A Matter of Geography: A New Perspective on Medieval Hebrew Poetry by Uriah Kfir

Reviewed by: A Matter of Geography: A New Perspective on Medieval Hebrew Poetry by Uriah Kfir Jonathan Decter Uriah Kfir. A Matter of Geography: A New Perspective on Medieval Hebrew Poetry. Leiden: Brill, 2018. 164 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000187 "The Hidden Praises of Time Have I Seen" is a panegyric by a poet named Pinḥas, a rival of the more famous Todros Halevi Abulafia (1247–d. after 1298), in honor of Don Çag Yiẓḥak ben Ẓadok, a courtier in the service of Alfonso X of Castile. The poem opens with a fictional poetic speaker recounting a "prophetic" vision, a gathering in which poets come from all directions to boast over their specific locales. After the representatives of the East, North, and South speak, they call for the prince of the West, but no one answers until Pinḥas himself steps forth and boasts of its qualities. The participants "whisper to one another about [End Page 214] the one for whom kingship is fitting" until Time (i.e., Fate) interjects, "What have I to do with North, East, and South? The West have I acquired! / Behold, my seal and its cord [Genesis 38:18] are yours; the mark of dominion have I set upon your beloved's forehead." The "beloved," of course, refers to the addressee of the poem, Don Çag Yiẓḥak ben Ẓadok. Pinḥas's masterful poem participates in a discourse of post-Andalusian Hebrew poetry that centered on geography, a subject of cultural import after the period of the great Hebrew poets of al-Andalus (Samuel ha-Nagid, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Judah Halevi, etc.) had come to a close. Clearly for Pinḥas, the West (which meant Spain from a Mediterranean perspective) could claim superiority over other regions, and here the claims of poetic accomplishment and political legitimacy dovetail poignantly. The recent book by Uriah Kfir, based on a Hebrew doctoral dissertation (Tel Aviv University), provides an in-depth view of the fascinating dynamics of geographic debate in Andalusian and post-Andalusian Hebrew literature. (The dissertation also offers critical editions of many of the texts discussed.) The approach departs from existing scholarship in that previous scholars (with a few exceptions) have thought more in terms of literary development across geography rather than the way in which geography itself functions as a topic within medieval Hebrew literature. Rather than focusing on the degree to which post-Andalusian poets depended on, selectively absorbed, or departed from Andalusian literary conventions, Kfir investigates the cultural tensions of place, wherein al-Andalus and later Christian Iberia functioned as a "center" with a venerated literary tradition, while other locales—including Italy, Provence, Egypt, and Iraq—functioned as its "periphery." In approaching the corpus in this way, Kfir reads through prisms that have been employed fruitfully in postcolonial theory in Europe and the United States, including within the field of modern Hebrew literature. The book is divided into two main sections, the first of which deals with the Iberian "center" from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries. Here Kfir discerns a four-part process ("distinction, amplification, promotion, and preservation") by which the hegemonic claims of the earliest generations of Andalusian poets are reproduced by authors of Christian Iberia for the retention of hegemony in the face of rising Hebrew centers in Provence and the Islamic East. Kfir first shows how the great poets of what has been termed the Golden Age of Hebrew poetry in al-Andalus promoted the primacy of the Jewish culture of the Islamic West. Thus Samuel ha-Nagid asserted not only his literary prowess but also his independence from Hai Gaon of Baghdad in legal matters. Andalusian Jews represented themselves as the descendants of Jerusalem exiles, hence claimants of pure Hebrew speech, and also as the inheritors of Eastern geonic authority. Hebrew authors of Christian Iberia, though they departed from their predecessors in significant ways, could make the case for continuing the Andalusian tradition most easily and represent their superiority not as a matter of mere emulation but rather as one of innate ability. The second part of the book presents a series of case studies of authors from Iraq, Egypt, Italy, and Provence during the thirteenth...

