My Heart is in Sepharad: Writing Medieval Spain in the Modern Sephardic Diaspora

by

Leonard Stein

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Centre for Comparative Literature University of Toronto

© Copyright by Leonard Stein 2021

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My Heart is in Sepharad: Writing Medieval Spain in the Modern Sephardic Diaspora

Leonard Stein

Doctor of Philosophy

Centre for Comparative Literature University of Toronto

2021

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the cultural construction of a modern global diaspora by

foregrounding the historical, linguistic and nationalist contexts embedded in literary works

produced over the last two centuries, written by a diverse collection of writers who imagine a

preserved ethnoreligious community. Sephardim—descendants of medieval Jews expelled from

Spain in the fifteenth century—have sustained an ethnic heritage by drawing on the figures,

texts, and experiences of medieval Iberia, specifically the Golden Age of al-Andalus (ca. 950-

1140) and the anti-Jewish measures in Christian Spain that led to the Inquisition and expulsion

(ca. 1391-1492). I argue that by reading, translating, and rewriting the rich literature of medieval

Iberian Jews, from Andalusian liturgical poetry to Kabbalistic commentaries to converso

epistles, modern Sephardim creatively interpret the historical and political significance of their

ancestral homeland. To conceptualize such diasporic identities, I compare temporalities, regions,

and genres, consistently juxtaposing major forms of literature written by Iberian Jews throughout

the Middle Ages with those written by their descendants.

This study of a modern diaspora also compares the role of contemporaneous

historiography, from Romantic historicism to the Wissenschaft des Judenthums to archival

research of the Cairo Geniza, in accessing the history and texts of a former homeland. I further

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explore the intertextual strategies through which modern Sephardim imagine the medieval

Jewish experience, constructing palimpsests that bring influential texts into relief by writing

around and about them in order to situate artistic expressions, such as those in homoerotic or

Romantic poetry, as a medieval inheritance. By adopting genres from al-Andalus, where

quantified meters of poetry and conventions of form reflected Jewish acculturation in a

predominantly Arab society, Sephardim writing in Hebrew, in particular, produce experimental,

actively archaic forms of poetry and narrative. Finally, this study addresses how Sephardim

deploy medieval tropes, such as the intolerance of the Inquisition or the heroic pilgrimage of an

Andalusi poet, to project an ethnicity onto modern nationalist identities.

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Acknowledgments

The journey to the end of this dissertation, marked by these words, has been guided by several important figures. This is a study on modern Sephardic identity, a project that comes from being the product of Egyptian and Bulgarian families. My father, who taught me music and how to ask questions, descends from a North African line that eventually returns to Spain. My mother, who taught me creativity and always encouraged me, is named Alcalay because her family held on to Cervantes’s city for generations. Many years ago, I would sing Ladino songs with my mémé, and this work is perhaps another version of that. How fortunate am I to have been embraced at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature and Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies. I have learned from wonderful peers, students, and instructors, including Ann Komaromi, Mary Nyquist, and Doris Bergen. My academic committee provided everything a student could ask for. Thank you, Yigal Nizri, for your support and perspective in Israeli literary and social studies. Karen Weisman, thank you for turning me into a Romantic! I grew from your critical comments, your conversations, and your work Singing in a Foreign Land, which I used as both a critical resource as well as an aspirational model for scholarly work enveloped in beautiful prose. Academically, I am of course most indebted to Jill Ross, who oversaw my development from every stage, from my admissions process to several courses to her unbeatable guidance as my supervisor. Jill, your accessibility, even in the darkest hours, has meant the world to me. Thank you for all of your insight, for the challenging notes that always improved things, and for listening. I am grateful to call you a friend. Lastly, I thank my family, who kept me grounded and who gives me purpose. To my three genius, talented, hilarious, and loving children: Shoeva Yiskah, Elul Menachem, and Nogah Salo. Most of all, I acknowledge and send love to my wife, Keshet Rachel Margalit. Not even an Andalusian ode written by Yehuda Halevi could possibly express my thankfulness in having you in my life. Throughout these crazy years, flying around the world with three children, the wars, the crises, and even a pandemic, you have been here. You are my home.

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Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................................................... IV

TABLE OF CONTENTS ..................................................................................................................................... V

INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................................... 1

0.1 DEFINING IDENTITIES ........................................................................................................................... 6 0.1.1 The Medieval Subject ....................................................................................................................... 6

0.1.1.1 Convivencia ........................................................................................................................................... 9 0.1.1.2 Converso ............................................................................................................................................. 11

0.1.2 The Modern Subject ....................................................................................................................... 14 0.2 THEORIZING SEPHARDIC WRITING ...................................................................................................... 17 0.3 STRUCTURE OF RESEARCH .................................................................................................................. 23

0.3.1 How do Sephardim access the past? .............................................................................................. 23 0.3.2 How do Sephardim reproduce the past? ......................................................................................... 25 0.3.3 How does the past inform political notions of the self? ................................................................... 27

0.4 A NOTE ON STYLE .............................................................................................................................. 29

CHAPTER ONE: ACCESSING MEDIEVAL HISTORY ....................................................................... 32

1.1 GRACE AGUILAR AND MODES OF MEMORY ......................................................................................... 35 1.1.1 Inquisition Narratives .................................................................................................................... 38 1.1.2 Depicting Queen Isabella ............................................................................................................... 46

1.2 EMMA LAZARUS AND THE PROCESSES OF TRANSLATION ...................................................................... 51 1.2.1 Lazarus’s Reinterpretation of Inquisition History ............................................................................ 62

1.3 YEHUDA BURLA AND THE READING OF GENIZA RESEARCH .................................................................. 71

1.4 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................................................... 90

CHAPTER TWO: SEPHARDIC PALIMPSESTS .................................................................................. 91

2.1 EMMA LAZARUS AND HOMOEROTIC PALIMPSESTS ............................................................................... 95 2.2 MOSHE DAVID GAON AND LADINO HYPERTEXTS ............................................................................... 119 2.3 ANGELINA MUÑIZ-HUBERMAN AND MYSTICAL TEXTUALITY ............................................................. 151 2.4 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................................... 170

CHAPTER THREE: ANDALUSIAN FORMS IN MODERN HEBREW SEPHARDIC LITERATURE

171

3.1 A. B. YEHOSHUA’S JOURNEY TO THE BEGINNING OF SEPHARDIC POETRY ........................................... 173

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3.1.1 Performing Yehoshua’s Journey ................................................................................................... 192 3.2 THE NEW TUNES OF AMNON SHAMOSH ............................................................................................. 196

3.2.1 Shamosh’s Muwashshaḥ ............................................................................................................. 204 3.3 ALMOG BEHAR AND THE INTIMATE PROXIMITY OF AL-ANDALUS ....................................................... 214

3.3.1 The Waves of Saj‘ ........................................................................................................................ 217 3.3.2 Behar’s Inlays .............................................................................................................................. 222

3.4 THE MODERN MAQĀMA OF BURLA..................................................................................................... 230 3.4.1 The Medieval Hebrew Riddle ....................................................................................................... 240 3.4.2 Medieval Epistolary Writing ......................................................................................................... 249

3.5 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................................... 258

CONCLUSION: THE SEARCH FOR A NEW HOMELAND .............................................................. 261

4.1 GRACE AGUILAR AND THE GRADUAL EMANCIPATION ANGLO-JEWRY ................................................ 263 4.2 THE AMERICAN DREAM OF EMMA LAZARUS ..................................................................................... 273 4.3 YEHUDA BURLA AND THE ZIONIST YEHUDA HALEVI ......................................................................... 279 4.4 FUTURE DIRECTIONS: INTER- AND INTRA-COMMUNAL SEPHARDIC STUDIES ....................................... 287

BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................................ 294

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Introduction

On March 1, 1935, the longest-running and last American Ladino newspaper, La

Vara (“The Rod”), printed an ode to Spain without attribution. Abraham Aaron Cappon, a

Sarajevan rabbi, journalist, and hispanophile, originally published “Á España” in his 1922

collection of poetry, using Latin script partly to reach readers in Spain (cf. Schmid). La Vara,

however, transliterated the Spanish poem into Hebrew script, to the general exclusion of both

non-Jewish Spanish speakers and Jewish Ashkenazi Yiddish and Hebrew speakers. Instead,

the poem, as with most of the satirical writing, poetry, editorials, and news that filled the

pages of La Vara, appealed to a diasporic community at home with a diasporic vernacular.

But this community was not only linked by language, borne out of several dialects

preserved and continuously developed by Spanish Jews following their expulsion in 1492.

Despite the geographic and cultural gulfs that separated Vienna—where Cappon printed his

collected Poesías—from New York City—where La Vara was printed—and the

intercontinental landscape that made up the newspaper’s subscriptions, the poem “Á España”

conjures the collective voice of its readers through the nostalgia of a lost, medieval

homeland:

,הדיריק ןייב היינאפסיא ,יט הא ,םומאמאייל יט ״ירדאמ״ סורטוזונ הדי״ב הרטסיאונ הדוט סירטניימ יא .םומאשיד ונ האוגניל יסלוד וט יטסאריטסיד סונ וט יקנואא ,וניס וט יד הטסארדאמ ומוק יטראמא יד סומאקנאטסיא ונ .וניריט ומיסיטנאס ומוק

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,סירדאפ סורטסיאונ ןוראשיד יק ןיא ,סודאריטניא סיטנייראפ סוס הא ,סיראיילימ יד סאזיניס סאל יא .סודאמיק יא סודאטנימרוט יד ,סומא״בריסנוק סורטוזונ יט רופ ,וזוירולג זיאאפ ,לאיילי״פ רומא ,סומאדנאמ יט יטניאוגיסנוק רופ .וזורולאק ודולאס ורטסיאונ

Á Tí, España bienquerida, Nosotros “madre” te llamamos Y, mientras toda nuestra vida, Tu dulce lengua no dejamos. Aúnque Tú nos desterraste Como madrastra de tu seno, No estancamos de amarte Como santísimo terreno, En que dejaron nuestros padres Á sus parientes enterrados Y las cenizas de millares De tormentados y quemados. Por Tí nosotros conservamos Amor filial, país glorioso, Por consiguiente te mandamos Nuestro saludo caluroso. To you, O dear Spain, we call you “mother”, and, throughout all our lives, we do not forsake your sweet language. Even though you exiled us like a stepmother from your breast, we do not wane in loving you as the holy ground, in which our parents left, their kin buried, and the ashes of thousands, who were tortured and burned.

For you we maintain filial love, glorious country,

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so that we send you our warm greeting (Cappon; cf. Díaz-Mas 175-176)

The poem exemplifies the newspaper’s not infrequent interest in the legends and

legacy of medieval Spain. Indeed, on the very page in which Cappon’s ode was reprinted, the

editors honored the centenary of the Andalusi Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides with

both an essay and a long ode in rhyming couplets (see fig. 1). In its brevity and simple

alternating rhyme scheme, however, the poem’s ambivalent juxtaposition between near-

familial bonding and the abandonment of a personified homeland, the sanctification of

territory defined by the destruction of the speakers’ ancestors, and the perpetual literary

return toward the medieval past, all offer a poetic introduction to the subjects of this

dissertation. Who are the “we” assumed in this poem, and how exactly do they send a “warm

greeting” to a country responsible for their exile? And what is specifically imagined of that

“glorious country” of which La Vara’s readers—mostly American immigrants from Ottoman

territories—likely never saw?

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Figure 1. Page 2 of March 1, 1935 edition of La Vara, featuring “Á España” (extreme left

column), an ode on Maimonides (top middle columns), and an essay by La Vara’s editor,

Albert Levy (right columns).

This dissertation examines how modern writers who identify as Sephardim—the

implied “we” in Cappon’s ode—imagine, preserve, and reconstruct the ancestral homeland of

medieval Jewish Spain. Modern Sephardim represent a wide spectrum of languages, cultures,

and nationalisms. They have formed disparate communities around the world, from Spanish

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and Portuguese Sephardim of London and Amsterdam to the Arabic-speaking Sephardim of

North Africa and the Middle East to Latina/o descendants of crypto-Jews in the American

Southwest. To conceptualize such a diasporic community in literature requires various

networks of comparative analysis. This study thus compares major geographic sites of

modern Sephardic literature, but also the kinds of literature written, such as historical novels,

travel narratives, secular, political and religious poetry. Most importantly, to emphasize the

sustained significance of a medieval homeland for a modern diaspora, this study compares

temporalities, surveying literature written by Iberian Jews throughout the Middle Ages—

liturgical poetry, Neoplatonic treatises, Kabbalistic commentaries, elegies and riddles,

epistolary and travel writing, among others—which modern Sephardim read and rewrite. By

placing Sephardi authors in dialogue with each other, I explore what such juxtapositions

reveal about how these writers move between their own temporalities and that of medieval

Iberia, from the Andalusian mix of languages, beliefs, and identities, to the later Inquisitorial

suppression and oppression of Jewish life.

Recent scholarship on diasporic literary networks within Jewish studies have paved

the way for research like my own. In Diasporic Modernisms: Hebrew and Yiddish Literature

in the Twentieth Century, for example, Allison Schachter complicates the nationalist

demarcations of language by surveying modern Hebrew and Yiddish writers to “capture the

uneven relationships between their diasporic literary languages through strategies of

translation, fragmentation, and narrative breakdown” (10). Schachter’s subsequent essay with

Lital Levy, “Jewish Literature / World Literature” provides an even more expansive vision

for comparison, calling “for a new Jewish literary studies that places Jewish literatures from

eastern, western, and southeastern Europe; Southeastern Asian; North Africa; and the Levant

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into productive dialogue” (Levy and Schachter 105). This dissertation similarly imagines a

new Sephardic literary studies, surveying a global network of modern literature from the past

two centuries built upon the shared descent of medieval Jewish Spain.

This introduction will offer a contextual guide to the medieval and modern history

and literature at the center of my study, as well as situate my project within the broader

discourse of literary studies. After unpacking the unstable definitions of my principal

subjects, medieval Iberian Jews and modern Sephardim, I introduce some of the major fields

of critical theory that relate to and are impacted by the literature I analyze. Finally, I present

the central questions propelling my research on diasporic Sephardic identity and provide a

brief outline of the succeeding chapters.

0.1 Defining Identities

0.1.1 The Medieval Subject

Before considering the various fields surrounding modern Sephardic literature, one

must first attempt to define just who, precisely, Sephardim are. To identify a site of origin in

the Jewish communities that once lived in medieval Spain, a period that modern

historiography neatly marks as starting with the Muslim Umayyad conquest of the Iberian

Peninsula in 711 and ending with the official expulsion of Jews in 1492 in unified Christian

Spain, misleadingly oversimplifies images of communal integration.1 Contrary to

popularized narratives of Iberian Jews, and despite the occasional designation of the biblical

1 Such temporal demarcations ignore the Jewish settlements under Roman and Visigothic Iberian rule that precede the Umayyad Caliphate, as well as the lingering converso presence maintained and persecuted after the expulsion.

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term Sepharadi—from the ambiguous site Sepharad mentioned in Obadiah 1:20—in

Andalusian Hebrew letters, never in the Middle Ages “did a Sephardi community exist that

operated in a politically cohesive manner, nor was there anything that might be described as a

Sephardi consciousness” (Ray, “New Approaches” 17). Rather, Iberian Jews mainly

identified themselves in more local terms, and could assume or reject cultural norms

depending on their proximity to new or lost environments.

The biography of the legendary Yehuda Halevi (ca. 1075-1141), long celebrated as

the pinnacle of Andalusian Hebrew poetry—and a central figure discussed in this

dissertation—belies the stable assignations of an expansive territorialized Jewish identity.

Originally from Christian Spain, Halevi, as Ross Brann expertly encapsulates, “appeared on

the Andalusi-Jewish scene as an outsider, became an Andalusi by choice…was quickly

embraced as an insider, and ultimately was deemed the epitome of the Andalusi-Jewish

ideal,” all before repudiating its Arabized culture at the end of his life and physically leaving

the land (“Judah” 268-269). The oscillating directions that amount to Halevi’s life emphasize

the decentering of a national homeland in Spain during the time medieval Jews lived on the

Iberian Peninsula.

Jonathan P. Decter therefore concludes his study, Iberian Jewish Literature: Between

al-Andalus and Christian Europe, by defining Sepharad as an “imaginary construct,” one

which, particularly after de-territorializing campaigns of the Almohad revolts and the

Reconquista throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, “came to designate a region with

no real political boundaries that existed wherever Jews imagined it to be” (211). Although

excluded from his discussion, two important implications of this cultural imaginary arise

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from the hazy parameters set by Decter: that Iberian Jews continually redefined the import of

a lost homeland throughout the first generations after the 1492 expulsion, and that these

definitions differentiated modern literary depictions of medieval Spain from the more

complex eras and regions increasingly fleshed out by historians.

Regarding the latter implication, I refer to a modern Sephardic cultural imaginary of

medieval sites and figures. In cataloging a bibliographic record of modern literature about

medieval Iberian Jews (composed by Sephardim, non-Sephardi Jews, and otherwise), I have

yet to encounter narratives about the Jews from the kingdom of Valencia, for example, or the

complex ways in which the legal fueros and furs codes of Aragon and Catalonia governed the

economic and professional development of Jewish communities. Similarly, while the Joanine

Monarchic Dynasty of Portugal (1385-ca.1580) occupies a significant portion of Jewish

history—particularly the deaths and devastation brought by the Portuguese Inquisition

several years after Jews fled Spain—modern Sephardic narratives of the Middle Ages

overwhelmingly depict Iberian landscapes in what is now modern-day Spain.

More specifically, Sepharad has broadly been sketched into two consistent

archetypes: the so-called Golden Age of al-Andalus (ca. 950-1140) and the insufferable

plight leading up to the Spanish Inquisition and expulsion (ca. 1391-1492). If it appears

radically discordant to pair these two disparate settings, distinguished by majority cultures,

religions, languages, and centuries of time, it should also be understood that this precisely

reflects the stark trajectory so commonly practiced by Sephardi writers, sometimes within a

single composition. Recurring depictions of an elite class of literary or otherwise exceptional

figures, such as Moshe Ibn Ezra, Shelomo Ibn Gabirol, Halevi and Binyamin of Tudela of the

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eleventh and twelfth centuries, and Yitzḥaq Abravanel, Tomás de Torquemada, and Gracia

Mendes Nasi of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries offer a convenient spectrum for modern

Sephardim to recall the highs and lows of a millennium of Jewish presence in the Iberian

Peninsula. The question thus arises as to how to understand this temporal conflation, which

partly symbolizes the conflicting dichotomy Sephardim have inherited and constructed out of

their ancestral past, an imagined utopia versus its subsequent dystopia, a propinquity to

Muslim or Christian culture, south or north. Two Spanish key terms central to each historical

era elucidate the significance of this juxtaposition: convivencia and converso.

0.1.1.1 Convivencia

Convivencia, or “coexistence,” promoted by philologist Américo Castro and

frequently debated—most vociferously by Spanish nationalist critics—is the historical

discourse on the productive cultural interactions between Jews, Muslims, and Christians in

medieval Spain, particularly during the ostensibly more tolerant eras of the Córdoban

Caliphate and subsequent ṭawā’if, independent Muslim party kingdoms, during the tenth to

eleventh centuries. The scholarly polemics generated by this reinterpretation, depicting Spain

either as a lost interfaith utopia or its antithesis, have underscored the challenges of

distinguishing contemporary political ideologies from historical research. Nevertheless, the

specific history and modern interpretation of Jews living as a minority in Andalusian society

do offer fruitful directions related to my research.

Historians credit the caliphate of ‘Abd al-Raḥman III (929-961) with the renaissance

of architecture, sciences, and arts in Córdoba. The efflorescence of an Andalusian Jewish

culture, evidenced in a spring of rabbinic commentaries and rulings, Neoplatonist treatises,

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writings from an unprecedented aristocratic and political leadership (e.g., Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut

and Shemuel ibn Naghrillah Hanagid), and a renaissance of Hebrew poetry both sacred and

secular, stems considerably from the interaction with and adaptation of popular Arabic

literary, philological, and scientific production, drawn locally or as received from the

Abbasid caliphate capital in Baghdad. The decline of a socially tolerant atmosphere in al-

Andalus matches the decline of the ṭawā’if, starting with the 1066 massacre of Jews in

Granada, only exacerbated by the Berber conquests of the Almoravid dynasty in 1090 and

later the Almohad Caliphate in 1146, resulting in the exiles or forced conversions of

Andalusi Jews.

Rather than explain Andalusian Hebrew literature as the result of unfettered

acculturation, scholars like Brann interpret a process of situational marginality, in which an

“impulse to produce and consume Arabic and Hebrew culture concurrently can be seen as a

sign of ambiguity and conflict central to Andalusi-Jewish identity” (Power 125). This

ambiguity, as Esperanza Alfonso has demonstrated, can be read in the motifs of duality that

appear throughout Andalusian Hebrew poetry, such as the experience of the “exile/domicile

[facing] Muslims (and Christians) as enemies/neighbors,” expressions at the core of a

constant identification of the Jewish Self in relation to a majority Other (7).

The ways in which modern Sephardim have read the Jewish literature of al-Andalus

is, unsurprisingly, informed by their own proximity to Arab cultures. Yuval Evri’s recent

Hebrew study, The Return to al-Andalus: Disputes Over Sephardic Culture and Identity

Between Arabic and Hebrew [ תויברע ןיב תידרפס-תידוהי תוהזו תוברת לע תוקולחמ :סולדנאל הבישה

תוירבעל ], offers one such example, specifically as it concerns an understudied community that

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contributed to the support or dismissal of a developing political Zionist discourse. Examining

the “controversy over the study of medieval Spanish poetry and thought and the role of this

heritage in the renewal of modern Jewish culture and identity [ דרפס תריש רקח לע תקולחמ

תינרדומה תידוהיה תוהזהו תוברתה שודיחב וז תשרומ לש הדיקפת לעו םייניבה ימיב התוגהו ],” Evri’s

historical research focuses on a particular kind of Sephardi: Arabic-speaking, mostly

Palestine-born intellectuals from the 1880s to 1930s (20).

Many other Sephardim, however, did not interpret al-Andalus through Zionism or the

Arabic language. One of the central modern writers analyzed in my study, Emma Lazarus

(1849-1887), for example, an English- and German-speaking Sephardi living in New York

during the latter half of the nineteenth century, displays no particular awareness of the Arabic

influence upon the Andalusi poets she so venerates in her writings. Other Sephardi writers

discussed here did, however, such as the Israelis Yehuda Burla (1886-1969), Amnon

Shamosh (b. 1929) and A. B. Yehoshua (b. 1936), all of whom underscore the linguistic and

social interactions between Arabs and Jews that appear on their pages. These distinctions of

influence question the currency of a convivencia discourse sketched in the comparative

imaginations of modern Sephardim, particularly as they reflect a contemporary Jewish-Arab

political rhetoric.

0.1.1.2 Converso

If Andalusi Jews have been mythologized for producing a Golden Age of Hebrew

literature amidst a more tolerant landscape of interfaith coexistence, the subsequent Jews of

Christian Spain have been conceptualized specifically through the lens of religious

intolerance. Nowhere is the historian’s case of identifying Iberian Jewry so fraught with

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controversy than in the figuration of fifteenth-century conversos, the former Jews turned

New Christians, commonly referred to in Hebrew as ha-anusim (“the coerced”) and/or the

Spanish pejorative marranos (“swine”). In 1391, after years of organized mob incitement by

the Archdeacon Ferrant Martínez, riots in Seville led to the killing and dispersion of

thousands of Jews, as well as the forced conversion of tens of thousands of Jews to

Catholicism. In the century to follow, economic restrictions, forced religious disputations,

and official policies to convert Jews (as well as Muslims) severely restricted Jewish religious

practice in Spain before the establishment of a Spanish Inquisition against Judaizing

conversos in 1478.

In March 1492, following the victory of the Granada War that finalized the

Reconquista’s reunification of a Catholic monarchy, King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I

issued the Alhambra Decree, officially demanding that Jews convert to Christianity or flee

Spanish lands by July of the same year. With death as punishment for failing to comply with

the ultimatum, about half of Spanish Jewry dispersed toward Portugal, Northern Africa,

Western Europe, and particularly the Ottoman Empire, which welcomed the economic

benefits of Jewish immigration. Many conversos chose to leave Spain in the decades after the

expulsion of Jews, as once outside the Inquisition’s jurisdiction, they could return to openly

practicing Judaism in newly established Sephardic communities like Holland and Northern

Italy.

While Spanish medieval conversos publicly assimilated into their society by attending

Mass or changing their names, for example, scholars have famously disagreed on the degree

of persecution, the scope of converted Jews or, even more nebulous, how many of these

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converts truly embraced their new religious status. Yitzhak Baer, the leading historian of the

so-called Jerusalem School, claimed in his indispensable History of the Jews in Christian

Spain that “Conversos and Jews were one people, united by bonds of religion, destiny and

messianic hope” (424). Similarly, Haim Beinart, a student of Baer’s and an important

historian on conversos and the Inquisition, contends that “[t]o a greater or lesser degree every

Converso did his best to fulfil Mosaic precepts, and one should regard as sincere the aim they

all set themselves: to live as Jews and to achieve as great a degree of perfection as possible in

their Judaism” (Conversos 242). As an extreme counter-position, Benzion Netanyahu,

relying primarily on Hebrew rabbinic sources, averred that conversos were undeniably

Christian in religious faith and degree of social assimilation, were overwhelmingly not

crypto-Jews, and that the establishment of the Inquisition had ironically “caused the

temporary resurgence of the Spanish Marrano movement,” not vice versa (3).

These positions undoubtedly reflect alternate nationalist perspectives of mid-

twentieth-century Jewish historiography, in which defining a post-Holocaust Jewishness,

much like Spanish debates over convivencia, complicate historical figuration. In the middle

of this debate, philosophy scholars like Yirmiyahu Yovel have argued that the “Marrano

experience” of the fifteenth century, especially with its valuation of privacy, subjectivity, and

social disengagement, would engender a form of secular urbanism that anticipates Western

modernism (cf. Yovel 337-358). In other words, as an outsider breaking from communal

religious or nationalist norms, the crypto-Jew prioritizes an individualism preceding the

Enlightenment.

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In The Converso's Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary

Literature and Culture, Dalia Kandiyoti provides the most recent and comparative

examination of the modern fascination with the Inquisitional converso. Like Evri’s history on

the idealization of an Andalusian culture in Palestine, a popular and mythologized medieval

figure yields fruitful ground for comparative study, in this case to show the ways “in which

Sephardi history and culture and the converso diasporas are connected and converge with

other histories explicitly” (Kandiyoti 46). The subject recalls Shachter and Lital’s call for a

global Jewish literature, as Kandiyoti not only connects modern literature by European and

Latin American writers invested in the figure of the medieval crypto-Jew, but also

contemporary Turkish fiction about the dönme, followers of the seventeenth-century

Sephardi messiah Shabbetai Tzvi, whose conversion to Islam and concealed antinomian

religious practice draw parallels to their Iberian forebears. Kandiyoti’s work thus

demonstrates how the converso, like convivencia, continues to generate interpretive

engagements with medieval Jewish history.

0.1.2 The Modern Subject

Like their medieval progenitors, modern Sephardim do not neatly fit into ossified

categories. The elusive definitions of Sephardic identity derive not only from a falsely

perceived coalescence of diasporic communities not necessarily traced back to the 1492

Spanish expulsion (e.g., the conflation of Middle Eastern or Asian Jews, commonly termed

Mizraḥim (Easteners), as Sephardim), but also from the degree to which Sephardim have

stood for useful politicized metaphors of alterity, both within Jewish populated centers (i.e.,

State of Israel) and as cultural and social foreigners; the American Sephardi Federation, for

example, defines itself as an organization serving the “Greater Sephardi communities, i.e.,

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the traditional Sephardim (Jews who traced their lineage to Spain and Portugal), as well as

Jews stemming from the Mediterranean basin, the Balkans, Middle East, Africa, and Asia”

(“History”). The wielding of such classifications has been exacerbated when related to

normative, Ashkenazic Jewish cultures, prompting critics such as Jonathan Schorch to

misleadingly label Sephardim as those “being Jewish but not Ashkenazic” (85).

Paloma Díaz-Mas offers a more manageable definition by deeming Sephardim

“descendants of the Spanish Jews who were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in the

fifteenth century or have assimilated to them socio-culturally” (8). What Díaz-Mas’s

definition implies, and what Jonathan Ray has demonstrated in his work, After Expulsion:

1492 and the Making of Sephardic Jewry, is that Sephardim constructed a collective identity

as Spanish Jews only as a result of the diaspora that followed their expulsion. Although often

elided in sweeping narratives of Sephardic communities, the fractious and unpredictable

encounters in new locales throughout the sixteenth century produced “the shared experience

of cultural dislocation that fostered a new unity among the previously disparate groups [of]

Iberian Jews and their descendants” (Ray, After 10). Such interactions would inevitably

shape significant religious, cultural, and linguistic differences between disparate Sephardic

communities, so that the lowest common denominator between a religious, English-speaking

American Sephardi and a secular, socialist Bulgarian Sephardi, for instance, might primarily

be the sustained articulation of a medieval Spanish heritage.

