Behind the Veil

In his introduction to “Esther’s Children,” editor Houman Sarshar speaks of a time when, 6 years old and about to start elementary school, he discovered his legacy as an Iranian Jew. It was 1973. Over breakfast in their apartment in Tehran, Houman’s father, a top planning commissioner in the shah’s Iran, noticed the Star of David pendant--a recent gift from a grandmother--hanging from his son’s neck. He reached over and slipped the necklace under Houman’s shirt.

“If anyone in school asks about your religion,” he instructed his son, “lie. Tell them you’re Muslim.”

Houman’s mother, a successful and highly regarded writer, journalist and television personality, flew into a rage at her husband’s urgings. Surely, she asserted, no one in the shah’s modern, Westernized Iran cared about a child’s religion. Surely, the Muslim hatred for Jews, the years of discrimination against “impure infidels,” the pogroms and forced conversions that had, for centuries, been the lot of her and her husband’s people had died when Iran became Americanized.

“Jewish, Muslim--what does it matter nowadays?” she asked in her typically confident tone.

But it’s her next sentence that leaves the deeper impression on Houman.

“Just tell them you’re Iranian,” she said. “Iranian like them.”

“Iranian like them” is not a notion with which the Jews of Iran have often felt at ease. The oldest community in Diaspora, Jews have lived in Iran longer than there has been an Iran or a Persia. Their history dates from 597 BC when King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylonia conquered Jerusalem and brought back 10,000 Jews as captives from Jerusalem and Judea. Some 58 years later, the children of those captives would rise against their Babylonian masters and help the armies of Cyrus the Great into victory, thus ushering in the Persian Empire.

Having lived in freedom in Zoroastrian Persia, the Jews found themselves under attack when Islam arrived in AD 637. Their persecution began with a list of obligations, Shorut, written by Umar II, that denied social and political equality to believers whose book was not the Koran. Friendship between a Muslim and Jew, under this law, was considered a mortal sin. Jews were declared impure and untouchable--a belief that was strengthened by Shiite clergy about 700 years later--and barred from any physical interaction with believers.

Though the laws of impurity extended to nonbelievers of every faith in Muslim Persia, they specifically targeted and victimized the Jews. Muslim clergy, especially Shiite mullahs, have always claimed a holy mandate to rule. Against the traditional, more secular monarchies in Persia and later Iran, they needed an army of zealots--the believers--to make a show of force. The quickest and most certain way to rally the troops, the clergy learned, was to designate a clear enemy--the Jew--and to declare jihad. In this, the Muslim clergy were in time emboldened by news of the Inquisition in Europe and by news of an anti-Semitic movement called Limpieza de Sangre, “Purity of Blood,” which had grown in Spain, targeting newly converted Jews to Christianity.

For the 1,300 years the Jews of Iran were forced to live in specific neighborhoods and to identify themselves by wearing special patches on their clothes or, for women, wearing thicker veils over their faces. Declared “not Iranian” and therefore barred from holding military or government posts, they were forbidden to leave their ghettos on rainy days (for fear that the rain might wash the impurity off their bodies and onto Muslim soil), to touch any food or item that may be consumed by a Muslim or to study any language except Hebrew.

Jews had no right to defend themselves in a court of law or to offer testimony in another’s defense. The life of a Jew was, by edict from the clergy, worth the equivalent of the market value of a cow. Worse yet, the entire Jewish community of a vast and varied nation was punished for the crimes--real or imagined--of any individual member.

The history of Iranian Jews under Islam is therefore replete with tales of pogroms and forced conversions. Their lot improved markedly in the mid-20th century when the late shah’s father, Reza Shah Pahlavi, under American influence, curbed the power of the mullahs and created a disciplined standing army that, for a while at least, kept the “believers” in check. Until then, whether suspected of drinking the blood of Muslim children, accused of plotting to destroy Islam or convicted of insulting the prophet (famously when a group of Jewish children walked, in 1922, ahead of a mule that had belonged to a servant who worked for a mullah), the Jews remained under constant pressure, always on the brink of annihilation. If the community survived long enough to see the shah’s reign, it was by preserving their unique identity without ever challenging the treatment they were subjected to. They learned to be vigilant, invisible, and silent.

