Mashhadi Jews' origin
Evidence of Jews living in the historical region of Greater Khorasan (not to be confused with the contemporary Iranian provinces of Khorasan), which encompassed parts of modern-day north-eastern Iran, southern Turkmenistan, and northern Afghanistan, dates back to the fourth century. In the Babylonian Talmud, a story from the fourth century AD refers to a member of the religious academy in Pumbedita (modern-day Iraq), who travelled to Marv at the border of Turkmenistan and Iran. He was taken in by the local Jewish community, whereupon disputes about ritual cleanliness arose. This suggests that there were local liturgical and halakhic differences between Jews in Greater Khorasan and Babylonian Jews, which over time became standardized by the religious authorities from Babylonia to a certain extent.
Modern Jewish settlement in Mashhad
In the modern period, the establishment of a Jewish community in north-eastern Iran is connected to King Nader Shah Afshar (r. 1736–1747). He relocated about forty Jewish families from the city of Qazvin near the Caspian Sea to Kalat-e Naderi, which he wanted to establish as the new capital of Iran. The families he chose were trusted merchants, possibly in the gemstone business. Khorasan’s northern edge was difficult to control because many local tribes had shifting loyalties and sometimes cooperated with raiders or rival powers. By relocating groups who depended directly on royal patronage and had no strong local tribal base, Nader Shah could build communities whose security depended on the state. Jews, Armenians, and some artisan groups fell into this category, but so did Kurdish and Turkic clans, who were moved far from their original homelands. In 1747, while the resettlement project was still in progress, Nader Shah was assassinated. Most Jewish families established themselves in Mashhad, in a quarter called Eid-Gah (“Place of Festival,” or “Place of Eid prayer”), which had formerly been home to a Zoroastrian community.
The Jewish families in Mashhad thrived economically due to their previous status as merchants, as well as their geographical proximity to the Silk Road trade, connecting them with cities such as Bukhara and Samarkand in today’s Uzbekistan, Herat (Afghanistan), or Marv (Turkmenistan). Jews from other places in Iran moved to Mashhad, such as from Yazd, especially after the famine in 1770, and from Kashan in Central Iran, pointing to the fact that at the time, it offered greater economic possibilities and a safer life for a minority community.
The Allahdad riot
In 1839, a riot broke out during which the Jewish community was pressured to convert to Islam. While some individuals and families had previously converted voluntarily, this event—called Allahdad (“God given”)—was violent, leading many members of the community either to accept Islam or to leave Mashhad. Various reasons are given for this event: the main narrative is that a woman (or in some versions, a Jewish man from a community outside of Mashhad) slaughtered a dog for medical reasons. The Muslims in Mashhad took this as an offense to their religious holiday of Muharram, after which they began to attack the Jewish neighborhood. While this is a feasible explanation for the outbreak, it might have been a pretext for pressuring the Jewish community to accept Islam. Scholars advocate for explaining this event not as a single, sudden cause, but as the result of several interacting pressures—religious hostility, local tensions, and political circumstances that made the community vulnerable. Community narratives recall that only a few of the influential members of the community officially accepted Islam, while others followed suit without formally converting. Nonetheless, after this date, the majority of the community lived as Muslims, praying in the mosque, marrying according to Islamic customs, and going on pilgrimage to Mecca. Yet it is important to note that the community was not homogeneous: while some fully accepted Islam, others performed a Muslim identity in public but retained Jewish customs in private, and yet another group rejected the conversion and no longer mixed with the former two groups. This had economic implications, as the first two groups were able to continue or even thrive in business, while the last group lived isolated with few contacts to the outside world. However, no clear causality can be stated regarding how internal class differences were connected to religious identity and practice.
Hybrid identities
The diaries of travelers, such as the Jewish convert to Christianity Joseph Wolff or Ephraim Neumark, describe the Mashhad community as having strong Sufi inclinations, defying rigid and exclusive religious belonging (before 1839). Neumark states that they were highly respected by the city’s authorities (after 1839). Of those who decided to leave Mashhad, most went to Herat, becoming leading members of the community there. Others moved to Bukhara, as well as to Marv, where they lived together with other Persian-speaking Jews, yet retained their unique identity as Mashhadi Jews. Some accounts relate that Mashhadi Jews identified as Jewish when in Central Asia, while others also retained their Muslim identity outside of Mashhad.
The contemporary emphasis that the Muslim identity was only “fake,” imposed on them from the outside, while they maintained a strict Jewish identity in secret, does not apply to he community as a whole. Some community members recalled that it was “an open secret” that they still practiced Jewish traditions, but that this was not an issue as long as they professed loyalty to Islam in public. It might therefore be more accurate to speak of fluid or multifaceted religious identities in which Muslim and Jewish elements aligned, rather than a “real” (Jewish) and a “fake” (Muslim) one. This does not preclude that the community was vulnerable and at times under pressure.