Determinations of who can and cannot be considered Sephardi have also been

frustrated by the very proprietors of the term. As the Ladino press of the 1910s frequently

reported, Ottoman Jews in New York City were ambivalently received by the Spanish and

16

Portuguese Jews who did not consider the new immigrants to be Sephardim. While the

Spanish and Portuguese community only ever reached a few thousand individuals, their elite

status as the first established Jews in America clashed with the arrival of indigent, non-

English speaking foreigners. Confrontations between these Eastern and Western

coreligionists betray the classist and xenophobic attitudes embedded in a nativist self-

fashioning, substantiating Aviva Ben-Ur’s thesis “that Sephardim and Mizrahim in the

United States should be considered a social rather than an ethnic group” (107).

More recently, claims of Southwestern and Latin American crypto-Judaism, as

exemplified by writers who attest to centuries of an unbroken transmission between

themselves and medieval conversos, have challenged essentialist notions of Sephardic Jewish

identity. This phenomenon, mostly discussed in ethnographic fieldwork and considered by

Kandiyoti, has renewed questions of fluidity, hybridity, and appropriation drawn from the

traumatic memory of the Spanish Inquisition and expulsion. To incorporate this aspect of

contemporary crypto-Judaism within the broader survey of modern Sephardim, I have

included a novel by the prolific Mexican writer Angelina Muñiz-Huberman (b. 1936), whose

personal history informs much of her career as a novelist, poet, and scholar. Born to Spanish

parents fleeing the Spanish Civil War, and later settling in Mexico, Muñiz-Huberman learned

from her mother of her family’s centuries-preserved crypto-Jewish heritage, which would

spawn a lifelong literary and spiritual interest in Judaism, Ladino, and the Kabbalah.

Ultimately, modern Sephardic identity is conceptualized by how to read Sepharad,

but it is also determined by the particular cultural spheres that situate Sephardim. While the

primary literature in this dissertation aims to illustrate the scope of a modern Sephardic

17

diaspora, drawing writers from Victorian London, Gilded-Age New York, turn of the century

Bosnia, 1950s Jerusalem and contemporary Mexico City, plenty of sites remain missing from

this study. A more exhaustive treatment would certainly represent Sephardim from

Francophone countries, Northern Africa (particularly Spain-bordering Morocco), Latin

American and Balkan countries, as well as Jewish literature in other languages spoken by

Sephardim, such as Ḥaketía, Arabic, and Turkish.

0.2 Theorizing Sephardic Writing

The heterogenous literary contributions of modern Sephardim around the world over

the last two centuries defy simple categorization, but the types of writing that reimagine or

evoke Sepharad advance a number of discourses. One of these, medievalism, reanimates the

Middle Ages both through modern artistic and scholarly production. From Pre-Raphaelite

paintings to the satiric film Monty Python and the Holy Grail to popular Renaissance fairs in

the United States, medievalism, as David Matthews asserts, conjures a past “in some sense

still alive and still with us, or able to be with us” (41). In literature, medievalist scholars have

overwhelmingly focused on German, French, and English texts, particularly the ways in

which invented mythological pasts shape nationalist imaginary communities.

This scholarly trend does not mean that Jews do not appear in European medievalist

narratives. On the contrary, one of the most impactful historical novels, Walter Scott’s 1819

Ivanhoe, with its subplot of an imperiled Jewish daughter set in twelfth-century England,

generated a variety of conversionary Jewess romances. It also produced Jewish counter-

narratives Michael Ragussis refers to as racial plots, in which a heroine must choose between

Christian love or racial preservation, fatherland or father (cf. 136-137). The Victorian Grace

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Aguilar (1816-1847), a central writer in my study and one of the first Sephardim to

fictionalize medieval Spain, structures her Inquisition novel The Vale of Cedars from the

mold of Ivanhoe, but depicts a medievalist heroine in order to assert “the continuous

development and preservation of Judaism” (Ragussis 147).

Aguilar’s novel represents a form of Sephardic medievalism that has recently

developed into its own minority discourse: sephardism. Originally coined by Edna Aizenberg

and further expounded by Yael Halevi-Wise and others, sephardism charts a literary history

that ranges from French Enlightenment philosophy to contemporary novels, incorporating

and manipulating the Sephardic legacy of Spain or romanticizing and appropriating it as a

cultural and political construct. Kandiyoti’s focus on the converso naturally belongs to this

discourse. Indeed, a modern Argentinian novel about a crypto-Jew’s harrowing experience

inside an Inquisitorial dungeon, for example, might artfully critique the insidious forces of

Latin American totalitarianism. Alternatively, the converso has become a metaphor,

expressed most emphatically by the influential Sephardi deconstructionist Jacques Derrida,

for whom the marrano emblematized a Freudian reading of archives, the political rhetoric of

lying, and the aporetic experience of death (Derrida Archive 69-70; Without 63-64; Aporia

77-81).

In addition to Kandiyoti’s work, sephardism has been used and developed by other

scholars, such as Sarah Phillips Casteel, who has analyzed Caribbean sephardism in Calypso

Jews: Jewishness in the Literary Imagination, and the anthropologist Maite Ojeda-Mata,

whose Modern Spain and Sephardim: Legitimizing Identities examines—coming full

circle—how Spanish society responds to contemporary Sephardim in light of a shared,

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mythologized medieval history. Sephardism also redefines the earlier orientalist scholarship

Ismar Schorsch persuasively termed the Sephardic mystique, in which a nineteenth-century

German Jewry of scholars, writers, rabbis, and even architects “distanced itself from its East

European origins” by appropriating the rationalistic, philosophical, and urbane legacy of

medieval Spain as a desired cultural heritage (71). Romanticizing a Golden Age of Spain,

while, as Ammiel Alcalay notes, “all but completely ignoring the living examples of that

very culture,” inevitably reinterpreted images of the past that reflect more on the German

worldview than the figures they objectify (153).

While this scholarship displays the breadth in which Sepharad has captured literary

and political imaginations around the world, it can also disregard the particular space of

Sephardim as collective inheritors of these historical experiences. As Halevi-Wise asserts,

the discourse of sephardism is “less intrigued by the ethnic identity of Sephardim themselves

than by the agendas of writers from diverse faiths, ethnicities, and national backgrounds who

deliberately use the theme of Sepharad as a metaphor” (4). This broader application inspires

an impressive range of intersections with non-Jewish cultures and regions, but does so at the

expense of a more comprehensive study of modern Sephardic identity. More specifically,

whenever Sephardim interpret the history, literary styles, and political significance of their

ancestral homeland, they in turn reconstruct a diaspora that continues to imagine a preserved

communal network. Even when modern Sephardim essentialize the ethnic characteristics of

their identities in the process, their writing of medieval Spain similarly metaphorizes

nationalist and religious critiques and grafts them onto a familiar, collective tradition.

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A sephardist focus on ethnic identity, in contradistinction to Halevi-Wise, would

parallel needed correctives in other fields. If the literary contribution of modern Sephardim

has been broadly overlooked or deemphasized in medievalism and sephardism, so too have

Sephardim been understudied in Diaspora studies, the contemporary interdisciplinary field

that examines the experience of communities identified by their dispersion from a former

homeland who maintain some degree of cohesion. In aligning with postcolonialist concepts

of hybridity and alterity, as promulgated by Homi Bhabha and others, many diasporists have

emphasized that “a shared, ongoing history of displacement, suffering, adaptation, or

resistance may be as important as the projection of a specific origin;” consequently, diasporic

identities, fluid, heterogenous, and increasingly politicized, are “sutured together...by power

inequality” and an ongoing tension toward nation states (Clifford 306; Hua 193).

Such definitions of modern diasporas would seem relevant for a critical study of

Sephardim, who continue to prioritize the experience of Spanish expulsion in collective

memories and artistic expressions to this very day. This critical lacuna on Sephardim might

relate to a general distancing of Jewish diasporas as framed in anti-Zionist readings, or what

Stuart Hall defines as “the old, the imperialising, the hegemonising, form of ‘ethnicity’”

(235). An important exception here is the work of brothers Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin,

whose treatment of diasporic identity as informed by Jewish historical experiences similarly

leads them to upbraid Zionism as “the subversion of Jewish culture and not its culmination”

(712).

But critical gestures toward the modern State of Israel need not interfere with the

study of a Sephardic diaspora. Jonathan Ray, for example, considers the impenetrability

21

between Jewish and Diaspora studies as partly a fallacy of diasporists “to view the wider

Jewish diaspora as a monolithic and undifferentiated whole” (“New Approaches” 11).

Whereas Ray primarily focuses on sixteenth-century Sephardim, my study reflects the

literature of various nineteenth- and twentieth-century communities, who articulate an

ambivalent relationship with the Sepharad they identify as a spiritual homeland, occasionally

in opposition to Israeli or other nationalisms.

By Sephardic ambivalence, I refer not only to the dichotomy of Sepharad as al-

Andalus and/or Inquisitional Spain, but to the complicated process in which modern writers

access a cultural heritage somewhat or almost entirely obscured to them through time and

displacement. My interest is not only on what modern Sephardim imagine as an ancestral

past, but how they construct such pasts through inherited or learned texts. For Israeli

Sephardim, the rewriting of an Arabized, Andalusian literature requires a noticeable shift

away from colloquial, modern Hebrew. Ladino and Spanish-writing Sephardim similarly

evoke a Jewish experience of pre-expulsion Christian Spain, while other writers recreate

medieval narratives and poetry in languages wholly foreign from their ancestors.

Furthermore, Sephardim of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries interested in learning about

Sepharad must grapple with sparse or politically-inflected historiographies, as well as source

texts inaccessible, unreliable, or muddled by inaccurate translations. These challenges to

bridging a ruptured lineage elucidate the modern quality of Sephardic identity, fashioned

from the contemporaneous cultural and political environments surrounding each particular

Sephardi writer.

22

And yet, Sephardim writing Sepharad do engage with other texts, both medieval and

modern, from Jewish and non-Jewish sources, in the process of evoking and claiming

medieval Jewish forbears. All of my primary literature offers fruitful readings into that

“network of textual relations” broadly theorized as intertextuality (Allen 1). This does not

implicate some of the field’s more disruptive offshoots, such as poststructuralist

interpretations that destabilize texts and authors—positions popularized by Roland Barthes

and Derrida—but the open structuralist approaches advanced by theoreticians like Gérard

Genette, who have classified various “types of discourse, modes of enunciation, [and] literary

genres” that arise from confined systems of literary production (1).

Some of the Sephardim that I focus on substantiate an intimate familiarity with

medieval Iberian texts by imitating their styles and quoting them throughout their writing.

Others rewrite or comment over medieval texts to produce novels or poetry resembling

palimpsests, a metaphor developed in narratological studies to refer to the “involuted

phenomenon where otherwise unrelated texts are involved and entangled, intricately

interwoven, interrupting and inhibiting each other” (Dillon, Palimpsest 4). Still other

Sephardim write with hardly any access to medieval Jewish texts, producing narratives

mostly dependent on contemporaneous historical scholarship. The permeability of Sephardic

literary networks that connect medieval and modern writing thus demonstrate a dynamic

subject for intertextual studies.

Ultimately, this dissertation foregrounds the agency of modern Sephardi writers in

discourses that often exclude or deemphasize them, specifically medievalism, sephardism,

Diapora studies, and literary theory. To focus on literature produced by Sephardim, even if

23

only the kind that imagines Sepharad, expands the inclusive breadth of literary criticism in

the process of more clearly defining the formation of a diverse and understudied global

minority.

0.3 Structure of Research

This study investigates a particular question within the field of Jewish studies: how

does the past help construct identity? As it relates to modern Sephardim writing medieval

Spain, the question generates more specific questions, around which my chapters revolve.

0.3.1 How do Sephardim access the past?

The first modern Sephardim to creatively write about the history of medieval Spain

had few unproblematic resources to follow. Although, as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi claims, a

spring of sixteenth-century Jewish historiographical works were written in response to the

trauma of the Spanish expulsion, such as Ibn Verga’s Shevet Yehuda, a centuries-old Jewish

indifference to historical works meant that this sudden surge received “an equally abrupt

withering away...[and] stimulated no further bursts of historical interest and creativity” (73).

The broken chain of historiographical transmission has meant that modern Sephardim would

need to rely on contemporary historical works, in addition to a well of collective memory, in

order to recapture the past.

Before examining the themes and styles of diasporic Sephardic literature, I first

compare how Sephardim access and imagine medieval Spain. Chapter One addresses the

question of how historiography informs creative constructions of the past, especially when

those constructions assert authorial claims of an ancestral heritage. The texts chosen for this

chapter reflect three monumental stages of historiographical research as related to the subject

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of medieval Iberia. As the child of Portuguese crypto-Jewish emigrants, Grace Aguilar

acknowledges an orally transmitted collective memory, and writes historical fiction around

the Spanish Inquisition by relying on contemporaneous English and American historians. Her

Inquisitional romances Vale of Cedars and Records of Israel cite historical details provided

by acutely problematic historians, and Aguilar reconciles fabricated or romanticized

information by occasionally correcting details with her family’s received history.

A generation after Aguilar’s death, the American Sephardi Emma Lazarus wrote

about Spanish Jewish history and translated Andalusian poetry as a reader of the orientalist

and aspirational Wissenschaft des Judentums movement. Although largely removed from the

original Hebrew, Arabic, and Spanish writings that historians translated and incorporated into

their research, Lazarus’s English poetry internalizes the Sephardic mystique constructed by

contemporaneous German Jews.

Finally, in depicting the medieval poet Yehuda Halevi, Israeli novelist Yehuda Burla

confronts an accepted folkloric history in light of the discoveries of the Cairo Geniza

published in the years prior to his novel. Unlike Aguilar and Lazarus, the author’s fluency in

Hebrew and Arabic evince direct access to his subject’s writing, but Burla similarly

problematizes his novel when accepting or rejecting historical information that counters his

Zionist narrative. Whether mediated through fabricated romances, motivated translations, or

autochthonous archival texts, Sephardim consistently locate their ancestral past through

contemporaneous historical resources. In detailing these writers’ relationships with

historiography, the chapter consequently charts the developing discipline of modern Jewish

Studies.

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0.3.2 How do Sephardim reproduce the past?

Hebrew poetry from the so-called Golden Age of al-Andalus significantly impacted

Sephardic poetry for generations to follow. Before the Spanish expulsion, the last leading

Jewish poets living in Christian Spain during the tumultuous fourteenth and fifteenth

centuries, such as Vidal Benveniste and Shelomo Bonafed, continued to compose poems in

the meter and style of an Arabized culture long since vanquished, demonstrating “the vitality

of the poetic genres and motifs introduced by R. Solomon ibn Gabirol, R. Samuel Ha-Nagid,

and their contemporaries, which endured as long as Hebrew poetry was composed in Spain”

(Mirsky 187).

Centuries later, modern Sephardim would adapt medieval styles in ways that

depended on linguistic familiarity with primary texts. The issue of access does not only refer

to influential historiography, but to the ways in which inherited texts shape the structure of

modern literature. Chapter Two explores the intertextual practices in which modern

Sephardim imagine the medieval Jewish experience by constructing palimpsests, bringing

influential texts into relief by writing around and about them, and thereby reading and

intervening with their ancestral past.

In her English poetry, Emma Lazarus draws upon and incorporates her translations of

Andalusi poets to create a new type of homo-erotic poetry. The Ladino poetry of Moshe

David Gaon (1889-1958) similarly translates and responds to the Andalusi poets to convey a

neo-Romantic and Zionist speaker. Muñiz-Huberman rewrites Binyamin of Tudela’s travel

narrative, infusing her prose with a magical lyricism directly borrowed from medieval Jewish

Spanish mysticism. All of these dialogues with inherited texts offer the means by which

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modern Sephardim, who do not primarily write in Hebrew, creatively interpret and claim the

medieval Jewish experience in Spain as their own.

For modern Sephardi Hebrew writers, genres of Hebrew Andalusian poetry, all

directly influenced by popular Arabic poetry previously developed in al-Andalus and the

Muslim East, have typified the conventions of a medieval style. The Arabic maqāmāt (sin.

maqāma), short narratives in rhymed prose and generally organized as a collection of a

trickster hero’s humorous adventures told by an accompanying narrator, arrived in al-

Andalus around the tenth century. The development of Hebrew maqāmāt, such as those most

prolifically written by translator-author Yehuda al-Ḥarizi (1165-1225), differed in several

ways from its Arabic model, such as the dependence of intertextual biblical references and

archetypes, an embrace of its narrative’s fictiveness, and a general tone of “elevation and

festiveness” (Drory 205). The Arabic qaṣīda, a mono-rhymed, single-metered ode, similarly

pre-dates al-Andalus, arriving from pre-Islamic Bedouin poetry that typically lamented the

loss of a campsite before turning to the praise of an individual or place. The Hebrew qaṣīda

closely adapted to this classical, multi-thematic structure, and was particularly useful in

capturing temporal and geographical communal displacement, “opening with the lamentable

present and leading to a nostalgic reminiscence over former days” (Decter 52). Finally, the

muwashshaḥ, a strophic, complex metered song developed in al-Andalus, was promptly

adapted by Hebrew poets for both liturgical and secular use. The typical closing of the poem,

called the kharja, written in a vernacular dialect as the voice of a responding speaker, has

produced considerably contentious scholarship as to its origins and meanings.

27

The Hebrew Golden Age imparted a literary legacy of Arabized forms that modern

Sephardim would continue to adopt a millennium after their emergence. Why do Hebrew

writers use these forms, and what do they illustrate in particular for claimed descendants of

the medieval poets who first introduced them? Chapter Three will focus on experimental

literary forms used by four Israeli Sephardim, each adopting an Andalusian style to imagine a

medieval voice. Burla’s travel narrative plays with the rhyming maqāma form in detailing the

non-humorous adventures of the heroic poet Halevi, A. B. Yehoshua inserts a qaṣīda as

imagined by a tenth-century Sevillian rabbi responding to the death of a woman, and Amnon

Shamosh experiments with a neo-muwashshaḥ form that uses Arabic for his kharja. Finally,

Almog Behar (b. 1978) offers liturgical supplications that imitate one of the masterpieces of

medieval Hebrew poetry by the eleventh-century Andalusi poet Shelomo Ibn Gabirol.

Each of these texts will receive close readings, demonstrating parallels of rhythm and

rhyme with Andalusian models, to substantiate my claim that a medieval poetics informs

notions of Sephardic diasporic identity as much as imagined territorial constructions of a lost

homeland. In order to define these intertextual encounters in modern Sephardic writing,

Chapter Two and Three both provide a contextual history that summarizes and compares

medieval Hebrew genres and literary forms.

0.3.3 How does the past inform political notions of the self?

In writing about the Jewish experience of the Spanish Middle Ages, particularly in

narratives of the Inquisition and the expulsion, Sephardim could rely on an accessible history

to advance modern political agendas. The juxtaposition of the medieval past and the modern

(read: progressive) present has proven quite expedient in politicizing a Sephardic collective

28

memory. For example, in Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in

the Modern Era, Judith Phillips Cohen reveals how in 1892, Salonican Jews attempted a

major, unprecedented political initiative to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of

the Spanish expulsion, turning the event into a national holiday that would celebrate Ottoman

tolerance and acceptance in a way that would firmly signify Sephardim “as both modern and

Ottoman” (Cohen 46). The politicized rereading of an ancestral past extends to most of the

primary authors I discuss, who could symbolize the Sephardic diaspora according to their

particular nationalist worldviews.

After considering the ways in which modern Sephardim access, read, and imitate the

figures, texts, and experiences of medieval Spain, the dissertation ends with a concluding

chapter on how an inherited history translates into nationalist ideals. Cycling back to the first

group of primary authors—Aguilar, Lazarus, and Burla—this chapter addresses how

Sephardim project medieval tropes, such as the intolerance of the Inquisition or the heroism

of Yehuda Halevi’s pilgrimage, to align modern nationalisms with reflections of Sephardic

identity. Aguilar’s writing advocates for Jewish emancipation in England, while affirming

the author’s domestic ideology. Lazarus reads the history of the Inquisition to advocate for an

American exceptionalism, and Burla’s Zionist novel expands a historical trajectory that

typically starts in the modern political projects of Ashkenazim during the late nineteenth

century, while symbolically idealizing the role of modern Sephardim in the State of Israel.

After this comparative analysis, the conclusion ends with a reconsideration of Sephardic

identity and the future of Sephardic studies evolving out of diasporic culture and literary

medievalism.

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0.4 A Note on Style

Despite the terminological morass discussed earlier, I generally refer to the modern

writers in this dissertation as Sephardim. I apply this term even in contemporary Israel, where

the blanket term Mizraḥim is more commonly used, in order to emphasize the site of

medieval Spain in the work of each of the writers discussed here. As for spelling, I usually

refer to words and names as they are used in their original language (e.g., maintaining the

Arabic plural ending maqāmāt instead of the Anglicized maqamas; Shelomo instead of

Solomon), unless an Anglicized word is widely used (e.g., Sephardi instead of the more

linguistically accurate Sepharadi). I do, however, distinguish people from things by using

Hebrew suffixes for the former (e.g., Sephardi translator, Andalusi poet), and conventional

English suffixes for the latter (e.g., Sephardic identity, Andalusian poetry).

The diasporic language spoken by Sephardim goes by a pool of names, such as

Judeo-Spanish, Judezmo, and Spanyolit, reflecting the diversity of its speakers. I generally

use the term Ladino, as it is popularly referred to today, even though I am aware that scholars

usually use Ladino to specifically refer to the Judeo-Spanish “calque type language of

liturgical translations from Hebrew” (Schwarzwald 145).

Unless otherwise cited, English translations are my own. I often translated texts as

accurately as possible, at the poetic expense of the original words. In an effort toward

accessibility, I have tried to both preserve the original language and offer English translations

whenever citing or referring to non-English texts or terms, even when citing secondary

sources. This often appears with a foreign language, such as Arabic, Hebrew, or Spanish,

within brackets that follow an English translation, or vice versa. Additionally, since Hebrew

30

Andalusian poetry and its modern adaptations frequently incorporate biblical inlays, I have

often relied on Robert Alter’s translation of the Hebrew Bible as an accurate, elegant

resource. Ladino texts, which vary in orthography and script, will be transcribed as they were

originally printed.

Whenever possible, I also transliterate key terms into English. These terms are

usually in Hebrew or Arabic. For Arabic, I have generally followed the conventional,

scholarly system for transliterated letters:

ā ا b ب t ت th ث j ج ḥ ح kh خ d د dh ذ r ر z ز s س sh ش ṣ ص ḍ ض ṭ ط ẓ ظ ‘ ع gh غ f ف q ق k ك l ل m م n نـھ h w و y ي

31

My method for transliterating Hebrew is more idiosyncratic. I slightly differ from the

conventional transliteration of biblical and medieval Hebrew (e.g., the Hebrew letter waw),

since I also write about modern spoken Hebrew (e.g., the Hebrew letter vav). To make

matters more complicated, some of the modern Sephardi Hebrew writers I cite write in both

contemporary, colloquial Hebrew and medieval Hebrew. To avoid confusion, I have

generally maintained one style of transliteration for all types of Hebrew, which appears as

thus:

’ א b ב v ב g ג d ד h ה v ו z ז ḥ ח t ט y י k כ kh כ l ל m מ n נ s ס ‘ ע p פ f/ph פ tz צ q ק r ר sh ש s שת/ת t

32

Chapter One: Accessing Medieval History

Before examining the themes, styles, and political positions that help define diasporic

Sephardic literature, I wish to first compare how Sephardim access the medieval past they in

turn reconstruct. In writing about medieval Spain, modern Sephardim and their readers have

often claimed, explicitly or implicitly, that an ancient Spanish heritage substantiates the

authenticity of their narratives. In the preface to her Inquisition tales, Records of Israel

(1844), Grace Aguilar describes a transmission of the Inquisition and crypto-Judaism “not

only known to, but often recalled by, persons living now, as having been encountered by

their own immediate ancestors, and hanging over their own childhood” (Records ix-x).

Critical reception of her fiction underscored this relationship between author and history, as,

for example, when one contemporary reviewer noted that the Inquisition plot in Aguilar’s

romance Vale of Cedars “is a topic on which the author of course writes with a strong

personal sympathy, which increases the reader’s interest in the...interesting and well

managed plot” (“The Vale of Cedars”).

A generation after Aguilar’s death, the American poet Emma Lazarus began openly

identifying herself as a Sephardi by linking the medieval past with the contemporary moment

in poetry and essays, and boldly titling her 1882 collection of translated Andalusian poetry

and other medievalist poems, Songs of a Semite. As in the case with Aguilar, reviewers of

Lazarus’s poetry drew a direct line between subject and poet. One critic fancifully began

their review of the collection by claiming that “[i]n the veins of this gifted lady there must

flow the grand old Jewish blood, or her brain could never have shaped such thoughts and her

hand could never have penned them” (“Songs of a Semite”).

33

The Hebrew Jerusalemite novelist Yehuda Burla, the last author discussed in this

chapter, reflected his Sephardic identity by writing fiction often centered around Middle

Eastern characters. Alongside a minority of pre-State writers that include his student

Shoshana Shababo and Yitzḥak Shami, Burla’s very presence as a modern Hebrew writer

was often read, including by himself, as evidence of the potential and limitations of a

reconceptualized Sephardic literature. In an essay titled “Sephardim and Our National

Revival [ תימאלה ונתיחתו םידרפסה ]” for the Zionist periodical East and West ( ברעמו חרזמ ), for

example, Burla emphasized the importance of Hebrew literary production, especially by the

Sephardic inheritors who eternally carry the names and poems of the Hebrew Golden Age in

Spain “in our hearts [ ונבל לע םירבדה ןורכז תולעבו ]” (“Sepharadim” 163). Reception of Burla’s

fiction similarly underscored the weight of ancestral ties. Instead of an archaic subject from

centuries past, as one reviewer noted, Burla could easily write These are the Journeys of

Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, a historical novel about the famous Andalusi poet, because the topic

sprung from a foundation of Oriental Sephardic writing rather than the “Western style of new

Hebrew” [ שדחה ירבעה ןונגסבש ירבעמה דוסיל םייחרזמ-״םיידרפס״ תודוסי ]” common among Eastern

European Hebrew writers (Penueli 253).

Such essentialist notions tying identity with historical authenticity ironically

reproduce the forms of anti-Jewish logic of blood purity that these, and other Sephardi

writers, commonly condemn in their medievalist literature. For a modern writer to claim a

medieval Sephardic heritage does not, of course, equate to a broadened wealth of inherited

knowledge, but assumptions that presuppose such claims of ethnic authenticity belie the

various strategies demanded of historical writing. Part of what makes Aguilar, Lazarus, and

Burla modern writers involves the creative ways in which they confront the temporal gap

34

dividing the ancestral subjects they claim as connected to their Sephardic identity and their

current diasporic positions. Contrary to implications of a purely insulated, ethnic

transmission of learning about al-Andalus and Christian Spain, these writers wrote about

subjects from centuries past after having read contemporaneous historiography available to

them. This chapter demonstrates how these three writers read historians from three different

eras of modern historiography, and how their readings informed their interpretations of the

Jewish experience in medieval Spain.

Modern Sephardim from the nineteenth century onward had significantly fewer

resources than their expelled ancestors to recall their long-established homeland, and thus

often depicted medieval Spain in ways reflective of their modern positions. Writing medieval

Spain close to when the first modern Sephardi historiographers did—such as Elias Haim

Lindo, who translated various Spanish documents into English for the first time in his

History of the Jews of Spain and Portugal (1848)—Aguilar juxtaposed her family’s memory

of the Inquisition with some of the only historical writings available to her, those of

American and British Romantic historians. Emma Lazarus’s use of scholarship from the

German Wissenschaft des Judentums movement reflects the linguistic and political

interpolations that separate her from the medieval documentation she presents to an

American readership. Finally, Burla constructed a chronicle of the medieval pilgrimage of

Yehuda Halevi by juxtaposing new scholarship drawn from the Cairo Geniza alongside

invented narratives without historical record. When compared with primary historical sources

of the subjects they convey, these writings present modern renderings of diasporic identity

construction among Sephardim, one not primarily based on received legends stretching back

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to medieval Spain but interpreted through the intervention of contemporaneous

historiography.

