The secret Jewish lives of my family in Iran

Last week a Jew was executed in Iran after  being sentenced to death for fatally wounding a man. The family of Arvin Nathaniel Ghahremani, 20, said he was defending himself against a knife attack, and after wrestling the weapon off his assailant had tried to get the man to hospital.

His family also said “key errors in the case were intentionally ignored” at his trial.  The Norway-based Iran Human Rights group agreed: “Institutionalised antisemitism in the Islamic Republic undoubtedly played a role in the implemenation of his sentence.”

Five weeks before Ghahremani’s execution, Israel assassinated Hezbollah leader  Hassan Nasrallah and leaders of the tiny Iranian-Jewish community of 9,000 or so were very quick to condemn the Jewish state’s “aggression” in doing so. Such is the price for Jewish survival in the philistine regime.

But the price has been higher. In the 19th century, it was convert to Islam, or escape. This was the dilemma facing my parents and their forbears in Iran, a country where they had lived since the mid-eighteenth century when the Azizollahoffs, were brought to Mashhad from the western shores of the Caspian Sea, in the mid-18th century by a Sunni ruler called Nadir Shah. At first their large family prospered in the city but when Shah was assassinated by rival Shiite Muslims and they no longer had his protection, their fortunes worsened.

A century later, life had got so bad that in 1839, 50 of the town’s 2,400 Jews were murdered in a pogrom.  After the massacre, the local imam took six young Jewish girls for his harem and thereafter there were essentially three choices for the Jews of Mashdad: convert to Islam and assimilate into Muslim society; convert on the surface, but continue to practise Judaism in secret; get out.

The Jews who refused to convert mainly fled to Herat in the predominantly Sunni Afghanistan.  The crypto-Jews who remained continued to practise Judaism, to lead a double life in Mashhad, for five generations. They had Muslim names, attended mosque, wore miniature tefillin under their turbans and bought halal meat while keeping the laws of kashrut. They devised a secret writing called Jadidi that used Rashi script and Farsi words. They kept hidden synagogues in their homes, and paid bribes to local imams and the police to ensure their relative safety.  And they were known as Jadid al Islam: The New Muslims.

But even though they had ostensibly converted they were never seen as Muslims or treated as equals by their non-Jewish neighbours.

Considered unclean, these crypto-Jews continued to live in the edgah, the ghetto outside the city’s walls, in the shadow of the imam’s mosque, where they had been banished before the 1839 pogrom. Unable to live and work in the city, many of the men became merchants, in some cases leaving their wives and families for months and sometimes years on end.

Fifty years later in 1889, my forebears the Azizollahoffs would build a market called Azizollahoff Caravan Sarai for travellers on the Silk Route to sell their wares. It was also a place where the Jews of Mashhad would work, open shops and where they could pray in secret. The market remains to this day, complete with a plaque bearing the family’s name.

But before this in 1859 and only 20 years after the pogrom, all the Jews who had fled Mashhad and who were living in Herat were taken prisoner by Persian troops for alleged treason. After a 20-day march in the snow, poorly dressed and nourished, the survivors of the 400km journey were imprisoned for almost two years and forced to live with camels and horses in a dilapidated military inn near Mashhad. Eventually, the poverty-stricken crypto-Jews of Mashhad raised sufficient funds to buy the prisoners’ freedom.

Among the survivors of the prison was my paternal great-great grandmother, Rahel Mashade and her husband, my great-great grandfather, Abdul Cohen. A highly resourceful pedlar, beautician and hairdresser who sold fabrics and herbal medicines door to door,  she also made it her mission to teach and persuade the hidden Jewish women of the city to keep the faith. It is no exaggeration to say that she was central to the prevention of the community’s assimilation. She also played her part in stalling further pogroms, a threat which loomed over the community every year as Pesach approached. One year, escorted by three Jewish men disguised as women in chadors, my great-great grandmother went to the office of the city’s governor with a substantial gift in tow and convinced him to convince the local police to defuse a brewing riot against the Jews.

My paternal grandmother was also a woman of influence. Known as Rahel Mashade II, she was a midwife who delivered some Jewish and Muslim 300 babies. She was not an educated woman but she managed to concoct what were, according to family lore, effective medicines, including contraception. She also helped prepare brides for their big day, doing their make-up, painting beautiful henna patterns on their hands and and teaching the Jewish marital laws in which she was well versed. In the basement of her home, Rahel kept a secret synagogue where she covertly baked communal matzot. Each matzah was individually wrapped and collected at night under the cover of a chador.

My mother, Haji Bibi Rivka Haruni, lived with Rahel Mashade II from the age of 13, when she became a child bride. She taught herself to read and write the Jadidi script and to read a siddur and the Torah. Marrying in one’s early teens was common in the community: it was seen as a a way of ensuring Jewish continuity in the face of Muslim persecution. My mother went on to have eight children, six of whom survived. Her own mother had given birth to 14 babies, eight of whom died. Life in early 20^th century Persia – the Persian government changed the name of the country from Persia to Iran in 1935 – was brutally hard.  Both women lived without running water and electricity. Their Judaism, their faith, was a central tenet of their resilience.

In 1925, my maternal Azizollahoff grandparents and their families escaped to Jerusalem. My paternal grandmother Rahel Mashade II, travelled to the city via Damascus in 1935 when she was 70 and with three young grandchildren in tow who were recorded in her passport as her children. In 1937, my mother Rivka, then aged 28, left Mashhad in a horse and cart with three children (I was born later, in 1943) for Bombay where her husband had escaped three years previously. There was a large Iraqi Jewish community in the city and thanks to the legendary Sassoon family, many synagogues and Jewish schools and Jewish-friendly factories where the émigrés could work.

After the War of Independence, my family moved from Bombay to Israel and several Mashhadi families went with them. Some two decades previously some Mashhadi Jews had come to London where they set up the  Persian Hebrew Congregation, in Stamford Hill. Next year the Persian synagogue, as it is known, celebrates its centenary. I came to London from Israel in 1957.

But there aren’t many of us here. Most Mashhadi now live in Israel, Milan and New York. Of the 9,000 or so Jews who remain in Iran most are reluctant to leave because international sanctions implemented against the regime have downgraded its currency so severely they would find it difficult to set up home elsewhere: their money would not go far. So they remain trapped, publicly distancing themselves from Israel and Zionism, living with the constant fear that they will be accused of spying for the Jewish state.

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November 20 marks the tenth anniversary of the Knesset law designating a date to mark the expulsion of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries in 1948. This year, the theme is the Jews of Iran jw3.org.uk/whats-on/arab-iranian-jews-2024

You can watch Rachel Freedman’s Harif lecture here.