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Dunash ben
Labrat |
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Dunash ben Labrat, often known as Rabbi Adonim Halevi
(920-990) laid the foundations for the greatest post-biblical
period of Hebrew poetry by expressing Jewish traditions
in Arabic verse forms. Dunash was best known for his poetry
— of which little
unfortunately remains — but it was his religious and
grammarian
disputes that furnish our fragmentary biographical information.
Medieval Spain, both Muslim
and Christian,
was generally tolerant
of religious minorities, though Jews were often massacred
in wars between Muslims and Christians and between contending
Muslim states. Dunash was born in Fès and probably
served as a rabbi in the great city of learning, Cordoba.
Dunash'a works include the Shabbat song Dror Yikra and Dvai
Hasair, the (now) traditional preface to birkat hamazon
at weddings.
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Spanish Hebrew poetry |
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The secular Hebrew poetry of Spain is often seen as its
golden
age — this literary greatness being shared with
Islamic science and Christian theology. Poets like Yehuda
Halevi (1086-1145), Samuel
HaNagid (993-1056), Solomon
ibn Gvirol (1021-?1070) and Moses
ibn Ezra (1055-?1135) produced a great wealth of poetry
that employed linguistic virtuosity, Hebrew learning and
Arabic idioms/images in a deeply personal style. Most were
court poets retained by the Jewish aristocracy, or members
of that aristocracy, and their poetry has the Arab celebration
of the senses with a sombre religiosity and sense of man's
sinfulness. The themes are deeply varied: war and all its
exultations and terrors, love and the fleeting nature of
passion, desolating grief, injustice, the follies of human
nature and our mortality.
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Hebrew
poetry |
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Hebrew, an ancient
Semitic language,
largely written
today as it was some 3000 years ago, is the medium of
a long and rich tradition of poetry. Its greatest period
is the classical (1150-150 BC), where the characteristics
of parallelism
and terseness were used to create hymns, prayers, songs,
lamentations and aphorisms, as Old
Testament readers will know. Poetry of the Piyyut (500-800
AD) period was more liturgical, but in Muslim Spain secular
poetry had its great flowering. Hebrew poetry has often
adopted the metrical forms of surrounding cultures, and
these in Spain were qasida, rubaiyat
(quatrains) and muwashshah (girdle or love poem).
Hebrew poetry has retained its characteristics in all periods,
until perhaps the present, when contemporary
Israeli writing and poetry
dealing with the holocaust and current politics employs
free verse and everyday or enigmatic images.
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Books and Internet resources |
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Outside the pay-for encyclopedias, Internet sources do not
match those in book form, or even the summary and bibliography
to be found in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry
and Poetics (1993). Moreover, Medieval
Hebrew is a specialist
field, and accounts of its poetry tend to be scholarly
e.g. A. Schippers'
Spanish Hebrew Poetry, N. Roth's Deal
gently with the young mna, and R. Scheindlin's Wine,
Women and Death and The
Gazelle. Hebrew literature sources are listed at Haifa
University, Mount
Scopus Library, and the Jewish
National and University Library. There are many popular
poetry translations, however, e.g. those by T.
Carmi, B.
Lewis, Kovak
and Jospe, K.
Brook and P.
Cole. A little history will help, of medieval
Spain
and the Jewish
people. Good listings of resources on medieval Spain
are found at Jewish
medieval history and Spanish
medieval history. Much more extensive for Jewish concerns
is Judaism
and Jewish Resources, which also lists Hebrew language
courses and centres.
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