Last month, as she took her usual morning walk on Santa Monica Beach, near her home in Los Angeles, Nazila received an unusual text message. It was ominously brief: “We’re okay. Don’t call! Don’t text!”
Since June 12, when Israel started bombing Iran, Nazila—an Iranian Jewish expatriate who asked me to withhold her last name for fear of regime retaliation against her relatives in Iran—had been anxious about the welfare of her family members. The text came from Nazila’s sister, who, along with her husband and children, is among the roughly 9,000 Jews who still live in Iran. After the escalation of hostilities with Israel, and the wave of arrests that Iran has conducted throughout the country, several dozen Jews were detained, according to human-rights agency sources. Authorities have interrogated them, scoured their social-media and messaging-app activity, and warned them to avoid contact with any Israeli citizen or relatives abroad.
Some of these Jewish Iranians have reportedly now been released—but some, also reportedly, remain in custody. My emphasis on reportedly is because a climate of fear inside the country makes full information difficult to obtain. Publicity is the last thing Iran’s Jews need: Their entire survival strategy has been to lead the most inconspicuous lives possible—and news of detentions is more attention than the community wants.
This persistent sense of threat has been a grinding reality for Iran’s Jewry since 1979, when a revolution led to the establishment of an authoritarian Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. That new regime’s anti-Western stance put it on a path to conflict with the United States and Israel, and created their long-standing suspicion that Iran’s nuclear program was not purely civilian, as Tehran claimed, but also involved clandestine efforts to develop weapons. That 46-year conflict came to a head this past June.
The fact that Israel and, subsequently, the U.S. have taken military action inside Iran, including—in Israel’s case—the targeted assassinations of regime scientists and military leaders, has raised the stakes in ways that make the position of Iranian Jews much more precarious than before the start of the war. The arrests of Jewish Iranians following the bombing raids seem to be part of the embattled rulers’ paranoia about spies and enemies within, given clear evidence of foreign-intelligence penetration at the highest levels.
The regime’s more rational elements may eventually prevail and reduce tensions. Right now, the rhetoric is menacing: The new revolutionary anthem, which originated from devotees of Iran’s supreme leader and was prominently featured on state television last week, calls for “uprooting” not Zionists or Israelis, but Jews.
Under Iran’s last monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the country’s Jewish community numbered as many as 100,000, with roots in Iran that predate the advent of Islam by more than a millennium. When popular protests swept the country in 1979, leading to the shah’s overthrow, some Jews fled before the mullahs consolidated power. The departures increased after a revolutionary tribunal ordered the execution of a prominent Jewish industrialist and philanthropist, Habib Elghanian, on charges that included espionage for Israel. By introducing the manufacture of plastic goods, Elghanian had transformed the country’s industrial capacity and paved the way for its economic modernization. That the Islamic Republic would kill such a man sent shockwaves through the Jewish community.
Although no law or official policy banned Jews from leaving Iran, the government was disinclined to issue them passports. Many Jews, my father included, were denied passports without explanation. So to escape, they resorted to hiring smugglers to help them cross on foot into Turkey or Pakistan. The uncertainty that permeated the Jewish community in the months after Elghanian’s execution held a sense of terror. No one knew whether he was an exception or his fate would be widely shared. They feared that the regime’s anti-Zionist posture was not reserved for solely the Jewish state and could mutate into a hostility toward Jews in general.
That anxiety was allayed by the informal accord between Khomeini and Iran’s Jewish leaders after a 1979 meeting in Qom, the religious city where he had resided before moving to Tehran. After much circumlocution, the ayatollah ended the meeting by saying, “We separate the affairs of our own Jews from those of the godless Zionists in Israel.” Within days of his statement, it had become a talisman painted on the walls of Jewish schools and synagogues. Khomeini’s distinction has guided Tehran’s position on the country’s Jewish community ever since—until now.
Furthermore, Iran’s new constitution recognized Jews as a “people of the book” and allowed them to practice their religion, which meant they could have synagogues, Hebrew schools, and social institutions. This ostensible status of protected minority did give the community a measure of safety in postrevolutionary Iran. This accounts for the fact that—unlike other Jewish communities in the Middle East and in North Africa, which were virtually eradicated after the establishment of Israel in 1948—several thousand Jews still call Iran home. But the quasi freedom of these protections did not mean that Jews could thrive socially and economically; they lead much diminished lives today than previous generations did in the heyday of prerevolutionary Iran, during the 1960s and ’70s. The Islamic Penal Code does not treat non-Muslims—or women, for that matter—as equal citizens before the law. And because the country’s official forms require applicants to state their religious affiliation, Jews and non-Shiite minorities, including Sunni Muslims, have been effectively excluded from careers in academia, the government, or the military. In other words, Iran has never had laws that discriminated specifically against Jews, but it does have laws that discriminate in favor of Shiite Iranians, especially regime supporters.
