Introduction
Rabbinical texts from twentieth-century Iran are largely absent from the international academic landscape. This absence reflects a longstanding perception that religious traditions among Iranian Jews in the late Qajar and early Pahlavi periods were deficient, if not altogether lacking. In many accounts by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European travellers and missionaries, as well as by Jewish representatives of institutions such as the Alliance Israélite Universelle school network, the religious practices and learning of Iranian Jews were either ignored or disparaged.Footnote 1 With few exceptions, European Jewish and non-Jewish observers portrayed Iranian Jews as isolated and superstitious, lacking knowledge of both religious law and Hebrew. Over time, these assessments were partly internalized by Iranian Jews themselves, many of whom came to embrace European notions of modernity, education, and religiosity as indispensable to communal advancement.
These representations profoundly shaped subsequent understandings of Iranian Jewish history. Religious ideas and practices among Iranian Jews underwent significant transformations from the late nineteenth century onward, developments that coincided with the emergence of modern nationalism and a broader reconfiguration of religion’s place in social life during the Pahlavi era. As in broader Iranian society, certain understandings of religion increasingly came to be represented as an impediment to progress.
Scholarship on Iranian society more broadly has demonstrated that reformist discourses did not simply adopt European models as remedies for the country’s perceived backwardness, but instead engaged with them critically, selectively, and in multifaceted ways. Such differentiated perspectives have increasingly been applied to Jewish communities in Iran, particularly in studies of national belonging and political and cultural participation. More recent scholarship has demonstrated the varied positions Iranian Jews adopted within these realms. Yet important questions remain about how Iranian Jewry engaged with processes of modernization beyond political identification and institutional frameworks. In particular, religious texts have rarely been examined as sources through which Iranian Jews themselves articulated and negotiated the social and intellectual challenges associated with modernity.
This article seeks to address this gap through the early twentieth-century writings of rabbi Ḥaim Moreh. Rather than reproducing a dichotomy between Western modernity and Iranian traditionalism, the article highlights the plurality of Jewish responses to modernity in late Qajar and early Pahlavi Iran, as well as how religious knowledge was reframed in this process. Moreh wrote during a period of profound transformation marked by the collapse of the Qajar monarchy, the establishment of the Pahlavi state, the emergence of Jewish associations, far-reaching educational reforms, and the growing influence of European, Russian, and American political actors on both Iran and its Jewish communities.
In presenting an English translation of Moreh’s Judeo-Persian works for the first time, I pursue two aims. First, I examine the social context and various engagements with reform initiatives among Jews in Iran that led to the production of his texts. Second, I examine the vernacularization and popularization of religious knowledge in Moreh’s writings and their accommodation within modernist discourses. This approach requires recovering forms of religious and communal identification that have been marginalized or obscured by narratives that cast Iranian Jewish history in terms of (Iranian) backwardness and (Western) advancement. Instead, I use the books published by Moreh to examine how local actors selectively engaged with and reshaped reformist ideas in accordance with their own social and communal concerns.
Judeo-Persian in early twentieth-century Iran
For Jews in Iran, Persian was the language of everyday life, which they typically wrote using the Hebrew alphabet. This language and script are known as Judeo-Persian or Fārsī-Yahūdī.Footnote 2 Hebrew was used primarily as a liturgical language, and only those with advanced literary training wrote in Hebrew fluently.Footnote 3 Jewish boys usually attended the maktab, where they learned the Hebrew script based on religious texts by rote learning. A few became literate in the Perso-Arabic script, mainly through self-instruction. Their spoken language was Persian, but the script they knew was Hebrew. In the early twentieth century, Hebrew changed from a sacred language to a marker of a new form of Jewish self-identification, a connection to Jews beyond Iran, particularly European Jews. In this transitional period, Judeo-Persian was, for a relatively short time, used for printing Jewish newspapers and books in Iran, before the nationalization politics of Reza Shah put an end to this and universalized Persian as the language of the nation. In Iran, Moreh’s books were among the first printed in Judeo-Persian and represent a novel endeavor to systematize and disseminate religious knowledge for a broader Jewish public: a new religious canon in the vernacular language, as part of a broader educational project.
Ḥaim Moreh was born in Tehran in 1872. His father, Mordechai ben Eliyahu, was from Shiraz and passed away when Ḥaim was just seven years old. Ḥaim Moreh had also lost sight in both eyes at the age of two as the result of an illness (measles or rubella). He was raised by his maternal grandparents, and his grandmother advocated for his education despite his blindness. He studied under the supervision of rabbi El’azar Melamed of Yazd and already at a young age showed a remarkable ability to memorize religious texts. Sometime after 1898, when the first Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) school opened in Tehran, Ḥaim Moreh taught Hebrew and religious subjects there (fig. 1). Through conversations with older generations of Iranian Jews, I found that he was a highly esteemed teacher and charismatic personality. Many of his pupils admired him, and some even named their firstborn sons after him.Footnote 4
Four books were published by Moreh between 1921–1939, the first three in Judeo-Persian and the last in Persian.Footnote 5 Ḥaim Moreh was blind, but he knew the Torah and Talmud by heart. Moreover, he learned French and was deeply versed in Persian literary traditions. His students read texts to him and wrote down what he dictated to them. Some of these students would later become important figures in the community. In his first book, Derekh Ḥayim (The Way of Ḥaim), Moreh mentions three people who contributed to the publication: Sulaymān Kohan-Sedegh, Sulaymān Ḥaim, and Monsieur Brasseur, former director of the Alliance Israélite in Isfahan. Before getting to the actual contents of Moreh’s books, I begin by situating these figures within their social and intellectual environment.
Education and national consciousness
In the late nineteenth century, exposure to European societies through education, the press, and travel confronted increasing numbers of Iranians with the material advances of the West, giving rise to a discourse of decline and necessary renewal. Concern over Iran’s economic hardships, widespread corruption, and perceived moral decline brought about diverse visions for reforming society in alignment with what was understood as modern civilization.Footnote 6 Reformist literature of the late Qajar era addressed illiteracy and the absence of modern educational institutions as main problems. These discourses circled around two groups as the primary impediments to progress: the masses, depicted as lacking education, and the clergy, portrayed as resistant to reform.
