Rashid al-Din Hamadani

Origins and early life

Rashid al-Din Fadl-Allah Hamadani was born about 1247 at Hamadan in Persia into a Jewish family: his father was an apothecary, his grandfather is said to have served the Ismaili court, and he was trained as a physician in the Jewish medical tradition of the city.

Work and career

This fiche states plainly that he converted to Islam around the age of thirty, and that he is included here under the rule of this site that a Jew who left Judaism remains part of its story — and because his origin was never forgotten by others: it was thrown at him throughout his career and used to kill him. He entered the service of the Mongol Ilkhans of Persia as a physician and rose to be vizier under Ghazan Khan and Öljaitü, effectively governing the empire for twenty years.

He reformed the coinage, the tax system and the postal relays, founded at Tabriz a whole scholarly quarter, the Rab'-e Rashidi, with a library, a hospital, a paper mill and a scriptorium employing copyists and painters, and endowed it so that his books would be recopied annually in Arabic and Persian. Commissioned by Ghazan to write the history of the Mongols, he turned it into something no one had attempted: the Jami' al-tawarikh, the Compendium of Chronicles, a history of the known world — Mongols, Persians, Arabs, Turks, Chinese, Indians, Jews and Franks — written with informants and written sources from each of those peoples, including a Chinese scholar, a Buddhist monk from Kashmir and a Frankish envoy.

Historians call it the first world history, and its illustrated manuscripts are among the treasures of Persian painting. In 1318, aged about seventy, he was accused of poisoning the late sultan; his enemies made much of his Jewish birth, and he was executed at Tabriz. His head was carried through the city, and years later his remains were expelled from the Muslim cemetery and reburied in the Jewish one.