Refiguring the Middle Ages: Reflections on Hebrew Romances

Abstract

AMONG ASHKENAZIC JEWS, the chanting of the Scroll of Esther is characterized by an interesting convention: at verse 6 of chapter 2, where Sreference is made to the Babylonian Exile, the traditional melody is momentarily abandoned, and the verse is sung in the tune of Lamentations. After its completion, the proper chant is resumed.' The mention of the exile hints, in its own melancholy tonality, at the impending disaster to be plotted by Haman, but ultimately alludes to something broader and far more general than its local context. It has often been pointed out that the name of God occurs nowhere in Esther, but even where the Jews did not bring with them the divine name, they brought the mournful music of exile. A brief change intimates the origins, not merely of Esther and her uncle, but of the entire Jewish community scattered through the 127 provinces of Ahasuerus, and so indirectly brings to mind the shaping force of a momentous idea in Jewish history. This idea was that for their sins the Jews were compelled to live in exile from the land promised and given by the Lord. It was an idea built upon their forcible deportation by Assyrian and Babylonian conquerors, and elaborated in the Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah and some of the later Psalms; and it was intensified and spiritualized after the destruction of the Second Temple by Titus in the year 70 C.E. Both the first and the second hurban, traditionally assigned to the same date (the Ninth of Av), are of importance in seeking to define the elusive concept of Middle Ages for the purposes of Jewish literary history. The chronological boundaries of the Christian Middle Ages are applied conventionally to Jews and Arabs, and in many respects such categorization makes excellent sense: to mention Hebrew poetry, for example, is to think of Yehuda Halevi, Solomon Ibn-Gabirol, or Moses and Abraham Ibn-Ezra, all poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Their poetry may properly be called medieval because it may be seen to belong to an intermediate phase in the history of Hebrew letters, characterized by the reclamation of the Hebrew language for