Secular Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain 1031–1140

Abstract

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?KeywordsJewish CommunityJewish LifeEleventh CenturyMajor Turning PointIslamic RuleThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.