Arabic and Hebrew poets used homonyms as ornaments in their writings. The use of homonyms eventually gave rise to a new literary genre in medieval Hebrew poetry in Spain with Moshe ibn Ezra's Sefer ha-'anak and continued in the East in the thirteenth century. It reappeared many years later in the sixteenth century in Turkey. This chapter deals with the various collections of homonyms written in Medieval Spain and in the East. It describes the many forms of structure that order these collections and explains the different means poets used to create these homonyms. The chapter tries to answer the questions: Why did all these Hebrew poets go to so much trouble to compose collections of homonyms, and why did they devote so much effort to enhancing and diversifying the structure of these collections?. Keywords: Arabic poets; Hebrew poets; medieval Hebrew poetry; medieval Spain; Moshe ibn Ezra; Spain

Gender Studies and Medieval Hebrew Poetry Matti Huss Tova Rosen . Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, xvi + 264 pp. 1 Tova Rosen's Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature is a significant contribution to the field and one that has far-reaching implications for the way we read both the secular and liturgical works of the Hebrew Middle Ages. It is also the first work of its kind: an extensive study of medieval Hebrew literature done from the perspective of gender studies. Rosen's detailed readings take us from the secular and liturgical poetry of the Andalusian period (Muslim Spain, 950-1150) through the rhymed narratives and the secular poetry of various literary schools of the Christian-Spanish era (c. 1200-1497). To this rich mix, Rosen adds an important element from the Hebrew-Italian school of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries: the Mahbarot (rhymed narratives) of Immanuel of Rome. In her first chapter, "No-Woman's-Land: Medieval Hebrew Literature and Feminist Criticism," Rosen presents the historical and literary background of the period as well as the theoretical and methodological assumptions on which she bases her readings. She follows these with a gender-oriented outline that enables the reader to comprehend the principal contours of the diverse body of texts that she investigates. In the seven subsequent chapters, she offers close readings that focus on different aspects of this outline. Some chapters deal with a single work (chapter 5), and others investigate a group of texts (chapters 3, 6, 7, and 8) or analyze the features of an entire genre from a feminist perspective (chapters 2 and 4). In the course of her detailed discussion of these aspects, Rosen meticulously unearths the [End Page 369] complicated textual network that surrounds them. She directs our attention to correlate texts and echoes of texts from Hebrew, Arabic, and European contemporary literary systems. 2 The main criterion guiding Rosen in the process of constructing the outline with which she opens her book is a detailed analysis of the ways in which the binary opposition between women's speech and women's silence is molded in poems and rhymed narratives of various genres. Rosen's decision to focus on this specific opposition is, of course, not accidental. The contrary values given to feminine speech and silence occupy a central position in patriarchal thought throughout the ages. The projection of this contrast on secular and liturgical Andalusian poetry—and on the rhymed narratives written mainly in Christian Spain—proves efficacious and reveals major generic features that traditional genre analysis overlooked entirely or whose significance it failed to appreciate. For example, Rosen shows how three out of four of the central features of the beloved in the Andalusian love lyric—her beauty, her cruelty, the existential threat to which she exposes her lovers, and her powerful silence—are transformed radically in the erotic epithalamia by poets of the period. The silence of the beautiful beloved, which is the ultimate metonymy of her continuous rejection of the lovers' advances, is in these epithalamia replaced by the erotic speech of the bride directed to the bridegroom—a speech act that signals the commencement of their sexual relations. Correspondingly, misogynic elements typical of the silent beloved in love lyrics are deprived in the wedding poems of their devastating demonic power. But this happens only after they are explicitly displayed in the text. For example, the bride in Judah Halevi's "Halo ala" tries to calm the frightened bridegroom. She informs him that he should not be afraid of the metaphoric snakes curling in her hair because they are not meant to harm but only to arouse him: "And if you see my snake in the garden bed of my cheeks / approach, do not be frightened, I have placed him there to entice you."1 These same metaphoric snakes appear in the conventional love lyric as guardians whose function is to deter the lover from even daring to [End Page 370] approach the beloved. One should, of course, suspect the integrity of these disavowals in the erotic epithalamia even if they are spoken by the bride and...

