The Jews of Iran

Why this Topic exists

The community that the Bible and the textbook both skip past.

Iran, the country once known to the West as Persia, holds one of the longest continuous Jewish histories anywhere on earth. It begins in the sixth century BCE and runs, unbroken, to the present day. Persian kings appear by name in the Hebrew Bible; a Jewish queen of Persia is the central figure of an entire biblical book. And yet, in most school histories, the Jews of Iran barely register, a footnote between ancient Israel and modern Europe.

This Topic restores the thread. It follows a community that was present at the very beginning of the Jewish diaspora. That community 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. Unlike the Jews of Iraq or the Jews of North Africa, whose communities almost entirely disappeared, Iran's is one of the few ancient communities of the region that still exists, even now.

How to read this Topic

Three points to set straight first.

A presence at the beginning

The community is as old as the diaspora itself.

The Jewish story in Persia begins with a catastrophe that happened next door. In 586 BCE the Babylonian Empire destroyed Jerusalem and deported much of the Jewish population to Babylonia, the land that is now Iraq. When the Persian Empire conquered Babylon about fifty years later, those exiled communities came under Persian rule. Jewish life then spread across the vast Persian realm, which at its height stretched from Egypt to India.

So the Jewish presence in the Persian world is not a later arrival; it reaches back to the founding moment of the whole diaspora, more than 2,500 years ago. From that point on, 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.

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 539 BCE, after conquering Babylon, Cyrus issued a decree allowing the exiled Jewish community to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their Temple. For a people who had been forcibly deported, this was an extraordinary reversal: a foreign emperor not only permitting their return but supporting it.

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. (As with all such material, this Topic treats the biblical account as a historical document. It records how the community understood its own story; it is not used here as religious proof.) 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 everywhere today. Whatever the precise history behind these texts, they show how deeply the Jewish and Persian stories were intertwined from the very start.

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.

Life was not uniformly easy. Under the various Islamic dynasties that ruled Iran, Jews lived as a religious minority with the second-class status common across the region (described in the Diaspora Topic). There were periods of real hardship: forced conversions, restrictions, and at times persecution, particularly under some of the more rigid dynasties. The community at Mashhad, in northeastern Iran, was forced to convert outwardly to Islam in 1839 while secretly keeping Jewish practice for generations, one of the most striking cases of hidden Jewish life anywhere. Yet through all of it, the community endured, kept its traditions, and remained unmistakably itself.

The Jewish languages of Iran

A family of languages all their own.

Like every old diaspora community, 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.

Judeo-Persian has one of the oldest written records of any Jewish diaspora language: documents survive from more than a thousand years ago, making it a precious source for historians of both Jewish and Persian culture. Alongside everyday speech, Iranian Jews produced religious poetry, translations of the Bible, and literature in these languages, a written tradition that tied them to the wider Jewish world while keeping them rooted in Persian soil.

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. The girls are dressed in the fashion of the 1970s: flared trousers, patterned blouses, long straight hair. They could be a graduating class almost anywhere in the world that decade.

What it is. It's a school photograph, a twelfth-grade class at a Jewish school in Iran, taken in the 1970s. The students are young women on the edge of adulthood, posed with the man who taught them. An ordinary record of an ordinary school year.

When and where. The 1970s placed this class at a very particular hinge of history. These girls were growing up in the final years of the Iran most of their families had always known, a community more than 2,500 years old, by then mostly urban, modern, and integrated into Iranian life. Within a few years of this photo, the 1979 revolution would transform their country, and most of the Jewish community would leave.

Why it matters. Look at how modern and unremarkable the scene is: the clothes, the easy poses, the ordinary classroom moment. This is the community at the height of its modern life, in the years just before the great change. The photograph captures something a date in a textbook cannot. The people who lived through these turning points were not figures in a history lesson. They were teenagers in school photos, with futures they assumed would unfold in the only country their families had ever known. Most of these girls would build their adult lives somewhere else entirely.

Look closer. Notice that this is a class of girls, educated through the twelfth grade, a sign of a community that valued schooling for its daughters and had moved firmly into the modern world. The man at the center, formal in his suit and hat, belongs to an older generation; the students around him to a new one that would scatter across the globe.

Afterlife. This photograph, like many images of Iranian Jewish life, survived because families carried it with them when they left, and because community members later gathered and shared such pictures to preserve a record of a world that was changing. The school these girls attended, the city they lived in, the community that built it; much of that dispersed after 1979, to Israel, to the United States (especially Los Angeles and New York), and to Europe. The photograph is a small piece of a community keeping its own memory.

The modern community

A confident community, by the mid-twentieth century.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the Jews of Iran numbered roughly 100,000 to 150,000 people. Under the rule of the Pahlavi shahs (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.

The two photographs in this Topic capture the span of that modern life: a grand school gathering in the early twentieth century, and a class of schoolgirls in the 1970s. Between them lies the story of a community that had moved fully into the modern world while keeping a Jewish life that reached back more than two thousand years.

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: the new political climate, the execution of a prominent Jewish community leader early in the revolution, the war that soon followed with Iraq, and a general atmosphere of insecurity.

Over the following years, the great majority of the community, well over 100,000 people across the broader period, emigrated, primarily to the United States, Israel, and Europe. Los Angeles became home to one of the largest Iranian-Jewish communities in the world; 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.

Here is what sets Iran apart from nearly every other ancient Jewish community of the Middle East: it did not entirely 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 the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside Israel.

It is a community living in a complicated position. Its country's government is openly hostile to the State of Israel, yet it formally recognizes its Jewish citizens and reserves them a seat in its parliament. However one reads that situation, the simple fact is remarkable. After more than 2,500 years, through empires, conquests, conversions, and a revolution that scattered most of its members across the globe, a Jewish community still lives on the Iranian plateau. It is an unbroken thread reaching back to the very beginning of the diaspora.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Topic fits.

Teaching Connections

The disciplines and courses this Topic naturally supports, for any educator, anywhere.

• 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; the departure as a documented case of population displacement.
• Historical Thinking & Continuity: a 2,500-year continuous community and the survival of a remnant after 1979: a study in endurance.
• Source Analysis & Archives Education: photographs, memoirs, and community records.
• Geography & Comparative History: Iran’s gradual departure set beside Iraq’s near-total airlift; 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.