Moses Dar‘ī

Moses ben Abraham Dar‘ī was a poet whose family apparently hailed from Dra‘, Morocco. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, into a Rabbanite family, Dar‘ī moved to Fātimid Fustāt (Old Cairo), where he worked as a physician. He joined the Karaites in his youth and in his writing frequently asserts his Karaite allegiances. More than five hundred of his Hebrew poems are extant, collected in a dīwān (anthology) dated to 1163 or 1171, which he called The Garden of Flowers of Qasīdas and Poems (Firdaws azhār al-qaṣā’id wa-’l-ash‘ār), and a supplement to it. He adopted many Andalusi forms in both religious and secular poetry, which included love and wine songs, riddles, poems for holidays, poems about his own Karaism, and more.