As Israeli-Iranian tensions escalated in 2025, the Islamic Republic’s state media reprised a familiar sequence: broadcasting statements from representatives of Iran’s Jewish community condemning “Zionist aggression.” Amplified by official and para-state media — some of them closely aligned with the Revolutionary Guards — these declarations were not aimed solely at a domestic Iranian audience. They were addressed to the global Jewish diaspora, and in particular to Jews of Iranian origin dispersed between Los Angeles, Tel Aviv, and Paris.
This mechanism reveals one of the Iranian regime’s most productive contradictions. On one side stands a revolutionary theocracy that has inscribed the annihilation of Israel at the heart of its doctrine. On the other stands a state that maintains on its territory a legally recognized Jewish community, endowed with a constitutionally guaranteed parliamentary seat, functioning synagogues in the historic neighborhoods of Tehran and Isfahan, and a range of communal institutions. This contradiction is neither an inconsistency nor a historical accident: it constitutes a deliberate political apparatus. The presence of Iran’s Jews functions as a symbolic resource, a propaganda instrument, and a diasporic lever.
This controlled permissiveness serves several functions. First, it allows the regime to dissociate, at least in appearance, Judaism from Zionism: we respect Jews, we fight Zionists. The formula is all the more effective because it is embodied in tangible realities — open synagogues, a parliamentary seat, communal schools. It does not produce coherence, but plausibility. It also serves as a diasporic weapon. By compelling Iran’s Jewish representatives to publicly condemn Israel, the regime manufactures statements exploitable against global Jewish cohesion — particularly among those who still have family inside Iran. Finally, this Jewish presence offers Tehran a diplomatic showcase: it enables the regime to present itself as an orderly Islamic power, distinct from the most brutal forms of Sunni jihadism, while laying claim to the legacy of a supposedly tolerant Persian civilization.
The analytical interest of the Iranian case therefore lies less in the existence of a protected Jewish minority than in the political use of that protection. The tolerance extended to Iran’s Jews is not merely a constitutional residue or a historical survival. It has become a tool of identity engineering: a means of symbolically severing Jews from the State of Israel, then exploiting that separation against the diaspora itself.
To understand the specific vulnerability of this community to such instrumentalization, one must recall its historical depth. Iran’s Jews form one of the oldest Jewish diasporas in the world, their presence tracing back to the Babylonian exile and the Edict of Cyrus in 538 BCE. This antiquity sustains a singular collective psychology: that of a community which conceives of itself not as foreign, but as indigenous — rooted in Persian soil long before the Islamization of the country. Before 1979, Iran’s Jews numbered between 80,000 and 100,000, integrated at every level of Iranian society — the liberal professions, commerce, education, medicine, and certain banking activities. The case of Habib Levy — personal dentist to Reza Shah, military officer, historian of Iranian Jewry, and a figure of Iranian Zionism — illustrates the complexity of that era. It does not imply that the Pahlavi regime endorsed organized Zionism; Reza Shah was wary of politically organized movements with foreign ties. But it shows that an integrated Iranian Jewish identity, sometimes inflected by Zionist sympathies, could still occupy a recognized place within the state. The Islamic Revolution shattered this integration. Within months, tens of thousands of Jews left the country. Others departed progressively through the 1980s, fleeing the Iran-Iraq War, the confiscation of property, and an atmosphere of ideological hostility. Today, only a reduced, aging community remains — constrained to permanent public loyalty in order to preserve its collective survival.
The Islamic Republic’s calculus therefore reflects not an absence of repression, but a selective one. The 1979 Constitution recognizes Jews as a protected religious minority, on the same footing as Christians and Zoroastrians. But this protection remains conditional. Any Iranian Jew suspected of proximity to Israel — financial, familial, or symbolic — risks crossing into the category of enemy of the state. The execution of Habib Elghanian in 1979, the trial of thirteen Jews accused of espionage in 2000, and the interrogation of community members during the tensions of 2025, all illustrate this logic. The regime does not necessarily seek mass persecution; it favors exemplary terror. The diplomatic cost, moreover, forecloses any officially proclaimed persecution, as it would sever Iran from partners in countries where Jewish communities wield considerable influence. The cost-benefit calculus clearly favors maintaining the façade of tolerance.
The maneuver unfolds in three stages.
First stage: the staging of tolerance. By exhibiting a visible Jewish community — houses of worship, a parliamentary seat, communal schools — the regime counters accusations of antisemitism with material proof: look, Jews live here. The argument is formidable precisely because it is partially true. It forces the adversary to qualify where they would prefer to condemn outright.
Second stage: the declaratory constraint. Community leaders are regularly called upon to condemn Israel or to endorse the regime’s geopolitical positions. The diaspora and specialists of the Iranian world understand these statements as gestures of survival. Yet their propagandistic function remains intact: producing the image of an Iranian Jewish community that is separate from Israel — or even opposed to it.