Hebrew Studies 41 (2000) 343 Reviews the English reader nothing except that the work's title has been translated into English (there is no translation of poetry, no analysis in English and often no English abstract). Thus the reader unfamiliar with Hebrew learns little except that an unapproachable work has been written. If the aim of the bibliography is to include works for readers of Hebrew, then why exclude the vast corpus of Hebrew scholarship lacking translated titles? More useful would be a complete bibliography of Ibn Gabirol's poetry with search indices in Hebrew and English. Goldberg's bibliography is intended as a "test-case" for forthcoming bibliographies on translations of poetry by other major medieval Hebrew poets such as Samuel ha-Nagid, Judah ha-Levi, and Moses Ibn Ezra. The scope of such an endeavor is truly daunting. Because the unit of study-tbe poem, or a section thereof.-is so small, compiling all references to all poems would seem a nearly intractable project. While beginning witll a single poet to be followed by other individual poets seems a logical method of progression, we must consider the ramifications for the field of medieval Hebrew literature. The approach of scholars of literature has long been to document chronologically the contributions of "great men" to Jewish intellectual history. The approach disregards the contributions of "lesser poets" and more importantly, privileges the field of Jewish history over literary studies, perpetuating the marginal status of medieval Hebrew literature (and particularly its literary study) within the scholarly canon. Still, Goldberg's bibliography is extremely thorough and is an invaluable contribution to the field, both on the levels of research and pedagogy. As we look forward to forthcoming volumes on other poets, we wonder if there are plans for updating the bibliography or digitizing the project. Jonathan P. Deeter The Jewish Theological Seminary New York. NY 10027 jodecter@jtsa.edu JEWISH POET IN MUSLIM EGYPT: MOSES DARci's HEBREW COLLECTION. By Leon J. Weinberger. pp. 43 (English) + 526 (Hebrew). Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama, 1998. Cloth, $176.00. Hebrew poetry employing Arabic prosody and dealing with themes adopted from Arabic poetry was written in all the Arabic-speaking lands Hebrew Studies 41 (2000) 344 Reviews during the great age of Judeo-Arabic civilization; it was, indeed, a key feature of that civilization. Unfortunately, the magnificent achievements of the Hebrew poets of al-Andalus in the Golden Age (tenth to twelfth centuries), as well as the enthusiasm for Spain evinced by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish scholarship of western European provenance have tended to obscure the production of Hebrew poetry in Arabic-speaking Sicily, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. One eastern diwan-that of Eleazar ben Jacob of Baghdad-bas long been available in a critical edition by H. Brody (1934/5), but not a single study of it ever seems to have been published. Portions of the diwiin of Joseph ben Tanhum Yerushalmi have been published, but this major collection of poetry and rhymed prose epistles is still far from from being available to sc~olar1y research. The works of another major Eastern Hebrew poet, Moses DarI, an Egyptian Hebrew poet of Moroccan origin who is thought to have lived in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, have only been available in selections published by S~a Pinsker in his Liqute qadmoniyot (1860) and by Davidson in articles published in 1927 and 1936. A few of his poems in English translation were included in Leon Nemoy~s Karaite Anthology, and one in Ted Canni's Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse. It is gratifying, therefore, that the bulk of DarI's dfwiin has now been edited and published with an introduction, notes, and variant readings by Leon J. Weinberger. Like the other Hebrew poets of the Judeo-Arabic sphere, Dari follows closely the traditions of the Golden Age poets, an aspect of his work highlighted by Weinberger in his English introduction. But Dari is also capable of going his own way in treating traditional themes and of inventing some new ones. Thus, in the love poetry, he refers more explicitly to sexual intercourse than we are used to from Golden...

