of the Hebrew names engraved into the bricks on the four sides of the wall.
Today there is no official, organised Jewish community in Oman, although a small number of expatriate western Jews live in the sultanate. The houses and the synagogue described by 19th century travellers have all disappeared.
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