Threads of Gold: Reclaiming the Textile in the Metaphors for Biblical Citations in Medieval Hebrew Literature

Abstract Although Immanuel of Rome’s Bisbidis abounds with onomatopoeic inventiveness, it has received little critical attention aside from its status as a curiosity: a dazzling poem by the only Italian Jew with extant medieval Italian lyrics. While this paper explores Immanuel’s familiarity with works by Cecco Angiolieri, Dante Alighieri, and other duecento Italian poets, it aims to demonstrate the ways in which Bisbidis embodies the medieval Hebrew-via-Arabic genre of the maqāma. After providing background on secular medieval Hebrew literature composed in the Mediterranean region and situating Immanuel’s composition in its literary-historical context, I evaluate several components – including thematic, formal, and philological correspondences – that Bisbidis shares with the Hebrew maqāma.

Abstract This article proposes a new reading of the opening scene of Joseph Ben Meir Ibn Zabara’s twelfth century (at the latest: 1209) The Book of Delight. This reading derives from the hypothesis that this art of storytelling is based on a poetic principle of uncertainty, and is therefore associated with the various forms of the ambiguous and the ambivalent (the grotesque, the uncanny, the ironic, etc.). As I have argued elsewhere about other rhymed Hebrew stories, this approach is appropriate, in my view, to the character of some of the most fascinating rhymed stories produced in medieval Hebrew literature. In the present study I suggest yet another demonstration of the poetic benefit that can accrue from the adoption of this approach.

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 paper proposes a new reading of the banquet scene in Joseph Ibn Zabara's The Book of Delight. This reading derives from the hypothesis that this art of storytelling is based on a poetic principle of uncertainty, and is therefore associated with the various forms of the ambiguous and the ambivalent and the qualities that are typically associated with them—a sense of confusion and disorientation and an inability to decide among contradictory insights or emotional responses. As I have argued elsewhere about other rhymed Hebrew stories, this approach is appropriate to the character of some of the most fascinating rhymed stories produced in medieval Hebrew literature. The paper will describe the poetic devices which are used in this scene for the purpose of creating the jolting effect of uncertainty.

In the Medieval Hebrew Literature, we have no evidence about women as authors, except for Dunash ibn Labrat’s wife (X cent.) and Qasmuna bat Isma’il (XII cent.). Women were not "silent" at all in the Middle Ages, but the feminine way to compose texts at that time was oral, being made in the native Jewish-Languages, while Hebrew – known almost only by men - was the language of the written Literature. In this essay we will deal with the (self-)representation of women in the Judaeo-Provencal medieval literary corpus. First, we will analyze some texts, explicitly composed for women, in order to understand the feminine perspective and literary liking as a public. Second, we will deal with an example of women literary creativeness, i.e. a particular Jewish blessing, transmitted in three extant Jewish prayerbooks (XV century), which recites: “Bless you God, for I was born a woman”. This probably refers to a local tradition of Provencal Jewish women who created it during the Middle Ages.

This essay approaches the medieval Hebrew literature on women's healthcare, with the aim of analysing notions and ideas regarding fertility, pregnancy and childbirth, as conveyed in the texts that form the corpus. Firstly, the work discusses the approach of written texts to pregnancy and childbirth as key elements in the explanation of women's health and the functioning of the female body. In this regard it also explores the role of this approach in the creation of meanings for both the female body and sexual difference. Secondly, it examines female management of pregnancy and childbirth as recorded in Hebrew medical literature. It pays attention to both the attitudes expressed by the authors, translators and copyists regarding female practice, as well as to instances and remedies derived from "local" traditions--that is, from women's experience--in the management of pregnancy and childbirth, also recorded in the texts. Finally, the paper explores how medical theories alien to, or in opposition to, Judaism were adopted or not and, at times, adapted to Jewish notions with the aim of eliminating tensions from the text, on the one hand, and providing Jewish practitioners with adequate training to retain their Christian clientele, on the other.

