Lior Sternfeld

Since the 1979 revolution, Iranian Jews have faced two powerful and inherently contradictory calls to compromise their voice and identity. From one side, Israel has consistently held the opinion that as an at-risk community they should be evacuated and resettled. On the other, Iran's revolutionary regime has made "Islamic" a centerpiece of Iranian identity, placing Jewish identity directly at odds with what it means to be an Iranian. For decades, foreign opposition groups have spread baseless and unsubstantiated claims suggesting that Iranian Jews are to be placed in concentration camps or forced to wear yellow stars. At the same time, Iran's top politicians repeatedly peddle anti-Semitic innuendo and promote Holocaust denial conspiracies. Yet such narratives miss the central fact rarely acknowledged in Israel or Western academic and public spheres: Iranian Jews have continued to maintain ownership of their story and narrative as both Iranian and Jewish. This article seeks to analyze the navigation of Iranian Jews between their struggle as a religious minority in the Islamic Republic and maintenance of their autonomous voice as represented outside Iran.

During World War II, millions of refugees fled their homes and were displaced across Europe, central Asia, and the Middle East. In September 1939, Nazi and Soviet armies invaded Poland, resulting in countless individuals being deported or "resettled"—forcibly exiled to labor camps in Siberia and Soviet central Asia. This article examines the story of a large wave of Polish refugees granted amnesty by Iran after the Soviets allied with Great Britain in June 1941. Between 1941 and 1943, hundreds of thousands of Poles were allowed into Iran, where social and political conditions helped them rebuild their lives, establish thriving Polish institutions, and leave a lasting impact on Iranian urban culture. Polish exiles in Iran established newspapers, art galleries, cafés, orchestras, theaters, and salons that catered first and foremost to the Polish community but later became central to the myriad of Allied army soldiers stationed in Iran, as well as to the emerging Iranian urban middle class.

During Mohammad Mosaddeq’s tenure as the Iranian Prime Minister, the struggles for de-colonization took shape vis-à-vis the old superpowers, Britain and France, in Iran and the rest of the Middle East. Following the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, Mohammad Mosaddeq became the first Middle Eastern Muslim leader that overcame Britain, albeit temporarily. Mosaddeq paid a price, overthrown in 1953 in an American and British-backed coup, but his struggle aroused interest around the world and received different interpretations, depending on the location. This article examines the way Mosaddeq was perceived in Egypt, where he visited in November 1951 for a highly significant four-day visit. The article examines the evolution of the anti-colonial struggle in Egypt and the emergence of a new vernacular framing of the struggles in the Middle East in one context.

In 1951 Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, who was the prime minister of Iran, announced the complete nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Almost immediately following this announcement, he went on a journey to the United States to defend Iran's rights over its natural assets, following a British demand that the United Nations prevent Iran from doing so. On his way back to Iran, Mossadegh visited Egypt, a nation which had many similarities to Iran at that time; both were reigned by pro-western monarchies, each had a depressed nationalistic movement, and both had major national assets which were controlled by British interests.

The Egyptians viewed the Iranian Prime Minister as a role model. British officials in Egypt and the Egyptian political elite did not share the same point of view, however. Mossadegh's visit to Cairo cemented his position as a regional leader, and at the same time provided Egyptian nationalists a paragon upon which to base their own national government.

In July 1952, a few months after the visit, the Free Officers Revolution took place in Egypt, which engendered a new spirit and hope among the Egyptian people. In August 1953, Mossadegh was overthrown in a CIA sponsored coup d'etat, and the Iranian National Project came to a premature end. The new revolutionary regime in Egypt, however, used the Iranian coup to make a stand toward the new Third-World-Consciousness that was just about to embark. Egyptian officials used Mossadegh's tremendous popularity in Egypt to recruit the masses the long fight against British and western imperialism, which would eventually culminate with the nationalization of the Suez Canal.

In the recent years Iranian influence on the Arab Middle East was viewed in a negative context. As this paper will show, in the earlier years the Iranian influence was not only taken as much more positive, but Iranian politics was also adopted as a model for the Arab fight against Western imperialism.

This paper tries to answer the following questions: How did the Egyptian public react to Mossadegh's visit What were the approaches toward Iran in the Egyptian public sphere What did British decision-makers think about the implications of such a visit How was Mossadegh character was used in the rhetoric of the new Egyptian regime
In the paper I analyze Egyptian newspapers coverage, British Foreign Office documents, and memoirs of leaders of the Free Officers regime.

Iran is home to the largest Jewish population in the Middle East, outside of Israel. At its peak in the twentieth century, the population numbered around 100,000; today about 25,000 Jews live in Iran. Between Iran and Zion offers the first history of this vibrant community over the course of the last century, from the 1905 Constitutional Revolution through the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Over this period, Iranian Jews grew from a peripheral community into a prominent one that has made clear impacts on daily life in Iran.

Drawing on interviews, newspapers, family stories, autobiographies, and previously untapped archives, Lior B. Sternfeld analyzes how Iranian Jews contributed to Iranian nation-building projects, first under the Pahlavi monarchs and then in the post-revolutionary Islamic Republic. He considers the shifting reactions to Zionism over time, in particular to religious Zionism in the early 1900s and political Zionism after the creation of the state of Israel. And he investigates the various groups that constituted the Iranian Jewish community, notably the Jewish communists who became prominent activists in the left-wing circles in the 1950s and the revolutionary Jewish organization that participated in the 1979 Revolution. The result is a rich account of the vital role of Jews in the social and political fabric of twentieth-century Iran.

regenerative union would bear the fruits of civilization: a modern, peaceful, integrated region. While Chevalier never mentioned the conquest of Algiers, a cadre of Saint-Simonian engineers and administrators seized the opportunity to apply his ideas in a colonial context, inaugurating a new form of technopolitical governance for France and its trans-Mediterranean possessions. In the last chapter, William Granara seeks to bridge divisions in the study of North African literature by reading three Arabic works from the 1930s and 1940s in light of a French novel from 1899. Authors Zin al-ʿAbidin al-Sanusi, an ardent critic of French colonialism in Tunisia, and Louis Bertrand, a strong apologist for France's rule over Algeria, made opposing national claims to the Mediterranean. In his epic tale, the "Latinist" Bertrand portrayed France fulfilling its imperial destiny to restore Rome's mare nostrum after centuries of physical and political degradation. In his play, novel, and short story, by contrast, al-Sanusi depicted the sea as an expansive crossroads rightfully belonging to a myriad of peoples: Europeans and Africans, as well as Arab-Muslim Tunisians. As these summaries make evident, The Making of the Modern Mediterranean shies from any unified approach or a single takeaway about unity. What it does, overall, is showcase leading scholarship that embarks from non-European points of departure and uncovers inhabitants of the sea's southern and eastern coasts and beyond shaping the modern world on their own terms.

Dario Miccoli's review essay on
Georges Bensoussan, Jews in Arab Countries: the Great Uprooting (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019).
Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein (eds), The Holocaust and North Africa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019).
Lior B. Sternfeld, Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019).