Foreword Raymond P. Scheindlin Most of this issue of Prooftexts is devoted to a single Hebrew poem, a work that is probably the most ambitious literary endeavor undertaken by a Hebrew poet in the Middle Ages, Miqdash meʿat by Moses da Rieti (1388-c. 1460). Begun in 1416 and stretching over more than 130 pages in the only printed edition (edited by Jacob Goldenthal, Vienna, 1851), the work is loosely modeled on Dante's Divine Comedy, being written in terza rima, divided into three parts made up of cantos (the third part is missing and may never have been composed), and including glimpses of unseen worlds as well as digests of philosophical, scientific, and religious lore. It may be described as an attempt to provide a broad view of the nature of the Jewish religion in a philosophical and kabbalistic vein, through visions, prayers, surveys of Jewish literary history, and epitomes of philosophical systems. Although it is often referred to in scholarly writing on medieval Hebrew literature, intellectual history, and philosophy, Miqdash meʿat is virtually unknown and practically inaccessible. Yet its importance and literary quality have been recognized in the past, as is attested by the numerous manuscripts in which it has been transmitted and by the fact that one of its cantos was used as a prayer in Italian synagogues and was early translated into Italian. Its importance has occasionally been recognized by moderns as well: two selections were included in T. Carmi's Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, and Dan Pagis, in private conversation, is said to have called Rieti a "poetic genius." Yet until the appearance of the article "Mosheh de Rieti (xive-xve siècle): Philosophe, scientifique et poète," by Alessandro Guetta in the Revue des études juives 158 (1999), not a single study had been devoted to it since the nineteenth century. This neglect may be due to the somewhat forbidding character of the work, arising from: the unfamiliarity of Rieti's Hebrew idiom (a combination of Tibbonide Hebrew and Italian-Hebrew diction); his innovative use of a difficult rhyme scheme that was completely new in Hebrew and that necessitated a certain amount of syntactic distortion; the complicated subject [End Page 1] matter; and the fact that the text published in the nineteenth century is unvocalized and provides no commentary to guide the reader. During the past several years, Alessandro Guetta (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales), Devora Bregman (Ben-Gurion University), and the undersigned, despite living and working on three different continents, have been finding opportunities to study Miqdash meʿat together. Professor Bregman is a specialist in medieval Hebrew literature, especially of Italy; Professor Guetta is a specialist in Jewish intellectual history in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, with a particular interest in Rieti and with a specialist's familiarity with Rieti's Italian writings; and the undersigned is a specialist in Hebrew literature of the Judeo-Arabic world with a strong interest in literary translation. Our collaboration began at the Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania, where the three of us participated in a yearlong seminar (1998-99) devoted to medieval Hebrew poetry. During the summer of 2000, we put in a month of intensive work on the project together in Jerusalem. Since then, we have worked by correspondence, both electronic and conventional. Our hope was to produce an edition that would include a new and fully vocalized Hebrew text based on a complete survey of the many manuscripts, together with a commentary and a translation into English. In this issue of Prooftexts, we are presenting the first two cantos of Miqdash meʿat as a sample of our work. The division of labor was as follows: Professor Bregman took responsibility for the Hebrew text. I took notes during our deliberations in Philadelphia and Jerusalem and drafted a commentary in Hebrew, based on our discussions. This draft, as critiqued and revised by my colleagues, became the basis of the English commentary presented here. As part of the work on the commentary, I also prepared a line-by-line prose translation, which I later converted into the metrical, unrhymed translation published here...

