Narratives of Being Jewish in Iran: A comparative study

Iran is currently home to the largest Jewish diaspora in the Middle East. However, the twentieth century saw the Jewish community in Iran massively diminished after a long history of co-existence. The variety of interactions between Jews and Muslims in Iran has been reduced to a history of conflict. This study is based on biographies of Jewish Iranians in Israel, Germany, Iran and the United States in order to provide a nuanced picture of their lives among Muslims before its witnesses are gone. The study will point out the ambiguous and fluid nature of interactions, as well as the contextual factors that allowed for constructive relations. The second focus of this project is on how religious and ethnic affiliations change in the course of migration. The comparison of the four major countries of residence of Iranian Jews will point out the influence of different national contexts on the communities and present the differences and similarities of a distinct yet very diverse group. The applied method is biographic research analysis on data collected through fieldwork (semistructured biographic interviews and participant observation) and from existing oral history archives. The purpose of the interviews is not to analyse how it really was but how the past is narrated and what these narrations tell us about the way individuals locate themselves in regard to the various communities of belonging. The interviews will result in a pioneering publication that offers empirical evidence from Iran, Israel, the United States and Germany. To date, Jewish-Muslim relations in Iran were studied on the basis of archival material primarily. In contrast, this study examines everyday life, providing new insights into the role of religion and community formation in Iran including practices of ritual impurity (nejasat), that are understood as the main sources of discrimination against Jews in Iran. Experiences of discrimination will not weigh less due to positive experiences. However, in a context in which differences between Muslims and Jews are all the more reinfoced, the focus on positive interactions constitutes a necesseray balance.

Who are Iranian Jews and what can we learn from their history? Today's Iran has an almost 3000-year-old history of Jews living in this region. Only from the mid-20th century, onward the majority of them started to emigrate, mainly to the United States and to Israel. As Jews who lived in, and were influenced by an Islamic culture, they are in a particular position: on the one hand, they are under pressure to position themselves and due to the political conflicts in the region cannot return to Iran. But their history also harbors potential: Jews and Muslims might not have lived in complete harmony together, yet historically speaking there was a lot of contact and mutual exchange in economic, religious and cultural aspects. Exploring these histories suggests that contemporary understandings of being "Jewish" or "Muslim" are not necessarily representative. Rather, these categories are internally highly diverse and susceptible to change. The project thus pursued a twofold approach: a historical one, through which we explored the everyday experiences of Jews in Iran and a contemporary one that shows how Iranian-Jewish communities evolved after leaving Iran. The combination of historical and anthropological approaches allows illuminating processes of memory formation: which aspects of Iranian-Jewish history were discarded and forgotten because they do not conform to modern ideas of "Being Jewish"? On the other hand, which aspects are particularly emphasized? Through a comparison of Iranian-Jewish communities in Iran, in Israel and the United States, this project showed how different national contexts, but also transnationally formative discourses about Jewish identity affect the memory formation and identification of these different communities. Finally yet importantly, the project thus also endeavored to preserve aspects of Jewish history in a contested region that due to political polarization is threatened to fall into oblivion.