Exile and nostalgia in Arabic and Hebrew poetry of al-Andalus (Muslim Spain)

Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 377 Reviews and to do penance, admitting: "The greatness of man is only allowed by the will of the Creator" (p. 67). So these great pagan kings began to speak the language of the Hebrew monotheists in this version. Alexander, in particular , always is shown to display magnanimity in victory, as when he sheds tears over the fall of Darius: "You have to understand that kings do not rejoice about the fall of fellow-kings" (p. 73). The Hebrew language of the text is basically biblical, although influenced in crucial instances by Arabic grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, sometimes deploying rare, although not unprecedented, Hebrew usages, such as "lalJ.arof' (for "to hibernate," which is attested in the biblical book of Isaiah, see p. 70). Altogether, we seem to have a version fairly close to its foreign models, but significantly Hebraized in expression and sentiment. We should be grateful to van Bekkum for this helpful, accessible, and reliable edition of a piece of work that helps us to piece together the history of some of the remoter comers of the history of Hebrew literature. Apart from a few infelicities of English expression. this is an exceedingly graceful introduction to an opus known in so many forms and in such far flung traditions. It provides a valuable, and, in some respects, surprising link between the generations. Leon I. Yudkin University College London London, England l.yudkin@ucl.ac.uk C""l":ln "C":l n"':ll)n ",nn n,"Uf (SECULAR HEBREW POETRY IN THE MIDDLE AGES) [Hebrew]. By Tovah Rosen. pp. 149. Tel Aviv: Haqibbutz Hameuchad, Qeren Yehoshua Rabinowitz Laamoniyut , 1997. Paper. Tovah Rosen has written a helpful handbook for the intelligent lay reader on the prosodic types and literary themes in secular Hebrew poetry in the Middle Ages, and on its most prominent practitioners. This book is not for specialists, who are (or should be) familiar with the literature. Rosen introduces her subject with a broad review of Hebrew culture in Muslim Spain during the five hundred year period from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. She points to Iberian Jewry's "sudden" and "revolutionary" awakening (p. 13) and the emergence of its leading luminaries . Samuel the Nagid, Solomon Ibn Gavirol. Moses Ibn Ezra. Judah Halevi, Dunash ben Labrat, Isaac Ibn Khalfon. and Abraham Ibn Ezra. Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 378 Reviews However, it should be noted that the foundations for the new literary developments in Spain were already prepared in Babylon, chiefly through the efforts of Sa'adyah Gaon (882-942 C.B.), head of the academy in Sura. In Sa'adyah's poetic writings we find a revived emphasis on the language of the Hebrew scriptures as the preferred medium of literary composition, a practice followed by the Hebrew-Hispanics (p. 16). Moreover, Sa'adya's pupil Dunash ben Labrat-who later became a protege of Sasday ibn Shaprut, the first prominent Jewish courtier in Muslim Spain-pioneered a method of adapting Arabic prosodic conventions to Hebrew. Dunash's achievement was to become the standard for the two prosodic styles in secular (and religious) Hebrew poetry, the qasidah type, with its metrically balanced hemistichs in each verse, and the muwashshal), with its strophes of alternating constant and variable rhymes. In chapter 3, Professor Rosen asks whether it is possible to derive aesthetic enjoyment from Hebrew secular poetry written over a thousand years ago and should we apply modem standards of poetry to the works of Moses Ibn Ezra and his contemporaries. One could argue that the very posing of this question is unsettling. Are we to judge Chaucer and Milton by modem standards, or do we allow their poetry to broaden our sensitivity by familiarizing us with a wide range of experience with which, in the ordinary course of events, we might have no contact? Do we not also deepen our experience from reading Milton or Judah Halevi by making us feel more poignantly and understandingly the everyday events of our lives? A dominant aspect of this experience which Rosen describes (pp. 33-34) was the idealized setting of Hispanic courtly culture where Hebrew poetry was composed for entertainment and not exclusively for prayer...

