Mashhad מַשְׁהַד

The date of the community's founding matters here, because it 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 his treasury and mint. So in 1839, the year of the Allahdad, the community was less than a century old. "Ancient Mashhadi Jewry" is a figure of speech.

On 26–27 March 1839 came the pogrom that the Mashhadis themselves named Allahdad (اللهداد, "God's justice"). The survivors converted to Islam in their entirety; 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, where they are believed to lie still.

Then came a hundred and twenty years of double life, arranged with deliberate precision: two names for everyone, domestic synagogues, cellar mikva'ot, scrolls and tefillin carried through the streets by women in chadors, the ostentatious ḥajj, matzah baked after midnight so the children could not give it away, betrothals in infancy.

The numbers must be given 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. Then: about 2,500 in Mashhad in 1946; about 2,000 in Tehran by 1956; after 1979, of the remaining 2,000 Iranian Mashhadis some 1,800 left. Today there are about twenty thousand Mashhadis in the world: ten to fifteen thousand in Israel, five to seven thousand in the United States, chiefly in Great Neck outside New York—and about ten people in Iran.