The Jews of Iran

Why this Chapter exists

A Jewish history as old as the diaspora itself.

Iran, the country once known to the West as Persia, holds one of the longest continuous Jewish histories anywhere on earth. It begins no later than the sixth century BCE and runs, unbroken, to the present day. Persian kings appear by name in the Hebrew Bible, and a Jewish queen of Persia is the central figure of an entire biblical book.

The community was present at the very beginning of the Jewish diaspora. It lived through every Persian empire and the arrival of Islam, and developed its own languages and traditions. Then, after more than two and a half thousand years, it went through a wrenching change in the twentieth century. The Jews of Iraq and the Jews of North Africa left almost entirely in the mid-twentieth century. Iran’s community, though much smaller than before, still exists.

A presence at the beginning

There from the diaspora’s first days.

The Jewish story in Persia begins with a catastrophe that happened next door. In 586 BCE the Babylonian Empire destroyed Jerusalem, including its Temple, the center of Jewish worship, and deported many of Judah’s people to Babylonia, the land that is now Iraq, as told in The Jews of Iraq. When the Persian Empire conquered Babylon about fifty years later, those exiled communities came under Persian rule. Jewish life then spread across the Persian Empire, which at its height stretched from Egypt to India.

From that beginning, more than 2,500 years ago, Jews lived across the Iranian plateau without a break. They were there through every empire that ruled it: the ancient Persian dynasties, the Greek conquest, the later Persian empires, the arrival of Islam in the seventh century CE, and every regime since. The last Persian empire before Islam made Zoroastrianism, Persia’s ancient faith, its state religion.

Cyrus and the return

The Persian king who sent the Jews home.

One figure ties the two histories together more than any other: Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire. In 538 BCE, the year after conquering Babylon, Cyrus issued a decree allowing the exiled Jewish community to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their Temple. According to the Book of Ezra, Cyrus also returned the vessels of the Temple that the Babylonians had carried away.

This is why Cyrus holds a place in Jewish memory unlike almost any other non-Jewish ruler. The Hebrew Bible names him directly and casts him in a uniquely favorable light. Later Persian kings appear in the Bible too. The Book of Esther is set entirely in the Persian court, and tells of a Jewish queen who saves her people from destruction, the story behind the holiday of Purim, still celebrated by Jews around the world.

A community across the centuries

Through every empire, the community held.

For more than two thousand years, Jewish communities lived in cities across the Iranian plateau: in Isfahan, Shiraz, Hamadan, Tehran, Yazd, Kerman, and many smaller towns. Hamadan was traditionally held to be the burial place of Esther and Mordechai, the heroes of the Purim story, and a shrine there remained a site of Jewish pilgrimage for centuries.

The Arab armies that carried Islam out of Arabia conquered Persia in 641 and found a strong Jewish community in Isfahan. Under the caliphs that community grew until Arab and Persian geographers called its quarter al-Yahudiyya, “the city of the Jews.” When the Spanish Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela passed through around 1166, he put the number of Jews there at 15,000. He also named their chief rabbi, Sar Shalom, appointed by the exilarch in Baghdad, the head of the Jews of Iraq. The community left writing of its own. In the fourteenth century the poet Shahin retold the stories of the Torah in Persian verse written in Hebrew letters. His Musa-nama, the Book of Moses, was completed in 1327 and runs to about ten thousand lines. His Ardashir-nama wove the Book of Esther, the story set at the Persian court, into a Persian epic.

Under the various Islamic dynasties that ruled Iran, Jews lived as dhimmis, a protected but second-class minority that paid a special tax and lived under legal restrictions (described further in the Dhimma Chapter). Jews faced forced conversions and persecution under the Safavid dynasty, which took power in 1501, and under the dynasties that followed. From 1656 to 1662 Jews were forced to convert to Islam, as Babai ben Lotf, a Jewish poet of Kashan who lived through it, recorded. In 1839 a mob attacked the Jewish quarter of Mashhad, in northeastern Iran, killed some 35 Jews, and forced the rest to convert to Islam. Many kept Jewish practice in secret for generations. Under the Qajar dynasty (1796–1925), Jews often suffered abuse and discrimination. Shi‘i rules of ritual purity treated them as najes (“impure”), forbade physical contact with them, and required them to wear identifying dress. In Shiraz, in the south, mobs attacked the Jewish quarter in 1892, 1897, and 1910, killing and wounding many Jews. In the late nineteenth century the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a French Jewish organization, opened modern schools in the larger communities.

The Jewish languages of Iran

A family of languages all their own.

Like other old diaspora communities, the Jews of Iran developed their own ways of speaking: Jewish forms of Persian, written in Hebrew letters, that scholars group together as Judeo-Persian. These were not a single language but a family of related dialects, varying from city to city, each blending the local Persian with Hebrew and Aramaic. In western Iran, the Jews of towns such as Sanandaj spoke a dialect of Aramaic instead.

Judeo-Persian has one of the oldest written records of any Jewish diaspora language: documents survive from more than a thousand years ago, and historians of both Jewish and Persian culture draw on them. Alongside everyday speech, Iranian Jews produced religious poetry, translations of the Bible, and literature in these languages.

