Yazd is a desert city in central Iran whose inhabitants, in addition to the Shīʿī Muslim majority, include Jews, Zoroastrians, and Bahā'īs. The number of Jews in Yazd has diminished over time. Nineteenth-century travelers’ accounts estimated it at three thousand; it was two thousand in the early twentieth century, and seven hundred in a 1966 census of Jewish communities. In the mid-1970s, shortly before the 1979 revolution, the Jewish community had some fifty families, or about 250 individuals; there are still around ten families in Yazd. In addition there are Jews of Yazdī origin in Tehr…