Landscape and Culture in the Medieval Hebrew Rhymed Prose Narrative

Abstract

In a previous publication, I discussed landscape as a theme in the poetry of Andalusian Jewish authors. In particular, I showed that the Andalusian Hebrew poetics of estrangement and nostalgia were grounded in a lingering memory of the garden landscape and its counterpoints in the desert and forest. The garden of the Andalusian tradition was a manmade enclosed garden (hortus conclusus), an engineered landscape wherein nature was recreated in a highly organized and idealized form. For authors displaced from al-Andalus, the garden became a cultural icon associated with the social practices of the courtier class (such as wine drinking, conversation, and entertainment).1 The present article continues this discussion by investigating the literary representations of landscape in Hebrew rhymed prose narratives produced in Christian Iberia. The movement of Jewish intellectual centers from al-Andalus to Iberian Christian territories gave rise to a unique intellectual environment wherein Jews synthesized elements of the Judeo-Islamic heritage with new elements reaching them from EuropeanJewish and Christian culture. Scholars such as Bernard Septimus and Yom Τον Assis have studied the strategies of synthesis and accommodation utilized by legal scholars and exegetes in Castile and Aragon who were faced with competing traditions such as the Andalusian practice of polygyny versus French monogamy or Andalusian rationalist exegesis versus French lit-