There have been few efforts to examine the lives, and especially the religious experiences, of ordinary Iranians especially those belonging to non-Muslim communities. Standard Qajar chronicles leave out non-Muslims in the official narrative and are mostly concerned with the lives of the elite. Few Jews have written accounts of their own life experiences in this period. However, the experience of conversion among Jews seems to have engendered a new sense of self-awareness and an urgency to share what a number of converts saw as their personal transformation. Their unconventional accounts fill an important gap in the existing historical sources for this period of Iranian history. This paper is inspired by memoirs of Rayhan Rayhani (1859-1943), an orphan from Kashan who became a Jewish peddler and later underwent a religious transformation when he converted to the Baha'i faith. His memoir, written with a keen historical insight, gives voice to the experience of a disadvantaged, marginalized, and evolving Jewish community. Being self-educated, his memoir may lack in style and sophistication. But its rawness also makes him more transparent. As a Jew branded as ritually "impure" by Shi`i law, Rayhani illustrates the often invisible experience of the "Other," who also carried the burden of being "unwanted." His account is a refreshing view of history from below. It tells the story of commoners who struggled to survive in a harsh environment of instability, war, and economic decline and who struggled for improvement in spite of overwhelming traditional obstacles. The fascinating picture Rayhani draws of the undercurrents of life in Iran challenges conventional notions of rigid social and religious barriers. His testimony gives insight into a life wherein, as a matter of survival, identities had to be both resilient and negotiable. His story reflects the complexity and prevalence of the conversion process and its interaction with a range of factors including Iran's social and political changes of the late Qajar period and a rise in messianic expectations, especially among Jews. For Baha'is, Rayhani's life was a period that began with fluid identities and ended with doctrinal and communal consolidation. He started out as what can be called a "Judeo-Sufi" Baha'i and ended up with a mainstream Baha'i identity, a notion defined in his lifetime.