Iran Drops the Façade of Tolerance Toward Persian Jews

Tehran’s clerical regime claims it is hostile to Zionists, not Jews, but its renewed abuse of Persian Jews exposes that as a lie. The early years of the Islamic Republic were marked by systematic persecution of a Jewish community that has been resident in Iran for centuries. Later, the regime put on a more tolerant façade. That has winked out of existence in the aftermath of this summer’s humiliating defeat at the hands of Israel.

For years, the regime showcased the country’s small Jewish population as a propaganda tool to deflect accusations of antisemitism and to whitewash its attacks on Israelis and Jewish sites abroad.

The regime’s treatment of Iranian Jews was always a calculated balancing act, meant to appease its antisemitic base while trying to avoid greater international scrutiny. But after the Twelve Day War in June, and repeated failures to strike Jewish targets in Europe, Tehran has redirected its hostility toward its own Jewish citizens. In just its latest act of cruelty, the New York Times reported on November 6 that the Islamic Revolutionary Court has sentenced a 70-year-old Iranian-American Jew, who has been held in Tehran’s Evin Prison since July, to two years in prison for the crime of visiting Israel 13 years ago to attend his son’s bar mitzvah.

Without consequences or outside pressure to stop it, the regime could revert to the same violent persecution and executions of Persian Jews that marked the early years of the Islamic Revolution.

Before the regime took power in 1979, Iran’s Jewish community numbered as many as 120,000 people. The Islamist revolutionaries quickly executed prominent Jews after seizing power, and the purge drove most of the rest into exile, leaving fewer than 8,000 today. The persecution never stopped, and by 2000, 17 Jews had been executed on fabricated espionage charges.

The regime later sought to project tolerance. In 2003, the so-called “reformist” President Mohammad Khatami visited Tehran’s Yousef Abad Synagogue. That year, the Expediency Council amended Article 297 of the 1991 Islamic Punishments Act to grant equal blood money — the compensation an offender’s family must pay to a victim’s family — to Muslims and non-Muslims, including Jews.

Since then, the regime has used the Jewish community as a diplomatic shield for its antisemitic policies. Iran’s Jews have been coerced into attending pro-regime rallies and forced to condemn Israeli strikes against the regime’s terrorist proxies and the Islamic Republic’s military and nuclear sites. State media amplified this propaganda to back its claim that the regime differentiates between Jews and Zionists.

At the same time, the regime’s antisemitic messaging continued unabated, with state outlets promoting Holocaust denial and quoting Adolf Hitler’s thoughts on Jews. At Friday prayer, imams appointed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei have repeatedly called for the annihilation of the Jewish people and labeled Jews “enemies of Islam” and “enemies of humanity.”

Despite these campaigns, ordinary Iranians reject the regime’s antisemitic and anti-Israel stance. In 2018, protesters chanted anti-Palestinian slogans such as “Death to Palestine,” a sentiment echoed after October 7 when soccer fans in Tehran repeated similar chants. Students pressured to say “Death to Israel” reversed it to “Death to Palestine,” and Tehran University students refused to walk over Israeli flags. Polls by Ipsos (2022) and GAMAAN (2025) show that most Iranians support better relations with Israel and oppose the Islamic Republic’s “Death to Israel” slogan.

Although sporadic persecution of Jews persisted, such as when authorities executed a Jewish-Iranian man convicted of murder despite evidence that he had acted in self-defense under laws biased against him, a systematic crackdown on Persian Jews had not occurred since before 2000. That changed in June as Israel overwhelmed the Islamic Republic’s air defenses, damaged its nuclear infrastructure, and killed senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders without losing a single fighter jet. It was a major humiliation.

The regime’s frustration had been building for years before the Twelve Day War as Israel repeatedly foiled Tehran’s plots to attack Jewish targets in Germany, France, Sweden, Cyprus, and elsewhere. Khamenei even increased funding for anti-Israel operations, but to no avail.

Unable to retaliate abroad, security forces arrested more than 30 Jewish community members on false espionage charges and summoned or interrogated several rabbis and cantors in Tehran and Shiraz shortly after the war. Security agencies coerced the Jewish Association of Iran into sending threatening messages to members warning that any contact with people abroad was “forbidden” and that they would be held responsible for online activity related to the Twelve Day War. Another message ordered them to attend a rally “in support of Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Revolution, and the armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

The crackdown on Iran’s Jewish community is not over and should serve as a warning to Western governments and Jewish organizations. The regime’s antisemitism is not rhetorical but operational, embedded in its security institutions. The Islamic Republic’s return to the tactics of its early years, fusing plots against Jews abroad with renewed persecution at home, should prompt new sanctions and international monitoring. Iran’s Jewish community should not be left to face this campaign in silence.

Janatan Sayeh is the Iran research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies focused on Iranian domestic affairs and the Islamic Republic’s regional malign influence. Born and raised in Tehran’s Jewish community, he studied Hebrew and Arabic at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and received his B.A. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.