Machine summary:
l+ ' THE PARTICIPATION OF JEWS The available Persian sources permit us to recognize that the court of Akbar was "a veritable assemblage of the wise of every religion and sect, where everyone brought forward seriously the assertions and con• tentions of his belief.
!? An even more detailed account of such disputa• tions with Jews participating can be derived from the famous Persian book on comparative religions called "Dabistan," which mirrors many of the events of Akbar's time.
A further testimony confirming the actual presence of Jews in the Moghul empire at the time of Akbar is found in a remarkable letter of a Hindu Maratha ruler, by the name of Shivaji (1627-80), to Aurangzeb, the Moghul emperor in the middle of the seventeenth century,· whose intolerance towards non-Muslim subjects Shivaji strongly denounced as follows : "The architect of the fabric of the empire, Akbar, reigned with full power for fifty-two lunar years.
the famous Muslim scholar, al-Biruni who in his book on India reports :-50 "In former times the inhabitants of Kashmir used to allow one or two foreigners to enter their country, particularly Jews, but at present they do not allow any Hindus whom they do not know personally to enter, much less other people.
the scantiness of information concerning the economic and cultural-" structure of these· Jewish newcomers from Persia to Moghul India-be it Lahore, Agra, Kashmir or elsewhere-it is amongst them that we must look for those learned Persian-speaking Jews who participated in the discussions and disputations at the court of Akbar.