Iran is home to the biggest population of Jews in the Middle East outside Israel.

Like the country's Armenian, Assyrian and Zoroastrian minorities, it has one reserved seat in parliament.

Jews trace their presence in Iran from the point that Cyrus the Great liberated the people from slavery in Babylon in 593BC. There are about 25,000 left in Iran. Tehran has 20 active synagogues. But the Jewish population has dwindled rapidly since an Islamic theocracy was established. At the end of the Shah's reign, there were an estimated 100,000 Jews. Esther, the legendary empress and wife of Ahasuerus, was Jewish.

Maurice Motamed, the country's Jewish MP, has criticised Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's denials of the Holocaust but is otherwise a staunch supporter of the radical president's foreign and security policies. "I am an Iranian first and a Jew second," he said.