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Explaining Jewish Conversions to the Baha'i Faith in Iran, circa 1870–1920

Why did so many Iranian Jews convert to the Baha’i faith circa 1870–1920? The two recent publications reviewed here go a long way to explain what, on the surface at least, appears to be a rather unexplainable moment in the history of Iranian Jewry. Until recently, only scant attention has been paid by contemporary scholars of Iranian Jewry to the phenomenon of conversion to the Baha’i faith by large numbers of Iranian Jews in late Qajar Iran. In Esther’s Children: A Portrait of Iranian Jews, fleeting reference is made to conversions among Jews to the Baha’i faith. These conversions are either presented as having been (or having been perceived as) a threat to the very existence of the Jewish community in Iran (p. 200), or else as a major catalyst for Zionist leanings among those who opposed conversion (p. 240). Daniel Tsadik, in his insightful study on Jews in nineteenth-century Iran, devotes less than one page to conversions to the Baha’i faith among Jews in this period (p. 156). Tsadik notes that by the 1890s some Jewish Baha’is had begun to openly identify as Baha’i, that some had even visited Baha’u’llah in Palestine, and that the Jewish and Muslim clergy felt ill at ease about these conversions, but he does not discuss the effects of this large-scale conversion on the Jewish population of Iran in the following decades. Two publications on the crypto, “new-Muslim” ( jadid alIslam) Jews of Mashhad are similarly lacking in their treatment of Jewish conversions to the Baha’i faith among that particular local community. Raphael Patai’s study of the