1.1 Grace Aguilar and Modes of Memory

In Aguilar’s Women of Israel, a series of essays first published in 1844 that chronicles

the history of Jewish women from biblical days to the contemporary, one particular source

appears most prominently, that of the three-volume History of the Jews (1829) by the English

clergyman, historian, and poet Henry Hart Milman. Alongside the Bible, much of Aguilar’s

source material for these essays derives from either Josephus or Milman, and both are

frequently cited as correct, or incorrect (e.g., “We do not...at all agree with Milman’s

supposition”), or judged as correct over the other (e.g., “we incline toward the opinion of

Milman”) (Aguilar Women 91; 176). It is only because the clergyman is the rare “exception”

as a writer of Jewish history with “all the eloquence of modern writing,” Aguilar concedes,

that she consistently cites the problematic source (129; 277). In a later expanded edition of

his History, Milman would similarly decry the “absolutely barren” world of Jewish

historiography, blaming Jews specifically for leaving no “trustworthy record even of their

interworking into the frame of society, their influence, their commerce, their relations to the

rest of mankind” (1863, 450).

While his denunciation ignores historical works by early German Wissenschaft des

Judentums Jewish scholars, such as Isaak Marcus Jost’s Geschichte der Israeliten (1820-

1829), and various essays by Eduard Gans and Leopold Zunz surveying medieval Jewish

history and literature, Milman nevertheless articulates the frustrating conundrum for an

Anglo-Jewish reader like Aguilar. How does one learn the history of a people notoriously

vilified? For Aguilar, limning the heroic contributions of historically victimized Jews in

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Women of Israel, as well as unprecedented essays like “The Jews of England” and “The Jews

of Continental Europe,” at least offered an initial, albeit problematic, venture into Anglo-

Jewish historiography. Aguilar actively mediated historical sources deemed unreasonably

exaggerated or suspicious, ostensibly on the authority of her position as a Jewish writer. Her

assessment of historiography would also significantly shape her fiction writing on Jews in

medieval Spain, a subsection among her diverse literary projects that, when critically

examined, challenge assumptions of an ancestral preservation of Sephardic authenticity.

Although most of her creative writings about Spain relate to the Inquisition, Aguilar

did imagine the Jewish experience in al-Andalus in a poem titled “Song of the Spanish Jews

During Their ‘Golden Age,’” first printed in 1843 for the Jewish newspaper The Occident

and American Jewish Advocate. Historical information on the Golden Age seems to have

derived solely from Milman, whom Aguilar cites in Women of Israel when claiming that the

era’s “long line of literary men, who swelled the Jewish ranks during that epoch, sufficiently

mark the influence of freedom and prosperity upon the mind” (307). A similar quotation from

the same section in Milman’s History prefaces the “Song,” inspiring a poem about the proper

adulation for one’s homeland (Aguilar, “Song” 289).

The limitations of Aguilar’s historical source produce fascinating projections that fill

the content of her poem. First, Milman spends a mere two paragraphs summarizing the entire

culture of al-Andalus, with inaccurate and romanticized generalizations about its Jewish

contributions. Not that Aguilar would access this poetry, since Milman apologetically

conceals any glimpse of this monumental shift in Hebrew letters, writing that while “we

would gladly explore this almost hidden source of Jewish poetry...our work has no space”

(Milman History 1829, 284; 286). Consequently, Aguilar’s “Song” imagines what Milman

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only barely alludes to, the experience of al-Andalus as a home for Jews, illustrated here in the

poem’s opening and closing two stanzas:

OH, dark is the spirit that loves not the land Whose breezes his brow have in infancy fann’d, That feel not his bosom responsively thrill To the voice of her forest, the gush of her rill. Who hails not the flowers that bloom on his way, As blessing there scattered his love to repay; Who loves not to wander o’er mountain and vale, Where echoes the voice of the loud rushing gale. .................... Home of the exiles! oh ne’er will we leave thee, As mother to orphan, fair land we now greet thee, Sweet peace and rejoicing may dwell in thy bowers, For even as Judah, fair land! thou art ours. Oh, dearest and brightest! the homeless do bless thee, From ages to ages they yearn to possess thee, In life and in death they cling to thy breast, And seek not and wish not a lovelier rest. (1-8, 21-28)

In her analysis of Aguilar in Singing in a Foreign Land: Anglo-Jewish Poetry, 1812-

1847, Karen Weisman emphasizes the functions of irony layered in “Song of the Spanish

Jews,” an irony predicated on the poet’s domestication of a foreign homeland through the

familiar and valued resource of the English pastoral hymn. Since a retrospective image of the

ostensible Golden Age of Muslim Spain anticipates a traumatic end of Jewish suffering and

expulsion in Christian Spain, Aguilar structures her poem not as an encomium of Spanish

hospitality, but “as an imagined castigation of those who refuse the immersion in the culture

of Spanish pastoral tranquility, or more precisely, the culture that knows to praise the

pastoral” (Weisman 174). Aguilar’s contemporary position as an Anglo-Jewish poet versed

in the conventions of Romantic pastoral, in other words, allows for a Sephardic sensitivity

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toward one’s homeland that in effect distorts the temporal and spatial settings of a Golden

Age in its modern, English foregrounding.

While the threat of exile figures for one “Who hails not the flowers that bloom on his

way,” the dramatic praises of home betray the speaker’s own sense of exile in relation to

Spain. Aguilar’s quotation of Milman that prefaces “Song of the Spanish Jews” already

indicates this exile when compared to its source. Aguilar’s preface claiming that “[i]n

emulation of their Moslemite brethren, [Jews] began to cultivate their long disused and

neglected poetry; the harp of Judah was heard to sound again, though with something of a

foreign tone,” elides the continuation of the original sentence (“Song” 289). In History of the

Jews, Milman explains that Hebrew Golden Age poetry had a “foreign tone” because Spanish

Jews “borrowed the rhythm peculiar to the Arabic verse” (1829, 284). The implications of

this change of form, as elucidated in the third chapter on modern Hebrew poetry, do not

easily translate into English, nor are they attempted in Aguilar’s poem. Instead, one is hard

pressed to find any analogue in the canon of Andalusian Hebrew poetry to Aguilar’s

patriotic, romantic verses, illustrating a Sephardic voice undeniably “foreign” in both

language, structure, and content to the literary lineage it implicitly claims.

1.1.1 Inquisition Narratives

Aguilar’s well of historical information relating to the Spanish Inquisition proved

more fruitful and deeper than her imaginary reconstruction of Andalusian poetry. In a

“Memoir” that prefaced various posthumous editions of Aguilar’s collected works, Aguilar’s

mother Sarah briefly defines Grace’s heritage in a suggestive tone, stating that she was “the

only daughter of Emmanuel Aguilar, one of those merchants descended from the Jews of

Spain, who, almost within the memory of man, fled from persecution in that country, and

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sought and found asylum in England” (v; emphasis added). The limits of the Aguilar family

memory, implied by the modifier “almost,” finds expression in the categories of historicity

undergirding Grace Aguilar’s writing about the Jewish experience in medieval Spain. These

categories correspond to a Spain entirely imagined (al-Andalus), a Spain negotiated by the

weaving of oral and written history, and finally a Spain entirely informed by historical

writing.

The clearest example of the way family memory, historical records and creative

fiction blur in Aguilar’s writing appears in “The Escape,” one of the two novellas in her

Records of Israel, set during the great 1755 earthquake of Lisbon. Aguilar complicates the

veracity of the novella by offering several origin stories. In her preface to Records, Aguilar

notes that the incidents and characters “are fictitious,” before substantiating a climactic

scene—the story’s namesake—as a rendering of an actual incident drawn by a historian: “For

the particulars of the attempted escape itself, the author is indebted, not to imagination, but to

a similar occurrence, described at length in Stockdale’s quarto History of the Inquisition”

(Preface ix; x). Aguilar refers here to John Joseph Stockdale’s collection of sensationalist

propaganda, The History of the Inquisitions; Including the Secret Transactions of those

Horrific Tribunals (1810), which historian Edward Peters in his critical assessment of the

Inquisition narratives sums up as “a work of no historical value whatsoever” (283). Yet,

Aguilar contradicts her own apologetic preface by closing the story with an asterisk on the

last sentence, qualifying as “A fact” that the descendants of the characters Alvar and Almah’s

family mark the anniversary of the Lisbon earthquake by donating clothes to the poor (“The

Escape” 139).

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To make distinctions of fiction more confusing, the story’s Inquisition narrative

clashes with a similar story that appears in “The Jews of Continental Europe,” a

posthumously printed essay by Aguilar that has received scant scholarly attention. The essay

surveys the general conditions of modern European Jews before ending with an anecdote of a

Lisbon crypto-Jewish merchant “whom we will call Garcias, though that was not his real

name,” and who, like the character Alvar from “The Escape,” was captured, tortured and

imprisoned for years by the Holy Office (“The Jews” 302). When the Lisbon earthquake of

1755 struck, Garcias wisely chose to remain in his cell while others fled, an act that led to his

release, whereupon he and his family eventually escaped Portugal for England to live as open

Jews. “Incredible as this story seems,” Aguilar concludes, “we have neither added nor

diminished one item of the real truth, and our romance of real life is not quite concluded...[as

their] children still survive” (309).

These biographical details directly contradict Stockdale’s recounted/invented

Inquisition episode of “a young Negro in behalf of his master,” which Aguilar previously

acknowledged as the inspiration for the characters Almah and Alvar (Preface x). The various

clues left by Aguilar suggest a well of family oral history, drawing a personal and direct line

between the horrors of the Inquisition and contemporary England. The children of the crypto-

Jews who “still survive” in “The Escape” bear testimony to the extraordinary trials of

Spanish Jews, but ironically become crypto-Jews again as Aguilar obscures their names in

print. The amalgamation of imagined and transmitted sources, as well as Aguilar’s

concealment of family details, render the tracing of oral sources of information related to the

Inquisition particularly challenging.

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Even without locating the origins of orally transmitted tales, we can see Aguilar’s

juxtaposition between historical reading and family memory in “The Edict: A Tale of 1492,”

the other novella published in Records of Israel. As the title suggests, Aguilar sets a tale of

heroism, romance, and tragedy on the eve of the Alhambra Decree, in which a newly married

couple living in the Jewish village of “Eshcol,” along the Sierra Morena, must trek their way

to the ports for survival. The narrative combines various gothic elements sure to entertain a

Victorian audience, such as the gruesome death of the protagonist’s deaf brother by a wild

boar or a converso relative’s sudden reappearance at the harbor of loading Jews. Two

intertextual practices, however, reveal the writer’s lack of access to primary medieval

documents; the first a historical account, the second a transmitted memory.

Immediately after the Jewish couple Josephine and Imri complete the wedding

service under their bridal canopy, a troop of Spanish soldiers interrupts the celebration to

declare a new decree, to the confusion of all of the attentive Jews:

From the most high and mighty sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella, joint sovereigns of Aragon and Castile, to whose puissant arms the grace of God hath given over all heretics and unbelievers, before whose banner of the holy Cross the Moorish abominations have crumbled into dust...Whereas we have heard and seen, that the Jews of our states induce many Christians to embrace Judaism, particularly the nobles of Andalusia; for THIS they are BANISHED from our domains. Four months from this day, we grant them to forswear their abominations and embrace Christianity, or to depart; pronouncing DEATH on every Jew found in our kingdom after that allotted time. (Aguilar “The Edict” 35-36)

In its truncated form, Aguilar’s appears but a shadow of the infamous edict,

somewhat encapsulating the proclamation of the original text, “mandar salir todos los dichos

judios e judias de nuestros reynos e que jamas tornen ni buelban a ellos ni a algunos dellos

[to order all of the aforementioned Jews and Jewesses of our kingdoms to depart and to never

return, nor come back to them or to any of them]” (qtd. in Fernández 393). Nevertheless,

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several inconsistencies, such as the fictional signature, “at our place of Segovia this thirtieth

day of March,” instead of “Granada a XXXI dias del mes de março” betray the author’s

displacement from its primary source (Aguilar, “Edict” 36; qtd. in Fernández 395).

If Aguilar did not access this famous historical document, where did the text come

from? Not having displayed any patent fluency in Spanish or Hebrew, Aguilar would have

likely learned of the decree and the preceding history of the Inquisition in the tawdry

descriptions offered by nineteenth-century English historians, whose fascination with

medieval Spain appears in the works of John Stockdale’s History of the Inquisitions (1810),

John Bigland’s History of Spain (1810), William Coxes’s Memoirs of the Kings of Spain

(1813) and others. The exiled Spanish historian Juan Antonio Llorente, whose abridged

English translation of The History of the Inquisition of Spain (1826), likewise reinforced

common tropes of the Spanish Black Legend as it came from the pen of a secretary of the

Inquisition office. These works, as Gary Kelly notes, “focused on policies and practices of

and resistance to modernization in relation to Spain’s historic unmodernity,” corresponding

to a nationalist resistance to the Peninsular War (22). But by emphasizing lurid and

sensational characterizations bordering on the sentimental or gothic novel, British Romantic

historians established a genre of literary history concentrated on the pleasure of its

readership, or as one such writer prefaced, on the omission of “uninteresting particulars,

which tend to mislead and weary, instead of instructing and entertaining” (Bigland vii).

These “uninteresting particulars” would have also included the persecution of Jews; as

Michael Ragussis claims, by broadly excluding Jews from their Inquisition histories (and

instead distorting the plight of innocent Protestants), British historians shaped an anti-

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Catholic ideology that simultaneously worked “to avoid aiding Jewish Emancipation by

stirring English sympathies for the Jewish martyrs of the Inquisition” (135).2

None of the above English-language histories, however, reproduce the text of the

original decree, and so Aguilar’s reconstruction of the expulsion relies on the most thorough

and serviceable information yet available to her, that of American Hispanist William H.

Prescott’s popular History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (1837). Like the Romantic

historiographers, Prescott interpreted the Spanish Inquisition as an “evolutionary progress”

away from Catholic bigotry, a progress Ragussis emphasizes was part of a “tradition of

liberal Protestantism in which the sanctity of the individual conscience was maintained above

all else” (164). That Aguilar lifted phrases from Prescott (e.g., “The doom of exile fell like a

thunderbolt”) and other details establishes her intertextual reading (Prescott 140). For

Aguilar, Prescott’s philosemitic interpretation of medieval history, in which the exiled Jews

epitomize the “extraordinary act of self-devotion by a whole people for conscience’ sake,”

offers a source text that finally acknowledges and praises the experience of Spanish Jews,

instead of ignoring or, at best, offering lachrymose interpretations of their fallen state (143).

As will be explored in the concluding chapter, such readings implicitly reinforce

Aguilar’s own nationalist leanings, since the irretrievable loss of the “mechanical skill,

intelligence, and general resources of an orderly, industrious population,” as Prescott phrases

it, could aptly apply to Aguilar’s figuration of the patriotic and resourceful English Jew

2 As will be elaborated in the concluding chapter, the slow process toward Jewish emancipation in Victorian England depended upon Catholic emancipation, as both minority groups were defined by their alterity in the English political and public sphere for centuries.

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(149). In addition to the Prescott quotations, Aguilar incorporates another text in “The Edict”

to emphasize the collective pain of the Sephardic diaspora created by departure from Spain.

Barely surviving the journey to a harbor in Málaga, the couple Josephine and Imri leave their

homeland with a hundred other Jews on a ship, who all, in “the language of Jerusalem,”

simultaneously chant:

Farewell! farewell! we wander forth Doom’d by th’ Eternal’s awful wrath; With naught to bless our lonely path, Across the stormy wave. Cast forth as wandered on the earth; Torn from the land that hailed our birth; From childhood’s cot, from manhood’s hearth, From temple and from grave. (Aguilar “Edict” 79)

What marked a golden age in the projected ode of “Song of the Spanish Jews”

contrasts here with an elegy for the Spanish homeland. As in the text of the edict, the song,

which continues its shifting iambic tetrameter and trimeter in a tidy rhyme scheme for several

stanzas, betrays the agency of the author at the expense of historicity. The exiles’ song

concludes the story of the Spanish Jewish experience, as a lightning bolt strikes the ship soon

after the last verse, creating an intractable fire that sinks the ship and kills everyone on board,

including the enduring lovers of the tale. This stunning finale makes for a sort of inverted

exodus, as instead of biblical Israelites who spontaneously sing of their freedom upon

crossing the Red Sea, Aguilar offers what more closely resembles a new Lamentations, in

which exiles die in the void between homeland and safe haven. Such patent allusions to a

Jewish literary tradition alter the novella’s narrative tone, from an entertaining yet

historically consistent framework to a tragedy of biblical proportions.

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Historical records resemble but, significantly, do not substantiate Aguilar’s lightning

finale. Haim Beinart’s review of the documentation relating to the 1492 departures by sea,

for example, does detail the grim exodus of Jews, who underwent mass conversions,

robberies of immense sums, epidemics, rape, and starvation (cf. Expulsion 274-279). In

relation to Aguilar’s novella, I have found a similar depiction of exile, as reported in

Shelomo Ibn Verga’s Shevet Yehuda (The Scepter of Yehuda), most instructive. The

sixteenth-century collection of tragic tales, much of which depends on oral stories, has

longed divided historians as to their reliability, but provides what Jeremy Cohen calls “an

exercise of sorts in midrash,” reading the current position of exile by learning from the

transmitted stories of the past (7).

In the fifty-first chapter of the collection, Ibn Verga provides his most extensive

discussion regarding the Spanish expulsion of 1492, describing the harrowing outcome for

some of the exiles:

.׳ה שא םב רעבתו תוינאה ופרשנ יכ םימבו שאב ואב םהמ

There were those who came [to their deaths] by fire and water, as when ships caught fire, and the fire of the Lord burnt among them (Num. 11:3) (Ibn Verga, ch.51, p. 90).

Immediately after the description of fire-sunken ships, Ibn Verga relates a story he

had heard of a man cast out of a plague-stricken ship, who lost his wife and sons on the

shores of a new land, and then laments to God, “Master of the universe! You do so much for

me to leave my religion, but know that despite the heavenly hosts, a Jew I am and a Jew I

will be and nothing that you brought or will bring on me will avail [ התא הברה םימלועה ןובר

תאבהש המ לכ ליעוי אלו היהא ידוהיו ינא ידוהי םימש יבשוי לש םחרכ לעש הנמאנ עדת ,יתד בוזעאש השוע

ילע איבתו ]” (ch.52, p. 90).

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When considering this sequence, Ibn Verga’s account of the expulsion offers a

potential resource for mining a collective Jewish memory, once articulated in a near-

miraculous phenomenon (i.e., a divinely decreed death by fire and water), followed by death

and an enunciation of resolve. While I do not claim that Aguilar draws from Ibn Verga’s tale

specifically, both writers’ mix of history and legend constructs narratives reflecting the role

of Jewish memory in the Sephardic diaspora. As a writer who creatively draws upon the

lessons of medieval Spain to highlight the national responsibility of England toward its

Jewish residents, “an exercise of sorts in midrash” we may note, Aguilar recapitulates Ibn

Verga’s cry in the voice of her doomed protagonist (e.g., “I NEVER could deny God! Exile

and death were welcome––but for thee”) (“Edict” 77). Aguilar’s farewell poem, despite its

ahistorical fire and English prosody, nevertheless asserts the value of the Sephardic

diaspora’s collective renderings of exile, retelling stories that validate her authorial position

as an inheritor of the Spanish expulsion.

1.1.2 Depicting Queen Isabella

Another route in examining the stark differences between modern Sephardic writing

and the medieval Jewish experience it seeks to capture relates to the mythology of the

former’s infamous villains: Torquemada, King Ferdinand, and most elusive of all, Queen

Isabella. Before the Inquisition, courtier Jews encouraged and facilitated the queen’s

marriage to Ferdinand (Baer 305-306). Gregory Kaplan has demonstrated a theme of

admiring, beseeching, and eventually deifying the queen in converso literature, starting from

before her coronation until 1480, as a response to her occasional protection of Jewish

interests and seeming involvement in solving the social barriers of conversos, many of whom

believed she “would be their savior” (305).

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These depictions drastically changed with the institution of the Tribunal of the Holy

Office of the Inquisition, and contemporary Hebrew accounts offer condemnatory language

toward the queen specifically, laying ultimate or substantial blame for the persecution and

ultimate expulsion of the Jews. In his Seder Eliyahu Zuta, Eliyahu Capsali (1483-1555)

provides perhaps the most extensive medieval Hebrew account of the expulsion, offering a

Hebrew rendition of the Alhambra Decree, as well as many other details of the Jews’

experience of 1492, as culled from contemporary exiles. In Capsali’s chronicle, Isabella is

seen as the ultimate foe responsible for the Jewish expulsion, manipulating her husband to

action, on account of her radical Catholic mindset:

חלש :םוי םוי הלעב םע תטטוקתמ התיה האשינ זאמו ונירכועב התיה ליב״זיא הכלמה תעשרמהו .הרשבב םותמ ןיאמ תביואל לארשיל ךפהתו הבבל וטה ׳ירמוכה יכ ,ואציו ינפ לעמ ׳ידוהיה תא

The wicked Queen Isabel hated us, and ever since she married would argue daily with her husband to “send the Jews away from my face and leave,” since the priests convinced her to hate the Jews with her innermost being. (Capsali, no.67, 205)

Capsali goes on to imagine Isabella chiding her husband into action by mocking him

for his rumored Jewish heritage, catalyzing the decree’s enactment as one woman’s anti-

Jewish bitterness. In the introduction to his biblical commentary, Don Yitzḥaq Abravanel

notes his personal efforts as financial advisor to prevent the edict going into effect, a cause

widely cited (and exaggerated) in medieval Hebrew and Christian chronicles. Like Capsali,

Abravanel depicts Isabella as primarily responsible for the king’s intransigence:

רומגו לחה והשעמ תושעל החקל בורב ותטה ונטשל ונימי לע תדמוע הכלמהו לכ ינפמ

All throughout, it was the queen, standing next to him, directing him in her wrath to enact his deed from start to finish (Abravanel 422).

Explaining the demonization of Isabella by Jewish exiles does not require adroit

conjecture, but it should be noted that modern historians do concur that the queen at least

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supported the expulsion. Beinart, for instance, links Isabella’s expressed support for the

Inquisition’s eradication of Judaizing conversos with her stance on the expulsion, as perhaps

in contrast with her husband Ferdinand’s more pragmatic views (Expulsion 43). Benzion

Netanyahu similarly considers Isabella “undoubtedly in favor of the expulsion, but she was

not the moving spirit behind it” (56). If Isabella’s reliance on a view of Christian piety partly

explains her anti-Jewish behavior during her queenship, from her petition to Sixtus IV on the

problem of relapsed Jews to the eventual signing of the Edict of Expulsion, then exaggerated

portrayals by Spanish Jews of her authority during the expulsion underscore a Jewish

narrative of radical religious intolerance.

Given medieval depictions of the cruel, Jew-hating queen, it is surprising that Grace

Aguilar, the first modern Sephardi to creatively write about the Inquisition, casts Isabella as a

sympathetic character. In her novel, The Vale of Cedars, first printed serially in 1846,

Aguilar constructs an Inquisition romance in which Donna Marie Henriquez, a Spanish

crypto-Jew, must choose between her Jewish faith and her love, namely a Christian

Englishman passing through Spain. Structured as a counter-narrative to Sir Walter Scott’s

Ivanhoe (i.e., the Jewess Rebecca’s impossible love with the famed knight), Aguilar positions

her heroine at the forefront of power. As a friend, Queen Isabella gently attempts to convert

Marie during the Inquisition for the benefit of the latter’s soul, and she betrays nothing of the

methodical villainy laid out in the Hebrew texts.

Some critics have pointed to this depiction of Isabella as part of a larger Victorian

trope. Michael Galchinsky, for example, explains the discrepancy “by seeing Isabella as a

substitute for Victoria,” whom Aguilar apparently idealized (245n58). A closer examination

of the intertextual practices of Aguilar’s medievalist romance reveals the way in which

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Spanish narratives would inform her own revisionist history. The novel offers a clue to her

source text when describing the queen’s features:

Peculiarly and sweetly feminine, infused, as Washington Irving observes, with “a soft, tender melancholy,” as was their general expression, they could yet so kindle into indignant majesty, so flash with reproach or scorn, that the very color of the eye became indistinguishable, and the boldest and the strongest quailed beneath the mighty and the holy spirit, which they could not but feel, that frail woman form enshrined. (Aguilar, Vale 63)

Aguilar’s depiction here not only parallels other accounts of Queen Victoria, as per

Galchinsky, but aptly aligns with the writer’s valorization of the ideal domestic woman:

preserved yet powerful, undeniably feminine yet endowed with agency. Indeed, the heroine

Marie appears a reflection of Queen Isabella, as the former’s crypto-Judaism symbolizes how

an interiorized religiosity reinforces the wise and brave actions of a capable woman in the

public sphere; Marie’s declaration of Jewish identity at her lover’s murder trial, a gesture that

leads to her inevitable death, exemplifies the same “mighty and holy spirit” characteristic of

Isabella.

Aguilar’s citation of Washington Irving, however, once again illustrates the influence

of problematic literary historiographers of her day. Irving’s work, A Chronicle of the

Conquest of Granada (1829), a key source text for Aguilar’s novel, certainly appears as

legitimate a primary source as any other. Irving ascribes his work to mysteriously discovered

manuscripts by one “Fray Antonio Agapida,” whose writings, Irving reports, “deposited in

the libraries of various convents, have been dispersed during the late convulsions in Spain, so

that nothing is now to be met of them but disjointed fragments” (vi). The conceit of

pseudepigrapha emphasizes a crucial aspect of Irving’s romantic history. Aside from entire

fabrications made out of the personalities and conversations that dramatize the text’s account

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of the Granada War of the late fifteenth century, the fictitious friar “served as a unifier,

bringing closer into harmony the diverse segments of narrative” available to the author

(Harbert xxiii). These segments derived solely from Spanish royalist historiographers, the

result of years of Irving’s residences in Madrid and Granada during the 1820s.

While Conquest provided atmospheric descriptions for Aguilar’s novel, it was

Irving’s first Spanish history book, the four-volume biography, A History of the Life and

Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828), that provided the sentimental adulation for

Aguilar’s Isabella. Among the various charitable descriptions of the queen, Irving stresses

that the “affections of conjugal love were delicately entwined with fervent religion and the

most tender melancholy” (History IV.22-23; emphasis added). Although many of the

memorable aspects of Irving’s history bear no source other than the author’s creativity, such

as the infamous fabrication of Columbus proving the Earth round, this particular description

lifts word-for-word the account by Spanish royal librarian Diego Clemencín. In his Elógio de

la réina católica Doña Isabel (1821), Clemencín writes that “los afectos del amor conyugal

están delicadamente enlazados con la piedad y la mas tierna melancolia” (Clemencín 573;

emphasis added). Ironically, Aguilar’s use of secondary historical sources, the product of a

temporal and linguistic displacement from the valorous ancestors she wished to convey,

ultimately lead back to the Spanish historiographers that idealize the authority and glorious

legacy of the monarchy.

Entrenched in a Spanish orientalism that identified the medieval past as a nationalist

legacy, and depending upon royalist writers, Irving’s claim that Queen Isabella “strenuously

opposed the expulsion of the Jews, and the establishment of the Inquisition, though,

unfortunately for Spain, her repugnance was slowly vanquished by her confessors,” seems

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predictable (History I.107). For Aguilar, a portrayal of that “kind, loving, generous mistress,”

although in contrast to Spanish Jewish depictions shortly after their exile, renders the queen

as a paragon for the Jewish heroine of the novel, bridging victim and persecutor in the lens of

this modern Sephardi writer (Aguilar, Vale 250).

1.2 Emma Lazarus and the Processes of Translation

Although separated by generation and country, Grace Aguilar and the American poet

and translator Emma Lazarus bear striking similarities. Both were Sephardi English-speaking

women writers, who were educated at home, died young of illness, never married, articulated

a national patriotism through their sense of Jewish identity, felt alienated from traditional

religious observance that they publicly criticized, and advocated for various social causes. In

addition to all of this, both writers drew from contemporary historiography as a way of

connecting to and disseminating what they considered a proud Spanish and Portuguese

Jewish heritage. Unlike Aguilar, however, whose immediate crypto-Jewish family offered

some glimpses into the experience of the Spanish Inquisition, Lazarus grew up in an affluent

family unaffiliated with Jewish religious or cultural education. In other words, when Lazarus

reclaims her Spanish ancestry in writing, she does not assert an oral tradition transmitted by

family. Rather, Lazarus’s learning of Sepharad derives from a more geographically distant,

albeit Jewish, literary source.

The nineteenth-century scholarly movement known as Wissenschaft des Judentums

(Science of Judaism) differed vastly from the Romantic medievalist historians of Aguilar’s

contemporary England. First organized by German-speaking Jews, such as Leopold Zunz and

Eduard Gans, the movement not only initiated some of the first modern scholarship related to

the critical study of the literary and social history of the Jewish people, it also resulted in

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unprecedented publications of ancient and medieval texts related to Jews. Despite these

strides, Wissenschaft scholarship engendered various problems related to ideologies affecting

its research. According to Wissenschaft historian Michael A. Meyer, the majority of its

scholars considered their work a “religious enterprise,” aiming to inspire modern Jews

through a kind of Hegelian presentation of God’s providence in Jewish history (e.g., Frankel,

Graetz) or as the work of “uncovering...the genuine religious spirit of the Jewish people”

(e.g., Geiger) (105; 106). Wissenschaft scholars have been criticized for an orientalist

glorification informing a preoccupation with medieval Spain, which as noted, Ismar Schorsch

labeled the allure of a Sephardic mystique.

