The Allahdad in Mashhad: a community that went underground for a hundred and twenty years

After that day the community lived a double life for a hundred and twenty years.

First, what inverts the usual picture: Jewish Mashhad did not exist before the eighteenth century. The community was created by Nader Shah, who settled some forty Jewish families in the city—by tradition from Qazvin and Dilman—in the 1730s and 1740s, most often 1746, to service the treasury and the mint. So in 1839 the community was less than a century old.

The trigger was a domestic quarrel. A Jewish woman, told by a physician to cure a diseased hand by killing a dog and immersing the hand in its blood, hired a Muslim boy to do the killing; a dispute over payment followed, and the boy declared that the dog had been named Ḥusayn. The accusation fell during ʿĀshūrāʾ. (Another account traces the tension to an earlier dispute over payment for a ḥusayniyya built beside Jewish shops.)

The date is a case where a reference work can be more exact than anyone. 10 Muḥarram 1255 AH (ʿĀshūrāʾ) = 26 March 1839; 12 Nisan 5599 = 27 March. Both reckonings are right, and the one-day difference is the difference between converting the Islamic and the Hebrew date, compounded by the sunset boundary of the day. Passover that year began on the evening of 29 March, so the pogrom fell three days before the festival—which is why the community's memory anchors it in Nisan. House style: "26–27 March 1839 (10 Muḥarram 1255 / 12 Nisan 5599)." And "11 March," which the English Wikipedia prints, matches neither date.

Numbers, as ranges. The killed: 30–40; most often thirty-two, or about thirty-six, is printed. The community: about 150 families by some accounts, three or four hundred by others; two to two and a half thousand souls. The survivors converted to Islam in their entirety, reciting the shahāda together; the conversion ceremonies were led by the Imām Jumʿa, Ḥājji Sayyid Asghari. The synagogue was burnt and turned into a mosque; by tradition seven Torah scrolls were immured in the walls of the shrine of Imam Reza.

How the underground held is known in detail, and the details are worth listing: two names for everyone; domestic synagogues and cellar mikva'ot; scrolls, tefillin and tallitot carried through the streets by women in chadors—the most effective device, because the chador was not searched; ostentatious Muslim piety, up to the ḥajj, and food bought in Muslim shops and then discarded; matzah baked after midnight so the children could not give it away; strict endogamy with betrothals in infancy.

Sir Moses Montefiore obtained from Muḥammad Shah a decree permitting a return to Judaism; almost no one used it, out of fear. They left instead for Herat and Afghanistan, for Bukhara, Samarkand and Merv: for a Sunni environment where the question of apostasy did not bite so hard. In Jerusalem the first Mashhadi synagogue opened in 1901, the second in 1905.

And the newest correction in the field. Ariane Sadjed has shown that some of the converts genuinely entered Muslim Mashhad and prospered there, and that the community's own historiography imposes a modern binary conception of religious identity on people who practised "multiple forms of religious belonging, and the switching of identities according to time and place." The account of the Allahdad as the moment that forged the community is not invented—it is selected and emphasised in retrospect.