Hebrew poetry is very far from the Arabic courtly poetry in Spain. From what is accepted in research on Hebrew poetry in Spain, and following Weiss, almost all the secular poetry in its various genres might be placed under the definition of courtly poetry since it was mostly written by virtue of the existence of a Jewish courtly culture, and from within that culture. However, to define the new style in Arabic poetry in itself as 'courtly', and to distinguish it from the old warlike style, is misleading. Yellin compares the Hebrew and the Arabic poetry of praise, and further in his writing. The special quality of the Andalusian poetry - again, the Arabic and the Hebrew - stems from the various aspects of the country's geographic and anthropological landscape, and is not a function of the court milieu.Keywords: Andalusia; Arabic poetry; courtly culture; courtly poetry; Hebrew poetry

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...

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...

The book includes sixteen studies about medieval Hebrew poetry compared with Arabic poetry. It is well known that since the tenth century medieval Hebrew poets took Arabic poetry as the ultimate paradigm in terms of prosody, language purism and rhetorical devices and even in regard to poetical genres. However, the concept unifying all studies in this book is that a comparative examination must consider not only the identical elements in which Hebrew poetry borrowed from the Arabic one, but alos what is much more significant – what Hebrew poetry stubbornly set itself at a distance from Arabic poetry. The conclusive result of this sort of examination is that Hebrew poetry combined selectively borrowed Arabic poetical values with traditional ethical Jewish values to create a distinctive poetical school.

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...

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...

From the ruined shell of Rome after the empire's fall, Hebrew literature moved into a new home — the Islamic empire — in the 7th and 8th centuries CE. It is a commonplace that Hebrew poetry reached a 'golden age' — as did Arabic poetry at the same time — in Muslim Spain in the 11th and 12th centuries. Most of this poetry may be dated specifically from the fall of the Umayyad caliphate in 1031 until the Almohad invasion of Spain in 1140. Less common is the observation that this period coincided with, and was inseparable from, a decisive historical shift in the global balance of power. For this was the juncture at which Christian Europe emerged and began to overtake Islam, militarily, economically and culturally. In which ways did the decline of the Islamic empire and the rise of Christian Europe affect Hebrew creativity?

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

From the ruined shell of Rome after the empire's fall, most of the world Jewish population came under Islamic rule in the seventh and eighth centuries CE.The main influences on Jewish culture, particularly Spanish Hebrew poetry, for the next half millennium were Arabic. Hebrew poetry in Muslim Spain represents a turning point in Jewish life mainly in its non-theological elements, influenced by contemporaneous Arabic poetry with its various genres: love poetry, including homosexual poetry, poetry of friendship, wine songs, war poetry, and so on.1 This was the most important Hebrew poetry between the end of the biblical age and modern times. Most of it belongs to the narrow period 1031–1140 when the Umayyad empire fell apart and Christian Europe began to overtake Islam, militarily, economically, and culturally. Hebrew poets not only adopted Arabic versification; they seem to some extent also to have been influenced by a secular lifestyle associated mainly with court culture, while at the same time keeping strictly to Jewish tradition and, in fact, also writing poems for the synagogue liturgy. What did the secularization of Hebrew poetry mean? Was it just literary convention, influenced by Islamic poetry? Or did it reflect a lifestyle anticipatory of the modern era?

