Judeo Persian Literature with Alan Niku

Oh, we have this thing in the attic that my grandfather passed down to us and we think it's Cassidyur or something because it's written in Hebrew and then I look at it and I see that it's Shahiq and it sees handwritten manuscripts that were being written for hundreds of years give it like two generations and the stuff will be gone unless we do something You, you have to, it's all on you and that we are going to be forgotten and that we have the world forgotten and that we have a golden heart that we have forgotten We're back kind of like lost my wind from before but I should be powered after some gorgeous herbs Yeah, you don't need your wind because there's a leaf blower outside and that creates the wind Yeah, so I'm sitting here on the floor like true Persians with Alan Nikou We're going to talk about Judeo-Persian literature and you know how sitting on the floor isn't just Persian It's also Persian Jewish And a lot of other cultures Yeah, it's also a lot of it and no, what do you mean? It's like it's like a Shirazi salad thing It's like oh, it's Israeli, you know, it's Persian Right, we can claim sitting on the floor is only ours If you're not here then where? Yeah, yeah, that's fair This is the safe space So yeah, tell the listeners a little bit about what's your deal, what's your story I'm working the film industry and I writer and I do movie stuff basically But a big other interest that I have is has been in trying to learn about my heritage and trying to preserve my heritage and trying to figure out Figure out all these things that nobody ever taught us Like so if you go to a Jewish school you aren't learning about Persian Jewish History or culture or any of those things and if you Are in the greater Persian, Iranian world you're usually not learning about The Jewish part of that and so I just started Trying to find information and that information was very scarce And so eventually I just because we're talking about Jew-day Persian literature eventually I Had to turn to primary sources there were enough Books that are written about this especially not in English So I had to start Going to the source and looking at the manuscripts that exist and What's out there in the world? Well to decipher those manuscripts you have to be equipped with some skills Right share those Yeah, so that's that's kind of the reason that I then realized I need to do this And Nobody else can do it basically Yeah, we're all the time they go to you No, nobody there are people right there are there are about kind of us I took this class through the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages And it's like a Judeo-Persian class and there were maybe 10 people in the class People all around the world who was on zoom and it was Basically like the whole community of people who Can read Judeo-Persian and understand it So Judeo-Persian is the term that academics used to describe The Persian language written in Hebrew letters There are many dialects that are represented in that but generally it's standard Persian written in Hebrew letters That means that in order to understand what it is to be able to read it You have to both be able to read Hebrew Which most people who speak Persian don't read Hebrew And then the ones who do read Hebrew don't read necessarily handwritten Hebrew Which then every scribe with of which there are hundreds or thousands Every scribe has different handwriting And some of them are using different writing traditions A summer writing something that looks like the Hebrew we might have learned in Hebrew school And some are using a more Persian traditional type of writing that resembles other fonts Some people are writing in something kind of similar to the Rashi script Which it looks different and so you have to get used to it It's not that different but you have to learn several different My new detailed writing systems for Hebrew and the other side of that is that it's not in Hebrew So if if I give Judeo-Persian to a Hebrew speaker they won't necessarily Like don't read it and they will say this isn't Hebrew I don't know what this is Because it's Persian So most people who read Hebrew don't speak Persian So we need to have both and then not only that but it's also This is a tradition that goes back over a thousand years And so people who have not spoken far see the same way for a thousand years It has changed So you also have to learn all these dialects and all these archaic Things that are going on in in the writing So you have to learn formal Persian Not just colloquial like the colloquial we grew up speaking Yeah So if I were to read some Judeo-Persian you wouldn't necessarily Understand a lot of it because People who grew up speaking colloquial Persian especially in a diaspora We don't know all of the things that our parents know We don't know all of the Arabic loan words. We don't know the archaic forms that they learned because It's like if if somebody who grew up speaking English in From American parents in like China If he gave them Shakespeare and he said read this they wouldn't Understand it very well because they didn't grew up with formal English education Yeah, I mean I hope this doesn't dissuade anyone who's listening like oh my god Yeah, the good thing is that it's learnable right it is like you can study Farsey And you can study how to read Hebrew and then it's just a matter of putting those together And there was enough of a tradition of it. There are like thousands of texts out there that are in Judeo-Persian So like it is practicable and it's actually a really fun thing to practice because it's like Putting to get this puzzle that nobody else has ever done I find that really interesting then fun Yeah, I want to touch on the Nobody else has ever done because within The Jewish literary canon Judeo-Persian I think is the most neglected And also within the Persian literary canon it's the most neglected And a lot of that is because of those reasons you just mentioned and also Because the manuscripts are not really well organized or just scattered throughout the world and not widely accessible Why I don't why do you think that this is happening with why does happen to our Writing literature and why do you think so much of our history was recorded vocally would you agree with that or Um, yes, I know it was a lot more was recorded in in writing than we realize Mm-hmm It's just that a lot of it was lost or is hiding in people's closets and addicts Or was thrown away or read its manuscript. It wasn't ever published in a mess produced way So that's part of it is lack of a printing press just historically speaking in Iran. They didn't have a printing press until much later than most places So for example the Persian Jews had a seedure that was a different Liturgy than the Sephardic one that we used now and it was different than the Ashkenazi one it was its own Thing has a lot of differences in it and that Eventually gave way to the Sephardic one because There was a printing press in Italy and Livorno that was able to print two versions of a seedure They printed in Ashkenazi in a Sephardic one because that's what was in Europe And then when you print a seedure then you have Thousands of seedures a prayer book by the way Jewish prayer book then you have thousands of copies of this thing that Suddenly everyone can have one right so people would come in from other countries into Persia into Iran and they'd bring thousands of Sephardic seedure and And suddenly everyone could have one so suddenly that's