Not all distance is the same.

There is the distance of genuine conflict — of peoples whose interests are irreconcilable, whose histories are defined by what each has done to the other. Closing it, when it can be closed at all, requires years of painful, incremental work. The distance between Israelis and Palestinians is something like this. Pretending otherwise is sentimentality, not hope.

And then there is a different kind of distance. The distance of misrecognition. Of two peoples who are, at the level of actual values and actual history and actual shared enemies, natural allies — separated not by genuine enmity but by assumption, ignorance, and the successful projection of a conflict that belongs to governments and not to the people living under them.

Last Friday night at Beth Tzedec in Toronto, a room full of Jewish and Persian university students demonstrated, with startling clarity, which kind of distance had been keeping them apart.

It was not the first kind.

The Jewish-Persian relationship is one of the oldest and most persistently misrepresented in human civilization. When Cyrus the Great issued his edict in 539 BCE — releasing the Jewish people from Babylonian captivity and financing the rebuilding of the Temple — the Jewish people received it not as diplomacy but as theology. The Book of Isaiah calls Cyrus by a title given to no other non-Jew in the Hebrew canon: meshiach — anointed one. The Talmud itself was compiled under Sassanid Persian rule, its rabbis in continuous intellectual engagement with Zoroastrian civilization. Their Persian interlocutors were not........

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