Thus, for a late nineteenth-century Sephardi writer interested in an ancestral literary

heritage, the modern scholarship of Ashkenazi German Jews ironically provided some of the

most accessible, albeit problematic, research available on the Jewish experience in al-

Andalus and Christian Spain. Like Aguilar, Emma Lazarus wrote various poems and essays

related to Sepharad that generally belong to either her Jewish historical poems (alongside

others such as “Raschi in Prague,” “Bar Kochba,” and the Maccabean revolt in “The Feast of

Lights”) or her translation poems, alongside those of Heine, Goethe, and François Coppée.

Lazarus confronted a challenge that significantly shaped her writings on the Hebrew poetry

in al-Andalus; namely, she did not understand the poems in the language in which they were

written. The Prussian-raised Reform rabbi Gustav Gottheil, of New York City’s Temple

Emanu-El, introduced the genre to Lazarus when, in 1877, he asked her to translate three by

poems by Shelomo Ibn Gabirol, Moshe Ibn Ezra, and Yehuda Halevi for a collaborative

work eventually published in 1887 as Hymns and Anthems Adapted for Jewish Worship, one

of the first books of Jewish hymns published in America.

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Fluent in French and German—having already printed translations of Heine as a

teenager—Lazarus’s lack of Hebrew was mitigated by Gottheil sending her books of German

translations from other rabbis/Wissenschaft scholars, particularly Abraham Geiger’s Divan

des Castiliers Abu’l-Hassan Juda ha-Levi (Dīwān of the Castilian Abu al-Ḥassan Judah

Halevi) (1851), Jüdische Dichtungen der spanischen und italienischen Schule (Jewish Poetry

of the Spanish and Italian Schools) (1856), and Salomo Gabirol und seine Dichtungen

(Salomon Ibn Gabirol and His Poems) (1867), and Michael Sachs’s Die Religiöse Poesie der

Juden in Spanien (The Religious Poetry of the Jews in Spain) (1845). After offering the

requested pieces, she would continue to research the subject for her own interest, fascinated

by this unknown history of Jewish lyricism. First published in Jewish periodicals in 1879, her

translations of medieval Spanish poems became part of a collection of pieces published in

1882 under the brave title, Songs of a Semite: The Dance to Death and other Poems, marking

a distinct focus on the subjects of her writing.

Lazarus’s personal correspondence, first published by Morris U. Schappes in 1949,

reveals that the poet sought Hebrew instruction in 1882 through private tutors. Until then, her

lack of Hebrew became a subject of both self and external criticism in relation to her

translations. In a reply to her friend Samuel Gray Ward, who had no problem criticizing her

translations of the medieval poems, she wrote back, noting that her versions “bear no relation

whatever to the immense treasure of poetry that lies hidden in its original source...I am

studying Hebrew, & hope soon to be able to appreciate them in the original—then I shall be

more competent to weigh the worth of your objection” (qtd. in Schappes 421-422). The

linguistic complications engendered by Lazarus’s German intermediaries likely explain why

scholars have largely ignored her translations, as if the expected contamination of a second-

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degree translation prevents fruitful comparative analysis. But a closer examination of the

English and German translations and their Hebrew source texts illustrate Lazarus’s own

reckoning with her Sephardic identity in relation to her ancestral past. Chapter Two on

Sephardic palimpsests will examine how a discovery of homoerotic Andalusian poetry

provided Lazarus a voice for repressed longings rooted in a medieval, Hebrew tradition. For

now, I turn to Lazarus’s idiosyncratic reading and writing of medieval Hebrew to underscore

the issue of inaccessibility.

Songs of a Semite contains two sections of translations on medieval themes, “A

Translation of Heine and Two Imitations,” and “Translation from the Hebrew Poets of

Mediæval Spain.” Unlike the citation, “From the German of Heine,” that prefaces the former,

the section of Andalusian poetry contains no reference to Lazarus’s source material, as if

Lazarus had translated directly from the Hebrew. In twenty poems by Gabirol, Halevi, Ibn

Ezra, and Yehuda al-Ḥarizi, the section juxtaposes a range of genres closely associated with

Golden Age poetry: erotic wine songs, liturgical confessionals, meditations on mortality, and

Halevi’s passionate songs of Zion. Since each of Lazarus’s poems contain several layers of

translation and editing, the study of their way into English illuminates the fraught

relationship between one modern diasporic Sephardi and the medieval past she attempts to

access.

To highlight one example of the winding complications in a first printing of

Andalusian poetry on American shores, consider a short poem by Lazarus titled “Love-

Song,” the first in a section from “Abul Hassan Judah Ben Ha-Levi.” In two stanzas, the poet

offers a confusing array of elements both familiar and unfamiliar to Andalusian Hebrew

poetry:

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“See’st thou o’er my shoulders falling, Snake-like ringlets waving free?

Have no fear, for they are twisted To allure thee unto me.”

Thus she spake, the gentle dove,

Listen to thy plighted love: – “Ah, how long I wait, until Sweetheart cometh back (she said)

Laying his caressing hand Underneath my burning head.” (Lazarus, Songs 73)

The abrupt opening of the poem’s conversation, with its use of English archaisms

(“See’st,” “spake”) hint of a medieval origin. Lazarus’s source text of Halevi’s poem was the

same as her translation of a song by Halevi offered for Gottheil’s collection of hymns,

Abraham Geiger’s Divan des Castiliers Abu’l-Hassan Juda ha-Levi (1851). Printed in Gothic

Fraktur calligraphic typeface, Geiger provides brief contextual background to the poem

completely elided by Lazarus. Belonging to the Hebrew medieval genre of the epithalamium

(known as תולולכ יריש , or in Geiger’s term, hochzeitgesänge),3 this particular, untitled song,

Geiger notes, was written in honor of the Talmudist Yosef Halevi Ibn Migash, who served as

the head of the rabbinic academy of Lucena during Halevi’s lifetime (Divan 24). As a short

poem, Geiger offers the German reader a delicious example of the sensual possibilities

afforded to Andalusi rabbis:

“Siehst Du über meine Wangen Schlangenähnlich wallen Locken,

Fürchte nicht, sie sind geschlungen. Dich zu mir heranzulocken.”

3 The broader epithalamium originated in classical antiquity, and its literary history demonstrates pathways for the revival of antecedent style. The “Epithalamium” of the English Renaissance poet Edmund Spenser, for example, incorporates an array of characters from Greek mythology while simultaneously drawing on an inheritance of medieval romance.

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Also spricht das holde Täubchen. Höre auf Dein liebes Weibchen: “Ach, wie lange wart' ich, bis der

Traute, der das Herz mir raubt, Leget kosend mir die Linke

Unter das erglühte Haupt!”

“Does thou see over my cheeks Snake-like locks flowing?

Fear not, they are twisted To allure thee unto me.” So speaks the beloved dove, Listen to thy dear lady: “Ah, how long do I wait, until

Dear, who steals my heart, Laying thy carressing left hand

Underneath my burning head.” (Geiger, Divan 25)

Comparing the English with its uncited German source, Lazarus closely replicates

Geiger’s phrasing and format of the poem, starting with the first word’s homophonic

translation of “See’st” from the German “Siehst.” The English rhyme scheme of ABCB EE

FGHG parallels the German’s ABAB CC DEFE, while the interwoven eight and seven

syllable lines correspond to those in the German. To maintain the strict parameters of

German prosody, Lazarus alters various words for the English, rendering “Wangen” as

“shoulders” instead of the more accurate “cheeks,” “liebes Weibchen” as “plighted love”

instead of “dear lady,” and erasing the strangely specific “left” caressing hand in “Leget

kosend mir die Linke.”

As with most of the translated poetry and historical information contained in the

Divan, Geiger cites the Italian Wissenschaft scholar S. D. Luzzatto as his source for the song.

Luzzatto, a “worthy disciple of Halevi [einen würdigen Jünger unseres Juda],” had produced

an unprecedented Hebrew transcription and vocalization of Halevi’s poetry in his 1840

monograph Betulat Bat Yehuda (Judah’s Virgin Daughter), as well as a multitude of journal

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articles and the later Diwan (1864), all of which significantly influenced modern scholarly

research and translations of the poet (Divan 112). Luzzatto’s own research into Halevi’s

poetry drew heavily from his acquisition of an extraordinary thirteenth-century manuscript,

now known as the MS Oxford 1971 (Opp. Add. 4° 81), originally purchased in Tunis a year

prior to the printing of Betulat. This dīwān, in tandem with a seventeenth-century copy of the

oldest known dīwān, known as Maḥaneh Yehuda, MS Oxford 1970 (Poc. 74), has since been

the basis for all printed editions of Halevi’s poetry to this day, including the still standard

multi-volume edition by Heinrich (Ḥayyim) Brody (1894-1930). As the Maḥaneh Yehuda

manuscript does not contain the poem, known by its first line “Surely a third arose between

two lights [ ישילש םירואה ינש ןיב הלע אלה ],” Luzzatto’s transcription in Betulat marked its first

printing in the modern era. Here is how Luzzatto transcribed the last seven lines (out of

twenty-seven) that would eventually become Lazarus’s “Love-Song,” with my literal

translation following:

ישחנ ייחל תגורע ךות הארת םאו :אישהל ךל ויתמש אלה ארית-לא השג

םירמא לא ןזא הנת ריקי ןב הנת םירדחמ ןח תיבצ םב-הגהת רשא םירימא ןיבמ הנויכ ןנורתת ךב ?ישפנב והדפא יבצ ליחוא יתמל״ ״?ישארל תחת ולאמש הארא יתמו״

And should you see my snake in the garden bed of my cheeks Approach, fear not, for I put him there to allure you:

Pay mind, dear son, lend your ear to the sayings Uttered by a graceful gazelle from inner chambers She will rejoice in you as a dove from between the treetops

“For when can I hope for the deer, for him whom I will ransom my life? And when will I see his left hand under my head?” (Luzzatto 39)

The form of the poem, exemplified in this quoted piece, already indicates some of the

changes produced by its subsequent translations. The strophic poem juxtaposes a consistent

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rhyme (-shi) of two lines after each rhyming three-line stanza (in this case, -reem), all in a

thirteen-syllable Arabic quantified meter of short and long vowels known in Hebrew as ha-

merubbeh. Unlike typical Andalusian strophic poems of an erotic theme, Halevi’s does not

close with a kharja, or exit, the rhyming couplet in which the speaker of the poem shifts,

most clearly signaled through a change of the verse’s language into vernacular Arabic or

Romance. Instead, the poem ends with a quotation from the Song of Songs (8:3), a rather

uncommon strategy and what Joseph Yahalom considers “a most original religious recast of

a secular genre” (“The Kharja” 31). The expectation of a woman’s interjecting voice likely

explains why Luzzatto added quotation marks—among other modern forms of punctuation

obviously absent in the manuscript dīwān—into his transcription. But all of the cited lines

actually make up the bride’s erotic address, who already started speaking several lines

earlier. Furthermore, the ambiguous position of the final lines defies neat categories of

punctuation. The reference to words spoken from “inner chambers” indicates a liminal status

of human speech, in which words imagined or whispered in cloistered confines nevertheless

may reach the intimate proximity of the groom’s “ear”—in a poem that smoothly transitions

from the assumed voice of the poet in its opening lines to that of the bride.

Luzzatto’s confusion of quotations would only exacerbate Lazarus’s efforts to

channel a medieval Hebrew lyric. Guided by Geiger, Lazarus structures her “Love-Song” as

a short poem in three parts, with an interjecting narrator that introduces the speaker and her

addressee (“Thus she spake”), and a final quotation with an additional emphasis on the

speaker (“she said”). Closely mirroring Geiger also forces Lazarus to mix and truncate the

order of the middle three-line stanza into two.

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Comparing Lazarus’s poem to the original source reveals the temporal and linguistic

displacement separating the two poets. Not only do clever word plays and biblical inlays

disappear in this double translation, but, with Geiger’s excision of the 20 lines that precede

the selected final verses, Lazarus’s snippet of a poem has lost much of the body and

coherence of the original. Furthermore, in a footnote to the Hebrew poem, Luzzatto notes

that while preparing his monograph he “accidentally discovered a great treasure [ ללש אצומכ

תעדה חסיה יתאצמ רשאכ בר ],” specifically, that the strophic poem in question actually forms the

second half of a wedding song to Ibn Migash, whose overture, titled “Sun is Married to

Crescent [ רהסל שמש הלעבנ ],” appears a few poems earlier in the manuscript dīwān (Luzzatto

38). Seen as a whole, Halevi’s poems celebrate Ibn Migash’s wedding through the poet’s and

the imagined voice of the bride, juxtaposing imagery from biblical landscapes in the first

section with the erotic pastoral imagery of animals (i.e., doe, gazelle, dove, deer) specifically

found throughout the Song of Songs in the second.

The beginning of the bride’s address, absent in the German and English translations,

introduces Edenic motifs (e.g., “My beloved, in my Garden of Eden delights have sprouted /

two breasts given to you [ םי ך נתנ ל ם ה םי תנ נ ם י שד שנ י דנ / םי ע י דנ ע ת גנ וח ב מ צ י די יד ]”)4 that build

toward the ironic image of the bride’s hair scaring the groom as a poisonous snake in the

metaphorical “garden bed” of her cheek. In the Hebrew, the threat of an alluring snake

clearly reinterprets Eve’s response to God after eating from the forbidden fruit: “The serpent

beguiled me and I ate [ לכאו ינאישה שחנה ]” (Gen. 3:13). In her address of seduction, however,

4 The translation follows Brody’s transcription and interpretation of the dīwān (II.21, p. 23). Luzzatto’s transcription changes the meaning to “My beloved! In the garden of delight of delights sprouted / two breasts [ םידש ינש / םינדע ינדע תנגב וחמצ !ידידי ]” (l.18-19).

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the speaking bride in the poem embodies all aspects of Eden, including the flowing hair

meant to entice the groom toward the fruit––her breasts––that it covers. The poem’s final

hemistich cites from the Song of Songs to continue the motif of Edenic/sexual consummation

through the rhetorical strategy known as paralipsis. Since the referenced biblical verse fully

reads, “His left hand beneath my head, his right hand embracing me,” the bride’s quotation of

only its first half implies a promise of the second half of the verse; their union, in other

words, will result in the groom finally taking her previously forbidden fruit.

Lazarus’s poem, however, entirely misses the biblical conceits interwoven in the

Hebrew and reduces the translated metaphors to their basest images (snake = hair; bride =

dove). Without accessing the full poem or associating the Hebrew phrases with their biblical

referents, Lazarus erases the seemingly superfluous “left [Linke]” hand of the German, while

maintaining Geiger’s actually superfluous modifier, the speaker’s “burning [erglühte]” head.

Every source in the genealogy of the “Love-Song” contains changes and additions,

albeit less radical in relation to its propinquity to the original text. To showcase the poetry of

Yehuda Halevi, Lazarus relied on a translator who restructured the rhythm and rhyme to suit

a German readership, while excising whole stanzas from his source. In its previous iteration,

Luzzatto does not simply display a medieval manuscript, but translates a scrunched medieval

cursive script into a newly formatted Hebrew typography, whose line spaces, vocalization,

modern punctuation, and footnotes all help interpret the meaning of the text. Even Luzzatto’s

prized Tunisian manuscript, compiled by a Cairene rabbi named Yeshu‘a Bar Eliyahu Halevi

a century after Halevi’s death (1141), signals a disintegration of literary transmission by

separating the two parts of Ibn Migash’s wedding song; that Yeshu‘a also falsely attributed to

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Halevi poems from other poets in the dīwān further illustrates the challenge of accessing a

dependable, primary source for Halevi’s poetry.

Despite Lazarus’s ignorance of Halevi’s “Love-Song” in its original language, the

selection and translation of the poem illustrates the resourcefulness of Andalusian poetry for

one particular Sephardi. To anthologize and translate the Hebrew poets of medieval Spain,

Lazarus the German reader had plenty of poems in various genres to sample from Geiger’s

work, from riddle poems to laments. The issue of speech in “Love-Song,” however,

correlates to a trend that appears in Lazarus’s selection of the other Hebrew poets, in which

the speakers of poems provide some of type of quotation. As a result of its fragmentation and

previous editing, “Love-Song” provides the most confusing direction of dialogue in

Lazarus’s collection, as the identity of the interlocutors and the narrating speaker of the poem

blur; just as the presumed voice of the poet slides into that of the bride’s in the original

Hebrew poem, Lazarus here reports words presumably spoken first by a woman about her

own sensual body, then echoed by her lover, and now mediated by the narrating poet.

As will be discussed in following chapter, the suggestive reflexivity of homoerotic

language in some of the poems Lazarus chose to translate instructed her own censored love

poetry. In this case, words of medieval longing repeatedly shift the genders that identify the

poet, the poem’s speakers, and their translators, until “Love-Song” at once becomes a

reconstruction of an ancestral Sephardic past while also a means to voice intimate dialogues

otherwise suppressed in the poetry of the translator.

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1.2.1 Lazarus’s Reinterpretation of Inquisition History

On only one occasion in her publishing career did Lazarus celebrate the rewards of

her private Hebrew lessons. In a letter to the editor of The American Hebrew, Phillip Cowen,

in 1883, Lazarus enclosed a stanza of poetry she titled “Consolation,” which, she noted, had

been “translated from the original Hebrew--& so am very proud of it as my first effort!” (qtd.

in Schappes 435). Although Lazarus claimed not to know which Spanish Hebrew poet wrote

it—a curious problem corrected by later Lazarus anthologists as the medieval poet and

translator Yehuda al-Ḥarizi— the poem was printed in the May 11, 1883 edition of The

American Hebrew with the proud subtitle, “Translated from the Hebrew, by Emma Lazarus”

(“Consolation”). So impressive was this translation that shortly after Lazarus’s death in 1887,

Cowen honored the poet by reprinting the poem, setting a facsimile of Lazarus’s handwriting

of the English verses onto the newspaper page (see fig. 1).

Figure 2: Facsimile of Lazarus’s translation, “Consolation,” published in the December 9,

1887 issue of The American Hebrew.

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Biographers have cited this fluent translation, which breaks the original four Hebrew

lines into eight iambic tetrameter lines of rhyming couplets, as evidence of Lazarus finally

breaking the linguistic barriers that separated her from her Jewish heritage, or that at least she

“came to know the language well enough to understand Alcharisi’s intentions and imagery”

(Vogel 154). Relying on the biblical covenant between God and Noah after the flood,

Lazarus smoothly translates the image mollifying the speaker’s sadness by similarly

positioning its surprising appearance as the poem’s last word, “Behold once more revealed––

the Bow!” (“Consolation”). The posthumous reprinting, displaying the undeniable work of

Lazarus’s own hand, points to the intimate familiarity between modern and medieval poet,

Andalusi and modern diasporic Sephardi. Nevertheless, while a German reader would not

find the poem among the other Hebrew translations produced expectedly by Geiger and

Sachs, “Consolation” did in fact appear in a source text familiar to Lazarus, actually the

primary historical source for all of her Jewish-themed poems: Heinrich Graetz’s multi-

volume Geschichte der Juden (1853-1876). Only available to English readers as History of

the Jews in 1891, Graetz’s ambitious historical survey—spanning ancient Canaanite society

to contemporary antisemitism—was generally inaccessible to an American readership during

Lazarus’s lifetime. But there, in Graetz’s sixth volume, in a section on the biography of al-

Ḥarizi, Graetz included a stanza of poetry previously translated into German by Saul Isaac

Kaempf (Geschichte 210). Instead of the surprising reveal of “the Bow,” Graetz’s German

version smoothly shifts from the Hebrew by ending the poem with “der Regenbogen!” That

Graetz, like Lazarus, expressed uncertainty as to the poem’s true author (i.e., al-Ḥarizi or

Avraham Ibn Ezra) further exemplifies the latter’s consultation for her “Consolation.”

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Whatever the reason for Lazarus not citing the original German translation, her usage

of Graetz’s Geschichte informed much of her worldview on medieval Spain, and none so

problematic as her long poem, fully titled as “An Epistle from Joshua Ibn Vives of Allorqui

to His Former Master, Solomon Levi-Paul, De Santa-Maria, Bishop of Cartagena, Chancellor

of Castile, and Privy Councillor to King Henry III. of Spain.” Published in the June 16, 1882

issue of The American Hebrew, the poem further illustrates how Lazarus relied on Ashkenazi

scholars to access her own Sephardic heritage, and then transmit that information to an

American readership. Unlike her translations of the Andalusi poets, including “Consolation,”

Lazarus here acknowledges her source upfront to readers, prefacing that she has done “little

more than elaborate and versify the account given in Graetz’s History of the Jews” (“An

Epistle” 1). Furthermore, in the following week’s issue of The American Hebrew, Lazarus

provided a “Notes to Epistle of Joshua Allorqui,” translating into English a snippet—but,

significantly, not the entire section—of Graetz’s account of the episode for readers to better

understand the historical context of her work.

The poem concerns Paulus de Santa Maria, formerly known as Shelomo Halevi of

Burgos, an actual Jewish scholar who converted shortly after a wave of anti-Jewish riots and

massacres began in Seville in 1391 and quickly spread throughout Catholic Spain. In

Graetz’s interpretation, Paulus’s drive to rise in status made him one of the bitterest enemies

of the Jews prior to the Inquisition, specifically as a former rabbinic scholar who could

weaponize his cunning intelligence for an anti-Jewish campaign.

While his family renounced him, a former student of his, Yehoshua Yosef Ibn Vives

Halorki, penned a letter trying to make sense of how someone so admired and respected

could heartlessly abandon his people. Lazarus’s poem assumes the text of the polemic, in

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which the speaker asks his teacher to explain the reasons for believing in Catholic doctrines

that have produced only war and dissension. In her thirty-four ottava rima stanzas, Lazarus

imagines the impassioned, confused and sarcastic content of the letter, producing some of the

most biting verses of her literary career, such as the following:

Our God of Sabaoth is an awful God Of lightnings and of vengeance, ––Christians say.

Earth trembled, nations perished at his nod; His Law has yielded to a milder sway.

Theirs is the God of Love whose feet have trod Our common earth –– draw near to him and pray,

Meek-faced, dove-eyed, pure-browed, the Lord of life, Know him and kneel, else at your throat the knife! (Lazarus, Emma 225-226)

Such lines articulate the weaponized rhetoric of Jewish polemical literature, such as

the hypocritical pretense ennobling the New over the Old Testament’s divinity. The sets of

contrasts (i.e., Sabaoth/Love, awful/Meek-faced) outlined here break in hierarchy once the

speaker reveals that Christian self-ascriptions belie a reality of carnage and forced

conversion. Interestingly, Lazarus names the Jewish deity the “God of Sabaoth,” a corrupt

transliteration of the Hebrew word for heavenly hosts ( תואבצ ), which Lazarus would have

found throughout the New Testament of the King James Bible (cf. Rom. 9:29; Jam. 5:4).

Because of the assumed quotation in the line, it is not clear whether the speaker, ostensibly

writing in Hebrew, mocks Christians for their biblical illiteracy or whether Lazarus herself

ironically relied on Christian scriptures for her own use of the Hebrew term.

As clarified in the “Notes” portion that Lazarus translated, Graetz cites the multiple

motives Halorki raises that could account for his teacher’s conversion, from self-interested

affluence to philosophic speculation; Halorki responds to each motive and dismisses each, so

that “under the shadow of doubt he shatters the foundations of Christianity” (66). Lazarus’s

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translation of Graetz, however, elides several passages of the account that significantly

inform her poetry, particularly the perceived reception of the letter:

Every sentence in this epistle was calculated to cut the Jew-hating new-Christian to the quick. The evasive and embarrassed reply, which Paul indited later on, clearly indicated how he had winced under this attack. (Graetz, History 187)

The colorful narrative depicted by Graetz exemplifies the alternative vision implicitly

layered into Wissenschaft historiography. Although often criticized by later scholars (e.g.,

Salo Baron) for summarizing a Jewish history of unyielding suffering, Graetz traces a

constellation of historical Jewish resilience throughout his History, translating what Ismar

Schorsch claims as an “effective vehicle for reinvigorating the waning identity of a

disintegrating community with the power of historical memory” (193). Halorki’s polemic

illustrates one case study of combating modern antisemitism, but like Aguilar’s dependence

on British and American historians, Lazarus’s use of the historiography produces various

ironies, two of which apply to the present poem. First, despite the centrality of the document

already established in the very title of the poem, “An Epistle” does not directly rewrite the

text of Halorki’s letter. Graetz’s account only paraphrases Halorki’s arguments, and since

Lazarus did not know Hebrew when writing the poem, she would not have had much use for

the letter’s first printing in 1849. The issue of linguistic accessibility again deserves attention,

since Graetz’s interpretation of the letter betrays a fundamental dishonesty in the

historiography carried over into Lazarus’s poetic rendition. Namely, Halorki’s letter is not a

biting satire, but, as Yitzhak Baer suggests, the work of a “rower trying to make his way

through a sea of doubts to the shores of Christianity” (147). Amidst the sweeping anti-Jewish

wave of death and mass conversions of 1391, Halorki’s letter reflects the mind of a

bewildered student seeking guidance from his teacher’s stunning abandonment of Judaism.

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Reading Halorki’s letter directly reinforces Baer’s thesis. For example, although he

cannot reconcile the status of Jesus with the Torah’s conditions for the expected messianic

era, or the role of the New Testament alongside rabbinic teaching, Halorki only poses his

theological questions after stressing that his teacher has the proper wisdom to answer them.

Paulus’s instruction might very well contain those “treasures of Christian books [ ירפס ינומטמ

םירצונה ]” he has mastered, Halorki implies, and the latter suggests that the seeming

contradictions would resolve if the two could only see each other face to face:

םיניינעה ולאמ ךל הלגנה יל רמאתו ינרותו ךמלוא לצ תחת הנוכשאו הפועא םדק יחריכ יננתי ימ ולא לע ילוממ תובשויה תוקפסה ןומה ריסתו יבבל תימה טוקשת ילוא ,דחא לא דחא םירזה אמיכחלו רפסה לע ותולעהל יואר ןיא קזיה המש הכילהה ןויסנמ ךשמי אלול ...םישוריפה .אזימרב

Would that I was as in moons of yore, I would fly off and find rest under the shadow of your porch, to teach me and tell me what has been revealed to you from each of these strange matters, maybe you would silence my roaring heart and remove my many enveloping doubts on these interpretations...If it were not for the danger of travel, this would not be proper to raise in a book. But a hint for the wise. (Halorki 99)

Halorki’s plea for an intimate reunion sharply contrasts with Graetz and Lazarus’s

depictions of an irrecoverable relationship, divided by conflicting religious faiths. Indeed, the

biblical and rabbinic allusions of the original letter reveal a channel of communication still

accessible between student and teacher, while underscoring Halorki’s personal crisis. The

scriptural allusion in the first phrase (“Would that I was as in moons of yore”) conveys a Job-

like speaker (cf. Job 28:2), who yearns for God to again watch over and guide him, especially

after all of the calamities that have befallen him. The last phrase appears throughout

midrashic literature, and fully expanded reads, “a hint for the wise is sufficient, for the fool a

fist [ אזימרוכב איטשלו אזימרב אמיכחל יד ];” in other words, acknowledging his deficiency, Halorki

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admits that it will take much work to arrive at the theological certainties a sage like Paulus so

smoothly reasons.

The second irony with Lazarus’s recreation of Halorki’s letter concerns the poet’s

choice to eschew the immediate and later consequences of this historical saga. Rather than

offer an “embarrassed reply,” as Graetz claims, the converso Paulus is first in the student-

teacher correspondence to use sarcasm, as when attacking Halorki’s Aristotelian scholarship

by referencing “your rabbi, Averroes [ ךבר דשר ןב ]” (Paulus 104; cf. Baer 150). More

glaringly, in addition to the arguably altered tone of the poem in comparison to the original

letter, Lazarus does not learn from or actively ignores the central irony of Halorki’s stance

and the poem’s powerful Jewish message: that its writer would in turn inflict irreparable

harm as an active converso missionary himself! Not long after the theological exchange,

Halorki would convert and become Gerónimo de Santa Fe, cementing his legacy as both a

writer of anti-Jewish polemical literature (i.e., Ad convincendum perfidiam Iudaeorum and

De iudaicis erroribus ex Talmut), and most famously as a leading Catholic prosecutor

throughout the Disputation of Tortosa of 1413-1414.

