Khvaja Bukharai

Origins and early life

Khvaja Bukharai was a Jewish poet of Bukhara in Central Asia, writing in Judeo-Persian, the Persian language in Hebrew letters that was the literary tongue of the Jews of Iran and Transoxiana; he was a Jew, remained one, and composed for a Jewish audience.

Work and career

In 1606 he completed the Daniyal-nama, the Book of Daniel, an epic of 2,175 couplets in the classical Persian masnavi form, based on the biblical book, on the apocryphal additions such as Susanna and Bel and the Dragon, on the midrashim, and on Saadia Gaon's calculations concerning the coming of the Messiah. He wrote in the manner of the two great Judeo-Persian poets who preceded him, Shahin of Shiraz and Imrani, taking the metre and the imagery of Firdausi and Nizami and turning them to the sacred history of Israel, so that Daniel in the lions' den is told with the vocabulary of Persian epic.

The poem is apparently the earliest named and dated work of Bukharan Jewish literature, and it matters for two reasons: it shows that a Jewish literary culture in Persian existed in Central Asia at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and it preserves, in its messianic passages, what the Jews of Bukhara hoped for. It was copied, re-edited and expanded by later hands, and manuscripts survive in Jerusalem, St Petersburg and New York.

Almost nothing is known of the man himself beyond his name and the date of his poem, and this fiche does not invent what the sources do not give.