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Article Excerpt
The crypto-Jewish community of Mashhad, one of Shi'ite Islam's holiest cities in Iran, owes its inception to the settlement of several Jewish families in the city in the first half of the eighteenth century. (1) The community's forced conversion to Islam in 1839, combined with its members' tenacious though covert fidelity to their Jewish faith for over a century, called into being a unique collective identity. These families had to lead a double life for as long as they stayed in Mashhad, recurring pogroms as well as changes of rulers and regimes notwithstanding. Indeed, only after World War II and another pogrom did a real exodus begin. Most of them moved to Tehran, while many emigrated to Israel. By the time of the Khomeini revolution in 1979, they were scattered to every major city of commerce on earth. The revolution removed the bulk of the Tehran community--about half the total--to New York. (2)
The purpose of this article is to chart the patterns of gender roles forged during these years, with particular focus on the post-immigration period. What were past patterns, how did they mold the immigration experience, and how were they molded by it? Finally, what can these patterns tell us about the Mashhadi community more broadly? The experience of women immigrants, comparatively neglected until the last two decades, has been a topic of increasing scholarly interest. (3) However, besides exploring the effect of immigration on gender roles and on the family, which is of intrinsic importance, this venture can also shed light on the entire community's reconstitution in the United States and the identity changes resulting from such an upheaval.
Throughout the community's history--the underground period, the relocation to Tehran, and the emigration to the West--the family was the arena for identity formation. Bred by crypto-Jewish ethnicity, the family was the most formative and most significant factor for the individual within Mashhadi culture. Its primacy was manifested in the prevalence of intra-communal marriages, the importance of raising a family, and loyalty to the family as the central institution in one's life. The centrality of the family endured, though gender roles have continually changed. In tracing these changes, the period before emigration to the United States should be divided not only by the movement from Mashhad to Tehran, from provincial and religious city to the capital and center of the Shah's modernization and secularization policies, but more significantly by the emergence of an openly Jewish community. Together, these two periods comprise nearly a century and a half within what the demographer John Caldwell has called the "patriarchal belt," which geographically comprises large areas of Africa and Asia. (4)
Each period of the Mashhadi story requires a different method for divining the patterns characteristic to it. Knowledge of the underground period, with its scarcity of sources, comes mainly from folklore and memoirs. Most of these accounts are in a male voice, but a voice that recognizes and celebrates the pivotal part that women played in building the underground community. These stories and memories comprise the basic building blocks for reconstructing our knowledge of gender roles during the underground period. For the later part of this period, as well as for the Tehran period, interviews with community members, male and female, provide a more balanced voice. Finally, for the period of migration to the West, the New York community has produced a wealth of publications and archival sources, which have documented its memory celebrations and preserved the reminiscences of its members. The decision to focus the research for this article on the New York community was in part based on this relative wealth of such material.
Past Patterns of Partnership and Patriarchy
The influence of past power structures and cultural values on the formation of gender roles after immigration is not clear-cut. (5) Rebuilding one's life necessitates overcoming economic hardship, cultural challenges, difficulties with a new language, and, not least, ethnic and racial discrimination. In the process, all the power constructions of the original society--both private and public--become fluid. Yet all these components are interconnected. Language proficiency and cultural absorption influence the economic situation, and the ability of some individuals to adjust faster and more fully to the new society's requirements influences power constructions. However, the old patterns--economic, social, and cultural--form, at least in part, the prism through which the newer experiences pass. Research has shown the interaction of ethnicity, gender, and class in shaping attitudes toward women's work and adjusting to changed gender roles. Patriarchal values change and are changed by different cultural contexts. (6)
By far the most common reference to past gender roles by the Mashhadi women of New York concerns their life in a Muslim society. "Muslim culture," a set of behavioral and social customs that sometimes predated Islam and are more complex than religion, featured a patriarchal system that deeply influenced the lives of Jewish women in Iran. (7) Their relegation to a separate sphere and the patriarchal conventions of their society shaped their fate. True, Jewish women were not as directly affected by the dominant religious culture as were their Muslim neighbors. Some differences were halachic in origin, like the prohibition on temporary marriages, which were common practice in Muslim society. Other differences were rooted in social characteristics, like the greater availability of education for non-Muslim girls. (8) Nevertheless, household composition, gendered work roles, and power relations within Jewish and other minority families bore a remarkable resemblance to those of the majority society. (9) In the case of the Mashhadis these similarities were even more pronounced, since the conversion turned the Mashhadi women, at least outwardly, into Muslims.
