Hebrew Poetry Research Articles

The Land as Woman: Esther Raab and the Afterlife of a Metaphorical System

The land as woman is one of the most deeply rooted metaphorical systems in Jewish as well as Western and Middle Eastern cultures, and it has been used to support the discourses of colonialism and nationalism throughout history, as well as in some of the most beautiful devotional poetry. The metaphor has its origins in the Hebrew Bible, where the male prophet, ventriloquizing a male God, addresses Zion as his beloved—yet often unfaithful—wife, thus metaphorically and lexically linking idolatry with adultery and whoredom (both are zenut in biblical Hebrew). In modern Hebrew poetry, the male poet lays claim to this biblical trope, but now within a secular, nationalist “conquest” of the land as woman. In this article, I explore what happens when modernist women poets critique a tradition that views women always as metaphors, never as literal subjects. I read Esther Raab’s early poetry as an example of the revolutionary work of modern Hebrew women poets who develop a new erotics of address to the land that calls into question patriarchal models of conquest and subjugation.

Hebrew Matters

Hebrew Matters is the third in a trilogy of books—following HebrewSpeak and HebrewTalk—that examines Hebrew roots, their derivations and their contexts, as they appear in the Hebrew Bible, Rabbinic Literature, Medieval Hebrew Poetry, and on the vibrant streets of the modern State of Israel. Each of the book’s 110 chapters is devoted to one Hebrew root and takes the reader on a journey through Jewish history, Jewish literature, and Jewish thought. The book is designed so that the reader will begin to understand how these roots have developed into a reborn living language, Modern Hebrew. Although the book deals seriously with Hebrew, each root is presented with a light touch, is spiced with a good measure of humor, and tells an interesting story or two on the way.

Morphology and Markedness: On Verb Switching in Hebrew Poetry

Historically, grammarians have viewed tenses as simple, unanalysable pieces of grammatical information. Portmanteau tenses may combine tense, aspect, and modality, but these are the main categories. Suzanne Fleischman has proposed a radically new paradigm in which not only verbal forms but entire discourse contexts are analysed as clusters of oppositional properties to which markedness values apply. It is in the interaction of the cluster of properties associated with a verbal form and those associated with its discourse context that we find the locus of verbal meaning. This interactive meaning is illustrated by examples from Psalm 18, demonstrating that morphological forms have the effect of either drawing non-prototypical situations closer to the prototype or drawing situations farther away from the prototype.

“To Breathe Life into the Past as a Means of Bringing New Blood to the Present”: The Instructional Poetry of Abraham Ibn Ezra

ABSTRACT Abraham Ibn Ezra (1092-1167), the renowned exegete and grammarian who was as well a mathematician and an astronomer, a liturgist and an author of secular Hebrew poetry left his mark on the pages of history as a consummate Renaissance man who greatly contributed to diverse knowledge areas. He was the first to introduce to Hebrew secular poetry the debate genre, realism, humor, and the instructional genre. All of these already existed in Arabic poetry, but they had not been adopted by the Hebrew poets of Spain during the classical period. Ibn Ezra made use of them in his poetry. The introduction at this moment of features from Arabic literature that previously had passed over the Spanish Hebrew classics is at first glance perplexing, and worthy of our interest.

Dry, Weary, Smiling Bones: Finding a ‘Yes’ through Hebrew Narrative and a Reduced Spirituality

Life can be a difficult phenomenon to acquiesce to, much less embrace. Tragedy is seemingly around every corner, and very many philosophies and faiths both ancient and modern have championed the exit from existence over its entrance. Existentialism and nihilism proclaim the seizure or suicide of one’s undesired birth, moksha and nirvana the blessed non-return of a wandering soul. Yet against these currents the Jewish ideational approach to being, with its ever-old and newness, has consistently given the world a ‘yes’, and this apparently despite having every reason not to; although perhaps “because” is more appropriate to that prior clause than “despite”. In what follows we therefore consider how we might uncover from within Judaism an abstracted “spirituality” for our times, a numinousness that is not necessarily a “belief”: a “faith” that is more in line with a hope. Our objective is to learn how to think differently rather than to convert, and thus towards this more modest goal we set out to explore some images from Hebrew poetry and narrative, attempting to bring forth core conceptualities which could then be applied to an affirming notional framework befitting anyone who would ponder—who would feel—a way through. How might we state this ‘yes’ for our lives?

