The Jewish Ḥāfeẓ: Classical New Persian Literature in the Judeo-Persian Garšūni Literary Tradition

Abstract

Abstract The immensity of the corpus and diversity of genres of Classical New Persian in Judeo-Persian garb is remarkable, comprising a wide-ranging multitude of genres from translations of the Tanakh and rabbinic works to chronicles, lexicographies, religious poetry, translations of medieval Hebrew poems, and a large corpus of non-Jewish Classical Persian literature transcribed in Hebrew script. Yet, Judeo-Persian literary corpora remain incompletely catalogued as well as unsatisfactorily studied. While detailed studies of the genres of Judeo-Persian literature-in-transcription, as well as comparisons with literature in the common Perso-Arabic script, are still desiderata, this article aims to undertake a preliminary survey of the extant Judeo-Persian versions of the Dīvān of Šams od-Dīn Moḥammad Ḥāfeẓ of Shiraz (d. 792/1390) and address some contextual aspects of its popularity among Iranian Jewry.