The irony of depicting the presumed speaker of “An Epistle” as a heroic defender of

Judaism is exacerbated when considering that Graetz himself, only several pages after

discussing the Halorki-Halevi correspondence, acknowledges the eventual outcome of

Halorki, a man who “like his teacher, Solomon-Paul de Santa Maria, considered it his

mission in life to draw his former brethren over to Christianity by every possible means”

(History 200). Unlike her ignorance of the Hebrew lines that would eventually become

“Love-Song,” Lazarus did have access to the history of Halorki’s religious development but

conveniently omitted it from the narrative of her long poem. What could explain Lazarus’s

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inconsistency? The story of Halorki’s conversion certainly interferes with the poem’s central

assertion of the immutable faith of the Jewish people and the hypocrisy of Christian

ideology. But by polarizing the correspondents in the stark categories of a heroic survivalist

and villainous renegade, Lazarus can portray a noble Sephardic past without the messy

historical details that implicate Jews in the destruction and eventual dispersion of their

homeland. For an English readership who could not access Graetz or this history, Lazarus

can thus reclaim and reshape the incident as part of an unambiguous narrative of medieval

Spanish Jewry. Her omission of Halorki as proselytizer, like her absent citation in an

“original” Hebrew translation of “Consolation,” exemplifies the recurring problem of

accessing material documents despite implicit assertions of a medieval Sephardic heritage.

Following Aguilar, Lazarus’s medievalist poem highlights the distance between

ancestor and inheritor when considering medieval chronicles on the same subject. Depictions

of Gerónimo de Santa Fe by Jewish exiles, specifically as retold by Ibn Verga (who bases his

account on Bonastruc Desmaestre’s report and who identifies Gerónimo as Halorki), or

Abravanel (who lambastes the converso’s proofs) hardly match the airs of the sharp Jewish

scholar later idealized by Graetz and Lazarus. In Shevet Yehuda, the Jewish delegation at the

disputation excoriate Gerónimo for his impertinence and disingenuousness, breaking the pre-

established rules for engaging in a debate on the Talmud’s substantiation of the Christian

messiah, while Pope Benedict XIII regularly chides his spokesperson for acting like a Jew

whenever Gerónimo resorts to sophistry. The conniving figure marks a striking contrast from

that of the elegant Jewish writer imagined by Lazarus, as a passing comment that Ibn Verga

offers mid-way in the debate illustrates:

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,תורחא תויארב םש ךיראהו ,הברה שייבתנו ,לוכי אלו םינושארה וירבד ןקתל ומינוריגה רזח .תווע רשא תא ןקתל הנוכה התיהש וניבה םלכו

Gerónimo responded by correcting his initial words but could not. He was very embarrassed, and expatiated with other proofs, but everyone understood that he was trying to straighten what he made crooked. (Ibn Verga ch.40, p. 75)

Unsurprisingly, the Christian, Latin protocols of the disputation do not vilify

Gerónimo, but praise the converso for “his style of argument, with its mixture of rabbinical

learning, audacious inventions, and Aristotelian logic” (qtd. in Maccoby 188). The

differences between the two Hebrew and Latin texts, or even the historicity of Ibn Verga’s

colorful, abridged rendering, do not concern me here. Instead, I wish to emphasize the

medieval Jewish perspective of Halorki, a man nicknamed “the blasphemer [ ףדגמ ]” from the

initials of his Christian title, who snatches documents from the hands of rabbis to prevent

their proofs and deceitfully misquotes rabbinic passages (Ibn Verga ch.40, p. 68). If the

Hebrew accounts demonstrate the cunning Halorki’s ineptitude for presenting cogent

evidence of Talmudic support of Jesus, it is also here that we find the sarcastic tenor Lazarus

attributes to her brave writer.

As in the Latin account, Halorki engages in a rhetorical strategy that relies on hostile

verbal attacks against the delegation, “entering the debate in rancor [ המטשמב סנכיש ]” and

drawing such retorts as, “You have not understood the saying, or maybe you’re acting like

you do not understand [ ןיבמ ןיאש ימכ םכמצע םישוע םתאש רשפא וא רמאמה םתנבה אל הז יפכ ]” (69;

70). Comparing Halorki’s letter with Ibn Verga’s account of Gerónimo reveals the final layer

of irony of mistranslation, in which the sarcastic speech toward a destructive adversary

eventually does flow from Halorki’s mouth, but in the opposite direction Lazarus would have

intended.

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As in her collection of Andalusi poets, Lazarus’s writings on the plight of Jews in

Christian Spain reflects just as much on the Wissenschaft scholars that mediate her project

into her ancestral past as they do on the primary documents she seeks to offer to an American

readership. Hebrew poetry, originally structured on the model of Arabic poetics, now

assumes a rather German form, losing context, references, and whole stanzas in the process.

Similarly, a long poem imitating Halorki’s polemic epistle to Paulus showcases the way one

ideological historian, Graetz, read the original letter, an interpretation followed so

meticulously that it ironically recasts the medieval figure and distances him from what he

eventually becomes.

1.3 Yehuda Burla and the Reading of Geniza Research

In significant ways, Yehuda Burla provides a portrait of the modern Sephardi writer

in contrast to that of Aguilar and Lazarus. While also interested in the literary heritage of

Sepharad, Burla did not face the same limitations that led the previous writers to seek

historical information from distant, problematic sources. Rather, as a Jerusalemite with a

yeshiva education, a prolific career in Hebrew literature (eventually serving as president of

the Hebrew Writers Association in Israel), fluency in Arabic, and a residence shared by

important historians of Jewish medieval studies, Burla was ably equipped for researching the

primary texts for a historical novel about Yehuda Halevi’s legendary voyage from al-Andalus

to Palestine.

Various critics, however, expressed an ambivalence toward Burla’s reading of history

when his novel These are the Journeys of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi first appeared, with the

review by S. Menaḥem perhaps most scathing. The novel, Menaḥem wrote, amounts to “a

failed experiment because it describes legend as if it were historical reality [ לשכנש ןויסנ אוה

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תירוטסיה תואיצמכ הדגא ראתמ אוהש ינפמ ]” (113). This transgression, according to Menaḥem, is

not entirely Burla’s fault, since the author “brought without change the facts known to us

about R. Yehuda Halevi’s pilgrimage to the Land of Israel (and they are quite scant), adding

nothing to them but some ‘detail,’ a touch of love and adventure, as suitable for a novel [ אוה

אלא ןהילע ףיסוה אלו ,)דאמ תוטעמ ןהו( י״אל ל״היר לש ותיילע לע ונל םיעודיה תודבועה תא יוניש אלב איבה

ןמורל תואיכ ,הקתפרהו הבהא ךפונו ׳תוריפ׳ תצקמ ].” Although Menaḥem’s larger problems, as he

states further on, concern the protagonist’s lack of personality and the tiring use of rhymed

prose, the question of the available historical record as it relates to Halevi and Burla’s

interpretation of it forms the last part of this chapter.

Burla structures the plot of the novel around the general progression of Halevi’s

actual voyage to Palestine in 1140. Starting in Granada, where the poet must quell the fierce

objections by coreligionists and his own daughter, Halevi begins his expedition with the

assistance of several willing supporters. In a narrative following a tradition of the maqāma,

Halevi faces a new dramatic episode with each destination, passing through small Jewish

communities on the way to Seville, embarking on a risky sea voyage, disputing with an

apostate in Tunisia, encountering a welcoming community in Alexandria, falling into a love

triangle with a well-versed woman, continuing on to Damietta, and sending final farewells to

the Egyptian community in Cairo. Almost halfway through, the historical novel then

continues into uncharted mythological territory, tracing Halevi’s activities in Palestine,

befriending Muslims and Crusader Christians, visiting Yavne, Petah Tikva, and Mount

Carmel, and finally dying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem; these thirteen chapters on

Halevi’s experience in Palestine do not correspond to historical evidence.

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Nevertheless, and contrary to the critic Menaḥem’s assessment of Burla’s “scant”

information, a seismic leap in literary and historical research separates the novel, published

in 1959, from the previously discussed Sephardi writers. Unlike Aguilar, whose reliance on

Romantic historians limited any access to Andalusian poetry, or Lazarus, a poet/translator

exclusively mediated by Wissenschaft scholars, Burla’s career aligns with a new surge of

medieval scholarship whose trajectory transplanted a German-based center of Jewish studies

to one in Mandatory Palestine and almost exclusively published in Hebrew. Part of the

geographical shift reflected the historical crisis of Nazi Germany in the early 1930s, such as

the relocation of the Schocken Institute for Research on Hebrew Poetry from Berlin to

Jerusalem or the immigration of important scholars like Berlin-educated Yitzhak Baer,

responsible for establishing the Hebrew University’s “Jerusalem School” of Jewish medieval

history. After Brody’s multi-volume Dīwān, printed in Berlin from 1894 to 1930,

developments in the study of Halevi and other medieval poetry continued in Jerusalem,

culminating in work from the most influential modern scholar of medieval Hebrew poetry,

Jefim (Ḥayyim) Schirmann’s 1956 anthology of Hebrew Poetry of Spain and Provence,

offering a comprehensive overview of Andalusian Hebrew poetics. Contemporaneously,

Shelomo Dov Goitein began publishing crucial papers in Jerusalem that offered

unprecedented translations into Hebrew of medieval Judeo-Arabic documents, such as

correspondence between Halevi and his associates in Egypt.

All of this fresh research was informed or eventually impacted by the accessibility of

centuries-old documents culled from the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, Egypt. Although

already “discovered” and largely expatriated to Cambridge University by Solomon Schechter

at the end of the nineteenth century, the hundreds of thousands of archival manuscripts

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collectively known as the Cairo Geniza, particularly as they related to the field of Andalusian

culture and poetry, were only treated to critical assessments and publication through the work

of scholars like Schirmann and Goitein beginning in the early 1950s. For the first time in

centuries, unpublished poetry, a spectrum of rabbinic literature, intimate correspondence,

uncensored texts, and a plethora of mundane notes became accessible to a Hebrew-speaking

readership in a wave of new publications attesting to the near-sanctified status of

authentically preserved medieval texts; Schirmann’s substantial 1965 update to his

anthology, which added hundreds of unpublished Hebrew poems discovered by Goitein and

others, typified the potential for Geniza research.

The exciting atmosphere of a new scholarly center for medieval poetry in Jerusalem

coupled with monthly publications of discoveries from the Cairo Geniza during the 1950s

helps account for the pseudo-temporal setting that frames Burla’s historical novel. Beginning

with a note from the “publisher [ סופדה-תיבל איבמה ],” the preface attests to the miraculous

discovery of a manuscript from the hand of Halevi’s chronicling travel companion, the

fictitious Moshe Yehuda Elishama‘, transmitted over generations in pristine form and now

printed “letter for letter, word for word [ הלמב הלמ תואב תוא ]” (Burla, ’Ele 9). The

“publisher’s” assurance of diligently preserving the text of the manuscript, with only

occasional explanatory footnotes and light touches of punctuation, echoes the efforts of

Geniza ethnographers to assure their readers of the authenticity of their subjects; in the

1950s, Goitein, for example, not only transcribed Judeo-Arabic texts according to their

spacing and line format, but described in detail the quality of the manuscript itself (i.e., “a

dark brown parchment, thick ink, a very cursive Western script [ בתכ ,הבע ויד ,ההכ םוח ריינ

דאמ טוהר יברעמ ]”) (Goitein 136).

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The preface is followed by an introduction by the twelfth-century “author,”

employing various strategies to further signal that the following novel should be read as a

medieval manuscript. Typographically formatted with the body of the words shaped as a

goblet, the introduction certainly appears medieval. Its first words, “Praise to the Creator and

may the Chooser be Elevated [ רחוב׳ה הלעתי׳ו ארוב׳ה חבתש׳י ],” imitate the technique found in

medieval Hebrew texts (e.g., Maimonides’s compilation of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah)

to open with an acrostic containing the tetragrammaton. Elishama‘ assures the reader that he

wrote the text of each episode almost immediately after it occurred, “not subtracting a word

or adding an idea [ ןינע יתפסוה אלו רבד יתערג אל ]” (Burla, ’Ele 10). The allusion to the biblical

commandment “to not add or subtract” from the law of the Torah (cf. Deut. 13:1) reinforces

the sanctity of the present text, as if Halevi’s journey has been religiously preserved until the

modern day; the biblical phrase borrowed in the novel’s title, “these are the journeys [ הלא

יעסמ ]” (cf. Num. 10:28; 33:1), similarly elevates the status of the character’s chronicles. Even

the sections written in the rhymed-prose genre of the maqāma shouldn’t detract from the

historicity of the events, as, according to Elishama‘, they merely reflect the author’s

propinquity to the “source of poetry and persuasive eloquence [ הריהזמה הצילמהו הרישה רוקמ ],”

Halevi himself.

Despite these narrative frames, as well as the archaic Hebrew words and medieval

poetic forms used throughout, the historical novel displays plenty of evidence of the actual

date of its authorship. Like the other writers, Burla’s position as a modern Sephardi offers a

complicated approach to contemporaneous historiography about medieval Jews from al-

Andalus. Beyond Aguilar’s footnotes and Lazarus’s supplementary “Notes,” however, Burla

attested to his reading of new scholarship on Halevi by publishing a biography a year after

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the release of his novel, titled Rabbi Yehuda Halevi: Notes from the Paths of his Life, the

Scope of his Poetry, a Summary of his Philosophical Doctrine, and his Journey to the Land

of Israel ( לארשי ץראל ועסמו תיפוסוליפה ותנשמ תיצמת ,ותריש ףקה ,וייח ביתנמ םינויצ :יולה הדוהי יבר ).

As indicated by its hefty title, the companion piece offers a contrasting presentation to the

figure of Halevi found in the novel. Whereas one presents a romanticized portrait of the

mythologized poet, using the flowery style of the maqāma, invented dialogue and imagined

prophetic experiences, the other assumes a modern academic format. The nonfictional Rabbi

Yehuda Halevi systematically presents and analyzes various poems of Halevi’s with

annotated footnotes, outlines an efficient overview of Halevi’s philosophical dialogue, The

Kuzari, and provides general historical information related to Andalusian society and

Halevi’s voyage to Palestine.

The juxtaposition of the companion biography with the historical novel thus offers an

access point into Burla’s sources, as various bits of historical information around the voyage

repeat in the biography with either oblique references or quotations from contemporaneous

historians. A clever display of this kind of intertextual reading occurs in the novel’s tenth

chapter, when Halevi and company celebrate the circumcision of the grandson of

Alexandrian rabbi Aharon al-‘Ammānī. While there, the men meet a beautiful and eloquent

young woman known as Ruḥiya, who will inspire Halevi’s desert writing as his infatuation

flares. The spectacle of the meeting brings to mind a previous incident from a less eloquent

woman, one of the anecdotes from the novel based on the complex transmission of a

medieval source:

/ םיעודי םיררושמ םיער בשומב / םיעברא ןבכ זא אוהו ונבר בשי םימיה םתואב דרפס ןומירב ארובה דוקשי / ותה ןודיעו / וקה תוקדב / .יפוד לכ אלל שונא ירוציב / יפויה חבשב ורפיסו ונדו רדחל סנכית זא / .ול סנו תפומ והמישי דע / ולספ ראפי החמומ ןמאכ ולעפ לע ומש חבתשי

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הנהו / םנושלב הלמ ןיא ,םלוכ ושירחהו ואתשה / !ארובה ךורב – ראות-תפי השא / הרקמב :רמאו ונבר חתפ זא / .ריטפת התפשב גהלו לסכ-רבד :ועמש / םנזאל החיש עיגהו היפ החתפ בהז םזנ :בותכב ומייסו ריגסמ ןיאב םנושל זא הרתוה תמאבו / ״ריתהש הפה אוה רסאש הפה״ .ריזח ףאב

In the pomegranate of Spain [Granada] in those days, our rabbi, about forty, sat / amongst fellow known poets / discussing and speaking in praise of beauty / of human beings without any blemish. / In the precision of the line / and the delicacy of the feature / the Creator, may He be blessed, shall labor as a master artist beautifying His sculpture / until he puts before Him a masterpiece and flees. / Then, by chance, entered into the room / a beautiful woman – bless the Creator! / astonishing and silencing everyone speechless / but behold, she opened her mouth and chatter entered their ears / Listen: words of stupidity and prattle slip her lips. / Then our rabbi opened and said: “The mouth that prohibited is the mouth that permitted” / And indeed their tongues were then untied, unyielding, and its end is as written: a golden ring in the snout of a pig. (Burla, ’Ele 89)

In its compact form, the recollected story quickly highlights many characteristics that

idealize elite Andalusian culture: a philosophical discourse on aesthetics, a male-dominated

courtly setting, the objectification of a woman, the power of words and speech to seduce or

repel, poetic allusions to biblical and rabbinic Hebrew literature, and the illustration of adab

( بدأ ), the Arabic concept of social refinement and wisdom borne by the cultured individual.

Despite the stimulating atmosphere of the discourse, the anecdote does not share what

anyone actually says about beauty beyond the presumed indirect speech of God as the

“master artist.” The anecdote also does not provide the woman’s words that repel the men,

and Halevi, the only quoted person from the gathering, speaks the words of a rabbinic legal

principle found throughout the Mishna (e.g., Ketubot 2:2) and Talmud (e.g., Ketubot 18b;

22a). “The mouth that prohibited is the mouth that permitted” refers to an individual

invalidating a previously made claim or vow, but in a recontextualization that resembles the

playful use of biblical quotation in Andalusian Hebrew poetry, Halevi literalizes the

statement’s meaning as a recapitulation on the experience just witnessed (i.e., the woman’s

crass voice will now undo the men’s speechless state). The punchline of the anecdote echoes

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Halevi’s joke by recasting for the reader a quotation, in this case biblical, which fully reads,

“A golden ring in the snout of a pig, a beautiful woman who lacks good sense [ ףאב בהז םזנ

םעט תרסו הפי השא ריזח ]” (Prov. 11: 22).

Unraveling the provenance of this recalled memory demonstrates the ways in which

Burla borrowed from contemporaneous historical research. In his biography of Halevi, Burla

reports the anecdote again (sans rhymed prose), claiming that it “was transmitted to us by Ibn

‘Aknin at a later time [ רתוי רחואמ ןמזב ןינקע ןבא י״ע ונל הרסמנש ]” (21). Burla here refers to

Rabbi Yosef ben Yehuda ben Ya‘akov Ibn ‘Aknin, the late twelfth-century Andalusi

Neoplatonist theologian and poet, who provided the anecdote in his tripartite Judeo-Arabic

commentary for the Song of Songs, titled ראונאלא רוהטו רארסאלא ףאשכנא (The Revelation of

Mysteries and the Appearance of Lights). The above citation implies Burla read the anecdote

directly from its obscure source, an understandable presumption considering his familiarity

with medieval Jewish literature and fluency of Arabic displayed throughout the novel (with

accompanying footnotes of Hebrew translation). While the manuscript of Ibn ‘Aknin’s

commentary was only made broadly accessible after the novel’s publication (i.e., A. S.

Halkin’s bilingual publication in 1964), the particular story in question appeared earlier,

through several generations of translations.

As in Lazarus’s case, the history of the anecdote in the modern era begins with

nineteenth-century scholars affiliated with the Wissenschaft des Judenthums movement.

After Moritz Steinschneider referred to a curious incident regarding Halevi in an entry for the

Ersch-Gruber Encyclopedia in 1855, the Moravian Jewish scholar David Kaufmann “dieser

Stelle von Neubauer erbeten [requested this passage from Neubauer]”—as in Adolf

Neubauer, the sub-librarian responsible for cataloging Hebrew manuscripts at Oxford’s

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Bodleian Library—in order to produce a German translation of the Judeo-Arabic for the

monthly Wissenschaft journal MGWJ in 1887 (Kaufmann 89). Fifty years later, at the

beginning of his long scholarly career, Ḥayyim Schirmann cited Kaufmann’s article to

incorporate the anecdote into his critical biography, “The Life of Yehuda Halevi [ הדוהי ייח

יולה ],” which appeared in the Hebrew Jewish Studies journal Tarbitz. Introducing its first

Hebrew translation, Schirmann conceded that while the story “does not add any new facts

from what is known of the poet [ ררושמה ייחמ עדונש המל השדח אדבוע םוש ףיסומ וניא ],” it does

provide a glimpse into the Andalusian cultural erudition that surrounded Halevi during his

stay in Granada (44). Schirmann’s translation, although slightly divergent from Halkin’s later

direct translation, nevertheless provides the source of Burla’s rhymed rendering:

ףסאתה .הלק החיש םשל הפסאב ]יולה הדוהי םע[ ותא וחכונש ע״נ הדנרג יבשותמ ןקז ינעידוה םיאשינה היתונומראמ ןומראב ,יולה הדוהי ׳ר םג הז להקבו ,םע ןומהו םידבכנ לש בר רפסמ תפי השא העיפוה ,ומלוע ךותב ארובה תמכח לע םיממותשמ םהש דועבו .יפויה לע ןויד םשל דועבו .ויתוריצי לולכש לע ךרבתי לאה תא וחבשו היפי לע וממותשיו .הפי תשובלתבו םינפ .]םלואב[ םיכלהתמה לא רבדל השאה הליחתה ,התינבת יוושו התרוצ יפי לע םיממותשמ םהש הפה :הזה לוקה תא ועמשב ]יולה הדוהי[ רמאיו .סג אטבמו רעוכמ לוק הל שיש ,ועמש זא ךרדב שמתשה אוהש םושמ ,ךכ לע םיעמושה וחמשיו )ב ,ב תובותכ( !ריתהש הפה אוה רסאש וז תיריש הארוהב ל״זח תאמ ארמימב הלאשה

An elder among the inhabitants of Granada, may they rest in peace, informed me that they were present with him [Yehuda Halevi] at a gathering for casual discourse. A great number of dignitaries and lots of people gathered, and in this assembly R. Yehuda Halevi as well, in a castle among lofty castles, for a discourse on beauty. And as they were astounded by the Creator’s wisdom within His world, there appeared a woman with a beautiful face and in beautiful attire. And they were astounded by her beauty and praised the Lord, may He be blessed for the complexity of His creation. And while they were praising the beauty of her shape and the value of her form, the woman began to speak to the passersby [in the hall]. Then they heard that she had an ugly voice and a crude accent. And when he heard this voice, he [Yehuda Halevi] said: “The mouth that prohibited is the mouth that permitted!” (Ketubot 2:2) And those who heard him were happy for that, since he used a borrowed Amoraitic statement from our sages, may their memory be a blessing, for this poetic teaching. (Schirmann, “Ḥayyei” 45)

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With only minor variations, like the absence of the biblical quotation or praise from

the attendees on the Talmudic statement, the outline of the story remains tightly intact.

Juxtaposing Schirmann’s Hebrew translation with the rhymed depiction from Burla’s novel

also emphasizes the difference between first-hand experience and transmitted memory.

Whereas Schirmann’s source introduces an anonymous “elder” in contrast to the ostensibly

more reliable and immediate report from Halevi to the narrator in the novel, the latter account

derives from the former. This derivation becomes clear when considering the account as

reported in the biography Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, where Burla appears to plagiarize from

Schirmann. Comparing the two texts reveals that Burla almost entirely lifted, word-for-word,

Schirmann’s Hebrew translation, without referring to his source.

Strangely, several chapters later, Burla does on one occasion reference “the scholar

Ḥ. Schirmann [ ןמריש .ח םכחה ],” before quoting a paragraph on the historical context of the

Almoravid and emerging Almohad campaigns in twelfth-century al-Andalus (Rabbi 47).

That cited text originally derived from a continuation of Schirmann’s biography of Halevi,

printed in a subsequent 1938 issue of Tarbitz where the original article on the Ibn ‘Aknin

story appeared. Whatever the reason for citing one source and not the other (e.g., the author’s

implicit valuation of historiography over translation), the elision of Schirmann in Burla’s

quote reinforces notions of Sephardic access privileging a modern multilingual novelist’s

reading of al-Andalus. The story might have been “transmitted to us by Ibn ‘Aknin,” as Burla

notes, but only after a process of scholarly publication that transplanted it from a medieval

manuscript in Oxford, to a Wissenschaft journal printed in Prussian-partitioned Krotoszyn, to

a Jerusalem journal by a Kiev-born scholar of medieval Hebrew poetry.

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Interestingly, Burla’s framing of the anecdote in his novel somewhat parallels the

appropriation of Schirmann’s text in the biography. After Ruḥiya’s speech at the

circumcision party, the narrator Elishama‘ witnesses Halevi intimately speaking to al-

‘Ammānī. Elishama‘ manages to hear a “smidgen of their conversation [ םחישמ ץמש ],” enough

to grasp the subject matter, and he then shares the story with a friend also named Yehuda

while Halevi speaks to al-‘Ammānī nearby; Elishama‘ then offers the reader a “summary

[ ןינעה רוציק ]” of the story retold to Yehuda, which forms the rhyming text previously cited

(Burla, ’Ele 89). This peculiar narratological shift departs from typical episodes in the novel,

in which the narrator chronicles journeys experienced alongside Halevi. In this case,

however, Elishama‘ did not preside among the dignitaries in Granada years ago, nor does he

have complete access to the conversation that he witnesses between Halevi and al-‘Ammānī.

Nevertheless, he has become familiar enough with the event to commandingly recount it

twice (i.e., in the undocumented account to his friend, and in the rhyming summary of that

account for the reader). Although likely not deliberately self-reflexive, Burla himself has

similarly reconfigured a small portion of a text (i.e., a paragraph within Ibn ‘Aknin’s

commentary), told and transmitted by others multiple times, so that he can now retell it

twice: in the uncredited translation for his biography, and in the interpretive rendering in his

novel.

Adding a fascinating layer to the episode’s issues with transmission, Elishama‘ states

that he realized the subject of Halevi’s conversation because “I often heard the actual

incident from his mouth [ אדבועד אפוג ויפמ יתעמש תובר ],” referencing a Talmudic term that

emphasizes the problematic reception of anecdotes. The Aramaic phrase, “the actual incident

[ אדבועד אפוג ],” derives from an argument about orphans and money lending in which one

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rabbinic authority challenges another to prove an unsubstantiated ruling from the legendary

Amoraitic rabbi Shemuel; when the authority retells the “actual incident” involving Shemuel,

he in turn reveals that he has misspoken, as Shemuel’s actions do not equate to a ruling made

in his name (cf. Bava Metzia 70a). Like the actual poet Halevi, who often manipulated

biblical phrases to render wildly new meanings, or the recollected Halevi, who uses a

rabbinic term for a joke at a woman’s expense, Burla underscores the derivative layers of

storytelling by using a Talmudic phrase that itself involves recounting an incident from

another famous Jewish figure; ironically, as retelling the incident reveals the unauthoritative

nature of the Talmudic interlocutor’s legal claim, so too does Burla’s methods of retelling the

Granada episode belie the implicit claims of directly transmitting a medieval Andalusian

anecdote.

Burla’s juxtaposition of scholarly research and historical fiction would have been

clearly disconnected had the novelist not closed his biography by including two chapters

from the novel, “On Carmel” (“ למרכה לע ”) and “The Letter” (“ תרגאה ”). These chapters not

only alter the style and historicity of the nonfiction book, but they also contradict Burla’s

presentation of the mysterious last months of Halevi’s life. The biography ends its historical

overview by asserting that “it is not known to us if he actually ever left Egypt, if he was

worthy to arrive at the Land of Israel and where he died [ אצי ללכב םא השעמל ונל עודי אל

ותומ ואצמ הפיאו לארשי ץראל עיגהל הכז םא ,םירצממ ],” whereas the supplementary chapters have

Halevi establishing himself as a teacher in Jerusalem, trekking to Mount Carmel, and

experiencing a mystical revelation with Elijah the Prophet about the spiritual ramifications of

the voyage for the rest of the Jewish diaspora (Burla, Rabbi 120). According to the preface to

this appendix, Burla’s historical fiction “is based on the popular opinion that R. Yehuda

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Halevi was worthy of arriving to the land at the end of his days and to take pity on her dust

[ הרפע תא ןנוחלו ויפוסכ ץראל עיגהל יולה הדוהי ׳ר הכז םנמא יכ ,םעב הצופנה העדה לע ססובמ ]” (125).

The phrase “popular opinion” here assumes a rather expendable definition, as with

one exception, none of the episodes from the final chapters of Burla’s novel parallel with the

folklore surrounding Halevi’s later life in Palestine, since hardly any such folkloric stories

exist. According to folklorist Tamar Alexander, the dearth of written and oral stories related

to Halevi is “precisely because he was so central a figure in Jewish culture...around which no

controversy swirled” (Alexander-Frizer 216-217). Instead, only two strains of preserved

folklore involve Halevi in Palestine: playing a minor role in stories about the peripatetic

fellow poet Avraham Ibn Ezra (whom Burla entirely ignores in his novel), and the most

persistent legend concerning Halevi—or perhaps any Jewish figure of the Middle Ages.