Literature and music have a long entwined history. Since Antiquity, music and poetry (a crystalized form of “literature” or the “poetic”) have been regarded as “twin sisters,” constituting a productive source of creation and inspiration. In the Romantic era (especially German Romanticism), this affinity reached one of its peaks, as demonstrated in the emergence of symbiotic musical-poetic forms and modes of aesthetic expression. From the perspective of cultural history, however, the scope of this relationship is even wider and can be traced back to the overlap between language and music. The compatibility of music and poetry has produced a range of scholarship elaborated in various traditions of knowledge and research disciplines, including semiotics, poetics, aesthetics, musicology, cultural studies, and critical theory. It is well known that sound is a central component of both musical and verbal sign systems. What happens to this sound, however, when we read a story? Moreover, whereas the connection between sounds and poems seems obvious, as shown in the field of research called prosody, which explores various phenomena such as rhythm and alliteration, metric and intonation, the connection between sounds and prose fiction is less obvious. This article focuses on a body of works—theoretical, methodological, and textual—dedicated to the exploration of literature and music relationships in general, in order to understand the relationship between Hebrew literature (including poetry, but mainly prose fiction) and music in particular. Compared to other national literatures, such as French, English, and, above all, German, the scholarly study of Hebrew literature and music is relatively young. Central domains of this study are the employment of sound and acoustic components (i.e., prosody), the incorporation of musical intertexts (i.e., texts that are connected to the realm of music, such as musical terminology, descriptions of music playing, allusions to musical repertoire and themes), and the shaping of analogies between musical forms and narrative structures (i.e., the sonata form or the counterpoint). Hebrew literature also has a history, of course, from the Bible and other ancient texts to medieval Hebrew poetry and up to modern Hebrew and contemporary Israeli literature. Viewing these poetic traditions through the specific lens of language/literature and music relationships, an emerging field of study dealing with representations of music in modern Hebrew and Israeli prose fiction will be discussed, alongside scholarship on the relationship between Hebrew poetry and music.

The paper shows how selected late medieval Hebrew authors used their artistic work to explore their individuality. Although Medieval Arabic and Hebrew poetry used fixed patterns with many conventional elements that left little space for the poet’s individual stamp, classic Arabic poets like Abū Nuwās were able to put to use their own creativity for the expression of an individual voice. Medieval Hebrew poets took this cue. Examining the cases of Ibn Gabirol and Bonafed among others, the paper illustrates tendencies towards individual expression and reflection with some striking examples, showing that within the limits of conventions small but significant steps were taken in this corpus towards the formation of the self.

The purpose of this study is to examine the notions of "exile" (qhurba) and "nostalgia" (al-hanin ila al-Watan) in Arabic and Hebrew poetry in al-Andalus (Muslim Spain). Although this theme has been examined individually in both Arabic and Hebrew literatures, to the best of my knowledge no detailed comparative analysis has previously been undertaken. Therefore, this study sets out to compare and contrast the two literatures and cultures arising out of their co-existence in al-Andalus in the middle ages. The main characteristics of the Arabic poetry of this period are to a large extent the product of the political and social upheavals that took place in al-Andalus. Some of the cities which for many years represented the bastions of Islamic civilization were falling into the hands of the invading Christian army. This gave rise to a stream of poetry that reflects the feelings of exile and nostalgia suffered by those poets who were driven away from their native land. This Arabic poetry had a substantial influence on the literary works of the Jewish poets who were reared within the cultural circles of the Arabic courts. As a consequence the Hebrew poetry they composed, in many respects, bore the stamp of the Arabic poetry in form and content. This thesis is divided into three major parts organized as follows: the first part deals with the themes of exile and nostalgia in Arabic poetry in al-Andalus. It contains three chapters: chapter one begins with a study of the origins of the themes of exile and nostalgia in the Arabic poetic tradition. Chapter two focuses on the nostalgia and lament poetry in al-Andalus describing the characteristics of each period through examining specimens of Andalusian poems. Chapter three is devoted to a study of the poetic product of Ibn Hamdis, the Sicilian (d.1133) and discusses how the themes of exile and nostalgia became the framework of both his life and his poetry. The second part of the thesis parallels the first part in that it deals with the Hebrew poetry in al-Andalus. It consists of three chapters: chapter one investigates the origins of the concept of the homeland in the Biblical sources. Chapter two discusses the form and the structural scheme of the Hebrew poetry in al-Andalus and the influence of the Arabic poetry on the Hebrew poetic works. Chapter three is devoted to a study of the poetry of the Jewish poet, Judah ha-Levi (d.1140) and his nostalgic expressions for Zion. The third part is a comparative literary study of two specimen poems of Ibn Hamdis and ha-Levi. The aim of this study is to develop methods for an analysis of the motifs and internal structure of these two poems. The linguistic analysis is focussed mainly on the levels of phonology, morphology and syntax, while the traditional analysis is focussed primarily on the content and imagery.

