Sacred and Suggestive

Sacred and Suggestive: The Many Faces of Medieval Hebrew Poetry from Spain Adena Tanenbaum Moshe Ibn Ezra. The Liturgical Poems of Moshe Ibn Ezra: A Critical Edition, 2 volumes. Edited from manuscripts and printed editions, annotated, and introduced by Israel Levin and Tova Rosen. [Hebrew.] Tel Aviv: Haim Rubin Tel Aviv University Press, 2012–14. Volume 1, pp. 386; volume 2, pp. 650. Shari L. Lowin. Arabic and Hebrew Love Poems in al-Andalus. Culture and Civilization in the Middle East 39. Abingdon, UK & New York: Routledge, 2014. Pp. xvii + 304. In the preface to his 1928 edition of Moses Ibn Ezra’s poetry, Hayyim Nahman Bialik wrote: Of the considerable inheritance of poetry and piyyut that this prolific poet left us, the largest portion—his liturgical poetry—is scattered and dispersed in mahzorim and ancient collections, both printed and manuscript . . . while the other part—the non-liturgical poems—found refuge in only one dîwân that has come down to us, the one on which this edition of secular poetry is based, and even it is fragmentary and completely corrupt . . . [F]rom time to time, isolated poems of Moses Ibn Ezra have been printed in journals or various antiquarian anthologies . . . The publication of these samples has further fueled the longing in the hearts of those who admire Andalusian Hebrew poetry [mokire shirat yisrael bisfarad] . . . to see the marvelous products of [Ibn Ezra’s] spirit collected together in a complete ingathering [kinus] and brought out, as far as possible, in a proper publication.1 [End Page 247] Bialik’s language of exile, redemption, and national restoration is typical of his larger kinus project, which envisioned the “ingathering,” editing, rehabilitation, and preservation of dispersed and neglected Hebrew texts as a vehicle for creating a new national culture in the first decades of the twentieth century. A proponent of cultural nationalism, Bialik framed his literary kinus agenda in terms of national revival and ascribed a transformative potential to classical Hebrew texts. In his view, a well-ordered and accessible literary canon was crucial to restoring knowledge of the Jewish cultural heritage, which would in turn help to forge a unified Jewish national consciousness.2 For Bialik, the Hebrew poetry of medieval Spain represented “a wondrous, lofty, and splendid palace which in its magnificence stands as a sign and a wonder for the current generation,” to whom he ascribed an impoverished spirit. Only the complete revival of the palace of Spanish poetry . . . can open the eyes of the public to its glory and exalted nature, so as to awaken in their hearts the desire to enter into it . . . It is in the power of [this poetry] to enrich the content of our national knowledge [haskalatenu ha-le’umit].3 While Bialik aspired to a kinus shalem of Moses Ibn Ezra’s oeuvre—likely along the lines of his and Ravnitsky’s 1924–25 edition of Solomon Ibn Gabirol’s poetry—the 1928 volume of secular poetry they coedited was the only one to see the light of day. The medieval dîwân from which it drew consists mostly of nonliturgical poems (shire ḥol) but includes some piyyutim (shire kodesh) and has come down to us in three more or less complete manuscripts. The dîwân was assembled anonymously, though its Arabic superscriptions reflect some familiarity with the circumstances of the poems’ composition. According to medieval Andalusian convention, a poet’s nonliturgical corpus, which fulfilled an array of social functions quite remote from the world of the synagogue—panegyric; celebration of [End Page 248] erotic love; the beauties of nature; the pleasures of wine-drinking; the joys of friendship; lamenting one’s fate—was collected in a dîwân devoted to a single author, often by someone other than the poet himself. Piyyutim by multiple poets, on the other hand, were adopted into the liturgical rites of various communities and preserved in prayer books and mahzorim, anthologies which effectively created a literary canon of synagogue poetry for a given community, although it was always possible to absorb additional piyyutim. Since the time of S. D. Luzatto (1800–1865)—a pioneer in the study of Andalusian Hebrew poetry—Ibn Ezra

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