by Bruce Feiler
He was despised, we held him of no account.
Yet it was our sickness that he was bearing,
Our suffering that he endured.
We accounted him plagued,
Smitten and afflicted by God;
But he was wounded because of our sins . . .
He shall receive the multitude as his spoil.
For he exposed himself to death,
And was numbered among the sinners,
Whereas he bore the guilt of the many.
For thousands of years, many Christians have fervently believed that these verses are predictions of Jesus Christ. The universalism of Second Isaiah, in this view, applies less to a general time of God’s kingdom and more to the specific dominion of Christ Almighty.
Jews, not surprisingly, have viewed these verses differently. Some do see the servant as an individual, with Abraham, Moses, or Second Isaiah having been proposed. But more see the servant not as the messiah but as an ideal that reflects the innate character of the entire people. The only time the servant is named, for example, in the second song, the reference is to Israel, “You are my servant, Israel in whom I glory.” In this view, the righteous of Israel were sent into exile, suffered in silence, were smitten and afflicted by God, and bore the guilt of the many residents of Israel and Judah who had sinned over the centuries. By rewarding the moral conduct of the Israelites in exile and lifting them out of Babylon, God turned Israel into a light to the nations.
Sitting in Persepolis, I couldn’t help viewing these passages differently. One overriding challenge of my journeys across the Middle East was trying to remove the stories of the Bible from the gilt-edged pages that sometimes ossify them today, as well as the rigid, sectarian interpretations that have come to define them over the centuries. My goal was to replant those stories into the ground from which they sprang and see if viewing them in the context of their time changed the lessons I gleaned from them. In the case of the Prophets, that meant viewing them not through the prism of the New Testament or the Talmud, both of which were colored by the already boiling rivalry between Jews and Christians in the early centuries of the first millennium C.E. Instead, I wanted to view them in light of the mid–first millennium B.C.E.
In the case of the Servant Songs, that meant understanding that they were written during a period ripe with Persian influence. The songs cry out to be interpreted in a broad context. Considering that they are dispersed over five chapters, it seems fair to assume that the compiler of Isaiah viewed them as part of the larger book. The servant, after all, was not an end unto himself but a means to a world in which all humans work to fulfill God’s mission. “Observe what is right and do what is just,” God commands.
For soon my salvation shall come.
Happy is the man who does this . . .
Who keeps the sabbath and does not profane it,
And stays his hand from doing evil.
The message here is that each person who follows God’s laws and acts morally can help bring about God’s ultimate triumph. And by working toward this end, humans will be “happy.”
If this philosophy sounds familiar, it is: The grand idea at the heart of Second Isaiah bears striking similarity to the grand idea introduced by the Persian kings of the sixth century B.C.E. Morality is the highest calling of human conduct, and happiness the ultimate reward. And while these ideas may be practiced differently by different peoples, they ultimately transcend national borders and religious boundaries. They are universal.
This type of overarching, all-inclusive value system—especially one based on justice for all and happiness for every individual—was not widespread before the mid–first millennium B.C.E. The premise of the Pentateuch is finding a piece of land for God’s chosen people so they can live a God-centered life. Universality is hinted at in the story of Abraham—”all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you”—but the idea that his life would lead to righteousness and contentedness for everyone would have been far-fetched to him, as well as to Moses, Joshua, David, and almost any other Israelite leader.
By the sixth century B.C.E., this idea was no longer absurd. The epoch of rival nation-states had given way to one of sprawling empires. A unified world was now imaginable. The vision of unity advanced by the Achaemenids allowed Jews and others to maintain their cultural identity as part of a new enlightened empire. The Bible pays tribute to that policy of tolerance in the Book of Ezra. Given that acknowledgment, it seems reasonable to conclude that God in Isaiah knows of Cyrus’s respect for different faiths when he chooses him to be his anointed one. The lesson here is transcendent: Even those who believe in other gods can still, by acting morally, be part of God’s world. In a moving confluence of scripture and history, one figure embodies this ideal more than any other, both in the real world of the Ancient Near East and in the verses of Second Isaiah. Cyrus may not be the messiah as the term would later come to mean, but he was the messiah as it was understood at the time.
