The Jewish Diaspora

Migration

Ancient settlement in Persia

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500 BCEBabylonia (Mesopotamia) → Persia (Isfahan, Shiraz, Hamadan)

Why it happened

Cyrus's conquest of Babylon let the exiled Jews return home from 537 BCE,1 but many chose instead to remain and settle across the Persian realm,2 joining Israelites the Assyrians had earlier deported to the cities of the Medes.3

The migration

The community's roots reached back to the Assyrian conquest of the northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE,3 after which deportees were resettled in the cities of the Medes3 — a milieu the Book of Tobit recalls through its exiled Israelite family at Ecbatana.4 Under the Achaemenids Jews spread through the imperial provinces: Susa, capital of Elam and a royal winter residence,5 is the setting of the Book of Esther;6 tradition further locates the tomb of Daniel at Susa7 and of Esther and Mordechai at Ecbatana (Hamadan).8 Settlement concentrated in Media and Elam, later growing so dense around Isfahan that the tenth-century geographer Estakhri called the district Yahudistan, 'land of the Jews.'2 Most exiles freed by Cyrus in 537 BCE1 chose not to return to Judah,2 seeding one of the oldest continuous communities of the Jewish .2

Genetic corroboration

  • autosomalA genome-wide study of seven Jewish groups including Iranian and Iraqi Jews found each community carries shared Middle Eastern ancestry, and that the resolves into two major clusters, one of them 'Middle Eastern Jews' — corroborating the common Near Eastern origin of Persia's and Babylonia's Jews.9

Sources

  1. BGrabbe LL. 2004. A History of the Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period, Volume 1: The Persian Period (539–331 BCE). T&T Clark (Bloomsbury Academic) link
  2. BLoeb LD. 1977. Outcaste: Jewish Life in Southern Iran. Gordon and Breach (New York)
  3. BJewish Publication Society. 2023. II Kings 17:6 (Hebrew Bible / Tanakh). The JPS TANAKH: Gender-Sensitive Edition (Revised JPS) link
  4. BFitzmyer JA. 2003. Tobit (Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature). Walter de Gruyter (Berlin / New York)
  5. CLendering J. 2020. Susa. Livius.org (Articles on Ancient History) link
  6. B2000. Esther 1:2. Tanakh (Hebrew Bible, Ketuvim), Revised JPS 2023 translation via Sefaria link
  7. BBenjamin of Tudela. 1907. The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela: Critical Text, Translation and Commentary (ed. Marcus Nathan Adler). Henry Frowde / Oxford University Press (London); original 12th-century travel account link
  8. B2007. Hamadan. Encyclopaedia Judaica (2nd ed.), via Jewish Virtual Library link
  9. AAtzmon G, Hao L, Pe'er I, et al.. 2010. Abraham's Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry. The American Journal of Human Genetics 86 850–859. doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2010.04.015