Jews have remained in Iran partly because the mullahs wanted them to. As the regime matured and grew more confident in its power, it recognized the political value of retaining a Jewish community. By the 2000s, with the rise of a new cadre of clerics into the ranks of leadership, the existence of Jewish Iranians inside the country became an important symbol, especially in contrast with the absence of Jewish life in other Muslim countries in the region. In 2003, the reform-minded Mohammad Khatami became the republic’s first president to visit a synagogue. This new revolutionary generation boasted of the Jewish presence in Iran as evidence of its Islamic tolerance. It liked to showcase Iran’s Jewry to Western governments, which is why the sole Jewish representative from the Iranian Parliament, the Majles, has on several occasions been included in Iran’s delegation to the annual United Nations General Assembly. Iran’s Jews became the regime’s principal defense against accusations of anti-Semitism—even as some leaders notoriously questioned the veracity of the Holocaust. After all, how could the republic be anti-Jewish if Jews felt safe enough to live there?
Jewish survival within the world’s most overtly anti-Zionist nation-state reveals how keenly aware Tehran is of what sways global public opinion. But it also says a great deal about how indiscriminate brutality toward dissidents and minorities creates a common bond among all those who are not regime supporters. If Jews suffer at the hands of unjust, authoritarian rulers, they also know that their experience is shared by many, many non-Jewish Iranians. This nuance is lost on most Western observers. Like with other paradoxes of post-1979 Iran—such as the existence of perhaps the world’s most dynamic feminist movement, in a country where gender inequality is ruthlessly policed state policy—Iran’s Jews are indeed second-class citizens, but of a regime that makes second-class citizenship the norm for all except its loyalists. The suffering that Jews experience is common to so many others that its universality has created a measure of equality in the face of misery.
This status quo was shaken by the deadly October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, which led to the war in Gaza and a wider confrontation between Israel and Iran’s regional ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah. Tehran’s customary anti-Zionist theatrics were swapped for actual drones and missiles fired at Israel the following April, in response to Israel’s attack on Iran’s consulate in Damascus; in turn, Israel retaliated by taking down Iran’s air-defense systems. Amid these heightened tensions, the grinding reality that had defined Jewish life in Iran for more than four decades took on a new, more menacing urgency. In an attempt to extend the old order by invoking Khomeini’s original formulation of Jewish–Iranian relations, Iran’s chief rabbi, Yehuda Gerami, issued a statement condemning Israel’s attack as “cruel, aggressive, and inhumane” and lamenting “the martyrdom of a number of our dear countrymen at the hands of the Zionist regime” (my own translation). He tried to dispel suspicions of Jewish disloyalty and proclaimed solidarity with fellow Iranians: “Iranian Jews, as a part of the great nation of Iran, condemn these attacks and stand by their countrymen.”
The events of the past month have cast a perilous shadow over Iran’s Jewry, reawakening the fear that had followed Habib Elghanian’s execution and an urgency about the need to leave Iran. The chances of doing so, however, have greatly diminished since January of this year, when President Donald Trump ended nearly all refugee admissions into the United States by executive order. Some 14,000 members of persecuted minorities in Iran—among them more than 700 Jews—had registered with HIAS, originally known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a major refugee-resettlement organization that has facilitated the passage of thousands of Jews and other minorities into the United States; none of these applicants for refugee status have been able to leave Iran. Mark Hetfield, HIAS’s president, hopes that the Trump administration might yet make an exception. “Given their increasing vulnerability, and President Trump’s expressed commitment to religious freedom,” he told me in a recent interview, “we pray that he would expand their escape route.”
The signs in Iran are ominous—and the pleas from Iranian Jewish elders may now go unheard. The community’s old talisman may no longer hold its charm. An overlooked victim of the 12-day military operation against Iran is Iranian civil society, especially its minorities, particularly Jewish Iranians, who were already at risk. Since the war, their conditions have infinitely worsened—a fact that should lead the Trump administration to reconsider its refugee ban. The United States took on a moral responsibility for Iran’s persecuted citizens when it became a combatant against their oppressive regime.
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