Kabul in eastern Afghanistan has been an important crossroads on the route to India and the Khyber Pass since antiquity and has been the capital of Afghanistan since 1773. End of 2009, its population of approximately 2.5 million included only one Jew.

There were apparently Jews living in Kabul in their own quarter as far back as the twelfth century. The Arab geographer al-Idrīsī (d. 1166) wrote in his Nuzhatal-Mushtāq fi ʾkhtirāqal-Āfāq that the Muslim population of the city was so large that there was a special quarter for the Jewish “infidels.” Many Jews served i…