Foreword

Abstract

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...