The misogynic attitude to women in medieval Hebrew literature is well known by now. It has been studied, however, only in the learned literature of the time—legal documents, midrashim and commentaries, poetry, mystical treatises, and moral writings. All these were written documents put down by men and for men. Whether there is a way to hear the female voice in medieval Jewish culture, in which women did not write, is a question often asked, usually with a negative answer. Following studies in general folkloristics and feminist theory, I suggest that the female voice could be heard in the medium that was open to them—oral folk literature. As the major contributors to everyday life, women expressed themselves in various events, both intimate and more public, by telling stories and listening to them. In the early-sixteenth-century Ms. Jerusalem we find transcribed tales from a much earlier period (the thirteenth century) which express the ideas, feelings, and mentalities of broader strata of Jewish society, not just its male and learned members. Thirteen tales identifiable as 'women's tales' appear in this manuscript and are published and discussed here.

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.

The Return of the Repressed:Modern Jewish Studies in JQR David N. Myers As one reads the editorial announcement with which Cyrus Adler and Solomon Schechter opened the new series of JQR in July 1910, one gets the distinct sense that they felt themselves at the dawn of a new era. "America," they wrote, "is fast becoming the center of Jewry, and in all likelihood, will become also the center of Jewish learning in the English world." The transatlantic passage of the Jewish Quarterly Review from London to Philadelphia, from the editorial control of Claude Montefiore and Israel Abrahams to Adler and Schechter, symbolized a broader transition of Jewish scholarship from its European birthplace to its new American home. Well before the devastation of the Shoah—and alongside the fledgling Zionist enterprise in Palestine—America was indeed becoming a center of Jewish scholarship. At first, this growth took place mainly in rabbinical seminaries and Jewish colleges (such as JQR's first sponsor, Dropsie College). Later in the twentieth century, the main institutional venue shifted from seminaries and colleges to the university, where Jewish studies has become a mainstay of humanistic inquiry. One could well imagine Adler and Schechter feeling a mix of sadness and satisfaction that Dropsie College did not survive, but its library—and JQR itself—were taken over and put to new use by a research center at the University of Pennsylvania. Quite similar to the founding fathers of Wissenschaft des Judentums, the first American editors conceived of their journal as filling a need not currently being met by the existing scholarly literature. Research in Jewish studies in America, they asserted, followed either a theological or local historical bent. By contrast, they aimed for a measure of Schechterian catholicity by embracing work in Jewish history, literature, philology, and archaeology. That said, the journal unavoidably tracked the research interests of the editors. Semitic philology and Bible à la Adler were amply represented in [End Page 345] the first years, as were articles that reflected Schechter's passion for and expertise in Geniza materials. What was conspicuously lacking was work on modern Jewish history. The editors made clear that they did not intend to retain the old JQR's interest in English Jewish history. Nor did they feel obliged to replicate the efforts of the American Jewish Historical Society. And yet, topics of modern concern crept into the pages of the journal. In the second issue (October 1911), the scholar of medieval Hebrew literature from JTS, Israel Davidson, wrote an essay that eventually wended its way around to its main subject: a review of a new dictionary devoted to the importation of Hebrew and Chaldean words into Yiddish coedited by C. D. Spivak and the renowned translator Yehoash. In a lengthy prelude to this discussion, Davidson offered an intriguing survey of both Hebrew and Yiddish literature in which he revealed himself to be impressively conversant with belles lettres and criticism in both languages. Even more interesting, though, were his judgments of the status of the two in his own day. Comparing the development of the two literary cultures, Davidson maintained that "in the short space of a quarter century Yiddish literature has made such rapid strides that it bids fair to outstrip modern Hebrew" especially in poetry and fiction. "Where is the Hebrew artist," he asked, "to equal Abramowitz [i.e., Mendele Mokher Seforim], unless we place his own Hebrew works side by side with his Yiddish? What Hebrew writer can measure up with the genius of [Y. L.] Peretz?" Davidson recognized that Hebrew literature was undergoing its own "extraordinary development." But he seemed intent on placing Yiddish even higher on the ladder of success, noting the "gigantic proportions" of its recent achievements. He even sought to explain its advantage over Hebrew by contrasting its mass appeal to the latter's "upper class" orientation. Davidson hastened to insist that his comparison had nothing to do with the ongoing ideological debate du jour about whether Hebrew or Yiddish was the national language of the Jews (as, for example, at the 1908 Czernowitz conference). One might speculate that he did not want to run afoul of the new editors of JQR, who sought...