For Iranian Jews, too, modernization came to be closely associated with educational reform and the need to educate the broader community. AIU schools have long occupied a privileged place in this narrative as the institutions that introduced modern education and the resulting upward social mobility to Iranian Jewish society. Opposition to such reforms was consequently almost erased from historiography and connected forms of traditional religiosity were rendered increasingly illegible. Perceived as too closely embedded in the surrounding Muslim environment, these religious practices appeared incompatible with emerging conceptions of Jewish identity, shaped by projects of modernization and their attendant European norms.
From left: Mollā Yaʿqub, Mollā Daniel, and Ḥaim Moreh.
However, characterizing resistance to reform within the Jewish community as a product of ignorance neglects the extent to which concerns over communal and societal cohesion shaped such attitudes. As Aaron Rodrigue points out with regard to the Ottoman Empire, the AIU contributed to a reorientation of local Jewish elites away from their immediate social environment and toward Western cultural models, resulting in a growing sense of cultural distance from the surrounding society.Footnote 7 Given the profound nature of these transformations, there is little reason to assume that their far-reaching implications were uniformly welcomed within the broader Jewish community.
Prior to the twentieth century, religious affiliation and Jewish peoplehood were largely inseparable. The educational and ideological programs introduced by the Alliance Israélite Universelle reconfigured this relationship by promoting new conceptions of Jewish collective identity, often at the expense of traditional forms of religiosity. AIU schools insisted on French as the language of instruction and, until the mid-1920s, neither Hebrew nor religious education were central parts of the curriculum. Among traditionally minded Jews, the neglect of religious subjects, enforcement of French while both Persian and Hebrew were disregarded, the often-paternalizing attitude, and attempts to substitute traditional norms with secular culture were seen as leading to the disruption of family and community values.Footnote 8
AIU principals for example considered local attire as the main marker of local Jews’ “cultural backwardness.” Zvi Yehuda explains that AIU teachers in Baghdad “thought that if the Jewish child were to doff his traditional head covering, cut his hair and remove his ear locks, and speak and think in French, he would thus shake off backwardness, becoming ‘developed’ and ‘progressive.’”Footnote 9 However, for community leaders and rabbis, as well as the surrounding non-Jewish society, “this attire symbolized the religious and national identity of the Jews, and any attack on their outward appearance was considered an injury to their tradition and their religious-ethnic identity.”Footnote 10
While the AIU representative in Baghdad asserted in his letters to Paris that the introduced changes were accepted without opposition, a Judeo-Arabic newspaper offers quite a different account:
several youths have begun to trim their beards with scissors, and from day to day their number has grown until some of these youths took the step of shaving their beards with a razor (because of our many sins). From one day to the next the phenomenon is spreading so that one who shaves his beard cannot be distinguished from the Gentiles (Christians). It also has become the occasion of blasphemy by the Muslims in the marketplace who say: “wonder of wonders, the Jews have forsaken their religion” (heaven forbid!). When the rabbis heard this, they sought a remedy.Footnote 11
Consequently, Baghdadi rabbis threatened all Jewish barbers with excommunication if they cut anyone’s beard or ear locks. The opposition must have been effective, since one of the AIU officers wrote back to the headquarters, referring to the president of the Baghdad community: “I fear a student of the preparatory school in Paris would be a tool in his hands and would be broken by him as happened previously to Mr. Nerson [the first principal].”Footnote 12
Struggles with the AIU included prominent figures such as Rabbi Yosef Hayyim, the most renowned rabbi in Mesopotamia.Footnote 13 Hayyim established close ties with the AIU executive in Paris and its representatives in Mesopotamia, while simultaneously conducting prolonged struggles with them over how to run the schools. Iranian Jews were in close contact with Baghdad, based on trade and family relations, but also in terms of religious authority.Footnote 14 It is striking that while the Baghdadi case demonstrates strong reactions from both rabbinic and lay authorities, the archival records regarding Iranian rabbis are largely silent on this matter. Baghdadi Jews may have been more experienced in contact with Europeans, their well-established trade relations and advanced socio-economic position rendering them more confident and assertive toward AIU personnel. Surviving sources from Iran, however, rarely preserve the perspectives of rabbis or community leaders, except in correspondence addressed to AIU officials, in which requests for assistance often emphasized communal deprivation and dependence.Footnote 15 Such documents therefore tell us more about the conditions under which Iranian Jews communicated with foreign benefactors than about local attitudes toward reform. Rather than indicating the absence of disagreement, the paucity of dissenting voices may reflect the uneven preservation of sources and the asymmetrical power relations that structured their production.
Joseph Cazes, for example, who established the first AIU school in Tehran, also left Iran after only two years. According to Amnon Netzer, this was due to “intrigue” among Tehrani Jews. Rather than asking what concerns or disagreements may have animated the conflict, Netzer interprets it primarily through a narrative of European advancement vis-à-vis Iranian backwardness:
In Europe, a Jew could be a man of letters and science, and also a Jew; he could feel a loyalty to his country and participate in its affairs, and at the same time identify himself with the people of Israel. In the Persia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the former area of human endeavor did not exist, and the latter, nationalism, was no more than a fanatical religious loyalty in which the Jews could never participate.Footnote 16
This statement by one of the most prolific scholars of Iranian Jewish history portrays Iranian Jews as living in an environment devoid of science and education, incapable of developing either Iranian or Jewish forms of national consciousness. Existing forms of knowledge production and transmission among Iranian Jews largely disappear from view, and Jewish participation in the social and political life of Iran is rendered invisible. As the following sections demonstrate, Moreh’s writings point to a more complex reality, showing how reforms were accommodated within local frameworks.
