Ḥabib Elghanian חַבִּיב אֶלְקַנְיָאן

President of the Tehran Jewish Society, a major industrialist, a man whose name was widely known in Iran. On 9 May 1979 he was executed by sentence of a revolutionary court—the charges included "friendship with the enemies of God" and spying for Israel.

This is the event that triggered the mass flight: some thirty thousand Jews left Iran within months. In June 1980 Albert Danielpour was executed—a second wave. Those who identified themselves 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.

The community's post-revolutionary position is arranged in a particular way, and it deserves precise description. 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 figures are better given with their sources, because they diverge sharply. Around 1900, some fifty thousand. 1948—a hundred thousand per the Encyclopaedia Judaica and the Jewish Virtual Library against a hundred and fifty thousand per Wikipedia: 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.

And one more thing that Jewish accounts almost always 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. Mehrdad Amanat has shown they were moved by messianic expectation 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—and by the promise of civic equality. The Alliance schools and the Bahaʾi movement were in effect two different answers to the same question.