Isaac ibn Sahula's Meshal ha-kadmoni, a classic of medieval Hebrew literature, was composed in Castile during one of the most prolific periods in the development of classical Kabbalah. This article argues that while ibn Sahula chose to avoid discussion of the ten sefirot and other forms of symbolism typically associated with kabbalistic writings from this period, he nonetheless sought to promote a worldview in the Meshal ha-kadmoni that bears a distinct affinity to medieval Kabbalah. Throughout the text, ibn Sahula's articulations of matters relating to divine providence over individuals and the natural order, the origin and nature of the human soul, and the attainment of prophetic insight, all resonate deeply with kabbalistic texts from 13th century Castile. Moreover, ibn Sahula consistently emphasizes the importance of esoteric knowledge, accessible exclusively to Jews as a secret tradition or "kabalah" deriving from revelation in antiquity, which constitutes the inner core of Judaism. The Meshal ha-kadmoni thus serves as an important witness to the major concerns and values of the cultural context in which many of the classics of medieval Kabbalah, including the zoharic literature, took shape.

The present article analyzes the Hebrew story of Johanan and the Scorpion, found in a thirteenth-century manuscript from Northem France (Ms. Oxford [Bodl. Or. 135]), which represents an unusual phenomenon in Jewish literary tradition. Although it appears in a manuscript considered an important milestone in the history of medieval Hebrew literature, and despite the Jewish cultural norm of rewriting literary works again and again, it is the only existing Hebrew version of this theme. The reason it was never revised or copied may be the portrayal of the main character as a Jewish knight who leaves his community and surrenders to the element of ‘the other’, thereby losing his original identity. The assumption is made that these problematic ideas and poetic materials, together with historical circumstances, created the non-acceptance of this story.

Reviewed by: The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken, 1877–1959 Michael Brenner Anthony David . The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken, 1877–1959. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003. Pp. 451. Salman Schocken was the German version of the American dream: a poor Jew from the Prussian eastern provinces moves to a small town in Saxony, builds up one of Weimar Germany's leading chains of department stores, and emerges as an architectural pioneer who has Erich Mendelsohn build the most exciting Bauhaus-style department stores. He becomes a Zionist visionary and a leading spirit behind the rise of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, builds up a publishing house that serves as intellectual comfort during German Jewry's darkest hours, emerges as the publisher of Franz Kafka and a keen promoter of Shmuel Yosef Agnon for the Nobel Prize. As if this were not enough, he founds an institute for medieval Hebrew literature which searches for the Hebrew Nibelungenlied, possesses one of the most precious private collections of rare books in Judaica as well as German culture, and is responsible for the emergence of Israel's leading newspaper Ha'aretz. In other words, a biographer's dream. The self-made man from Posen, whom Hannah Arendt called the "Jewish Bismarck" (p. 204), was one of the most versatile figures in an era with no lack of versatile personalities. He was not just the chairman of the Organization of German Department Stores but a person deeply instilled with the ambition to turn his clients into educated people, into Bildungsbürger like himself, and to make his stores aesthetic masterworks of the new Bauhaus style. Next to the underwear counter he would give out poems by Goethe, and with the profit he made, he would support poor writers, such as the young Agnon, who had moved to Germany from Palestine before World War I. His Schocken Library, a predecessor of modern paperback series, produced one piece of essential Jewish culture after the other in Nazi Germany and became a remarkable monument to spiritual endurance in times of horror. The Patron himself had to leave Nazi Germany, and as he was an active Zionist, it was clear where his path would lead. The department stores remained in the hands of "Aryan" trustees until the end of the Thousand-Year Reich, so Schocken concentrated on his favorite endeavors: a research institute on medieval Hebrew poetry, the preservation of his unique library, and his involvement with the Hebrew University. He founded a publishing house in Israel, bought the newspaper Ha'aretz for his son Gershon (who would turn it into Israel's leading paper), and had [End Page 457] Erich Mendelsohn build his private home and his library, which became the unofficial intellectual center of Jerusalem. In the words of his biographer, "it was the only place in town where guests could expect such a high quality of cakes, wines, and light snacks. Being across the street from Golda Meir's residence gave it an added aura of mystery. It was a piece of prewar central Europe lodged in the heart of a Spartan state" (p. 384). As early as the 1930s Schocken suggested S. Y. Agnon, whom he had supported in the difficult years back in Germany, for the Nobel Prize and used all his connections in Sweden and in the literary world to promote this goal. He published Martin Buber and Franz Kafka, and he financed Gershom Scholem's research on Kabbalah. Still Salman Schocken was not a happy man in interwar Palestine. He was keenly aware of how little difference he was able to make there, in contrast to his time in Weimar Germany, and how little recognition he received. "In Germany I was always a part of things" he told the philosopher Hugo Bergmann. In Palestine, he felt like a nobody, writes David (p. 304). In 1939 Schocken left Jerusalem for New York and would thereafter return to Israel only for visits. In the United States, he had high hopes of achieving with American Jews what he failed to do in Palestine: to turn them into Bildungsbürger, who would read and produce a Jewish culture comparable to that found in...

