Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, not a Jew, but guess who is…

Hall of Famer Rod Carew, indeed. My friend Laura Rozen got underneath the Daily Telegraph’s phony story about Iran’s president being a secret Jew like Megan Fox gets underneath the hood of her GTO in Transformers:

Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is of Jewish descent, the Daily Telegraph reports, based on the fact that his family name was previously “Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.” Not so, says Iranian-born Israeli Middle East analyst Meir Javedanfar: “As someone who wrote his biography, I can tell you that this claim is inaccurate and would be happy to go on the record to say so. Saborjiyan are people who paint carpet threads. Also, in Iran many Muslims and Jews share the same surname.” Psy-ops?

via Is Ahmadinejad Jewish? ElBaradei arrives in Iran, and other news – Laura Rozen – POLITICO.com.

More from her source, Meir Javedanfar, at the Guardian. Long-story short, the family switched to Ahmadinejad to sound less like low-class bumpkins.

I think there’s something to Laura’s cheeky suggestion that the notion that Ahmadinejad is overcompensating for his Jewish roots is some kind of psy-ops campaign. Or, as Foster Kamer pointed out this weekend on Gawker that “now…Ahmadinejad has his own birthers.” Exactly.

In any event, I feel President Crazy’s family’s name-changing pain. When Great-Grandpa David immigrated to America from Poland after a stop in London, he was a Rozstajn or some such thing in Polish-Yiddish. That being too complicated, he changed it to Rothstein. The prevailing theory after that has some divergences. One is that we ditched ‘Rothstein’ because there was a Jewish mobster family in Chicago of the same name who my respectable industrialist great-grandfather did not want to be associated with. The other is that my great uncle Walter wanted to get into Harvard Law, and having an obviously Jewish surname was an easy way to be filtered out.

And so we became Rostons. There are still Rothsteins down south from the other branch of the family who never changed it.

The point is: Iran is a complicated country, more multiethnic and riven by geographical, cultural, and class upheaval in the past century than people give it credit for. There are any number of reasons that the Sabourjians became Ahmadinejads. Covering up their Jewish roots is a highly unlikely reason.

In any event, even if they were Jews way back, Islam is one of the most welcoming religions for conversion out there. Until somebody out there shows me pictures of a young Mahmoud’s secret bar mitzvah, with the Loony Tunes theme, I’m not buying this bill of goods, and the rest of you should stop spreading it.