It appears that the Telegraph in the UK has reported that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s family converted from Judaism to Islam and changed their name when he was 4 years old, largely on the basis of the change in family name from Sabourjian.

The problem is that this is simply untrue, according to the Guardian.

First, the Telegraph says:

• That “Sabour” is the word for Talit used by Iranian Jews.
• Not true: it means “thread painter”, and refers to those who work coloring fibers for Persian carpets.
• Note that thread painting is not a traditionally Jewish profession in Iran.
• The word used by Iranian Jews for the Tallit is “Tallit” (my experience with Iranian coreligionists) or Titzit (19^th Century Iranian Judaism Scholar David Yeroshalm), both Hebrew words from scripture.
• According to scholars, there is no word Sabour at all among Jewish dialects in Iran.
• That “Jian” is a suffix that almost exclusively refers to practicing Jews.
• Simply untrue. It’s a fairly common suffix.

What is true, however, is that surnames have come fairly recently to Iran, and that the “hicks in the sticks”, typically had surnames associated with the family profession, like “thread painter”:

The reason that Ahmadinejad’s father changed his surname has more to do with the class struggle in Iran. When it became mandatory to adopt surnames, many people from rural areas chose names that represented their professions or that of their ancestors. This made them easily identifiable as townfolk. In many cases they changed their surnames upon moving to Tehran, in order to avoid snobbery and discrimination from residents of the capital.

The Sabourjians were one of many such families. Their surname was related to carpet-making, an industry that conjures up images of sweatshops. They changed it to Ahmadinejad in order to help them fit in. The new name was also chosen because it means from the race of Ahmad, one of the names given to Muhammad.

But wait, there’s more:

Moreover, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s mother is a Seyyede. This is a title given to women whose family are believed to be direct bloodline descendants of Prophet Muhammad. Male members are given the title of Seyyed, and include prominent figures such as Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei. In Judaism, this is equivalent to the Cohens, who are direct descendants of Aaron, the brother of Moses. One has to be born into a Seyyed family: the title is never given to Muslims by birth, let alone converts. This makes it impossible for Ahmadinejad’s mother to have been a Jew. In fact, she was so proud of her lineage that everyone in her native village of Aradan referred to her by her Islamic title, Seyyede.

So, even if his father, or his father’s family were Jewish, he would not be, because Judaism is matrilineal, and if your mother is not Jewish, you are not Jewish, except by formal conversion.

Of course, I am competing with two links from two papers, the Telegraph, and the The Grauniad^*, so why am I taking the side of the latter?

It’s pretty simple really: First, I have had Iranian Jewish friends, and the phrase “Sabour” never came up, and we did talk about Tallit in shul, and second, because the source was a newspaper formerly owned by Conrad Black, before he was sent off to a very well deserved stint in jail, and every story from a news outlet formerly owned by Conrad Black should be viewed with a jaundiced eye.

Additionally, you will note that that the Telegraph provides no on the record sources for its analysis, while the Grauniad^* does, and goes into some detail as to the background of these sources.

^*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”