For centuries, folktales, poetic odes, and biographical notes about Halevi emphasized

the poet dying immediately upon arriving in Jerusalem. The scene has become such an

integral element in the collected memory of the pilgrimage and life of Halevi that it often

served as proof that the poet indeed reached his promised land. Before modern Hebrew

writers like Micah Joseph Lebensohn and Shemuel Yosef Agnon imagined it, Heine

popularized the episode in his ballad “Jehuda ben Halevy,” lyrically recounting how “a

Saracen came riding / Brazen-souled along the roadway...[and] swung a shining lance / Into

the poor singer’s bosom” (Heine 100). Modern anthologies of Halevi’s poetry would

likewise recall the frightening image of martyrdom; one of the earliest English collections of

Halevi’s poetry after Lazarus, from 1924, claims he was killed while “singing his great Song

to Zion by the ruins he had longed to see,” and Franz Rosenzweig, while acknowledging the

story as “legend” in his German commentary, concedes that “there is even less doubt that the

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real story cannot have been much different” (Salaman xvi; Rosenzweig 275). Even in a

biographical note for a Sephardic prayer book printed as recently as 2019, the editors inform

the reader that “[a]ccording to popular belief, [Halevi] did actually reach Jerusalem, where he

fell to the ground in a state of ecstasy... trampled and killed by an Arab horseman” (Elbaz et

al. 462).

Scholars of Halevi have long pointed to the source of the legend, as it first appeared

in print in 1587 by the Jewish Italian historiographer Gedelia Ben Yosef Ibn Yaḥya as part of

a collection of medieval biographies within his work הלבקה תלשלש (Chain of Tradition):

יתלבקו ויטויפב הארנכ לארשי ץראל ךלהשכ הנש ׳נ ןב היה יולה הדוהי יברש ןיסחוי רפס בתכ רמאנש המ םייקל ץראה לע וילוסרקב ךלהו וידגב תא ערק םילשורי ירעש לא ועיגהבש ׳א ןקזמ אלה ןויצ תרמואה רבח אוהש הניקה רמוא היהו וננוחי הרפע תאו הינבא תא ךידבע וצר יכ :והתימיו והסמריו וסוסב וילע ךלהו ותוקבד בורמ וילע האנק שבל ׳א לאעמשיו ׳וכו ילאשת

It is written in Sefer Yuḥasin [Book of Genealogies] that Rabbi Yehuda Halevi was fifty years old when he went to the Land of Israel, as it is seems from his liturgical songs. And I received from one elder, that when he reached the gates of Jerusalem, he tore his clothes and walked on his ankles on the ground, in order to fulfill what is said, “For Your servants cherish her stones and on her dust they take pity” [Ps. 102:15]. And he recited the dirge he composed, that goes, “Won’t you ask Zion, etc.” And one Ishmaelite became jealous of him because of his great devoutness, and rode over him, trampling and killing him. (Yaḥya 92)

As with Aguilar’s Inquisition stories, the anecdote combines available written and

oral accounts that significantly blur the lines of historicity. The Sefer Yuḥasin, written by the

Jewish astronomer and historian Avraham Zacuto after his expulsion from Spain in 1492,

only provides the one sentence of information on Halevi’s voyage that Ibn Yaḥya quotes. But

like many of the other biographies in his section on medieval Jewish scholars, Ibn Yaḥya

does not specify the source for learning about Halevi’s death––a story transmitted orally, as

indicated by the phrase “I received.” The legend rests on the reliability of one anonymous

“elder,” just like Ibn ‘Aknin’s story of the crude-speaking woman. Unlike the twelfth-century

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story, however, whose source could have presumably witnessed Halevi’s exchange and

reported it to Ibn ‘Aknin in his lifetime, no known source precedes the martyr legend

recorded by Ibn Yaḥya, whose book appeared some four and a half centuries after the alleged

incident. The temporal gap in historiography almost certainly accounts for the curious

identification of Halevi’s assassin as an “Ishmaelite.” Ibn Yaḥya’s immediately previous

entry––on the Almoravid invasions that immediately followed Yosef Ibn Migash’s death––

might account for the slip (i.e., “the Ishmaelites decreed forced conversions and many

troubles upon Israel [ תובר תורצו תודמש לארשי לע ורזג םילאעמשיה ]”) (Ibn Yaḥya 91).

Additionally, as a sixteenth-century Italian historiographer who would have only ever known

of a Palestine occupied by Ottoman Muslims in his lifetime, Ibn Yaḥya might have projected

a contextual present into the medieval past.

In the epilogue to his historical and literary analysis of Halevi’s pilgrimage, Raymond

Scheindlin notes that while Ibn Yaḥya’s account conflicts with information discovered in the

Cairo Geniza, “every detail—even his mistakes—is related to some aspect of Halevi’s

poetry” (250). The reference borrowed from Zacuto of Halevi dying at fifty, for example,

literalizes a Zion song written before the voyage, “Still Chasing Youth Past Fifty [ ףדרתה

םישימח רחא תורענ ].” The poem “Won’t You Ask Zion [ ילאשת אלה ןויצ ]” specifically prefigures

the tragic scene of Halevi’s death, in which the speaker yearns to see the gates of Jerusalem

and witness the destruction of the Temple. The poem’s powerful imagery of the desolate city

explains its centuries-old incorporation into the Ninth of Av as a liturgical lament, but here

the legend broadens the theme of the poem’s destruction to also include the body of its poet.

Whatever the case, the anachronism of the assassin’s identity has been used as chief

evidence against the anecdote’s historicity for as long as modern scholars have studied

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Halevi’s poetry. More than a century before Burla’s novel, Luzzatto considered Ibn Yaḥya’s

account the “famous lie [ םסרופמ רקש ]” in the mythology surrounding Halevi’s voyage

(Betulat 25). A simple knowledge of the history of the Crusaders’ occupation of Jerusalem

during the twelfth century—starting with the small Jewish community fighting alongside

Muslims during the Siege of 1099—counters the suggestion of a zealous “Ishmaelite” killing

openly practicing Jews in 1141. The legend distorts the trajectory of Halevi’s actual

pilgrimage, a trajectory continually modified in the many articles scholars have written as

new archival material came to light.

In his reading of the Tunisian dīwān, for example, Luzzatto figured that Halevi

started his journey in Córdoba and Granada before sailing to Alexandria, then traveled to

Damietta, visited Cairo to see the biblical wonders of the Israelites, and finally died

somewhere in the Egyptian desert without reaching his destination (26). Graetz later supplied

the names of Egyptian friends and officials Halevi had visited, but read the available poems

as proof that the poet had reached Jerusalem, Tyre, and Damascus. In an article published in

1941, historian Salo Baron reviewed Halevi’s biography and conceded to the lack of

evidence following a mysterious long sojourn in Egypt, adding that “perhaps some day a

lucky find will help clear up this historically as well psychologically significant riddle” (258-

259). A letter from Halevi to the Jewish Egyptian courtier Shemuel ben Ḥananya, discussing

the complex forms of hospitality preventing his expeditious departure to Palestine, was one

such “lucky find” and published by Shraga Abramson in 1952. Then, in the mid-1950s,

Goitein began publishing other letters from the Geniza from and about Halevi during his stay

in Egypt, providing the clearest narrative of the interpersonal dramas surrounding the

journey. After the 1950s, important Geniza research conducted by students of these scholars

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continued to shed light on Halevi’s biography—up to the last important historical work

published on the subject, Ezra Fleischer and Moshe Gil’s collection of Judeo-Arabic

correspondence around the voyage, וגוח ינבו יולה הדוהי (Yehuda Halevi and His Circle) (2001).

Nevertheless, aside from an acquaintance’s letter that mentions Halevi’s death a couple of

months after sailing from Alexandria in May 1141, no documentation has yet to unearth the

ultimate mystery of the poet’s experience in Palestine.

These are the Journeys of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi exemplifies Burla’s familiarity with

the considerable scholarly interest solely related to Halevi’s journey and the particular details

of his stay in Egypt. Several chapters revolving around the character Aharon al-‘Ammānī, for

example, reflect the actual Aharon al-‘Ammānī, which geniza research has identified as one

of Halevi’s primary hosts during his stay in Alexandria. In another chapter, a Tunisian

apostate named al-Batzrī reports to the chief of police that Halevi will not return money that

he has held for him unless al-Batzrī returns to the Jewish fold, a dramatic episode based on

the real Cairene Ibn al-Batzrī, who unsuccessfully sued Halevi in front of a qāḍī, or Muslim

judge, for just that alleged crime. As with al-‘Ammānī, Burla learned about the al-Batzrī

episode from geniza correspondence that discussed the matter—in this case, a letter written

just days before Halevi embarked on a ship going to Palestine; as revealed in his recount in

the biography Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, the story draws from “the research in recent years of

Prof. S. D. Goitein [ תונורחאה םינשב ןייטיוג .ד .ש ׳פורפה ירקחמ יפל ]” (103).

Considering his reliance on historical scholarship, Burla’s adherence to the martyr

legend deserves scrutiny. Unlike the legend, which occurs at the instant of Halevi’s arrival at

the gates of Jerusalem, Burla’s protagonist has stayed in Jerusalem for months, toured the

holy land, established a community for religious instruction among Jewish pupils, and

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engaged in interfaith dialogue with Christian and Muslim inhabitants drawn from arguments

in his Kuzari. At the very end of the novel, however, the narrator describes the interreligious

communities of Jerusalem gathering at the Western Wall on the night of the Ninth of Av.

After following the custom of praying and tearfully reciting dirges at candlelight to mark the

fast day, Halevi suddenly falls down from an irrevocable tragedy:

,הקעז ,המיא .וימדב םילובט וידמו ותנתוכו והזחב ץוענ ץח וניאר וינפ לעמ ותוא ונומירהשמ .הכובמ ,המוהמ

When we lifted him from upon his face we saw an arrow stuck in his chest and his gown and uniform soaked in his blood. Terror, outcry, tumult, turmoil. (Burla, ’Ele 265)

The scene patently draws from the legend of Halevi’s death at the gates of Jerusalem,

but more closely integrates the liturgical history that associates “Won’t You Ask Zion” with

the fast day. Again, the final representation of the composer of the classic Songs of Zion

conflates subject with speaker in a symbolic death that, as the narrator informs the reader in

the concluding chapter, spawns the first wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine since their

ancient expulsion. The spiritual meaning of Halevi’s voyage to end his days in the land he

has always yearned for, a yearning elucidated in his poetry and acknowledged in the novel by

a vision of the prophet Elijah, circumvents the problematic agency surrounding the murder.

Burla depicts twelfth-century Jerusalem in terms of an imagined co-religious

harmony, and the recasting of the folkloric perpetrator exemplifies this. Instead of

stereotyping the Muslim Arab in an act of religious zealotry, à la Ibn Yaḥya, or considering

the historically dangerous environment of the crusaders, Burla neutralizes the murder as a

bizarre, random incident without further explanation. The narrator Elishama‘ tangentially

reports that “a Muslim man was caught disguised as a Syrian merchant [ שובלב שפחתמ ימלסומ

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ינאייריס לכור ]” the next morning, but not before elaborating on the collective pain of Christian

and Muslim friends, who faint upon hearing of Halevi’s death and actively participate in his

funeral (266).

Similar to Aguilar’s reading of problematic Romantic historians, the novel’s account

reveals Burla’s ambivalent approach to his source material; while generally relying on the

only extant, albeit tenuous, account of Halevi in Palestine, Burla attenuates the political

overtones of Ibn Yaḥya’s “Ishmaelite” assassin inevitably charged in a novel written in

1950s Israel. In his biography of Halevi, Burla recounts Ibn Yaḥya’s tragic legend of Halevi

but clarifies the assassin as a “Bedouin horseman [ יאודיב שרפ ]” (120). In his analysis of the

novel, Almog Behar considers the identity of a Bedouin a “modern concretization

[ תינרדומ היצזיטרקנוק ]” of the folk story’s “Ishmaelite,” but the minor change also adds

symbolic value (“Mi-Yehuda” 255). To specify Halevi’s assassin as a Bedouin

simultaneously retains Ibn Yaḥya’s anachronistic detail of a Muslim character while

suggesting that Halevi did not die by the hand of a native inhabitant of the land, but rather by

that of a nomad not necessarily involved in the nationalist stakes of medieval/modern Jewish

resettlement.

The episode closing Halevi’s imagined chronicles highlights a final “modern

concretization,” as a nexus between accepted mythology, historical scholarship that explicitly

rejects it, and the novelist who attempts to reconcile the two. Burla’s historical novel works

with the pool of contemporaneous research available to him, and interestingly, research

subsequent to the 1959 novel would alter the previously accepted narrative of Halevi’s

voyage (e.g., confirmation of Halevi travelling to Palestine by ship, as opposed to the novel

chronicling a desert hike from Egypt). The ahistorical quality of the novel’s depiction of

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Halevi’s death, like the other Palestine episodes that consume almost half of the novel, do not

necessarily clash with the scholarly narratives of Halevi’s voyage constructed by geniza

research as much as it fills a vacuum that has yet to offer such an account. The novel’s

marydom narrative evokes the limitations of archives, but the placement of the chapter at the

end of Burla’s scholarly biography of Halevi anticipates the future substantiation of

transmitted Jewish folklore.

1.4 Conclusion

By representing medieval Jewish experiences and literature, modern Sephardim

bridge the temporal, linguistic, and geographic gaps that divide them from the former

homeland and heritage they claim. To build those bridges, writers like Grace Aguilar, Emma

Lazarus, and Yehuda Burla relied on historiography available to them. Articulating a

Sephardic diasporic literature requires consideration of the influence of complicated source

material, especially as ideological stances by historians establish narratives consequently

claimed by the writer. The development of this Sephardic literature thus corresponds to the

development of modern historical research on Jewish culture in al-Andalus and Christian

Spain, which shifts, almost unrecognizably, from an era of Victorian romantic histories, to

Wissenschaft Jewish studies, to Israeli literary studies impacted by the Cairo Geniza. These

historiographical eras determine the range of access available to Sephardic writers in their

projects to imagine Sepharad.

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Chapter Two: Sephardic Palimpsests

The previous chapter explored literary works by three modern Sephardim who each

learned about medieval Spain by reading and thereby interpreting contemporary

historiography. Moving from an engagement with historical scholarship to creative writing,

the present chapter will consider the intertextual strategies through which modern writers

incorporate medieval texts into their literary production, effecting a temporal and spatial

bridging between diasporic Sephardim and their medieval homeland. I frame these strategies

by means of a medieval textual practice helpful in conceptualizing medievalist literature: the

palimpsest. From the Greek etymology of something—originally a wax tablet—scraped

again for reuse, the term conveniently identifies paleographical discoveries of the layering of

texts in parchments that simultaneously expose various texts.

To give one example relevant to this study, by the end of the nineteenth century,

Cambridge scholars began categorizing what would amount to hundreds of palimpsests from

the Cairo Geniza; a piece of vellum might contain a medieval liturgical poem or rabbinic text

written over a Greek or Aramaic biblical translation from centuries prior and only faintly

visible. But a scholarly fascination with palimpsests has ventured beyond physical, literal

texts. Since Thomas De Quincey’s 1845 essay on the “deep memorial palimpsest of the

brain,” the term has been metaphorized in virtually every discipline, ranging from the natural

sciences, to architecture, the arts, psychology, and literary studies (De Quincey 192). What

had once been limited to paleographers has now come to mean, according to the Oxford

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English Dictionary’s updated edition, anything “having been reused or altered while still

retaining traces of its earlier form; a multilayered record” (“palimpsest”).

In critical discourse, the palimpsest has approximated, merged, or been conflated with

a number of concepts, such as Freud’s metaphor of the Wunderblock (mystic writing pad)

meant to explain layered processes of the unconscious, to the interlayered power dynamics in

postcolonial studies, to Derrida’s deconstruction of language in the figure of the crypt (cf.

Freud; Derrida “Fors”). In literary criticism, the palimpsest has received ample attention

within narratological studies by scholars like Gérard Genette, who despite titling his

structuralist survey Palimpsests, preferred the term hypertextuality to define the interaction of

what he labeled a hypertext “grafted” onto a primary hypotext (5). Genette’s exhaustive list

of literary transformations, from parody to intramodal transmodalization, typifies the kinds

of intertextual relationships enabled by the concept of the palimpsest, that he calls in his

subtitle, “literature in the second degree.” Linda Hutcheon has furthered Genette’s metaphor

by considering the reception of audiences, who experience the “doubled pleasure of the

palimpsest” when encountering works of adaptation (116).

Concepts drawn from the analysis of the literal palimpsest, such as erasure, trace, and

contamination, have further enriched usage of the metaphor, as has the word’s latest

derivative: palimpsestuous. First used by Philippe Lejeune, the term pushes the adjective of

being like a palimpsest (i.e., palimpsestic)––with its paleographic focus of a buried text––

toward a more theoretical adjective invested in the interaction between texts; or, as Sarah

Dillon defines it in her study of the metaphor, “[w]here ‘palimpsestic’ refers to the process of

layering that produces a palimpsest, ‘palimpsestuous’ describes the structure with which one

is presented as a result of that process” (“Reinscribing” 245). The new term suggests a more

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dynamic relationship between texts, in which one does not necessarily privilege the other by

its antiquity or authenticity, but—like a parchment containing multiple texts read at the same

time and in the same space—helps inform interpretations of one another. In a Derridean

gesture, Dillon further defines palimpsestuous by its linguistic signifier, to imply “an

inventive process of creating relations where there may, or should, be none; hence the

appropriateness of its epithet’s phonetic similarity to the incestuous.” (“Reinscribing” 254).

The sense of disordered desire implied in the term here anticipates new reading practices in

which the inadvertent presence of layers, such as primary sources a modern writer did not

know about or acknowledge, nevertheless contributes in the interpretation of a hypertext. The

metaphor draws upon the existence of unexpected textual overlaps in literal palimpsests, and

defining palimpsestuous through wordplay may suggest another reading, that of texts indeed

related to one another. The strangeness of the palimpsest might involve the binding of

familial texts between progenitor hypotexts—such as those first composed in al-Andalus and

Christian Spain—and hypertexts composed by modern, ethnic inheritors.

A long stream of palimpsests runs through Sephardic literary history, from the earliest

traces of Hebrew writing in medieval Spain to contemporary literature. It begins with the

corpus of Andalusian Hebrew poetry, developed by the appropriation of Arabic-language

poetics to often rewrite or, in the case of the kharja, incorporate Arabic and Romance verses

into the body of the poem (cf. Rosen, “The Muwashshah”). This stream continues in the

literature written by the conversos and crypto-Jews in Christian Spain, “marked by the social

and existential complexities they engendered and embodied” as a confusing, multilayered

religious identity (Yovel 57). After the Spanish expulsion of Jews in 1492, Sephardim

produced and continued to sing a Judeo-Spanish musical repertoire in layers transformed by

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generations of oral transmission. Hypotexts appear in modern, nineteenth-century Ottoman

Ladino songs, which involved contrafacta, or the musical substitution, replacing lyrics of

previous Turkish or Greek songs (cf. Seroussi and Weich-Shahak). Finally, the palimpsest

appears in the entangled roots of modern Ladino literature, such as T. Yaliz’s 1934

medievalist play, Los Marranos, based on Ludwig August Frankl’s serialized story

“Geschichte Diego d’Aguilar,” itself based on legends about the actual converso Inquisitor

who left Spain to found a Sephardic community in Vienna in the mid-eighteenth century (cf.

Stechauner).

The works discussed in the previous chapter already introduced avenues to examine

Sephardic literature through the metaphor of the palimpsest, such as Grace Aguilar’s

rewriting of the Ivanhoe Jewess narrative and her use of oral traditions of crypto-Judaism,

and Yehuda Burla’s transmission of Yehuda Halevi’s folkloric martyrdom in his historical

novel. Like the previous chapter, this study of palimpsests will focus on three modern

Sephardim, each of whom actively incorporate and reinterpret Jewish texts from medieval

Spain into their poetry and fiction. I begin with a continued analysis of Emma Lazarus,

whose translation of homoerotic poetry from al-Andalus informs her own poetic production,

allowing for a palimpsestuous reading connecting Andalusian conventions with the modern

Sephardi. From there, I consider the lyrical Ladino poetry of Moshe David Gaon, whose

dialogues with medieval figures, notably Shelomo Ibn Gabirol and the debaters in Yehuda

Halevi’s Kuzari, reevaluate the traditional status position of the Ladino language; Gaon also

displays forms of palimpsestic contamination, in which corruptions from a hypotext interfere

with the production of a hypertext. Finally, the contemporary Mexican scholar and novelist

Angelina Muñiz-Huberman constructs a magical realist novel, El mercader de Tudela (The

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Merchant of Tudela), out of the travel itinerary of the twelfth-century Binyamin of Tudela

and Spanish Kabbalah, illustrating the mystical textuality of the palimpsest.

In addition to opening up intertextual relationships between medieval Spain and

modern Sephardim from very diverse backgrounds, I choose these three writers specifically

to showcase some of the significant categories of Jewish literary production developed in

medieval Spain: secular love Hebrew poetry, Neoplatonic devotional songs, philosophical

discourse, geography, and mystical literature. By exploiting and mirroring palimpsests,

Lazarus, Gaon, and Muñiz-Huberman do not simply adapt these literary genres, but overlay

actual medieval texts into their original writing as a way of claiming identities transmitted

through a Spanish Jewish literary heritage.

2.1 Emma Lazarus and Homoerotic Palimpsests

When Emma Lazarus consulted the works of Wissenschaft scholars to learn and

rewrite her own heritage as a Sephardi, she in turn discovered a literary genre influential for

another type of her writing. As with most of the poetry generated by Andalusi Jews, the use

of homoeroticism derived from pre-existing conventions of popular Arabic poetry that

traveled westwards from major Arab cultural centers such as Damascus and Baghdad to al-

Andalus by the ninth and tenth centuries. Wine poems, such as those composed by the

Baghdadi Abbasid poet Abu Nawās, not only celebrated the courtly debauchery of garden

and palace gatherings predominantly occupied by men, with its encouragement of

drunkenness and exaggerated descriptions of their drink, but also lauded the beauty of the

cupbearer, often a boy or a woman dressed as one. Eroticism in Arabic writing long preceded

these homo-social settings, as pre-Islamic forms such as the introductory poem known as the

nasīb ( بیسذ ), fused the speaker’s mourning for a Bedouin campsite with the absence of a

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lover. However, the popularization of the medieval short, mono-rhymed love poem known as

the ḡhazal ( لزغ ), and the invention in al-Andalus of the longer, strophic poem known as the

muwashshaḥ ( حشوم ), further developed a rhetoric for beauty that employed inventive conceits

for the subject’s body––either a woman or young man––as well as depicting the speaker’s

suffering in their broken or nascent relationship.

In the mid-tenth century, the first Jews to write Hebrew poetry in al-Andalus imitated

the secular world and meters of the Arabic wine poem, ḡhazal, and muwashshaḥ. Starting

with the Lucennan poet Yitzḥak Ibn Mar Shaul in the late tenth-century, these poems also

incorporated an objectification of the male subject. Alongside sensual poetry about women,

many Hebrew poems celebrated, yearned for, or complained about the beloved commonly

referred to by the masculine animal metaphors of a gazelle ( יבצ ) or fawn ( רפוע ). In addition to

echoing biblical similes for the male lover (e.g., “My lover is like a gazelle or like a fawn

[ םיליאה רפעל וא יבצל ידוד המוד ]” (Song 2:9))—the terms, as Shulamit Elizur perceptively notes,

illustrated the dichotomous cultural influence of poets living as a minority in an Arabic-

speaking society; the Hebrew gazelle (tzevi) phono-semantically matches with the Arabic

word for boy, يبص (ṣabī ), while the Arabic translation for a fawn, لازغ (ḡhazal), already

signified the Arabic lyric genre of tragic lovers (Elizur 80-81). Conventional descriptions

projected onto these beloved subjects almost always signaled a youthful male, such as the

kind with downy facial hair or feminine features. As in the corresponding poetry about

women, these animal titles, inherited motifs, and the solipsistic focus on the speaker’s

emotional turmoil often elide any information about the identity and experience of the

beloved object.

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To give one example of the Hebrew homoerotic poem in al-Andalus, let us consider a

short piece translated by Emma Lazarus, often overlooked by her anthologists. Two years

before her death, before embarking on a trip through Europe that marked the end of her

literary career, Lazarus printed an essay lauding Heinrich Heine for The Century Illustrated

Magazine. Asserting that Heine inherited a Jewish literary legacy, she quotes from two

poems by Yehuda Halevi that exemplify a “flash of the Heine wit” (Lazarus, Emma 286).

The first, “Love-Song,” was taken from her previously published Songs of a Semite (and

discussed here in Chapter One), while the second translation appeared for the first time in

this essay:

The day I crowned his rapture at my feet He saw his image in mine eyeballs shine. He kissed me on the eyes – ah, what deceit! He kissed his picture, not these eyes of mine. (Lazarus, Emma 286)

The editor for the most updated critical edition of Lazarus’s poetry, Gregory Eiselein,

claims that Lazarus must have directly translated from the Hebrew, even though “her textual

source has not been identified” (Eiselein 286). Actually, Lazarus consulted once again

Abraham Geiger’s Divan des Castiliers Abu’l-Hassan Juda ha-Levi. Like her translation of

“Love-Song,” the poem conveniently appears there fully formed in its tight, few lines:

Ich wiegt’ ihn einst auf meinen Knieen, Er sah sein Bild in meinen Augen; Er küsste mich mit Liebesglühen, – Der Schelm! er wollt’ sein Bild einsaugen. Once I rocked him upon my knees, He saw his image in my eyes; He kissed me with love’s glow The scoundrel! he wanted to suck his image. (Geiger, Divan 17)

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Lazarus maintains her style for translating lyrics as closely as possible to the German,

generally paralleling the structure and content of the poem by rendering the German nine-

syllable lines of alternate rhymes for the similar ten-syllable lines of alternate rhymes. The

translation similarly approximates each word, except that the first line of the German

(literally, “Once I rocked him upon my knees”) presents a more ambiguous image, “I

crowned his rapture at my feet.” Although she would not have known it––as the original

Hebrew does not appear in Geiger’s monograph––the phrase of the line closely echoes the

ambiguous tone of Halevi’s Hebrew:

יכרב ילע והיתעשעש םוי ינושיאב ותנומת אריו

עתעתמ יניע יתש קשנ .יניע אלו קשנ וראת תא

On the day I dandled him on my knees

and he saw his image in my pupils he kissed my two eyes, deceiving,

his figure he kissed, but not my eyes. (Halevi, Dīwān II:13, p. 16)

As discussed in the previous chapter, the process of multiple translations generates

discordant and often ironic meanings in comparison to the original text. In this case, Lazarus

aims to praise one poet (Heine) by quoting the greatness of another (Halevi), uninformed that

the primary Hebrew text is itself an imitation poem. Heinrich Brody was the first to note that

Halevi’s short poem derives from the tenth-century Abbasid poet, Aḥmad Ibn al-Ḥusayn,

better known as al-Mutanabbī (“The Would-Be Prophet”), whose qaṣīda, “ يتلوق نم لیدب هوأ

اھاو ” (“O, The Exchange of My Word, O Wonder”), contains the following two lines:

اھایحم يرظان يف رصبت اھب تولخ املاط ةیماش اھاف ھب تلبق امنإو ينطلاغت يرظان تلبقف

A Syrian, each time I was alone with her,

she saw her face in my eye.

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She kissed my eye and she deceived me, for she had not kissed it, only her mouth. (Mutanabbī 1065)

Al-Mutanabbī’s poems follow the conventional structure of a qaṣīda. Before

transitioning into a long ode for his last patron, the Persian Buyid emir ‘Aḍud al-Dawla in

Shiraz, the poet opens with the nasīb. The speaker laments a deserted Syrian campsite, where

he once took pleasure from a beautiful woman, possibly inspired by a cupbearer or one of the

singing girls mentioned further on in the ode; the lascivious activity implied in being “alone

with her,” as well as the various physical flirtations described in the continuation of the

nasīb, conveys an unquestionably erotic tone. Halevi does maintain the Arabic conceit of

mischievous narcissism in the Hebrew rendering, but, in a curious twist, deliberately alters

the gender of the subject from a Syrian woman (shāmiya) to an unidentified masculine lover

(“he saw,” “he kissed”). In his translation of the poem, Peter Cole considers Halevi’s gender

swap alarming, “something neither convention nor meter would necessarily call for” (Cole

440). But such Hebrew homoerotic poetry was indeed conventional by the early twelfth

century—a variety of such poems appear in Halevi’s own dīwān—reinforcing a motif of the

playful and elusive fawn.

Before moving on to Lazarus’s poetry, let us consider the layers of texts involved in

the palimpsest of a single poem. The Arabic forms the extreme subterranean hypotext, a

poem that shifts from the conventional amorous lines about a woman to its main subject, the

generous and powerful warrior-patron. Halevi’s Hebrew strips the original poem’s courtly

setting of Shiraz and its speaker’s imagined encampment in Syria, only betraying a trace of

the nasīb in the image of the mirroring eye. In the process of writing a new layer onto the

text, the poem blurs distinctions of love, and not only the kind defined by gender. Rather than

directly translate from Arabic to Hebrew, Halevi refashions al-Mutanabbī’s first line by using

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a biblical passage that verbalizes parental delight over infants: םיכרב־לעו ואשנת דצ־לע םתקניו

ועשעשת [and your babes shall be borne on the hip, and on knees they shall be dandled] (Is.

