Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (35 page)

Of course, that kind of thing can happen almost anywhere, but in Iran it resonates for the Christians in a particular way. Later, over beef schnitzel at the nearby Armenian Club, Catherine and her thirty-four-year-old daughter, Maria, explained that regardless of whether the Muslim intruder was crazy, the incident underscored the fact that Christians don’t feel secure even in their places of worship and will always be treated as outsiders.

The Armenian Club is a refuge, a members-only club for Armenians and other Christians. A nondescript box of a building with exposed wiring and crumbling plaster, it struggles to preserve some of the elegance of better days.
The Magic Flute
plays over the stereo system. The tables are covered with salmon-colored satin cloths, the room is brightly lit by polished brass sconces and chandeliers. It is one of the few sexually integrated public spaces in Iran where women do not have to hide their hair under scarves or the shape of their bodies under long, loose-fitting clothing. For that reason, Muslims are barred from entry. I had met Catherine through Nazila, but as a Muslim, Nazila couldn’t join us.

Even though Armenians can drink alcoholic beverages in the privacy of their homes, that right does not extend to the club, and Catherine didn’t think the ban was such a bad thing. “When the men were allowed to drink here they’d get drunk out of their minds,” she said. “It’s better to keep drinking in the home.”

I asked Catherine’s daughter, Maria, what life was like for her. So she told me about the lashing. It had happened three years ago, but for Maria it was the defining moment of her adult life in Iran. “My colleague and I were wearing light blue coats and head scarves at work the way we always do,” she recalled. “The police came and asked, ‘Why are you wearing a color like that?’So I told them, ‘It is the uniform for my company.’They said, ‘Your scarf is fit for a discotheque.’ So I asked them, ‘What kind of woman would wear a scarf on her head to a discotheque?’

“They ordered us to come to a certain place for punishment. My mother tried to stay with me but they sent her away. It was a very big dirty place. The windows were painted black so no one could look in or out. There were about fifty of us sitting there from morning until night. We had to wear black chadors over our clothes.

“Finally a woman guard came in carrying a big cable in one hand and a Koran in the other. She asked if anyone was pregnant. The pregnant ones pay a fine instead of getting lashed. But the rest of us—the rest of us got lashed. One by one. We were all shouting and crying, ‘Why are you doing this to us? Is this true Islam?’ The guard ignored us. I was lucky. I was wearing two sweaters and a raincoat under my chador. I only got five lashes. The guard told me she didn’t beat me hard because I was so thin.”

Maria acknowledged her loneliness. She had led a sheltered life and years before, her parents had forbidden her to attend a far-off university because they didn’t want her to live alone. Although she is beautiful, with waist-length black hair, she is unmarried, in part because she wants to marry an Armenian. Her father—divorced from her mother—is a Muslim and that has caused nothing but trouble, she said. “Some people I work with, Muslims, don’t want to come to my house because they think Christians are unclean. And did you know we’re considered less valuable in the eyes of the law than Muslims? It’s not right. Humans are humans. It’s the same body, the same blood. Who made this law and called it Islamic law?”

“Do you ever think of leaving Iran?” I asked Maria.

Catherine jumped into the conversation. “Absolutely,” she said. “The U.N. will pay for our tickets as refugees. I’m going to be sixty-five. Our tickets will be coming. We’ll go to America.”

“I’d like to work for an airline,” said Maria. “And I’m trained as a hairdresser. God knows that I believe in Him. So I’ll leave my fate to Him.”

In fact, two months after our lunch, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees arranged political asylum for Catherine and Maria and resettled them in Vienna. They had no family or friends there. They did not speak German. But Vienna was their way out, and they took it. Months later they sent me a Christmas card from Glendale, California. They were starting a new life there.

On Friday nights at the Yousefabad Synagogue in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in central Tehran, there are other believers who have put their fate into God’s hands. The numbers attest to the treatment of Jews in the Islamic Republic. There were about 80,000 Jews in 1978, the year before Khomeini’s revolution; twenty years later, the number had dwindled to about 30,000.

