History of the Jews in Iran

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The history of the Jews in Iran dates back to late biblical times (mid-1st millennium BCE). The biblical books of Chronicles, Isaiah, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, contain references to the life and experiences of Jews in Persia. In the book of Ezra, the Persian kings are credited with permitting and enabling the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their Temple; its reconstruction was carried out "according to the decree of Cyrus, and Darius, and Artaxerxes king of Persia" (Ezra 6:14). This great event in Jewish history took place in the late 6th century BCE, by which time there was a well-established and influential Jewish community in Persia.

Persian Jews have lived in the territories of today's Iran for over 2,700 years, since the first Jewish diaspora when the Assyrian king Shalmaneser V conquered the (Northern) Kingdom of Israel (722 BCE) and took some of the Israelites into captivity at Khuzestan. In 586 BCE, the Neo-Babylonian Empire expelled large populations of Jews from Judea to the Babylonian captivity.

Jews who migrated to ancient Persia mostly lived in their own communities. The Persian Jewish communities include the ancient (and until the mid-20th century still-extant) communities not only of Iran, but also the Armenian, Georgian, Iraqi, Bukharan, and the Mountain Jewish communities.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

Some of the communities were isolated from other Jewish communities, to the extent that their classification as "Persian Jews" is a matter of linguistic or geographical convenience rather than actual historical relationship with one another.

Jews trace their heritage in Iran to the Babylonian captivity of the 6th century BCE and have retained their ethnic, linguistic, and religious identity.^[6] However, a Library of Congress country study on Iran states that "Over the centuries the Jews of Iran became physically, culturally, and linguistically indistinguishable from the non-Jewish population. The overwhelming majority of Jews speak Persian as their mother language, and a tiny minority, Kurdish."^[7] In 2012, Iran's official census reported 8,756 Jewish citizens, a decline from 25,000 in 2009.^[8]