One Jew’s memory of silent violence in Iran
Al-Hurra is a US-funded medium aimed at Arabic readers. This article by Randa Jebai acquaints them with the Iranian Jews of California who have escaped persecution but still feel a strong Iranian identity:
A street in Beverly Hills
On a quiet street stands a jewelry store with an unusual name: Unicorn. The name, its owner explains, is no accident. Farid Nasseri, an Iranian Jew who emigrated to the United States at age 16, says, “The unicorn is a symbol of purity, magic and strength,” before beginning to recount a story about wounds that remain open despite years of stability.
“I grew up in an Iranian city where religious fundamentalism was deeply rooted,” Nasseri says. “As a Jewish child, some secular Muslims welcomed me, but others rejected me simply because I was Jewish.”
Behind his calm voice lies a memory of silent violence. Migration was not a search for a better life, but an escape from psychological pressure and daily persecution that followed his identity through the streets of Tehran.
After the Islamic Revolution in the late 1970s, everything changed. “They knew I was Jewish. I was harassed and beaten from a young age. I remember a winter day when they tore off the head covering my mother had made for me and beat me until I hit the wall. In that moment, I decided to leave,” Nasseri recalls.
The decision was not easy: family, home, memory. But freedom, he says, was worth more than all of it.
Iran’s Jews are not newcomers to the land. They are among the oldest Jewish communities in the world. Lawrence Sternfeld (previously known as Lior – ed), a historian specializing in Persian Jewish history, said in an interview with Alhurrathat their roots date back some 2,700 years, to the Babylonian exile. Their presence initially concentrated in Isfahan, before spreading to other regions.
Their relationship with Zoroastrian society was uneven, but it improved after the Islamic conquest, when Jews were granted the status of a “protected religious minority.” Over time, however, the Jewish experience was not uniform across Iran; conditions varied by region and era. Even so, Jews emerged as custodians of Iranian arts, language and music.
They are, Sternfeld notes, the only officially recognized religious minority that does not belong to a non-Persian ethnic group. Yet the adoption of Shiite Islam as the state religion imposed legal and social restrictions that diminished the status of Jews and other minorities.
Before the 1979 revolution, Iran’s Jewish population numbered about 100,000. After the revolution, it fell to roughly 23,000, more than half of whom live in Tehran, about 10 percent in Isfahan, and the rest in cities such as Shiraz and Hamadan. Despite the decline, the community continues to maintain schools, restaurants, and religious and social institutions—making Iran, paradoxically, the largest Jewish population in the Middle East after Israel.
Life after the revolution, however, changed fundamentally. According to Sternfeld, Jews were barred from senior positions in government and the military and faced restrictions in education, inheritance, and the management of private schools. They were also forced to draw a sharp line between their religious identity and Israel, amid official anti-Zionist rhetoric that directly affected their daily lives.
When I began researching the lives of Iranian Jews in Beverly Hills, I found that novelist Gina Nahai is nearly the only literary voice to have documented this experience (Many Persian Jewish women writers exist -ed). She herself fled Iran with her family because of their Jewish faith. I met Nahai in the heart of Beverly Hills, in a home that reflects both her identity and her comfortable standard of living. She explained what compelled her to write her novels: “I wanted to record the story of Iranian Jews in the United States, especially in Los Angeles. Forty years have passed, and what happened during that time is what truly shaped our identity.”
Nahai added, “Our children who were born here and have never seen Iran still feel a strong Iranian identity. They listen to old Persian songs, speak Persian, respect the culture and enjoy the food. What we feared losing after the revolution remained—and even grew stronger.”
The decision to emigrate was not planned. “We left our home in Tehran with our bedrooms and clothes still there. We thought we would return every summer. But we lost everything: our businesses and our house were confiscated,” she said.
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