This article aims at a critical examination of modern research on medieval Hebrew literature. Here, the definition of ‘medieval Hebrew literature’ excludes writing in Jewish languages other than Hebrew, and singles out literature from other types of non-literary Hebrew writing. The variety of literary types included in this survey ranges from liturgical and secular poetry to artistic storytelling and folk literature. Both early liturgical poetry (piyyut) and the medieval Hebrew story are rooted in the soil of the Talmudic period. The beginnings of medieval Hebrew storytelling were even more deeply connected to the narrative traditions of the Talmud. However, the constitutive moment of the birth of piyyut and narrative as distinct medieval genres had to do with their separation from the encyclopedic, all-embracing nature of the Talmud.

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 34, 2-3, 2009 © The Maghreb Review 2009 This publication is printed on longlife paper BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS Books reviewed in The Maghreb Review can be ordered from The Maghreb Bookshop: www.maghrebbookshop.com. Our catalogue is also available on our website. Alexander E. Elinson, Looking Back at al-Andalus. The Poetics of Loss and Nostalgia in Medieval Arabic and Hebrew Literature, Brill Studies in Middle Eastern Literatures, 34, Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2009. Raymond P. Scheindlin, The Song of the Distant Dove. Judah Halevi’s Pilgrimage, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. From the moment the Iberian Peninsula became part of the Umayyad empire, there were Muslims who left al-Andalus. Some returned, whereas others did not. Their motives for travelling and migrating were manifold: apart from making the pilgrimage to Mecca, they included commercial and educational purposes (ri˛la fı †alab al-fiilm). Many left because the political circumstances in al-Andalus had become unbearable, either under Muslim rule or – to an increasing extent since the 11th century, under the Christian reconquistadores. Andalusian Jews too left their homes for similar reasons. The sacred sites of the Holy Land drew them in a similar direction as Mecca, and so did Egypt as one of the trading hubs of the Western medieval world. Likewise, Jews were also exposed to the violence resulting from the clashes between Christians and Muslims and which drove them away, either to other parts of the Muslim world, mostly the Levant, or to the northern part of the Iberian Peninsula. Both Muslims and Jews left behind testimonies which allow us glimpses into what it may have meant for them to abandon their homeland, a homeland which for the Jews was always a place of exile. Most of the traces of emigration and displacement examined in the two books discussed here are poetical and need to be analysed as such if we want to extract from them any information regarding their authors and their historical circumstances. The subject of the first book under consideration here is nostalgic visions of al-Andalus as expressed in medieval Arabic and Hebrew poetry, analysed within a literary context. The main ambition of the study is to show how the authors, themselves sons of al-Andalus, appropriated poetical traditions which had been established centuries earlier and in the main lands of the Arabicspeaking world, in a new historical and cultural setting. 228 BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS The book begins with an introduction and is divided into four main chapters, two of which are revised versions of articles already published. A summary and an appendix with select Arabic and Hebrew texts and a bibliography are at the end. The introduction begins with the events of 1492 as the best known and perhaps also most obvious context in which nostalgic perspectives on alAndalus were articulated. Nostalgic visions of homes lost, albeit in this case not of al-Andalus, but rather expressed in al-Andalus, can be traced back to the eighth century and fiAbd al-Ra˛m!n, the Umayyad prince who famously compared himself with a palm tree ‘in the West … far from the land of palms’. The historical circumstances which generated the real losses connected with the poems discussed here were more diverse than expulsions forced upon Muslims by the Christian reconquistadores. Further examples of nostalgic poetry were composed in the aftermath of the internal divisions which emerged in the violent confrontations around the end of the caliphate of Cordoba. As Elinson argues on several occasions, poetry served under such circumstances as a vessel in which al-Andalus survived in memory. The first chapter deals with rith!" al-mudun, elegies for cities which have their origins in the nasıb of pre-Islamic qaßıdas when the beloved and the happy days are gone and the poet sees only ruin at the deserted campsite. In the urbanized landscape of al-Andalus which was gradually lost to Christian rulers, but also suffered greatly from strife among Muslims, poets exploited this genre frequently. The chapter focuses on the elegy on Cordoba written by Ibn Shuhayd (d. 1035) after it was sacked during the Berber fitna of 1013. The second...