Despite the conversion, social and religious-cultural life also flourished, as can be inferred from a manuscript about the story of Yusuf (Joseph) and Zulaikha. The text is a Judeo-Persian transcription of the Sufi poem by Nur ad-Din ‘Abd ar-Rahman Jami, based on the biblical story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife. It was completed by the scribe Eliyahu ben Nissan ben Eliyah in 1853, fourteen years after the Allahdad, and contains twenty-six fine miniatures. Housed at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, the manuscript speaks to a long tradition in which Judeo-Persian authors borrowed the Persian/Islamic literary conventions when retelling biblical stories—a tradition kept alive by the Jewish community in nineteenth-century Mashhad.
Mashhadi Jews would mainly marry each other, and usually not even other Iranian Jews. This practice was common, especially among minority groups in Iran, but was more pronounced among Mashhadis, who maintained this practice until a few decades ago. It is usually explained by their past as crypto-Jews, when they had to hide and protect themselves. In addition, accounts from the Jewish communities in Herat and Bukhara also position this practice in relation to socio-economic status (Mashhadi Jews thought of themselves as superior), and religious legitimacy; that is, that Bukharan Jews would not allow their children to marry Mashhadis, because they had the stigma of conversion. It can be concluded that the community was diverse: not all of them practiced Islam the same way, nor was the community as a whole exceptionally rich, and while some Mashhadis were revered in comparison with other Jews, others were looked down upon.
The Pahlavi era and emigration
With the end of the Qajar dynasty in Iran in 1925 and Reza Shah Pahlavi taking the throne, the influence of religion in public was pushed back, leading Mashhadi Jews to live more openly as Jews. Religious schools were no longer clandestine, and Jewish education and religiosity did not have to take place in private. A Jewish boys’ school had existed prior to 1925, and some Mashhadi families had sent their children to private Persian schools. By the 1930s, the Jewish community was running a Talmud Torah school and a heder ( for boys in addition to the state schools. The community had expanded from the old quarter to a new neighborhood called Jannat, and a Jewish family in this neighborhood was the first in the city to own a telephone. Moreover, the community ran a caravanserai, bathhouses, a cemetery, and several synagogues, some of them in close proximity to the Shrine of Imam Reza, the most important Shiʿite pilgrimage site in Iran.
In 1946, when Soviet troops left Mashhad, a riot and anti-Jewish violence occurred. Mashhadi Jewish memoirs often highlight the governor or certain police officers who personally safeguarded families, emphasizing the contrast with earlier periods. Possible catalysts could have been an alleged “pro-Russian” stance among the Jews, but these were only rumors, part of a pattern where Jews were accused of foreign allegiances during times of political uncertainty.
By 1948, the Jewish population of Mashhad was recorded at around 2,500, but most left after the riot, and by the early 1970s, only a small number remained. Early migration to Jerusalem had already taken place in the nineteenth century, often in connection with pilgrimage to Mecca. A few affluent families had also moved to London or South Africa in the 1920s. Mashhadi Jews arriving in Palestine in the late 1930s and early 1940s were confronted with doubts about their Jewish status from the rabbinic establishment. Only after petitioning the Sephardic chief rabbi Ben-Zion Meir Hai Uziel were they recognized as halakhically Jewish.
In the mid-twentieth century, most Mashhadi Jews went to Tehran. There, they constituted a community and synagogue of their own, not mingling with other Jews. In 1979, large-scale migration took place to the United States (East Coast) and Israel. About 10,000 Mashhadi Jews are estimated to live in Israel today, forming the largest concentration of this community outside Iran. In addition, there are several thousand in the United States (around 4,000), as well as smaller communities in Milan, London, and formerly in Hamburg, Germany.
Among the many synagogues that existed in Mashhad, one still exists, to the author’s knowledge, though it is inactive. Besides a Mashhadi synagogue in Tehran, there are two that were founded in Jerusalem by the first immigrants to that city in the late nineteenth century. One of them has a plaque at the entrance identifying it as the synagogue of the Anusim (“forced converts”) of Mashhad. It was founded by Haji Adonya (Adonai) HaCohen and is named after him.
Bibliography
Dilmanian, Yaghoub. History of the Jews of Mashad, 1746–1946 AD: From Their Entrance to Mashad at the Time of Nader Shah Afshar until Their Migration from Mashad to Tehran. Translated by Vida Nabavian. New York: Privately published, 1999.
Levy, Azaria. The Jews of Mashad. Includes multiple articles on Mashhadi Jewish history, such as “The Expulsion of the Jews of Mashad from Herat, 1856–1859.” National Library of Israel catalogue listing. https://www.nli.org.il/en/books/NNL_ALEPH990017691420205171/NLI
Nissimi, Hilda. The Crypto-Jewish Mashhadis: The Shaping of Religious and Communal Identity in Their Journey from Iran to New York. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021.
Patai, Raphael. Jadīd al-Islām: The Jewish “New Muslims” of Meshhed. Detroit, Mi: Wayne State University Press, 1997.
Sadjed, Ariane. “Conversion, Identity, and Memory in Iranian-Jewish Historiography: The Jews of Mashhad.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 53 (2021): 235–51.