Perhaps the most devastating consequence of this--the Jews’ inability or reticence to challenge their lot--was a decision not to record their history for fear of angering the mullahs. (The fatwa against Salman Rushdie, while certainly the most well-known in the West, was by no means the first or only one of its kind.) And so, a people that had existed on a land for 3,000 years, that had produced poets and philosophers, scholars and scientists and physicians, failed, ironically, to document its own existence.

The only exception to this was Habib Levy’s “History of the Jews in Iran,” written in Farsi in 1956 and out of print until an abridged version was translated into English and released in the United States in 1999. Levy wrote his book in the Iran of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, at a time when the Jews were protected and were flourishing. That was the Iran that Houman Sarshar grew up in, the Iran his parents worked and thrived in. It was a nation torn between its desire to return to a pre-Islamic, tolerant, progressive past and its deep and visceral ties with Islam. From that country, some Jews found the means to immigrate to Israel and the West. Others lived a middle-class existence and feared a time when the shah would be overpowered by the clergy. Still others, Sarshar’s parents among them, thrived not so much by denying their Jewishness, perhaps, as by hoping it would go unnoticed.

It was his parents’ past--the awareness that while in Iran, they had kept their identity half-veiled--that set Sarshar on the quest to create “Esther’s Children.” The Islamic revolution of 1978 wreaked unimaginable havoc upon the lives of Iranians everywhere, it is true, but it also forced many into exile in lands where, away from the reach of the mullahs, they discovered strengths they had forgotten they had. So it was for the two-thirds of Iranian Jews who left the country in the ‘80s and ‘90s. While some continued to live by the old rules in Iran, a group of scholars in Los Angeles set about gathering oral histories. The result is an impressive archive collected under the aegis of the Iranian Jewish Oral History Project, the findings of which have been recorded comprehensively in “Esther’s Children.” A collection of 25 articles written by distinguished historians and scholars living in the West, “Esther’s Children” is exquisite in presentation and meticulous in research. It manages a fine balance between the aesthetic and the academic, between preserving the Iranian and presenting the Jew in every facet of life. It is not angry or pretentious, nor is it hesitant or apologetic. It is simply a voice that stands confident and utters, without fear or compromise, the simple truth of a people’s existence.

It brings to life--in 458 oversized pages and 500 photographs from personal and public archives--the rundown overcrowded neighborhoods where the Jews lived and died in poverty and disease; the synagogues, some of which have sat empty since the mass emigration of Jews after the revolution; and the schools, established in Iran in the 1920s by the Alliance Israelite Universelle when the Jews were at last allowed to learn to read and write Farsi, French and eventually English. It presents a young girl dressed in a traditional gown for her wedding; a group of Polish soldiers who, having escaped Hitler’s armies in Iran, were given safe haven in Jewish homes. It depicts the tomb of Queen Esther, wife of Ahasuerus, who married the king by hiding from him her Jewishness and later saved the Jews of Iran from Haman’s pogrom, commemorated in the holiday of Purim.

In the end, “Esther’s Children” transcends ethnic or regional significance and stands as testimony to the most urgent question facing the West today: What happens to a people who are unable to fight or who choose not to bear witness to evil, a people who do not--or cannot--fight the armies of God, a people who blink in the face of fundamentalism?

Unmoved by his wife’s assertions of her children’s rightful legacy as Iranians, Sarshar’s father turns to his son that fateful morning in Tehran and teaches him a lesson he believes will serve him well:

“If anybody asks you your religion,” he says, “you’re allowed to lie.”

The more things change for Jews all over the world, the more, it seems, they stay the same. Yet for the Jews of Iran--at least under the protection of the United States Constitution, in exile and away from the mullahs--it is possible at last to speak the truth.