Descendants of Cyrus

by Thornton, Christopher;

  “I mean the house where she grew up.”

  “Why are you interested?” Javad queried.

  “There might be a plaque outside it. After all, she is Iran’s first Nobel laureate.”

  This was sheer folly, and I knew it. Anything to do with Iran’s premier human rights advocate would not have been advertised, least of all in Hamedan. If anything, the information would have been buried, lest her childhood home turn into a pilgrimage site for Green Movement types—flowers left at the front door in the middle of the night, graffiti sprayed on the exterior walls.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t have any idea,” Javad said, wagging his head. And with that he shook my hand and again wished me a very pleasant stay in Iran. And again he sounded like he meant it.

  I had lied to Javad about meeting Sohrab. He wasn’t due for at least an hour. I just wanted to shake him off, since there was nothing to be gained by talking to him further. Any question on any “sensitive” subject—and there are many in Iran—would be met with predictable regime blather, all the more nauseating because of its pretended sincerity, as if any sincere thought went into the answers at all. And so, with time to kill, I went looking for the tomb of Esther and Mordecai and the synagogue complex where both are buried, long a pilgrimage site for Sephardic Jews.

  Whether or not the biblical figures actually lie in the tomb has long been a subject of debate. Some historians claim that they were moved to present-day Israel and laid to rest in Baram, near Haifa. The twentieth-century German archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld believed that they were buried in nearby Susa, today’s Shush, the Persian Empire’s capital in Esther’s time. But no historical bickering obscures the fact that Jewish history has been entwined with the history of Iran, and the history of Iran has been entwined with Jewish history, and so a visit to the tomb, whether Esther and Mordecai lie there or not, was anything but a waste of time.

  The first Jews arrived in ancient Persia in 722 BCE, when the Northern Kingdom of Israel was conquered by Shalmaneser V, king of the Assyrian Empire, driving the Israelite tribes into exile. Those who fled to Persia arrived in Khorasan, the region that today straddles Turkmenistan and western Afghanistan. In 586 BCE more Jews sought exile in Persia, this time when the Babylonians expelled the Jews from the Kingdom of Judah, and for two hundred years the Persian Empire became the repository for many of the Middle East’s Jewish exiles.

  Cyrus’s policy of religious tolerance played a role. As the empire expanded, freedom of religious expression was enshrined as the rule of law, and in 529 BCE this was codified in the Cyrus Cylinder, often regarded as the world’s first declaration of human rights. In 537 BCE Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple. The second volume of the Book of Chronicles states:

  Thus saith Cyrus, king of Persia: All the kingdoms of the earth hath the lord, the God of heaven given me; and He hath charged me to build Him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whosoever there is among you of all His people—the lord, his God, be with him—let him go there.

  In recognition, Cyrus is the only non-Jew to have been given the title “Lord’s Messiah,” or divinely appointed leader. Cyrus died before the Temple was completed, so it was left to his son-in-law and successor Darius to see the project through. More than forty thousand Jews are believed to have accepted Cyrus’s offer to return to the ancient land of Israel, but among those who chose to remain behind were Esther, an orphan, and her guardian and uncle, Mordecai. And so begins a tale of intrigue with all the convolutions of a Greek drama.

  One night in the middle of a six-month feast—wining and dining were something of a marathon sport in the Persian Empire—Ahasuerus (believed by some to be Xerxes, the son of Darius), summoned his queen Vashti to appear before his guests so they could admire her beauty. But Vashti refused, igniting a storm of controversy. Ahasuerus’s advisers warned him that if word of Vashti’s rebellion got out the news would rock the kingdom, so she was ousted from the court, and a yearlong contest to find a replacement was won by Esther, who became the wife of Ahasuerus and queen of the Persian Empire.

  Esther fell easily into her role, and the scandal that Vashti may have caused soon faded. Then things changed. One day, Esther’s uncle Mordecai overheard two soldiers manning the city gates planning an assassination of the king. Mordecai relayed the news to Esther, who conveyed it to Ahasuerus, and the king had the plotters executed. Mordecai rose in the king’s favor but was otherwise unrewarded—for the time being.

