Esther's Children: A Portrait of Iranian Jews

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Esther's Children: A Portrait of Iranian Jews

(Interesting book but it looks like it has the same old Zionist Style of Story telling.)

By    Alyssa A. Lappen (Earth) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)  
Only 20,000 severely oppressed Jewish people remain in Iran today. This is the remnant of the Middle East's oldest Jewish community outside Israel--dating from 563 B.C.E. (after Jerusalem's first Jewish Temple was destroyed). This elegant book's 25 essays by Persian Jews detail Iranian Jewish history and culture, as well as some of the repressions that arrived with Islam's advent and worsened markedly under the Safavids beginning in 1501, possibly a result of Shi'ite religious wars with Sunni Turkey.

Whatever the cause, however, this book provides a welcome window onto harsh Islamic treatment of non-Muslims, actualized through the religious ordinances (fatwas) of Iranian mullahs that ruled "impure" all infidels--Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists and others--and also Sunni Muslims.

As Hooshang Ebrami explains in "The Impure Jew," for example, Iran's Islam imposed special degradations on one of its oldest minorities, rejecting them "as impure human beings." Institutional humiliations and limitations varied over time, Ebrami writes, yet "never ceased since the advent of Islam in Iran." Umar II (717 to 720) reduced the status of non-Muslims under the restrictive Shorut laws that became more resptrictive and oppressive with time. According to these religious laws, for example, simply touching those outside the faith rendered Muslims impure. Thus religious laws strictly prohibited Muslim-Jewish (and indeed, Muslim-Christian) friendships as mortal sins.

While the idea of unclean persons may have originated with non-monotheistic Zoroastrian and Hindu doctrines, Ebrami notes that the Koran expanded upon this according to faith: "O you who believe, the idolaters are surely unclean, so they shall not approach the sacred Mosque." (IX: 28).

The Shi'ite clergy increasingly upped the ante on Judeophobic regulations that worsened the economic and living conditions of "impure" Jews, Ebrami notes. Jews were "considered as unclean and polluting as dogs or pigs (not to mention urine or feces) and contact with them was shunned." Islamic jurist Mohammad Baqer Majlesi (d. 1699) under Shah Abbas II imposed laws that further protected Muslims by preventing their physical contact of any kind with "impure" Jews. These daily humiliations stripped Jews of even those flimsy rights that Iranian Islam had previously allowed.

Now, Jews could not give children Muslim names, read the Koran, hold public office, have shops in the bazaar, open shops on city streets--or even leave home when it rained. Muslims could murder Jews and go free, Ebrami writes, by paying a small blood price. On pain of death, Jews had to wear special hats and red clothing patches; remain silent and bow their heads while Muslims cursed them; and remain home after drinking wine, (required in Jewish rituals), or immediately be killed upon leaving. Even painting a room white in their homes could earn them a death sentence.

Jews for the most part lived in the "mahalleh," an Islamic equivalent of European ghettoes that centuries of "discrimination, marginalization, and disenfranchisement" earned them negative connotations. But even during the secular Pahlavi dynasty, when Iran's ruling elite gutted Sh'ite religious power, giving Iranian Jews more freedom than they had since 717, one learns here that harsh discriminatory regulations remained in force.

The memoirs of Hakham Yedidia Shofet, an eminent Pahlavi era rabbi, for example recall that near Kahsan's mahalleh was a large mosque with a courtyard attached via a short pathway to the bazaar. As Ebrami notes, this could have allowed Jews a quick shortcut to the market, but Islamic laws still prevented Jews from setting their "impure feet" on the mosque courtyard, on pain of death. To save their wives a half-hour walk around, several prominent Jews petitioned the local mullah for access through the yard--noting that impure dogs, cats, donkeys and camels routinely used it. The mullah declined them. "Jews are najes and therefore not allowed to come close to the Muslims' mosque," he told them.

Following the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini strengthened such dhimma laws still further.

This book shows that while Jews lived a rich and productive life over centuries in Iran, they did so in spite of Islamic oppression, not thanks to its tolerance. In other words, Iran's Jews were no better off than their European counterparts, and in fairly recent times, fared considerably worse.

A highly educational volume.

--Alyssa A. Lappen

[joeblow]

Esther's Children: A Portrait of Iranian Jews

(Interesting book but it looks like it has the same old Zionist Style of Story telling.)

[BULLSHIT REMOVED]

A highly educational volume.

--Alyssa A. Lappen

* DISCLAIMER, I AM IRANIAN *

What a load of shit, almost reaches the level of the Talmud. So, Iranian Jews are oppressed? Oh, that's why they turn down the $50,000 plus no-interest loans/free housing to move to Itsalie (AND THEY ALL CAN VISIT AND RETURN FROM THERE BY WAY OF TURKEY AFTER THEY HAVE COMPLETED THEIR MILITARY SERVICE LIKE EVERY OTHER IRANIAN, FUCK!), the first head of the Secret Service/Military Intelligence after the Islamic Revolution was a Jew (NO, HE MUST HAVE BEEN A JESUIT), and Iranian Jews in America always return to Iran to find spouses (AND NOT SOME PERVERT ASHKENAZI IN NEW YORK, BLAH).