Judeo-Persian refers to both a group of Jewish dialects spoken by the Jews living in Iran and Judeo-Persian texts. As a collective term, Judeo-Persian refers to a number of Judeo-Iranian languages spoken by Jewish communities throughout the formerly extensive Persian Empire. The speakers refer to their language as Fārsi. Some non-Jews refer to it as "dzhidi", which means "Jewish" in a derogatory sense. Judeo-Persian is basically the Persian language written in Hebrew Alphabet. However, it is often confused with other Judeo-Iranian languages and dialects spoken by the Iranian Jewish communities, such as Judeo-Shirazi, Judeo-Hamadani and Judeo-Kashani.
The earliest evidence of the entrance of Persian words into the language of the Israelites is found in the Bible. The post-exilic portions, Hebrew as well as Aramaic, contain besides many Persian proper names and titles, a number of nouns, such as dat = "law", genez = "treasure", pardes = "park", which came into permanent use at the time of the Achaemenid Empire. More than five hundred years after the end of that dynasty, the Jews of the Babylonian diaspora again came under the dominion of the Persians; and among such Jews the Persian language held a position similar to that held by the Greek language among the Jews of the West. Persian became to a great extent the language of everyday life among the Jews of Babylonia; and a hundred years after the conquest of that country by the Sassanids, an amora of Pumbedita, Rab Joseph, declared that the Babylonian Jews had no right to speak Aramaic, and should instead use either Hebrew or Persian. Aramaic, however, remained the language of the Jews in Israel as well as of those in Babylonia, although in the latter country a large number of Persian words found their way into the language of daily intercourse and into that of the schools, a fact which is attested by the numerous Persian derivatives in the Babylonian Talmud. But in the Aramaic Targum there are very few Persian words, because after the middle of the third century the Targumim on the Pentateuch and the Prophets were accepted as authoritative and received a fixed textual form in the Babylonian schools. In this way they were protected from the introduction of Persian elements.
Literature
There is an extensive Judeo-Persian poetic religious literature, closely modeled on classical Persian poetry. The most famous poet was Mowlānā Shāhin-i Shirāzi, who composed epic versifications of parts of the Bible, such as the Musā-nāmah ; later poets composed lyric poetry of a Sufi cast. Much of this literature was collected around the beginning of the twentieth century by the ּּBukharian rabbi Shimon Hakham, who founded a printing press in Israel.
Sheshom Dar : A poem read on the festival of Shavuot detailing the commandments, based on the Azharot literature
Shira-ye Hatani, or Shira, often beginning with the words "Shodi hātān mobarak bād" : Verses sung at weddings and festive occasions. Originally composed for the groom during the Shabbat Hatan
