Moses ben Samuel of Damascus (Moses ben Samuel ha-Ṣefati), a native of Safed in Palestine, was a Karaite poet. In the mid-fourteenth century he moved from Safed to Damascus and became  chief secretary (Ar. kātib) of the local Mamluk emir, managing his private estates in Syria and Palestine. Sultan al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ’s 1354 decree imposing discriminatory restrictions on Jews with regard to dress (see ghiyār ), housing, and mounts and banning them from government service (trans. in Stillman, 1979) led to an accusation of blasphemy against Moses ben Samuel, but he escaped the d…