  Enter Haman the Agagite. Haman was a well-known prince, and Ahasuerus, believing that a person of such esteem should receive his due, ordered that anyone encountering Haman in the street should bow to him. The commoners accepted Ahasuerus’s dictate, but there was one holdout: Mordecai, who claimed that one should only bow to God. One day the two passed in the street, and Mordecai refused to bow. Haman was so offended he plotted to rid the empire of all the Jews, and he began to work on Ahasuerus, eventually convincing him that they were planning to rise against him. Driven by haste and fear, Ahasuerus signed an order stating that all the Persian Jews were to be executed.

  Seeking to protect not only her uncle but the rest of the Persian Jews, Esther took it upon herself to figure a way out of the mess. She soon cooked up a plan. The first step was asking both Ahasuerus and Haman to be her guests at a private banquet. Both agreed, and walking home from the banquet that night Haman again encountered Mordecai in the street. Again Mordecai refused to bow. Haman, doubly affronted, sought the permission from Ahasuerus to hang Mordecai.

  That night, while mulling Mordecai’s fate, Ahasuerus recalled the time when Mordecai had saved his life by revealing the assassination plot. The tables then turned. The next day he asked Haman what would be a fitting reward for someone the king wanted to honor. Thinking that the king was referring to him, Haman said that such a man should be escorted through the streets on horseback, clad in royal garments. Ahasuerus agreed and commanded Haman to deliver that treatment to Mordecai, and told him that Mordecai had once saved his life.

  Mordecai was now back in the king’s favor, but the fate of the rest of the Jews still hung in the balance. At another banquet a few nights later, Esther took the opportunity to ask the king a favor. Ahasuerus said he would be glad to grant her anything she wished, so she begged him to withdraw the order mandating the Jews’ destruction. She acknowledged that she herself was Jewish, and that it was Haman who had plotted to rid the empire of its Jews, and all because of his tiff with Mordecai.

  Furious, Ahasuerus sought revenge on Haman. Fearing the worst, Haman fled to Esther and begged her to save his life. But the loop was closing. A raging Ahasuerus tracked him down in the queen’s bedchamber, and now Ahasuerus imagined the worst—that Haman was trying to seduce his wife. Haman’s fate was sealed. Ahasuerus ordered him to be hung on the gallows that Haman had constructed for Mordecai. After Haman was dispatched, Mordecai became Ahasuerus’s prime minister, and the king gave all the Jews of the empire the right to carry weapons to defend themselves against any future plots. Ever since, the Jews of Iran have been dubbed “Esther’s children.”

  Once Javad was out of sight, I turned right, ducked around the corner, and headed in the direction of the synagogue. Nothing suggested I was approaching one of Judaism’s major pilgrimage sites. On the corner hung a giant poster of a black-turbaned mullah, but in contrast to Khomeini’s dagger-like glare, this one was flashing an ear-to-ear grin. For any passing resident the message of the mega-face was clear: we are everywhere, and you will not forget that we are everywhere.

  The tomb was embarrassingly modest, topped with a nondescript dome that could have been mistaken for a neighborhood mosque or, in former times, a local bathhouse. Persian Jews unable to travel to Jerusalem use the tomb of Esther and Mordecai as their own Western Wall, and often leave slips of paper in the twisted, rusty fence that surrounds the compound. But on this day there were no prayer slips in the fence. Only a yarmulke on the head of one of “Esther’s children” l
ingering outside, who told me I was in the right place.

  I passed through the gate, but another man, also wearing a yarmulke, gestured for me to wait. He disappeared inside, and a minute later Rabbi Rajad emerged. He was as old as the oldest men at the gate and shabbily dressed, in baggy unwashed pants and a tattered sport coat, and sporting a blue baseball cap that had lost its insignia ages ago. But his smile was bright, revealing a mouthful of yellow, crooked teeth, and his handshake, though as limp as a dishrag, was soft and tender.

  In ragged English he asked if I was Jewish—but didn’t wait for an answer. He fished in his pocket and brought out a cardboard yarmulke, handed it to me, and led me to the door.

  The interior was equally drab. Plain, sand-colored walls were decorated with bits of Jewish memorabilia, and in a tiny side room were a dozen metal chairs with split plastic seats. In the middle, taking up almost the entire room, were two sarcophagi, standing side by side and covered with thick, red velvet cloths fringed with gold—the final resting place of the two biblical figures. Rabbi Rajad pointed with pride to a large ceramic work hanging on the wall near the entrance. It was the Ten Commandments, written in Hebrew.

