The presence of Jews in Iran goes back millennia. And despite the ongoing tension between the contemporary Islamic Republic and the State of Israel, a small community of Jews remains — a rarity in the modern Middle East. The history of Iranian Jewry features ancient ties to stories from the Hebrew Bible, a flourishing of medieval poetic output and a fruitful exchange with both Iranian culture and the global Jewish community. Taken together, this history shows the perseverance and creativity of a community that has endured through periods of hardship and opportunity.
Some historians trace the arrival of Jews to the eighth century BCE, when the Assyrian ruler Sargon II resettled Israelites in what is now western Iran. Others consider the community’s story to begin with its bond with the Achaemenid emperor Cyrus the Great, who in 538 BCE freed the Jews and allowed them to rebuild their Temple in Jerusalem. Several books of the Hebrew Bible refer to Iran, including Isaiah, Ezra and the Book of Esther, the latter telling the story of a Jewish woman marrying the Persian emperor Ahasuerus and convincing him to save her people from mass murder. Iranian Jews believe that Esther and her relative Mordechai are buried in the Iranian city of Hamadan, and have historically made pilgrimages to their tomb.
Centuries later, the great compilation of oral traditions known as the Talmud was redacted in the lands of the Achaemenids’ successors, the Sasanians. This central text of Jewish law and legend contains tens of Persian words as well as accounts of engagement and debate with Zoroastrians, members of the dominant religion of pre-Islamic Iran.
As Iran came under Islamic rule in the seventh century CE, Jews and other non-Muslims faced restrictions on their status and were granted legal protections in exchange for paying a poll tax, or jizya. Yet in spite of certain inequities, Jews were able to make political and cultural inroads and enjoy a degree of autonomy. This was especially the case as Iran came under Mongol rule. In the 13th century, the great Jewish-born scholar and administrator, Rashid al-Din, served as a senior vizier to Emperor Ghazan. He is remembered for writing the monumental Compendium of Chronicles, a kind of world history of the Mongols and the peoples they encountered.
In the literary sphere, the 14th-century Jewish poet Shahin published Musanameh (The Book of Moses), a poetic rendition of the Bible amalgamating Jewish, Islamic and Iranian legends that helped launch a tradition of poetry in Judeo-Persian (Persian written in the Hebrew script). Judeo-Persian is just one of many distinctive languages spoken by Iranian Jews. Many major centers of Iranian Jewish life have unique languages cultivated by their communities, including Judeo-Hamadani in the West and Judeo-Kermani in the Southeast. Another means of internal communication is Lutera’i — possibly coming from the Hebrew lo Torah (not from the Torah) — which mixes Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary with Persian grammar, making it hard for non-Jews to understand.
Matters shifted considerably for Iranian Jews as the Safavid dynasty consolidated its power over the country under the banner of Shi’ism in the 16th century. Jews are mentioned in historical sources during their reign as working in agriculture, weaving, butchery, magic, minstrelsy and medicine. But these were also times of economic and political hardship. The reign of Shah Abbas I from 1581 to 1629 saw Jews and other religious minorities subject to incidents of forced conversion. When the Safavids collapsed into chaos in the early 18th century following an invasion from Afghanistan, Jewish communities found themselves subject to wealth extraction and population transfers.
These painful times were chronicled in Ketab-e Anusi (The Book of Forced Converts) and other poetic histories, which built on the literary legacies of earlier centuries. Perhaps the most infamous example of forced conversion is that of the Jews of Mashhad in northeast Iran. In the spring of 1839, as Jewish and Muslim holy days aligned, a mass attack took place against Jews under accusations (according to one narrative) of disrespecting Shi’a rituals. Dozens of people may have been killed and the rest of the community was forcibly converted to Islam. Despite this, many Mashhadi Jews continued to live as Jews, practicing secretly away from the eyes of their countrymen.
By this point in the 19th century, many of Iran’s roughly 40,000 Jews lived in a Jewish quarter (known as the mahalleh) in their respective cities. While these spaces marked Jews as different from Muslims, who sometimes considered Jews ritually impure, they allowed for social cohesion and safety in numbers. Jews worked a range of professions, from peddlers to tailors, dancers to midwives, and as court doctors like the well-known Haqq Nazar. Fath Ali Shah, who ruled Iran from 1797 to 1834, even married a Jewish woman — Maryam Khanum Bani Esra’il, the ninth wife in a harem of (by some estimates) hundreds that bore the shah around 260 children over the course of his lifetime.
