The Jews of Persia

In the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, not all the Jews returned to Palestine. Some stayed in Babylon and their descendants still live in Iran. (A friend of mine has a grandmother who is an Iranian Jew. He has family both in Israel and Iran and has two passports so that he can visit each country!)

For five centuries after the return of Jews to Jerusalem, there was some commerce and communication between the Jews of Palestine and the small remnant in Persia. After the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, some Jews immigrated back to the Persian Empire.  For 1500 years after the exile, there were Talmudic academies in Babylon; after the destruction of Jerusalem, those academies created the Babylonian Talmud.

In the mid 7th Century, Islam invaded Persia. For the next twelve centuries, the population of Persian Jews varied depending on their treatment as a religious minority. (See this Wikipedia page for an article on Persian Jews.) It was probably not much more than ten to twenty thousand. During World War II, Jews emigrated from eastern Europe to Iran and the Jewish population in Iran reached approximately 150,000 by the creation of the nation of Israel in 1948.  After the creation of Israel, Jews emigrated from Iran to Israel and by 1979, the Jewish population in Iran had dropped to 100,000. The Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 led to ten of thousands of Jews fleeing the persecution that followed, emigrating to either Israel or the US.  Current estimates of Iranian Jews puts the population under 10,000.