Description
Book SynopsisThis book tells the little-known story of a fascinating crypto-Jewish community through two centuries and three continents. Beginning as a precarious settlement of a few families in mid-18th-century Mashhad, an Islamic holy city in northern Iran, the community grew into a closely-knit group in response to their forced conversion to Islam in 1839. Muslim hostility and a culture of memory sustained by intra-communal marriages reinforced their separate religious identity, vesting it in strong family and communal loyalty. Mashhadi women became the main agents of the cultural transmission of communal identity and achieved social roles and high status uncharacteristic for contemporary Jewish and Muslim communities. The Mashhadis maintained a double identity, upholding Islam in public while tenaciously holding onto their Jewish identity in secret. The exodus from Mashhad after 1946 relocated the communal center to Tehran, later to Israel, and, after the Khomeini revolution, to New York. The relationship between the formation and retention of communal identity and memory practices - with interconnected issues of religion and gender - draws upon existing research on other crypto-faith communities, such as the Judeoconversos, the Moriscos, and the French Protestants, who, through the special blend of memory-faith and ethnicity, emerged strengthened from their underground period. For the immigration period, the author challenges the old paradigm that "modernity and religion are mutually exclusive." The book also explores the sometimes uncomfortable yet intimate relationships that exist between seemingly incompatible ways of seeing the past, both secular and religious.
Trade Review“Hilda Nissimi’s book is a valuable and worthy contribution to what is gradually emerging as a new and much needed phase in Judeo-Persian studies brought about by a new generation of scholars who are expanding on the work of previous archeologists, historians, and anthropologists to shed light on previously overlooked nuances of what it meant, and indeed of what it means, to be an Iranian Jew.” —From the Foreword by Houman Sarshar, editor of Esther's Children: A Portrait of Iranian Jews
“In 1839, the Jews of Mashhad in Northern Iran were forcibly converted by their Muslim neighbors. Like the Marranos, they continued to observe Jewish practices in secret. Members of the community can now be found in Israel, the United States, England and elsewhere. Of special interest are the features of an underground community. There was much intermarriage within the community. Women played a very special role in the maintenance of tradition. When the Mashhadis left Iran and returned to the open practice of Judaism they tended to build their own synagogues, similar to the Landsmannschaft of the emigrants from East Europe. The importance of this book is that it treats a topic of which the average reader knows nothing.” —AJL Newsletter