Another hallmark of this period is the growing Jewish interest in other religions. Beginning in the 1840s, and increasingly through the latter quarter of the 19th century, many Jews converted to the Baha’i faith. The universalist faith that began in Iran in the early 1800s offered Jews spaces in which to engage as equals with non-Jews, putting aside the discrimination and accusations of impurity they felt elsewhere, without fully forsaking their Jewishness.
Under the Qajar dynasty, which ruled until the early 20th century, Iran became increasingly embroiled in imperial jostling in the Middle East and Central Asia, bringing ever more attention to Jews in the country from their western coreligionists. Jewish philanthropists sought expanded rights for the Jewish community and one international Jewish philanthropic body, the Alliance Israelite Universelle, established its first European-style school in the country in 1898. A network of the group’s schools would subsequently spread around Iran, including schools for girls. Pupils were drilled on mathematics, Persian literacy and French, giving them access over time to professional and social opportunities in the modernizing Iranian state.
One of the most momentous changes under the Qajars was the establishment of a constitution that promised to represent the “whole of the people,” and offered a quota seat in the new legislature for Jews and certain other religious minorities. This more open environment saw Jews establish their first newspaper, Shalom, in 1915, and a Zionist association by the end of that decade. The iconic journalist and community figure of this period, Shemu’el Yehezkel Hayyim, argued for a marrying of Iranian and Zionist identities and published poetic works that fused these ideological currents. He would be executed in 1931 by Reza Shah, the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, under spurious accusations of plotting against the monarch (but more likely because of his political activity on behalf of Jews and non-Jews).
Despite this, the Pahlavi era is remembered often as a halcyon period for Iran’s Jews, perhaps because it was an improvement from the pressures they faced earlier, under the Qajars, and would later under the Islamic Republic. Jewish integration and acculturation that began in the late 19th century accelerated in multiple directions. Politically, some Jews joined the communist Tudeh party and established left-leaning periodicals. Others devoted their time to Zionist organizations such as Ha-Halutz. Jews were also ever more visible in mainstream culture and society. Notable examples include Soleiman Haim, who compiled an iconic Persian-English dictionary still used by many Iranians today, as well as the legendary composer Morteza Neydavud and the decorated pharmacology professor Iraj Lalehzari.
By the 1970s, Jews were overrepresented among university students and lecturers and in the medical profession. According to one estimate, Jews represented some six percent of the country’s 10,000 doctors — remarkable for a community that numbered just 62,000 out of a total population of 35 million. The reign of the second Pahlavi monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah, also saw increasing ties to and migration between Iran and Israel. Between Israel’s founding in 1948 and 1953, around 31,000 Iranian Jews migrated to the new state, to which Iran granted de facto recognition in 1950. Conditions on arrival were tough, yet by the 1960s Iranian Jews had produced Persian-language radio, periodicals and poetry to stay connected to their culture and community. Iranian Jews would later achieve renown in Israeli politics, military, music and television.
While many Jews fared well under the shah, the wider political environment was growing increasingly heated in resentment against him. Religious, economic and political grievances mounted into a revolutionary swell by 1978-9. While some members of the community were excited by the prospect of change and liberalization, others were apprehensive about the prominence of the revolution’s Islamist faction, headed by Ruhollah Khomeini, who was known for his antisemitic and anti-Israel rhetoric. Matters worsened still when community leader and business tycoon Habib Elqanian was executed by the newly founded Islamic Republic in May 1979. Around two thirds of the community emigrated to the United States, Israel and Europe over the next decade, where they formed robust diaspora communities with a deep attachment to their language, food, culture and homeland.
Yet many Iranian Jews remained in the country. Today, about 10,000 Jews continue to live in Iran, even as Jewish populations elsewhere in the Middle East have dwindled practically to zero. The Islamic Republic’s constitution preserved the quota seat in parliament for Jews, and there are records of Jewish soldiers fighting in the Iran-Iraq War. Jewish institutions, including the longstanding Jewish Association, have maintained an active schedule of public-facing events, including the regular periodical Ofeq Bina, but challenges for the community remain.
In 1999, several Iranian Jews were arrested on trumped-up charges of spying for Israel. The presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-2013) was marked by an uptick in inflammatory rhetoric that included Holocaust denial. Successive rounds of domestic protest, including the 2022-3 Woman Life Freedom demonstrations, and ongoing tensions with Israel and the United States, have seen the community come under constant scrutiny and pressure from authorities. The persistence and perseverance of Iranian Jewish life in spite of these pressures proves a determination to hold on to a fascinating culture and heritage that is unique in Jewish history for its variety and longevity.
