Page 13 - Journal of the Cenral Asian Society (1960)

230 FISCHKI.

8

Decline of the Jewish Settlements
The termination of Judaeo-Persian literary activities in Lar
as well as in other centers seemed to have been caused by a
change in the political situation. Lar, the Jewish cultural outpost
of the Persian Gulf Region, became namely a storm center and
the starting point of a movement which transformed years of
peace and prosperity enjoyed by the Jewish-Persian communities
into years, and even decades, of great oppression and persecution
towards the middle of the seventeenth century. It was in Lar
that internal strife, jealousy, and disharmony within the Jewish
community brought the whole Persian Jewry to the very brink
of catastrophe. Jewish renegade, Mulla Abu'l Hassan Lari,
once a leader of his community in Lar, turned Muslim, denounced
his former co-religionists and suceeded with the help of Shiite
dignitaries to enforce upon them the wearing of a special Jewish
headgear as a sign of discrimination and humiliation.Lari’s
crusade against his former co-religionists was only the prelude
to much greater hardship and persecution for the Jews of Persia
at that time77—a tragic chapter which cannot be discussed in
this connection.7*

;4 When John Fryer visited I.ar in 1676 he observed that "the Jews of Lar
arc only recognizable by the upper garment marked with a patch of cloth of
dilTerent color,” I. c.
Of the many documentary references to these events attention is directed
to "History of the Mission of the Fathers of the Society of Jesus established in
Persia" (Paris 1659) by the Rev. Father Alexander of Rhodes, parts of which
have been translated and published by A. T. Wilson in p. 675/705. Bull, of
School of Oriental Studies. London 1923-25, Vol. III. Sec pp. 695-697, chapter
XVI "The Jews in Persia compelled to become Mohammedans and the Chris­
tians delivered from the fear of a like evil." See the present writer's forth­
coming book on "History of the Jews in Persia."
*• After the completion of this study new source-material on the Jewish
settlement in Ormuz became accessible to me, mainly hitherto unpublished
documents from Je>uit and Carmelite archives, which enrich considerably
our knowledge of this community and its religious and cultural life.
The new material will soon be published.