Three Judeo-Persian Contributions

Three Judeo-Persian texts are presented in this article. The first and the longest is the Scroll of Antiochus, one of the para-Biblical Apocrypha, in a Judeo-Persian translation made around 1600 in Lār from a vorlage in Medieval "Biblical Hebrew,"which was, more likely, a European print or a handwritten copy of such a print (a handwritten copy from Constantinople 1504/5?). The second text is a short fragment from a pseudo-historical composition written in Early Judeo-Persian, in 947/8CE in Afghanistan, with a style very similar to Seder Olam. This text is useful because it clarifies a critical point of the traditional Jewish chronology that appears in the Scroll of Antiochus. The third text is a fragment from an 18th or 19th century guide for disputation against Muslim claims, which used Arabic Quranic verses recorded in Hebrew characters and reflected the Persian pronunciation of Arabic.