The Jewish Community in Contemporary Iran: A New Analytic Approach

Abstract

This paper takes a broad and novel approach to analysing the Iranian Jewish community of Iran, both as a distinct group and as a constituent part of Iran’s wider population sharing its national culture. The goal was to find a new way of addressing the topic, avoiding many ambiguities, and bringing all discourse back to its starting point: Iranian identity. If we identify Persian roots as the focus and the heart of our investigation, and we establish that a cultural study of the Iranian Jewscannot be separated from Iranian identity itself, we not only shift attention to a common denominator that links a variety of topics, but raise new questions, new issues, and new considerations. The aim was to identify an analytical tool through which we could interpret and relate various outlooks on Iranian identity: the analysis led us to consider religion as the source of a common sense of belonging, in contrast to most scholars whose work is predicated on the dichotomy of “secularism vs religion.” Instead, the Iranian identity discourse that emerges from this paper finds connections and affinities across the common dividing lines represented by religion, ethnicity, and geography. Reinforcing an Iranian discourse through the Jewish experience can constitute a valid response to the deep crisis of the Iranian national question and the enhancement of national, economic, and religious alliances. This paper employs a qualitative approach to the framework ofnational identity, based on the idea of its progressive character and related to the concept of identity as socially constructed. The theoretical assumptions expressed throughout this paper have found their empirical explanation in fieldwork that the author conducted in Iran in 2019.