the Liturgy that takes over because otherwise it's a handwritten manuscript You can't compete yeah, you can't compete and I guess that's why we've just been generalized the Sephardic because people are looking over The two major liturgies I actually been thinking about this a lot because of Passover that we just had and I was thinking like is There a Persian Haga dog sure is that sure is and it's because I haven't published it yet Yeah, there is it's uh, I actually have the last few years I've I've It's a mint. It's in handwritten form and I typed it out and I had it So the last few years I bring it to our families said that and we and like I have it next to the Mass printed ones that we use and we use the Maxwell House one because that's a printing press. It's been printed So we can give that we can give one to everyone at the table and I don't You know, I'm not gonna go print 30 copies of the Persian Haga dog To revive this thing that hasn't been done for a couple hundred years But to fully answer. I don't know if anyone's listening, yeah, just DM me if you're interested. Or if anyone's listening and has some money, let me know. Okay, that's also interesting. Make it happen. But to fully answer your question, it's also. Part of it is this lack of access that's also what we're dealing with now that it's in a language and a writing system that the convergence of people who can read and write in that is very small. And then there are a bunch of reasons. I mean, when the Allianz schools came to Iran in the early 1900s, they brought Western education. And so they basically got Persian Jewish students to stop writing in Judeo-Persian. And they taught them the Persian Arabic script, which is what we use now. And so you see a sudden change. So like my grandparents, they would write when they were young, they would write in Judeo-Persian. Then at some point they switched to writing in Persian script, Persian Arabic script. And our parents' generation grew up not knowing Judeo-Persian script at all. To the extent that like, if I showed Judeo-Persian to my parents, they don't know how to read it. And then I'll ask them to try and they'll start trying to read it. And eventually because they speak very good Persian, they're able to figure it out eventually, but still very slow for them. But with practice, it's very doable. How long have you been studying to like prepare to read Judeo-Persian? It first started about 10 years ago when I found that the manuscript of the seedore that somebody had scanned. It's been published. It's like somebody's dissertation, basically. They scanned pictures of this seedore and they wrote a little bit about it. And the seedore is in Hebrew, the prayers are in Hebrew, but there are little like all the directions like, and then say, or at this part stand up, or whatever, all the directions are in Judeo-Persian. And so at first, so I slowly read those and I marvel at it like, wow, it says this in farcey, but in Hebrew letters. And it would be like two words at a time. And that sort of started to give me a basis and then you just start reading longer texts and you start looking through more. And then it got to the point that I was reading whole books, basically in Judeo-Persian. Wow, very impressive. It helps that I grew up learning how to read Hebrew. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to get off topic, but you were telling me when we first met that your parents taught you farcey and Hebrew side by side, which is very special. I think, you know, there's a Beverly Hills High School accent that people have no idea to describe. I didn't know it was Beverly specific. Oh, I don't know. I feel like it's like L.A. Persians have. I don't know. You said that and then someone else, I met recently, I was like, oh, and a Beverly High accent. And it's because we were taught English by non-native English speakers, like AKR parents, because we were scared of not sounding like we spoke English at schools. We were like, don't speak farcey, Persian, and home. So yeah, I've been told to have a California surfer accent. And it's just because I spoke farcey with my parents and they learned English from the people around me, like at school and all that. So you said you were reading entire books of Judeo-Persian? Why don't you share with us some of these great Judeo-Persian writers that should be more known? So the first major one is Shahinah Shirazi. And this is the first major known one. So he lived in the 12 and 1300s. And the reason I say he's the first known one is because there were certainly more before that. It was going to go in a tangent a little bit. But basically the first time that modern Persian, new Persian, which developed after the Arab invasion of Iran, new Persian, the first time it was written was not in Persian Arabic script. It was initially like the oldest example of the language that we have written is in Hebrew scripts. It's Judeo-Persian. That's how like enmeshed into Persian culture, Jews are and have been for a very, very long time, even from more than 1,000 years before that. So in the 1200s, basically, so 500 years after the Arab invasion, that's when the Mongols came through the region and they basically destroyed everything. So there were likely there were Persian Jewish writings older than Shahin, but we just don't know about them because everything was destroyed by the Mongols. If you look in the Cairo-Ghinesa, which is all the way in Egypt, there's Judeo-Persian in the Cairo-Ghinesa. Oh, wow. So there's a lot of letters, mercantile kind of stuff from a period of a few hundred years. And so it's like, if there is that much Judeo-Persian, not that there's like massive amount, but there. If there's a significant amount all the way in Cairo from that whole region, then for sure there's plenty also in Iran itself. But anyway, because of the Mongols, we don't know because in 1258 or something like that, they destroyed the library of Baghdad, which contained probably like an outrageous trove of things about our people that will never know because of that. So thanks a lot, Mongols. Because it was also like after Esfahon, that was another Jewish capital. Yeah. And it was part of the Persian Empire for many, many hundreds of years. So after the Mongol period we see Shahin Shirazi who comes around. He probably was from Shiraz, as you could guess from the name. And he wrote basically these huge epic poem versions of the Torah. So he took the stories of the Torah, not just the Torah, but also a lot of Midrashim that are around it. Midrashim were like the same word as Madrasah in Arabic/Farsim. I just said Midrash. Stories and tales that are related to the Torah. He took those both from the Jewish tradition and from the Islamic tradition. And he weaved them into this huge epic poem. So it's kind of based on Shahinah, being the Persian tales, like the mythology of Iran, written as an epic poem in new Persian for the first time, not even for the first time, but kind of. And Shahin did that for the Persian Jews. He wrote this huge, huge thing and it's really cool. It's like all the stories of the Torah that we grew up knowing, plus some other cool little ones. And he tells them in this like really cool rhyming Midr Persian verse. And there's a lot of stuff in there that indicates what life for Jews must have been like at the time in Iran. A lot of really interesting historical references and things like that. He kind of started the modern tradition of Judeo-Persian with this massive thing. And it's been published in Perseaud