History of the Jews in Iran

Based on Wikipedia: History of the Jews in Iran

Here is a number that might surprise you: Jews have lived continuously in what is now Iran for over 2,700 years. That makes the Persian Jewish community one of the oldest in the world outside of Israel itself. To put that in perspective, when the first Jews arrived in ancient Persia, Rome was still a collection of mud huts on the Tiber, and the Parthenon wouldn't be built for another two centuries.

This is not the story most people expect. The modern headlines paint Iran as an existential threat to Jewish life. But history tells a far more complicated tale—one of persecution and protection, of royal patronage and popular prejudice, of Jews who became so thoroughly Persian that, as one scholarly study puts it, they became "physically, culturally, and linguistically indistinguishable from the non-Jewish population."

The First Exiles

The story begins with catastrophe. In 722 BCE, the Assyrian king Shalmaneser the Fifth conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel and scattered its people across his empire. Some of these exiles—members of what would later be called the Ten Lost Tribes—were settled in the land of the Medes, in what is now northwestern Iran. The Book of Tobit, an ancient Jewish text, mentions Jews living in the Iranian cities of Rey and Hamedan during this period.

Then came a second, even larger displacement.

In 586 BCE, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar razed Jerusalem to the ground, destroyed Solomon's Temple—the holiest site in Judaism—and marched the Jewish population off to Babylon in chains. This was the Babylonian Captivity, one of the defining traumas of Jewish history.

But within fifty years, everything changed. The Persian king Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, and what happened next has echoed through Jewish memory for two and a half millennia.

Cyrus: The Anointed One

Cyrus did something unprecedented. He issued a decree allowing the Jews to return to their homeland and rebuild their Temple. The Hebrew Bible preserves what it claims are his exact words:

"The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah. Any of his people among you may go up to Jerusalem in Judah and build the temple of the Lord."

For this act, the prophet Isaiah called Cyrus "messiah"—the anointed one—making him the only non-Jew in the entire Hebrew Bible to receive that title.

Now, modern scholars debate how authentic this decree really was. Professor Lester Grabbe argues there was no formal edict, just a general Persian policy of allowing exiled peoples to return home. The archaeology suggests the return wasn't a dramatic exodus but rather a slow trickle over decades, with perhaps only 30,000 people eventually making the journey.

But the historical details matter less than the memory. For Jews, Cyrus became the model of the righteous gentile king—proof that even foreign rulers could be instruments of divine will. That memory would color Jewish-Persian relations for centuries to come.

The Temple Rebuilt

The Second Temple wasn't finished until 515 BCE, under the Persian king Darius the Great. It took over twenty years. The prophets Haggai and Zechariah kept pushing the project forward, and when it was finally consecrated, it stood as a monument to Persian benevolence as much as Jewish faith.

This Temple would stand for nearly six centuries, until the Romans destroyed it in 70 CE. Throughout that entire period, Persian Jews maintained connections with Jerusalem, traveling there for festivals and recognizing its religious authority.

But many Jews stayed in Persia. They had built lives there—businesses, communities, families. The empire was vast and relatively tolerant. Why leave?

Esther and the Shadow of Genocide

The Book of Esther tells a darker story. According to this biblical account, a Persian vizier named Haman convinced King Ahasuerus—probably Xerxes the First—to authorize the murder of every Jew in the empire. The plot was foiled by Queen Esther, herself secretly Jewish, and her cousin Mordechai. Haman and his ten sons were hanged, and the Jews were saved.

Whether this story is historical fact, historical fiction, or something in between, Jews still celebrate their deliverance every year during the festival of Purim. It's a raucous holiday, full of costumes and drinking and the reading of Esther's story. Children boo and shake noisemakers whenever Haman's name is mentioned.

The holiday commemorates survival. But it also remembers how close extinction came.

The Parthian Centuries

After Alexander the Great's conquests, Persia passed through Greek hands before the Parthian dynasty established a new empire around 247 BCE. The Parthians ruled for nearly five hundred years, and they proved remarkably tolerant of their Jewish subjects.

The Parthian system was loose and decentralized—a network of vassal kings rather than a rigid bureaucracy. This had its downsides. At one point, two Jewish brothers named Anilai and Asinai managed to carve out what amounted to a small bandit-state in the city of Nehardea. But the overall tolerance was genuine.

How genuine? Consider this: members of the royal family of Adiabene, a Parthian vassal state, actually converted to Judaism. The queen mother, Helena, became famous for her piety and generosity to Jerusalem.

The Parthians saw themselves as heirs to Cyrus. An old Jewish saying from this period captures the warmth: "When you see a Parthian charger chained to a tombstone in the Land of Israel, the hour of the Messiah will be near." The Parthians, in other words, were expected to play a role in Jewish redemption.

Babylon Becomes the Center

When the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Second Temple in 70 CE, the center of gravity in Jewish life began to shift eastward. Babylon—firmly within the Parthian sphere—became the new heart of the Jewish world.

