Juifs de Hamadan

At the foot of Mount Alvand, on the high plateaus of western Iran, lies the city of Hamadan, which scholarly tradition identifies with ancient Ecbatana, capital of the Medes. Hamadan is generally identified with ancient Ecbatana, the Achmetha of the Bible, capital of Media Magna; it appears that Jews settled there shortly after its founding and prospered, but that with its conquest by the Arabs in 634 the persecutions began. From this identification flows one of the oldest claims of diaspora Judaism: that of a continuous Israelite presence, anchored in the soil of Iran since the dawn of the Persian age.

The Jewish community of Hamadan derives its singularity from two inseparable facts: its presumed antiquity, which would connect it to the Assyrian deportations and the Achaemenid era, and the presence within it of the traditional mausoleum of Esther and Mordecai, a sanctuary venerated to the point of being regarded as the second holy site of Judaism after Jerusalem. The tomb of Esther and Mordecai in Hamadan is recognized as the second most sacred Jewish site, holding considerable value in Judaism; it is a historic monument built of stone and brick.

This book sets out to retrace, with the caution imposed by the scarcity of archives, the path of a community that stands at the meeting point between biblical memory and documented history. We shall distinguish everywhere between what the archive establishes, what tradition transmits, and what the confrontation of the two allows us to nuance. For the singularity of Hamadan lies precisely in this fertile tension: nowhere else in the diaspora does legend take root so powerfully in a real topography, nor is history written so closely in the shadow of a sanctuary.

The genealogy of the Hamadan community has its roots in the biblical deportations. The oldest reference to the Jews of Hamadan is found in the Old Testament, according to which a group of Israelites was brought to the Persian plateau by King Shalmaneser of Assyria around 722 BCE (2 Kings 18:11) and "settled in the cities of the Medes." This verse constitutes the scriptural foundation upon which every claim to antiquity is built.

From this biblical clue, scholarship draws a plausible hypothesis rather than a certainty. Given the size and importance of Hamadan as a royal city or capital of the Medes, it is reasonable to suppose that many of these Jews settled there, making the Jewish community of Hamadan the oldest outside Israel. The argument rests on topographical deduction: if Israelites were scattered "in the cities of the Medes," the very capital of Media would naturally have received a notable share of them.

The community's internal tradition extends this memory through a precise tribal claim. According to Habib Levy, the Jews of Hamadan believe themselves to be of the tribe of Simeon — one of the twelve tribes of Israel — most having chosen the name "Simeon" for their male sons across past generations. This onomastic practice, handed down from father to son, illustrates the way a community preserves and performs its legendary origin in the daily practice of naming.

The identification of Hamadan with Ecbatana further structures the city's Achaemenid memory. Historically, Hamadan is identified with Ecbatana, one of the principal cities of the Achaemenid Empire. The biblical book of Ezra (6:2) indeed mentions Achmetha — Ecbatana — as the place where the decree of Cyrus authorizing the rebuilding of the Temple was found, thus inscribing the city within the narrative of the return from exile. At the threshold of this history, archive and tradition answer one another without fully confirming each other: Memory asserts an antiquity that the sources render only probable.

The sacred heart of the community is the mausoleum that tradition ascribes to Esther and Mordechai. According to the account passed down by the Jews of Persia, after the fall of Haman hostility toward the Jews intensified, and the two heroes of the Book of Esther left Susa for the north, as far as Hamadan, where they died at an advanced age and were buried; above their tombs rose a mausoleum that still stands. For generations, Iranian Jews came here especially at Purim, to read the Megillah as close as possible to the heroes of the story.

The historical attestation of the shrine is ancient and precise. Benjamin of Tudela, who was there in the mid-twelfth century, claims to have found fifty thousand Jews there; he mentions the sepulchre: "In front of one of the synagogues of Hamadan lies the sepulchre of Mordechai and Esther." The Navarrese traveller thus constitutes the first outside witness firmly linking the city to the tomb.

Archaeology and art history, however, qualify the dating. According to legend, the original shrine was destroyed by the Mongol invaders in the fourteenth century; the historian Ernst Herzfeld dates the present structure to 1602, and its appearance reflects a Persian style common to that period, known as emāmzādeh, characteristic of the shrines of Muslim religious leaders. An interior inscription illuminates this material history: nineteenth-century visitors describe a marble plaque on the inner walls of the dome stating that the structure was dedicated in the year 714 (Jewish year 4474) by Elijah and Samuel, sons of Ismael Kashan.