He was a shepherd who inaugurated a radical era of peace.
So do you agree?” Linda said to Shahrokh. We were sitting on a rock overlooking the ruins. Only a handful of visitors were wandering the grounds. I found it amusing, but ultimately touching, that Linda had all but taken over our outing. Her visceral reaction to being in Persepolis reminded me why I had embarked on a journey of visiting biblical places to begin with—and why I had married her.
“Does history confirm that Cyrus was a messianic figure?” she said.
“I think so,” he said. “In archaeology we have to use all categories of sources—texts, remains, classical sources. We need first to see the physical context, then check sources like the Bible and other texts. But this is an example where the written text, the Bible, captures the greatness of Cyrus that we see evidence of in other places.”
“But few people know this story,” she said. “We know about Rome and Athens and Jerusalem. Do you think Persepolis was as important as the other great cities of antiquity?”
He smiled. “At that time, yes. But the problem with Persepolis is that it wasn’t the only major city of the Achaemenids. The king was itinerant and traveled between residences, so no one city rose to the level of Athens or Rome.”
Linda touched my arm. “So, as my husband would say,” she began, but paused when I glared at her hand for flouting Muslim law. She kept talking. “As my husband would say, the big question in the world today is Can the religions get along? It sounds like the Achaemenid empire may be the first example where this actually happened.”
“They began this idea, actually. And they showed that they could provide a space for different people to believe in their own gods and follow their own religion. We have tablets in which a Babylonian priest received a tribute for an Iranian god. This would be like a Christian priest participating in a Jewish ceremony, and a Jewish priest in a Muslim ceremony.”
“I love it! I wish everybody could hear your story.” Now she touched his arm. “You make me feel hope.”
For a second Shahrokh paused, unsure what to do. Would Kamran point out this violation of Muslim law? Would he? And in that instant, I realized that this innocent pose—one visitor lightly touching another—was the exact same one carved on the outer walls of the Great Audience Hall: a small gesture of happiness in a forbidding world.
“Khanoom Linda,” Kamran said, shaking his head in exasperation. Now Shahrokh was free to speak from his heart.
“I’ve always believed that archaeology is not just something for archaeologists,” he said. “We are doing archaeology for the people. If we just say, ‘This pot is from 669 B.C.E.,’ that means nothing. We have to go through the entire ancient culture and say, ‘This was the idea of that time, and this is how it’s relevant today.’ We are building lots of roads today. But if we don’t follow the old roads, we are wasting lots of time and energy. If we do follow the old road, we can see that others may already have chosen the best way to go, the best passes, the best part of the mo
untain to cross. If everything we create is new, we are ignoring six thousand years of experience.”
“So the road to peace begins here?” Linda asked.
“I don’t think it’s the only one,” he said. “But I do think it’s one. Maybe even the anointed one.”
. 3 .
A CROWN OF BEAUTY
Linda was the first to notice: No cops were standing guard in front of the building on Palestine Street. Nor were there security guards stationed in front of the door. There were no metal detectors, either. The Abrishami Synagogue in downtown Tehran, the largest of the capital’s twenty-three shuls, was the only big-city synagogue either of us had visited in more than a decade without visible police protection.
Even more shocking: the place was overflowing. On a ho-hum Friday night, more than eight hundred Jews had shown up to attend Shabbat services in the capital of one of Israel’s most vocal critics. As we stepped through the door, Linda was escorted to the women’s section, and I was shown to the men’s. Once I was seated, the president of Iran’s Jewish Federation, Harun Yesha‘ya, legendary for befriending Ayatollah Khomeini when the two were imprisoned together in the 1960s, leaned over. “We don’t get many visitors from America,” he said. “Would you say a few words to the congregation?”
