Isfahan (or Esfahan) is a major city in central Iran, historically known as the capital of Persia from 1598 to 1722. Often nicknamed "Half of the World" (Nesf-e Jahân) due to its immense cultural and architectural significance, it is renowned for its Safavid-era palaces, tiled mosques, and, frequently, for traditional Persian carpets.
Upon that they settled there, cultivated the soil, raised children and grandchildren...” Today there are reportedly around 1,500 Jews still in Isfahan and more than a dozen synagogues.
Both the city and region were then called by the name Aspahan or Spahan. The city was governed by a group called the Espoohrans, who descended from seven noble Iranian families. Extant foundations of some Sassanid-era bridges in Isfahan suggest that the Sasanian kings were fond of ambitious urban-planning projects.
The city was the splendid capital of the Seljuq and Safavid dynasties, and is renowned for its beauty, which has given rise to the Iranian saying that “Isfahan is half the world”.
Estimates range from 9,000 to 20,000 Jews currently living in Iran. According to Sternfeld, the most credible approximation is 15,000, which is the number most Jews living in Iran cite. More than half of the Jewish population lives in Tehran, with the second most in the city of Shiraz.
Iran is not an Arab country, and the differences between Iranians and Arabs are evident in their ethnicity, language, history, and culture. Iranians are primarily Persians who speak Farsi, while Arabs are a distinct ethnic group who speak Arabic.
The biblical name for modern-day Iran is primarily Persia (Paras), especially in the Old Testament books of Esther, Daniel, Ezra, and Nehemiah, referring to the powerful Persian Empire that liberated the Jews from Babylonian captivity, with earlier mentions of the region also referencing Elam.
In a country often seen as hostile to Jews, Iran's Jewish community remains one of the oldest in the Middle East. Nearly 10,000 Jews continue to practice their faith, operating synagogues, kosher restaurants, and schools, even under the watchful eye of the regime.
Kish Island is considered the most beautiful city in Iran from a tourism perspective, hosting many tourists every year. Traveling to Kish and strolling on coral beaches, visiting luxury shopping centers, and enjoying its recreational attractions will give you joyful and pleasant moments.
Furthermore, Iran's new constitution recognized Jews as a “people of the book” and allowed them to practice their religion, which meant they could have synagogues, Hebrew schools, and social institutions. This ostensible status of protected minority did give the community a measure of safety in postrevolutionary Iran.
On Sunday, the Jewish community in Isfahan, with an estimated 1,500 Jews, said “the Zionists' brutality is far from any human morality” in a statement published in reports on the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency.
Terminology. Today, the term Iranian Jews or Persian Jews is mostly used in reference to Jews who are from Iran (historically known as Persia). In various scholarly and historical texts, the term has extended to be used in reference to Jews who speak various Iranian languages.
Before 1979, Iran was officially known as the Imperial State of Persia, though the name "Iran" had been used internally and was formally requested for international use in 1935 by Reza Shah Pahlavi. The country was ruled by the Pahlavi dynasty until the Iranian Revolution, which established the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Israel continues to encourage the remaining Jews in Iran (less than 9,000) to immigrate, since Israel sees them as hostages of the Iranian regime. In 2007, Israel offered monetary incentives to Jews in Iran to encourage Iranian Jewish immigration to Israel. Jews of Iranian descent in Israel are considered Mizrahim.
The term Mizrahi is almost exclusively applied to descendants of Jewish communities from North Africa, Central Asia, West Asia, and parts of the North Caucasus. This includes Iraqi Jews, Iranian Jews, Bukharian Jews, Kurdish Jews, Afghan Jews, Mountain Jews, Georgian Jews, and the small community of Bahraini Jews.
“Jews can buy homes anywhere in the world, in France, in Turkey and even in Iran,” said Shlomo Levinger a spokesman for some 20 Jewish families who want to move into the buildings.
From the time nations began, the Bible calls the Promised Land “the land of Canaan” until the days of Joshua around 1390 BC when that region took on the designation “the land of Israel.” The Bible never calls it Palestine.
Iran, once called Persia, has been a major power for over 2,500 years. It began in 550 BC when Cyrus the Great founded the Achaemenid Empire. That empire ruled much of the ancient world. Since then, the Persian state has survived under many dynasties – Achaemenid, Parthian, Sassanid, Safavid, and others.
The majority of Iranians are of Persian ethnicity. Even within this ethnic group, the Persian people have a diverse ancestry, but all of them have one thing in common: their language. Persian people speak Persian, also called Farsi, an Iranian offshoot of the Indo-Iranian language family.
High poverty rates among Ahwazi Arabs, despite their province's production of 90 per cent of Iran's oil revenue, have fuelled resentment, as has discrimination on cultural-linguistic grounds. Some Arabs are Sunni and not allowed to practice their faith publicly, or construct a single Sunni mosque.
Did you know that Iran and Turkey are not Arab countries and their primary languages are Farsi and Turkish respectively? Arab countries have a rich diversity of ethnic, linguistic, and religious communities. These include Kurds, Armenians, Berbers and others. There are over 300 million Arabs.