Shortly after Moreh published his last book in the early 1940s, plans for educational reform were further complicated when an orthodox rabbi from Poland by the name of Isaac Meir Levy arrived in Iran. Levy founded another school network, Ozer HaTorah, which emphasized religious education and rejected modern Hebrew as part of the orthodox stance against a Jewish nation state. Avraham Cohen writes:
He [Levy] tried to give Jewish children in Iran the same education given to the children of Orthodox Jews in Galicia. The history of the Jews of Iran received no attention whatsoever. Rabbi Levy tried to force educated Iranian Jews to wear a kippa and tzitzit not only in synagogue, as was their custom, but also in the street, and to comply with other customs from Eastern Europe. Even at the end of the 19th century education of this type would not have satisfied the needs of Iranian Jews; in the second half of the twentieth century it aroused opposition.Footnote 17
According to Cohen, Levy prohibited the use of Hebrew books from Mandatory Palestine. Only after 1948 were modern Hebrew and Israeli national holidays included in the curriculum.Footnote 18 Despite these differences, both AIU and Ozer HaTorah pursued a mission of educating Iranian Jews towards their respective idea of Jewishness. In addition, Zionist initiatives also entered the scene. Each of these networks operated with distinct agendas, within which Iranian Jewish traditions were largely disregarded or even viewed as in need of “civilizing.” Iranian Jews were not merely passive recipients of these interventions, but incorporated the different agendas advanced by external actors into local demands and circumstances.
Jewish associations and the Hebrew “revival”
The development of Jewish associations in Iran is connected to the Constitutional Revolution (1906–1911), which initiated processes of institutionalization and centralization, resulting in “new types of social and communal action.”Footnote 19 From the late nineteenth century, Jews from many cities in Iran started moving to Tehran for economic opportunities and because contact with representatives of European embassies and transnational Jewish associations in the capital promised new possibilities. The latter’s newly developed interest in their co-religionists was typically framed within a discourse of benevolence in which European Jews acted as benefactors vis-à-vis a community perceived as in need. For Iranian Jews, in order to engage more broadly with their European co-religionists, knowledge of modern Hebrew gained increasing importance. Spoken Hebrew, as distinct from its function as a sacred liturgical language, became a central medium through which Iranian Jews could be recognized by European Jews and, in turn, participate in what many came to regard as a more “advanced” civilizational sphere. Accordingly, the first Judeo-Persian newspaper printed in Iran in 1915, Shalom, stated its purpose in its first issue as leading Iranian Jews towards education and enlightenment, an endeavor in which “only the Hebrew language can connect us with our fellow Jewish in other nations.”Footnote 20
At the beginning of 1918, a society to promote the teaching and learning of Hebrew was formed, Anjoman-e taqwīyat-e zabān-e ʿibrī (Association for Strengthening the Hebrew Language). In 1919, the association renamed itself Taškīlāt-e Ṣīyūnīst-e Īrān (Zionist Organization of Iran) in order to, according to Amnon Netzer, gain recognition from Zionist organizations in Europe.Footnote 21 This group published several books in Judeo-Persian, among them Tārīḵča-ye naḥżat-e Ṣīyūnīst (History of the Zionist Movement). Walter Fischel describes this publication as containing numerous biblical quotations, indicating the strong religious and messianic character of Persian Jewry’s conception of Zionism. In the 1950s, the Zionist youth movement still had a branch in Iran called He Ḥalutz ha-Dati (Religious Pioneers), conveying a religious, rather than national, outlook. What evolved under the label of “Zionism” in Iran at the time was thus quite different from political understandings of Zionism in Europe. Iranian “Zionism” did not entail the immediate objective of settling in the Land of Israel, but rather was “a factor in bolstering self-confidence on a domestic level.”Footnote 22 Beyond Zionism, some Jews also founded associations devoted to progress and public health, and participated in Freemasonic and esoteric circles, often beyond specifically Jewish interests.Footnote 23
Zionism was thus not the main objective of communal organization, and it was not unchallenged. In 1919, the First Congress of Iranian Zionists convened in Tehran. Among those present were Yequti’el ben Isaac, head of Ḥevra Qaddisha (Holy Brotherhood, a Jewish burial and welfare society), Loghman Nehorāy (who later became the Jewish representative in the Majlis), and Elbo Nehorāy, all originally from Kashan.Footnote 24 Yequtiel, upon returning to Kashan to establish a branch of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, cut off his relations with the Zionists, pointing to AIU’s reservations towards political engagement.Footnote 25 Loghman Nehorāy, “was not interested in Jews beyond Iran,” as a member of the Jewish Agency would later remark, representing a localized perspective rather than one concerned with a Jewish nation state. Rather than aligning themselves exclusively with a single ideological project, many Iranian Jews navigated multiple institutional and intellectual networks, reframing them according to local circumstances and priorities. The boundaries between these different currents were often more porous than organizational histories suggest.
Shaping a local synthesis
Sulaymān Kohan-Sedegh, one of the key figures involved in the publication of Moreh's books, was an AIU school graduate and among the first generation of Jews to reap the rewards of a modern education. He also later taught at the AIU school in Tehran and, at the age of twenty, was employed by the gendarmerie, the largely outer-city policing branch of the Iranian army. A few years later, he was promoted to the rank of sarvān or captain. Co-founder and head of the Zionist organization, Kohan-Sedegh also worked closely with both the AIU and Ozer HaTorah schools in Iran. Engagement in these different networks was not self-evident, given the ideological differences between them, but Kohan-Sedegh’s cooperation led to local, hybrid forms of education tailored to the needs of the community. Kohan-Sedegh served as the first president of the Ozer HaTorah Cultural Center and corresponded regularly with AIU officials in Paris. Similar to the Baghdadi Jews mentioned above, he advocated for greater autonomy and local control of Jewish education, rather than dependency on Paris. In 1920, the Zionist Organization of Iran requested the World Zionist Organization in London establish a Jewish national school in Iran, run by the community rather than by the AIU. In Kashan, where community elders had been opposed to opening an AIU school, the first Jewish school had already opened in 1910–11; communal schools in Rasht and Tehran followed in 1922 and 1931, respectively.