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

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.

Gender Studies and Medieval Hebrew Poetry Matti Huss Tova Rosen . Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, xvi + 264 pp. 1 Tova Rosen's Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature is a significant contribution to the field and one that has far-reaching implications for the way we read both the secular and liturgical works of the Hebrew Middle Ages. It is also the first work of its kind: an extensive study of medieval Hebrew literature done from the perspective of gender studies. Rosen's detailed readings take us from the secular and liturgical poetry of the Andalusian period (Muslim Spain, 950-1150) through the rhymed narratives and the secular poetry of various literary schools of the Christian-Spanish era (c. 1200-1497). To this rich mix, Rosen adds an important element from the Hebrew-Italian school of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries: the Mahbarot (rhymed narratives) of Immanuel of Rome. In her first chapter, "No-Woman's-Land: Medieval Hebrew Literature and Feminist Criticism," Rosen presents the historical and literary background of the period as well as the theoretical and methodological assumptions on which she bases her readings. She follows these with a gender-oriented outline that enables the reader to comprehend the principal contours of the diverse body of texts that she investigates. In the seven subsequent chapters, she offers close readings that focus on different aspects of this outline. Some chapters deal with a single work (chapter 5), and others investigate a group of texts (chapters 3, 6, 7, and 8) or analyze the features of an entire genre from a feminist perspective (chapters 2 and 4). In the course of her detailed discussion of these aspects, Rosen meticulously unearths the [End Page 369] complicated textual network that surrounds them. She directs our attention to correlate texts and echoes of texts from Hebrew, Arabic, and European contemporary literary systems. 2 The main criterion guiding Rosen in the process of constructing the outline with which she opens her book is a detailed analysis of the ways in which the binary opposition between women's speech and women's silence is molded in poems and rhymed narratives of various genres. Rosen's decision to focus on this specific opposition is, of course, not accidental. The contrary values given to feminine speech and silence occupy a central position in patriarchal thought throughout the ages. The projection of this contrast on secular and liturgical Andalusian poetry—and on the rhymed narratives written mainly in Christian Spain—proves efficacious and reveals major generic features that traditional genre analysis overlooked entirely or whose significance it failed to appreciate. For example, Rosen shows how three out of four of the central features of the beloved in the Andalusian love lyric—her beauty, her cruelty, the existential threat to which she exposes her lovers, and her powerful silence—are transformed radically in the erotic epithalamia by poets of the period. The silence of the beautiful beloved, which is the ultimate metonymy of her continuous rejection of the lovers' advances, is in these epithalamia replaced by the erotic speech of the bride directed to the bridegroom—a speech act that signals the commencement of their sexual relations. Correspondingly, misogynic elements typical of the silent beloved in love lyrics are deprived in the wedding poems of their devastating demonic power. But this happens only after they are explicitly displayed in the text. For example, the bride in Judah Halevi's "Halo ala" tries to calm the frightened bridegroom. She informs him that he should not be afraid of the metaphoric snakes curling in her hair because they are not meant to harm but only to arouse him: "And if you see my snake in the garden bed of my cheeks / approach, do not be frightened, I have placed him there to entice you."1 These same metaphoric snakes appear in the conventional love lyric as guardians whose function is to deter the lover from even daring to [End Page 370] approach the beloved. One should, of course, suspect the integrity of these disavowals in the erotic epithalamia even if they are spoken by the bride and...

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...

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

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