Jadīd al-Islām ג'דיד אל-אסלאם

The term jadīd al-Islām (جدید الاسلام, "new to Islam") in Persian usage meant a convert from another religion. In the Jewish history of Iran it refers to two entirely different things, and conflating them is the commonest error in popular accounts.

The Safavid jadīd al-Islām of 1656–1662. Under Shah ʿAbbās II came the third and severest wave of persecution: Jews were killed or forcibly converted, and the Jews of Isfahan were expelled from their quarter and converted wholesale. After large payments the "new Muslims" were permitted to resume Jewish practice—and most returned to Judaism openly, within a few years. The story is told from inside by the Judeo-Persian verse chronicle Kitāb-i Anusī of Bābāʾī ben Loṭf, and from outside and independently by the Armenian chronicle of Arakʿel of Tabriz, printed at Amsterdam in 1669: the two agree, which is what makes the episode secure.

The Mashhadi jadīd al-Islām, from 1839. After the Allahdad pogrom the entire surviving community of Mashhad recited the shahāda. Here there was no return: apostasy from Islam in Shiʿi Khorasan, and in the city of the shrine of Imam Reza at that, meant death. The community lived a double life for some hundred and twenty years, into the 1950s.

How it held is known in detail. Everyone carried two names, one Jewish and one Muslim. Synagogues were domestic, mikva'ot in cellars. Torah scrolls, tefillin and tallitot were carried through the streets by women in chadors: the most effective device of all, because the chador was not searched. Ostentatious Islamic conformity: food bought in Muslim shops and thrown away, the ḥajj performed. Matzah baked after midnight so that the children could not give it away. Marriages only within the community, betrothals in infancy—so that a girl could not be taken into a Muslim family.

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.

One correction, the newest 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.