Prior to Moreh’s books, Kohan-Sedegh published two volumes on the history of Iranian Jews, on which Habib Levy later based his publications. Moreover, Kohan-Sedegh published the Self-Teaching Guide to Hebrew in 1915, and a book on Hebrew grammar in 1918, all printed by the Association for Strengthening the Hebrew Language.Footnote 26 Kohan-Sedegh also published several books on Jewish law, ethics, explanations of religious rituals as well as two volumes titled The Interpretation of Dreams by Daniel the Prophet and Quadripartite Calendar (with Hebrew, Persian, Gregorian, and Arabic dates). There are many overlaps with Ḥaim Moreh’s books, pointing to the need perceived by some community leaders to present an accessible canon of Jewish texts in the vernacular language.
The second person Moreh mentions as helping with his books was Sulaymān Ḥaim (1886–1969). Sulaymān had been a student of Moreh and wrote down what Moreh dictated. Sulaymān later became famous for his English–Persian Dictionary, published between 1929–31, which is still in use today.Footnote 27 Sulaymān Ḥaim worked as a translator in the Ministry of Finance and in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Tehran.
Finally, Adolphe Brasseur—the third person Moreh mentioned as having made the publication of his book possible—was a French citizen who arrived in Esfahan in 1908 from Izmir, where he had previously taught at an AIU school. According to a deputy of the Jewish Agency, Brasseur supported “the idea that all countries in the world should create one universal government. Thus, all local national governments must stop. He proposed this plan to some of the Ambassadors of different countries. Consequently, he was not so happy with Zionism, but because of us [members of the Sokhnut], he did not say anything.”Footnote 28 How did Iranian Jews position themselves in this environment of competing ideas about Jewish nationhood and religiosity brought forth by different external actors?
Vernacularizing religious knowledge
Moreh’s books are the first attempt to make religious knowledge accessible to the broader community through printed Judeo-Persian texts. Jewish religious texts that had previously circulated primarily among the scholarly elite, were translated, summarized, and explained in Judeo-Persian and, for the first time, printed in this language for a wider readership. A few decades before, Judeo-Persian printing presses were established by Iranian, Afghan, and Bukharan Jews in Jerusalem, serving a similar purpose.Footnote 29 These books served to acquaint Jewish communities with a canon of religious knowledge fixed in written form, as religious authority was changing and oral modes of transmission were retreating.Footnote 30
Moreh’s books reflect the very debates in which Jewish educational institutions in Iran were embroiled: the place of religion in modern education, the role of Hebrew, and the integration of Iranian Jews into a wider, historical Jewish consciousness. Moreh’s first book, Derekh Ḥayim, was published in 1921. The introduction was written by “Monsieur Laredo,” headmaster of the AIU school in Tehran at the time (original in French):
Two elements constituted the strength and vitality of our people before their dispersion: Religion and Language. Religion, despite persecutions, forced conversions, and expulsions, has remained firm and intact thanks to its moral beauty and eternal truths.
Language, on the other hand, lost all living character; the Israelites, mingling with other peoples, abandoned the biblical language to adopt that of their new homeland. But as the disappearance of our language undermined the preserving effect of our religion, the future of Judaism was in danger. Fortunately, a powerful reversal is emerging in the Jewish world: working toward the revival of the Hebrew language, while remaining faithful to Mosaic law. Yet the Jews of this country—whose religious sentiment is so easily shaken, and whose fidelity to ritual practices leaves much to be desired—are in great need of a stimulus that would bind them to our traditions and instill in them a love for our religion, our language, and our history. But while awaiting the desired means of progress, an appropriate form of Jewish education has just been advocated. (…) It is to be hoped that this manual, so useful and so interesting, will be adopted by all the Jewish schools of Persia.
Laredo presents religion, Hebrew language and historical consciousness as the pillars for “re-establishing” a Jewish identity. He formulates this identity as transregional, yet Iranian Jews are situated as weakened and shattered within this framework, still in need of being educated.
Following this introduction is a foreword by Sulaymān Ḥaim, which asks the readers to consider the “spiritual aspects” of the book as a way to an “independent and reason-based” understanding of their religion. Ḥaim writes:
How regrettable it is that some of our youth, simply because they find themselves in environments that do not permit them to become properly acquainted with the principles and branches of their ancestral religion, become so influenced by foreign ideas that—even when their inner voice calls them so seek the truth of their ancestral faith—they are too entangled in acquired beliefs. If this small work cannot assist them, no worldly means will be available to them. Indeed, had it not been for the foundational teachings that I received in childhood—through the blessed influence of the esteemed author—I too might have been led astray by the environment into which I later fell.Footnote 31
Sulaymān Ḥaim warns against the perils of becoming detached from the tenets of Judaism, alluding to his own inclination to Christianity, which he developed in the course of his studies at the American Presbyterian college.Footnote 32 He then states the intended audiences for the book: parents and teachers, the general public, and thoughtful and enthusiastic youth.Footnote 33 This situates the book as intended for the common reader, not for religious scholars. Following the foreword, Moreh remarks that the book is a translation of Hebrew texts into Persian because many readers are not fluent in Hebrew.
Derekh Ḥaim presents the foundations of Jewish law: the thirteen principles of faith and the 613 commandments of the Torah, based on Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah.Footnote 34 After each section, the book has study questions written for “the purpose of exams,” clearly marking it as a textbook. After that, Moreh outlines the “history of the world and events in Israel,” emphasizing the importance of Jewish history in fostering awareness of a Jewish identity beyond Iran. It is the first time a rabbinical book in Iran includes secular history.
