Siahkal was the scene of the 1971 Marxist
Siahkal uprising.
The Jewish community There used to be a sizeable Jewish community in Siahkal with synagogue(s) and neighborhoods. The written historical sources on this community are limited, and mostly lost to history limited, as the Gilan province was largely isolated, and mostly ignored in history, but they might have been present since antiquity given speaking the
Judeo-Siahkali dialect, as opposed to other Jewish communities of Gilan and surrounding provinces. The community married among themselves and had a long tradition that they were descendants of
King David. Some were descendants of Jews of
Dilaman, who were ordered by
Nadir Shah Afshar in the year 1746 to relocate to
Mashhad. The community faced one or several pogroms and mass conversions in recent history based on their collective memory. Possibly, around 1880, there was a pogrom in Siahkal in which many Jews were killed, many were subjected to forceful conversion to Islam, and others left the city to live in Rasht (Netzer, Siahkal). In the following years, Many of the remaining members of this isolated community converted to
Baháʼí Faith,
Islam, or joined
the Marxist movement. Others gradually left the town, commenced by events of the pogrom of 1880, the Marxist insurrection of 1921, the Soviet Occupation, and then as well as the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, which prompted emigration of the remaining practicing Jews to either
Israel,
Rasht,
Tehran, or
the United States;. ==Demographics==