This late seventeenth-century manuscript contains a full copy of the text of the Ardashīr-nāmah (The Tale of Esther), an epic poem by the fourteenth-century Jewish Persian writer Shāhīn-i Shīrāzī…
Not in vain did I vow to be faithful,
not in vain did I tag at your heels.
With the mole I struggled from darkness,
stubborn and under a spell.
You, grief of the nails on my fingers,
you, woe of my…
According to the colophon, the scribe in Prague who produced the Klausen Book of Psalms, Shabbetai Sheftel ben Zalman Auerbach (d. 1738), was descended from a family expelled from Vienna in 1669/70…