Isfahan אִיסְפַהַאן

Isfahan's Jewish quarter is Yahūdiyya, later Jubāra. Muslim geographers explained the name by the settlement of Babylonian exiles there; the story of an Achaemenid foundation is tradition, but the toponym itself is real and early. Persian tradition credits the settlement of Jews at Isfahan and Hamadan to Shūshandukht, daughter of the exilarch and queen of the Sasanian Yazdegerd I.

Benjamin of Tudela in the twelfth century gives Isfahan fifteen thousand Jews and a chief rabbi, Sar Shalom, appointed by the Baghdad exilarch over all the Persian communities. Medieval travellers' numbers are conventionally taken as inflated and should be used with that qualification; the report of administration from Baghdad, however, agrees with what is known of the exilarchate from other sources.

In 1596 Isfahan became the Safavid capital under ʿAbbās I—and there lies the cause of what followed. The waves of persecution run under ʿAbbās I before 1613 and in 1620, and the third and worst is 1656–1662, under ʿAbbās II: Jews were killed or forcibly converted, and the Jews of Isfahan were expelled from their quarter and converted wholesale. The capital is struck first, because there the decree is executed literally.

Then a long decline: by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Isfahan had some three hundred families, eighteen hundred souls. The Alliance school opened in 1901; in 1903–04 there were about six thousand Jews; in 1948 about ten thousand, most of whom went to Israel; in the early Islamic Republic about three thousand; in 2003, fifteen hundred, seven hundred of them in the Jubāra quarter.