This chapter considers the philosophical quest for God that found powerful expression in medieval Hebrew poetry. It mentions poets that composed hymns in praise of the deity and his creations as philosophers who understood them and poetically expressed their great thirst for the divine presence. It also reviews poetical compositions on the soul or on the wonders of nature that may be contemplated with devotional intent, and specific compositions whose direct address to the deity indisputably marks them as prayers. The chapter looks at Solomon Ibn Gabirol's 'Keter malkhut' which found its way into some standard liturgies. It examines philosophical prayers attributed to Aristotle and other non-Jews that were included in Hebrew collections.

Reviewed by: The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken, 1877–1959 Michael Brenner Anthony David . The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken, 1877–1959. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003. Pp. 451. Salman Schocken was the German version of the American dream: a poor Jew from the Prussian eastern provinces moves to a small town in Saxony, builds up one of Weimar Germany's leading chains of department stores, and emerges as an architectural pioneer who has Erich Mendelsohn build the most exciting Bauhaus-style department stores. He becomes a Zionist visionary and a leading spirit behind the rise of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, builds up a publishing house that serves as intellectual comfort during German Jewry's darkest hours, emerges as the publisher of Franz Kafka and a keen promoter of Shmuel Yosef Agnon for the Nobel Prize. As if this were not enough, he founds an institute for medieval Hebrew literature which searches for the Hebrew Nibelungenlied, possesses one of the most precious private collections of rare books in Judaica as well as German culture, and is responsible for the emergence of Israel's leading newspaper Ha'aretz. In other words, a biographer's dream. The self-made man from Posen, whom Hannah Arendt called the "Jewish Bismarck" (p. 204), was one of the most versatile figures in an era with no lack of versatile personalities. He was not just the chairman of the Organization of German Department Stores but a person deeply instilled with the ambition to turn his clients into educated people, into Bildungsbürger like himself, and to make his stores aesthetic masterworks of the new Bauhaus style. Next to the underwear counter he would give out poems by Goethe, and with the profit he made, he would support poor writers, such as the young Agnon, who had moved to Germany from Palestine before World War I. His Schocken Library, a predecessor of modern paperback series, produced one piece of essential Jewish culture after the other in Nazi Germany and became a remarkable monument to spiritual endurance in times of horror. The Patron himself had to leave Nazi Germany, and as he was an active Zionist, it was clear where his path would lead. The department stores remained in the hands of "Aryan" trustees until the end of the Thousand-Year Reich, so Schocken concentrated on his favorite endeavors: a research institute on medieval Hebrew poetry, the preservation of his unique library, and his involvement with the Hebrew University. He founded a publishing house in Israel, bought the newspaper Ha'aretz for his son Gershon (who would turn it into Israel's leading paper), and had [End Page 457] Erich Mendelsohn build his private home and his library, which became the unofficial intellectual center of Jerusalem. In the words of his biographer, "it was the only place in town where guests could expect such a high quality of cakes, wines, and light snacks. Being across the street from Golda Meir's residence gave it an added aura of mystery. It was a piece of prewar central Europe lodged in the heart of a Spartan state" (p. 384). As early as the 1930s Schocken suggested S. Y. Agnon, whom he had supported in the difficult years back in Germany, for the Nobel Prize and used all his connections in Sweden and in the literary world to promote this goal. He published Martin Buber and Franz Kafka, and he financed Gershom Scholem's research on Kabbalah. Still Salman Schocken was not a happy man in interwar Palestine. He was keenly aware of how little difference he was able to make there, in contrast to his time in Weimar Germany, and how little recognition he received. "In Germany I was always a part of things" he told the philosopher Hugo Bergmann. In Palestine, he felt like a nobody, writes David (p. 304). In 1939 Schocken left Jerusalem for New York and would thereafter return to Israel only for visits. In the United States, he had high hopes of achieving with American Jews what he failed to do in Palestine: to turn them into Bildungsbürger, who would read and produce a Jewish culture comparable to that found in...

