Mashhad Behind Shuttered Windows

For more than a century, a whole community of Jews went to the mosque on Friday and kept the Sabbath on Saturday behind a bolted door. They bought halal meat in the market and let the neighbours watch, then fed it to the cat and ate the kosher meat slaughtered in a back room. They made the pilgrimage to Mecca and earned the title Hajji, and used the cover of that journey, sometimes, to slip away to Jerusalem instead. This is Mashhad: not a story of Jews who were lost, but of Jews who decided, under a sentence of death, that the surface and the soul could be kept apart for as long as it took.

It is one of the hardest stories on the Jewish map, and one of the strongest. The community was young when the blow fell - barely a century in the city - and it answered the impossible demand to disappear by becoming two things at once. Outwardly, Jadid al-Islam, new Muslims. Inwardly, Anusim, the compelled ones, the same word the Spanish exiles had used for themselves. They held that double identity for generations, and they came out the far side still Jews.

A king's idea

The Jews of Mashhad did not drift into the city. They were placed there. In the 1740s, Nadir Shah - the conqueror who had just sacked Delhi and carried home the Peacock Throne and a mountain of plunder - moved a few dozen Jewish families to Mashhad, in his home province of Khorasan. He was a Sunni who did not fully trust the Shia majority around him, and he wanted reliable hands near his treasure and his trade. So Jews came to a city that had never allowed them, by royal command, to guard a king's gold.

It was a precarious gift. When Nadir Shah was assassinated in 1747, the protection that came with him began to fray. The community stayed and grew and prospered in the bazaar, but it lived now without a patron, a small island of Jews in one of Shia Islam's holiest cities. For most of a century that worked well enough. Then, on a single day in the spring of 1839, it stopped working entirely.

Two marriage contracts

What the converts did next is the marvel of the story. They became, outwardly, devout Muslims, and inwardly kept the entire architecture of Jewish life standing in secret. Men prayed at the mosque, then gathered afterwards in a hidden room for the real service. Sabbath candles were lit where no window could betray them. Matzah was baked at night for a Passover no one outside the community was meant to know was happening. Boys wore tiny tefillin under their turbans, it is said, and the men translated the prayers into Persian so the young could follow.

Two devices held the line above all. The first was endogamy so strict it bound the whole community into a single extended family - children betrothed astonishingly young, so that no daughter could be married off to a Muslim before her own people had claimed her. The second was a quiet forgery: families kept two marriage contracts, a Jewish ketubah in Hebrew and Aramaic for the truth, and a Muslim certificate in Persian for the authorities. One document for God, one for the state. A community can survive a great deal on the strength of that distinction.

The shutters open

The secret period ended where it could. Under Reza Shah Pahlavi, from the 1920s, the Mashhadis began to live openly as Jews again - and chose, tellingly, not to dissolve into the wider Iranian Jewish world but to keep their own distinct identity, forged in all those years of concealment. They had become a tribe within a tribe, and they liked it that way.

Today the largest concentrations of Mashhadi Jews are in Israel and in New York, where the community that first rented a synagogue basement in Queens now anchors a substantial presence in Great Neck on Long Island, organised, prosperous and proudly itself. They keep the memory of the double life not as a wound to display but as a credential. Few communities can say they were ordered to vanish and politely declined for a hundred years. The Mashhadis can. The shutters opened; the habit of holding on did not.