Baba'i ben Farhad

Origins and early life

Baba'i ben Farhad was a Jew of Kashan, in Persia, active between about 1721 and 1731, and the grandson of the chronicler Baba'i ben Lotf — the kinship is confirmed, not assumed: the Encyclopaedia Iranica names 'Baba'i ben Lotf and his grandson Baba'i ben Farhad' among the cultural figures of Kashan, and the Posen Library records that 'he followed in the footsteps of his grandfather'.

Work and career

He followed them exactly, in fate as in craft. When the Afghan invasion and the collapse of the Safavid state brought new terror to the Jews of Persia, the community of Kashan was forced in 1729-30 to convert to Islam, and Baba'i, like his grandfather before him, lived as a crypto-Jew, Muslim in public and Jew in secret, until the community could return to its faith. And like his grandfather he wrote it down: the Ketab-e Sar Guzasht-e Kashan, the Book of Events of Kashan, some thirteen hundred verses in Judeo-Persian, chronicles the persecution, the forced conversion and the return — a document edited critically by the scholar Vera Moreen in 1990 and used by historians as a primary source for one of the darkest passages of Iranian Jewish history.

He died after 1731; his and his grandfather's chronicles together are the memory of Persian Jewry's seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.