The Supreme Leader of Iran—now resting in “pieces”—dedicated his life, and the resources of his entire nation, to one overriding goal: the annihilation of the Jewish state. Iran arms Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border and Hamas to the south. It funds the drones and missiles that rain on Israeli cities. “Death to Israel” is not a slogan in Iran; it is the Mullah’s chief and overriding goal.
And yet, in the heart of Tehran, there is a Jewish community. With close to ten thousand Jews, it is the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside Israel, living under the rule of the very mullahs who have sworn to destroy the Jewish people’s state.
How is this possible? How does a government that screams “Death to Israel” from its parliament floor permit a Jewish community to exist within its own borders?
To understand why, we must go back to the theological foundations of Islam’s relationship with Jews, and a single Arabic word that unlocks the whole system. The Quran commands: “Fight those who do not believe in Allah… until they pay the jizya while they are saghirun.” That final word, saghirun, means subdued, brought low, humiliated.
Based on this verse, Islamic law developed the dhimmi system, a formal legal status for Jews and Christians living under Muslim rule. Dhimmis were permitted to live and practice their religion, but only within a rigid framework of enforced inferiority. The Pact of Umar, the foundational legal document governing this arrangement and attributed to the seventh and eighth centuries, spelled out the terms in detail: Jews could not build new synagogues, could not ride horses, could not carry weapons, had to wear distinctive dress, had to rise when a Muslim entered the room, could not raise their voices in prayer, and could not display religious symbols in public.
The historian Bernard Lewis explains that Islamic civilization sometimes treated its Jewish communities with more day-to-day tolerance than medieval Christian Europe did, but that treatment rested entirely on the assumption of Jewish inferiority. The much-celebrated ‘golden age’ of Jewish life in Muslim Spain was golden for dhimmis—Jews flourished economically and culturally during this brief era—but only within a framework of permanent second-class status.
This is why Tehran permits the Jews of Iran to exist—barely. They are dhimmis: tolerated, subordinate, and silent, living under constant surveillance, subject to interrogation, and held collectively responsible for every action the State of Israel takes. They are Jews, but they are not uppity Jews. The moment they dare to assert themselves, the tolerance ends
The Church, for all its differences from Islam, demanded the same thing from the Jews living in Christian lands.
Saint Augustine, the towering figure of Western Christianity, constructed a theology of Jewish existence in his City of God that would shape Christian attitudes toward Jews for over a thousand years. Reading Psalm 59:11, “Slay them not, lest my people forget; scatter them by Your power,” Augustine argued that God preserved the Jewish people in a state of permanent degradation as proof of Christianity’s truth. A thriving, powerful, confident Jewish nation would embarrass the Church, but a beaten, scattered, voiceless Jewish people was God’s own testimony to the triumph of Christianity.
Augustine’s image for the Jewish role was the scriniaria, the document case that carries the scrolls from place to place. The case preserves the texts. It does not understand them. Jews, he wrote, bear the law and the prophets as testimony to the Church’s truth, spreading the scriptures across the world through their very dispersion, proclaiming the prophecies that Christianity claims to fulfill—all without understanding what they are carrying. In Augustine’s framework, the Jewish people had one job: to carry Christianity’s books around the world, testifying to truths they could not grasp, and serving a religion that had superseded them—not as teachers or partners, but as shleppers.
Augustine was not alone. An entire tradition of Church writing, from Tertullian to John Chrysostom, hammered home the same theme: Jews were finished, Jewish suffering was divine punishment, and the Jews’ apparently permanent homelessness was a clear sign that they were rejected by God. Islam and Christianity, for all their differences, built the same cage. Jews could exist, but only as the subordinate, the silenced, the defeated. That arrangement suited both theologies perfectly.
While Christians and Muslims were constructing their theologies of Jewish subservience, Jewish thinkers were grappling with the same reality from the inside. Maimonides, the greatest Jewish legal and philosophical mind of the medieval era, looked at the two religions that persecuted his people and relegated them to second-class status—and saw in them the hand of God.
