Iran and the Jewish people: An alliance before war

What It Covers

Throughline traces the 2,500-year relationship between Iran and the Jewish people, from Cyrus the Great's liberation of Jewish captives in Babylon through the 20th-century golden age of Iranian Jews, culminating in the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the execution of industrialist Habib Al Ghaniyan, which triggered mass Jewish emigration from Iran.

Key Questions Answered

• •Historical alliance origins: Cyrus the Great's 539 BCE conquest of Babylon produced what historians identify as the first declaration of human rights, explicitly permitting freedom of religion. This act liberated thousands of Jewish captives held for 50 years and established a Jewish diaspora model — either return to Israel or actively support that community from abroad — still recognizable today.
• •Iran-Israel shadow partnership: Between 1950 and 1979, Iran and Israel maintained public distance while privately cooperating on agriculture, joint weapons development, intelligence sharing, and trade. Iran became only the second Muslim country after Turkey to extend de facto diplomatic recognition to Israel, and thousands of Israelis lived in Tehran during the 1970s, with Iranian Jews serving as the primary bridge between the two nations.
• •Minority advancement through constitutional reform: Iran's 1905 constitutional revolution abolished the Islamic dhimmi system, which had legally barred Jewish Iranians from public baths, markets, and equal commerce for centuries. Understanding how legal reform — not gradual cultural change — enabled rapid minority economic mobility explains how figures like Habib Al Ghaniyan rose from a Tehran ghetto to founding Iran's first plastics factory and first high-rise within one generation.
• •Scapegoating as political strategy: When Iran experienced significant inflation in the late 1970s due to mismanaged economic growth, the Shah arrested prominent businessman Habib Al Ghaniyan on price-gouging charges rather than implementing economic solutions. Recognizing this pattern — authoritarian regimes deflecting economic failures onto visible minority business leaders — provides a framework for understanding how political instability accelerates persecution of minority communities.
• •Revolutionary rhetoric and coalition-building: Ayatollah Khomeini deliberately layered anti-imperialist, anti-American, and anti-Israel language onto his religious messaging to attract secular leftists and communists who would otherwise reject clerical rule. This rhetorical strategy, delivered via smuggled cassette tapes during his 1964–1979 exile, demonstrates how ideologically opposed groups can be unified through shared external enemies rather than shared internal values.