The discourse on modernization during Reza Shah's reign had a profound influence on gender relations throughout Iran, but little concrete outcome in the religiously conservative city of Mashhad. Regardless of the changed atmosphere in much of Iran, the Mashhadis did not feel able to dissent from the dominant religious culture and remained a crypto-faith community. (10) In a few cases, a more modern approach to women's status in the larger society allowed Mashhadi women to push beyond longstanding constraints, such as the early age at which girls traditionally married (see Figure 1). Thus, with the general rise in the age of marriage, the marital age of Mashhadi girls also rose. For those born after the 1920s, the age was typically above 15. New educational opportunities for women also influenced the Mashhadi community. In the 1930s, a crypto-Jew donated money for a girls' school in Mashhad, which was attended mostly by Jewish girls. (11) Overall, however, the full effect of the Shah's modernizing policies would be felt by the Mashhadis, and by Mashhadi women in particular, only after World War II, when they left Mashhad for Tehran in massive numbers.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
Their state as crypto-Jews, however, was the most important definer of social and gender relations. The image of women in communal folklore of this period is heroic and does not always conform to accepted gender roles. (12) They are recalled as transmitters and "cultural custodians," who never failed to remind their husbands that if they chose assimilation, they also chose isolation within the family. Concerns about cultural and religious continuity among the Mashhadis as crypto-Jews led to the empowerment of the women, who traditionally cared for the education of their children and for the functioning of the family. Defying the official religion enhanced the importance of the home as the physical place and the family as the framework for most religious practices. Marriage was a means for increasing religious solidarity and preserving values, attitudes, beliefs, and traditions. (13) The enhanced importance of the family fostered endogamy and with it greater protection for the women and their empowerment. (14) The women became mothers of the new community not only in a biological but also a spiritual sense. They were the model according to which the coming generations were fashioned. (15)
Underground circumstances also led to a temporary reversal of women's customary inferiority in religious knowledge. In the first couple of decades after the conversion, both sexes were equal in their inability to acquire deep learning. Shortly after the conversion, the self-exile of a large section of the community to Herat, a city several hundred miles to the east, resulted in the disappearance of traditional male religious leadership. (16) On the other hand, the women had the advantage of a wider range of activities--like baking matzoth for Passover--that allowed for the memorization of religious rituals and through them the inculcation of their clandestine religious identity. (17) By the end of the century, when the community began to feel less pressure to submerge their identity, boys and men again gained better access to religious studies, although few took advantage of it.
Full relief from the need to lead a double life came only after the community left Mashhad, an ongoing process that began in the early twentieth century and peaked in the decade after 1945, when most Mashhadis left for Mandatory Palestine or Tehran. The first Mashhadis settled in Tehran in the beginning of the 1920s. By 1925, twenty-five families had settled there. (18) Although Mashhad was an important intermediary center of trade, it could not compare to Tehran, which was more modern, secular, and open to the new gender roles that the constitutional revolution and Reza Shah's reforms set into motion. Communal ties held fast among those Mashhadis who had relocated to Tehran, although as no statistical data exists, changes in the status of women can be outlined only from the memories of community members.
In Tehran, women's role in the preservation of communal identity focused mainly on the transmission of the community's particularity. In education, men established a clear ascendance in secular and religious studies unprecedented since the forced conversion. Although educational opportunities improved immeasurably for both sexes, boys took better advantage of them. Girls born after 1930 had for the first time the opportunity for an equal, albeit separate, education. This included college...
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