Days of Darkness, Days of Light: The Unknown Story of Iran's Jews

[Ian David]

Days of Darkness, Days of Light: The Unknown Story of Iran's Jews

In a Reform Judaism magazine interview, Dr. Houman Sarshar reveals the little-known story of Iran's Jews from antiquity to the present.
The director of publications at the Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History, Dr. Houman Sarshar is the editor of three volumes of The History of Contemporary Iranian Jews and, most recently, Esther's Children: A Portrait of Iranian Jews; he is also a contributing author to the Encyclopaedia Iranica. He was interviewed by RJ editor Aron Hirt-Manheimer.

Historically, how have Jews fared in Iran?

Jews have lived on the Iranian plateau since about 720 B.C.E., approximately a thousand years before the arrival of Islam. In antiquity they participated freely in every sphere of society, from the army to the courts. But with the arrival of Islam in 650 C.E., all non-Muslims came to be deemed as second-class citizens and were compelled to wear clothes of specific colors. In 807 Caliph Harun al-Rashid issued a decree forcing Jews to affix yellow patches on their clothes. The plight of the Jews worsened in 1501 with the ascendancy of the Safavids, who made the Shi'ite creed the dominant form of Islam in Iran. The Shi'ite clergy then introduced the notion of religious impurity and applied it to all non-Shi'ites, even Sunnis. Jews were subjected to a wide range of humiliating and dehumanizing restrictions: they could not leave their houses on rainy days, build homes with walls taller than those of their Muslim neighbors, paint their houses white, buy property from Muslims or sell foodstuff to them. In public, to distinguish themselves from Muslims, Jewish men had to wear unusually large turbans and women had to attach bells to their chadors (veils). A Jew who touched food in a store was forced to buy it at whatever price the merchant demanded because it was now impure and no longer consumable by a Shi'ite Muslim. These policies--waxing and waning in their severity and implementation--would last for the most part until the beginning of the twentieth century, when in 1906 the Iranian Parliament opted a Constitution which stated (in Article 8) that Jews, Zoroastrians, and Christians could no longer be treated as second-class citizens. Consequently, the Jezieh or poll tax imposed on all non-Muslim citizens was appealed, as were a host of other discriminatory practices. Jews were now permitted to partake in military service, buy homes, and open shops outside the Jewish quarters. In short, it took nearly thirteen hundred years for the Jews to regain the freedoms they had in ancient times.

This process of reassimilation accelerated in the early 1940s with the ascendancy of the Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. His father, Reza Shah, an archnationalist and Nazi sympathizer during the Second World War, had been forced to abdicate the crown after the 1941 Allied summit in Tehran. Determined to forge a new relation with the West, the Shah quickly established diplomatic relations with the Allies and adopted their party line on virtually all foreign policy issues. On a personal level, he was also sympathetic to the Jews. As a ruler, he felt a close emotional bond with Cyrus the Great, who in 539 B.C.E. had allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem after the Babylonian expulsion and rebuild the Temple. Some twenty-five hundred years later, the Shah's Iran became one of the first Middle East nations to recognize the State of Israel.

The friendship between the Shah and Iranian Jews cemented in 1953, when the turmoil leading up to the CIA-backed coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mosaddeq forced the Shah and his family to flee the country. Learning that the Shah had taken refuge in a Rome hotel, a Jewish merchant, Morad Arieh, sent him a blank check drawn on a Swiss account along with a letter stating that his majesty could draw against the account at will and repay the loan when everything returned to normal. During the Shah's 25-year reign, key industries like banking, insurance, pharmaceuticals, textiles, plastics, paper, aluminum production, shipping, imports, tile manufacturing, and liquor distillery and distribution were either established and owned by Jews or financed and managed by them. The historian Habib Levy has termed these years the golden age of Iranian Jewry.

So these were the best of times for the Jews of Iran.

Yes, but that is not to say that there was no antisemitism; it just wasn't governmentally sanctioned. For example, one year after the Six-Day War, Israel's national soccer team competed against Iran for the 1968 Asian Nations' Cup at Tehran's 30,000-seat Amjadieh Stadium. False rumors were flying that the Jewish Iranian mogul Habib Elghanian had bought 15,000 tickets to the game and handed them out free to the Jewish community so the Iranian Jews would go and cheer the Israeli team. In the end, Iran beat Israel 2 to 1 with a final goal late in the game to the exuberance of an almost exclusively Muslim audience. Rumors were then started that the Shah had bribed the referee to save face, or alternatively that Israel had lost on purpose to help the Shah succeed where the Arabs had failed, that is in beating Israel.

Six years later, in 1974, all hell broke loose the day after the government issued a 200-rial banknote with a six-cornered star on the back and distributed one million to the banks. This occurred shortly after the oil embargo, when the Shah had broken ranks with the neighboring Arab countries and sold oil to America, and after the Shah's decision to join a number of Israeli oil companies in laying two pipelines, one from Eilat to a refinery in Haifa and another from Eilat to Ashkelon. Iranians were furious. Within three or four hours rumors were rampant that the new banknote had been counterfeit and printed in Israel to undermine the Iranian economy. By three p.m., the central bank recalled the remaining notes and burned them along with the undistributed ones.

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