All the converts among the Jews are ours

Beha bought himself lands outside the town, laid out a garden, a true Persian garden, on the banks of the river, and took up his abode in a large house in the corn-growing plain of Acre for in those days, and during all his lifetime, money flowed in from Persia to support the exiles, money enough to permit of Beha’s organising an army of missionaries both in Persia and in India. These missionaries met, and still meet, with success. “To north Persia,” said a Beha’i, “the Europeans have sent out many missions to convert the Jews. How many have they converted? Not one. All the converts among the Jews are ours, and to us many hundred have turned.” A Hindu from Lahore who had become a Babi in India and journeyed out to Acre to receive the doctrine at the fountain head, stated that the faith prospered in his country. “My wife I left and my children in Lahore,” he explained. “It is two years since I saw them, but news reaches me by the post. First, I opened a shop in Alexandria, then having made sufficient money I came here to witness to the truth. After some time I shall return, for in my city we are many.” The printing press of the sect is in Bombay. The holy books amount to some hundred, exclusively the work of Beha. They are written in Arabic and Persian, the style of them being pure and beautiful, but singularly original. For Beha was an educated Persian gentleman, unlike the Bab who was too illiterate to write Arabic correctly, which defect he explained by saying that he had come to release all creation, animate and inanimate, from the bonds which sin had laid upon it, including letters, which were henceforth to be free from the rules of grammar and orthography.

-Gertrude Bell and the Babi and Baha'i Faith, Jamileh Yazdi