Various researchers have discussed Maimonides' attitude toward poetry, principally Ḥ. Schirmann, who studied medieval Hebrew poetry, and M.S. Geshuri, the Jewish music researcher, both of the previous generation of researchers of Judaic studies. This chapter discusses the Maimonides' attitude toward poetry in a more general framework, focusing on the status of secular poetry in Jewish culture in the Arab-Muslim space basing on Maimonides' pronouncements in his treatises in regard to this poetry and to both Hebrew and Arabic literature in general. Finally, Maimonides' serious reservations over poetry are proved by the fact that, in contrast to all other Jewish scholars in the medieval Arab-Muslim cultural space, he was not assisted by Hebrew or Arabic poetic verses to support what he said, except once.Keywords: Arab-Muslim cultural space; Hebrew poetry; Jewish culture; Maimonide; secular poetry

Throughout the last two centuries, Hebrew metrics was studied by leading linguists and specialists in medieval Hebrew poetry. Nowadays, it has disappeared from the academic discussion such that it is sometimes even difficult to find scansions or the name of the meter in new editions of poems. This book aims to rectify this gap, helping readers to understand the metric structure of this poetry in order to facilitate the work of editing and cataloguing those samples still in manuscript form for future editors. Delgado presents his view of Andalusi Hebrew metrics, as encountered in medieval manuals of Arabic and Hebrew metrics and scattered notes in the works of Andalusi Hebrew philologists. Whilst twentieth-century scholars spoke about the adaptation of Arabic metrics to Hebrew, he instead approaches these compositions by Andalusi Jews (10th-13th c.) as Arabic metrics written in Hebrew, thus emphasising how Hebrew poetry of the Andalusi Jews can help us to understand the general evolution of Arabic strophic poetry, and its experimental evolution, which is quite unlike classical and strophic Arabic poetry. This method respects the Hebrew vowel system, and does not necessitate alteration of word morphology, leaving the guttural letters quiescent (unless required by metrical license); nor does it necessitate guesses about metres that are not in the classical catalogue. Although the author has not found each and every classical metre from Andalusi Hebrew poetry included in this manual, they are all catalogued, either in case someone finds them in future or because they help us to comprehend the metrical structures that are characteristic of strophic poetry. As such, this monograph will be of great interest to scholars of Hebrew metrics.

The article focuses on a double reading of one short poem, Shmuel Hanagid's “God Blesses Old Age,” which belongs to the genre of Hebrew philosophical poetry written in medieval Spain. Dan Pagis made a revolutionary distinction between two types of poetry in this genre, “poems of admonishment and faith” that provide an affirmative and constructive perspective on the human condition, and “dark poems of fate” that express a pessimistic and nihilistic approach. A prominent theme in this poetry is youth and old age, which is developed in two opposing directions: some poems praise old age and condemn youth (these may be considered poems of admonishment and faith) while others, to the contrary, condemn old age and praise youth (and may be counted among the dark poems of fate). In the present article we analyze Hanagid's afore mentioned poem which gives simultaneous expression, using the very same linguistic units, to both mutually contradictory perspectives (praise and condemnation of old age as well as praise and condemnation of youth; this poem can thus be read as both a poem of admonishment and faith and a dark poem of fate at one and the same time). The main claim in this article is that the double reading is made possible by the poem's metaphors, each of which can be interpreted in contradictory ways. This is not a hypothesis that can be made lightheartedly with respect to Hebrew poetry in Spain, one of whose poetic principles being, according to Dan Pagis, that “each trope has an unambiguous referent.” I argue that because this is indeed the case we must be more sensitive to cases in which a Hebrew poem from Spain does allow for an ambiguous perception of its components, and that the general principle should not be taken as absolutely denying the possibility of ambiguity in the interpretation of a metaphor, even if such ambiguity is not typical of the poetry of the times. At the end of the article I link this claim to Ross Brann's words on “cultural ambiguity in Muslim Spain” and its effects on the thoughts and lives of that period's poets.