“All those words of Jesus of Nazareth and of this Ishmaelite who arose after him are only to make straight the path for the messianic king and to prepare the whole world to serve the Lord together… The world has become filled with the ideas of the Messiah, the ideas of the Torah, and the ideas of the commandments, so that these have spread to faraway islands and to many faint-hearted nations, and they now discuss these ideas and the commandments of the Torah.”
Maimonides was not endorsing Christianity or Islam, and he was certainly not naive about what these religions had done to his people. He was making a theological observation: when the Jewish people were exiled, dispersed and could not speak for themselves, God ensured that the Biblical message still reached the world and that His plan to redeem humanity would continue to advance. It arrived through other voices, in other languages, shaped by other hands.
But it was never quite Israel’s voice. As Rabbi Yehuda Leon Ashkenazi wrote: “Throughout the entire exile, when the nations heard Israel speaking, what they actually and truly heard was the Christian speaking, or the Muslim speaking. Not Israel itself.” The Bible spread to every corner of the earth, monotheism took root in civilizations all across the world, and billions came to believe in the God of Abraham—but the Jewish people who stood at Sinai, who received the Torah and were chosen by God, had no seat at the table. The message spread, but the messengers were sidelined.
That era is over.
The reestablishment of the State of Israel in 1948 gave the Jewish people something we had not possessed for two thousand years: sovereignty in our ancient homeland. But it did something else that was equally momentous. It blew apart the theological consensus of Augustine and the Quran, the centuries-old assumption shared by Christianity and Islam alike, that the Jewish people were a permanently subordinate people dependent on the tolerance of others. Suddenly, there were Jews who were not asking permission to exist. Suddenly, a prime minister of a Jewish state stood before the General Assembly of the United Nations and told the world, in plain language, who the enemies of civilization are and what must be done about them—attacking the evil of radical Islam and shaming the spineless European nations too frightened to confront it.
Isaiah prophesied that this day would come:
Not from Rome or Mecca, but from Zion—and now, for the first time in two thousand years, that is exactly what is happening. Rabbis and thinkers and teachers are speaking directly to the world, in our own voice, from our own land.
Most of the Muslim world responded to Jewish sovereignty with fury, and much of the Christian world has not been far behind. Iran and its proxy armies are dedicated with religious ferocity to Israel’s destruction—not for geopolitical reasons, but because a sovereign Jewish state speaking from Zion overturns everything Islamic theology says about the divine order of the world. And it is why Christian voices like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens work so hard to delegitimize the Jewish state, portraying us as a colonialist project and questioning our right to defend ourselves. The theology has shifted, but the instinct is the same one that ran through Augustine and the Quran: Jews must not be allowed to stand tall and proud.
To their credit, not everyone has responded this way. Many Evangelical Christians, and a growing number of Catholics, genuinely grappled with what Jewish sovereignty means, changed their theology and embraced Israel. In 2015, the Vatican issued a landmark document stating explicitly that “God has never revoked his covenant with Israel”—an explicit rejection of Augustine’s degrading view of the Jewish people. But they remain the exception. The dominant response of the Muslim world and much of the Christian world to Jewish sovereignty has been hostility, delegitimization, and, in the case of Iran and its proxies, open calls for genocide.
“Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?” (Psalm 2:1). The nations are not raging because Jews exist—they tolerated Jewish existence for centuries, as long as Jews knew their place. They are raging because the Jews have gotten uppity, and there is nothing they can do to stop it.
We are back. We are sovereign. We are speaking from Zion in our own voice, and the world must listen, whether they like it or not. Two thousand years of Augustine and the Quran, two thousand years of cages built to keep the Jewish voice silent — that is over, and it is never coming back.
Chag Atzmaut Sameach—Happy Israel Independence Day!
