Lev Nussimbaum

Other critics, however, maintain that the book is partially plagiarized. They suggest that it was adapted by Nussimbaum from an earlier manuscript. A 2011 issue of Azerbaijan International re-opened the issue of the authorship of Ali and Nino. The primary author featured in this issue, Betty Blair, states that "we are convinced" that the book was written mostly by Azerbaijani author Yusif Vazir Chamanzaminli, though they also offer evidence that Nussimbaum wrote at least some portions of the book.

In 1938, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria, Nussimbaum fled to Italy and settled in the seacoast town of Positano. He died there of a rare blood disorder which causes gangrene of the extremities. This was most likely Buerger's disease, which is known to afflict Ashkenazi male Jews, rather than Raynaud's Disease, which is more prevalent in women. It is highly likely 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. Little was known in the early 1940s about Buerger's disease, especially that the disease could be reversed if the patient stopped smoking. Essad Bey, who was known to be a heavy smoker, died a painful death at the age of 36.

Reiss also debunks claims made by the heirs of Austrian baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels, who claimed co-authorship. Reiss acknowledges that she registered the book with German authorities in Austria after 1938, but suggests that this was because Nussimbaum could not have received money for publishing the book in Germany due to his Jewish ethnicity.

Tom Reiss attributes the 1937 novel Ali and Nino: A Love Story, published under the pseudonym Kurban Said, to Lev Nussimbaum. In his biography of Nussimbaum, The Orientalist, Reiss argues that Said was another pseudonym of Nussimbaum's, and that Ali and Nino was written by Nussimbaum.

Historians and literary critics who knew these subjects well discredited Essad Bey as a reliable source. 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. The fact that Essad Bey was so prolific calls into question the authorship of these books and whether Essad Bey was primarily operating as a broker and doctoring manuscripts and marketing them under his pseudonym, which had become famous. In 1934, his agent Werner Schendell [de] warned him to slow down and take a year off between books so that he would not appear to be so prolific. That year no books were published in German – only two novellas in Polish.

In 1932, Essad Bey married Erika Loewendahl, daughter of shoe magnate Walter Loewendahl. The marriage failed, ending in scandal. Erika ran off in 1935 with Nussimbaum's colleague René Fülöp-Miller. Erika's parents, who were wealthy, succeeded in getting the marriage to Nussimbaum annulled in 1937.

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". Among the works credited to him are early biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Czar Nicholas II, Mohammed, the Prophet; and Reza Shah of Iran. All of these biographies were allegedly written between 1932 and 1936. At one point, Nussimbaum was requested to write an official biography of Benito Mussolini. 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.

Politically, Essad Bey was a monarchist. In 1931, he joined the German-Russian League Against Bolshevism, the members of which, Daniel Lazare remarks, "for the most part either were Nazis or soon would be". He joined the Social Monarchist Party, which advocated restoration of Germany's Hohenzollern dynasty. He also had connections to the pre-fascistic Young Russian movement, headed by Alexander Kazembek.

Lev Nussimbaum, as Essad Bey, wrote his first book Oel und Blut im Orient (Blood and Oil in the Orient) in German in 1929. Although he claims that his account was autobiographical, historians in Azerbaijan and Georgia discount this claim, as there are many major factual errors in the historical description. Essad Bey describes his delight when, at the age of 14, he and his father left Azerbaijan. In the final passage of the book, he writes: "At that moment, Europe began for me. The Old East was dead."

In 1926, he began writing under the pen name of Essad Bey for the literary journal Die literarische Welt (The Literary World). At least 120 articles were published under this name. By the early 1930s, Essad Bey had become a popular author throughout Western Europe, writing mainly about contemporary historical and political issues.

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. They "spoke out about the wretched situation of Muslims in the colonial world." However, some Muslims objected to the way Nussimbaum depicted Islam in his writings, accusing him of Orientalism and of not being a "real" Muslim. 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. As a result of this and similar accusations, Nussimbaum stopped attending Islamia meetings; however, he never renounced Islam or distanced himself from it. 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."

(1) When Essad Bey was 17 years old, he officially obtained a certificate of conversion as "document of proof" in a declaration to Imam Hafiz Shuku (1871-1924) of the former Ottoman Embassy in Berlin on August 13, 1922.

They purportedly boarded a ship bound for Istanbul, where thousands of refugees had fled. Nussimbaum eventually settled in Berlin (1921–1933), where he enrolled simultaneously in high school and in Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität. He did not graduate from either school, but told people that he had received a Cand. Phil. degree.

In 1918, Lev and his father temporarily fled Baku because of the massacres that were taking place in the streets between different political forces. According to Essad Bey's first book, Blood and Oil in the Orient, which historians do not consider to be very reliable, the two travelled through Turkestan and Persia. Researchers have found no record of this adventurous journey except in Nussimbaum's own writings. Nussimbaum and his father returned to Baku, but when the Bolsheviks took Baku in the spring of 1920, they fled to Georgia. They stayed there until the Bolsheviks took Tiflis and Batumi.

His father, Abraam Leybusovich Nussimbaum, was a Jew from Tiflis, in present-day Georgia, born in 1875. He later migrated to Baku and invested in oil. His mother, Berta Basya Davidovna Slutzkin Nussimbaum according to her marriage certificate, was a Jew from Belarus. She committed suicide on February 16, 1911 in Baku when Nussimbaum was five years old. Apparently, she had embraced left-wing politics and was possibly involved in the underground Communist movement. Nussimbaum's father hired Alice Schulte, a woman of German ethnicity, to be his son's governess.

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. He lived there and in Baku during his childhood before fleeing the Bolsheviks in 1920 at the age of 14. 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. 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, the Russian Empire, the Bolshevik Revolution, newly discovered oil, and Islam. He wrote under the name of Essad Bey in German.

Lev Nussimbaum was born in October 1905. He claimed that he was born in a train. Documents in the Kyiv State Archives and the Kyiv Synagogue state that Lev Nussimbaum was born in Kiev. Nussimbaum's birth was originally registered in the Kyiv Synagogue.