  I asked him if the synagogue still held regular services. This disguised my real question: Were there enough Jews in Hamedan to hold services? According to Jewish law, a service requires the presence of ten adult men. Yes, he said, pointing to the tangle of dilapidated chairs. There were still 150 Jews in the city, and they were all practicing, he added proudly. In 1850, when the global traveler Israel ben Joseph visited Hamedan, the city had an estimated 500 Jewish families and three synagogues. But times had changed. One hundred and fifty years later, the Jewish population in all of Iran had shrunk to 15,000, still the largest in the Middle East outside of Israel, but a flicker of its former presence.

  I thanked Rabbi Rajad for the visit and was about to leave when he asked where I was from. I told him, and his eyes brightened, and then he asked if I had a pen I could give him. His hobby was collecting pens from all over the world, and he had accumulated a vast collection, but one still missing was a pen from the United States. Yes, I said, and pulled a plastic ballpoint from my pocket I had been carrying the last few weeks. But it was a German brand, the kind he had probably piled by the hundreds on a dusty shelf at home. As I took it from my pocket I watched his eyes glow, then dim. Still, he managed a weak grin of appreciation before offering another mushy handshake, and led me to the door.

  Zigzagging back to the mausoleum, I felt a jab of remorse. I wished I’d packed a boxful of American-made pens he could display beside the Ten Commandments—Bics and Papermates, Crosses, Parkers, and Sheaffers, but it was not to be. I looked forward to the tomb of Avicenna, hoping the medical genius from medieval Persia had a remedy that could offer relief.

  Avicenna was one of the leading lights of the Persian golden age. Born in 980 in present-day Uzbekistan, where his father was an official in the regional government, he was quickly recognized as something of a wunderkind. By the age of ten he had memorized the entire Quran, and in his adolescence he learned mathematics, studied Islamic law, and began to dabble in philosophy and the theories of Euclid and Ptolemy. His academic track hit a speed bump when he struggled with Aristotle’s Metaphysics, but he managed to overcome it and became so immersed in his studies that he would often unravel the solutions to problems in his dreams. By the age of eighteen he was recognized as a qualified physician, and was comfortable enough in his accomplishments to claim that medicine was much easier than the tougher pursuits of math and metaphysics.

  Avicenna’s life then began a series of twists and turns that kept him always on the move and working under less-than-opportune conditions. His professional breakthrough came when he helped his local emir recover from a serious illness. In gratitude, the emir offered to make him his personal physician, and the post came with a priceless perk—access to the royal library. But disaster soon struck when the library went up in flames. Rivals pointed the finger at Avicenna, claiming he had done the deed so that he alone would be the caretaker of the knowledge he had acquired.

  With the benefit of his position also up in flames, Avicenna took to the road after being offered a stipend by the vazir of Urgench, Turkmenistan. But the salary turned out to be too small, so Avicenna was on the road again, this time to Nishapour in Iran, and then Merv, Tabaristan, and Gorgan, on the Caspian Sea. There he acquired a patron—a friend who bought a house near his own so Avicenna would have a suitable place to study and lecture. It was here that he began writing his Canon of Medicine.

  It wasn’t long before Avicenna was on the move again, this time to Rey, part of today’s Tehran. There he found an equilibrium and was able to write as many as thirty essays and treatises. It would not last. Eventually he was driven out by the constant bickering between the lady of the house and one of her sons. His next destination was Qazvin, in northwest Iran, but he soon was packing again. This time he headed south, to Hamedan. Avicenna wasn’t afflicted with wanderlust or an aversion to put down roots. Economic difficulties in the lives of his patrons usually forced him to uproot himself.

  After he had established himself in Hamedan, Avicenna received another offer to become a personal physician, this time from the wife of a local aristocrat, but he was also solicited by the city’s new emir, who tried to seduce him with gifts. This new relationship had its ups and downs, and eventually the emir ordered Avicenna banished. At first Avicenna hid in the house of a friend, but, when the emir was stricken with a severe illness, the emir decided to let bygones be bygones and offered Avicenna his position back. Avicenna accepted, but he was not a miracle worker, and the emir ultimately died. Avicenna then hid in the house of a local pharmacist and continued his studies, but eventually he was discovered by the new emir and thrown into jail.