Ronny Someck and the Politics of Popular Poetry

Ronny Someck's poetry is unique in that it translates canonical Hebrew poetry into popular poetry. It is especially visible in the intertextual relations that Someck's poetry constructs with Yehuda Amichai's canonic poetry. Following Marx, the article analyses Someck's poetry as commodity structure as fetish. Someck brilliantly—and broadly—utilizes the figure of the stereotype; but in contrast with the accepted norm, he relies on the contradiction at the basis of the fetish to write subversive political poetry. Avoiding the binarism existing between resistance and affirmation, in his poems Someck develops a dialectic discourse that keeps rewriting the popular text as commodity existing in the circular rotation of selling and buying. This dialectic is manifested in the mode in which the fluid, hyphenated Arab-Jewish identity is represented in his poems. Through his poetry, Someck constitutes an inexhaustible space that allows the poems to develop subversiveness, which operates under the false appearance of total, coherent spaces. As part of Israeli culture, it could have been expected that this poetry would be stereotypical, adopting an Orientalist outlook. But Someck's poems develop, instead, an unstable gaze that undermines Orientalism's binarism. The lack of binarism is expressed in Someck's poems through a dual-layered structure; the two layers, one figurative and one literal, are separate and continuous and carry out complex interrelations. Within this relational frame the literal, violent layer punctures the figurative layer, and then materializes via political violence. But instead of relating to the Israeli occupation as an arena of a binary confrontation between the Israeli army and the Palestinians, it relies on its Mizrahi identity to destroy this binarism, and thus develops a flexible moral and political stance. Through writing his poetry as a "minor literature," Someck can maneuver between its two linguistic options—deterritorialization on one hand and reterritorialization on the other. A very impressive example is the poem about the Israeli Arab-Druze poet Samih El Kasem, in which he highlights the poet's guitar-playing in Hebrew as a major language. The deterritorialization in Samih El Kasem's poetry is expressed in the subversive deterritorialization of Someck's poem. The linguistic deterritorialization is visible when Someck defines his poetry as a stammer and thus gives voice to the oppressed and the rebels.

Karakteristik Mazmur Pujian

The study is titled characteristics Psalm of Praise. This study will seek and discover the characteristics and principles of psalm praise in the Book of Psalms. To discover the characteristics of the Praise Psalm used qualitative rather than experimental research methods. This qualitative method can also be used for reflective speculators. With four steps: analyzing the passage according to its elements, the second step is to recognize the language style of poetry and stories that are historical, the third reveals the original meaning of Hebrew poetry, the fourth looks for the characteristics of the Hebrew satra of the author's motives and goals. So that preserved by this method can be formulated characteristics from the Psalm of Praise. There are three important things to remember in the Psalm of praise is, first the Psalm of praise begins with an invitation to worship The Lord, The second psalm of praise continues by giving a description of the reasons why God is worthy of praise. Third is the psalm praise usually includes and sometimes ends with a further invitation to praise God therefore the proper title is the characteristics Psalm of Praise so that the awkwardness of distinguishing the interpretation of different types of psalm can be well cleared.

Trends and Characteristics of Modern Hebrew Poetry and How Influenced by the Old

بدأ الشعر العبري الحديث مع البدايات الأولى لحركة الهسكالا، وقد اختلف النُّقَّادُ والأُدَبَاءُ حول تحديد الإرهاصات الأولى للشعر العبري الحديث، وظهر خلال تلك الفترة مجموعة من الشعراء، ومنهم موشيه حاييم لوتساتو، و"نفتالي هيرتس فيزل". و"ميخا يوسف ليفنسون"، وشاعر الهسكالا "يهودا ليف جوردون". وخلال مرحلة الهسكالا تميز الشعر بعدة ميزات ومنها التأثر بالعهد القديم، وبالشعراء الأوروبيين، وسيطرت حالة من التفاؤل على معظم الشعراء، بالإضافة إلى حضور الشعر على الساحة الأدبية بقوة خلال تلك الفترة.
 كذلك تسبب فشل حركة الهسكالا وعدم قدرة اليهود على الاندماج في المجتمعات الأوروبية، في محاولة البحث عن حلول لمشكلة اليهود، فظهرت الإرهاصات الأولى للإحياء الصهيوني، وتميز الشعر خلال تلك الفترة بسيطرة الذاتية وروح التشاؤمية والاستعانة بأفكار العهد القديم، مثل فكرة الخلاص والعهد، بهدف تحريك مشاعر اليهود صهيونيًا، فضلا عن إحياء اللغة العبرية والتأثر بالشعر الأوروبي، وتذبذب الشعر العبري بين الواقعية والرمزية.

