Shahin Shirazi

Origins and early life

Shahin Shirazi, called Mowlana Shahin, was a Jewish poet of Shiraz who wrote in Judaeo-Persian, that is Persian in Hebrew characters, and who worked under the Ilkhan Abu Said Bahadur Khan between 1316 and 1335, a contemporary of Hafez in the same city.

Work and career

He remained a Jew and wrote for and about his community; the Encyclopaedia Iranica counts him, with his successor Emrani, as one of the two greatest poets of Judaeo-Persian literature. Almost nothing personal is known of him, and even Shahin, which means falcon, may be a pen name rather than his given name, an uncertainty this fiche states rather than hides; it touches his biography alone, not his authorship or his Jewishness, which are firmly established.

His achievement was to render the Hebrew Bible into the metre and idiom of the classical Persian epic: the Musa-nama of 1327, roughly ten thousand couplets covering Exodus to Deuteronomy; the Bereshit-nama on Genesis, from about 1358; and the Ardashir-nama, an epic on the Book of Esther that fuses the biblical narrative with the Iranian national tradition, modelled on the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, which has earned him the modern nickname of the Jewish Ferdowsi.

His poems were copied, illustrated and recited in the Jewish communities of Iran, Bukhara and Afghanistan for centuries, and illuminated manuscripts of them survive in major collections. He is the founding figure of a literature written in Persian and Hebrew script at once.