Part I Antiquity to the Middle Ages: An Iranic Locale, Outside Views -- 1. Mazdak, Mazdakism, and the Mazdakite Parenthesis in Sasanian History -- 2. “Ḥiwi” (Ḥəyyawi) of Balkh -- 3. Poor Pharaoh, Wicked Moses: The “Letter of Haman” — A Rabbinic Parody of Anti-Jewish Counter-History -- Part II Modern Contexts: Otherworldly Counter-Biography of the Other and the “Enemy Within” -- 4. Haim Vital, Founders of Other Faiths, and the Censors Nicholas I -- 5. Moses Mendelssohn, Hartwig Wessely, and Fear of the Haskalah.

Counter-hagiography and counter-biography besmirch foundational figures held dear by different religious, political, or social groups. Such phenomena figure prominently in the history of religion and conflicts. For example, what we know of the Mazdakite revolution in pre-Islamic Iran/Iraq comes from revilers. The anti-Judaic polemicist from ninth-century Afghanistan and Iraq, Hiwi (“Snake”), was actually called Ḥəyyāwī (still a name among Iraqi Jews). The reputation of the great Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) thinker Moses Mendelssohn was damaged among the Orthodox by how Haskalah extremists portrayed him in their image. In 1869, a Genoan politician, Cesare Cabella, fulminated against Esther and Mordecai. In the Letter of Haman in rabbinic homiletics, Jews parodized hostile representations of their sacred history. Gerson Rosenzweig parroted in his 1892 talmudic-style Tractate America, anti-immigrant rhetoric from New York newspapers. Roman-age rabbis responded to claims about the protagonist of the Book of Joshua, “Joshua the Robber” as per a North African inscription early Byzantine Procopius of Caesarea alleged to have seen.