Popular piety made the place a centre of intense pilgrimage, blending devotion and votive practices. The Jews held the sepulchre in great veneration and visited it at the end of every month and at Purim; they even offered sacrifices there, which they gave to the poor in order to gain the protection of Mordechai and Esther. The shrine transcends confessional boundaries: a small synagogue adjoins the tomb, and the site is also regarded as holy by Muslims and Christians, who come there to pray. Thus the archive confirms the antiquity of the cult while pushing back the dating of the building well beyond the Achaemenid era to which memory attaches it.

Before the medieval age proper, a few figures emerge from the sources. The earliest is the Sasanian Jewish queen Šušandoḵt, daughter of the resh galuta or exilarch of Persia, wife of the Sasanian king Yazdegerd I (r. 399–420) and mother of Bahrām Gōr, to whom a Pahlavi source attributes the founding of Hamadan. This tradition, whether historical or etiological, symbolically links the city's birth to a Jewish presence of high rank.

The eighth century sees the rise of a striking messianic figure. Then comes Yudḡān, or Yehuda Hamadāni, who flourished in the mid-eighth century during the rise of the Abbasid caliphate; he claimed to be a prophet and led a Jewish sect known as the Yudḡdāniya, a messianic sectarian movement stemming from Abu ʿIsā Eṣfahāni, with his followers regarding him as the Messiah. Hamadan thus appears as a hotbed of religious ferment within Persian Judaism.

The demographic and commercial apogee of the community falls in the medieval period. The testimony of Benjamin of Tudela, already cited, puts forward the considerable figure of fifty thousand Jews in the twelfth century. According to a remark by Edrisi, it is also evident that the city was inhabited by a large number of Jews: "The trade of this place was very considerable, which explains the great number of Jews it contained." The community's prosperity therefore rested on Hamadan's position along the trade routes linking Mesopotamia to the Iranian plateau, making its Jews notable players in commerce.

This continuity, however, had as its reverse a vulnerability to political upheavals. With the conquest of the city by the Arabs in 634, persecutions began; later, under the Safavid and Afghan dynasties of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Jews of Hamadan suffered heavily. The medieval and modern history of the community thus oscillates between phases of flourishing and episodes of adversity, according to the fortunes of the dynasties.

The Safavid age, glorious for Shiite Iran, was a dark one for its Jewish minorities. Pressure on the communities intensified under the reign of Shah Abbas I, and the memory of these ordeals was recorded by Judeo-Persian literature. The Judeo-Persian poet Babai b. Luṭf of Kashan described in verse the persecutions of the Jews throughout Persia under Abbas I. This versified chronicle, the Kitāb-i Anusi, remains a precious source for reconstructing the forced conversions and humiliations imposed upon the communities, including that of Hamadan.

The upheavals of the fall of the Safavids and the Afghan invasion in the eighteenth century further worsened Jewish precariousness, as the history of the successive dynasties recalls. The condition of Persian Jews then fell under a status of precarious tolerance, subject to the Shiite ritual purity laws that relegated them to the rank of the impure and restricted their activities.

It is within this context that the late persecutions of the Qajar era have been the subject of recent research based on previously unpublished documents. An episode of 1892 has been studied on the basis of newly discovered letters: Soli Shahvar, in "Oppression of Religious Minority Groups in Times of Great Upheaval in Late Qajar Iran," addresses the 1892 persecution targeting the Jews and Baha'is of Jewish origin in Hamadan, drawing on two newly discovered letters (The Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. 108, no. 2, 2018). This event illustrates the persistent fragility of the minorities during the great political shocks of the late nineteenth century, when social tensions discharged themselves upon the most exposed communities.

Despite these ordeals, the permanence of the tomb of Esther and Mordechai played a role of communal cement. The existence of this sanctuary was an important factor in the formation and persistence of Jewish society in Hamadan; the tomb of Esther and Mordechai is the second most important sanctuary of the Jewish people in the world. The holy site thus functioned as an anchor of identity that maintained communal cohesion through the vicissitudes.

One of the most remarkable features of the Jews of Hamadan is the preservation of a language of their own, a linguistic vestige of a thousand-year history. The religious minorities of Iran have indeed played a conservatory role in the face of the spread of Persian. The study of the language of the religious minorities in Iran is particularly important for understanding the historical development and typology of the Iranian languages.

