The following is a text from a book published in 1853, describing a meeting with a Jewish tribe near the town of Bashkale in eastern Turkey.
Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon / Austen Henry Layard, 1853, pp. 383–384
My companions and servants required rest, and I therefore stopped for a day at Bashkale. When we resumed our journey, we chose a direct but difficult route to Van, a road open only in the middle of summer.
We followed a small stream and entered the heart of the mountains. Three hours of riding, in a continual ascent along the banks of the stream, brought us to a large encampment. The flocks were making their way down from the high pastures and had gathered to be milked at the entrances to the black tents.
A group of women were already kneeling and sitting around the sheep. Their long hair was arranged in curled folds, ending in braided strands decorated with gold coins. From a tall, brightly colored turban, also adorned with coins, a thin white veil fell over their shoulders and garments made of brightly colored silk. The children ran about with wooden bowls, while a girl standing nearby sang a melancholy song, beating a tambourine rhythmically.
The features of the women and men who came out of their tents as we rode toward them, as well as the language in which they addressed one another, immediately indicated that they were not Kurds. They were Jews, shepherds and nomads—perhaps remnants of those who, together with the High Priest Hyrcanus, were exiled from Jerusalem by Tigranes in the second century and settled in the vicinity of the city of Van. Their descendants, two hundred years later, had become so numerous that Shapur II killed no fewer than 10,000 families in Van alone.
We camped near the Jewish nomads and I visited their tents, but I was unable to learn anything about their history. They tended their flocks as their forefathers had done before them in those same hills, and paid taxes to the governor of Bashkale. There were many other families, shepherds like them, scattered throughout the mountains, just as they had been when they were despised by the Egyptians.