Third stage: the exploitation of diasporic fractures. The Iranian Jewish diaspora is not a homogeneous bloc. Generations born in Los Angeles, Paris, or Tel Aviv have often defined themselves in rupture with the Islamic Republic. Older generations sometimes retain a nostalgia for pre-Islamic Iran, an attachment to the Persian language, to the memory of Cyrus, and to an idea of Iran distinct from the regime. Some may also harbor an instinctive wariness toward the Israeli government, inherited from an Iranian political culture that has historically prized autonomy vis-à-vis foreign powers. Tehran exploits precisely this tension: it seeks to pit Jewish Iranianness against Zionism, as if one must necessarily exclude the other.
It is here that the notion of mosaic identity becomes central. It designates the capacity of a minority group to maintain its cohesion by assembling sometimes contradictory affiliations. For Iran’s Jews who remained in the country after 1979, this mosaic rests on three loyalties: loyalty to Judaism, through religious practice, festivals, and Hebrew memory; loyalty to Iran, through attachment to the Persian language, literary culture, and national history; and finally, loyalty to immediate survival, which demands public conformity to the codes of the Islamic Republic. This strategy carries a considerable human cost. It imposes a permanent dissociation between what is said in public and what is thought in private. Iran’s Jews have learned to live within a protective duplicity — not out of moral cowardice, but out of collective necessity. It is precisely in this gap that the regime inserts its lever of manipulation: a community placed in a state of existential fragility can be transformed into a vector of political messaging, because it cannot always afford the luxury of refusal.
This logic recalls, all proportions considered, the treatment of Soviet Jews in the 1940s and 1950s: exhibiting a few Jewish figures loyal to the regime in order to deny accusations of state antisemitism, while sustaining a machinery of marginalization and repression. In both cases, the minority is not useful despite its vulnerability, but precisely because of it.
The distinction drawn by the regime between Judaism and Zionism reveals its full instrumental function here. Presented as evidence of nuance and religious tolerance — Jews are protected, only Zionists are fought — it renders a radical anti-Zionism compatible, in appearance, with respect for minorities. This distinction is not entirely fictitious: it exists in certain religious, political, and academic contexts. But the Islamic Republic transforms it into a mechanism of coercion. To benefit from constitutional protection, Iran’s Jews must publicly dissociate themselves from Zionism. Religious belonging thus becomes a political currency. This contemporary instrumentalization belongs to a longer history of ideological manipulation surrounding Iranianness, Judaism, and the legacy of Cyrus. Even certain Iranian movements of fascist inspiration, such as the SUMKA, claimed to distinguish their Iranian Aryan nationalism from European racial antisemitism, invoking the historical friendship between Persians and Jews since Cyrus. Yet this claim did not prevent these movements from being perceived by Iran’s Jews as antisemitic and threatening.
The theocratic regime is not the sole actor in this strategy. The Revolutionary Guards and their media networks have developed an information warfare capability that goes well beyond traditional religious propaganda. During military crises between Israel and Iran, statements by Iranian Jewish representatives are amplified; diasporic voices critical of Israel are elevated; the tensions between Mizrahi Jews of Iranian origin and Ashkenazi elites within Israel are actively exploited. A genuine sociological fault line is thus converted into propaganda material.
The figure of Abdol-Hossein Sardari illuminates this memorial battle. An Iranian diplomat in Paris during the Second World War, he contributed to protecting Jewish families threatened by Nazi persecution. For Tehran, his memory is fraught: he embodies a humanist Judeo-Persian tradition, antedating the Islamic Republic, which the regime can neither fully claim nor entirely erase. His selective appropriation reveals the memorial distortion at work. The Iranian authorities mobilize moments of Judeo-Persian friendship to validate their purported tolerance, while obscuring their deeper significance: a historical relationship grounded not in the political submission of Jews, but in their full belonging to Iranian civilization.
The Islamic Republic thus belongs to the family of authoritarian regimes that maintain certain minorities in a state of symbolic subjection — visible enough to serve as proof of tolerance, yet too controlled to speak freely. Its antisemitism is not primarily racial in the Nazi sense; it is functional, mobilized for internal ideological cohesion and external geopolitical projection. Yet Iran’s Jews embody what the regime cannot erase: the memory of a different Iran. The Iran of Cyrus, of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, of Sardari, of the Jewish merchants, physicians, teachers, and intellectuals who participated in Persian life across the centuries. Their existence is a reminder that Iran and Judaism are not natural enemies — that they coexisted, for nearly three millennia, in a relationship of mutual fecundity.
It is precisely for this reason that they are precious. And precisely for this reason that they are dangerous. By confining them to a constrained public loyalty, the regime attempts to control the narrative of a memory that surpasses it. Iran’s Jews thus remain the living witnesses of a possibility that the Islamic Republic most deeply dreads: that of a different Iran.