Arabic script. Somebody like an older Persian Jew who I think, easily from New York or LA, lives in New York or LA, he took this whole Judeo-Persian thing and transcribed it into Persian scripts. And it's published. So I can have a copy of that. There's also in 120 years ago, Shimon Hassan from Bukhara, which is in Uzbekistan, when he moved to Jerusalem, he opened a printing press of Judeo-Persian. And he printed in Judeo-Persian this whole thing, this Shahin Torah. So it's been printed. It's not that it doesn't exist. It's just harder to find and harder to read. But what's really cool is that Musa-Nameh and Dari Shia-Nameh, which are the names of the major Shahin books, they were so popular that I've met many, many people who say, "Oh, we have this thing like in the attic that my grandfather passed down to us. And we think it's like a seedur or something because it's written in Hebrew." And then I look at it and I see that it's Shahin. And it's like these handwritten manuscripts that were being written for hundreds of years. And a lot of people have copies of this. It's common. So it kind of started with him. And then after him you start to see. They wanted us to comment on Shahin. A few things. But I've been reading through Vera Morin's book on Judeo-Persian Literature. She's a scholar on this subject and she did some translations to English. And she kind of talks about how there's not a clear consensus whether or not writers like Shahin are considered commentators, biblical commentators. But you did a lecture actually about. I don't remember one of the lectures I've watched. And you noted this scene of how Shahin describes Moses at the Burning Bush and attributes power to him that we don't actually read in the Torah. Yeah. So that section. So cool things like Shahin and many other Judeo-Persian writers. And it seems just Persian Jews in general from most of our history were very involved and tied in with Sufism. So Sufism is like what we learned in Azerbaijan. It's Islamic mysticism and it's something that was very much developed in Iran in the Persian world so Rumi who you hear about and Hafez and all these classic Persian poets. They were very Sufi they're mystical they talked about union with God that had all these metaphors that they used about They're trying to kind of describe the infinite nature of God and and Humans attempts to become one with that as being like the devotional part of a religion So the person Jews were doing that too Sufism was not just Muslim it was very much also a Jewish thing and so in Shahin you can see that like when when Moshe goes to the burning bush you look at the burning bush and it basically describes him like losing his ego. It's like ego to solution. It's It's kind of psychedelic. It's like very mystical and he he loses his sense of self and he becomes one with the universe kind of thing. It's very strange and cool and it's it's reflecting the times that in the place that Shahin lived and This is like stuff that was in some of the oldest strands of Judaism so to me it's not this isn't just for Persian Jews It's like all all Jews can have this as part of it. So I think saying that somebody like Shahin is not a biblical commentator is Kind of just from the Eurocentric point of view of like of course the people in in Spain and Germany who are writing biblical commentary are biblical commentators, but a guy from Iran is just a poet And it's an attitude a lot of people have and personally I disagree with that, but you know, so Do you think the audience was just for Jews because I mean like we can assume He's writing in Judeo-Persian because it's this attempt to keep There are culture preserve their culture from the dominant Islamic culture But I don't understand why he includes Islamic tropes like instead of musha being placed in a basket on a river. He's being placed in a basket in In fire, which is a Islamic There are there are a few Reasons for that. What is that they well a lot of the stories that he is using are from a thing that I think it's called Cali Miet or something like that and it's it's like the Muslim stories that Came from Jewish legends So like in Arabia in Almost pre-Islamic times they were already Jews living in Arabia and they brought stories from the Torah And Midrashim from the time into Arabia and then back spread and then that became was eventually written down as commentary In the Islamic tradition and so some people think that that then is coming back into Shahin so that it is originally Jewish so that's one Possibility another one is that like Okay, we live in America and in America people are mostly Christian or grew up in a Christian environment And so they bring their own Christian spin on things to the to the Bible right to the the Torah and to the other books of the Jews right and Because they're bringing that they'll bring sort of a Christian spin on it that just becomes part of the dominant culture of the time And a lot of Jewish people will then quote that kind of Christian version as the version Because they don't necessarily know that that's like a Christian version does that make sense? Yeah So in the same way Shahin is just living in a profound the Islamic environment And so he wouldn't necessarily Know or care that these are like the Islamic versions of the stories they are Also the Jewish versions they're part of this they're part of the tradition that he lived in Jews and Muslims were very much tied to each other for many hundreds of years So I don't know if it's that profound of a separation Like the way we experience it now in the US or in that whatever we For many years it was like oh their Muslim were Jewish we believe in the same God. We have a lot of the same stories The flavors of them are slightly different But like using the one that musha is put in a burning fire instead of a river Like that doesn't seem non-Jewish or anything It's about musha he's Jewish so why not? Well, would you who the Vanilla's are think about that? This is getting too niche. Well, we can get to that but The other thing I wanted to say is that it's not He wasn't only writing for Jews probably It's thought that he was probably also writing for Muslims. He was probably tied to The court of the king So he has like a section that he writes to I forget which Mongol ruler it is who is ruling at the time, but he writes a dedication to him Which is a common thing to do generally, but I think he Possibly knew this ruler and would be brought to his court to Say his poems, right? This is like a common thing that would happen whether they were Jewish or Muslim poets poets were Also performers and they were brought to perform Yeah, well except after the 1500s Yeah, I mean that sort of changed at that point, but he but he he must have been Performing these poems for all kinds of people and so it makes sense that you would also include Muslim tales Like what we forget is that most people at this time were not literate and these poems are not written to be read Like off a paper. They're they're written for the one person who knows how to read to read them To a large crowd of people who are listening And that crowd was probably a mixed crowd Because everyone was mixed So I don't know if I'm going down the list chronologically, but I did mention Yahu Dhaben Al-Azar But other people I've been fascinated by Ar Amina and also he's not really a writer officially, but he gets I mentioned Samad Samad Akasha. Samad He was a writer. He actually did. He wrote a book. Yeah, he did write, but like I don't know He didn't