Jews have a slightly self-mocking, slightly self-congratulatory way of expressing their feeling that they live in a small, beleaguered community, scattered around the globe. The term Jewish Geography is often used when two Jews meet and want to determine whom they know in common—not if they know people in common but how many.
In many ways, the idea of Jewish Geography began in Iran. When Cyrus swept into Babylon in 539 B.C.E., the expatriated Jewish community appeared to get its dreams fulfilled. They could return to Jerusalem, rebuild the Temple, and begin to restore God’s kingdom on earth. Exile was finally over. But in yet another twist in their national epic, the Jews did not react as expected. Some did rush back to Jerusalem, where they began drawing up plans for a new Temple. But in the most vivid evidence yet that exile was not as weepy as believed, many chose to stay by the rivers of Babylon. Others went to Egypt, and still more burst through the invisible wall between Mesopotamia and Persia and followed their unlikely savior back home. Faced with God-given freedom, some Israelites chose to be landed, but more chose to be landless.
Exile was so good for some Jews that they now opted to exile themselves.
The consequence of these migrations cannot be overstated. In Babylon, early Jews had shifted the definition of God from being a deity attached to a specific piece of geography to one universal in his reach. But that change, in many ways, was forced on them. This new shift was voluntary. With their dreams of empire lost, Jews took Cyrus up on his promise that they could worship freely in other people’s land. While Second Isaiah stressed to Jews that their God was strong enough to control foreign leaders, the newly liberated people adopted a more humble approach. Instead of being triumphalist and forcing others to lick their feet, as Isaiah had prophesied, Jews would become pluralists, content to live as religious minorities in others’ kingdoms. Being a light to the nations did not mean imposing their will on others; it meant, among other things, being a shining example of coexistence.
This new pan-national approach to Judaism has come to be known by the Greek word diaspora, meaning “disperse” or “scatter about,” from dia, meaning “about,” and speirein, “scatter.” The term was adopted from the Greek translation of Deuteronomy 28:25, “thou shalt be a diaspora in all the kingdoms of the earth.” Begun in the sixth century B.C.E., the diaspora widened under Persian, then Hellenistic control over the Ancient Near East. By 200 B.C.E. Jews were living and worshiping in the ancient equivalents of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Phoenicia, Turkey, Cyprus, Crete, Greece, Italy, Libya, Egypt, and Ethiopia. Diaspora was central to the future of Western religion first because it broadened the popularity of the God of the Israelites, ensuring that his influence would survive even after his new home in Jerusalem was again destroyed. Second, the diaspora provided a broad-based population familiar with the Hebrew scripture, which later facilitated the lightning spread of Christianity.
Life in Iran proved particularly welcoming for Jews, first under the Pax Persica, then under successive regimes, especially the Sassanians in the third century C.E., who made Zoroastrianism the official state religion. It was during these years that the Babylonian Talmud was compiled under Persian hegemony in Iraq. Even the arrival of Islam in Persia in the seventh century was not initially bad for the Jewish community.
The souring for Iranian Jews began with the Safavid dynasty, who converted the country to Shiism in the sixteenth century, plunging the Jews into a 350-year bog of marginalization, hardship, and alienation. Jews were not the only abused minority, as Sunnis and Sufis were also forced to convert to Shiism. But Jews were singled out for their religious impurity and forbidden from coming into contact with Muslims or touching food in Muslim shops. White was a symbol of cleanliness, and Jews were not allowed to paint the insides of their homes white or to ride white donkeys. With germs thought to be passed through water, Jews were not allowed to use public baths, drink from public wells, or walk in the streets on rainy days. The penalty for not complying was death.
Jews were slowly reintegrated into Iranian society in the twentieth century, as they left the ghettos and were even invited into government service. A new Golden Age of Iranian Jewry arrived with Reza Shah and his son, who allowed Jews to enter the arts, banking, insurance, and manufacturing. But their new high profile brought problems, too. A controversy erupted in 1974, when a new two-hundred-rial banknote was issued and had a six-pointed star on the back. Though the hexagram was often used in Muslim mosaics, its appearance on the currency flamed rumors that the shah was being secretly financed by Israel. The scandal was so great that the note was withdrawn from circulation by the end of business on its first day of distribution.
