Jews and Wine in Shiite Iran – Some Observations on the Concept of Religious Impurity

In the historiography of the Jews in Iran - starting from Walter Fischel's studies about Jews under the Safavids (Fischel 1937) and up to studies dealing with the condition of Jewish communities in Qajar Iran (Tsadik 2007, Yeroushalmi 2008) - the religious impurity that the Shi'i orthodoxy attributed to Jews (and other non-Muslim religious minorities), is perceived as one of the key factors that determined the social and the economic status of the Jews in Iran. Alongside this historiographical consensus that dominates the discourse regarding the annals of the Jewish communities in Iran, historical sources provide ample evidences for the participation of Jews in the production of wine and other alcoholic beverages consumed by Shiite Muslims.
The consumption of wine by Shiite Muslims from different strata of the society in the Safavid as well as Qajar eras was examined and analyzed in Rudi Matthee's seminal studies (Matthee 2005, 2014); the concept of impurity in the Shiite jurisprudence has also gained historical examination (Darwish 2014, Pargoo 2018). But historians have not yet addressed the social and religious questions related to the participation of non-Muslim religious minorities in the production and marketing of wine from the perspective of the their religious impurity.
While addressing this topic in the case of the Jewish communities in Iran, in my presentation I will point out to the significance of this topic in the study of the relationship between the Shiite majority and the Jewish minority in the 19th century Iran, and will examine the insights that Religious studies have to offer for a better understanding of what seems as an apparent contradiction between the religious impurity that was attributed to the Jews and the day to day implementation of this concept in the case of the production of wine and its consumption.