The mechanism of this preservation is now well established. Historical and linguistic data support the idea that the Zoroastrians and the Jews of the cities of central and western Iran preserved their ancient vernacular language, while the majority of the population replaced it with Persian during the New Iranian period. Judeo-Hamadani thus constitutes a dialectal survival which, by its very marginality, escaped the linguistic standardization imposed by dominant Persian.

Recent research, based on fieldwork surveys, has refined our knowledge of this language. A study devoted to Judeo-Hamadani examines many distinctive features of this language and updates recent research to clarify its origins, drawing on data collected in the field in Hamadan from October 2018 to August 2019. Linguists have moreover proposed a comparative framework encompassing the related Jewish vernaculars of the region. The term "Ecbatanian"—derived from Ecbatana, the ancient Greek name for Hamadan—designates the Median Jewish dialects of Hamadan, Tuyserkan, Nehavand, Borujerd, Khonsar and Golpayegan.

This scholarly designation is not neutral: by invoking the ancient name of the city, it reinscribes the language within the long duration of the Median Jewish presence. The kinship between these vernaculars is the subject of erudite debate, with certain features being widely shared across the Western Iranian languages, which limits their diagnostic value for establishing subgroups. The language nevertheless remains the most tangible witness to a cultural continuity that the archives document only imperfectly.

At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the community of Hamadan experienced a movement of modernization driven by education. The Alliance israélite universelle established a school there which became a focal point of social and cultural transformation. The figure of Menahem Shemuel Halevy embodies this renewal: in Hamadan, he worked as a teacher at the school of the Alliance israélite universelle, then became its director; he also served as a civil leader and representative of the Jewish community before the municipality of Hamadan.

His work combined modernization, Zionism, and communal defense. A Zionist, he emphasized the teaching of Hebrew and adherence to the Torah; he wrote poetry, essays, and historical works in Hebrew and Persian, centered on the history of Iranian Jews and the community of Hamadan, and was an influential defender of the community's rights, helping to protect many Jews from persecution. European-style education and national awakening thus came together to redefine communal identity on the threshold of the modern era.

The twentieth century, however, saw the gradual erosion of the community, under the effect of emigration to Israel, Europe, and America, accelerated after the revolution of 1979. The contemporary observation is strikingly fragile, as the sanctuary's visitors attest: there remain five Jewish families still living in Hamadan, a total of fifteen people, who may be the descendants of the biblical Jews of the time of Queen Esther.

The tomb itself remains at the center of persistent political tensions. The Iranian authorities downgraded the status of the tomb of Esther and Mordechai, removing the sign that identified the mausoleum as an official pilgrimage site, after a group of about 250 militant students surrounded the tomb while threatening to destroy it. Yet the sanctuary has also known international recognition: in 2024, the historic center of Hamadan — including the site of Ecbatana which encompasses the tomb of Mordechai and Esther — was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Between iconoclastic threat and patrimonial consecration, the fate of the tomb sums up that of a community reduced to a few souls but whose trace remains indelible in memory and in stone.

The history of the Jews of Hamadan unfolds like a long meditation on persistence. From the presumed Assyrian deportation to the handful of families that survive today, the community has endured nearly twenty-seven centuries of a presence that tradition holds to be uninterrupted and that the archive confirms at least since the Middle Ages. The size and importance of Hamadan as the capital of the Medes make it reasonable to suppose that its Jewish community is the oldest outside Israel.

Three pillars have sustained this permanence. The first is the shrine of Esther and Mordechai, which made Hamadan a hub of pilgrimage and a spiritual center of gravity for all of Persian Jewry. The second is language, that Judeo-Hamadani whose richness linguists are rediscovering today as a living fossil of Median Iran. The third is communal resilience, attested by the figures who, from the Sassanid queen Šušandoḵt to the Zionist educator Halevy, embodied the continuity of a presence ceaselessly threatened and ceaselessly renewed.

At a time when the community is no more than a memory embodied by a handful of faithful, its heritage takes on a universal dimension. UNESCO's recognition of the historic center of Hamadan now inscribes within the heritage of humanity a place where biblical memory and real history touch one another. The Great Book of the Jews of Hamadan thus closes on a cautious certainty: the archive can document the stones and the names, but it is the transmitted memory — that of the tribe of Simeon, of the Purim pilgrimages, of the verses of Babai b. Luṭf — that gives this community its depth and its soul.