Between the 17th and 19th centuries, a little-known literary and artistic tradition reached its peak in Persia: the production and illustration of Judeo-Persian manuscripts. Texts generally fall into two categories: Hebrew transliterations of great Persian literary works, on the one hand; and original Judeo-Persian poetic compositions, on the other. The language used in these works is a dialect of Persian heavily influenced by Hebrew and Aramaic and written using the Hebrew alphabet. The manuscript shown here, dating to the late 17th or early 18th century, is a copy of the Fath Nama (“Book of Conquest”), originally written around 1474 by […]