Reviewed by: The Budding of Modern Hebrew Creativity in Babylon, and: The Collected Essays of Rabbi Shelomo Bekhor Hutsin Yair Mazor The Budding of Modern Hebrew Creativity in Babylon, by Lev Hakak. Or Yeudah: The Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center, 2003. 372 pp. (in Hebrew). The Collected Essays of Rabbi Shelomo Bekhor Hutsin, by Lev Hakak. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2005. 281 pp. (in Hebrew). Numerous scholars, students, and even laypersons who display interest in Hebrew literature are well acquainted with Haskalah/Enlightenment Hebrew literature and scholarship from the late 18th through the 19th century, first in Italy and Austria, and later in Russia and Poland. That literature and scholarship (in various fields of study, such as Hebrew philology, biblical commentary, science, history, poetry, prose, drama) has been justly considered the bedrock of modern Hebrew literature and scholarship. As much as this statement is undoubtedly valid, however, it does injustice to the Hebrew poetry, epistolary writings, and periodicals produced in Babylon/Iraq during the Enlightenment. In other words, very few Hebrew poets, writers, and scholars have been acquainted with this treasure of Hebrew writings which greatly enrich the body of Hebrew Enlightenment literature. In this respect, the two books here, besides their scholarly worthiness per se, blaze a trail in Hebrew literature study and call attention to an enormous portion of Hebrew literature (notably poetry) that has been regretfully neglected. The Budding of Modern Hebrew Creativity in Babylon casts a novel and insightful light notably on poets who were prolifically active during the Enlightenment period in Babylon. The vast majority of Haskalah Hebrew literature in Babylon is associated with the Jewish religion, the laws of the Jewish culture, Biblical commentary, and liturgical poetry. During the Enlightenment [End Page 207] period over 2000 poems were written; these were fruitfully influenced by the Hebrew poetry of Spain during the middle ages as well as by Biblical texts. The great merit of The Budding of Modern Hebrew Creativity in Babylon is the author's capacity to discuss poems aesthetically while simultaneously presenting the biographical, social, scholarly, and ideological backgrounds in which the poems are rooted. It may be quite cogent to argue that the second book, The Collected Essays of Rabbi Shelomo Bekhor Hutsin, complements the previous book. This book contains two parts. The first addresses Rabbi Hutsin's educational and cultural background—his activities, his publishing house and bookstore, the periodicals in which he published his writings in conformity with Haskalah/Enlightenment ideas, his relations with Jewish scholars and writers in Eastern Europe, and the style and structure of his epistles and liturgical poetry. The second part of the book introduces Rabbi Hutsin's epistles in the way they were printed in a variety of periodicals that endorsed Haskalah. Dr. Hakak's two books may be justly considered highly valuable works of scholarship that bring to light worthy poetry and poetic periods without which the story of the evolution of Hebrew literature and culture would not be complete. Yair Mazor Hebrew Studies Program University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Copyright © 2007 Purdue University

Since ancient times, music was a basic component of poetry, both oral and written. Such was the case in ancient Hebrew poetry, as may be seen from the biblical Book of Psalms, which is filled with musical elements, such as musical terms and names of musical instruments. The element of instrumental music returned to Hebrew poetry only in the 10th century, with the flowering of a new school that was greatly influenced by Arabic poetry. A somewhat surprising discovery regarding the positive attitude towards music appears in the muwassaḥ of Yosef Ibn Ṣaddīq, Numi ahah, written in praise of the linguist Yiṣḥaq Ibn Barun. In brief, even though Ibn Ṣaddīq's poem fulfills precisely the demands of the muwassaḥ genre in terms of its structure and the object of love, the poet constructed it with great artistry as a poem of praise (mad).Keywords: Arabic poetry; Hebrew poetry; musical instruments; muwassaḥ; Numi ahah; Yiṣḥaq Ibn Barun; Yosef Ibn Ṣaddīq

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.

While a great many studies have dealt with medieval poetry, they have failed to discuss the poetry of longing (ḥanīn) as a separate genre, independent of other genres, especially elegies (in particular poems that lament the fate of cities) and poems of salvation and lament. Nor has any study so far undertaken a comparison between works of this genre by Muslim and by Jewish poets.In this article, we shall discuss the growth of the poetry of longing in Muslim Spain and provide a number of examples of verses composed by Muslim and Jewish poets who were born in the cities of Andalusia and shared a common fate: many of them were persecuted for a variety of reasons and forced into a life of wandering and exile, and suffered banishment, imprisonment and torture. The ways they expressed their longing for their native cities possessed similarities but also differences, depending on the way each such poet perceived the land of the west and the scenes of his native city. The differences were particularly marked with respect to the way Jewish poets viewed the cities in which they had been born.

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...