אצחצח דבר גבורות: The Discovery of the Opening Section of Shelomo Suleiman al-Sinjari’s Seder ha-ʿAvodah

Abstract This is the first publication of the beginning of one of the sidrei ʿavodah for the Day of Atonement by Shelomo Suleiman al-Sinjari, a prolific Palestinian paytan who lived in the second half of the 9th century. Although well known to researchers, this piyyut was incorrectly attributed to the greatest Palestinian poet: Eleazar b. Qallir. My consultation of a copy of the seder ʿavodah in a Cairo Geniza manuscript and the database of the Ezra Fleischer Geniza Research Project for Hebrew Poetry led to the correct identification of the author of אצחצח דבר גבורות as Shelomo Suleiman. The article contains a critical edition of the beginning of this seder ʿavodah with annotations and variants.

The Hebrew epithalamium in late antiquity: new evidence from the Cairo Genizah and beyond

Several anonymous Hebrew epithalamia (wedding poems), preserved in manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah, can be dated, in view of their specific literary characteristics, to Byzantine (and early Muslim) Eretz Israel (Palestine): noteworthy evidence of the flourishing of non-liturgical Hebrew poetry in late antiquity. The article demonstrates and analyses these poems’ affinities to Jewish Palestinian Aramaic epithalamia, in terms of subject matter and rhetoric, as well as their resemblance to classical Hebrew piyyut, in terms of language and style. They are also examined against the background of the performance of Hebrew wedding songs as reflected in Talmudic sources, and it is suggested that the influence of such non-liturgical epithalamia can be detected in the earliest known piyyut composition which marks the occasion of marriage, a Qedushta by El’azar birabi Qillir (Kalir). Some comparable characteristics of these non-liturgical Hebrew wedding poems and the epithalamium genre in Greco-Roman late antiquity are also considered. The article includes critical editions and English translations of two Hebrew epithalamia from the Cairo Genizah.

Does Ancient Hebrew Poetry Have Meter?

The study addresses the much-debated question of whether Hebrew poetic composition is characterized by meter. I examine the question in the light of ancient Greco-Roman literary theory and its reflections on Greek and Latin periodic prose. Greco-Roman theorists chart a spectrum of poetic composition, with ordinary prose on one end, metered poetry on the other, and poetic or "periodic" prose occupying a middle ground between the two. I show that (a) Hebrew poetic composition is characterized by the same formal devices as Greco-Roman periodic prose; (b) these devices structure Hebrew poetry into the same periodic literary form seen in Greco-Roman periodic prose; and (c) this form produces the same rhythmic effect as in Greco-Roman periodic prose, one that is natural, not intentionally summoned, and of comparative irregularity. Micah 3:9–12, Wilfred G. E. Watson's alleged "good illustration" of "regular metrical pattern," is examined as a case in point.

Does Ancient Hebrew Poetry Have Meter?

Does Ancient Hebrew Poetry Have Meter?

