[1] The event was first described in Joseph Wolff's 1845 travelogue "Narrative of a mission to Bokhara", in which he wrote: On Monday, the 11th of March, I arrived at Askerea, two miles distant from Meshed.
The first who came to meet me was Mullah Mehdee (Meshiakh), the Jew with whom I had lodged twelve years ago, and who treated me most hospitably when in distress and misery and poverty, previous to the arrival of Abbas Mirza at Meshed, from Nishapoor.
[3] Still another narrative reports that the dog was only a pretext and the conflict was because of earlier confrontations between a Sayyid (descendant of Muhammad) and the Jews who did not want to pay him for the husainia he built near the Jewish commercial shops.
With knives held to their throats, the Jewish patriarchs were forced to vocally proclaim their "allegiance" to Islam as it was agreed upon by the leaders of the community that in order to save the remaining 2,400 Jews, everyone must convert.
This fact in addition to recent withdrawal of Iran from Herat in 1838 under diplomatic pressure from the British government, created an increasingly hostile atmosphere towards the Jews in Mashhad.
[1] Few years after the incident with the intervention of Moses Montefiore the head of British Jewry at the time, Jews were allowed by Muhammad Shah's decree to return to Judaism.
[7] A group of Persian Jewish refugees from Mashhad, escaping persecution back home in Qajar Persia, settled in the Sikh Empire around the year 1839.
After World War II, most of them settled in Tehran, Israel, or New York City,[12] with 4,000 moving to the United States, where many ran successful jewelry and carpet businesses.