write them in Judeo version, I guess he probably I mean he wrote them in personal Arabic script But I mean he was Jewish so At least at the beginning and maybe forever Yeah, I just think he's a really interesting figure I'm going after the dramatic one like I mean how to messy divorce Samad ran away from his family and was gay So like it's really interesting because from Often from reading these people's work you can get like we don't have biographical knowledge about these people There are like historians wondering the Jewish neighborhoods of Kasha and 300 years ago right Writing down who everyone was But from their own work like that's why I love the primary sources from their own work they would You can figure out a lot about their lives and Amina is this poet. He was from Kasha and he was Born in the 16th late 16th century and lived into this early 1700s and he Very clearly had some major beef with his life Um as you mentioned and he has these poems that are about becoming bitter to women and he has one that's about It's a poem in Judeo version about Having a bad wife or an evil wife kind of thing. It's the word for it in farce. He can kind of go either way That's called to say a badia zen like Which means either it could either be like the evilness of a woman or a bad wife It could kind of go either way depends how you read it at different manuscripts have slightly different vowels or spelling and so You know you can get expansive meanings out of these but it's a really interesting sunny I mean funny if you have a sense of humor about it or sad. I guess poem about this guy's relationship with his wife It's really interesting. It's like he's also very religious man. He wrote really beautiful beautiful religious poetry and then also like became very bitter towards the end of his life and It seems like he moved from Koshan and went to like live on a mountain outside of Hennedun And just lived out his life. He had seven kids with his wife and he had to leave them all and go live in the mountains so sad Yeah, I guess I mean we don't know much, you know like we were talking about this like maybe he was a bad guy and maybe It's good you left. I don't know but You're reading primary sources. It's easy to take a very sympathetic of you of these characters And it's easy to kind of relate to Ben too. Like it's cool to see that We kind of think about it like well, we're real people and we have real problems but 300 years ago the Jews were all just if they were either bad best like they're all totally like downtrodden or they were all completely religious and completely in the old country But then you have all these people that we learned about if you start looking at the texts that were Deviants from religion and from culture and people who had Different streams of things in their lives like Samadakushani. He was very religious and he was also sometimes pretty atheist and he was gay and he was A musician and you loved poetry and he was kind of an asshole and he was he was a very rebellious guy He ended up getting his head chopped off. Wait. Why do you think he was an asshole? Not an asshole I don't mean that in a bad way like he would stand up to authority. The story is that he moved to India and the king came to Tell him you have to say the shahada the line that proves that you're Muslim that to convert to Islam. And at this point he was like, Although it's just one line. It's an easier process than the Jews. You don't have to cut off any things on your body. So he goes and he is told to say this line in the line is, there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet. And this isn't really about him being Jewish either, because a Jew would say there is no God but Allah. That's not controversial for a Jew. It's second line. But he just says, instead of there is no God but Allah, he says there is no God. Oh, wow. That's like, I can't. Which is like quite a outrageous thing to say in a conservative Islamic society in 1661. So he says that and they said, what about the rest? And he says, I'm still consumed with the nothingness before I can get to the somethingness. And that's a very like mystical answer to this. He's not necessarily being an atheist. And maybe he is who knows, but he's like he's saying there is nothingness. This like void and through that void, there is the insinant, which is that's the. That's kind of cobalist. It is. Yeah. So Kabbalah and Sufism are extremely intertwined with each other. And so yeah, he says that you can interpret it as he was still being a Jew now, like because he had left the religion to some degree, you can interpret it as him being kind of just an asshole, as I was saying, not an asshole. It's the wrong word. Being a sassy eye, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. I get what you meant. Or whatever it is. But yeah, he just he stopped it. There is no God. And so they chopped up his head. And then there's also a story that he remained alive and picked up his head and started walking towards the king. But he was convinced by something to not do anything. You know, there are all kinds of stories. There's a great picture of this painting, a drawing of him holding his own head. Yeah, I know which one you were sharing to it. It is very cool. So he's a freaky character. Amina, as we said, the guy with the, with the messy married life is an interesting character. Did Amina have another profession? Or was he just a writer? I imagine they probably a lot of them had other professions. Yeah. Amina was a particularly prolific writers. So maybe he was always, I don't really know. Yeah, I don't know. That's a good question. If you look at the musicians of Iran, like my, their musicians and my family from lay ancestors and they all had jobs, because you couldn't necessarily make it as just a musician. But, but yeah, if you go back a few hundred years, who knows if that was the case or not? So I guess Amina was probably performing though by his time, like during the Shiite rule, because you said 1600s, right? And then in one of my recent previous episodes, I talked a lot about the stigma of Mochreb, which is like the stigma against musicians, which were usually Jews. Do you think that stigma existed then or like how do you think it played into his writing? Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, it's possible that they that he was reciting and not reciting it as a spoken word thing and not singing it, because I think the band would probably be more unsinguing. Or if you did it privately in Jewish places, it would be fine. If they don't catch you singing, it's fine. I think Jews were allowed to sing to each other in the leisure. So yeah, I don't know if he had, if he would have gotten in trouble for that part of his life, there was also the part where the askins invaded Iran and they were Sunni. And then it's the whole not in a shot thing. That was like the later part of his life. He lived there so much. There's some some major turmoil in his lifetime. So, which also probably contributed to his bitter, his bitterness. But he has really beautiful, as I said, beautiful religious poetry too, that I think was it was used by Jews in the synagogue. And you were allowed to have music in the synagogue or in a mosque. You were allowed to like sing in a mosque. And so that that's probably also why a lot of hero, lyrical poetry, but he also wrote religious poetry. That he has these beautiful Judeo Persian translations of P.O. team, like liturgical poems that are originally in Hebrew from other parts of the world