Spanish Hebrew Poetry and the Arabic Literary Tradition: Arabic Themes in Hebrew Andalusian Poetry.

• Author: Scheindlin, Raymond P.

This book is a study of the relationship of the poetry of the Hebrew Golden Age in al-Andalus (tenth to twelfth centuries) to Arabic poetry; its core is a survey of the poetic themes and motifs in Hebrew Andalusian literature that have been borrowed from Arabic literature.

It was the example of Arabic poetry that inspired the Hebrew poets of tenth-century Cordoba to revolutionize Hebrew literature. The school of Hebrew poets that arose thanks to these poets' openness to the fructifying influence of Arabic letters has always been regarded as the pinnacle of Jewish literary achievement in premodern times. The broad fact of Arabic influence is undisputed, having been acknowledged by the poets themselves. The identification of specific points of influence has been the object of considerable study beginning in the nineteenth century and proceeding through the twentieth.

Since Arabic influence was acknowledged from the start, such research was necessary not to demonstrate its existence but to assist in the interpretation of the poetry itself, because the Hebrew style, the literary conventions, and the cultural assumptions of Golden Age poetry were exotic and hard to grasp until they had been thoroughly explored in the light of Arabic. Frequently, an image or a line of Hebrew verse that is obscure when considered only in its immediate context can be easily clarified by referring to Arabic literary traditions. The same is true of whole poems, whose intention and function often can be illuminated by calling on Arabic parallels. Sometimes a Hebrew line can even be traced to the influence of a particular line of Arabic poetry. Perhaps surprisingly, Arabic models even can be brought to bear on the interpretation of Hebrew religious poetry of the Golden Age as well as secular poetry, though it might have been thought that religious poetry, intended largely for use in the liturgy, would have been protected from outside influences.

Editions and commentaries on Golden Age Hebrew poetry have long drawn on Arabic poetry to the extent of the author's knowledge of Arabic. Landmark works that draw heavily on Arabic poetry are the voluminous and authoritative commentaries (1896-1901 and 1938-41) by Heinrich (Hayim) Brody on the secular poetry of Judah Halevi and Moses Ibn Ezra; the commentary by Saul Abdullah Yosef on parts of the oeuvre of the same two poets (1923 and 1926); David Yellin's Torat hashira hasefaradit (1940), a study of the prosody and rhetorical...