Maybe Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Isn't Jewish After All

Well is he or isn't he, for heaven's sake?

On Sunday, I posted about allegations that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is actually Jewish. I based my post on a widely circulated article in London's Daily Telegraph, which cited un-named "experts" who claimed that the original name on the president's national identity card was of Jewish origin, and religious at that.

What's in a name, you ask? And well you might. According to Ahmadinejad biographer Meir Javendanfar in an article for The Guardian, the name in question -- "Sabourjian" -- does not necessarily connote a Jewish heritage. (The Telegraph suggested that "Sabourjian" referred to a Jewish prayer shawl.)

Rather, experts consulted for the Guardian article contend that the name derives instead from a Farsi term for the person who paints threads in carpets. On this interpretation, the Ahmadinejad family changed their name after their son's birth not to hide their Jewish roots but because they didn't want to appear as country folk in the big city.

Hey, you say prayer shawl and I say thread weaver. Let's call the whole thing off.

But something tells me that we're going to hear more on this subject in the coming weeks and months as scholars and investigative journalists alike devote Talmudic -- no pun intended -- attention to sifting through the facts. (You gotta love that this all boils down to the linguistic connotations of an artisanal garment -- who ever said anthropology was irrelevant?)

When all is said and done, however, this story still has an ugly underbelly.

After all, if Ahmadinejad is Jewish, he's still a Holocaust denier. As the bloggers at Jewbonics point out, all this controversy really does is tell us whether to append "self-hating" or "anti-Semite" to Ahmadinejad's name for the next month or so. Neither is particularly appealing.

And if he isn't Jewish -- but this is all just one giant political conspiracy to malign him if he were -- well, that's pretty off-putting as well.

I have only one thing to say:

Oy vey.