Lior Sternfeld
I am a social historian of the modern Middle East with particular interests in Jewish (and other minorities’) histories of the region. My first book “Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran,” examines the integration of the Jewish communities in Iran into the nation-building projects of the twentieth century. This book examines the development of the Iranian Jewish communities vis-à-vis ideologies and institutions such as Iranian nationalism, Zionism, and constitutionalism, among others. My current research project examines the origins of “third-worldism” in the Middle East. My teaching interests include histories of modern Iranian and the Middle East, Jewish histories of the Middle East, and social movements in the Middle East and beyond.
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Papers by Lior Sternfeld
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.
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.
In recent years, our knowledge and understanding of the Jewish experience in the twentieth century have undergone tremendous transformation. A generation of scholars of Middle East history examined the Jewish history of the region not through an insular lens of Jewish history but rather studied Jewish minorities as part of the local societies in which they lived and participated in public, cultural, political, and economic life, in ways that had intersected with colonialism but were not limited to it. The study of Jewish history opened new ways to study the history of Middle Eastern societies. They examine Zionism as one of the multiple venues in which Jews became active and responded to nationalism and postcolonialism in various ways.
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).