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Kurds an ethnic group in their own right –
genetically most closely related to Jews
17.11.2007
Book Review - Ferdinand Hennerbichler
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November 17, 2007
As the Kurd conflict has currently reached a new
high point in world politics, wieninternational is
presenting the book “Die Kurden” written by
Ferdinand Hennerbichler, a member of its staff.
Kurds were not originally Iranians, even if they
speak an Iranian language today, but an ethnic group
in their own right descended from original
inhabitants of the Middle East. Genetically they are
most closely related to Jews.
This is the basic conclusion of the book “Die Kurden”,
a comprehensive history of the Kurds from their
beginnings until the present day – compulsory
reading for all those who seek to fully understand
the background to the long conflict involving the
Kurdish people and particularly the critical stage
it has reached at present. For experts at the RMIB
Geoscience publishing company in the Netherlands it
is the “most important new publication about the
Kurds”. In international expert circles the work by
Ferdinand Hennerbichler is being cited as a standard
reference work on the subject.
About the book
According to recent genetic studies, Kurds are very
closely related to Jews. Despite what many people
believe, they were not Iranians, even if they speak
an Iranian language today. There were Kurds in the
regions they inhabit long before the oldest of the
Indo-Iranians who live there today. Kurds originally
spoke their own pre-Indo-European language and they
did not adopt Iranian until the middle of the first
millennium before the Christian era. Even the
Iranian they speak today has very old roots (such as
full ergativity) and is unique in having links with
Basque. Basque is a living pre-Indo-European
language, and the oldest Kurdish could therefore be
as old as Basque, dating back to 2,500 years before
the Christian era. Population geneticists have also
discovered that Kurds are the descendants of the
oldest Stone Age farmers in Kurdistan. www.ekurd.net
Their ancestors thus co-invented modern agriculture
around 10,000 years before the Christian era and
helped to develop and disseminate Indo-European
languages. Moreover, leading international
researchers such as Ariella Oppenheim, Almut Nebel
and Marina Faerman in Israel have demonstrated that
the closest genetic relatives of the Kurds are the
Jews. Armenians are close relatives of both. All
three ethnic groups belong to the original
civilisations in the Middle East and Asia Minor.
Name: The name Kurd goes back to the Sumerian word
for mountains “kur” and means mountain dwellers.
Kurdistan means Kurd land and has been used only
since the 12th century. The oldest words for the
land of the Kurds (such as Karda or Kurda) were in
use 3,000 years before the Christian era. In the 2nd
millennium BCE one of their kings was also called
“Kurdish Hammurabi”. The original homelands of the
Kurds are in the partially hard to access mountain
regions of the Taurus and Zagros in south-east
Anatolia, northern Mesopotamia and north-west Iran. |
Ferdinand Hennerbichler explores the history of the
Kurds from their origins to the present day
Kurdish parliament in Kurdistan-Iraq
Book cover, Die Kurden, by Ferdinand Hennerbichler |
Population: There are no verifiable data as to the
number of Kurds in the world today. Estimates range
from 25 to over 35 million, making the Kurds the
largest stateless ethnic group in the world. More
than half of the Kurds live in Turkey, several
million in northern Iraq and north-west Iran, and
there are some hundred thousands in Syria and the
Caucasus states. In Europe there are more than a
million Kurds and Austria has around 150,000, where
they are regarded as being well integrated.
Religion: The Kurds are not militant religious
fanatics. Most of them are Sunnite Muslims, and
there is also a small minority of Shiites. For the
most part they were forced to convert to Islam in
the early Middle Ages. There are also various
syncretic religions among the Kurds, beliefs that
reconcile the contents of different religions. Some
of them go back to archaic sun worshippers and
Zoroastrianism, which is regarded as the precursor
of monotheism. In the first century Kurdistan played
an important role in the spread of Christianity in
the Middle East. The oldest Christians formed their
original communities and churches above all in the
region around Erbil, the present-day Kurdish
capital, in northern Iraq and into Iran. www.ekurd.net
Kurds gassed decades ago by
the British and Turks:
Many people might not know that when the Kurds were
gassed by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in the
1980s it wasn’t the first time they had suffered
that fate. Shortly before the death of Mustafa Kemal
(1881–1938), founder of republican Turkey, the
Turkish army used poisonous gas against the Kurdish
rebels in the mountain region of Dersim in eastern
Anatolia in the late 1930s, despite the fact that
Turkey had signed the Geneva Protocol banning
chemical weapons following the deaths caused by
poisonous gas in the First World War. And in the
1920s in Iraq, 65 years before Saddam Hussein, the
British used poisonous gas against rebels. They were
acting at the time as the world custodians in
present-day Iraq, then still called Mesopotamia, and
had a League of Nations mandate for their acts. They
promised freedom for Mesopotamia but in reality they
put it under the yoke of the new state of Iraq,
which was cobbled together in London from Shiite
regions in the south, Sunnite regions in the centre
and Kurdish regions in the north.
The guiding personality in Great Britain at that
time was Winston Churchill (1874-1965), initially
Minister of War and then Colonial Secretary.
Literally the entire population of the new Iraq,
Schiite and Sunni Arabs and Kurds alike, rebelled
repeatedly in the 1920s against the British
colonisation plans and were bloodily put down on
several occasions, in some cases with the use of
poisonous gas. It was certainly used against rebel
Arabs, but whether Kurds were also victims is still
in dispute today. There are witnesses that claim
that it was the case. In northern Iraq the Kurds
were nevertheless able to achieve limited
independence, at least for a time.
Genocide in Turkey
The Kurds were not so successful in Turkey. After
the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World
War, the Treaty of Sèvres provided for a mini-state
in south-east Turkey, which was to be united on the
basis of a free referendum with the Kurdish
territory in northern Mesopotamia to form a larger
Kurdish state. It never came about. The Treaty of
Sèvres was not ratified and never entered into
force. It was the victim of the new situation that
Mustafa Kemal and his republican troops created on
the battlefield.
Mustafa Kemal had originally promised the Kurds
equal treatment and limited independence if they
helped him to free Turkey from foreign troops. The
Kurds helped him, conquering cities like Urfa, but
were subsequently abandoned and their rebellions
were brutally quashed. Turkey prohibited a Kurdish
national identity and made it a punishable offence,
which it remains today. The Swiss historian
Hans-Lukas Kieser speaks of Kurdish genocide in
Turkey. It is only in recent times, with the
prospect of Turkey’s accession to the EU, that the
anti-Kurdish laws have been relaxed. After
negotiations have repeatedly stalled, the Kurd
conflict is escalating again in Turkey and its
impact is being felt as far as Austria. www.ekurd.net
Information:
The book Impressive size: 700 pages with many
illustrations, drawings, tables, references and new
maps.
Hennerbichler, Ferdinand: Die Kurden. Edition fhe,
2004, Paperback, 700 pages, 348 illustrations & 117
drawings, ISBN 963 214 575 5, Price: €49.90
Via e-mail: fhe@fhe.cc, from wieninternational at or
at any bookshop
The author
Ferdinand Hennerbichler: Born in Linz in 1946,
studied history and linguistics at the University of
Vienna from 1965 to 1972; has worked since 1967 for
the ORF and numerous other media in Austria, Germany
and Switzerland; has been reporting since the 1970s
on the Kurds and regularly travels to Kurdistan;
first history of the Kurds in 1988 with foreword by
Bruno Kreisky; worked for Bruno Kreisky as Middle
East assistant in the 1980s; has worked for the City
of Vienna and Compress since the early 1990s.
wieninternational at
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