The genealogy begins with Noah, alongside a chronological framework based on the Hebrew calendar. Biblical figures are followed by important rabbis such Maimonides and Yosef Karo, author of the Shulchan Aruch, one of the most authoritative legal texts in rabbinic Judaism. Moreh also narrates the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. Characteristically for Iranian historiography at the time, the section on Iranian history focuses on ancient, pre-Islamic Iran: Moreh describes the role of Jewish communities living under Sasanian rule and the office of the Exilarch (Rosh HaGeulah) as the sole authority for Iranian Jews after the destruction of the temple. Other main figures mentioned include Cyrus the Great, who permitted Jewish exiles “to return to their homeland,” and Esther, the Jewish queen at the Persian court whose story is celebrated at the festival of Purim.
Moreh then moves on to European Jewish figures such as rabbi Israel Baal Shem, the founder of Hasidic Judaism from today’s Ukraine, and the German philosopher and main figure of the Jewish enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn. Reference to Middle Eastern Jewry only appears in connection with the Damascus Affair of 1840, which contributed to the formation of Jewish organizations in Europe aimed at supporting Jewish communities in the Middle East. Moreh mentions European Jewish institutions such as the Anglo-Jewish Association, as well as Theodor Herzl’s call for a Jewish nation state. The only mention of contemporary Jewish history in Iran is in reference to the Alliance Israélite in Tehran, closing with the following paragraph:
What preserves the people of Israel’sFootnote 35 dignity and protects them from foreign oppression? What provides the language of freedom that allows Israelites to rise in defense of their rights when these are violated? Undoubtedly, it is knowledge alone, which can also save them from poverty and hardship.Footnote 36
Moreh presents knowledge not merely as a means of personal advancement but as a means of claiming and defending rights. As AIU schools are exclusively endowed with the capacity to fulfull this task, the passage also points to the Alliance’s broader institutional role in defending the legal, social, and economic interests of Iranian Jews.
In the foreword, Sulaymān Ḥaim had emphasized awareness of one’s own history and traditions as the most important protection from negative outside influences. For many traditional Jews in Iran—as in other parts of the Middle East—European, secular education and languages were perceived as precisely such influences. Moreh and his contemporaries did not regard this as a threat, however, as their concern was directed at another challenge: the conversion of Iranian Jews to Christianity and the Bahā’ī religion.
Countering conversion
The perceived weakness of Judaism in Iran and resulting threat of conversions led many rabbis such as Moreh to cooperate with and embrace the ideals of AIU schools. The modernization offered by AIU schools entailed cultural, economic, and political advancement, even if this came at the cost of disrupting the traditional social order and religious authority. AIU education offered access to European civilization; Christianity and—from the twentieth century onward—the Bahā’ī faith were appealing for similar reasons, among others, but they required abandoning Judaism. In all three of his books, Moreh alludes repeatedly to “misguided claims” and “heretics,” pointing to conversions as a main concern. In Derekh Ḥaim, Moreh devotes a long passage to Isaiah 52-53, a key text in Christian claims that the Hebrew Bible foretells Jesus as the Messiah. He argues instead that these chapters refer to the resurrection of the Jewish people as a nation.
Moreh’s third book, Yede Eliyahu (The Hands of Eliyahu), entails a fascinating description of a religious debate with a group of Christians. In a section titled “Questions and Answers,” containing Moreh’s answers to questions posed by students, one student asks whether it was necessary to engage in religious discussions with people of other faiths. Moreh answers in the positive, with the following narration:
On a Friday, the 22nd of Iyar, year 5677 [1917], Mister Schuler, preacher, and Jordan, head of the American school, came to the house of Mr. Ḥājī Yitzhak, of blessed memory, as representatives for the religious debate.Footnote 37 The aforementioned SirFootnote 38 Yitzhak and his sons, as well as the late Sir Yaʿqub, son of Mollā Nehorāy of blessed memory, and Sir Mollā Dāvūd Shādī, as well as several Israelite antique dealers were present. Since I wanted our efforts not to be in vain, I made three requests to the Christian gentlemen:
That none of us leave the assembly without the consent of the others, due to a lack of time; That every answer corresponds exactly to its question so that the time of the parties is not wasted; That everything discussed today be written down by one of us and one of you, and the results be published in the Shalom newspaper so that the Israelites of Iran may understand.
They said that if we wanted to publish this in the newspaper, they would not participate. [Moreh then questions the gentlemen about false accusations against Jews in connection with World War I, and raises the Dreyfus affairFootnote 39 in France, closing with the following words:] Since it has been established that the Jews had no fault, can we start with the discussion?Footnote 40
In this narration, Moreh sets the rules for discussion. Prior to the actual discussion, he addresses the claim of Jews having financed World War I. The encounter reads like a lesson in both history and how to confront antisemitic accusations. Moreh then starts the debate by pointing out that Christians were violating religious law by not keeping Shabbat, to which the Christian representatives reply that they were keeping it, albeit on Sunday. After some back and forth, Mr. Shuler reportedly wished to leave the event, stating that he had not been informed that Moreh would be their discussion partner, underlining the author’s status as a powerful contender.Footnote 41
Moreh then tells his students that, a few days later, he was approached by “a Christian person” who alleged that Moreh was unable to understand the claims of Christianity. Moreh replied with a citation from the Bible, referring to Jesus as the “son of a snake,” whose “father was unknown.”Footnote 42 The harsh debate shows Moreh’s intense engagement in pushing back the influence of Christian missionaries at the height of their schools’ success.
