Kitāb-i Anusī כִּתַאבּ-אִי אַנוּסִי

A chronicle in verse, written around 1662, on forty-five years of persecution: conversions, ransoms, returns, killings, and the expulsion of Isfahan's Jews from their quarter.

It should be read with three things in mind. Verse here is the ordinary form, not ornament: Judeo-Persian literature has told its stories in verse since Shāhīn, chronicles included. The author is a participant, and so the text contains what no external source has: how exactly the ransom was arranged, what was said in the community, who converted and who did not. And checkability: the expulsion from the Isfahan quarter is independently corroborated by the Armenian chronicle of Arakʿel of Tabriz (Amsterdam, 1669), and a collation of the two texts made in 2022 found them in agreement. For the history of the eastern communities that is a rare luxury: usually one must make do with a single witness.

The continuation is Bābāʾī ben Farhād's Kitāb-i Sar-guzasht-i Kāshān, on the years of the Afghan invasion and Nader Shah. Both texts have been studied and edited by Vera Moreen.

And the chief conclusion that follows from the chronicle: the Safavid jadīd al-Islām for the most part returned to Judaism openly within a few years of their conversion. That makes them the direct opposite of the Mashhadi crypto-Jews of 1839, who could not return and stayed hidden for a hundred and twenty years. One word, opposite fates—and Bābāʾī's chronicle is the document of the first of the two.