Hakim Masih, the doctor of the Shah of Iran, vividly remembers being in a gathering of Muslim clerics in Baghdad when they were debating a woman who spoke from behind a curtainHer logical and powerfully expressed arguments convinced that after hearing her on several more occasions, he became a believer in her.
The woman was Tahirih. He came to believe she was the Promised One.
Later, when he was back in Tihran, he treated a prisoner who was a Babi and a survivor of Fort Tabarsi who taught him about Tahirih and the Bab. Masih now understood the Station of the Baba and through Masih’s subsequent teaching, many Jews became Babis.
Tahirih’s stay in Hamadan touched off conversions to the new faith in the important Jewish community there. By the turn of the century, Hamadan had the largest group of Baha’is of Jewish background in Persia. In April, 1847, Mulla Lazar, son of the leading rabbi of Hamadan, hosted Tahirih in his home. His activities drew the anger of other Jewish elders who lodged complaints about him to the King. Later, his writings were found to reflect Babi/Baha’i ideas though he never publicly identified himself as a Babi.
(Mehrdad Amanat, Jewish Identities in Iran: Resistance and Conversion to Islam and the Baha’i Faith (I.B. Taurus: NY, NY 2011), 105.)