Object Spotlight

A class of schoolgirls, Iran, the 1970s.

About fifteen teenage girls stand crowded together for a class photo, an older man in a dark suit and hat at the center, their teacher or the school’s principal. It is a twelfth-grade class at a Jewish school in Iran in the 1970s. The girls are dressed in the fashion of the decade: flared trousers, patterned blouses, long straight hair. They could be a graduating class almost anywhere in the world.

These young women were growing up in a community more than 2,500 years old, by then mostly urban, modern, and part of Iranian life. Within a few years of this photo, the 1979 revolution would transform their country, and most of the Jewish community would leave.

The modern community

A confident community, by the mid-twentieth century.

In 1948, the Jews of Iran numbered about 100,000 to 120,000 people. Under the rule of the Pahlavi shahs, Iran’s last royal dynasty (1925–1979), the community’s position improved markedly: legal restrictions eased, and Jews moved into the professions, business, medicine, and the arts. A large, prosperous, modern community grew, centered increasingly on the capital, Tehran, with its schools, synagogues, hospitals, and newspapers. Emigration also began. From 1948 on, waves of Iranian Jews moved to the new State of Israel, about a third of the community by 1967.

1979 and the departure

A revolution, and a community scattered.

The turning point came in 1979, when the Iranian Revolution overthrew the shah and established the Islamic Republic. The new order brought deep uncertainty for religious minorities. The Jewish community was officially recognized and permitted to continue practicing, but several pressures pushed most of Iran’s Jews to leave. They included the new political climate and the execution of Habib Elghanian, the community’s most prominent leader, by firing squad in May 1979, on a charge of spying for Israel. By the count of the Federation of Iranian Jews, the regime has executed at least 17 Jews since 1979. Other pressures included the war with Iraq that soon followed and a general atmosphere of insecurity.

Between 80,000 and 100,000 Jews lived in Iran when the revolution came, by the usual estimates. Over the following years, the great majority, some 60,000 to 70,000 people, emigrated, primarily to the United States, Israel, and Europe. Los Angeles became home to one of the largest Iranian-Jewish communities in the world, and significant communities also formed in New York and in Israel. Unlike the airlifts that emptied Iraq within a few years, Iran’s departure was more gradual, stretched across the decades after 1979.

The community today

Still there, after 2,500 years.

Unlike the ancient Jewish communities of Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, the community in Iran did not end. A community of roughly 8,000 to 10,000 Jews remains in Iran today, far smaller than before 1979, but real and continuous, with functioning synagogues, schools, and kosher shops in Tehran and a handful of other cities. It is one of the largest Jewish communities in the Middle East outside Israel.

Iran’s government is openly hostile to the State of Israel. In 2005 its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, called the Holocaust “a myth,” and in 2006 its Foreign Ministry hosted a conference for Holocaust deniers in Tehran. That story is told in Holocaust Denial and the Response. Reviews of the state’s school textbooks have reported similar content. Citing the Anti-Defamation League, an American advocacy group, the U.S. State Department reported for 2021 that “incitement to hatred against Jews and Israel” runs through “multiple fields of the curriculum.” Citing IMPACT-se, an Israel-based monitoring group, it reported for 2022 that in Iranian textbooks “the Holocaust is ignored.” (US State Department, International Religious Freedom Reports: Iran 2021, Iran 2022.) The state formally recognizes its Jewish citizens and reserves them one seat in its parliament. After more than 2,500 years, through empires, conquests, forced conversions, and a revolution that scattered most of its members across the globe, a Jewish community still lives on the Iranian plateau.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History: the Classical World: the Persian Empire and the Jewish community: Cyrus and the return from exile, and how ancient empires governed diverse peoples.
• World History, Human Rights: the 1979 revolution and its effect on religious minorities, and the departure of most of Iran’s Jews as a documented case of a minority pressed to leave.
• Historical Thinking & Continuity: a 2,500-year continuous community and the remnant that stayed after 1979.
• Source Analysis & Archives Education: photographs, memoirs, and community records.
• Geography & Comparative History: Iran’s gradual departure set beside Iraq’s near-total airlift, and the distinctness of Persian (not Arab) Jewry.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Global History & Geography: 9.3 (the classical world, the Persian Empire and Cyrus) and 10.10 (human rights, the post-1979 departure).
• Common Core ELA-Literacy: RH.11–12.7 (integrating multiple sources): photographs, memoirs, and community records.
• C3 Framework: Dimension 2 (continuity and change, comparing communities: Iran’s gradual departure versus Iraq’s airlift).

Further Teaching Resources

• Farideh Goldin, Leaving Iran: Between Migration and Exile (Athabasca University Press): an open-access memoir of the Iranian-Jewish departure.
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, the scholarly reference on Iranian history and culture, extensive entries on the Jews of Iran across the centuries.
• JIMENA, Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa: recorded oral histories of Jews who grew up across the region, Tehran among them, describing family life, faith, and the journey out. JIMENA oral histories →