or from Iran. And those are really nice too. Yeah, I honestly, I've never really felt much towards poetry. I usually like to read novels, but his poems, the romantic ones that they really hit. They're really from the Varemarine book. Yeah, I think I should say. Yeah. Like the rose and because I don't know. Right. Yeah, the rose is a major, Sufi metaphor that is used by Jews also. And just like in Persian culture and general Persians. Yeah, it's like very Persian. It's very Sufi. The rose represents the beloved and the nightingale represents the lover of the beloved, the one who loves the yearner. So goalable, bold, but that's all. So the nightingale is the one that's calling out yearning for union with the beloved, which is a metaphor for man's yearning for unity with God. So it's like romantic love poems are religious love poems. That's very Sufi and it's very coupleistic and it's very Jewish, even pre-coupleized. Like she or has she read the song of songs is if you read it from a critical lens, it just seems like a love poem. It's also it's even like kind of sexy. It's like a check it out. And but it's been interpreted in this very religious way also of being about the love between humans and God. Yeah, I'm going to have to reread. I'm curious when did Kabbalah get to Iran? I mean, as with all these things, it's hard to know exactly, right? But they're very, they're many different versions of Kabbalah also. So there's the, it's been around for a very long time. And some of those versions certainly made it to Iran at some point. What I can say is that the version of Kabbalah that's very popular now is lurianic Kabbalah, which really began with Isaac Luria in the 1500s. And by the 1600s, we start to see it make its way into Iran. So in a lot of these poems, you, you see the Kabbalistic imagery and vocabulary start to make its way into these religious poems that people are writing. So I don't know if you can say there's one exact year where it happened, but that's what it, the mid 1600s also around like the Shabatite's fee incident. And that's kind of where a lot of that made its way in. And we have stories like you see in Kurdistan, it happens a little bit before it happens in Iran. Just because it's closer to where the Kabbalah was coming from. Yeah. That's a lurianic Kabbalah was coming from. But there does seem to have been a little bit of tension at some point between the pre-Kabbalistic mysticism of Jews in Iran and the post-Kabbalistic mysticism of Jews in Iran. But I think it eventually then it all came together because it's similar enough. But an example is so that the Persian seedur, the original Persian liturgy is from before that. So it doesn't have the very Kabbalistic editions that the Sephardic seedur that we use now has. You don't see those, which is very interesting. So it actually makes the Persian seedur is a lot more similar to what the Yemenites use today because they didn't accept Kabbalah into their liturgy, basically. Oh. Or not in the same way as the Spanish Jews. Interesting. That's a whole, the whole thing. Yeah, that seems like a different podcast that was said. I want to touch on you who they've been. El Azar is a guy who's deemed the rationalist philosopher of the JP guys. Well, there is, there is this quote that you mentioned. He says that there is no way you can take in Kabbalah without understanding, basically the tenets of the tonof and then goes on to kind of make a dish towards Eastern European Jews. He tells us epic. Yeah. That's the issue today. Yeah. So yeah. So he is, I mean, he's a really interesting person. I'm not sure. Sorry. I answered. I love Eastern. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. We just, we reserve the right to make fun of each other. We love my moment. You know, so that's yeah. Yeah. Exactly. No, it's, it's, you know, they've said worse things about us. So it's fine. No, he, he's an interesting character. They're all about unity. We are. We love unity. Unity is great. Unity of man and God, unity of the lover and the beloved. Yeah. We don't really care. Just kidding. Yeah, who do I know as our is he was from Kaushan. That's where he lived, which was so many cushions. Yeah, the Kaushan, Kaushan was a very literary place. A lot of literature came out of there. She asked you, but it in terms of, in terms of Judeo Persian writing. Okay. It's very Kaushan, very heavily features. She was kind of less so. I think there were more, maybe musical music. Musical music oriented. No, that there wasn't. There's, I mean, Shion, the great, the, the goat is from she was, but, but yeah, you just see a lot from Kaushan. And so Yeah, yeah, Huda Ben Alazar is, he wrote this huge book in the late 1600s. He wrote this, which by the way, like in the 1650s and 60s was when a massive amount of Iran's Jews were converted forcefully to Islam, and so that was kind of our Spanish Inquisition was in the mid 1600s. So he's coming like 20 years after that with this book that is a very deep rational, rationalist, philosophical explanation of basically my monodies' principles of Judaism, of what you must believe to be a Jew basically. And he has his own take on it and he kind of disagrees with my monodies on some things and he agrees with him on something. It's like very good, halachic criticism, I guess. And it's all in very, very complicated Judeo-person. It's very hard to read. You're asking if I could find that line. It's hard because he is so erudite that he is using really complicated Arabic terms of all these different languages and references to like Greek philosophers and Sephardic rabbis. And Persian rabbis from who were his predecessors and Persian non-Jews and the Quran and the Torah. He has dozens of sources. He's just like a really special guy. He clearly had a huge library and he was just referencing all of these manuscripts that he owned. And yeah, so the thing you mentioned is like, it's a tension that still exists today about Kabbalah and traditional Jewish practice. That you see in, I mean, you see it happened in Eastern Europe a couple hundred years later with the, maybe not a couple like a hundred years later with the specific movement that was all about you got to feel the stuff, you know, you got to feel the mystical things that are in Judaism. And then there were people who pushed back on that. I'm simplifying it, but there are people who pushed back on that saying like, no, you have to do the stuff to you have to follow off a laws of Judaism. And then if you want to also be mystical about it, then you can, but you can't just not follow the laws and be mystical. Not that that's what the specific Jews were doing, but that was the tension and that tension exists today. I mean, you have things like the Kabbalah Center, which is teachers Kabbalah, but not necessarily just to Jews. And there are some people who say that that's wrong. Some people say like you should be a religious Jew first. And then you can also take on the mystical element. If you're taking the mystical element without the grounded element, then what are you doing? And that exists in Islam too. People say exact same thing about Sufism, to do Sufism, right? You have to be like a religious Muslim first. And then you can understand the mystical nature of men's relationship with God. So he is part of the same conversation. And this is something that also happened with the Yemenite Jews and with the Eastern European Jews and so on. And the Spanish Jews also just happens everywhere where you have mysticism versus rationalism. And he was