Between Foreigners and Shi'is: Nineteenth-Century Iran and Its Jewish Minority

Between Foreigners and Shi'is: Nineteenth-Century Iran and Its Jewish Minority. By Daniel Tsadik. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007. Pp. xxiii + 295. $60.

Ii is clear from the start that Tsadik breaks new ground with this detailed, objective, well-researched, and comprehensive study of the Iranian Jewish minority in the 1880s. He undertakes archival work from a variety of sources to address a vast array of issues. These include the contradictory accounts of the size of the Jewish population in Iran, the urban geographical setting and internal migration to Tehran, and Jewish relations with the Muslim majority both in the local context and vis-à-vis the state.

Due to Islam's impurity laws, Muslims prohibited Jews (and other non-Muslims) from opening shops in the city bazaars, pushing them thus toward other professions. The author describes the use of impurity laws in some localities as a pretext for curtailing economic domination since they also swept up European traders in their wake. Jews worked as tailors, money-lenders, glass polishers, money-changers, engravers, producers of salt and ammoniac, fortune-tellers, mid wives, and prostitutes. Some worked in the fields and some owned small businesses. Like other non-Muslims they practiced professions that were shunned by Muslims, such as those of silversmith and wine-maker. A few members of the Jewish elite took on...