Two Poems

Two Poems by Amichai Chasson Angelus Novus On Saturday nights, when the family’s asleep and the head is bettered with wine, Walter Benjamin’s voice broadcasts on Radio Berlin: “The earth constantly trembles under the feet.” My body too trembles in an inciting devotion song I sneak through the rusty gate at Ibn Shaprut, collecting Gershom Scholem from his home on Abrabanel Street from Gaza to Berlin. Benjamin’s voice follows us, materializes in the filthy passages, Anglo-Saxon Haredi men wander around in three-piece suits. Benjamin in varnished shoes, Scholem in butterfly hunter’s hat, and I in black Adidas sweatpants. The young men recoil from us, crack sunflower seeds on the sidewalks, jerk off secretly to an ad on the back page of an abandoned newspaper, creating Angels of Sabotage summoning Lilith “Come come,” building a tabernacle for the Great Crocodiles not noticing that the earth is swarming with angels clad in dresses, gentiles’ jewelry, and three toes in every foot. Their eyes wide open, their mouths gaping, their wings spread as in a priestly blessing, they try to rise from the ground up to the Star of Redemption, moving slowly like Saturn toward Jerusalem (a guesthouse for broken angels tired of ruins who at the end of their lives come to die here, angels from America, from Ibiza, from Paris, from der Himmel über Berlin). I point to the smallest among them: Paul Klee painted him with watercolors. Benjamin hung him in every room he’d lived in, after his death the chopped-winged angel was sent to Scholem’s room on Abarbanel Street. In the courtyard children now play with curly payot mumbling in Yiddish, and I translate the warnings for Scholem: Sabateans on you, Gershom Scholem, naked punks rattling their organs, old Gnostics jumping from every direction. On the way home I count us aloud: “Iron numbers up!”* No one answers, they’re all absent. Benjamin did not reach Palestine, did not land in New York, committed suicide in the Pyrenees a moment before the border could have been stolen. Scholem died childless in Jerusalem. The Angel of History is now lying in the storerooms of the Israel Museum. I saw it a week ago. This is no London or Rome, here there’s no line, no guards, I stood alone in front of the angel who asked my name, I closed my eyes. I bought a poster from the souvenir shop near the exit. Now it hangs alone in my room, the angel redeeming me from all evil will bless the woman recumbent on the couch beside me with the weekend’s newspaper bleeding in her hands: “History!” And the portrait of Donald Trump smiling in it, tanned as ever. PAUL KLEE, ANGELUS NOVUS, 1920, OIL TRANSFER AND WATERCOLOR ON PAPER, 31.8 X 24.2 CM, ISRAEL MUSEUM, JERUSALEM POETRY Amichai Chasson (b. 1987, Ramat Gan, Israel) is a poet, author, journalist, film director, screenwriter, and artistic director. Chasson received the Minister of Culture’s prize in 2015 as well as the Dr. Gardner Simon Prize for Hebrew Poetry for his book Bli Ma in 2018. To read a bio of Maayan Eitan, turn to page 64. Saison We go hunting at the break of dawn, the parking inspector and me, not meeting each other’s eyes. Quietly walking searching for suspicious signs: him, on the windshields me, in the obituaries. Traces appear when the thirty days of mourning are over piled up on the sidewalks: Else Lasker-Schüler lying outside the fence, Martin Buber’s beard brushing the curbstones, Breakdown and Bereavement, first edition (Stiebel Publishing, New York), Tower and Stockade in volumes of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica, dedications in German. The neighborhood surrenders its assets. I sort books into produce cartons the inspector writes tickets, fixes them to the windshields on Hatibonim Street. When the hunt is over we sit down, sharing a conversation about the loot. The inspector takes Natan Zach, questions aloud: “How to sweeten days.” How else but with remnants. Translations from the Hebrew By Maayan Eitan Amichai Chasson / Photo by Moti Kikayon * Author’s note: “Iron numbers” is the name of a method for counting...