The Jews of Iran are the oldest Jewish community outside Israel. When Cyrus the Great conquered Babylonia in 539
B.C.
, he liberated the Jews who had been enslaved there, and many settled in Persia. Over the centuries, the Iranian Jews experienced waves of persecution and of tolerance. During a period of tolerance in the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries, for example, Iranian Jews were respected winemakers, bankers, and merchants. But in the second half of the seventeenth century, Jews were branded
najes,
“unclean,” and began to be persecuted as infidels. They were forced into ghettos, and banned from entering Muslim shops or homes in the belief that their presence would sully the premises. On rainy days, they were not permitted to leave their ghettos for fear that the rain would wash the impurity from their bodies onto Muslims. Jews were told that they were not real Iranians and forbidden to learn Persian. They were not allowed to testify in courts of law, even in their own defense. They were required to wear special hats and patches on their clothes. At one point Jewish women were banned from wearing chadors, putting them on the same level as prostitutes. Worst of all, some Jews were forced to convert to Islam.

The Jews endured physical attacks, rape, torture, expulsion, and murder. At times, the state held the entire Jewish community responsible for the crimes of one individual. One massacre in Tabriz in 1831 wiped out the city’s entire Jewish population. However, after Reza Shah came to power in the 1920s, Jews enjoyed a greater degree of freedom. They were allowed to leave their ghettos, attend school, and practice their religion. Gradually, they created space for themselves in Iranian civic life.

Under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Jewish population thrived, and Israel’s presence and influence in Iran increased. The Shah even opened limited diplomatic relations with Israel. Israeli and American intelligence played a role in the creation and operation of SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, and Iran remained a major supplier of oil to Israel in the 1970s, during the Arab oil embargo. In reading through classified American documents published by the militants who seized the American embassy in 1979, I came across one volume that included transcripts of verbatim conversations between senior Israeli and Iranian officials on a plan to jointly develop a missile that could have carried a nuclear warhead. The Shah, according to Richard Helms, a former American ambassador to Iran and former director of the CIA, once told the Israelis that neither Iran nor Israel should want to be alone “in a sea of Arabs.”

So it was to be expected that one of the first acts of the 1979 revolution was to occupy the gray concrete Israeli trade mission in north Tehran, rip down the Israeli flag, and run off with the furniture. Even the air conditioners were unbolted and carted off. The new regime expelled the twenty-two Israeli diplomats living in Iran and handed over the building to the Palestine Liberation Organization leader, Yasir Arafat, as his “embassy.” The Israeli officials took refuge in the American embassy; the Americans smuggled them out ofthe country on fake American passports.

The revolution’s relationship with Iran’s own Jews is an even more complicated matter. Certainly the antipathy for Israel hurt the Jews, and many fled. Still, Iran’s Jewish community remains the largest in the Middle East outside of Israel and the largest in any Muslim country in the world. More than two decades after the Iranian revolution, Tehran has eleven functioning synagogues, some with Hebrew schools; two kosher restaurants; a Jewish hospital; a home for the elderly; a twenty-thousand-volume Jewish library; and a cemetery.

Iran’s Ministry of Education runs the Hebrew schools, which are allowed to teach only the Torah and religious texts. Teaching Hebrew as a living language for everyday use—the way it is taught in and out of Israel as a pillar of Zionism—is forbidden. As in Armenian schools, the administrators of the Jewish schools are appointed by the government and with few exceptions must be Muslim. Jews can work in some government offices and state-run companies but cannot advance very far. The community’s last Jewish newspaper was closed down in 1991 after it criticized the government’s decision to take over the administration of Jewish schools.

One Friday night when Nazila and I visited the Yousefabad Synagogue, five hundred worshippers came to celebrate the beginning of the Sabbath. Two armed guards of the Islamic Republic stood watch at the simple entrance of green woven metal graced by the Iranian flag. Inside, women with colorful scarves covering their heads sat on the left, men in yarmulkes on the right. Intricately carved wooden doors surrounded by turquoise tiles contrasted with humble black armchairs and an old marble floor that needed a good scrubbing. A handwritten sign in Persian taped to a pillar captured the sacred and the mundane: “When reading the Torah keep silent” appeared just above “Throw the garbage in the wastebasket.”