The philosopher Philo, writing around this time, described the enormous Jewish population of Babylonia. Refugees fleeing Roman persecution swelled their numbers further. After the catastrophic Bar Kochba revolt of 135 CE, when the Romans crushed the last major Jewish uprising and banned Jews from Jerusalem entirely, Babylon's importance only grew.

The Parthian kings recognized this. They elevated the leaders of the Jewish community—the "Princes of the Exile," or Resh Galuta—from mere tax collectors to genuine nobility. These princes would govern Jewish internal affairs for centuries.

The Sassanid Revolution

In the winter of 226 CE, everything changed again. A Persian nobleman named Ardashir overthrew the last Parthian king and founded the Sassanid dynasty. The Sassanids would rule for over four centuries, and they brought a very different approach to religious diversity.

Where the Parthians had been relaxed, the Sassanids were zealous. They made Zoroastrianism—an ancient Persian monotheistic faith—the official state religion. A priestly inscription from the reign of King Bahram the Second, who ruled from 276 to 293 CE, boasts of having "smashed" Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and various other religions.

That was the theory. Practice was messier.

Royal Friends

King Shapur the First, the second Sassanid ruler, was genuinely friendly to Jews. He maintained a close relationship with a rabbi named Shmuel, and this friendship brought real benefits to the Jewish community.

Even more remarkably, rabbinic sources claim that Shapur the Second's mother was Jewish. Whether or not this is literally true, Shapur the Second also maintained warm relations with the rabbis. He was particularly close to a scholar named Raba, one of the most important figures in the Babylonian Talmud—that vast compendium of Jewish law and legend that was being compiled during exactly this period.

Raba's friendship with the king "enabled him to secure a relaxation of the oppressive laws enacted against the Jews." Sometimes personal relationships matter more than official policy.

The pattern repeated with King Yazdegerd the First, who married a Jewish woman named Shushandukht. She was the daughter of the Exilarch—the prince of the Jewish community—and she used her position to benefit her people. She funded the construction of Jewish neighborhoods in Shushtar, Susa, Hamedan, and Isfahan. Some historians even believe that the famous "Tomb of Esther and Mordechai" in Hamedan is actually her burial place.

Persecution and Survival

Still, Jews under Sassanid rule faced real dangers. They were required to pay special taxes. They faced periodic restrictions on religious practice. In the fifth century, the kings Yazdegerd the Second and Peroz launched genuine persecutions, executing religious leaders and pressuring the community.

Christians, being more scattered, often suffered worse. Jews tended to live in concentrated urban communities—Isfahan was practically a Jewish city—which offered some protection.

The situation grew particularly dire in the final decades of Sassanid rule. By the time Arab armies appeared on the horizon in the seventh century, many Persian Jews were ready for a change.

The Arab Conquest

When the armies of Islam swept into Persia in the 630s and 640s CE, some Jews actively welcomed them. A Jewish historian from Isfahan named Abu Naeem recorded that Jews rushed to open the city gates for the Arab invaders. They brought musical instruments to celebrate. Some believed the Messiah was coming.

The scholar Amnon Netzer argues this story demonstrates that Jews were actually the majority population of Isfahan at the time—otherwise, such a public display would have been suicidal in a Zoroastrian-majority city.

Under Islamic rule, Jews became "dhimmis"—protected but subordinate subjects. They could practice their religion but had to pay special taxes: the jizya, a head tax, and the kharaj, a land tax. They couldn't bear arms or ride horses. They couldn't testify against Muslims in court. They often had to wear distinctive clothing.

This was not equality. But it was survival. And for a community that had seen Jerusalem destroyed, that had fled Roman persecution, that had weathered Sassanid oppression, survival was no small thing.

The Long View

What makes the Persian Jewish story so remarkable is its sheer duration. Twenty-seven centuries of continuous presence. Empires rose and fell—Assyrian, Babylonian, Achaemenid, Seleucid, Parthian, Sassanid, Arab, Mongol, Safavid, Qajar, Pahlavi, Islamic Republic—and through all of it, Jews remained.

They adapted. They learned Persian, then Arabic, then Persian again. They adopted local customs while maintaining their religious identity. Over the centuries, as that Library of Congress study noted, they became virtually indistinguishable from their neighbors in appearance and language, even as they continued to pray in Hebrew and observe the Sabbath.

The relationship between Jews and Persia has never been simple. Cyrus freed them; Haman tried to destroy them. Shapur befriended them; Peroz persecuted them. The pattern continues into the present day, where Iran's government issues genocidal rhetoric against Israel while Iranian Jews continue to live, worship, and maintain the oldest Jewish community in the diaspora.

History rarely offers clean narratives. The story of the Jews in Iran is a story of remarkable survival in the face of both kindness and cruelty—often from the same empire, sometimes from the same king. It is a story that began when Assyrian soldiers marched Israelite captives eastward across the mountains, and it has not ended yet.