Why the Iranian Jewish Community is Not a Paradox
As the world marks the 40th anniversary of the 1979 Revolution, Iran is still considered an anomaly among the nations of the world, seen as a fanatic country that is paradoxically both “Islamic” and “Republic.” This oddity allows western observers to exclude Iran from the moral framework we apply to other countries and blatantly ignore complexities that may force us to change our view. The relationship between Iran, Israel, and the U.S. merits unpacking, especially after the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) made through the diplomatic efforts of the EU, the Obama Administration, and Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Despite the broad consensus of intelligence agencies worldwide (including American and Israeli) that Iran continues to abide by the parameters of the agreement, Israel has pushed for JCPOA’s revocation since day one, and Trump made it one of his campaign promises. Prime Minister Netanyahu has insinuated that Iran is inherently anti-Semitic, stating "Iran is committed to Israel's destruction” and has alleged that Iran is planning a genocide against Israel (a sentiment VP Pence reiterated just recently). Netanyahu makes these allegations of Iran’s antisemitism when advocating for annulling the agreement, and as we have recently seen in the U.S. antisemitism is an elastic concept. The U.S. followed suit to justify the withdrawal and imposition of new crippling sanctions on Iran.
Dehumanizing Iran with these disingenuous, broad-brushed generalizations is necessary when presenting it as an irrational and anti-Semitic state. This dehumanization allows the world to ignore both Iran’s commitment as a signatory to the agreement and the effects of the sanctions on the Iranian people, and while the Iranian regime has a lot to answer for, it is mostly for crimes against the Iranian people, not reckless international behavior. The same dehumanization contributes to the dismissal of the Iranian Jewish community and the reduction of their existence to merely a fig leaf for the Iranian government to insulate against accusations of anti-Semitism. Iran and Iranian Jews share a long and winding history, which cannot be simply reduced to whether Iran is or is not anti-Semitic.
Jewish existence in Iran goes back 2,700 years, but the twentieth century encapsulates a lot of the successes and failures, the hopes and the dreams, and the challenges of the Jewish community of Iran. When talking about Iran we have to view the population as a society of minorities, with a plurality of ethnicities religions, languages, and convictions—all of which lead to different interpretations of Iranian identity. Like other minorities, the Jewish communities of Iran worked throughout the 20th century to articulate their national identity, and their responses to many social and political trends shaped the notion of an “Iranian Identity.” Just like the rest of the society, the Jewish community of Iran is not homogeneous. Iranian Jews were Persian, Kurdish, Iraqi, and even Ashkenazi (German, Russian, and Polish). They built their communities in Iran and defined their identities as multi-layered. The plurality of identity resulted in Iraqi-Iranian-Jewish schools, synagogues, and clubs. Iranian Jews were not indifferent to trends in the Jewish world outside Iran and engaged in Zionist activism as they understood it. Like other Iranians they largely supported and joined the communist Tudeh Party, not because of ideological commitment to communism, but because the Tudeh was the major political force in Iran to combat fascism, racism, and anti-Semitism, and support national advancement and social justice. Participation in the Tudeh allowed the possibility of self-identification as a communist-Iranian nationalist-Zionist Jew.
In the course of the century Iranian Jews moved from the periphery to the center of society. The Iranian Jewish community, overwhelmingly, had become part of the educated urban upper middle class. Iranian Jews had a complicated relationship with the Shah, but there were those who supported the revolution and were active in the revolutionary movement because they considered it part of their national duty, something that cannot be fathomed if we consider just a one-dimensional binary definition of the relations between Jews and Iran. The community hoped that the revolution would allow a new Iran to emerge. They shared the sentiments and hopes of the other revolutionaries for a new Iranian democratic republic, in which the strength of the society would be manifested through its pluralism.
Despite moments of crisis after the revolution, like the May 1979 execution of Jewish community leader and prominent dignitary Habib Elqaniyan, the Jewish community still sought ways to improve their standing within the new Iranian order. Like other minorities they kept their reserved seat in the Majlis (the Iranian parliament) and used it to negotiate their place. When they felt that they needed to raise a voice against injustice in the Iranian sphere, they did it. The former representative Maurice Motamed famously criticized former President Ahmedinejad over his Holocaust denial. At the same time the leaders of the community fought for equal rights for Jews, such as excused dismissal from public schools on Shabbat, and to end legal discrimination against Jews in the courts in criminal and family cases. In December 2014 Iran unveiled a monument commemorating the Jewish fallen soldiers in the Iran-Iraq war, showing the public that Jews were and are part of the national story.
What, then, do we make of the story of the Jewish community in Iran today? Do we celebrate it as an achievement that it is the biggest Jewish community in the Middle East outside Israel, especially given the complete disappearance of the other Jewish communities in the Middle East? Or do we lament the fact that instead of 200,000 Jews that could have been there today, we are talking about a community of about 20,000 (the numbers are highly contested, and estimates run from 9,000-30,000)? I suggest reading the decline in the same manner that I suggest reading the ascend. The majority of Iranian Jews belonged to the upper middle classes and the migration out of Iran after the revolution was something that certainly had class attributes, i.e. many of the Iranian immigrants at the time were people from the upper middle classes.
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Just a couple of weeks ago the U.S., represented by VP Pence, and Israel, represented by PM Netanyahu, convened in Warsaw for an Anti-Iran international conference. Netanyahu argued in a now deleted tweet that “What is important about this meeting […] is that this is an open meeting with representatives of leading Arab countries, that are sitting down with Israel in order to advance the common interest of war with Iran.” Iran took offence at the meeting, both because of the aforementioned objective and because it took place in Poland. Javad Zarif and other Iranian politicians took to twitter to point out that during WWII Iran gave shelter to hundreds of thousands of Jewish Polish refugees.
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