In 1881 Sir William Taylour Thomson finally succeeded to force the Shah to abolish the Jizya tax for the Persian Jewry[43] Many times Iranian central government wished to help the Jews but did not have enough influence in places where local rulers and Shia clergy were powerful. In one incident of this type in Hamedan in 1875, an argument occurred between a Jewish goldsmith and a customer, eventually a crowd gathered and the goldsmith was accused of blaspheming Islam, a crime worthy of capital punishment in Islamic legal law.