The Safavid persecutions and the jadīd al-Islām

There were three Safavid waves: before 1613 and in 1620 under Shah ʿAbbās I, and 1656–1662 under ʿAbbās II—the third the severest. Jews were killed or forcibly converted; the Jews of Isfahan were expelled from the Jewish quarter and converted wholesale. Isfahan suffered first because from 1596 it was the capital: there the decree was executed literally.

After large payments the "new Muslims"—jadīd al-Islām—were permitted to resume Jewish practice. And here is the main thing almost absent from the reference works: most returned to Judaism openly, within a few years.

The sources for this event are, by the standards of the whole eastern chapter, unusually good. From inside, Bābāʾī ben Loṭf's Kitāb-i Anusī, a Judeo-Persian verse chronicle of the persecutions of 1617–1662, written around 1662 by a participant; the continuation is Bābāʾī ben Farhād's Kitāb-i Sar-guzasht-i Kāshān, on the years of the Afghan invasion and Nader Shah. From outside and independently, the Armenian chronicle of Arakʿel of Tabriz, printed at Amsterdam in 1669, which separately records the Isfahan expulsion. A collation of the two texts was made in 2022, and they agree; so the episode stands firm rather than resting on a single witness.

And the correction for which this entry is needed separately. The term jadīd al-Islām names two opposite fates in the Jewish history of Iran, and they are constantly conflated. The Safavid converts of 1656–62 returned to Judaism openly within a few years. The Mashhadi converts of 1839 could not return and stayed hidden for some hundred and twenty years. The same word, the opposite outcome.