Allahdad Massacre

The Allahdad (Persian: الله داد, lit. 'God's Justice') was an 1839 pogrom perpetrated by Muslims against the Iranian Jewish community in the city of Mashhad, Qajar Iran. It was characterized by the mass-killing and forced conversion of the Jews in the area to Islam. Following this event, the Jews who stayed in Mashad began to actively practice crypto-Judaism while superficially adhering to Islamic beliefs. While there had been previously been forced conversions and pogroms against Persian Jews in cities such as Shiraz, Isfahan, and Barforush, the Allahdad pogrom was a prominent event in the ambivalent history of Jewish–Muslim relations because an entire community of Jews were forced to convert, and it was one of the first times European Jews intervened on behalf of Iranian Jews. The event was first described in Joseph Wolff's 1845 travelogue "Narrative of a mission to Bokhara", in which he wrote: On Monday, the 11th of March, I arrived at Askerea, two miles distant from Meshed. I had sent on before the King's mehmoondar, and the gholam of the British embassy. The first who came to meet me was Mullah Mehdee (Meshiakh), the Jew with whom I had lodged twelve years ago, and who treated me most hospitably when in distress and misery and poverty, previous to the arrival of Abbas Mirza at Meshed, from Nishapoor. All the Jews of Meshed, a hundred and fifty families, were compelled seven years ago, to turn Mussulmans. The occasion was as follows: A poor woman had a sore hand; a Mussulman physician advised her to kill a dog and put her hand in the blood of it; she did so; when suddenly the whole population rose, and said that they had done it in derision of their Prophet. Thirty-five Jews were killed in a few minutes; the rest, struck...