REVIEW: Tova Rosen. <strong>GENDER STUDIES AND MEDIEVAL HEBREW POETRY</strong>: <em>UNVEILING EVE: READING GENDER IN MEDIEVAL HEBREW LITERATURE</em>. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

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...

Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew LiteratureRosenTova <i>Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature</i> University of Pennsylvania PressPhiladelhia, 2003, xvi, 264, £31.500-8122-3710-2

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...

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.

Book Reviews Ann Rosalind Jones. T h e C u r r e n c y o f E r o s . W o m e n ’s Lo v e L y r ic in E u r o p e , 1540-1620. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990. Pp. xi + 242. Feminist criticism occasionally distinguishes between gynocriticism, the resurrection of obscure or almost forgotten feminine literary figures of the past, and gender studies, the discernment and analysis of male-dominated literary ideologies and techniques according to which women writers, and women in general, are gendered, marginalized and controlled in any given historical period. In this forceful and perceptive study of eight women poets of the European sixteenth century, Ann Rosalind Jones has fused gyno- and gender criticism superbly and produced one of the most important works on the European renaissance lyric in this decade. Using a Marxist-feminist model of negotiation, Professor Jones studies four pairs of women lyric poets and their strategies for maneuvering within social and ideological restric­ tions and turning the contradictions among different discourses to their advantage. The pairing of the women (Isabella Whitney and Catherine des Roches, Pernette du Guillet and Tullia d’Aragona, Gaspara Stampa and Mary W roth, Louise Labe and Veronica Franco) transcends national boundaries, the rationale for the ordering and pairing being neither national nor chronological but following “ a continuum that moves from most adaptive to most oppositional positions, from less to more overtly contestatory responses” (8). The strength of this book does not merely reside in its theoretical positions, which are so elo­ quently argued in the Introduction and in Chapter One. Some of the virtues of the four ensuing chapters reside in the author’s selection of poems to argue her point, the precise English translations that immediately follow each selection, and the close readings and per­ ceptive commentaries Jones brings to bear on each text. One can only admire and defer to Professor Jones’s breadth of knowledge as a com­ parative literature scholar. To read her analysis of the poetry of Isabella Whitney, Tullia d ’Aragona, Gaspara Stampa, Mary W roth, and Veronica Franco was for this reviewer to be reading much of this poetry for the first time. One might arguably speak of a “ renais­ sance” of sixteenth-century scholarship in the past two decades due to feminist critics such as Tilde Sankovitch, Ann Larsen, and Ann Rosalind Jones, not to forget the broadened historical perspectives provided by the research of Natalie Zemon Davis, Barbara Hanawalt and others. One recalls that in his classic study on Rabelais’s religion, Lucien Febvre argued (against Abel Lefranc) that atheism was an ahistorical notion not part of the outillage men­ tal of Rabelais’s time, and that Lefranc was applying it ahistorically and retrospectively to Rabelais. To argue that a notion such as “ sexual power relations” is also an historical con­ cept is to state the obvious, especially if in saying so one fails to distinguish between a con­ cept implicitly and explicitly present. To say that the notion of “ sexual power relations” is not explicitly present in sixteenth-century literature is not to argue that it is not powerfully and implicitly present in the poetry itself. We cannot read the lyric poetry of the sixteenth century with the relative ideological innocence of that century, i.e., as if Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Derrida, or Irigaray had never existed. There is no possible quarreling with Pro­ fessor Jones’s theoretical perspective. Any disagreement with Jones’s readings should be, in this reviewer’s opinion, within the theoretical framework she herself has set. Within this framework, my disagreement with a few of Jones’s readings are a matter of nuance only. In her subtle reading of Pernette du Guillet Jones argues that Pernette used the technique of dialogue with, and imitation of, VOL. XXXI, NO. 2 85 L ’E s pr it C r éa te u r her mentor, Maurice Scève, in order to achieve (implicit) self-celebration. Personally I would see Pernette celebrating the category of the relational in sexual relations rather than superiority of one sex over the other. Posing as the weak, ancillary, or...

Preface 1 No-Woman's-Land: Medieval Hebrew Literature and Feminist Criticism 2 Gazing at the Gazelle: Woman in Male Love Lyric 3 Veils and Wiles: Poetry as Woman 4 Poor Soul, Pure Soul: The Soul as Woman 5 Domesticating the Enemy: Misogamy in a Jewish Marriage Debate 6 Among Men: Homotextuality in the Maqama 7 Clothes Reading: Cross-Dressing in the Maqama 8 Circumcised Cinderella: Jewish Gender Trouble Afterword Notes Acknowledgments Index