more of a rationalist. So it's not that he necessarily disbelieved in Kabbalah or said that we shouldn't be mystical in our Judaism, but he was like, you gotta do the things and you gotta have the philosophies. So he, the light you're referring to is where he says, certainly long winded about all this. The light, the light he says is that he refers to these people. And he says like certain Ashkenazi rabbis who play with the Sefi wrote, which is that means engage in Kabbalistic, lureonic, Kabbalistic thought basically without knowing the plain meaning of the Torah. And the plain meaning of the text and he refers to them as Hasid Shuteh, which means Hasid means pious. It now means Hasidic Jew. But that term existed much way before Hasidic Jews existed. The Hasidim were also the Sufi Jews of Egypt a thousand years ago. Like the son of my monides was Abraham then my monides was a Sufi Jew explicitly started Jewish Sufi order in Egypt. And he and his followers were called Hasidim and there were the Hasiday Ashkenazi in Germany like very, very long time ago. And Hasidim in Iran, a very, very long time ago. So anyway, sorry. Hasid means pious and Shuteh in Hebrew means fool, which. Oh, that's in Hebrew? Yes, so this is what I'm going to get at. This is like a. this is part of the Jewish dialect of Farsi is that we use the word Shuteh. So in certain towns in Iran, they use the Ola sound, it becomes an Ola sound just dialectically. And so Shuteh in Hebrew is pronounced Shuteh. And that is like the word that we that Persian Jews use for like a crazy person. Right, so like you grew up saying so and so, oh, Shuteh, right? He's crazy. It took me a very long time pretty recently to learn that that's not a Farsi word originally. It's a Hebrew word that became a lower word for a Persian dialect. So if I were to say to a Muslim Persian friend that somebody's a Shuteh, they wouldn't know what that is. Wow, you know this is. this is happening to me in a. because I have a lot of Persian friends or yeah, I have a lot of Persian friends who are in Jewish and. I would have been talking in Farsi and I'll slip these words and they're like, I don't understand what you're saying. And I feel like growing up the way these dialects were introduced to me was always in a shameful way. Like my dad's father would try to just sprinkle in Judeo-Svalon-y. And my grandmother would get so upset and say like, don't say that, don't teach them that, it's embarrassing essentially. And I feel like it's taken me so long to inquire further about this. And it's interesting how not only do we judge it this way, but also outside of our culture. Anything that's distinctively Jewish in outside land, outside of Israel is seen as something ghetto. Right. I mean often it was literally ghetto. Yes. But yeah, I mean, it's. that's a lot of part of just being a minority within any culture. Is that the minority thing is seen as. it doesn't have prestige. So I can talk like I'm also kind of a linguist, so from a. languages have prestige dialects. So I can't wait for the like we're just getting into it when you're a linguist an hour and oh my god, it's just because we don't have the stuff. But like they have prestige dialects. So like in English, there's a reason when somebody's pretending to be fancy. They're going to start talking in like a particular English accent. You know we live in America, that's the richest people in America don't have English accents. What about the trans-Atlantic? The trans-Atlantic accent. Yeah, that doesn't exist as much anymore, but it did at one point. But that wasn't a real accent that people used. It was people pretending to be up in class by using a sort of British accent. So this is the opposite of that happening. And it's the same reason that when you use a dialect of English that is associated with minorities who have been historically poorer, people say you're being ghetto. Speak properly please, even though there is no actual proper version of any language, a language is how people speak. So you get the cultural part of it where poorer people are seen as undesirable. And in Iran that was traditionally minorities too, like it's same as anywhere else. So the Jewish dialects are seen as uncultured, ghetto, etc. So an interesting thing to tie it back to, Judeo-Persian manuscripts is that every town in Iran had its own language. We call them dialects, but they're really languages. You started speaking Judeo-S-Vahani to a Persian speaker. They wouldn't understand it. It's really different. And there are probably zero manuscripts that have Judeo-S-Vahani in them. They'll have a word or two here and there, but everybody wrote in Judeo-Persian, because Persian was the prestige dialect. Even though they weren't necessarily speaking that way. So like if you look at Baba Yudan Loth, who was also from Kashan in the 1600s, he wrote the historical tract about the forced conversions of the Jews. He has a lot of words in his Persian that are Kashi words, Judeo-Kashani words, but he did not write in Judeo-Kashani. I'm part of a group we're trying to preserve these Jewish languages of Iran. And a hard thing is that we don't have any written examples. There is no written Judeo-Hammadunia that I know of, or Kashani, or S-Vahani, or Yazdi, or any of those. The only kind of counter-example I could give of that is that in the Kurdish regions, since they spoke Arabic, as the Jews spoke a version of Arabic, there are a handful of manuscripts that have that, because it was far enough removed from the heart of Iran that Persian was no longer there as much of a prestige dialect for them. So there are a few examples of written Jewish Nile Arabic, but in the Persian heartland, it's only written in Persian. It's a rich language, so it's a great language. It's my favorite language. Here. As being the one I grew up speaking, but it's interesting that Jews weren't writing in the language that they spoke. I don't want to catch you off guard with this question, but I feel like I have to ask. So for it. Are there any writers who were one in or what was their experience like? But I don't know like Josh were one of Iran. I mean, I know there I know a few, but I was human Yeah, this is easily the question I get asked the most in my classes every class Someone will ask this because I mean, it's very valid question because we're talking about a lot of dudes so There are some obviously much fewer. There's one that was like the rabbis daughter, but we don't have her name Yeah, so I don't she wasn't necessarily writer or she was a learner She was an intellectual. Yeah, she looked she looked before the Mongols came so if she wrote stuff we don't have it anymore But that's they call her bat's levy because her father was levy and so that that's the only name we have for her But there is in the 1600s in Kurdistan. There was us in that's Barzani who was the She was also the daughter of a rabbi and then when he died she took over He didn't have any sons and she took over the Ishiva and she became the Rabbi essentially they would use the term tanaeat for her But it was the same thing as being a rabbi and she led the community and she was well versed in Everything and we have poems that she wrote she wrote in Hebrew her poems Because it was Kurdistan so she wouldn't have written in juteyah Persian anyway, but she has some poems that are very complicated beautiful. He brewed it. It's very clear that she was an Absolute genius and amazing poet so we have that and we have some letters that she wrote basically asking people for