Republic of Hate - Podcast Nine - The End of the Shah of Shah

            The British Replace the Shah of Shahs              Reza Shah’s friendship with leading Nazis earned him disdain from the British and caused concern in the Soviet Union after German armies invaded it. In a joint operation, the British and Soviets ousted Reza and housed him in South Africa. The invasion of Iran, Operation Countenance, was mostly uncontested and resulted in very few casualties. One contemporary called it a “military stroll.” Iran became known as the Persian Corridor, providing a crucial supply route into the Soviet Union. Matthias Kuntzel suggested that without the Allied-Iranian connection, Hitler probably would have taken Stalingrad. Reza returned after death to be buried in Tehran. His son built a tomb for him. But after the 1979 revolution, the new Islamic authorities did their best to erase any memory of the Pahlavi dynasty they overthrew. Revolutionaries destroyed his tomb and turned it into a public toilet.             When Reza Shah's son, Mohammad Reza Shah, took over, the economy flourished, and the Jews, who had mostly lived as peddlers and moneylenders before, gained significantly. Between 1948 and 1953, over one-third of Iran's Jews emigrated. Most of the emigrants were poor, while wealthier Jews, mostly residing in Tehran, stayed. In 1950, the shah granted Israel de facto recognition, which upset Iran’s religious leaders and Iranian religious exiles living in Arab countries. "During the Shah's 25-year reign, key industries like banking, insurance, pharmaceuticals, textiles, plastics, paper, aluminum production, shipping, imports, tile manufacturing, and liquor distillery and distribution were either established and owned by Jews or financed and run by them. The historian Habib Levy has called these years the golden age of Iranian Jewry.”             There were social stigmas and conventions that the shah could not eliminate. The longstanding stereotype of Jewish uncleanliness persisted strongly. One Jew explained that Jews fought against this prejudice by openly showing their faith to non-Jewish neighbors. “It was a time for our neighbors . . . to witness our diligence in cleaning . . . Muslims still called Jews najes or dirty. This was the season to prove our cleanliness to our neighbors . . . Under the relatively secular Pahlavi dynasty, Jews and other non-Muslims enjoyed rights and protections similar to Muslims, especially in the mid-20th century. This caused envy—relative deprivation. During the Qajar era, Muslims were not significantly poorer than Jews, but they held higher legal and social status. The legal trend was moving toward liberalism, and Iranian culture became more inclusive. The emphasis on nationalism worried the clergy. The End of the Golden Era and anti-Shah Jews             Jewish life thrived more than ever during the Pahlavi regime. Some became high-ranking bureaucrats, industrialists, and merchants, accumulated wealth, and moved up the social ladder. Jewish communities built and expanded social institutions such as schools, synagogues, newspapers, and hospitals. While some Jews remained poor, the middle class, especially the upper-middle class, grew in size. Like earlier generations in the United States, poor but ambitious Jews moved through social classes to become successful and often influential. They were well represented in universities and professional organizations and could openly practice their faith. Jewish scholarship in the sciences flourished. During the 1979 revolution, 2 of the 18 members of the Royal Academy of Sciences, 80 of the 4,000 university lecturers, and 600 of the 10,000 physicians in Iran were Jews. Most Jews belonged to the middle class; about 10% were wealthy, and another 10% were poor.             Despite the new prosperity, young Jews disproportionately joined the ranks of the anti-Shah left. Perhaps they were motivated by the sense of justice that inspired the European and American left of the 1960s. Many Iranian youths viewed the Shah as a tool of U.S. interests. Collaborations between Jews and leftist movements began after Reza Shah openly supported Hitler. In the 1940s, the Tudeh Party openly condemned Nazism and anti-Semitism. Jewish Iranian intellectuals gravitated toward the leftist movement and anti-Zionism. Pro-Soviet Jews were often anti-American and anti-Shah. In August 1978, a Jewish group participated in protests for the first time under an Iranian-Jewish banner. On September 8, 1978, known as Black Friday, mass demonstrations took place in Tehran, with Jews among the protesters.             There was a small but vocal minority of left-wing Jewish social agitators. Marxism competed with other ideologies thriving in Iran and attracted Jewish supporters. In the 1970s, two Jewish activists, Harun Parviz Yesha'ya and 'Aziz Daneshrad, were imprisoned for attempting to overthrow the shah. After their release, they organized fellow Jews within hard-left circles. Other Jewish leftists operated mostly in Muslim-majority areas, such as the Mujahedin-e Khalq, MEK, and the People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran.             One of the Jewish activists in the MEK was Edna Sabet, who was born in 1955 to a Jewish family in Tehran from the urban middle class. Many of her family members were educated in the United States. As a university student in Tehran, Sabet was drawn to hard-left politics. Along with her Muslim husband, she became a prominent leader. Other sources claim she was a member of the Marxist-Leninist Peykar Organization, which broke from the MEK.             In either case, both husband and wife actively opposed the shah but grew dissatisfied with the Islamic regime they helped bring to power. Triumphantly, revolutionaries turned against those they deemed insufficiently radical. Sabet: She was arrested and executed in 1982 at the age of 27. The whole affair confused those who knew her and still puzzles historians of early post-revolutionary Iran. “What was a left-wing Jewish woman doing in an Islamic revolutionary organization in the first place?” asked historian Lior Sternfeld. “Despite her tragic end, her story illustrates another aspect in the complex weave of identities and loyalties that characterized many of those from her generation.”