  Wars between Hamedan and Esfahan kept Avicenna behind bars until the battles subsided, and then he was allowed to return to his post in Hamedan. But loyalty had its limits. Avicenna finally escaped Hamedan in disguise and headed to Esfahan, where he spent the next ten years as personal physician and scientific consul to the Persian army. A military campaign brought him back to Hamedan, but he contracted colic along the way and died in the city he had fled, in 1037.

  Avicenna was a true renaissance man whose vast imagination and intellectual curiosity could never be confined to one area of study. Five hundred years before the European Renaissance, he delved deeply into mathematics and logic, astronomy and philosophy, physics, theology, and poetry. He explored the symptoms of psychological depression, the uses of medicinal herbs, the importance of diet, contagious diseases and the use of quarantine to prevent their spread, and exercise and sleep to maintain good health. Avicenna’s most well-known works, The Book of Healing and The Canon of Medicine, were used as standard texts in European medical schools until the eighteenth century. In The Canon of Medicine, he wrote:

  At the conclusion of the first day’s exercise, you will know the degree of exercise allowable and when you know the amount of nourishment the person can bear, do not make any change in either on the second day. Arrange that the measure of aliment, and the amount of exercise shall not exceed that limit ascertained on the first day.

  Avicenna’s tomb stood in a cylindrical anteroom awash in light that spilled down from above. A gaggle of Koreans were milling around the interior, but not a word was spoken above the level of a whisper. Odd though it may have seemed, the scene represented true Persian values—a blending of spiritualism with the logic of science.

  I tried to imagine what Avicenna would make of Iranian society today and, if it arrived at his office, what remedies he would recommend for its ills. Iran is certainly youthful—more than 65 percent of the population is under thirty-five—but behind this image of health and vigor hides a long list of ailments. It has vast natural resources aside from oil—natural gas, coal, chromium, copper, iron ore, lead, manganese, zinc, and sulfur—but much of its wealth has been siphoned by corrupt officials. The
holdings of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, prominent cleric and former president, include interests in TV stations, mining companies, airlines, and petroleum engineering projects. And much of Iran’s wealth has gone to maintain an extensive network of security services whose primary aim is to maintain power by keeping the population in check. To make matter’s worse, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution many of Iran’s brightest professionals have left to set up new lives in Canada, the United States, and Western Europe. And the clergy’s enforced brand of Shiite Islam has alienated an entire generation from religion in any form.

  Then there is the utter failure of belief in the government and the Islamic ideology it espouses. International news channels—BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, Euronews—have become the only reliable conduits of information from the outside world. And there are the radio stations Voice of America and Radio Farda, the Iranian branch of Radio Liberty, both operated by the U.S. State Department. The depth of cynicism is so widespread that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei finally had to acknowledge it shortly before the 2013 presidential elections. In a desperate attempt to boost turnout, he urged all Iranians to vote “even if they did not support the Islamic regime.”

  Confronted with such a patient on his examining table, I could imagine Avicenna wringing his hands in despair: Where, oh, where to begin?

  In the park outside the mausoleum I heard a voice calling my name. It was Sohrab, fresh from his late-afternoon tryst. He was sprightly and buoyant and said we had one more stop to make before the day was done, so we got in the car and headed out of town.

  After we left the city the road crossed neatly tended fields of wheat and barley, and then began a gradual climb into the foothills of the Zagros Mountains. I asked where we were going, but Sohrab kept mum. The heat of the afternoon had broken, and cool evening air was sweeping down into the valley from the swards and gorges tucked in the clefts of the mountains. Sohrab asked me to change the CD in the car stereo, so I fished through the “banned” collection in the door pocket and put on Chet Baker in Tokyo. Chet’s rhythms suited the hour, with the sun beginning its decline, deepening the hues in the grain fields, allowing the sky to acquire a darker blue. Then Sohrab finally told me where we were headed: Ganjnameh, and he gave me a brief history lesson as Chet’s trumpet oozed from the car speakers.