The execution of Ḥabib Elghanian and the exodus of Iranian Jewry

On 9 May 1979, by sentence of a revolutionary court, Ḥabib Elghanian (1930–1979) was executed—president of the Tehran Jewish Society and a major industrialist; among the charges, "friendship with the enemies of God" and spying for Israel. Some thirty thousand Jews left within months. In June 1980 Albert Danielpour was executed—a second wave. Those who identified as Jews had their passports confiscated; they left through Turkey and Pakistan, often with HIAS assistance. Between 1979 and 2006 more than eighty per cent of the remaining Iranian Jews left.

To understand the community's post-revolutionary position one detail is needed. In February 1979 Khomeini received a Jewish delegation and issued a fatwa distinguishing Jews from Zionists—the formal basis of the double condition in which the community has lived since: protected and hostage at once. Jews retain reserved representation in the Majlis. And Iran to this day holds the largest Jewish community in the Muslim Middle East outside Turkey.

The numbers, with their sources, because they diverge sharply. Around 1900—some fifty thousand. 1948—a hundred thousand per the Encyclopaedia Judaica against a hundred and fifty thousand in other accounts: the discrepancy must be flagged. 1956—65,232, by the first national census: the only firm anchor, and it makes the lower estimate for 1948 the likelier. Then: 1979—sixty to eighty thousand; the 1980s—fifty to sixty thousand; the 1990s—about twenty-five thousand; 2009—twenty to twenty-five thousand; the censuses of 2012 and 2016—8,756 and 9,826; 2021—about eight and a half thousand. The diaspora: about a hundred thousand in the Los Angeles area, plus Great Neck outside New York, Baltimore, Miami, Texas, and a large community in Israel.

What came before is worth naming too, so that the twentieth century does not look like a single line. Reza Shah (r. 1925–41) granted legal equality, abolished the Jewish quarter and distinctive dress, and opened the state schools and the professions—the greatest single improvement in the Iranian Jewish condition in a millennium, though his late-1930s alignment with Nazi Germany cuts against it. Mohammad Reza Shah (1941–79): rapid urbanisation and enrichment, especially in Tehran, and close, semi-covert Israeli-Iranian relations.

And last, what Jewish accounts almost entirely omit. Departure from Judaism in Iran was not only under duress: in the Qajar period more than five thousand Jews voluntarily joined the Bahaʾi faith—in Hamadan, Kashan, Arak, Shiraz and Tehran; in Hamadan, by the mid-1930s, about a quarter of the city's eight thousand. Mehrdad Amanat has shown they were moved by messianic expectation, by the promise of civic equality, and by the Bahaʾi abolition of najāsat—the ritual impurity of the non-Muslim out of which the daily humiliation of a Jew in Qajar Iran was made. The Alliance schools, which opened in Tehran only in 1898—thirty-three years after Baghdad—and the Bahaʾi movement were in effect two answers to the same question.