Solomon Gozlan wrote poetry in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, and both languages together, and is only known through the acrostic signatures of his poems. He lived in southern Morocco, in the Draa region, and perhaps in the western Algerian city of Oran in the second half of the eighteenth century and early in the nineteenth. By his own testimony, he taught young children in the Tamgrut region and composed talismans.

Gozlan was the first Jewish poet in North Africa to write most of his work in spoken Judeo-Arabic and to address the living conditions and problems of peop…