Two Poems

Two Poems by Amichai Chasson Angelus Novus On Saturday nights, when the family’s asleep and the head is bettered with wine, Walter Benjamin’s voice broadcasts on Radio Berlin: “The earth constantly trembles under the feet.” My body too trembles in an inciting devotion song I sneak through the rusty gate at Ibn Shaprut, collecting Gershom Scholem from his home on Abrabanel Street from Gaza to Berlin. Benjamin’s voice follows us, materializes in the filthy passages, Anglo-Saxon Haredi men wander around in three-piece suits. Benjamin in varnished shoes, Scholem in butterfly hunter’s hat, and I in black Adidas sweatpants. The young men recoil from us, crack sunflower seeds on the sidewalks, jerk off secretly to an ad on the back page of an abandoned newspaper, creating Angels of Sabotage summoning Lilith “Come come,” building a tabernacle for the Great Crocodiles not noticing that the earth is swarming with angels clad in dresses, gentiles’ jewelry, and three toes in every foot. Their eyes wide open, their mouths gaping, their wings spread as in a priestly blessing, they try to rise from the ground up to the Star of Redemption, moving slowly like Saturn toward Jerusalem (a guesthouse for broken angels tired of ruins who at the end of their lives come to die here, angels from America, from Ibiza, from Paris, from der Himmel über Berlin). I point to the smallest among them: Paul Klee painted him with watercolors. Benjamin hung him in every room he’d lived in, after his death the chopped-winged angel was sent to Scholem’s room on Abarbanel Street. In the courtyard children now play with curly payot mumbling in Yiddish, and I translate the warnings for Scholem: Sabateans on you, Gershom Scholem, naked punks rattling their organs, old Gnostics jumping from every direction. On the way home I count us aloud: “Iron numbers up!”* No one answers, they’re all absent. Benjamin did not reach Palestine, did not land in New York, committed suicide in the Pyrenees a moment before the border could have been stolen. Scholem died childless in Jerusalem. The Angel of History is now lying in the storerooms of the Israel Museum. I saw it a week ago. This is no London or Rome, here there’s no line, no guards, I stood alone in front of the angel who asked my name, I closed my eyes. I bought a poster from the souvenir shop near the exit. Now it hangs alone in my room, the angel redeeming me from all evil will bless the woman recumbent on the couch beside me with the weekend’s newspaper bleeding in her hands: “History!” And the portrait of Donald Trump smiling in it, tanned as ever. PAUL KLEE, ANGELUS NOVUS, 1920, OIL TRANSFER AND WATERCOLOR ON PAPER, 31.8 X 24.2 CM, ISRAEL MUSEUM, JERUSALEM POETRY Amichai Chasson (b. 1987, Ramat Gan, Israel) is a poet, author, journalist, film director, screenwriter, and artistic director. Chasson received the Minister of Culture’s prize in 2015 as well as the Dr. Gardner Simon Prize for Hebrew Poetry for his book Bli Ma in 2018. To read a bio of Maayan Eitan, turn to page 64. Saison We go hunting at the break of dawn, the parking inspector and me, not meeting each other’s eyes. Quietly walking searching for suspicious signs: him, on the windshields me, in the obituaries. Traces appear when the thirty days of mourning are over piled up on the sidewalks: Else Lasker-Schüler lying outside the fence, Martin Buber’s beard brushing the curbstones, Breakdown and Bereavement, first edition (Stiebel Publishing, New York), Tower and Stockade in volumes of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica, dedications in German. The neighborhood surrenders its assets. I sort books into produce cartons the inspector writes tickets, fixes them to the windshields on Hatibonim Street. When the hunt is over we sit down, sharing a conversation about the loot. The inspector takes Natan Zach, questions aloud: “How to sweeten days.” How else but with remnants. Translations from the Hebrew By Maayan Eitan Amichai Chasson / Photo by Moti Kikayon * Author’s note: “Iron numbers” is the name of a method for counting...

The Hebrew Poetry of the Younger Generation of Immigrants from the Former Soviet Union in Israel. Part 2: Yael Tomashov, Rita Kogan

W kolejnych dwóch częściach artykułu na przykładzie twórczości czterech izraelskich poetek (Alex Rif, Nadi-Adiny Rose, Yael Tomashov i Rity Kogan) zaprezentowane zostały kulturowo-estetyczne właściwości poezji hebrajskiej przedstawicieli młodego pokolenia — tzw. generation one and a half — dzieci wychodźców z byłego ZSRR. Obszernie omówiono kwestię dziedzictwa oraz transformacji kulturowej i psychologicznej, a także praktyk poetyckich odróżniających poszczególnych autorów, w twórczości których wspomniane dziedzictwo i transformacja są obecne. Niniejszy artykuł poświęcony jest utworom Yael Tomashov i Rity Kogan (część pierwsza traktująca o twórczości Alex Rif, Nadi-Adiny Rose ukazała się w poprzednim numerze).

Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry

Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry

Truth, Poetry, and the Israeli Psychoanalytic Challenge

ABSTRACT This article explores the unique positioning of psychoanalysis in the fabric of Israeli life that for decades has been construed as realizing a historic dream and ideal. It recognizes the fusion of the collective-national and the personal in the Israeli clinic, and underlines the task of generating and granting personal meaning to the pressures, truths and traumas of the collective. The article follows the gradual and simultaneous evolution of diversity and multiplicity of signification in a patient’s therapy and in the Hebrew poetry she loves. As it traces the polarities of the national and the personal, poesis and truth, the article offers an articulation of psychoanalytic epistemic multiplicity that may bridge and soften their apparent incompatibilities.

The Hebrew Poetry of the Younger Generation of Immigrants from the Former Soviet Union in Israel. Part 1: Alex Rif, Nadia-Adina Rose

Na przykładzie twórczości izraelskich poetek (Alex Rif, Nadi-Adiny Rose) opisane są kulturowo-estetyczne wyznaczniki poezji hebrajskiej młodego pokolenia — tzw. generation one and a half — dzieci repatriantów z byłego Związku Sowieckiego. Szczególna uwaga poświęcona została zagadnieniu kulturowej spuścizny oraz tym poetyckim praktykom, w ramach których owa spuścizna znajduje swój wyraz. Jest to pierwsza część artykułu, następna — dotycząca twórczości Yael Tomashov i Rity Kogan — ukaże się w kolejnym numerze.

Robert Lowth’s Bible: Between Seraphic Choirs and Prophetic Weakness

Abstract Between 1741 and 1750 Robert Lowth, Oxford’s fifth chair of poetry, presented a series of groundbreaking lectures that reimagined the Hebrew Bible as literature, emphasizing its artful formal qualities. Today he is best known for rediscovering the parallelism of ancient Hebrew poetry, which he imagined as originating in the responsive singing of the seraphim. At a time when the divine authority of the Bible was waning, the reclassification of large swaths of prophecy as poetry helped Lowth extol the human figure of the prophet as a literary genius. Lowth idealized the prophetic-poetic text as “strong”: artful, controlled, ordered, and balanced. He responded to an anxiety about the place of the Bible and biblical prophecy in eighteenth-century English society by disavowing or minimizing the irregularities, stutters, and fissures in prophecy. But by introducing prophecy into poetry, Lowth—with much ambivalence—also ushered more passion, enthusiasm, and subjectivity into neoclassical English poetry. Despite his attempts to minimize the formal and theological weaknesses he found in the prophetic text, his scholarly project also transmitted them into English literature, allowing Romantic poets like William Blake to draw on biblical prophetic weaknesses in constructing their own complex prophetic positions.

The Hope of Salman Masalha: Re-Territorializing Hebrew

Israeli poetry can be depicted as a triangle composed of three elements: territory (the State of Israel); language (Hebrew); and identity (Jewish). In his Hebrew collection of poetry Eḥad Mikan (in place, 2004), Salman Masalha—a bilingual author publishing in both Arabic and Hebrew—challenges this interrelation of territory, language and identity. The debate between the literary scholars Hannan Hever and Reuven Snir explore the central expressions of this challenge. For it points, on the one hand, to the subversive potential of such work towards the Israeli canon while, on the other hand, to its connection to Arabic literature. Writing in the language of the other often invokes the seminal essay by Deleuze and Guattay Kafka: Toward Minor Literature (1986). In that context, it was assumed that Hebrew works by Arab authors de-territorialize the Hebrew language, detaching it from its natural users. In the present essay, however, we point to the ways in which Masalha’s Hebrew poetry in fact re-territorializes the Hebrew language; that is, it turns Hebrew from the language of the Jewish people to the language of the region, to the language of “Someone from Here” (as the Hebrew title of the book implies). We will present close readings of the poems, as well as of the para-textual features of the collection, in order to demonstrate how Masalha’s work not only comments on his identity as an Arab living in Israel, but on the identity of Hebrew poetry as well. Our reading therefore perceives Masalha’s collection as a milestone in the evolution of Hebrew poetry; while in 1948 Hebrew poetry was transformed into Israeli poetry, in the 21st century, it is being transformed into poetry “written from here.”