I sat with the women in the back row. Despite the solemnity of the standing and bowing and praying during the service, the women near me wanted to enjoy themselves. They chanted their prayers in Hebrew, but like many Jews who live outside Israel did not know what the words meant. Unlike the Armenian Christians, whose first language is Armenian, the first language of the Jews is Persian. The women were eager to talk to me. And talk they did, alternating between English and Persian.

“I have a son in New Jersey,” a sixty-seven-year-old woman with heavy glasses whispered to me in English. “In Hackensack. His name is Eddie. I’ve been to America five times.”

“My son lives in Connecticut,” chimed in a sixty-three-year-old woman with dyed blond hair and heavy black eye makeup. “Bridgeport. Do you know Bridgeport? I lived there three years.” She pulled out her address book. “This is his phone number.”

The administrator of the synagogue motioned for us to stop talking. So I turned away from the group. It was no use. The woman sitting on the other side of me started talking. “My son’s in Dallas,” she said. “It’s years that I want to go, but I can’t get a visa.”

As the service continued, stories of sadness trickled out: the suspicion of Jews by the Iranian authorities; the confiscation of the passports of Jews and the enormous bribes paid to get them back; the pain of not being able to visit Israel legally; the ban on telephone and mail service to Israel; the requirement that Jewish schools open on Saturdays, violating a commandment not to work on the Sabbath; the story about a member of the synagogue who had disappeared without a trace years before while trying to escape over the Pakistani border.

The women said that the repressive rules of the Islamic Republic and the relentless anti-Israeli rhetoric have made them feel even more Jewish. The synagogues have become places to meet and talk as much as to pray. “Before the revolution we went to Israel every six months,” the blond woman said. “I have so many relatives there but we can’t visit. My mother finally died from the sadness. The sorrow of families divided can kill us. There are hardly any young Jews in our country anymore. My son—he is very handsome. He wants to marry an American girl. Do you know any?”

Her friend in the heavy eyeglasses interrupted. “People’s attitudes change toward us as soon as they find out that we’re Jewish,” she said. “It’s impossible for a Jew to get a job. My son studied electrical engineering in the States for seven years but as soon as he writes down he’s Jewish he’s disqualified for jobs here. My other son got so depressed that he died of depression. I curse the revolution. It took everything from me, everything.”

Maybe I was being overly sensitive, but I saw anti-Semitism under the surface in Iran wherever I looked. I saw it during a call on Fatemeh Hashemi, the daughter of former President Rafsanjani, when the conversation turned to her younger sister, Faezeh. Faezeh had recently canceled a trip to the United States. I told Fatemeh that I was disappointed, because I had planned to show her sister around
The New York Times.

“It’s better you didn’t do that,” Fatemeh said. “Everybody knows
The
New York Times
is run by the Jews.”

I saw anti-Semitism among my Iranian friends. At a gathering of a group of women at the home of my friend Nargess one evening, one woman told a joke about a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim. Another told a joke about a Jew and a Turkish-speaking Iranian. In both jokes, the Jew was cunning, miserly, and a master merchant.

I had had it. After years of enduring comments like these, I protested. “I’m so sick and tired of these jokes about Jews,” I said. “My husband is a Jew. You’ve got to realize how offensive these jokes are.”

Nargess’s sister Monir, who owns a hair salon that is one of my favorite places to visit, tried to console me. “Your husband is okay,” she said. “He’s not a Zionist. So it’s okay that he’s a Jew. My best customer is a Jew. I love the Jews. When I move back to America again, I want all my best customers to be rich Jews.”

The women explained that they said nothing about Jews that they didn’t say about Isfahanis, adding that Isfahanis are just as cunning and miserly as Jews.

I tried to make the point again. “Monir, you’re a Turk from Azerbaijan,” I said. “Everyone is always making jokes about Turks. You of all people should be sensitive to this.”

“I love Turkish jokes,” Nargess chimed in. “They’re the best jokes in the world.”

“When you were in the United States during the hostage crisis and people cursed you just because you were Iranian, wasn’t that racist?” I asked.