Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: Jews in Iran
Iran is home to the biggest population of Jews in the Middle East
outside Israel

by Damien McElroy

daily telegraph/uk
Published: 4:15PM BST 03 Oct 2009

Iran is home to the biggest population of Jews in the Middle East
outside Israel Photo: GETTY
Iran is home to the biggest population of Jews in the Middle East
outside Israel. While the community faces limited discrimination, it is
largely free to exercise the same rights as Muslims enjoy in the
Islamic republic.

Like the country’s Armenian, Assyrian and Zoroastrian minorities, it
has one reserved seat in parliament.

Jews trace their presence in Iran from the point that Cyrus the Great
liberated the people from slavery in Babylon in 593BC. There are about
25,000 left in Iran. Tehran has 20 active synagogues. But the Jewish
population has dwindled rapidly since an Islamic theocracy was
established. At the end of the Shah’s reign, there were an estimated
100,000 Jews. Esther, the legendary empress and wife of Ahasuerus, was
Jewish.

The community played a prominent role in commercial life and supplied
several prime ministers. Sensitive posts in the judiciary and military
are barred from Jews.

Maurice Motamed, the country’s Jewish MP, has criticised Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad’s denials of the Holocaust but is otherwise a staunch
supporter of the radical president’s foreign and security policies. "I
am an Iranian first and a Jew second," he said.