Customer Reviews

Esther's Children: A Portrait of Iranian Jews

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This is one of the most beautiful books I own. It is beautifully designed, and the photographs are brilliant. The quality of the book itself is also most exceptional. In a lot of ways, the book is almost a photo-narrative of the history of Jews in Iran. I am an Jewish Iranian-American graduate student, and I am awed by the amount of information I've found in the book. There was so much about my own heritage that I didn't know. Every page is filled with invaluable information about the history and culture of the Jews of Iran. The information is certainly of scholarly quality, but the book is so easy and pleasurable to read. Anyone interested in Jewish studies, Iranian studies, or even Middle Eastern history should own this book. It also makes a spectacular gift. Mine was a gift from my girlfriend. I can not recommend it enough.

I have only dipped into the first few articles and I can say that the book is worth 100 times the price. Thank you for making this incredible work of history possible. It's contribution to Jewish history and to the history of Iran is invaluable.

This is one of the rare documents that describe a corner of so rich and profound Jews History in Persia (Iran). As much this book is probably one of a kind, and so well written, and the writer(s) efforts, has to be recognized; the planning and ideas which originated from its supporting organization (The Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History) which so far has led to production of this book deserves to be recognized much greater. The Persian (Iranian) Jews have brought a rich history with them to western hemisphere. Publication such as this, not only demonstrates their effort in more than 5000 years to survive, thrive, and contribute to the culture and governing system that they lived in, but also can acts as a permanent document to be passed on to their next generation; a generation which is not or so poorly exposed to their past and the history of their ancestors.

As a first generation Jewish-Iranian immigrant to the States, I want to thank Houman Sarshar and those who put together this work. My entire family has been unable to put this incredible volume down for the past three days! It is the only documentary I know that so beautifully, authentically, and fully details the history, lives, and images of Iranian Jews.

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

It is essential for the world over to become more aware of these important yet overlooked facts.

The book contains very interesting photographs of the early century, late 1800's and 1920's,, including two people very close to me.
Sadly there were factual conditions at some intervals that for an ancient nation, known for rescuing and harboring Jews, are very sad and disppointing. Even though the conditions cannot be compared to Europian persecutions,and mass murders, nevertheless unjust and not worthy of this nation. The good thing is that the book also mentions improvement of the conditions on occasions.
As a Persian, growing in a family with no prejudiece and having Jwes as my classmates and coworkers, and neighbors, I was disappointed that those unkind treatments could have happened in my homeland. My grand mother was living in a neighborly way next to her Jwish Neighbors and helping them when asked and accepting help when needed and offered. My grand father and father thought Jewish and Moslem kids side by side in the French established Jwish school. So it was painful for me to understand the way things were at times.

Hey, who ever wrote this book included some of my family photos. The farhoumand family or in the book "farhumand" is mine and i am proud to say we are the only ones because my grandfather made it up. he is the one with the cross-eyes as a little boy. Um.. yah my mom's side of the family is also in there "azizi." Anyways. I am not jewish, my family history is though. Now my family is Bahai, which is not a sect of islam. Yah... so thats cool! YAY I AM FAMOUS!