Bābāʾī ben Loṭf בַּאבַּאי בֶּן לֻטְף

Of Kashan; writing around 1662. His Kitāb-i Anusī ("the Book of a Forced Convert") is a Judeo-Persian verse chronicle of the persecutions of 1617–1662—events he witnessed for the most part himself.

This is a source of a particular kind, and its particularity is worth naming. First, it is from inside: not the dispatch of an outside observer and not a later memory, but a participant's account. Second, it is in verse—not because the author was ornamenting grief but because in Judeo-Persian letters verse is the ordinary narrative form, descending from Shāhīn and his epic. Third, it is checkable: the report of the expulsion of Isfahan's Jews from their quarter and their conversion is independently corroborated by the Armenian chronicle of Arakʿel of Tabriz, printed at Amsterdam in 1669. The comparison of these two texts is the subject of a study of 2022, and they agree; which is why the episode stands firm rather than resting on a single witness.

The continuation was written by Bābāʾī ben Farhād—Kitāb-i Sar-guzasht-i Kāshān, on the years of the Afghan invasion and Nader Shah, the 1730s. Both were studied by Vera Moreen: Iranian Jewry's Hour of Peril and Heroism (New York, 1987) on Bābāʾī ben Loṭf's chronicle, and Iranian Jewry During the Afghan Invasion (Stuttgart, 1990) on the continuation.

What follows from these chronicles for the larger picture. The Safavid persecutions came in three waves: before 1613 and in 1620 under ʿAbbās I, and in 1656–1662 under ʿAbbās II—the third the severest. And here is the main thing the chronicle gives that a reference work does not: most of the converts returned to Judaism openly, within a few years, having bought their way with large payments. The Persian jadīd al-Islām of the seventeenth century are not the Mashhadi crypto-Jews of the nineteenth: the word is the same, the fates opposite.