Another religious debate in which Moreh was involved, is recorded in the memoir of a Jewish convert to the Bahā’ī faith. In the memoir, the convert recalls how his father, a devout Jew, was very dissatisfied with the education Jewish children received at AIU schools. He saw AIU schools as weakening Jewish identity and values.Footnote 43 The father repeatedly complained to Mr. Cazes, the principal, until
Cazes succeeded in convincing him and some of the Jewish rabbis to agree to a debate during which they could put forth persuasive arguments to win back his son. However, it seemed impossible to calm down my father, who was torn with anger. Monsieur Cazes had advised him and other Jewish scholars that they should try to win over the Bahā’īs using convincing proofs and reason, not by hostility or use of force.Footnote 44
The author then introduces the debate participants:
Rabbi Ḥaim Moreh: He was blind, yet he knew the entire Torah by heart and had an astonishing knowledge of other books sacred to the Jews. He was a brilliant and powerful speaker, and had recently composed a refutation against Jesus and the Gospels, which was without peer or rival at that time.Footnote 45
Once again, the debate is described as having been won by the party to which the author adhered, this time the Bahā’īs: Mr. Arjomand, another Jewish Bahā’ī convert, is presented as sharp and fierce, causing the Jewish group to be shattered, retracting to the mere plea that everybody should be left in peace to follow their own religion. The author concludes that the debate was discussed in every neighborhood and marketplace, after which “the situation changed and we had no more fear. (…) But the dissatisfaction of my father persisted still.”Footnote 46
This kind of debate, usually held in private homes, was a common way of negotiating religious tension. As the two examples imply, such debates were the talk of the town afterwards. While aimed at refuting the other side, they were also a means of engagement and exchange.
Patriotism as ethical practice
Moreh’s second book, Gedullat Mordekhai (The Great Mordekhai), was published in 1924 and is the shortest of his Judeo-Persian books. Containing mostly instructions for holidays and translated prayers, it reads more like a manual of religious customs and rituals than a textbook. Moreh’s third book, Yede Eliyahu, is the most comprehensive, standing at 672 pages. It, too, contains a large segment on religious commandments, at the beginning of which Moreh refers to “certain readers of distinction” who complained that his two previous books had been too scholarly, emphasizing that the “language should be simplified.”Footnote 47 Yede Eliyahu thus aims to make religious knowledge even more accessible to a general audience. In it, Moreh refers to Gedullat Mordekhai, where he laid out the rites and prayers “according to the custom of the Land of Israel and according to our custom,” introducing some of the traditions as practiced by Jews in Palestine to the Iranian community.
Yede Eliyahu contains a section devoted to ethical duties, structured around a wide range of social and religious relationships. This section addresses individuals’ obligations to God, themselves, religion, fellow human beings, and the homeland, as well as reciprocal duties between children and parents, teachers and students, husbands and wives, masters and servants, and guests and hosts. The section also discusses the government’s responsibilities to the people and vice versa. One section is devoted to the duties of the Jewish parliamentary representative and the community’s corresponding obligations to him.
In the paragraph addressing the relationship between a teacher and his students, the author conveys a reformist perspective, departing from the teaching methods of the traditional maktab. Moreh, who attended the AIU after having gone through the traditional educational system, advocates new pedagogical methods and classroom arrangements: teachers should sit at the same level as their students and be willing to acknowledge their own mistakes. The relationship between teacher and student is conceptualized as free from both nepotism and despotism. Rather, the teacher’s aim should be to assist his pupils in the pursuit of knowledge.
In the “Duty of Man to His Homeland” section, Moreh defines homeland as “the land in which a person is born and raised, from which he enjoys its climate, produce, and resources.” This homeland is demarcated from the Holy Land: “The people of Israel in particular must be ready to make every sacrifice for their homeland, and also for the Holy Land [Eretz HaKodesh], the land of their ancestors, over which God’s providence is constantly watchful.”Footnote 48 On sacred days, the people of Israel should recite prayers “for the welfare of both their government and homeland, as well as for the land of Israel, and not neglect Zion.” While Iran is clearly defined as the homeland, loyalty to both Iran and “Zion” go hand in hand.
Although every reference to the Land of Israel is connected to biblical passages, Moreh also encourages settlement in Israel, the purchase of land and building of homes, migrating and “establish[ing] factories there,” and donating to the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemeth).Footnote 49 This runs counter to a clear separation between religious and political Zionism, and the subsequent development of one after the other. In Moreh’s texts, these concepts exist side by side as well.Footnote 50 Consequently, the author refers to biblical commentaries and Ashkenazi enlightenment literature for further reading.Footnote 51
Moreh emphasizes the importance of patriotism to Iran, arguing that Jews should present themselves favorably in order to demonstrate their loyalty and civic commitment to Iranian society. Iran’s independence is underlined by securing borders and preventing foreign interference, followed by a similar, although shorter, demand for the Holy Land. Moreh and his contemporaries never emigrated to Mandate Palestine. Like the objective of learning Hebrew, which he discusses on the same page, advocating for settlement in Israel was part of the educational discourse Moreh conveyed to Iranian Jews as part of a new consciousness.
Making religion compatible with modern knowledge
From the late nineteenth century, modernist discourses in Iran contrasted modern scientific knowledge with established forms of knowledge deemed erroneous, irrational, or “superstitious.” Yet, many modernists argued that modernity was universal and not exclusively a product of Western society, engaging in the “authenticating and Iranianizing [of] science.”Footnote 52
Moreh engages in a comparable process of vernacularization, incorporating modern ideas about hygiene, health, and medicine into a Jewish religious framework. After the chapters on ethics and duties discussed above, Yede Eliyahu contains a section on “Guarding the Body and Health,” which includes issues of cleanliness, hygiene, and medical advice. Moreh refers to the source of his writings as “Rabbi Reuven, the physician, and his fifteen disciples,” as well as a handwritten booklet in which the names of medicines were written “partly in Hebrew, partly in Arabic, and some in Lashon La‘az”(Judeo-Spanish). Moreh consulted some “physicians with various dictionaries” before bringing these diverse contents to paper.Footnote 53
In the discussion of health and hygiene that follows, Moreh connects the spread of certain diseases to the transgression of religious commands, employing a moral-religious etiology of disease. There is advice for very practical and detailed aspects of daily life, such as the importance of clean air and circulation, instructions on how to clean one’s ear canal, and the importance to look at things further away after reading for an extended period of time, in order to rest the eyes. Life-work balance is also emphasized, not least because “Regular physical activity ensures a healthy body capable of fulfilling God’s commandments.”Footnote 54 In some sections, Moreh refers to Pirkei Avot (Chapters of the Fathers) as his source, a part of Jewish law focused on moral sayings of the sages, but his arguments closely resemble Iranian modernist literature.Footnote 55 As such, the work constitutes a unique synthesis of Jewish religious thought and broader Iranian modernist discourses.
