Reports of Ahmadinegad's Jewish past, a hoax

I received an E-Mail from my sources in Iran that there was a rumor regarding Ahmadinegad being a Jewish convert. The story was intriguing and a nasty reminder of another undesirable character in history who had Jewish background and hated the Jewish people. The story was intriging enough to deserve an investigation ,once I began my work I ran into several reports which were all from an original source published in Telegragh.co.uk

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The Authors Damien McElroy and Ahmad Vahdat reported that the Iranian President Ahmadinejad was from a Jewish back ground. Their findings were based on a famous picture of Ahmadinegad showing his birth certificate to reporters in the recent election. If one looks carefully at this picture, it is quite obvious that his last name was Sabourjian before it was changed to Ahmadinegad. Allegedly the people with the last name of Sabourjian are traditionally from Aradan, which is Ahmadinegad's place of birth .According to the authors this name derives from "weaver of the Sabour", the name for the Jewish Tallit shawl in Iran. The name is said to be on the list of reserved names for Iranian Jews compiled by Iran's Ministry of the Interior.

Although, the change in name is undisputable, this argument did not seem strong enough to make such conclusions. According to the authors this conversion from Judaism to Islam took place when he was four years old. unfortunatly ,there is little privacy from government in Iran. Such information can not be hidden from the neighbors let alone an entire country. Also our Birth certificates as well as school reports always show a person's religion, Therefore when he entered to work for the Iranian government his Jewish background would have become common knowledge. I distinctly remember when Khomeini would insult the Shah's prime minister as Jewish born. In other words in that kind of anti-Semitic environment he would not have any chance of entering the revolutionary guards, working for interior ministry or shaking hand with Khamenehee.Further investigation brought me to an article printed in Guardian by Meir Javedanfar which refuted the story, with qualified people as his sources.I have a paragraph his article for you here:

{Professor David Yeroshalmi, author of The Jews of Iran in the 19th century and an expert on Iranian Jewish communities, disputes the validity of this argument."There is no such meaning for the word 'Sabour' in any of the Persian Jewish dialects, nor does it mean Jewish prayer shawl in Persian. Also, the name Sabourjian is not a well-known Jewish name," he stated in a recent interview. In fact, Iranian Jews use the Hebrew word "tzitzit" to describe the Jewish prayer shawl. Yeroshalmi, a scholar at Tel Aviv University's Center for Iranian Studies, also went on to dispute the article's findings that the "-jian" ending to the name specifically showed the family had been practicing Jews. "This ending is in no way sufficient to judge whether someone has a Jewish background. Many Muslim surnames have the same ending," he stated."}

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P.S. Jewish or not, he still shares a lot of features with that other undesirable character of history