Hamadan הַמַדַאן

Hamadan is ancient Ecbatana, the biblical Aḥmeta (Ezra 6:2). Here stands the Qever Ester u-Mordekhai, the tomb of Esther and Mordechai—a case where an honest examination yields something stronger than the plaque on the building.

What exists. Benjamin of Tudela reports Esther and Mordechai buried before a synagogue in Hamadan, and gives the city some fifty thousand Jews: this establishes that the tradition is no later than the twelfth century. The tombs themselves carry inscriptions dated 1140 and 1309–10; the present brick dome is assigned to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, consistent with the 1309–10 inscription. Rabbi Menaḥem ha-Levi (d. 1940) notes that the first chamber was built "two hundred years" before his time—that is, a later rebuilding. Jakob Eduard Polak in the nineteenth century described the structure: a dome some thirty feet high, two oak coffins two feet apart, inscribed with the closing verses of the Book of Esther and the names of the physicians who paid for repairs.

What does not exist. Evidence that Esther and Mordechai are buried there. The Book of Esther sets its action in Susa, and Ernst Herzfeld, rejecting the attribution, observed that if Esther and Mordechai were historical they would have been buried at Susa; he proposed instead Shūshandukht, daughter of the exilarch and queen of the Sasanian Yazdegerd I (r. 399–420), to whom Persian tradition credits the settlement of Jews at Isfahan and Hamadan. And neither Talmud knows anything of a Hamadan tomb.

Hence a formulation both more accurate and weightier: this is a genuine and continuously venerated Jewish shrine of at least eight hundred and fifty years' standing and a real medieval monument—the oldest continuously used Jewish pilgrimage site in Iran.

Hamadan matters on another count too. The Alliance school opened here in 1900. And Hamadan was the epicentre of the Bahaʾi conversions: between 1877 and 1879 some fifty Jews joined, and by the mid-1930s roughly a quarter of the city's eight thousand Jews had converted.