Some advice, such as how to behave during a cholera outbreak, is more archaic: “Water should be boiled, and pieces of iron that have been heated red-hot in a fire should be placed in the water. After breaking them into small pieces, the water may be consumed.”Footnote 56 Then there are several paragraphs devoted to infertility and how to detect which partner is infertile, as well as advice on sexual incapacity:
If a man is unable to perform sexually, he should avoid foods containing opium or camphor, and avoid salty, sour, or moist foods. He should not live in damp places. (…) [T]he urethra of a bull can be collected, burned, and its ashes mixed into old wine and consumed. (…) Activities that strain the brain are harmful for him.Footnote 57
This passage draws on Galenic humoral theory, in which sexual potency was understood in relation to the balance of bodily qualities and could be affected by diet, environment, and mental exertion.Footnote 58
Moreh then concludes by outlining religion and science as two sides of the same coin:
When King Hezekiah of Judah realized that sick people had no concern for God and relied entirely on physicians, he collected the book of medicine and hid it with knowledgeable people. The rabbis confirmed this (Mishnah, Pesachim 4:9). Hezekiah’s intention was not to abolish medicine, but to ensure that anyone who fell ill first prayed to God, relying on His mercy, and the physician’s medicine would then be given as needed. There is strong evidence that skilled physicians were considered necessary and obligatory (…) Without medical knowledge, how could he heal patients?Footnote 59
Moreh emphasizes the mutual dependence of medical science and religious belief, at the same time emphasizing trust in God as the prerequisite for being able to apply medicine. His concern about the erosion of religious authority in the face of modern science reflects ambivalence about reconciling faith with scientific knowledge. For the last decades preceding Moreh’s books, Iranian intellectuals had increasingly classified certain beliefs and practices as “superstition” (khurāfāt) and contrasted them with “science” (ʿilm) and rational inquiry. As Alireza Doostar shows, this did not produce a simple separation of science and religion. Rather, both religious scholars and secular intellectuals attempted to redefine religion in scientific terms.Footnote 60 Moreh, too, emphasizes religious authority as indispensable to modern science, while unanimously rejecting what he categorizes as superstitious belief:
Our Creator has commanded us not to practice omen-seeking [shogun-bīnī]. Due to the abundance of sins in these days, superstition is widespread among Israel, and many pay attention to baseless beliefs. For example, they say at a certain time one must not do a particular action. (...) They say that on the night of Shabbat, one should not eat eggs. From the house of a sick person, fire must not be taken outside. Similarly, from the house of a woman in childbirth, fire must not be carried out for nine days. There are many such matters that cannot be fully described by words. (…) Those who believe in such things and similar matters disobey God’s commandments. Some people, when they see a flame burning upright, say, “A guest will come to us.” If they extinguish that fire with water, the guest will fall into the water.Footnote 61 Although some have tested this and found it “true,” this practice is from Satan. For when a person believes such things, Satan arranges that the guest actually falls into the water, so the person remains bound to such superstitions. Woe to those who believe in such things, disobey several commandments, and even regard the testimony of the Holy Torah as false. (…)
There are people who suffer from headaches and vow not to buy an animal’s head until the headache passes. Others afflicted with internal ailments vow not to eat an animal’s entrails. These beliefs derive from the practices of idolaters, and Israelites should place their trust in God alone.Footnote 62
This text demonstrates how critiques of superstition were articulated through Jewish religious authority. Rather than opposing religion to science, Moreh presents rational conduct and the rejection of superstition as religious imperatives.
Accordingly, as fields such as cosmology and astrology came to be sidelined by modern scientific frameworks, their treatment in Moreh’s texts is often reduced to descriptive or didactic references, as their metaphysical significance no longer appeared like a valid mode of knowledge. For example, Moreh introduces the famous medieval poem “Keter Malkhut” by Ibn Gabirol (1021–1058), remarking that Ibn Gabirol’s measurements of the distances between the sun and the planets were inaccurate due to his lack of access to the instruments of modern science. Further, when referring to the cosmic order, Moreh explains the planets and spheres based on short summaries, suggesting that the poem’s cosmological framework was increasingly treated as cultural and literary knowledge rather than a source of scientific or metaphysical insight.
This dynamic also appears in the final section of Yede Eliyahu, devoted to dreams and their interpretation (fig. 2). Moreh refers to works on dream interpretation and astrology attributed to Hai ben Sherira Gaon (939–1038) and a book of dream interpretation written by Rabbi Mordechai ben Abraham in the “Bukharan language” (i.e., Judeo-Tajik), which he aligned with a traditional Jewish dream-interpretation manual, “editing and correcting some of its content.”Footnote 63 This editorial intervention suggests an effort to regulate and standardize these traditions. Before turning to the alphabetical list of dream symbols, Moreh introduces a series of practices and beliefs concerning sleep and dreams drawn from different strands of Jewish tradition. Under Parashat Vayishlaḥ, he notes that “a person who places his hand on his left thigh when going to sleep will see bad dreams.”Footnote 64 The practice echoes the biblical account of Jacob’s struggle with a mysterious being, in which Jacob is wounded on the thigh, linking a seemingly popular belief to a biblical narrative. Moreh also cites the Zohar, the foundational text of the Kabbalah, on the practice of rising at midnight to study Torah.Footnote 65 He further notes that the kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria prescribed the recitation of a specific prayer before sleep.Footnote 66 These references bring biblical narrative, kabbalistic practice, and popular beliefs into a shared body of practical knowledge concerning sleep, dreams, and spiritual protection. Their placement alongside more conventional bedtime rituals, and immediately before the alphabetical discussion of dream interpretation, suggests that Moreh did not sharply distinguish between these different forms of religious knowledge, but incorporated them together into his practical guidance on sleep and dreams.
