Mowlānā Shāhīn of Shiraz מוֹלַאנָא שָׁאהִין

Fourteenth century, Shiraz—the city of Hafez and Saʿdi, and that is not decoration but explanation: Judeo-Persian poetry grew in the same urban literary environment and by the same rules of prosody.

Shāhīn is the founder of the Judeo-Persian epic. His poems—the Musā-nāma (on Moses), the Ardashīr-nāma, the Bereshit-nāma—recast the narrative of the Torah in Persian epic verse, in the metre and with the devices of Firdawsī's Shāhnāma. This is neither translation nor paraphrase: it is the Torah told by the means of Persian epic poetry, with its battles, councils, loves and reversals of fortune.

Why it matters. Judeo-Persian literature is a large independent corpus almost unknown in general Jewish awareness: after Shāhīn come ʿImrānī, Ḥājjī Yosef of Kashan, and the later verse chronicles such as Bābāʾī ben Loṭf's Kitāb-i Anusī, in which even a chronicle of persecutions is written in verse—because for Judeo-Persian letters verse is the ordinary form, not a special one. Vera Moreen's anthology In Queen Esther's Garden is the best way into this corpus in English.

And one more thing, about the language. Judeo-Persian is not a jargon and not a cipher: it is the Persian language written in Hebrew script, with regional varieties (Judeo-Isfahani, Judeo-Shirazi, Judeo-Hamadani, Judeo-Yazdi). Its oldest document is the merchant's letter from Dandan-Uiliq near Khotan, around 781–790. This literature has six centuries of written habit behind it by the time Shāhīn sits down to write an epic.