funds and sending them to other towns and she was the same as any rabbi today They're 90% of their job is asking you for money. So that's yeah, so that's one example The examples are very hard to you know, you got to pull them out Yeah, right? I just want to say I wish we had the writing of Amino's wife I would love to see what what she says back to him and about him and I feel like there would be a great little beef thing going Kind of a Kendrick Drake kind of situation Who knows? I don't think we could find people who are related to them and they have maybe they there are Many scripts but because of all the rule they're hiding them, you know, it's possible and unlikely, but it's possible And also yeah, they're also like right before we have family trees that go back to like the late 1600s at the very earliest and Amino's right before that I'm sure 23 and me could accurately tell us. Oh for sure. Yeah, the most accurate I just I just think if we I look at Family trees and genealogies are other things looking for some of the names like Amino's real name was Daniel mean Ben Misha out So look for like Daniel means that might have been at the right time to have been him But haven't had anything yet, but it's very exciting to try to piece together these puzzles But is it us magazine like stars? They're just like us JP poets it is like that So true. Do you get a poet Persian poets? They are just like us. I mean literally are ancestors and they were complicated people just like us. But another example is in the 1800s in Tehran and Erasht there was a rabbi named Yakul Burashdi and he was your Yakul Ben Pautiel. This is real name and he wrote a bunch of Pew team in Hebrew dozens and We have them there's a manuscript that has all of these in there and he Has some poems that are attributed also to his wife Mariam And they wrote them in combination with each other. So there's a beautiful religious love poem, right? You can read it either way and it's and it's the title says that it's written in combination with his wife Mariam that's ever home and That's that one explicitly says that it was also written by her But it is quite possible that she helped write a lot of these poems Yeah, they all right They all they all have really basically the word Yakov Yakul the rabbi's name appears in a lot of the poems He writes them into the poet his name into the poem but also Mariam which is Mariam also appears in the poems a lot So it seems like they were they were both writing these and putting them but you know That's the way the society was was that Patriarchal and Women weren't going to get the shame that they deserved if they were writing Which it seems like some of them were seems like a stretch because we're barely Have documents of the Judeo person writers Who knows maybe Something was will just come out of the woodwork. I mean that that would be a dream about being Maybe you should start writing Judeo person poetry and thinking Where I guess I don't know this is a closing out thing but the reason how I know he was because I took this airmate class and That's really cool. Maybe talk a little bit about how you know This language that's dying So first on the you airmate. Yeah Well, first of all we you know if you just google my name Into put it in YouTube some of my classes will come up so your listeners can Check it out if you want a lot more information So in every region of Iran people spoke other languages not just Jews. It's a very multilingual society so in addition to Persian people In the northwest spoke azeri Turkish and in the west spoke Kurdish and in the north spoke Givakia and Mazandarani and so on all these regions had other languages So in the Kurdish region which is in western Iran, but also northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey and northeastern Syria in that whole region the Jews spoke auremic which is Not related to Persian at all Persians in Indo-European language Persian is very closely related to like Hindi and auremic is a Semitic language. It's closely related to arabic and Hebrew and it's the old language that they used to speak in post-biblical late biblical times and in the Mishnayik and Talmudic eras. I mean people spoke it before this but the Jews were speaking this language around the 400s BCE through the 600s CE That's kind of the range where it was the main literary written language of the Jews and then when in the 600s when the Arabs came Arabic became the main literary language of the Jews which I think is a very cool fact in general that from the 700s onwards most Jewish literature that we still quote to this day was written in Arabic. Arabic was a language of the Jews and in the mountains of the Middle East and the Kurdish region was very mountainous the Jews did not adopt Arabic as their language they continued to speak auremic and that just continued for the next 1300 years and so that brings you up into the 20th century in the early 1900s my grandfather was born in the city of Sanandage which is in western Iran and it is in the Kurdish region so the Muslims in that area speak various Kurdish dialects which are closely related to Persian but they are their own language and the Jews in addition to speaking Kurdish because they were speaking with their Muslim neighbors they also retained this auremic language from thousands of years before but they it obviously changed languages change over such a long period so the grammar changed and the vocabulary changed and they got all these low words from other languages and so on but basically my grandfather grew up speaking auremic which is that's a really cool thing to tell people in America because the only thing people know about auremic is that that's the language Jesus spoke and so that's like a it's just like yeah you know my grandfather spoke the language Jesus spoke it's not exactly the same language because it evolved a lot in those 2000 years but yeah that language because of the prestige thing and because of shame basically it wasn't passed down into my parents generation in my family a lot of families it was I know a lot of people here in LA who speak auremic they're mostly in their 60s and up but they still speak it in my family it was gone my dad knew a couple words and that's it and my grandfather died when I was three so I never learned that language but I was so interested in it that in my adulthood I found a linguistic book by Jeffrey Khan that explained to the dialect and it just is a linguistic explanation of the dialect so I studied that until I basically had this whole book memorized and from that I learned the language and then I went and befriended my dad's friends and relatives and all these people who speak it it's not a lot of people it's a few thousand and found videos on the internet of people speaking it and used all of that to to become a speaker of this language so I'm somewhat fluent I can speak it pretty easily I can't understand it as well as I speak it which is the opposite of most people right but it's because I didn't grow up hearing this language I learned it it helps that we're sitting on pillows on the ground with no back support oh and I'm hungry so please stop talking to me here has some goji's ads yeah I wouldn't have it okay so um so So I guess just to continue with that or to finish up on that, like that's part of the legacy of Jews in Iran is also this connection with the Jews further west in Kurdistan and that goes all the way back to thousands of years ago. So I think it's very cool. And the set end edge dialect particularly