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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2014
A few years ago, while conducting archival research on Pahlavi-era Iranian newspapers, I came across a photo from the anti-shah demonstrations that took place in late 1978 and early 1979. It showed a large group of Armenians protesting against the shah. In these years many Iranians and Westerners considered the shah's policies beneficial for religious minorities in Iran. Around the same time, I found a sentence that made this discovery more intriguing. In his seminal work Iran between Two Revolutions, Ervand Abrahamian mentions that throughout the Muhammad Riza Pahlavi era, the opposition to the communist Tudeh party accused it of being controlled by “Armenians, Jews, and Caucasian émigrés.” I tried to find references in the current scholarship to Jews participating in the party, which could have earned them their part in this propaganda campaign, but found very little. Having read the important works of Joel Beinin, Orit Bashkin, and Rami Ginat on Jewish revolutionaries, including communists, in the Middle East, I wondered where the Jewish radicals in Iran were. Several factors may contribute to this silence in the historiography: the writing of Iranian history from a Zionist vantage point, a lack of interest in the history of the Iranian left in the postrevolutionary historiography, and an inability to conceptualize the transregional and global nature of the Iranian Jewish community.
Author's note: I am grateful to Orit Bashkin for reading this essay and commenting on it.
1 Abrahamian, Ervand, Iran between Two Revolutions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 452Google Scholar.
2 Beinin, Joel, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Bashkin, Orit, New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Ginat, Rami, A History of Egyptian Communism: Jews and Their Compatriots in Quest of Revolution (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2011)Google Scholar.
3 Tsadik, Daniel, Between Foreigners and Shiʿis: Nineteenth-Century Iran and Its Jewish Minority (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 This book was originally published in Persian as a three-volume comprehensive history of the Jews of Iran, and was translated into English in 1999. Levi, Habib, Comprehensive History of the Jews of Iran: The Outset of the Diaspora (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Publishers, 1999)Google Scholar; idem, Tarikh-i Yahud-i Iran (Tehran: Barukhim, 1956).
5 Ram, Haggai, Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.
6 Ibid.
7 Tsadik, Between Foreigners and Shiʿis; Yeroushalmi, David, The Jews of Iran in the Nineteenth Century: Aspects of History, Community, and Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2009)Google Scholar; Amanat, Mehrdad, Jewish Identities in Iran: Resistance and Conversion to Islam and the Baha'i Faith (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011)Google Scholar.
8 See, for example, Maziar Behrooz's important and illuminating book on the Tudeh party, which nevertheless pays little attention to the ethnic and religious elements of the party. Behrooz, Maziar, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999)Google Scholar.
9 Lior Sternfeld, “Reclaiming Their Past: Writing Jewish History in Iran during the Pahlavi and Early Revolutionary Periods (1941–1989)” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, in progress); idem, “The Revolution's Forgotten Sons and Daughters: The Jewish Community in Tehran during the 1979 Revolution,” Iranian Studies (forthcoming).
10 Interview with Habib, 24 June 2013, Los Angeles.
11 Menashri, David, “The Jews in Iran: Between the Shah and Khomeini,” in Anti-Semitism in Times of Crisis, ed. Gilman, Sander (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 360Google Scholar.
12 Netzer, Amnon, Yehude Iran be-Yamenu (Jerusalem: HUJI Press, 1981)Google Scholar; idem, “Yehude Iran, Yisraʾel ve-ha-Republikah ha-Islaʾmit shel Iran,” Gesher 26 (1980): 45–57; idem, “ha-Yehudim ba-Republikah ha-Islaʾmit shel Iran: Kronologiyah shel Keʾev u-Metsukah,” Gesher 611 (1987): 38–47; Menashri, “The Jews in Iran.”
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15 The last chapter is believed to have been written just before the author's death in 1969, and in any case after the 1967 war. Most Iranian leftists radically changed their view of Israel after this war, as in their eyes it turned Israel from a potential ally of the Third World into a colonialist power. See Ahmad, Jalal Al-e, The Israeli Republic, trans. Thrope, Samuel (New York: Restless Books, 2013)Google Scholar.