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Soleyman (Sulaymān/Shelomo) Kohan Ṣedq (1886–1946) was a modernist leader of the Jewish community in Iran. His family moved to Tehran from Gulpāygān. Kohan Ṣedq became an officer in the gendarmerie and served as its treasurer. He was one of the first Zionist activists in Iran.After the Balfour Declaration (1917) the Anjuman-i Farhangī-yi Javānān-i Yahūdī (Pers. Cultural Association of Young Jews) was founded in Tehran. Under the leadership of Kohan Ṣedq it organized a committee called Anjuman-i Taqhviyat-i Zabān-i ʿIbrī (Pers. Association for Strengthening the Hebrew L…

The Anjuman-i Kalīmīān-i Tehrān (Pers. Jewish Association of Teheran) was a communal entity in Teheran that in cooperation with committees in other towns oversaw the interests and activities of Iranian Jewry. The AK developed in the 1940s out of the Va‘ad ha-Qehilla (Heb. Jewish Community Council), which was also known as the Ḥebra Israʾel, or Ḥebra.  It was headed by the Jewish representative in the Majlis (parliament). The other members were mostly powerful lobbyists whose fortunes gave them influence at the court and in the wealthier circles of t…

Menaḥem Shemu’el Halevi was born in 1884 in Hamadan. He was educated at the local religious maktab (Heb. ḥeder) and then at the traditional primary school of the Alliance Israélite Universelle when it opened in 1900. He was subsequently employed at the Alliance school for twelve years, first as a teacher, later as its vice-principal (1907) and principal (1910). His education and communal activism soon made him the Jewish community’s civil leader and representative to the municipality of Hamadan as well as its chief rabbi.Halevi fought zealously against assimilation and conversi…

Tzion ʿEzrī, born in 1892 in Isfahan, was one of the first graduates of the Alliance Israélite Universelle school founded in Isfahan in 1901. He completed his studies, which included the French language, in 1913, and in 1915 began working at the Isfahan branch of the Iranian Ministry of the Treasury, collecting taxes on alcoholic beverages and teaching French. Dismissed from the ministry after four years, he served in a secretarial and bookkeeping capacity in the Sixth Gendarmerie Regiment until 1921.ʿEzrī visited Palestine at the beginning of 1925. After his return to Isfa…

Soleiman Haïm, born in the Jewish quarter of Tehran in 1886, was an Iranian Jewish scholar, lexicographer, playwright, and the editor of a series of bilingual dictionaries that earned him  the nickname ustād-i kalām (Pers. master of words). He died in Tehran in 1970.Haïm grew up in stark economic conditions. His early education was in a traditional Jewish elementary school (Pers. maktabkhāneh) . In 1906 he entered the American College of Tehran (a secondary school run by Presbyterian missionaries), and he began teaching English there in 1915.  He was brie…

Ḥanina Mizraḥi was born in Tehran in 1886. His father was Rabbi Ḥayyim Eleazar Mizraḥi, the spiritual leader of the Jewish community of Tehran. The family emigrated to Palestine in 1895, and there Ḥanina Mizraḥi attended the Lemel school in Jerusalem, the Mizraḥi seminary for teachers, and Yeshiva Tiferet Yerushalayim.A teacher, educator, and public figure,  Mizraḥi wrote the first works about the folklore and customs of the Jews of Iran. His books are  Ba-Yeshishim Ḥokhma: Arba'im S ippure ʿA m mi-pi Yehude Iran-Paras (Wisdom Is Among the Elderly: Forty Folktales from the J…

Hatef (Hātif; Pers. The Crier), a Jewish women’s organization in Iran, was active in the 1960s and 1970s. It was led by Dr. Azīza Barāl and functioned in cooperation with Sāzmān-i Bānovān-i Yahudī-yi Irānī (Pers. The Jewish Women’s Organization of Iran). Hatef concentrated its efforts on women in Tehran’s Jewish neighborhood and engaged in social, family, cultural, health, and economic activities. It had branch offices in other cities, among them Isfahan, Shiraz, and Ārak. The organization taught women to read and write as w…

Mullāh Ḥayyim Eleazar Mizra ḥi, son of Rabbi Ḥanina, was born in 1858 in Tehran. In addition to his attending the maktab (traditional Jewish primary school), he studied Torah with his father and with a shadar (rabbinical emissary from Palestine) hired by his father. At the age of fifteen he acquired the honorific title of mullāh because of his extensive knowledge and fascinating sermons. Mullāh Ḥayyim Eleazar worked in the pearl trade and also received financial help from his father. He became an important religious leader and scholar, and led a campaign against the Bahā'īs, publicly …

Qānūn-i Khayr-khwāh (Pers. The Goodwill Center) is a Jewish charitable organization that helps build hospitals, medical clinics, and orphanages throughout Iran.In the early 1940s the Qānūn-i Javānān-i Īsrā'īl-i Irān (Pers. Center for Young Jews of Iran) was established by doctors and young Iranian Jews to aid the needy, raise living standards, and improve sanitary conditions in the Jewish quarter (Pers. maḥalla) of Tehran. Many of its members were at first greatly influenced by the leftist ideologies of their time but became devoted Zionists in later years.During World War II, u…

In premodern Iran, the   kadkhudā (Pers. master of the household; later, mayor or alderman) was the administrative head of a Jewish community. He had the same  standing as the community’s religious leaders. While they handled internal religious matters, the kadkhudā managed internal communal affairs as well as relations with persons outside the community, and especially government officials. He was the Iranian equivalent of the public administrative figure that in other Jewish communities of the Islamic world was known variously as nasi, nagid, shaykh, muqaddam , or qāʿid .Before t…