Reviews 213 Parergon 21.1 (2004) and orthodoxy. Rex likes his territory known and numerable, and The Lollards offers just that. In general, however, Lollard scholars understand themselves to be in a terra far less cognita, the features and alignments of which are only just beginning to be distinguished. Mary Dove Department of English University of Sussex Rosen, Tova, Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature (Jewish Culture and Contexts), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003; cloth; pp. xvi, 264; RRP US$45, £31.50; ISBN 0812237102. Professor Rosen considers Unveiling Eve and her earlier articles to be ‘the only theoretically informed feminist sortie’ into medieval Hebrew literature (p. 18). She introduces the reader to a wide variety of texts, prose and verse, composed over four centuries in what is now Spain, southern France and Italy. She then unpacks each text as a modern resistant feminist reader influenced by Freud and French psychoanalytic criticism. But what of the medieval female reader/auditor of these texts? Those who produce literature themselves may be assumed to have first been consumers of the genre. Between the Old Testament and fifteenth-century Spain, a single poem ascribed to a woman (unnamed) has survived, due to its subject being the author’s famous husband, the tenth-century Spanish Hebrew poet Dunash ben Labrat. In the next century the Jewess Qasmkna composed only in Arabic, so Muslim literary histories preserved her reputation while Hebrew ones described the achievements of her father and brothers. Rosen does not try to ‘recover’ other woman-authored texts from her corpus and side-steps the debate over ‘authentic’ female voice in chansons des femmes. Nevertheless, the existence of at least two accomplished poetesses suggests a cultural milieu in which literary production and consumption were not only a vehicle for homo-social exchanges between men in a gender-exclusive environment. Rosen does not attempt to reconstruct that milieu; her book is emphatically not literary history, and readers unfamiliar with the complicated overlap and interchange between coexisting Jewish, Muslim and Christian cultures in the western Mediterranean will not gain a clear picture from her brief references to historical background. 214 Reviews Parergon 21.1 (2004) Following an introductory chapter covering the (mainly negative) feminine imagery in medieval Hebrew literature, relating it to previous studies of misogynist texts, Chapter 2 concerns eleventh- and twelfth-century Andalusian love poetry. The possibilities of cross-cultural fertilisation would seem promising, given its proximity in time and space to Continental Latin and vernacular lyric. However, the themes of feudal submission and love from afar favoured by poets such as Todros Abulafia, ‘a Jewish cavalier and troubadour’ (p. 50), already existed in classical Arabic authors like the Andalusian Ibn Hazm. For courtier-poets like Todros, Arabic, Iberian vernacular and previous Hebrew literature including the Old Testament all had status as alternative, co-existing canons. Rosen sees little difference in the emotional situation of the Hebrew courtly poet and his romantic object, compared with his Arabic and possible Occitan source-material. Given a monogamous medieval Jewish culture which condemned homosexuality and even celibacy, and which married both sexes off extremely young while guarding women both before and after marriage, I would expect to see some variations from the social situations to which Arabic and European lyrics allude. The Hebrew poet’s ostensible address must be a young (female) virgin who has everything to lose and nothing to gain from a relationship, as occasional female characters are allowed to reply: ‘Your discourse is lacking in reason and wisdom. / Your poem is like all poetry of flattery and lechery’ (p. 62). Instead of a troubadour’s rivals, the males with whom the Hebrew poet is in competition are the relatives of the unmarried girl, guarding the family honour and her value. So is marital union the poet’s goal? In the Toledan Judah Ibn Shabbetai’s thirteenth-century rhymed-narrative novella, a young misogynist falls for a prospective bride when he finds her to be his equal in composing and performing love lyrics. But her unlikely talent should have alerted the protagonist to his fairy-tale situation; the bridal veil is used by vengeful women to substitute a physically and financially...