66:12). By translating the poem for his monograph on Halevi’s poetry, Geiger erases—and

so invoking the etymology of the palimpsest—any perceptible mark of the Arabic origins

underneath the Hebrew, to follow Halevi’s gender swap and biblical metaphor.

Lazarus’s translation, the final layer in a multitiered text comprising a millennium of

literary history and four languages, has been produced to serve as evidence for the immutable

Jewish soul of Heine, as “imbued as he was with the spirit of his race, revering so deeply

their seldom-studied poetic legacy, he at times unwittingly repeated the notes which rang so

sweetly in his ears” (285). Although Heine almost certainly never read these particular lines

from Halevi, the assertion of a racial literary inheritance aptly resembles Lazarus’s own

position as a Sephardi poet invested in medieval forms of the lyric.

Returning to the issue of Halevi’s gender swap as applied to her quotation in the

Heine essay, Lazarus’s English rendering, “I crowned his rapture at my feet,” parallels

Halevi’s biblical inlay of parental affection and resembles the wholesome description once

given by George Eliot––the novelist directly responsible for Lazarus’s proto-Zionist

advocacy at the time––of a “mother’s early raptures” upon holding a mischievous child, with

their “stamping tiny feet” on her lap (cf. Lazarus, Emma 110; Eliot 30). But then what to

make of Geiger’s German translation of Halevi, situated as the initiating poem for a section

titled “Love Songs and Epigrams [Lieder der Liebe und Epigramme],” a title Lazarus

understood––evident in titling her previous quotation “Love-Song” ––in clearly erotic terms?

What kind of love is this love song? Unlike other poems in this Hebrew genre, and unlike the

continuation of al-Mutanabbī’s qaṣīda, the speaker does not offer any descriptions of the

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beloved’s body; the main action of the poem does, however, refashion a Narcissus type,

whose confused attraction at least implies physical beauty at his own reflection. But if

Halevi’s version reads as erotic or romantic, would the gender shift of its English

writer/translator as a woman neutralize the homoerotic voice of the poem’s unidentifiable

speaker, who astonishingly leaves no grammatical trace of gender in all of the languages

involved?

The question of how a modern reader interprets Halevi’s speaker kissing a boy

correlates to the broader conundrum of Hebrew homoerotic poetry, a subject of considerable

and prolonged contention in the scholarship of Hebrew medieval literature. Specifically, the

florid descriptions of masculine subjects, composed by men steeped in a Jewish religious

education, has provoked a debate as to the implications of actual homosexuality in

Andalusian culture. Early scholars like Brody dismissed allusions to men as poetic stand-ins

for women. Then, in a groundbreaking 1955 essay titled “The Ephebe in Medieval Hebrew

Poetry,” Schirmann suggested the poems fall within an Arabic “literary fashion,” but also

illustrate actual sexual feelings by Jewish men, who were “so strongly influenced by their

environment that they allowed the love for lads, at least in its sublimated form, to pass as

poetry” (67; 68). Neḥemiah Allony responded to Schirmann point-by-point to refute any

possibility of an “expression of homosexuality and paederasty [sic],” interpreting the poems

as, among other things, religious allegories for the love of God (321).

From there, the debate over homoeroticism expanded in new theoretical directions.

Norman Roth has devoted several essays, and produced a bibliography of homoerotic poetry

in Arabic and Hebrew from al-Andalus, to emphatically assert the permissive social norms

and fluid sexuality of medieval men of various religions, for whom “[i]t was...quite ‘normal’

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to enjoy the physical beauty and delights...the exuberant joy and innocent seductiveness––of

adolescent boys” (169). Raymond Scheindlin similarly challenged the rigid modern terms

projected onto a medieval “atmosphere not of maleness but of indefinite sexuality,” only to

assert an opposing position from Roth, that such poetry merely imitates Arabic literary

traditions rooted in Greek idealizations of beauty (Wine 82). In total, virtually every

significant scholar of Andalusian Hebrew poetry over the last century, including David

Yellin, Dov Yarden, Dan Pagis, Ezra Fleischer, Yehuda Ratzabi, and Tova Rosen, have

offered interpretations of this genre that often conflict with one another.

These divergent assertions all highlight the ambiguity of reading and interpreting this

poetry, an ambiguity that will directly serve a modern Sephardi similarly interested in

blurring distinctions of gender in her erotic poetry. For Lazarus, the only scholarly resource

for interpreting the Halevi-al-Mutanabbī poem and others like it comes from an apologetic

note found in Geiger’s monograph; there, he offers a deliciously ambiguous quotation from

his primary source, Luzzatto, to justify Halevi’s love poems, that “pederasty was honorable

among Arabs (as among Greeks) and that Jewish poets speak of their friends as if they were

lovers [la pédérastie était en honneur chez les Arabes (comme chez les Grecs) et que les

poétes juifs parlent de leurs amis comme si c'étaient des amants]” (Geiger Divan 135;

emphasis added). To read Halevi’s poetry the way Luzzatto does provides conflicting

interpretations of medieval social reality; perhaps Andalusi Jews adapted to a normalized

culture that practiced pederasty, and perhaps their poets used affectionate language for

platonic friendships. Both options, at the very least, blur expected boundaries of nineteenth-

century American social norms.

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It is through the lens of ambiguity that we can approach the metaphor of the

palimpsest in Lazarus’s own erotic poetry. As in the case of the Andalusi poets, the question

of Lazarus’s sexuality has long intrigued and frustrated biographers and critics. Apart from

overreading her lifelong bachelorhood, no evidence exists to substantiate what has been long

been hinted at in her writing. Nevertheless, Lazarus has become somewhat of a celebrated

figure in feminist and queer scholarship as an early Jewish/American/English-language poet

whose writing appears to limn same-sex desire. Poems like “Magnetism” and “Venus of the

Louvre,” for example, sensually describe the speaker’s objectification and desire for female

figures. Perhaps due to the impossibility of explicit lesbian intimacy, these poems illustrate

the temporal and physical displacement separating the speaker from her objects; a haunting

ghost in “Magnetism” and, in “Venus,” a classical statue encountered by an imagined Heine,

both deny the possibility of actual sexual union. Furthermore, Zachary Turpin has recently

republished lesser-known poems by Lazarus that originally appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly

Magazine, which read “as confident, public expressions of queer desire” (421). Women

eventually revealed as vanishing siren-mermaids or lying corpses again deny the possibility

of intimacy between Lazarus’s speaker and her objects of desire.

One particular poem, however, goes furthest as a potential lesbian union, and has

generated a wave of critical attention––more than any other piece of her writing––in efforts

to categorize Lazarus as a queer poet. The mystery of the poem’s origins, its discovery, and

the unusually explicit sensuality of the text likely contributed to its mystique and its place in

various anthologies of erotic poetry. Shortly before her early death in 1887, Lazarus ensured

the preservation of her life’s work by meticulously organizing and transcribing around ninety

of her favorite poems in a notebook, later used by her sisters to publish the posthumous two-

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volume exhaustive collection, The Poems of Emma Lazarus. However, one manuscript poem,

titled “Assurance” above its cursive text, remained completely neglected in Lazarus’s

notebook for nearly sixty-five years until a doctoral student consulted its pages archived in

the American Jewish Historical Society, beginning a cycle of interpretations that parallel the

contentious claims made by medieval Hebrew scholars:

Last night I slept, & when I woke her kiss Still floated on my lips. For we had strayed Together in my dream, through some dim glade, Where the shy moonbeams scarce dared light our bliss. The air was dank with dew, between the trees, The hidden glow-worms kindled & were spent. Cheek pressed to cheek, the cool, the hot night-breeze Mingled our hair, our breath, & came & went, As sporting with our passion. Low & deep Spake in mine ear her voice: “And didst thou dream, This could be buried? this could be asleep? And love be thrall to death! Nay, whatso seem, Have faith, dear heart; this is the thing that is!” Thereon I woke, and on my lips her kiss. (Lazarus, Emma 96)

The poem, a Petrarchan sonnet filled with enjambments, lush natural settings, a

dramatic suggestion of death, and adventurous passion, all fit Lazarus’s style of romantic

poetry. The subject––an assertive, undeniably female lover––and her unusual relationship

with the speaker/poet, likely explains the Lazarus sisters’ bowdlerization of the poem from

their collection, but also sparked curious theories of its implications for future scholars.

When he discovered “Assurance” in the Lazarus notebook, Arthur Zeiger, one of the first

scholars of Lazarus’s poetry and the first to write about the poem, offered in his dissertation a

“Freudian examination,” suggesting the text, “a lesbian fantasy, a variety of autism unique in

her work,” substantiated the biographical clues of the poet’s bachelorhood and “abnormally

strong attachment to her father” (192). Dan Vogel, in his critical survey of Lazarus’s writing,

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rejected Zeiger’s fallacy of conflating the poet as speaker, noting that “[i]t would not be the

first time that Lazarus presumed to speak the passion of a man”; indeed, like the Halevi poem

cited above, Lazarus does not signal any explicit reference to the speaker as female (89).

Esther Schor follows Zeiger’s lead by claiming the poem provides a glimpse into

Lazarus’s “unconscious,” so that the poem is not about a mysterious lover in her life, but

“about being chosen by desire––erotic desire, and for the body and soul of a woman” (233).

Most recently, in Queer Expectations: A Genealogy of Jewish Women’s Poetry, Zohar

Weiman-Kelman asserts that while Lazarus conceals the speaker’s gender, the poem’s

“clitoral imagery” in the mating female fireflies, the irregular rhyme scheme, the use of

reinforcement instead of the expected closing volta, and even Lazarus’s deliberate act of not

dating the poem in her notebook (unlike her other entries), comprise a “model of lesbian

history, where...the lesbian is neither entirely present nor absent, neither present nor past”

(85; 88).

The above readings illustrate how a single poem can spark a spectrum of critical

interest still animated by the mystery of the poet’s sexual identity. Nevertheless, no critic to

my knowledge has considered the way in which Andalusi poets generally informed a

homoerotic sensibility in Lazarus’s writing, most clearly articulated in “Assurance.” Such a

discussion will further queer readings of the poet specifically rooted in her Sephardic

identity, as Lazarus’s writings and outward expressions of herself as Jewish can be similarly

read in terms of difference and ambiguity. While a strong defender of Jewish values and

heritage, she stood out as a celebrity outlier in an era unfamiliar with Jewish secularism; as

she once confided to her friend Ellen Tucker Emerson, the Lazarus family had become

“outlawed now, they no longer keep the Law, but Christian institutions don’t interest her

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either” (Emerson 225). Too markedly Jewish in her professional life to assimilate into a

socially Christian mainstream—titling her poetry book Songs of a Semite—yet too messianic

in her proto-Zionism for the new Jewish Reform movement in America, and too removed

from observance for her family’s multi-generational membership in the Orthodox Spanish

and Portuguese congregation, Emma Lazarus’s alterity can just as readily be traced along

Jewish lines as along axes of sexual orientation. Yet, by reading and rewriting Wissenschaft

history and literature, Lazarus found a nexus in these aspects––ambiguity, same-sex desire,

Jewishness, and writing––articulated as a Sephardic heritage rooted in medieval Spain.

As evident in her translation of the Halevi-al-Mutanabbī poem, Lazarus was familiar

with homoerotic poetry from al-Andalus, but it is the application of an Andalusian hypotext

that underscores the palimpsestuous use of queer medieval desire for her own writing in an

identity marked as Sephardic. In Songs of a Semite, Lazarus introduces the translated poetry

of “Solomon Ben Judah Gabirol” with two epigraphs, the first an untitled laudatory poem by

“Moses Ben Esra”:

Am I sipping the honey of the lips? Am I drunk with the wine of a kiss? Have I culled the flowers of the cheek, Have I sucked the fresh fragrance of the breath? Nay, it is the Song of Gabirol that has revived me, The perfume of his youthful, spring-tide breeze. (Lazarus, Songs 66)

Moshe Ibn Ezra’s poem, as translated into English by Lazarus, suggests an

unmistakable similarity to the manuscript poem “Assurance.” In both short poems, a speaker

addresses a desire presumably of the same sex, conjuring “lips,” a “kiss,” a “cheek,” a

“breath,” and a “breeze;” the speaker questions an intimate encounter, interjects with “Nay,”

leading to a climax of his awakening by way of the lover’s words. To establish an

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intertextual reading of Ibn Ezra and Lazarus that responds to the topic of homoeroticism, we

must first expose the layers between the texts. Lazarus placed Ibn Ezra’s poem as the preface

to a section of translations of Ibn Gabirol’s poetry because of a misreading by Geiger, whose

German translation of the poem in his 1867 book Salomo Gabirol und seine Dichtungen was

Lazarus’s source text for her English translation:

Schlürft’ ich der Lippen Honig ein? Berauschte mich des Kusses Wein? Hab’ Wangenblüthen ich gepflückt, Gesogen Athems frischen Duft? –– Mich hat Gabirol’s Lied erquickt, Sein Aushauch junger Frühlingsluft Am I sipping honey on my lips? Am I drunk with the wine of a kiss? Have I plucked cheek-blossoms, Have I sucked the fresh fragrance of breath? –– Gabirol’s song has refreshed me, His breath youthful spring air (Geiger, Salomo 63-64)

Like Lazarus after him, Geiger turned Ibn Ezra’s lines into an answer and response by

posing the opening metaphors as questions. More significantly, because “it is hardly to be

doubted [Es ist wohl kaum zu bezweifeln]” that the “Shelomo” found in the original Hebrew

refers to the Andalusi poet Shelomo Ibn Gabirol, Geiger substitutes a common Jewish name

for an unmistakable identity (i.e., “Gabirol’s song has revived me”) (132). Aside from

adding the speaker’s “Nay” to resolve the preceding questions, Lazarus generally follows

Geiger’s translation of the poem, and by identifying the “Song of Gabirol” as the speaker’s

sensual subject, she conveniently introduces her own translations of Ibn Gabirol’s poetry

with the voice of a near-contemporary and equally esteemed Hebrew poet.

To discuss the actual reference of the poem, however, reveals another layer in the

palimpsest of Lazarus’s homoerotic writing. As Judeo-Arabic headers to medieval

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manuscripts first clarified, and as Brody noted in his authoritative edition of Ibn Ezra’s dīwān

in modern times, Shelomo does not refer to Ibn Gabirol, but to the Almoravid court physician

from Seville, Shelomo Ibn al-Mu‘allim, a writer and admirer of both Arabic and Hebrew

poetry. With the help of modern geniza research, scholars of medieval Hebrew poetry have

since pieced together the web of texts for which Ibn Ezra’s text functioned as hypertext to

another poem. Sometime around the turn of the twelfth century, Ibn al-Mu‘allim composed a

seventeen-line panegyric qaṣīda lamenting the departure of his friend Yehuda Halevi, to

whom the poem was originally sent. Since the peripatetic Halevi had been temporarily absent

when the letter arrived in Granada, Halevi’s mentor, Ibn Ezra, responded to the letter himself

with a complex forty-line panegyric to Ibn al-Mu‘allim, the first two lines of which Lazarus

would eventually translate as her epigraph for Ibn Gabirol. In 1963, using the unearthed

Schocken 37 manuscript of lost Andalusian poetry, Samuel M. Stern published the last part

of the correspondence, as Halevi eventually composed his own response to Ibn al-Mu‘allim,

replicating the forty-line panegyric structure from Ibn Ezra’s initial response.

Together, these three epistolary poems offer what Ann Brener labels the Andalusian

panegyric and panegyric-in-reply, which “share the same rhyme and meter—at times even

the same rhyme-words—and sometimes...similar images and idioms” (125). Ibn Ezra’s poem

does not just respond to a letter using conventional motifs at his disposal, nor does he simply

imitate the style of the poem he received, but actively incorporates the original text into the

response, binding sender and receiver together. We can see how closely these texts

interweave with one another when examining the original Hebrew. Al-Mu‘allim opens his

poem for Halevi by employing the conventional Arabic rhetorical device known as tajāhul

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al-‘ārif ( فراعلا لھاجت ), or “feigned ignorance,” in which the speaker hyperbolically questions

his perception of reality:

?םיעמ דוקי וא םיקחש קרבו / ?םיניע ולזי וא ףרעת בע ?םירהצ ירהז וא ורהז רוא / הזו ?רהס רואמ וא הדוהי ינפו

Is a cloud showering or are [my] eyes shedding [tears]? And is lightning in the clouds or a fire in my bowels?

And is that the face of Yehuda or the illumination of the moon? And is that the light of his radiance or the radiance of the afternoon? (Schirmann, Ha-

shirah II:240, p. 542)5

So overwhelming are the emotions for his subject that the speaker confuses

metaphors with the object to which they apply; the speaker, in other words, constructs an

ambiguous reality by “feigning” distinctions of clouds and eyes, Halevi’s face and the moon.

The first two lines that initiate al-Mu‘allim’s letter clearly serve as the basis for the questions

posed in the first lines of Ibn Ezra’s response:

םיפא רמו םייחל ץיצ וא / םינש ןייו םיתפש תפנ םיניע תואת המלש בתכמ / תאפמ םירוענ תוחור ובשנ וא

Is it honey on the lips and wine of the teeth or the blossoming of cheeks or breath of myrrh? Or have winds of youth blown from Shelomo’s letter, a delight for the eyes. (Ibn Ezra, Shirei I:95, p. 96)

Ibn Ezra adopts al-Mu‘allim’s mono-rhyme scheme of each line ending in -ayeem,

but improves upon it by doubling the lines of the original poem (from seventeen to forty) and

doubling the number of rhymes in the opening two hemistiches (sefatayeem, shinayeem, le-

ḥayayeem, apayeem). Al-Mu‘allim’s choice for quantitative meter, known as ha-shalem

5 The Hebrew punctuation has been inserted, of course, by Schirmann, who interprets the lines as rhetorical questions, similar to Geiger’s translation of the Ibn Ezra poem.

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( םלשה ), has been replicated in Ibn Ezra’s poem, and other structural components and images

either recur or receive a response. In the second line, for example, Ibn Ezra substitutes the

name of the receiver, Yehuda, for the new receiver, Shelomo. Thus, when conceptualizing

the metaphor of the palimpsest, Ibn Ezra’s poem preserves the subterranean layer of al-

Mu‘allim’s initial poem; in an interesting historical parallel, since al-Mu‘allim and Halevi’s

poems have only been published by modern scholarship, Ibn Ezra’s has functioned as a

hypertext for centuries until––like the paleographic excavation of ancient letters submerged

within geniza manuscripts–––the original texts have been recovered.

Considering that Lazarus would not have known about the Hebrew she mistakenly

attributed to Ibn Gabirol, how does one interpret the relationship between these two texts?

Sarah Dillon has suggested that the metaphor of the palimpsest releases what she terms a

palimpsestuous queer reading, in which critical analysis does not simply expose source texts,

but “traces in the fabric of literary and cultural palimpsests the interlocking narratives of

‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’, ‘heterosexuality’ and ‘homosexuality’ that characterize

gender and sexual identity, writing and culture” (“Reinscribing” 257). Dillon directed her

critique at the modernist bisexual writer H.D., who juxtaposed the lesbian desire of modern

female characters with settings in ancient Egypt and Rome. The emphasis of difference

underlying a model of queerness manifests in H.D.’s writing through layers of temporality

and gender. A similar model can apply to Lazarus’s medievalist writing, in which a temporal

and spatial collapse between al-Andalus and Lazarus’s modern New York, and the shift from

male to female homoeroticism, establish an intimate interaction between broader systems of

writing.

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To offer a palimpsestuous queer reading of “Assurance” by examining the

Andalusian poetry first conveyed and learned in Lazarus’s published translations thus opens

new directions of criticism that extend beyond familiar investigations into the poet’s

biography. Specifically, as interwoven with the homoerotic poetry from al-Andalus,

“Assurance” incorporates rhetorical devices conventionally used by Andalusi poets. The

Halevi-al-Mutanabbī poem introduced the role of ambiguity in reading the erotic tone of such

poetry and the issue of mirroring historical reality. Lazarus’s poem primarily projects a

queering ambiguity by questioning the existence of a shared experience. Guided by Geiger’s

translation, Lazarus constructs a new form of tajāhul al-‘ārif as questions followed by

resolution; unlike the original Hebrew, Lazarus introduces the “Song of Gabirol” to clarify

the confused sensual experience previously described.

Lazarus navigates a similar format in “Assurance,” as the speaker tersely juxtaposes

experiences unclearly real or fantasized until the tension climaxes toward an answer (i.e.,

“Am I sipping the honey of the lips...Nay”). The speaker has slept, yet feels a kiss when she

wakes, and so the dream of walking with a woman through a glade (and whatever other

activities the scene implies) appear as exaggerated impossibilities and yet feel real. The term

“feigned ignorance” implies that the medieval poet/speaker clearly understands the

distinction between the literal and the metaphor, and that the rhetorical questions posed

stylistically emphasize the exaggerated degree felt toward the subject. Despite the fear that

“love be thrall to death,” like an enchained slave wasting in a castle, the speaker’s account of

the experience in waking life indicates a discernment of the reality of her emotions.

In addition to the echo of tajāhul al-‘ārif highlighting the ambiguity of a homoerotic

experience, “Assurance” also exhibits a motif known as ṭayf al-khayāl ( لایخلا فیط ), or

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“phantom spirit.” Developed throughout early and medieval Arabic literature, and

incorporated by the Andalusi Jewish poets, ṭayf al-khayāl involves the beloved encountering

the speaker––like a phantom––in the haunting and arousing experience of a dream. Lazarus

includes minor examples of this motif in her translations in Songs of a Semite. In a translated

poem by Halevi, the speaker laments his lover’s separation by declaring, “In my dreams thy

shadowy image I shall see;” the “shadowy image” ( ךתומד in the original Hebrew), replicates

the idea of the khayāl ( لایخ ), what John Seybold defines as “an imaginative projection in a

dream or dreamlike state” (Lazarus, Songs 73; Seybold 182).

Select lines from the eleventh-century Saragossan poet Yosef Ibn Ḥasdai’s “Orphan

Poem [ המותי הריש ],” a qaṣīda dedicated to fellow poet and Granadan vizier Shemuel Hanagid,

more elaborately illustrates the motif in the way Lazarus eventually appropriates it:

המדא הקר ילע רמ תוקירמ תוצוק ידש ןיבו – יתבכשו המחל תקשנמ הפשהו הנבל תקבחמ ןימיהו .המוטפ םשב לכב שרעהו הנובל תרטקמ הטמהו המואמ ןיא הנהו – יתוציקה יכ ידע ,ינויזחב יתמענו המשנה היחי רבוע רמו תושפנה בבושי חיר לבא

And I lay down – and between my breasts, curls

dripping with myrrh over reddened cheeks And [my] right hand embracing the moon and my lips kissing the sun And the bed perfumed by frankincense and our couch filled with fragrance And I delighted in my vision, until I awoke – and behold, there was nothing Only the scent that brings back life and flowing myrrh that revives the soul (Schirmann, Ha-shirah I:54, p. 173)

The poem’s descriptions of the fellow poet operate within a dream fantasy that

resembles the hazy imagery and dramatic climax in Lazarus’s “Assurance.” Elements of

nature enmesh with the conventional body parts of Lazarus’s lovers (i.e., hair, lips, cheeks),

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with activity interrupted by the speaker’s awakening; as in “Assurance,” the speaker here

awakes with no trace of the lover, only a reviving scent––not unlike the perfumed “spring-

time breeze” in Lazarus’s Ibn Ezra translation. Both bring the intensity of the lover’s dream

to a climax that coincides with a sensual awakening. The ṭayf al-khayāl exemplifies a lover’s

only resource for encountering their beloved; the motif often appears in contexts of

irreversible separation, such as the beloved’s death, their departure from the city, or a

dissolution of the relationship. For “Assurance,” we may add a new scenario, that of the

impossibility of an open romance between two women. The creation of the beloved in the

faculty of imagination, as the medieval Arab logicians understood it, or the unconscious, as

modern critics would phrase it, allows the speaker in “Assurance” an interiorized experience

through the representation of the absent woman.

Andalusi poets were not the first or last to lyrically describe lovers inside dreams.

Two generations before the composition of “Assurance,” English Romantic poets commonly

depicted natural imagery, memories, and lovers through the nebulous perspective of nights

and dreaming. This includes “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the medievalist narrative poem by John

Keats, in which the heroine Madeline performs rituals in order to dream of her lover

Porphyro, who devastates her once she discovers he hid in her bedchamber all along;

similarly, in Percy Bysshe Shelly’s epic lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound, the Oceanides,

mythological nymphic sisters, experience their shared love for Prometheus by recalling

dreams of him. I do not necessarily dismiss the potential influence of this English literary

tradition, but rather stress the significance of Lazarus learning of Hebrew homoeroticism

through translation. By locating a motif specifically in Andalusian poetry, Lazarus interacted

with a Spanish Jewish heritage in its most personal and concealed application.

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The texts discussed so far illustrate a constellation of interlocking palimpsests: a

poetic correspondence between Ibn al-Mu‘allim, Ibn Ezra, and Yehuda Halevi from early

twelfth-century al-Andalus; and Lazarus’s homoerotic poetry as informed by her translated

Andalusian poetry. Somewhere between these two webs, we can also include an epigraphic

pairing of Ibn Ezra and Ibn Gabirol imaginatively constructed in Lazarus’s collection of

translated Andalusian poetry. Although she would not have known of the original context

involving Ibn al-Mu‘allim, Lazarus does interweave her translation of Ibn Ezra’s poem with

its assumed subject. As previously mentioned, Lazarus placed the Ibn Ezra poem as the first

of two epigraphs to introduce her translations of Ibn Gabirol’s poetry in Songs of a Semite

(see Fig. 1).

Figure 1. Epigraphs as they appeared in the first printing of Lazarus’s Songs of a Semite, p.

66.

The second epigraph, a quotation from Ibn Gabirol, appears to respond to the former’s praise

with its own:

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I will engrave my songs indelibly upon the heart of the world, so that no one can efface them. (Lazarus, Songs 66)

These two poems do not share any historical relationship with one another; the first

belongs to Ibn Ezra’s response to Shelomo Ibn al-Mu‘allim (not Ibn Gabirol), whereas the

second is a single line taken from Ibn Gabirol’s self-praise poem, titled תועמד ילוא (“Perhaps

Tears”) (cf. Ibn Gabirol, Shirei Ha-Ḥol Brody and Schirmann, no. 52, p. 28-29).

Nevertheless, in this modern misreading and pairing, both quotations imagine the effect of

Ibn Gabirol’s poetry. In Lazarus’s interpretation, Ibn Ezra here portrays Ibn Gabirol’s songs

through natural metaphors (e.g., honey, flowers, fragrance, breeze). Likewise, Ibn Gabirol

imagines an ultimate hypotext, in which his words go beyond their permanent markings on

parchment and into the heart of the world, “so that no one can efface them.” The metaphors

of engraving and effacement, of course, hearken back to the concept of the palimpsest, with

its literal definition of erasing a previously written text.

Ibn Gabirol’s line on engraving poetry illustrates an important distinction in the use

of homoeroticism by the Hebrew male poets mentioned thus far and that of Lazarus. The

medieval poems in Lazarus’s palimpsest play with conventions of same-sex desire through

the textual metonymy of writing. The “Song of Gabirol” praised by Moshe Ibn Ezra

celebrates the physical delights of a poem, and the original panegyric-in-reply glorifies every

aspect of Ibn al-Mu‘allim’s received letter: the onyx-chiseled lines on the parchment, the

night-dark ink, the sapphire spaces between words, the marble page, and so on; given these

metaphors, Brener considers the taste and fragrances mentioned at the beginning of the poem

(e.g., “flowers of the cheek,” “fresh fragrance of the breath”) an allusion to the practice of

medieval calligraphers, who “mixed their ink with various sweet-smelling scents” (99). The

self-reflexive poems of writing, in other words, channel symbols of friendship and desire; the

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Ibn Gabirol quotation, Ibn al-Mu‘allim’s letter (as well as the unearthed response by Halevi

not discussed here), and Ibn Ḥasdai’s “Orphan Poem” to Hanagid all relate to one another by

employing a convention that eroticizes the process of communication shared by men.

For Lazarus, however, a song, such as a “Song of Gabirol,” assumes an alternative

meaning: art expressed orally. Unlike the passions symbolized in the penetrating hands and

letters of erudite medieval men––what Hélène Cixous might dismiss as phallogocentric––

Lazarus offers a palimpsestic layering of sensual experience through the mouth and speech of

modern women. The wondrous effects of a poem, first detailed in self-reflexive Andalusian

poetry, shifts in the female poet’s rendering from a textual to an oral experience. In

conceptualizing yet another metaphor for the palimpsest, the subject of “Assurance”

addresses the speaker’s fear that their shared ethereal moments might “be buried.” But

through a voice, “Low and deep,” the speaker hears of its indelibility, offering the poem’s

namesake, the spoken words, “this is the thing that is.” Like a palimpsestic text, the existence

of a hidden, buried layer emerges when encountering the superficial layer; in this case, the

poem’s inclusio recalls the speaker’s awakening with the lover’s kiss, “still floated on my

lips.” A dreamy escapade, in other words, has been impressed upon the speaker and recalled

through a kiss, an intimate receipt not unlike the reissued words of a panegyric-in-reply in its

connection of past with present. The awareness of the kiss reifies the repressed reality of

what came before it and what, like the amnesia that follows dreaming, threatens to fade

away.

