The rise of the Safavid dynasty and the subsequent declaration of Shiism as the dominant form of Islam in Iran had many impacts on Iranian society and culture, one of which was the official designation of all non-liturgical music as haram. One of the long-term impacts of this designation was the eventual predominance of Jews in minstrelsy, and the consequent outcasting of the Jewish musician from both Muslim and Jewish society. Within this segregated community, the figure of the zanpush – the boy dancer – remains the most elusive and the least studied one to date. While many Western travel journals as well as some Persian memoirs mention them, little more than their name has survived. This scanty documentation changes with the introduction of photography in the Qajar courts and the use of musical troupes as subjects of photography, and starting with the late 1890s we find photographs of some of the more celebrated boy dancers accompanied by their troupes.
My paper will present a very brief history of Jewish minstrelsy in Iran to set the historical backdrop for the story of these boy dancers, the most famous of which seemed to have all been Jewish. With reference to photographs and memoirs, I will then explore the thrice-outcast character of the Jewish zanpush to see how the role of these boy dancers in society may shed light not only on their own mercurial gender and sexual identities in their eyes of their audience in particular, but further on the shifting boundaries of homosexual desire and the position of women in later-Qajar and early-Pahlavi societies in general. I will try to argue that their purpose in society, their fame and desirability, and their seemingly sudden disappearance from the minstrel scene in the late 1950s to early 1960s can all uncover previously overlooked nuances about sexual desire and gender roles in the rapidly shifting world of Iranian society during the first half of the twentieth century.