has a really cool confluence of loan words and influences from far sea and from Kurdish and from Arabic and Turkish and Hebrew. Modern Israeli Hebrew even says this very cool mix of languages and that's been very special to be able to connect with that to the extent that I've found writings in those languages too that I'm now working on translating. The Judeo person thing is also expanding even further. How do you divide your time between all these projects? I don't sleep. There's the short answer. Okay. So I just like one last thought. There's this Persian Israeli woman. She was actually one of the first people I had on the podcast. I don't think she's listening to this but she made this video that was going around on Instagram where she wrote this thing about how she feels that her languages, her native tongue is at war with her ancestral tongue talking about Hebrew and Persian. And I don't think they're at war. I don't think we should bring that into like leave our languages. Well, I don't know like don't bring that but really what made me think about this is when I was taking the Arabic class it actually felt really beautiful for me because so many things were uniting and I felt just like this unity when I see that there's a word that's shared between Hebrew, Arabic and Farsi. I can't think of a specific one right now but I think it's a really special experience with you. Feeled, elephant. Oh, feeled. Feeled in Hebrew. I don't know. Which then became feel in Arabic because they don't have a P in their language and then from Arabic I was loaned into Farsi. There are millions of people. Yeah, yeah, that's great. But did you have a question about that or? Now I just had a question about which part? About the languages fighting each other? No, it was just a statement that I don't think that they're at war. I think the languages have a nice history together. I can rant about that for another three hours if you want it but you know the short version is the, yeah, I mean like I said the first written example of Farsi is in Hebrew letters and Hebrew letters by the way are not Hebrew letters they're aromatic letters. They're a Syrian script which became what we call Hebrew scripts and Jews have been writing in Arabic as almost as long as they've been writing in Hebrew and they've been writing in Persian almost as long as that and these cultures were all so intertwined with each other. In a way that Jews in Europe weren't necessarily Jews in Europe were speaking languages and living in cultures that are very far removed from their Middle Eastern origins relatively speaking but in Iran and in the Arab world the Jews were like it was a very continuous evolution of the original. Maybe this is the real closing thought is what are your dreams or hopes with the work you're doing what do you feel like needs to be done? I would love for the conversation among Jews to change which it is a little bit we're seeing a little bit of it but basically to not treat Persian Jews as this exotic counter example kind of thing like this outlier where it's like well Jews are this this thing you see in America and then they're also Persian Jews which are like could it be this other thing or just like the well they're part of the Sephardic thing so they're just erased completely. So I you know it's oldest diaspora Jews have been Persian for longer than they've been basically anything else and in some ways Persians have been Jewish longer than they've been anything else besides that's the Arastrianism. Yeah besides the Arastrian the Persian this is what I always say to all the anti-Semites check out grandma you might be Jewish too. Well yeah I mean you go back far enough. Yeah and also there's another thing that has really stayed with me. I think it was telling you that I had this dream that I went to Tabriz and I don't know why I had this dream I've never been there I don't have any family from there and it was really vivid and then you were like oh do you know why you don't have family from there and I didn't know that it was one of the bloodiest persecution of Jews in Iran. Late 1700s there's basically a pogrom where every last Jew of Tabriz was killed or driven out so like that's why you have Jews from like we're from S.Vahon we're from Khaushan we're from Hamadon you have all these places but you don't really hear about Jews from Tabriz unless they were recent Jews from Urmia who went there for a little bit. Only every town in Iran had Jews it's really but you know things change. Yeah things change. Sorry I interrupt. That's okay. You were saying you don't want. Oh yes I mean that's just an example of one of the many things I'd love to change in the discourse. People know about the Holocaust. People know about the Spanish Inquisition. Those are both things that mostly happen in Europe. People don't know that the stuff that happened in Iran. People don't know about the good things that happened with Jews in Iran. They don't know about this like sufiasome thing that was this beautiful intertwined culture for thousands of years. They people just don't know. There's so much good information that people don't know and so much of that good information is buried in these primary sources that most people can't read. I would love to make this stuff available so that our generation can learn about it because our generation increasingly either says they're Persian or Jewish and not both. And the Persian non-Jews of our generation increasingly feel distant from Jews and the Jewish young people of our generation feel increasingly distant from Persians. So I'd love to show people that's what it was always like that there's a very interesting history that there are. You could teach whole classes about Persian Jews and most of it is stuff people don't know. So I just love to bring that out into the world for people to know. That's my primary thing. First for people to know and then they can help preserve it so that it doesn't disappear because give it like two generations and the stuff will be gone unless we do something. You have to do it all on you. It's all on me. Yeah. For not that you asked me but my hopes and dreams are. I did ask you what are your hopes and dreams? Just like because you know I studied literature I was a bit complied kid in college and I would like for Judeo Persian literature to be considered part of a literary canon. So yeah for people to know and all about the preservation I guess. Well you're working on it with this? Well I'm not doing it anymore for any more final thoughts. By the way do you know what I'm going to do is the intro music for the seventh episode? The M Ronnie city club. We didn't mention M Ronnie once. Which is that's the crazy thing. So just so everyone knows there are more Judeo Persian writers to talk about. Many many. Like we didn't even cover the second greatest one. Oh my god. So you know. Partly be part two. Yeah. Look at the links. Yeah look at the links. Okay. Bye. Hold on. Okay. Thank you. No, no. No. Sorry. This is the most rude. I was doing it on the five gods recording. I just. We're very uncomfortably sitting on. I don't know how our ancestors did this on the floor. Our joints are hurting. His ribs are hurting. Nothing but a gosh. Now, let's just happen. Let's wrap this up. I think. Yeah. Sounds good. Thank you. Okay. Bye. [Music] One ke gyer! برگنا حکار شكی باست توی. نموارت شباروی زمی. ونکن جاو همون جاست توی. هر کجار کنمو می بینام. نومتو بردزظه و ناست توی. ونکن رادزتو زلت بداهد. درگا حاش این همه بو باست توی. درگا حاش این همه بو باست توی.