Tova Rosen, Unveiling Eve. Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsUnveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature. Tova Rosen Susan L. EinbinderSusan L. Einbinder Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 80, Number 1Jan., 2005 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0038713400007478 Views: 6Total views on this site Copyright 2005 The Medieval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Love Lyrics in Late Middle Korean Peter H. Lee (bio) Gesang ist Dasein. —Die Sonette an Orpheus One of the most intriguing and challenging topics in Korean literary history is the love lyrics in Late Middle Korean. By “lyric” I mean a fictional representation of a personal utterance to be sung.1 We do not know when the texts and music were composed. The social settings of these anonymous feminine-voiced songs have almost disappeared. Because the predominant [End Page 201] written language among the learned until the mid-fifteenth century was literary Chinese, the prestige language, no song texts could be written down until Chosŏn officials wrote new texts as contrafactum2 (writing new texts for popular melodies) for well-known Koryŏ songs. Because of the sociolinguistic status of the vernacular, we have memorial (oral) but no written transmission. Moreover, we have no textual history to speak of until the compilation of the Akhak kwebŏm 樂學軌範 (Guide to the study of music, 1493) and two anonymous compilations—Siyong hyangak po 時用鄕樂譜 (Notations for Korean music in contemporary use; ca. early sixteenth century; made known only in 1954)3 and Akchang kasa 樂章歌詞,4 an anthology of song texts dating from Koryŏ and early Chosŏn. I consider them diplomatic copies of the songs. These texts must have invited innovation as part of the process of transmission (mouvance = fluidity).5 Thus Koryŏ songs owe their survival to the adoption of their accompanying music for court use in Chosŏn. It is unclear, however, how the texts, dubbed “vulgar and obscene” and expunged by Chosŏn censors as late as 1490,6 managed to survive. Are what we have the precensored or the censored versions? Perhaps these songs were so popular that no one needed to write them down to remember them. Repetition and recurrent refrains—mimetic in origin—of both verse and music made it easy for the unlearned to remember. Oral delivery was the mode of transmission in an orally based poetic tradition, and we can identify the speaker’s gender from verbal [End Page 202] features and textual markers: woman, the locus of unrequited love. Songs are inseparable from their performance. The music composed for performance, together with song lyrics, invites a communal identification of singer and audience.7 But the texts do not encode information about the speaker’s social status and economic class: was she a propertied woman like the Occitan trobairitz of medieval Europe?8 The singer re-creates emotions in a specific context and shares those emotions with the audience. Was the song performed before a mixed audience? Did they identify more with the speaker than with the speaker’s target, the beloved? It was not considered indecorous in the Koryŏ period for women to compose and perform songs of love and to take part in public entertainment—a challenge to male monopoly on desire and language. About the same period (eleventh to fourteenth centuries) in the West there flourished Mozarabic kharjas (“exit”; the oldest known secular lyrics in any Romance language, the earliest ca. 1000);9 songs by the troubadours and trobairitz (ca. 1100–1300) in Old Occitan (Langue d’Oc; Old Provençal)10 and by the trouvères of northern France (late twelfth to thirteenth centuries);11 Galician-Portuguese songs (fl. 1200–1350), cantigas d’amor and cantigas [End Page 203] d’amigo;12 Minnelieder (twelfth to early fourteenth centuries);13 Goliardic songs including the Carmina Burana (Songs of Beuren);14 the Cambridge Songs (Carmina Cantabrigiensia);15 and the Harley lyrics (compiled ca. 1314–1325),16 to mention a few. These Koryŏ songs have come to us from anonymous women who lived and sang from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries. No contemporary comments survive; the living context for these songs seems lost. Has the twenty-first century reader the means to understand the texts—can we reconstitute the feminine speakers’ voices, the first and only voices from that period, the inventors of love lyrics in the vernacular? Background The following observations are offered in the hope of better situating our songs in time and space, that is, in their sociopolitical and cultural contexts.17 My aim is to re-create...

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

1. No-Woman's-Land: Medieval Hebrew Literature and Feminist Criticism

This essay examines the non-linear development of the topos of the dissembling poet in medieval Hebrew literature, from Andalusian Spain down to Renaissance Italy. Drawing on classical and Arabic poetics, medieval Jewish philosophers and religious thinkers established two different theoretical models separating poetry from truth. In response, poets unabashedly devoted themselves to exploring literary variations on a theme rife with ironic possibilities: they employed their artistic medium to question the value of the medium itself. In its literary incarnation, suspicion about the lack of truth in verse amounted mostly to tricks of style and defensive manuevers, so the literary history of this topos underscores the confidence and selfconsciousness of poets well aware of their notoriety.

The purpose of this article is to provide a close reading of a thirteenth-century Hebrew narrative by Jacob Ben El‘azar of Toledo that recounts the tale of a “sodomite” who meets a violent end. The story focuses on the amorous affair of Sapir, an adult male, his beloved Shapir, a male youth around the age of puberty, and Birsha, a nefarious old man who lures Shapir away from Sapir, though Sapir ultimately seeks out Shapir and is reunited with him. Sapir and Birsha dispute over the boy and ultimately submit their case before a judge. The judge declares that Birsha deserves the death penalty, though he is spared this sentence and ordered only to forfeit the boy. Nevertheless, Sapir and Shapir take the law into their own hands and brutally murder Birsha. At the heart of the narrative is the tension between two models of eroticism between males, epitomized by the relationships of Sapir–Shapir and Birsha–Shapir, one sanctioned and the other condemned. The question that will be dealt with here is to determine what exactly distinguished the two relationships. Was Birsha considered a “sodomite” as opposed to Sapir, despite the fact that they both loved the male youth Shapir? Were they distinguished by their age, the nature of their desire, their sexual “identities,” their sexual acts, or other behaviors? (Foucault, The History of Sexuality, argued that the notion of sexual “identity” did not emerge until the modern era and that pre-modern societies thought only in terms of sexual acts. I largely agree with this evaluation though I will maintain that the categorization in the narrative under discussion distinguished between individuals who desired males and females versus those who desired males only.) In order to unravel this complicated narrative, we must delve deeply into the construction of sexuality within medieval Hebrew literature and more broadly within medieval Jewish culture—so enmeshed within its Islamic and Christian environments. I will argue that the identification of Birsha as a “sodomite” resided in his obsessive, mendacious, and violent qualities and not in his choice of love object, much less his sexual “identity.” Before presenting the narrative and my reading, I review some of the history of scholarship on homoeroticism in medieval Hebrew literature in order to provide a counterpoint to the methodological underpinnings of the present study. Throughout the study, I engage a variety of source types—Arabic homoerotic poems and narratives, Andalusi Hebrew poems, Christian reports of Muslim sexuality, exegetic and legal sources—in order to convey the highly specific and culturally circumscribed forms of homoeroticism assumed in Ben El‘azar's story.