The Iranian Revolution at first devastated local Jews. For years Khomeini had blamed Jews for spreading anti-Islamic propaganda, mistranslating the Koran, and taking over Iran’s economy. In 1979 the Israeli consulate was seized along with the American embassy, and the head of the Jewish community was executed. Of the 100,000 Jews in the country, 25,000 fled to Israel, 40,000 to the United States, and 10,000 to the rest of the world. As revolutionary embers cooled, Khomeini backtracked, saying, “We distinguish between Jews and Zionists.” Those Jews who stayed in the country were surprised by the freedom of worship they found in the Islamic republic. The result was a curious dynamic: At the start of the twenty-fifth century of Judaism in diaspora, Iran still had the largest Jewish population of any country in the Middle East outside Israel even as the Iranian government proclaimed its mortal hostility to the Jewish state.
One advantage of Jewish Geography is that just a few inquiries can give one access to the Jewish community anywhere in the world. In the case of Iran, that meant my making a few telephone calls around Beverly Hills (nickname: Tehrangeles), where an enormous concentration of wealthy Iranians fled around the time of the revolution. In no time I had a notebook full of names and an earful of advice. “You’re going to where?” one expat exclaimed. “I hope you like prison.” “You’re taking your wife?” another questioned. “Are you insane?”
“It’s a second honeymoon,” I said.
By consensus, the first person I had to call in Tehran was Yesha‘ya—”He has the heart of a lion,” I was told—a film producer who serves as the chief liaison between the Jewish community and the Islamic republic. If a Jew is harassed, Yesha‘ya knows which mullah to call to have it stopped, I was told. If a family needs wine for a bris, Yesha‘ya can garner special permission. A soft-spoken man who looks like an aging Omar Sharif, he struck me as someone who could fight with his guile, his charm, or his hands, depending on the need. He had a callous demeanor that indicated he didn’t win all of his battles, but an ease of manner that suggested he won enough. He arrived at our hotel along with h
is thirty-eight-year-old daughter and drove us to synagogue.
Abrishami Synagogue looked more like an overgrown Sunday school classroom than a house of worship. Barely one story high, it had white tile on the floor and ceiling, brown vinyl chairs, and fourteen chandeliers. Persian influences were everywhere. Persian carpets lined the floor of the central pulpit; a glass of mint and a pitcher of rose water were on the lectern. In deference to traditional Jewish laws, which forbid the use of electricity on Shabbat, the rabbi did not use a microphone. “We used to have a microphone,” Yesha‘ya explained. “But after the revolution, as Muslims became more traditional, we become more traditional, too. I think it’s ridiculous. Nobody can hear.”
Most striking was the sheer sense of joy that permeated the room. Children ran up and down the aisles. Worshipers chatted with one another as if at a picnic. There was no sense of fear or cowering. “Synagogue is not just a place for praying,” Yesha‘ya explained. “It’s also a place for connecting. Boys and girls who want to marry must come here.” The reason for the crowds, he noted, was that Friday is the Muslim Sabbath, so Saturday is a workday. It may seem like a rabbinic fantasy, but the most happening place for Jewish singles in Iran is Friday night services.
“But what about security?” I said. “Even most synagogues in America have guards.”
“Security in Iran is hidden,” he said. “The religious police have control over everything. You don’t see it, but they control the streets. And they have decided that we can pray freely.”
“So many Jews have left, though. Why not you?”
“Many Iranians see a nice life in the U.S. and Israel,” he said. “And it’s true, many of their problems are solved, but others are created—financial, cultural. I have many relatives who left but can’t find work. You have no property. Here I have a middle-class life.”
“And you don’t feel afraid?”
