| Summary: | <p>This dissertation studies Jewish history in the modern Persian Gulf with a transregional look
towards Zionism and the British mandate of Palestine. It studies these encounters from the
viewpoint of Jewish communities in the Gulf ports, the Zionist leadership in Palestine, and the
political elites of dominant Gulf states. During the 19th century, Jews from Iran and Iraq settled
in the Persian Gulf ports, seeking economic prosperity and British imperial protection. This gave
rise to an oceanic network of Gulf Jewish communities, one that reached across the oceans all
the way to Jerusalem. An understanding of Zionism developed in the Gulf in the 1920s, one that
was deeply shaped by the British imperial world. Gulf Jews viewed Zionism as a continued
commitment by the British empire to protect Jews, rather than as a nation-state project, and
therefore continued to migrate into British domains in the Gulf.</p>
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<p>The Zionist movement in Palestine sought political accommodation with Iran and Saudi Arabia,
and thought of the oceanic Gulf between them as a transit zone for Jewish migration. Zionist
emissaries had a strong presence in the Gulf during the 1940s, encountering Gulf Jews and
seeking to convince them of migration to Palestine. However, Jews there developed an
indigenous form of Iranian Zionism that professed loyalty to Iran while contesting European
Zionism’s fixation on migration and state-building. In the Persian Gulf, the nationalized
understanding of Jewishness arrived abruptly when crowds in Bahrain protested the partition of
Palestine in 1947. The attack on Bahrain’s Jewish community led to communal disintegration
and signaled the end of a Jewish golden age. This transregional study of Jewish communities in
the Persian Gulf offers a better understanding of modern empire and religious diversity in that
area, while showing the wider Middle Eastern effects of Zionism’s nationalization of Jewish
identity.</p>
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