Salmiya

When Cyrus the Great freed the Jews from Babylonian Captivity in 539 BCE, some of them did not return to Jeruslaem but eventually settled on the banks of the Zayandeh Rud in Central Iran, possibly founding the city of Esfahan. This is the beginning of Jewish life in Iran which thus started two-and-a-half-thousand years ago. While Cyrus is betoken as ‘the anointed’ in the Book of Isaiah, Jews seem to have lived for centuries in peace with the indigenous Persian populace . Persian religious tolerance was legendary as long as Zoroastrianism was the state religion. The alarming rhetoric in particular of the present president of Iran, who had openly questioned the Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazi’s terror regime in the early 1940s and the very right of Israel to exist, has caused considerable new concern about the safety of the Jews in the Islamic Republic. It raises again the question, what do we actually know about the relationship of Shi’a Muslims and other ‘people of the book’, o...

Not East and not West. That is and always has been Iran. Since ancient days Persia not Turkey, which truly belonged for so many centuries to the former, was the real bridge between Europe and Asia. Persians tried to conquer the classic old world, of course, and only the incomparable Alexander could stop them, at least for some time. The influence on European civilization has always been tremendous. Persian poets are not only highly revered by their own kinsmen. Goethe was inspired by Hafiz and Attar for writing his Westöstlicher Diwan . The amazing astronomer and mathematician Omar Khayyam became incredibly famous in 19th century’s America after Edward Fitzgerald’s evocative translation of his Rubaiyat. The Achaemenids, the Sasanids, Safavids, Qajars, all of them left behind mind-blowing monuments and architectural pieces of pure beauty. Seeing this would change anybody’s thinking about history, the coming and going of Empires, the origin of monotheism and its influence on Jews in the...