Lev Nussimbaum (October 17, 1905 – August 27, 1942), who wrote under the pen names Essad Bey and Kurban Said, was a writer and journalist, born in Kiev to a Jewish family.

In 1922, while living in Germany, he obtained a certificate claiming that he had converted to Islam in the presence of the imam of the Turkish embassy in Berlin.

[2] He created a niche for himself in the competitive European literary world by writing about topics that Westerners, in general, knew little about - the Caucasus,[3] the Russian Empire,[4] the Bolshevik Revolution,[5] newly discovered oil,[6] and Islam.

[8] Today, historians disregard books published under this name and rarely quote him, though the topics Essad Bey chose to write about are still critically relevant.

[24] By the early 1930s, Essad Bey had become a popular author throughout Western Europe, writing mainly about contemporary historical and political issues.

It is possible that Essad Bey denied his Jewish ancestry to doctors who were treating him, which led to the misdiagnosis of Raynaud's instead of Buerger's.

Writing about his childhood in Azerbaijan, he notes the emotional response he had in looking at the old palaces in Baku: I saw the broad expanse of the sandy Arabian desert, I saw the horsemen, their snow-white burnooses billowing in the wind, I saw the flocks of prophets praying towards Mecca and I wanted to be one with this wall, one with this desert, one with this incomprehensible, intricate script, one with the entire Islamic Orient, which in our Baku had been so ceremoniously carried to the grave, to the victorious drumbeats of European culture....

[34] (2) However, later accounts circulated that Essad Bey did not convert to Islam but simply reclaimed his religious identity since he had been born a Muslim.

[36] In 1924 in Berlin, Nussimbaum helped found an Islamic student group Islamia, where he met other Muslims: Arabs, Turks, Iranians, Afghans and Indians, as well as converts like himself.

In 1930, Mohammed Hoffman, a member of Islamia and himself a convert to Islam, accused Nussimbaum of trying "to pass for a born Muslim" and suggesting that his conversion was merely a ploy.

In 1934 the New York Herald Tribune ran a profile of Essad Bey which described him as an irreverent Muslim who "carries no prayer rug; he fails to salute Mecca when he prays... eats pigs and drinks wine; yet when he came to be married in Berlin he refused to abjure his creed.

"[40] A scathing review of Essad Bey's biography Mohammed expressed doubt that the author "had ever read the Quran, either in the original or in translation."

"[41] Despite Nussimbaum's being an ethnic Jew, his monarchist and anti-Bolshevik politics were such that, before his origins were discovered, the Nazi propaganda ministry included his works on their list of "excellent books for German minds".

[18] Among the works credited to him are early biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Czar Nicholas II, Mohammed, the Prophet; and Reza Shah of Iran.

[42] Essad Bey's works, many of which he claimed were biographies, are discredited by historians and literary critics and rarely referenced today except to note how unreliable they are.

[43] Tom Reiss attributes the 1937 novel Ali and Nino: A Love Story, published under the pseudonym Kurban Said, to Lev Nussimbaum.

[46] They also note that Nussimbaum left the Caucasus when he was only 14 years old [47] and that he boasted that he was a Monarchist, although the novel expresses the views of someone who sought the independence of Azerbaijan.

Blair argues, in contrast, that Ali and Nino is a "nationalist" book in a broader, non-communalist sense, since the novel is essentially about Azerbaijan's independence.