Turning then to the section on dream interpretation, dream symbols are arranged alphabetically, including food items; animals; natural phenomena such as the sun, fire, and moonlight; ritual objects such as the shofar and tefillin; Melekh HaMavet (Hebr. King of Death), the angelic figure of death in Jewish mystical tradition; biblical figures such as Job and Pinchas; and even topics such as incest. Yet the explanations attached to these symbols are generally brief, and the principles underlying their interpretations are absent. Functioning primarily as a catalogue of symbols, like cosmology, dream interpretation is preserved as part of the Jewish textual tradition, yet without a deeper interpretive discussion.
“Taʿbīr-e khwāb be tartīb-e ḥurūf-e abjad” (Interpretation of Dreams).
While these traditional practices were repositioned within a modern hierarchy of knowledge, Moreh’s poetry retains elements of traditional Persian literary forms. The author’s Persian poetry in Gedullat Mordekhai and his narrative retellings of biblical stories in Yede Eliyahu draw on established Persian literary conventions, while his Hebrew poetry engages with Jewish poetic and liturgical traditions. Although Perso-Islamic literary frameworks are less prominent than in earlier Judeo-Persian works, elements of Persian literature such as poetic imagery, forms of lamentation and rhyming couplets, remain present and are not treated as objects requiring correction.Footnote 67 In this respect, Moreh appears more traditional than some of his contemporary modernists, who identified classical Persian poetry as impediment to reform.Footnote 68
The distinctive synthesis Moreh presents has often been overshadowed by historiographical narratives that frame modern Iranian Jewish religious literature in terms of decline and lack of innovation, rendering the work “unoriginal.”Footnote 69 While Daniel Tsadik refutes the narrative of an educational and religious wasteland among Jews in Iran, attesting to rabbis’ engagement with a variety of textual sources and a tradition of knowledge transfer, in an article preceding his book he refers to Derekh Ḥayim as “anything but innovative,” resorting to the narrative of long-term “decline” in religious knowledge among Iranian Jews.Footnote 70 This decline is ascribed to:
times of heavy persecution and forced conversions, governmental disposal of their writings, poverty, lack of organized communal leadership, and to a limited extent, their living in Shi‘ite Iran politically detached from adjacent Sunni countries with their centers of Jewish learning.Footnote 71
Towards the end of his book, Tsadik also mentions the AIU’s influence as reason for the decline in rabbinical literature and knowledge in Iran. However, given the richness and diversity of the religious and intellectual landscape that his own research uncovers, the continued reproduction of narratives centered on decline and ignorance remains difficult to reconcile with the available evidence.
Influenced by reform initiatives promoted by European Jewish institutions and modernization movements in Iran, both of which increasingly privileged new forms of knowledge, religious traditions were marginalized or reframed according to new standards of legitimacy and authority. Yet, rather than disappearing, these traditions continued to be adapted and reinterpreted, albeit within a new discursive space. Moreh’s work should be understood not as a product of declining religious knowledge, but as a response to the changing conditions under which religious knowledge could be confidently adapted and reinterpreted.
Conclusion
Ḥaim Moreh’s books represent a unique textual source for the endeavors of Iranian Jewish communities to compile a canon of religious knowledge, integrate it within modern notions of religiosity and reform, and popularize it for a broader public. This happened in both conflict and collaboration with international Jewish organizations such as the AIU, the Joint Distribution Committee, and the Zionist movement, which promoted the publication of texts by and for the Jewish community, but also left their mark in determining the form and content of publications. Met with substantial resistance, AIU schools were, over time, looking for ways to do justice to the Hebrew “revival”, make space for religious knowledge and meet the demands of the local communities. Moreh’s publications are a result of this attempt, as AIU functionaries advocated and the Joint Distribution Committee financed his books as “proper” religious knowledge.Footnote 72
The broad range of sources Moreh employs disproves the assumption that Iranian Jews in the late Qajar period were devoid of access to religious learning. Yet, Moreh’s books advance a new standardization and vernacularization of religious knowledge, in terms of language and content: mystical and cosmological traditions were recast within a pedagogical framework that privileged legal and rational modes of religious instruction. The books also reflect the zeitgeist of transforming Hebrew from a liturgical language into a national one. That this endeavor achieved only limited success is evidenced by his fourth and final book, Bayānāt-e Moreh, published in 1939, which was written entirely in Persian.Footnote 73 Published during a period of increasing state centralization and restrictions on transnational political movements, Bayānāt-e Moreh is devoid of the references to Jewish nationhood found in Moreh’s earlier works. The book’s tribute to Reza Shah suggests that institutions such as the AIU had, prior to the rise of Pahlavi nationalism, served as important loci of collective identification for Iranian Jews, fulfilling some of the functions later associated with the nation state.Footnote 74
As the terms of public debate shifted, both reformist and anti-reformist actors were increasingly compelled to articulate their positions within a new ideological framework shaped by the nation state.
Moreh’s writings reveal that the boundaries between reform and tradition, as well as between religion and science, were fluid, sustaining multiple, overlapping repertoires that later narratives of modernization have tended to downplay. Moreh’s books represent a discursive space in which competing epistemologies could remain unresolved, without requiring a complete break with inherited traditions. At the same time, in seeking to demonstrate Judaism’s compatibility with modernity, Moreh and the circles around him employed a vocabulary of religious knowledge assessed through standards derived from modern science, ideals of progress and civilization, and emerging conceptions of Jewish collective identity. His writings therefore not only illuminate how a religious and intellectual world changed; they also reveal how the categories through which that world has been understood were themselves historical products of reform and modernization.
Disclosures
(see below, Competing Interests): none
Financial Support
Austrian Science Fund Grant no. FWF I 6420-G
