With the ascendance of Reza Pahlavi as the new Shah of Iran (1925), he embarked on a new nation-building project that sought to centralize the government, but also unify the language and culture, in a country of many ethnic and lingual minorities. The second part of the project was to secularize the public sphere but also the society in large. This project benefitted the religious minorities, and assigned specific roles to the Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian communities. The participation allowed major social, cultural, and political transformations to take place, and Iranian Jews experienced it to the greatest extent during the Pahlavi period. The talk will examine these transformations vis-a-vis the Pahlavi nation-building project and the roles it assigned to the Jews and other minorities.
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