The Jews of Iran: The History, Religion, and Culture of a Community in the Islamic World

Abstract

This is the third edited volume by Houman Sarshar that deals with the history of Iranian Jews. His previous editorial project, Jewish Communities of Iran, was a collection of all the entries on the Jewish communities of Persian-speaking countries published to date in the Encyclopeadia Iranica.1 Sarshar was also the editor of Esther's Children (published in 2002) and the English editor of three (out of four) volumes of Teruā—The History of Contemporary Iranian Jews (published 1996–2000).Houman Sarshar was born and raised in Iran in a Jewish family. He attributes his prolific scholarly work on the history of Iranian Jewry to a personal and familial motivation.2 Like many other Iranian Jews who fled Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Sarshar is anxious to preserve the historical and cultural heritage of this community. The shrinking size of the Jewish community in today's Iran lends urgency to his mission. In the 1970s, the size of the Jewish community in Iran was believed to be approximately 100,000, while today's Jewish community in Iran is approximately 10,000–15,000.This sense of urgency has led Jewish Iranian organizations outside of Iran to initiate and encourage publication of research on Iranian Jewry. This has resulted in almost twenty volumes (in English, Hebrew, and Persian) published during the last four decades. This review aims at examining Sarshar's most recent volume against the backdrop of previous research in order to draw attention to the concepts that have shaped this field through the years and to evaluate Sarshar's claim that “Jewish Iranian studies is at last entering the next and indeed exciting stage of scholarship” (p. xiii).The first collection of essays dedicated exclusively to the history of Jews in Iran was initiated in the 1970s by the Department of Iranian–Armenian Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The volume aimed to provide historical depth to the close ties and the warm relations between the state of Israel and Iran under the Pahlavi monarchy. This volume, titled Irano-Judaica, was completed in the mid-seventies but only published in 1982, when the political climate in both countries was less favorable for research dealing with the “historical friendship” between the Jews and the Iranian people. In his introduction, Shaul Shaked, who edited the volume, wrote: The idea of this book was conceived at the period when relations between Jews and the Iranian were on the whole friendly, and when these relations were even blessed by a measure of official approval, a rare enough phenomenon in the history of the two peoples. Such relations are severely condemned by the present ruler of Iran. May this book serve as a reminder that world civilization would have been so much the poorer but for the fruitful encounter between these two peoples and that neither Judaism, nor Christianity or Islam, would be the same without the mutual openness displayed by the Jews and Iranians towards each other in the Past. The “fruitful encounter between these two peoples,” mentioned by Shaked, was a substantial element of the Israeli discourse about Iran during the 1960s and 1970s, and this theme buttressed diplomatic relations between the two countries during Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi's reign (1941–79). However, the dramatic change in the political and diplomatic relations between the two countries following the 1979 revolution did not lower the motivation for further research on the topic. Shaked and Amnon Netzer, both from Hebrew University, edited five more volumes (the last of which was published in 2008) of Irano-Judaica. The main topics covered by this series of volumes related to the Jews and Judaism in the Persian Zoroastrian world. Among the ninety- five essays that were included in the volumes, only four address topics that are relevant to the history of Iranian Jews after Islam took root in Iran.The second editorial project addressing the history of Jews in Iran was initiated by Amnon Netzer in 1993 and was carried out thanks to the contribution of “the graduate society,” a nonprofit educational organization of Iranian Jews in Los Angeles. The “society,” which had been founded in 1991 in order “to promote a better understanding of the past among young Iranian Jews,” enthusiastically received Netzer's proposal to initiate a project concerning the history and culture of Iranian Jewry.3 This collaboration resulted in publication of three volumes of papers titled Padyavand. In his introduction to the first volume (published 1996), Netzer wrote: Throughout history Iranian Jewry has been an integral part of the Iranian people, contributing its part to the achievements of that nation. The bonds of friendship between the Iranian and Jewish people rest on a bedrock of mutual respect and cooperation which cannot be changed by political tension.4 Netzer's sweeping observations regarding the history of the Iranian Jewry, and their place in the history of Iran, echo similar concepts introduced by Iranian Jews throughout the twentieth century, and especially during the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah. These concepts allowed the Jews in Iran to express what they depicted as their special connection to Iran and its kings. One noteworthy example can be found in Tārīkh-I Yahūd-I Īrān (“A Comprehensive History of the Jews of Iran”) that was published in Iran in 1957. Habib Levy (1886–1984), the author, who was a prominent member of Iran's Jewish community in the twentieth century, dedicated the first volume of the book to “Dear Iranian compatriots that have unbreakable ties to the Jewish people.”5Four decades later, in a totally different political environment, while writing the history of Iranian Jews from outside Iran, Levy's nationalistic trope found its way into Netzer's Padyavand—the first collection of academic papers in Persian dealing with the history of Iranian Jewry. Netzer, a renowned scholar of Iranian Jewry and himself an Iranian-born Jew, reinforced the framework that Levy and Iranian Jews shaped for writing their history. But in Padyavand a new element was added, one that can be defined as utter disappointment with Iranian society for not acknowledging the Jewish contribution to Iranian history. The preface to the first volume of Padyavand, signed by “The Graduate Society Foundation,” includes the following: One would think that within this long period this community might have made a great contribution to Iranian society in general. But, unfortunately, no evidence has been found in contemporary Persian texts indicating the extent of social, economic, or political influence of Iranian Jews.6 These two conceptual framings were to influence the third editorial project to address Iranian Jewry. The project was initiated in 1995 with the foundation of the Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History. The