“Draw in your mind a small place like this, 3,000 Jewish souls, Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Arabs who weren’t separate, but a person glued to his brother, loud voices, flag raised, singing, some drinking and others clapping their hands, skipping and dancing wildly…I don’t know how to convey to you the great joy I felt within my heart! I imagined that the messiah had already come to Israel.” In 1866, Abraham Rosanes found himself on an extended expedition in Palestine, dispatching reports of his travels to be serially published in the newspaper Ha-Magid. Here Rosanes evocatively recaptures his experience as a participant in the hilula festivities—the “great joy” felt, his imagining of redemption. This is one of a handful of Sephardic Ottoman hilula narratives that use participant observation and ethnographic methods to record and represent the religious, cultural, and economic aspects of hilula celebrations for their readers. Though scholars have long delved into the religious and cultural practice of the hilula pilgrimage, it is often approached through Muslim and Must’arab Jewish sources. This paper argues that accounts by Ottoman Sephardic writers both reflect similarities with other accounts while markedly diverging in ways that reflect their broader positionalities. This paper considers the experience of hilula from the Ottoman Sephardic perspective by focusing on two nineteenth-century travelogues that were published serially in the Jewish press: Abraham Rosanes’s 1866-1867 Masaot ha-Haham ha-Abir, published in the Prussian Hebrew journal Ha-Magid and Yaakov Shaul’s Impresiones de Viajes en Palastina, published in the Izmirli Ladino newspaper, La Buena Esperansa. Although both composed by Sephardic scholars living in the Ottoman Empire, these two accounts differ in language, tone, and motivation. Comparing these two texts not only brings an Ottoman Sephardic perspective to help illuminate hilula practices in Palestine, but also highlights the variegated social terrain and key social, political, and religious divergences within the Ottoman Sephardic community.

“Iran is our homeland and we must strive for its progress and greatness” reads the headline of an October, 1945 article from the Iranian Jewish newspaper ‘Alam-e Yahud (The Jewish World). In the article, its Jewish author exhorts his coreligionists to work with non-Jewish Iranians to bring about Iran’s “greatness.” Similarly, a May, 1946 article titled, “We are also Iranians and we have rights in this home” in the Iranian Jewish newspaper Israil argues that Jews, who had been living in Iran for over two thousand years, “have known themselves to be Iranian and have always fought shoulder to shoulder with the rest of their compatriots to achieve the … well-being of Iran.” In the conclusion of this article, its author proclaims: “today Jews sincerely extend their hands to their beloved compatriots with the expectation that they will take our hands in a brotherly fashion.” These patriotic declarations, and appeals to Iran’s Jews and non-Jews to collaborate with one another, are common features of Iranian Jewish newspapers in the mid-twentieth century. In my paper I explore a few prevalent themes in the articles of two Tehran-based Iranian Jewish newspapers that were published in the ten years following the end of World War II. In addition to professing their loyalty to Iran, the authors of these articles focus on issues of antisemitism (both in Iran and abroad), and the professional and social limitations Jews were facing in Iran. I demonstrate that despite expressing dissatisfaction with their lot as minorities, Jewish authors in these two newspapers felt emboldened enough to directly challenge the anti-Jewish rhetoric that some Muslim Iranian authors were espousing in the Iranian press. At the same time, these Jewish authors also encourage Jews to interact and collaborate with non-Jewish Iranians, and they repeatedly refer to Muslim Iranians as their “brethren.” Through the examination of several Persian-language newspaper articles, with the addition of archival material in French, Hebrew, and English, I contend that Jewish authors were able to claim membership to the Iranian nation through these newspaper articles, by arguing that they were just as Iranian as their non-Jewish compatriots. In other words, these newspapers served as platforms for Iranian Jews to declare their belonging to the nation and to demand access to certain rights as fully-fledged Iranian citizens.

The paper traces the multiple factors through which a fluid and at times ambiguous religious identity among the Jews in Iran was transformed into a rigid one in the course of the 20th century. The Iranian province of Khorasan is a fruitful example for my argument, as at the beginning of 19th century, it was home to Sufi brotherhoods, where Jews and Muslims shared prayers, food, and literature. Although this was an asymmetrical relationship in the sense that Jews adapted to the majority Muslim culture, there were spaces of shared spirituality and culture, in which religious denominationalism played a minor role. In 1839, there was a riot in Mashhad, the capital city of Khorasan, in the course of which parts of the Jewish community were forced to convert to Islam. However, among those who converted, many kept their Jewish traditions secretly. They lived again more openly as Jews from the 1920s onwards. In the 1950s, the Jews of Mashhad left to Tehran, and later on to Israel and the United States. Since the 1980s, the community has increasingly reframed its religious identity: rather than to acknowledge the simultaneous practice of Jewish and Muslim identity and traditions, as well as the switching between different religious identities according to time and place, Mashhadi identity is structured according to a rigid dichotomy between a secret/true (Jewish) one and an outward/fake (Muslim) religiosity. In passing on their tradition, the Mashhadi community has resorted to a modern and Western understanding of being “Jewish”, a process that resulted in the reframing of their past according to this new framework of religious boundaries and identities. In reevaluating this history, I am not aiming to prove what was the “truth” or who was "really" Jewish. Rather, the history of the Jews of Mashhad is an important example for showing how ambiguous and dual religious identities were possible in a society, in which religion was one of the dominant factors in public life. Acknowledging this simultaneity will allow us to understand how public and private religion evolved in 19th century Iran, and to understand how the Jewish communities were part of these dynamics.