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Kirmanshah (Pers. Kirmānshāh; Ar. Qirmīsīn) is a town and province in western Iran, named after the Sasanian king Bahram IV (r. 388–399), near the rock-cut relief of Tāq-i Bustān. It is situated on a principal route from Baghdad to Teheran. In the Middle Ages it was relatively close to the yeshivot of Babylonia. The town probably had a fairly ancient Jewish community. It was mentioned by the tenth-century historian Nathan ha-Bavli, who reported that the exilarch Mar ʿUqba was banished to a locality called Kirmanshah between 909 and 916 because of a communal conflict in Baghdad.Kirmanshah…

The religious epic Fatḥ-nāma (Book of Conquest), written by the Judeo-Persian poet ʿImrānī in the late fifteenth century as a masnavī (narrative poem in rhyming couplets), begins with the conquest of the Holy Land by Joshua. Consisting of approximately ten thousand couplets, it claims to treat events from  Joshua to the reign of Solomon, but no known manuscript confirms that the poet completed this task. The existing manuscripts set the biblical account in classical Persian verse, including the books of Ruth, I Samuel, and the fi…

1.  Historical BackgroundTehran, Iran’s capital since 1786, was mentioned by Muslim geographers in the ninth century as a village near the city of Ray. It received attention after the Mongol destruction of Ray in 1220, but was not developed further until the seventeenth century. Although the settlement of Jews in Tehran dates back to the mid-eighteenth century, documented reports by travelers cannot be traced prior to the reign of Fatḥ ʿAlī Shah Qājār (1797–1834). The Jewish population of six hundred  reported by Rabbi David d’Beth Hillel in 1827 can be compared to the four th…

Amnon Netzer (1934–2008) was a pioneering scholar of Iranian Jewish history and culture, and of Judeo-Persian language and literature, who introduced Iranian Jewish literature to the world and made significant research contributions in Iranian Jewish history. His broad knowledge and rigorous investigative methodology served as a bridge connecting the pre-Islamic Iranian Jewish heritage to the modern period.…