The Gazelle: Medieval Hebrew Poems on God, Israel, and the Soul.

• Author: Saenz-Badillos, Angel

This excellent new book by Raymond Scheindlin, professor of Hebrew literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, complements his previous study of Hebrew secular poetry, Wine, Women and Death: Medieval Hebrew Poems on the Good Life (Jewish Publication Society, 1986), and touches on new topics related to Hebrew-Andalusian synagogue poetry. Although they are independent works, they have in common a profound comprehension of the Arabic and Jewish cultural world of the Middle Ages as well as a similar approach. The new book deals with the surprising phenomenon of the introduction of Arabic secular imagery into the closed world of Jewish liturgy in al-Andalus. In my opinion, it represents the full maturity of a brilliant scholar, who has elaborated a new image of Hebrew Andalusian poets and opened new avenues for research in the comparative fields of Arabic and Jewish poetry. With a method that is not frequently found in such works, he tries to offer a correct evaluation of that liturgical poetry not only from the point of view of Jewish literary history, but also from the spiritual atmosphere in which it was produced.

The author asks himself how the same poets could write both genres of poetry--the secular, for the Jewish courtiers, and the liturgical, for the religious congregations that met at the synagogue for prayer. He shows the contradictions in the use of the same imagery by the Jewish courtier, "living as he did in two different ideological systems at once," but nevertheless learning from his neighbors how to live with these contradictions. In addition--from a very modern perspective--Scheindlin poses the question of how much non-Jewish culture a Jew could in conscience adopt in the Middle Ages, and to what degree he could arrive at a kind of cultural symbiosis, belong at the same time to both Israel and to the international class of intellectuals.

The introduction, dealing with the spiritual atmosphere and the innovations of the Spanish school of synagogue poetry, is followed by two main sections on "God and Israel" and "God and the Soul." Professor Scheindlin comments on and translates thirty liturgical poems, written by the most important poets of the Golden Age: Ibn Gabirol, Moses ibn Ezra, Judah Halevi, and also by Ibn Ghiyath, Ibn al-Tabban, and Abraham ibn Ezra. He chooses the short compositions that represent the genres most commonly preferred by the Spanish poets, quite removed from the longer compositions of...