© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/18747167-bja10006 brill.com/jps Journal of persianate studies 13 (2020) 146–195 Joseph and His Two Wives: Patterns of Cultural Accommodation in the Judæo-Persian Tale of Yusof and Zoleykhā Julia Rubanovich Senior Lecture in Persian Language and Literature, Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel Rubanovich.Julia@mail.huji.ac.il Abstract The Tale of Yusof and Zoleykhā appears as part of a religious epic poem, the Bereshit- nāma (Book of Genesis), by the fourteenth-century Judæo-Persian poet Shāhin. Composed in 1358/9, in classical Persian with an admixture of Hebraisms and writ- ten in Hebrew characters, this tale was enormously popular within Persian-speaking Jewish communities and was frequently copied on its own. The paper focuses on two episodes from this story: Yusof’s marriages to Zoleykhā and to Osnat (Asenath). Shāhin was active in the late Il-khanid and early post-Mongol periods, when new forms of patronage of literary and artistic production emerged seeking to blend different cul- tural worlds. The poet indeed fashioned unique amalgams of Jewish and Perso-Islamic traditions, both in form and content. The two episodes constitute small case studies for exploring Shāhin’s diverse array of sources and for determining the thematic and struc- tural ramifications of this fusion. The paper pinpoints how Shāhin accommodated and adapted Jewish and Islamic materials and demonstrates that, though Jewish, the poet firmly ensconces himself in a Persianate cultural sphere. Keywords classical Judæo-Persian literature – Shāhin – mathnavi – Bereshit-nāma (Book of Genesis) – tale of Yusof and Zoleykhā – Yusef-o Zoleykhā by Pseudo-Ferdowsi – tafsir – qesas al-anbeyāʾ – Jewish acculturation under the Il-khanids – source analysis – text edition