Yaʿqūb Dilmāniān (Yaghoub Dilmanian), a Jewish merchant from Mashhad, Iran, compiled a history of the forced conversion to Shīʿī Islam of the city's Jewish community who were known as the Jad īd-i Islām (lit. "the new ones of Islam"). He was born in Mashhad in 1902 and died in 1988. As a businessman he traveled frequently and spent many years outside Mashhad in places such as Bombay.When Dilmāniān turned thirty-two, he decided to gather the recollections of the Mashhadi community elders and write a history of the Allāhdād (Pers. God gave), the forced conversion of the Jews of Mash…

Yosef Kohan (1927–1981), an attorney, was the last Jewish representative in the Majlis, Iran’s parliament, before the Revolution of 1979. Born and raised in Tehran, he attended the Kūrosh School and the Alborz high school, and in 1950 graduated from TehranUniversity’s Law School. Kohan became a member ofAnjuman-i Kalīmīan (Pers. Jewish Association) and was appointed its vice president in the mid-1950s. He became the first Jewish member of Tehran’s Municipal Council. He championed Jewish women’s rights and supported the passage of the women’s inheritance law. In 1976…

Yedidya Shofet (1908–2005), a leading religious authority of Iranian Jewry, hailed from Kashan and was descended from twelve generations of rabbis there. His first teacher of Torah and Jewish religious subjects was his father, Rabbi David Shofet. Later, he studied in the maktab (Ar./Pers. Jewish religious school, equivalent to Heb. ḥeder; see Kuttāb) with Mullāh Matanya, Mullāh Yeḥezqel Nāmrudī, Ḥakham Rofeh, and Ḥakham Shemuel Yerushalmi, the latter two of whom were emissaries (Heb. shadarim) from Jerusalem. Following elementary school, he studied in Mullāh Yeḥezqel’s bet mi…

Iran’s first constitution was enacted in 1906 and a Majlis (parliament) was established. The constitution gave the Jewish, Armenian, and Zoroastrian religious minorities civil rights almost equal to those of Muslims.Each of the minority groups was given the right to elect a representative to the Majlis.Under the 1906 constitution, a Jew could only be elected to parliament as a representative of the Jewish community. They voted in elections to the Majlis as members of an ethnic group and not as individuals. There was, however, a slate of ca…

Popularly known as "Mister Haïm" or "Monsieur Haïm," Shemu'el Haim was a modernist communal leader of Iranian Jewry at the beginning of the twentieth century. He was also a journalist, a Zionist, and a member of the Majlis, the Iranian parliament. Shemu'el Haïm was born in Kirmanshah in 1891 and was educated in the school of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, where he acquired a thorough command of English and French.In 1914 Haïm entered the customs service in Kirmanshah. While working there he became a political consultant to the British embassy, but his connec…

Jāme-yi Rowshanfikrān-i Yahūd-i Irān (Pers. The Organization of Iranian Jewish Intellectuals), a body that deals with Iranian Jewish communal matters, was founded in March 1978 when the new generation of progressive Jewish Iranian intellectuals succeeded for the first time in supplanting the established Jewish communal organization, Anjumān-i Kalīmīān. The Anjumān was replaced by the radical and moderate young intellectuals. Due to internal tense conflicts, the new body wasn't able to function and a decision was made to set new elections. A…

The Kūrosh-i Kabīr (Pers. Cyrus the Great) Jewish youth club in Tehran was founded in 1953 by a group of activists that included Moshe Kermaniyān, Avraham Moreh, ʿAṭāllāh Amīryān, Mordekai Fīrūz Ṭāleʿ, Amīr Elīyasī Tarshīsh, and Manūchehr Omidvar. The club, which was funded by the Jewish Agency, was affiliated with Anjuman-i Kalīmīyān (Pers. [Teheran] Jewish Association). Its goal was to teach the Hebrew language and instill the spirit of the He-Halutz Zionist youth movement. Its program was directed mainly at young people who lived in the maḥalla, Tehran’s Jewish quarter.In 1963, f…

Dr. Iraj Lalehzari was an Iranian Jewish research scientist in chemistry and pharmacology. Born in 1930, he obtained a doctorate in pharmacology at the age of twenty-one from Tehran University and a second doctorate in organic chemistry in Paris in 1953, where he remained for post-doctoral studies. He returned to Iran in 1958 as professor of chemistry at the University of Tehran, becoming chairman of the department in 1970. In 1973, he was promoted to dean of the College of Pharmacology. In 1975…

Ḥakīm Yazghel, known as Ḥakīm Ḥaqnaẓͅar (Ar. True-sighted), was the court physician of the Qājār rulers Muḥammad Shāh (r. 1834–1848) and Nāṣir al-Dīn Shāh (r. 1848–1896). He had a close relationship with Nāṣir al-Dīn Shāh’s mother and with Jayrān, one of the shah’s wives. His grandfather, also a physician, came to Tehran from Khunsār in 1821. Haqnaẓͅar was the founder of the Ḥakīm synagogue in Tehran’s Jewish quarter.  He had three brothers who were also court physicians. One of them, Ḥakīm Mūsa (d. 1881), also served Muḥammad Shāh and Nāṣir al-Dīn Shāh. Haqnaẓͅar excelled …

The Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906 and the process of modernization it introduced provided the momentum that impelled educated young Jews in Tehran to work together to further their interests. Under the leadership of an older man, the intellectual Yequtiel Kāshānī, and his assistant, Ayyūb Loqmān Nehūrāy (1882–1952), an association of young people was organized on the eve of the Constitutional Revolution. Using as its name the familiar Hebrew/Aramaic term Ḥebra Qadisha (holy association or sacred society), the organization remained active until the bomb…