center, founded in Los Angeles, aimed to collect historical documents related to the history of Iranian Jewry and to conduct interviews with the community's prominent figures. Homa Sarshar, who was the driving force behind the initiative, and headed the center, organized four international conferences between 1996 and 2000, during which researchers from around the world gathered to present papers dealing with the history of Iranian Jewry in modern times. These papers were published in Farsi in four volumes titled, Teruā—The History of Contemporary Iranian Jews. All four volumes were edited by Homa Sarshar, along with the help of Debbie Adhami, who was in charge of the English section of the first volume, and Houman Sarshar, who edited the English sections of the other volumes.In the preface to the first volume (published in the fall of 1996), Homa Sarshar points out what she refers to as the “lack of attention and fair judgment” with which historians of Iran treated its Jews, “who lived for centuries in Iran and were part of its history.” Homa Sarshar expressed her hope that the Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History would fill this void. Contemplating the history of Iranian Jewry, Homa Sarshar, an accomplished Iranian journalist and author, found inspiration in Esther, the Jewish-Persian queen from the Bible. Sarshar's play, titled From Esther to Esther, opens the first volume of Teruā. In her introduction to the play, Sarshar writes that she chooses to disregard the historical controversy regarding Esther, and whether she was Parthian or maybe nothing more than a myth. Sarshar explains that, for her, the story of Esther is a story that began yesterday and continues today and it is “the story of all the Esthers of my people, along the history of the Jews” (4).Esther's image as a symbol of the history of Iranian Jews was reinforced with the publication of Esther's Children—A Portrait of Iranian Jews, Houman Sarshar's first editorial project. For him, Esther's story was not only an inspiring metaphor but part of the history of Iranian Jewry. In the introduction to the volume, he wrote: A twenty-seven-hundred-year-old legacy of what it means to be an Iranian Jew, a legacy as old as the Bible itself, one that started with Esther when her uncle Mordecai told her to keep her Jewish faith a secret from King Ahasuerus in hopes of becoming queen. (xviii) In Esther's Children Sarshar introduces the history of Jews in Iran as existing between “dissimulation” (as did Esther) and “safe-keepers of some of the important elements of Iranian culture in general, particularly with respect to its music and its centuries-old tradition of wine-making” (xx–xxi). Sarshar's stance on the history of Iranian Jewry is consistent with those that have been mentioned above. But, by turning to the Book of Esther he introduces a new element for conceptualizing the history of Jews in Iran. However, one might argue that by turning to a biblical source Sarshar distances the topic from Iran and Iranian history.As much as these editorial projects have contributed to the Iranian Jewish studies, and are worthy of praise, there is room to examine the validity of their conceptual frameworks. Asserting that Iranian Jewry contributed to Iranian history and culture suggests that there can be an inclusive and coherent frame of reference according to which one can apprehend “the history” of a community. Moreover, even if we assume that contribution to a society can be measured, the question is whether this presupposition should be among historians' methodological tools when approaching a historical field of study.Returning to Sarshar's latest editorial project, The Jews of Iran: The History, Religion, and Culture of a Community in the Islamic World, it seems that this volume was carried out with a similar conceptual framework. Alluding to Esther in an artistic image (painted by German artist Hermann Anschütz) that adorns the volume's cover, Sarshar once again draws attention to Jews as “an active factor in the development of Iranian history, society and culture” (xiii). And this volume seeks to underscore this conceptual framework even further. In his introduction to the volume, Sarshar states that “Jewish Iranian studies is at last entering the next and indeed exciting stage of scholarship where […] researches are now examining the social, historical, and cultural life of Jews in Iran with the objectives of arriving at hypotheses that reach beyond a mere systematic archival documentation of facts” (xiii). Sarshar defines this new phase as one that “[is] raising our awareness about the fact that-whether as catalysts, harbingers, or markers of change – this ancient community of Iranians has consistently remained an inextricable thread in the complex fabric of greater Iran.” The volume is to offer “novel contributions to this new period of scholarship.”Sarshar's framework and the goals he sets for Jewish Iranian studies go beyond mere historical scholarship. It is not clear who the intended audience is for the “hypotheses” Sarshar is referring to. Are these hypotheses intended to guide future historical research? If so, isn't there a chance that Sarshar's framework runs the risk of marginalizing diverse historical episodes about Iranian Jewry that encompass conflict?In addition, the volume suffers from a few shortcomings. While targeting “the history, religion and culture of a community in the Islamic world,” Parvaneh Pourshariati's essay, which opens the volume, deals with the Jewish pattern of settlement in pre-Islamic Iran. The last four essays in the volume (out of ten) are dedicated to Jewish Iranian women's literary production, which the editor introduces as a “novel field in Judeo-Persian studies.” As novel and exciting as this new field might be, the emphasis that has been given to this new field detracts from the historical orientation of the book. Moreover, the literary works discussed in these essays were written by Jewish Iranian women who lived and published in the United States. As insightful as these essays are, for a broader understanding of the genre we need to also look at literary works written by Jewish Iranian women outside United States. Esther Shkalim's poetry, and the work of Sara Aharouni and Pari Sani, writing and publishing in Israel, might have added to the Jewish Iranian voices presented in this novel field of study. The other scholarly topics covered in this volume, namely the Lotera'i jargon of the Jewish communities (chap. 2), the history of the Jews of Mashhad (chap. 4), and Jews' material culture (chap. 6), to a large extent resemble what has already been done in previous edited volumes dealing with the history of Iranian Jews. Therefore, it seems that the present volume does not present a new stage of scholarship in Jewish Iranian studies, either in its conceptual framework or in the scholarly topics it covers. Thus, the need for new directions in Jewish Iranian studies remains to be addressed in the future.