Baghdadi Jews, also known as Iraqi Jews, are Jewish emigrants from Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, which not only includes Jews from the Iraqi capital city of Baghdad, but from other areas of Iraq, as well as Jews from Syrian and Yemenite origin.Many of them were merchant traders who settled on trade routes and formed immigrant communities in their new homelands. Baghdad and Iraq in general used to have one of the largest, if not the largest Jewish community in the Middle East and Central Asia, and these new immigrant communities also included Jews as part of the Mughal courtiers. Records of Jewish tradesmen traveling from Baghdad can be found from the early 17th century, and around the mid-19th century a large portion of the community started immigrating to South and Southeast Asia as well