c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the senior interreligious adviser of the American Jewish Committee.)

(UNDATED) Ten innocent Iranian Jewish men were recently convicted of spying for Israel and sentenced to prison terms from 4 to 13 years in length. The defendants included shopkeepers, Hebrew and English teachers, and a part- time rabbi _ all members of the Iranian Jewish community that traces its roots to the ancient Persian Empire.

The harsh verdicts were strongly condemned throughout the world.

President Clinton was “deeply disturbed,” declaring the Iranian Jews were not accorded due process of law. He called for Iran to overturn the verdicts.

The European Union echoed Clinton’s call for a reversal, and British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook cancelled a scheduled visit to Iran.

Putting innocent Jews on trial, however, is an old and ugly spectacle. Whenever cynical governments need scapegoats to divert their people from troubling domestic or foreign issues, they charge Jews with engaging in widespread sinister “conspiracies” against the state.

Such show trials before kangaroo courts always provide good theater for the general society because they play on latent anti-Semitism and distract the public from the real problems at hand. Today’s anti-Jewish trials in Iran are similar to other judicial outrages of the last hundred years.

In the mid-1890s, a century after its revolution, France was still bitterly divided between supporters of the republic and anti-democratic reactionary forces within the French military and Roman Catholic Church. Some of the latter group desired a religio-clerical Catholic state headed by a monarch.

In such a political system, Jews, Protestants and free thinkers would be second-class French citizens. Both sides perceived their differences in the starkest terms and believed the long-term future of France was at stake.

To gain credibility, ultra-reactionary forces in the army accused an innocent Jewish artillery officer, Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, of spying for Germany. A rigged court-martial convicted Dreyfus of treason and he served time in the wretched Devil’s Island prison near South America. Eventually, Dreyfus was found innocent and reinstated into the French Army, but his case painfully convulsed French politics and religion for decades.

In 1952 the brutal communist regime in Czechoslovakia sentenced one of its own leaders, Rudolf Slansky, a Jew, to death by hanging. Slansky’s “crime?”

What else? Spying for Israel. The current film, “Sunshine,” describes the virulent anti-Semitism that permeated many communist governments of that period. When consumer goods and personal freedom are in short supply, the population becomes restless. But a regime can conveniently create show trials featuring Jews as the always-guilty villains.

Following the collapse of Communism 40 years later, the democratic Czech Republic denounced the trials and Slansky’s execution. Ironically, his son served as an official in the new Prague government led by President Havel.

In 1970 the Soviet Union strongly rejected growing international pressure to permit its Jewish citizens to emigrate to Israel and other lands of freedom. Kremlin leaders correctly sensed that if Jews left the USSR, other dissatisfied groups would demand greater freedom. What to do? The answer was not long in coming.

Several Soviet Jews in Leningrad were charged with attempting to hijack a small aircraft with the purpose of flying it to Israel. The defendants faced death if found guilty. World reaction to the obscene Soviet trial was widespread and highly critical.

Many American Christian leaders called for the lives of the Leningrad Jews to be spared and as the flimsy case unfolded, the ridiculous quality of the trumped-up charges became apparent. The alleged hijackers were spared, and the trial backfired on the Kremlin because it graphically illustrated the plight of Soviet Jewry and highlighted the weakness of the communist leadership. Twenty years later, the Soviet Union was no more.

The most famous trial of the 1970s involved Anatoly Scharansky, a charismatic Soviet Jewish leader, who, unsurprisingly, was found guilty of espionage. During his eight-year imprisonment, Scharansky maintained his innocence and dignity as well as his ardent yearning to live in Israel. In 1986 he was released in a prisoner exchange, and today, as Natan Scharansky, he serves in the Israeli Cabinet.

I am convinced that when and if a democratic government is established in Tehran, the recent sordid trial, will, like the other show trials of Jews, be publicly repudiated. In the meantime, we can protest and demand that Iran overturn the unjust sentences of the 10 Iranian Jews.

DEA END RUDIN