Non-Shiʿis and non-Muslims are among the most marginally and poorly documented sectors of society in the Iranian historiography of the Safavid (907-1135/1501-1722) and Afsharid (1148–1210/1736-1796) periods. Not only are these groups scarcely represented in the sources, but in the rare cases where they do appear, the nature of their representation and of the sources themselves barely suffices to draw a nuanced picture of their status. Persian court chronicles, which are by and large concerned with the lives and military exploits of the rulers, devote few pages to the common folk in general, let alone religious minorities. Groups such as Armenian and Georgian Christians, Zoroastrians, and Jews do appear occasionally in the chronicles, but they usually do so as undifferentiated collectivities, with few (if any) proper names, and with seemingly no agency. European sources, consisting mostly of diplomatic and missionary reports and travelogues, contain more descriptions of these groups. While these sources exhibit the predictable biases of the foreign gaze and of implicit religious and political agendas, they are unsurmountable for getting at least a partial picture of the societal role of religious minorities.

Considering this documentary problems, the case of the Jewish community of Iran is of particular interest for at least two reasons. The first is a strictly historiographical one, this being precisely the existence of a small number of sources written from within the perspective of the community. Two major epic-style works are worth noting here. The first is the Kitab-i Anusi (The Book of Forced Conversions), written by Babai b. Lutf (d. 17th cent.). This work has been the subject of a thorough study by Vera B. Moreen based on manuscripts from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and the Ben Zvi Institute in Jerusalem. The second is the Kitab-i sar guzasht-i Kashan (The Book of the Fate of Kashan) by Babai b. Farhad (d. 18th cent.), the grandson of the author of the Kitab-i Anusi. This work has also been edited and translated by Moreen, based on two manuscripts also kept at the aforementioned institutions in Paris and Jerusalem.