Poetry, satire, and self in the post-constitutional Iranian-Jewish periodical Ha-Hayyim

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Iranian-Jewish newspaper Ha-Hayyim represented a high point of Jewish engagement with the wider public sphere in the late Qajar period. Its modernizing agenda saw it and its editor Shemuel Hayyim become subjects of controversy as Jews debated their political future in Iran. This article examines four poems featured in Ha-Hayyim as a means of illuminating a period of Jewish literary creativity mostly neglected by scholarship. The paper explores the poems as literary and historical texts and outlines the writers’ employment of modern literary techniques, comparing them with contemporary Iranian writing in Persian and Hebrew. Jewish literary engagement with Persian literature represents an important linguistic and political self-assertion in a dynamic cultural environment. The article pursues the poems’ overlapping treatment of Zionism and constitutionalism, examining how the two ideologies informed each other, and argues for a literary optic to the well-documented antagonism between Hayyim and his political rivals.