Today there aren't enough Jews left in Mashhad to form a minyan. But the community's descendants, along with Jews from neighboring Afghanistan and Bukhara, part of Soviet Central Asia, play a major, perhaps dominant, role in the international trade in rubies, sapphires and emeralds as well as semiprecious stones. While the more familiar diamond business is marked by a Yiddish-accented Ashkenazic atmosphere, the gemstone trade with its Persian speaking Afghani and Bukharan Jews has an Eastern flavor. In fact, some Persian Jews do deal in diamonds or in both types of stones, and a black-hatted ultra Orthodox Ashkenazic Jew can sometimes be spotted in Bangkok, the world's main source of rubies and sapphires. Fifty percent of them, however distantly, are related to me.
Every stone is different.
They're like people . The turquoise mines outside Mashhad are only part of the story behind the Jewish gemstone business. Levy, 62a wiry, white-haired man whose father and older brother born in Mashhad before the family left around 192 says Jews probably first came to that city around 1735. Persian leader Nadir Shah had made Mashhad, a city holy to Shi'ite Muslims, his capital. He considered the Jews trustworthy and brought some 40 families to keep his treasure.