In 1898 the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), the transnational Franco-Jewish philanthropy dedicated to “regenerating” Middle Eastern and North African Jews through western education, established a network of Jewish schools in Iran that would operate in the country for over eighty years. Fifty years later, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee began to subsidize educational and medical programs among the Jews of Iran, and several other international educational and vocational Jewish philanthropies ran schools throughout the country. In addition to the presence of transnational Jewish school networks, beginning in the 1950s, Jewish parents increasingly removed their children from Jewish schools and placed them in state schools, arguing that immersion in Muslim-majority spaces would aid their children’s upward mobility. Although most of the scholarship on Jewish schooling in Iran focuses on the AIU, a constellation of schooling options—both Jewish-run and state-operated—was open to Iran’s Jews by the mid-twentieth century. The attendance of Jews at religiously diverse schools in Iran, I argue, mitigated antisemitic experiences, engendered fruitful interreligious encounters, and helped Jews achieve significant upward mobility. Moreover, the various foreign Jewish organizations in Iran—working in tandem and at odds with one another—inadvertently helped Iranian Jews integrate within their broader non-Jewish milieus. However, Iranian Jews were not passive recipients of aid, but actively combatted these institutions’ paternalistic and Orientalist attitudes, which rendered them docile subjects in need of supervision. In this paper, drawing on reports, letters, speeches, newspaper articles, oral histories, and memoirs in Persian, French, Hebrew, and English, I examine how the various transnational Jewish educational philanthropies in Iran collaborated and competed with one another to secure primacy among Iran’s Jews. I also explore the collaborations and conflicts that arose between local Iranian Jews and foreign Jewish organizations to highlight individual and collective choices. In sum, this paper will offer a more nuanced picture of the educational landscape among Iran’s Jews and non-Jews, while demonstrating how Jews leveraged access to education and nationalist ideology to claim belonging to the Iranian nation.