Rabbi Menahem Samuel Halevy, known as Mīrzā Menahem (an honorific roughly equivalent to Mr. Menahem) in the Jewish communities of Iran, was born in Hamadan in 1884. He began his education in his father’s yeshiva and continued it at the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) school and the public schools in Hamadan. At the age of twenty he became a Hebrew teacher at the AIU school. From 1912 through 1922 he was its principal, and also taught French in the public schools and to the children of elite families. In 1921 some of Mīrzā Menahem’s Hebrew poetry was published in Hamadan (with Judeo-Persian…