The Jews of Iran, who today number some 10,000, comprise the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside of Israel. With a history that dates back to the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE, and the subsequent exile to what is modern-day Iran, Iranian Jewish life is deeply embedded in the past and present of the country.
In Jewish Iran, author Daniel Amir, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Amherst College, focuses on the Jews of twentieth century Iran. He explores their story through a vast array of perspectives, from how they related their story to one another, and the way they interacted with the outside world. His work illuminates how the Jews of Iran adjusted to the shifting national and political movements during that time period, forging what Amir calls a “multifaceted identity” for themselves.
As national and political movements changed, Iranian Jews took on roles across the political and ideological spectrum, including as social democrats, monarchists, Zionists, communists, poets, and revolutionaries. Amir utilizes Iranian Jewish newspapers, periodicals, journals, and other literary works to further illustrate this specific time period in history, chronicling the “intellectual and creative dynamism of Iranian Jews’ determination to remain part of these distinct political environments.”
They succeeded in making “these ideologies malleable to suit their needs and vocabularies,” showing at the same time “the power of marginal and minority groups to query and expand the top-down visions of self laid out by states.” To this end, Amir also examines — albeit to a limited extent — publications of other minority groups, including Assyrians, Armenians, and Kurds, who were also seeking their place in the broader Iranian society.
Jews had to find ways to navigate Iranian society as it went through periods of modernization during the twentieth century; they often faced discrimination and limits to their self-expression. It was one thing to combine often contradictory ideas on the printed page, and quite another to attempt to embody them in real life. For example, the arrest, imprisonment, and eventual execution in 1931of the prominent activist, Shmu’el Hayyim, for treason, demonstrated that Jews would have to “learn to negotiate the limits of [their] self-expression,” as Amir puts it.
Jewish Iran is framed as an academic work rather than a popular history. Examining contemporary publications is a valuable way to frame the Jewish experience, and to understand how the community grappled with its Jewish identity, its Iranian identity, and its relationship to the Zionist movement and the subsequent State of Israel.
Amir brings the story into the twenty-first century, still looking to local writings (often online now) for insight into the community. Over the decades, Amir writes: Iranian Jews demonstrated a political and intellectual agility, fitting and combining ideologies to suit their purposes on multiple simultaneous planes. In their writings, we find a community that was not only globally engaged but part of international flows of ideas and history.
