Exactly this. Take the Babylonian Jews. AKA the Iraqi Jews. They were the descendants of the Jews who stayed in Babylon after the Babylonian Exile in 586 BCE, when the Babylonians under King Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed the First Temple in Jerusalem and dragged much of the Jewish population of the Kingdom of Judah into exile in Babylon.
Then, when the Persian Empire defeated the Babylonians in 539 BCE, the Persian King Cyrus the Great allowed the Jews to return to Judea. Many Jews chose to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the Second Temple, which they completed in 515 BCE.
However, there were Jews who chose to remain in diaspora in Babylon. These Jews are the ancestors of the Babylonian Jews of Iraq.
And there were even earlier Israelite communities in the region that's now called Iraq. These were Israelites who had been taken captive and brought to Mesopotamia after the Neo-Assyrians defeated the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE and captured many of the societal elite. That is where many of the "Ten Lost Tribes" of Israel actually wound up. Many of the members of the Northern Kingdom of Israel who were not captured fled south to the Kingdom of Judah.
So, the Babylonian Jews lived in the same region (what is now modern day Iraq) for over 2500 years, ever since the early 500s BCE (and closer to 2700 years when we include the members of the Northern Kingdom who were taken captive in 722 BCE).
The Babylonian Jews had a rich and ancient culture and history. For hundreds of years, especially after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, the Babylonian Jewish community was a major source of Jewish learning and culture. That is one reason why the Babylonian Talmud is our main source of Talmud, and not the Jerusalem Talmud.
Babylonian Jews lived continuously in the region until the 1940s. They were, of course, always a minority population in the region. And under Muslim rule (starting with the conquest of Babylon in 636 CE), Jews in Ottoman Iraq were of second class Dhimmi status, subject to regular pogroms and forced to pay the Jizya, a tax on non-Muslims.
Then in 1941, Muslims in Baghdad carried out the Farhud, which was a violent pogrom against the Jews in Baghdad.
Over the following decade, the violence against the Jews in Iraq only escalated, and between 1948 and 1952, hundreds of thousands of Jews fled Iraq to escape mass genocide.
This was part of the overall flight of Jews out of the Muslim world in the late 1940s. In all, nearly 900,000 Jews were forced to flee MENA countries, narrowly escaping another Jewish genocide.
During Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, around 130,000 Jews were airlifted out of Iraq and brought to refugee camps in Israel. They arrived with nothing. The Iraqi authorities forced the Jews to leave all their valuables behind so that they could confiscate them and enrich themselves.
In this interview with The Book of Life Podcast, Australian Jewish author Sarah Sassoon describes her Babylonian Jewish family's harrowing escape from Iraq during Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, which she has turned into a children's book called Shoham's Bangle.
The descendants of these Babylonian Jews make up a significant portion of Israel's Mizrahi (Middle Eastern Jewish) population today.
Over the following decades, more and more Jews fled Iraq. There once was an ancient, thriving Jewish community of around 150,000 Jews in Iraq, which predated Islam by over 1000 years. Today, only around 4 Jews remain.
And guess what, kids! That is the very definition of ethnic cleansing: the expulsion, imprisonment, and/or killing of an ethnic minority by a dominant majority in order to achieve ethnic homogeneity.
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