This mystical eroticization of orality––in figurations of the mouth, lips, breath, voice,

and the words they produce–– reappears most vividly in another palimpsest of Lazarus, “An

Epistle.” As discussed in Chapter One, the long medievalist poem contains multiple layers

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underneath Lazarus’s English text; first, the original late-fourteenth-century Hebrew letter;

second, Graetz’s description of that letter in his Geschichte der Juden, the source for

Lazarus’s reconstruction of the manuscript. Published in the same period as her other

“Jewish” Poems, Lazarus temporally collapses Christian Spain into an Andalusian poetic

sensibility by projecting a homoerotic tension onto Halorki and his converted teacher Paulus

de Santa Maria. In the beginning stanzas of the letter, for example, Lazarus imagines

Halorki’s sense of betrayal, recalling the days when the two men would leave the synagogue

that Paulus used to teach in:

For on the Synagogue’s high-pillared porch Thou didst hold session, till the sudden sun

Beyond day’s purple limit dropped his torch. Then we, as dreamers, woke, to find outrun

Time’s rapid sands. The flame that may not scorch, Our hearts caught from thine eyes, thou Shining One.

I scent not yet sweet lemon-groves in flower, But I re-breathe the peace of that deep hour. We kissed the sacred borders of thy gown,

Brow-aureoled with thy blessing, we went forth Through the hushed byways of the twilight town.

Then in all life but one thing seemed of worth, To seek, find, love the Truth. She set her crown

Upon thy head, our Master, at thy birth; She bade thy lips drop honey, fired thine eyes With the unclouded glow of sun-steeped skies. (Lazarus, Emma 219)

Echoing verses from “Assurance,” the speaker nostalgically reminisces about a

relationship through their experience together in nature; again we read of a couple’s stroll

away from the city, where the sky glows (here from a setting sun, instead of glowworms),

and the sense of awakening that disrupts their previous experience (i.e., being rapt in the

synagogue). Lazarus conveys homo-social intimacy through expressions of the mouth. The

teacher shines because of his oral sermons, and the speaker “re-breathe[s] the peace” from

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their twilight together. More evocative are the lips, which sublimate a typically erotic

signification for a religious purpose. The speaker kisses the “sacred borders of thy gown,” a

reference to the custom of kissing ritual fringes worn underneath the clothing of Jewish men,

universally practiced by the wearer but here a ritual that teases the speaker’s propinquity to

naked skin.

The startling images of honey-lips echoes Lazarus’s Ibn Ezra translation of “sipping

the honey of the lips,” both borrowed from the Song of Songs: “Nectar your lips drip, bride,

honey and milk are under your tongue [ ךיתמלש חירו ךנושל תחת בלחו שבד הלכ ךיתותפש הנפטת תפנ

ןונבל חירכ ]” (4:11). To situate this metaphor in the speech of a rabbinic student conjures the

classic midrash, which equates the erotic image of sweet lips to words of Torah expounded

by rabbinic sages, “sweet like honey to those who hear it [ שבדכ ןהיעמוש לע ןיברע ]” (Shir Rabba

4:11). But these lines also reflect the coded language of a scorned lover writing from the pain

of nostalgia; by converting to Catholicism, the beloved has replaced the speaker for another

man––a false messiah of all things––who, as Lazarus startlingly declares by the end of the

letter, is no more a god than a decayed, flaccid worm amidst other worms (in contrast to the

bioluminescent mating of glowworms in “Assurance”). This betrayal manifests, as in the way

of lovers, through the lips: what first uttered the pleasurable words of Torah and revived the

speaker, now screeches an anti-Jewish rhetoric that, in fact, kills.

The above cases illustrate the way Lazarus’s work as a translator informed her

development as a poet, a process probably ignored by critics because of the alloyed results of

translating Hebrew from the German. Nevertheless, what started as a favor for Gustav

Gottheil to translate a few poems for his book on Jewish hymns burgeoned into a personal

project of understanding who these ancestral Iberian Jews were. As a result, the medieval

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poets provided Lazarus a resource to identify with a heritage not strictly defined by religious

grounds, as well as a language to express what likely reflected her own romantic interests. By

incorporating aspects of the medieval translations into her poetry, Lazarus constructs

palimpsests that offer new directions for reading queerness that draw on Andalusian

conventions of writing.

2.2 Moshe David Gaon and Ladino Hypertexts

Born in the Bosnian city of Travnik a decade after Lazarus’s death, Moshe David

Gaon (1889-1958) belongs to what Julia Phillips Cohen and Sarah Abrevaya Stein classify as

the third generation of Ottoman Sephardi scholars; the first to leave their provincial

upbringings and the limited readership of the Ladino press for broader, cosmopolitan, and

academic audiences (359). Apropos, Gaon left his Ladino-speaking community as a young

man to study at the University of Vienna, then traveled to Buenos Aires and Izmir as a

Jewish educator, before he immigrated to Jerusalem in 1909 where he continued his

educational advocacy and writing. In Israel today, Gaon is mostly remembered for his

scholarship, all of which concerned some aspect of Sephardic culture, such as a

comprehensive biographical dictionary of famous Sephardim who immigrated to Palestine, a

bibliography of the modern Ladino press, a collection of Ladino proverbs, and a monograph

on the classic Ladino commentary of the Torah, the Me‘am Lo‘ez. His sons, the famous

Israeli singer Yehoram Gaon and the philanthropist Benny Gaon, continued to publish

Gaon’s research posthumously and established in Ben-Gurion University the Moshe David

Gaon Center for Ladino Culture to advance Ladino scholarship and teach the language to

new generations of Israelis.

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Among its various publications, the Gaon Center helped republish in 2004 Gaon’s

single book of Ladino poetry, an obscure work first printed in Rashi Hebrew script in 1925,

titled סאיזיאופ (Poezias, or Poems). Aside from a thorough introduction that appears in the

republished edition by Avner Perez, no scholarship exists in Israel or abroad on these poems,

despite their extraordinary contribution to Ladino literature. When modern Sephardim wrote

in Ladino about medieval Spain, they overwhelmingly focused on the experience of the

Inquisition. Nevertheless, Gaon offers an unprecedented (and as far as I know, unrepeated)

attempt to convey medieval Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic literature into Ladino lyrical poetry.

As a result, Gaon weaves modern palimpsests that bridge and reposition traditional

hierarchies dividing Hebrew and Ladino, medieval and modern literature.

Gaon divides his book into three sections, each containing eight poems loosely

related to lyrical poetry, Jewish nationalist themes, and/or historical events. Each section

opens with a cited poem in another language: Hebrew lines from Bialik’s “Small Missive

[ הנטק תרגא ],” a German stanza from Goethe’s Faust, and an English stanza from Lord

Byron’s Gothic closet drama, Manfred. These latter epigraphs introduce the noticeable

imprint that informs Gaon’s own writing. A range of historical and personal factors

contributed to Gaon’s development as a poet, such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s

occupation of greater Bosnia in 1878, the publication of modern Ladino translations from

German literature at the turn of the century (e.g., Benedeto David Bezés’s 1906 Verter:

romanso muy renomado), and the cultural impact of Gaon’s studies in Vienna. Although

Gaon dedicates his book “to the fathers and mothers who rest in Spain [ סירדאמ יא סירדאפ סוליד

היינאפסיא ןיא ןימרוד יק ],” and devotes much of his poems to Sephardic, Jewish, and/or Zionist

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themes, his poetry exemplifies a literary inheritance in the works of English and German

Romanticism (Gaon 41).

The book’s preface by the “editor,” for example, describes the present poems as the

result of uncovering “an ancient, moth-eaten manuscript [ רופ ודימוק וטירקסונאמ ו׳זיי׳ב ןוא

סאילופ ]” from a cave, following James Macpherson’s influential conceit of a pseudo-

epigraphic publication of the Gaelic bard Ossian (Gaon 43). Gaon’s poem “ ןיק [Cain]” on the

biblical figure’s demon-guided descent into the earth’s abyss tersely imitates Lord Byron’s

closet drama, Cain, while the speaker of the poem “ הדיריק [Dear],” Perez notes in his

introduction, assumes the “helplessness, internal paralysis, inability to act on and actualize

love, the yearning for nature as a refuge, and suicidal tendencies [ ,ימינפה קותישה ,םינואה רסוח

םיינדבאה תושגרהו טלפמכ עבטה לא ההימכה ,הבהאה תא שממלו לועפל תלוכיה יא ]” of Goethe’s Werther

(Perez 24). These imitations, as well as recurring Romantic motifs in many of Gaon’s poems

(e.g., the despondency of the speaker, the sensuality of writing at night, the glorification of

sites in nature), offer a rare departure from typical Ladino poetry written at the time, which

were commonly modeled after modern works in French, “the lingua franca of the [Ottoman]

Jewish bourgeoisie” (Abrevaya Stein 59). In relation to this study, we see a new layer of the

Sephardic palimpsest, one not only intervened in by German Jewish scholars (à la Lazarus),

but one produced by German (and English) writers for a modern, Romantic Ladino

sensibility.

Considering Gaon’s literary influence, it is perhaps unsurprising that the most

impressive poem in Poezias, by far its longest and most complex, centers around the poetry

of the eleventh-century Shelomo Ibn Gabirol. If Yehuda Halevi has been mythologized in the

modern era as a proto-Zionist martyr, Ibn Gabirol has undoubtedly been remembered as the

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Jewish medieval personality of heightened feelings. Alongside an impressive body of

personal devotional poetry—what Israel Zangwill has compared to “the modern cosmic

mysticism of a Kant or a Wordsworth” ––and Arabic Neoplatonic philosophical literature

that, in its Latin translation Fons vitae (The Fountain of Life), was widely read by gentile

scholars, Ibn Gabirol’s secular poetry offers a kind of proto-Romantic poet in its unique

emphasis on individualism (xlvii).

Each of the major Andalusi Hebrew poets addressed a common motif of alienation,

whether geographic, spiritual, or interpersonal. More unusual for a Hebrew poet of his time

and place, Ibn Gabirol expressed a satirical disdain for society and a wrestling with the

speaker’s psychology. Much of his biography has been pieced together from recurring motifs

in the dīwān, which include the poet’s endless ailments, physical deformity, and relentless

insults aimed at others (including his own one-time patron, Shemuel Hanagid). Moshe Ibn

Ezra, in his history of Andalusi poets, was among the first to describe Ibn Gabirol’s “angry

soul—unsubdued by his intellect—and the demon he could not subjugate [ ילע היבצגלא הספנל

ךסמי אל ןאטישו ךלמי אל ןאטלס הלקע ]” (Ibn Ezra, Kitab 70). In the nineteenth century, Heine

admired “That sweet nightingale who caroll’d / Tenderly his loving numbers / In the

darkness of the Gothic / Mediæval night of the earth! [Diese Nachtigall, die zärtlich/ Ihre

Liebeslieder sang/ In der Dunkelheit der gotisch/ Mittelalterlichen Nacht!]” (Heine Poems

49; Romanzero 257). Today, it seems no contemporary collection of Ibn Gabirol’s poetry can

do without the inevitable note by the editor and/or translator of the Andalusi’s “brooding,

passionate nature” (Cole, Dream 74).

Gaon’s poem “ לוריבג ןבא המלש [Shelomo Ibn Gabirol]” departs from the short

meditations on other historical figures in Poezias (e.g., Torquemada, Uriel Acosta, Theodore

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Herzl) in terms of both its length—it spans hundreds of lines—and its intertextual structure.

It consists of an extended dialogue between the modern poet and his medieval muse, which

includes seven whole poems or stanzas from Ibn Gabirol’s dīwān. The poem also differs in

the self-reflexive focus of the speaker trying to compose poetry. Like Lazarus, Gaon

identifies his Sephardic self in relation to an Andalusian literary heritage. Instead of engaging

with medieval homoeroticism, however, Gaon locates and consistently equates the modern

speaker with the personality of Ibn Gabirol as a sensitive, religious, and social outcast. Block

quotations taken from different genres of Ibn Gabirol’s poetry (i.e., liturgical, self-praise,

elegiac, etc.) thus correspond with the biography of the speaker, who discloses, among other

things, his religious upbringing, his crippling depression, his precocious talents as a writer,

and his immigration to Palestine.

The introduction to an elegy by Ibn Gabirol illustrates the palimpsestic method of

linking Gaon’s biography with his predecessor. Appearing in the middle of the poem, the

speaker reveals the hopeless despair he finds himself in:

הסנאקנאמ הל הנגיס יס יק וטירפא יד סוטנימומ ןיא .הסנאריפסיא סאמ ריניט ןיס וטירפ הרטסומ יס ימ ודוט הזיטסירט ןוק וייל ירומרומ ודאלוסא סאיד סוטנאוק .הזימ ימ ןיא האיני׳ב יק ודאגיסוטניא ןאפ ןוא רופ

En momentos de apreto ke se signa la mankansa Todo me se mostra preto sin tener mas esperansa. Kuantos dias asolado murmuri yo kon tristeza por un pan entosegado ke venia en mi meza.

In moments of distress [my] inadequacy evident Everything appears black without further hope How many devastated days I muttered sadly for poisoned bread to come onto my table. (Gaon 113)

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Following this preamble, Gaon summons the voice of Ibn Gabirol, which structurally

and thematically matches the speaker’s bitterness. As the modern Ladino speaker, Gaon uses

eight syllables per hemistich in rhyming couplets, and the following poem from Ibn Gabirol

parallels this with sixteen syllables per line in rhyming couplets. Additionally, the sixteen

lines of the Ibn Gabirol quotation reflect the sixteen lines of the preceding melancholy

section. The quotation itself, starting with “If Yequtiel ceased to breathe [ הסיס ייוא לאיתוקי יס

ראריפסיר ],” consists of lines Gaon has selected (out of order), translated and reinterpreted

from an over-one-hundred-line Hebrew elegy, which begins, “In the days of Yequtiel that

have ended [ ורמגנ רשא לאיתוקי ימיב ]” (115). The original, medieval poem concerns the

catastrophic loss of Ibn Gabirol’s patron, Yequtiel Ibn Ḥasan, who maintained an elevated

position in the Muslim court in Saragossa before his execution in 1039 following a regime

change led by the reigning monarch’s nephew. As evident in several elegies, Yequtiel

supported and protected Ibn Gabirol in Saragossa and developed a rare friendship with the

ostracized poet. But the historical details of Yequtiel’s devasting death do not concern Gaon

in his ode to Ibn Gabirol, nor even that the elegy focuses on the mourning of a friend and

leader. Instead, the lines offer images of deep sorrow that palimpsestically interweave the

voice of a modern Ladino poet with his Hebrew Sephardi progenitor. As Gaon writes

immediately before presenting his translation of the poem, Ibn Gabirol’s elegy provides

personal comfort because it articulates Gaon’s own feelings of personal suffering:

היינאס הל יד ודידניסניא וטנייסיר וייל יקשוב סיטנא .היינאגניא ונ יס זוב וט סיא -וטנייס היינארטסיא זוב הנוא יטראפ הדאק יד וייל ויילוא הדיסראפסיא ריס סיאופסיד יא :יטריאוס לאמ וט הייסנוניד יק הדי׳בומזיא הל ,סיא הייא

Antes bushke yo resiento ensendido de la sanya una boz estranya siento - es tu boz si no enganya. I despues ser esparsida oyo yo de kada parte

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eya es la ezmovida ke denunsia tu mal suerte:

Before I look for rest inflamed by fury I feel a strange voice if I am not deceived, it is your voice. And then it scatters, I hear from everywhere it is this, moving, proclaiming your misfortune: (Gaon 113)

Much of Gaon’s poem follows this call-and-response structure. The modern speaker

discusses his own experiences, sometimes conjuring images of Ibn Gabirol, before

translating stanzas of poetry originally written by the medieval poet; the speaker’s strange,

supernatural vision of an angelic Ibn Gabirol—another echo of Romantic medievalism—

leads to a translation of the latter’s actual liturgical poetry; reflecting on Gaon’s own

immigration to Jerusalem fifteen years before he composed the present poem leads to another

translation, an elegy of Zion; and so forth.

In effect, the long poem displays the multiple talents of Gaon as a refined poet, a

reader of medieval history, and a capable translator of Hebrew. Considering the near collapse

of poetic forms, styles and languages that would otherwise distinguish medieval Hebrew

from modern Ladino, the reader might find it difficult to discern where the Romantic speaker

ends and the voice of Ibn Gabirol begins. In the original 1925 edition, Gaon signaled Ibn

Gabirol’s voice by enveloping the cited lines in quotation marks, aligning them in the center

of the page (as opposed to the two-column format of his hemistiches), and separating the

continuation of the poem with asterisks (see fig. 2).

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Figure 2. Example of Gaon formatting a Ladino translation of Ibn Gabirol, from the original

1925 edition of Poezias, n.p., p. 30.

Unlike the convenient multilingual texts that would accompany the Jewish prayer

book or in the notes section of a Wissenschaft monograph, the reader of the poem only

encounters Ibn Gabirol’s voice in Gaon’s language. The formatting not only privileges the

role of a Ladino hypertext by entirely omitting the Hebrew, but also redefines the medieval

poet’s famous derision of Saragossan Jews, whose abandonment of Hebrew betrayed their

acculturation:

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תרכמ התיה תידוהי תפשל אלו תירבע ןושלמ םנושל הרז תרדק רשא רדק ינב ןושלב יצחו תימדאב רבדמ םיצח

Their language is foreign from that of Hebrew, and they are not familiar with the Jewish tongue Half of them speak in Romance [Edomite] and half

in the dark language of the Qedarites [Arabic] (Ibn Gabirol, Shirei Ha-Ḥol Brody and Schirmann, no. 250, p. 169)

Ibn Gabirol’s criticism appeared at the beginning of a didactic poem ( קנע ) on the

sacred beauty of Hebrew grammar that the poet––in another, proto-Romantic gesture––was

inspired to write after a supernatural dream. The speech of the nomadic tribe of the Qedarites

refers to Arabic, the common language of the Iberian south, while Edomite (from the

rabbinic phrase for Rome and Christian people generally) refers to Romance. That the

common name for the diasporic language of the Sephardim, Ladino (i.e., Latin), originally

“applied to any medieval Moor or Jew who spoke Romance,” demonstrates the irony of

Gaon’s creative translation project (Díaz-Mas 75). In other words, Gaon’s long poem turns

Ibn Gabirol, the Andalusi antagonist of vernacular expression, into something of a Romantic

Romance poet.

The complex process that rendered the Hebrew script into Ladino print, however,

requires some context. Unlike the Andalusian poetry made famous by Wissenschaft scholars

or later geniza research, Ibn Gabirol’s religious poetry had been widely received in the

liturgy of the Sephardic diaspora from the Middle Ages onwards. Due to its gradual inclusion

into the Yom Kippur Service, his magnum opus, the long, devotional Kingdom’s Crown ( רתכ

תוכלמ ),6 resulted in almost as many translations as there are diasporic Jewish languages,

6 The title for this poem has been previously translated as “The Royal Crown,” “A Crown for the King,” etc., but I prefer Peter Cole’s rendering of keter malkhut as “Kingdom’s Crown.”

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including Yiddish, Dutch, Portuguese, French, Judeo-Arabic, and Persian. In fact, Gaon was

not the first to render Ibn Gabirol into Ladino, as Kingdom’s Crown first appeared in a 1552

Ladino prayer book, published by the ex-converso rabbi Yom Tob Atias (formerly Gerónimo

de Vargas) in Ferrera for a community of exiled Spanish Jews. Subsequent Ladino printings

follow the trajectory of the Sephardic diaspora, from Rabbi Ishac Nieto’s 1740 translation in

a Yom Kippur prayer book for the Spanish and Portuguese Community in London, to the

Sephardic community’s prayer book in Vienna published in 1888, to that of the Sephardic

community in Salonica published in 1920. But in order to efficiently convey the poem’s

meaning for service of the holy day, all of these translations effectively eliminated the

lyricism of Ibn Gabirol’s verses for the sake of unencumbered simplicity.

The first lines of Kingdom’s Crown from the Salonica prayer book exemplify the

traditional, didactic role of the Ladino language, which would follow “word for word the

syntax and even the morphology of Hebrew” (Varol 14). Published five years before the

publication of Poezias, the Ladino text appears as block, prose paragraphs, organized by

chapter, displaying a lack of aesthetic quality to its language, in sharp contrast to the

pulsating rhythms heard in the first extended rhyme of the original Hebrew:

הל ׳ה יטא .הטנא׳בירק יס ו׳גומ יט יד ירטנאליד י׳באס וגלא יק המלא ימ יא סא׳גיא סוט ןוס סאזואי׳באראמ ליא יא ודאנייר ליא ׳ה יטא .רואול הל יא וטניימיסני׳ב ליא יא .הרוזומריא הל יא האינאגאראב הל יא הזידנארג הסנאירק יד ודומ ודוט ׳ה יטא .רונוא הל יא הזיקיר הל סיא ׳ה יטא .ופאק יד ודומ ודוט הא וטניימאשאשניא הל יטא .ירפמייס הראפ סאטסיא וט יא .ןירדייפיד יס סוייליא יק תודע ןאד .ושאבא יד האיס ה׳בירא יד האיס יד סיטיסיטרו׳פניא יט יק .ראטסיא רופ סוייסריסניפ סורטסיאומ ןאסנאק יס וטירקיס וס ןיא יק האינאגאראב .וטריי׳בוקניא הטסיא סורטוזומ יד וטניימיס ליא יא וטירקיס ליא יד הזילאטרו׳פ הל יטא .ו׳גימ סורטוזומ

Maraviosas son tus hechas i mi alma que algo save, delantre de ti mucho se quevranta. A ti Adonai la grandeza i la barraganía y la hermosura y el vencimiento i la loor. A ti Adonai el reynado y el ensalsamiento a todo modo de capo. A ti Adonai es la riqueza i la honor. A ti Adonai todo modo de criansa sea de arriva sea de abaso. Dan ‘edut que eyos se depiedren y tu estás para siempre. A ti la barraganía que en su secreto se cansan muestros penserios por estar que te enfortecistes de mosotros

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micho. A ti la fortaleza de el secreto, i el cimiento de mosotros está encuvierto. (qtd. in Benardete 186)

.דאמ תעדוי ישפנו ךישעמ םיאלפנ .דוההו חצנהו תראפתהו הרובגהו הלדגה יי ךל .דובכהו רשעהו שארל לכל אשנתמהו הכלממה יי ךל .דמעת התאו ודבאי המה יכ ודיעי הטמו הלעמ יאורב ךל .דאמ ונממ תמצע יכ ,דמעל ונינויער ואלנ הדוסב רשא הרובגה ךל .דוסיהו דוסה זעה ןויבח ךל

Nifla’im ma‘asekha ve-nafshi yoda‘at me’od. Lekha Adonai ha-gedula ve-ha-gevura ve-ha-tiferet ve-ha-netzaḥ ve-ha-hod. Lekha Adonai ha-mamlakha ve-ha-mitnasi le-khol le-rosh ve-ha-‘osher ve-ha-kavod. Lekha beru’ei ma‘la u-mata ya‘idu ki hema yoveidu ve-ata ta‘amod Lekha ha-gevura asher be-soda nil’u ra‘yoneinu la‘amod, ki ‘atzamta mimenu me’od Lekha ḥevyon ha-‘oz ha-sod ve-ha-yesod. (Ibn Gabirol, Shirei Ha-Kodesh I:22, ch. 2, lines l-6, pp. 37-38) Your works are wondrous and I know it acutely: Yours, Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory, the splendor and majesty. Yours, Lord, is the kingdom exalted over all. Yours is all wealth and honor; all beings above and below you bear witness that they will perish while you endure. Yours is the strength within whose mystery our minds eventually fail; your force exceeds their intensity. Yours is the hidden chamber of power––of form’s secret and matter (Cole, Dream 99-100)

Commonly labeled the masterpiece of medieval Hebrew poetry, Kingdom’s Crown

has received its sufficient share of critical analysis, but I wish to focus on the significance of

its poetic form. In the Hebrew, the rhythm of Ibn Gabirol’s lines follow the Arabic

convention known as saj‘ ( عـجـس ), a style of repetitive rhymes without a maintained meter. As

the transliterated Hebrew verses above demonstrate, Kingdom’s Crown begins with a set of

masculine rhymes in eight lines that end in -od. The lines ascend in length like a rolling

wave, reflecting increasingly intensifying descriptions of God, before unpredictably crashing

to their shortest, encapsulating phrase (i.e., ha-sod ve-ha-yesod). Although the medieval saj‘

generally appears in Arabic and Hebrew prose narratives, the form here links scriptural

citations that consume the bulk of the text, “superladen with successive layers of meaning

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without losing their original meaning” (Schweid 83); or, as Raphael Loewe asserts, the

rhymes of Kingdom’s Crown generate a “tense expectancy...in the mind of the listener or

reader, as with each biblical quotation he strikes not a mere single note, but a chord” (117).

As indicated in the bolded transliteration, the quotations in the beginning of the poem

(e.g., Ps. 139:14; I Chron. 29:11; Ps. 102:27; Jer. 23:18; Hab. 3:4), also provide a musical

flow with internal rhymes and repetitive phrases (e.g., the emphatic cataloging of God’s

qualities in the prefix ve-ha). We may even conjecture that the “chordal” resonance of the

saj‘ rhymes that Loewe refers to aptly reflects the harmony between the subjects that divide

the poem’s three sections: the first section on the transcendent God, the second on the

cosmology of the universe, and the third on the soul and confession of the human penitent.

These verses emphasize the poem’s structure as a devotional song meant to be uttered

and heard, whereas the Ladino translation in the Salonica prayer book clearly signifies a

reading text. None of the ending words in the prayer book’s Ladino translation rhyme, and

with the reformatting of the verses into prose sentences, they do not appear as poetry either.

A frequency of typos in the Rashi script (e.g., micho, pensersios) and the usage of Hebrew

loan words where existing Ladino alternatives would suffice (e.g., ‘edut vs. testiguo), further

devalues the quality of the vernacular language. Unlike Cole’s commendable English

translation, the Ladino strictly abides by the syntax of the Hebrew, offering the closest word-

for-word translation available unless doing so might generate confusion. To clarify the

poem’s referent, for example, the translator occasionally breaks the long wave in the original

Hebrew into shortened sentences (e.g., A ti Adonai es la riqueza y la honor). All of these

aspects in the translation highlight the functional role of Ladino.

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Around the turn of the twentieth-century, however, Sephardic newspapers like El

Djudio in Istanbul and La America in New York began printing Andalusian Hebrew poetry in

Ladino for special issues, such as those close to the High Holiday season. These printings

brought poetic translations outside the synagogue, but Gaon appears to have been the first,

and possibly only, Sephardi to lyricize devotional Hebrew poetry into a particular meter and

rhyme in Ladino. As the first quotation in the poem, Gaon’s translation consists of thirty-four

lines selected from the first nine chapters of Kingdom’s Crown, on the mystery and authority

of God. Gaon abandons the liturgical method of a literal Ladino translation, as seen in the

first lines of the quotation:

ודאיג סיא ודוט יט רופ ,הזימרי׳פ הל סיא וייד יט הא .ודאוגיטיס סוס וט ולוס ,ודנומ לא ייא וסקי׳פ הדאנ וייריטסימ וט ודנייריקשיפ הטורבא יס וזיס ורטסיאונ .וייריסניפ ליד ודאשילא ונייטנוק יד סאטסיר וט המ הרוגי׳פ ינ ופריאוק ןיס המ ,ודוט סיטנייס יא סיאי׳ב וט .הרודאירק וט רידניטניא הסנאקלא יט סאניפא יא ,ודנאוק ,ידנוא ,יקרופ ,ומוק :הטסידופ ונ הקנונ יט ןיא .ודנאמוק וט ןוק יסראיג יניי׳ב ודוט יא ,סוס וט המ

A ti Dio es la firmeza, por ti todo es giado Nada fikso ay al mundo, solo Tu sos setiguado. Nuestro sezo se abrota peshkeriendo tu misterio Ma Tu restas de kontino aleshado del penserio. Tu vees i sientes todo, ma sin kuerpo ni figura I apenas te alkansa entender tu kreadura. En ti nunka no podesta: komo, porke, onde, kuando, Ma Tu sos, i todo viene giarse kon tu komando. To You, God, is the strength, who guides everything Nothing is fixed in the world, You alone remain. Our minds seek to bear Your mystery Yet You continue to be far removed from thought. You see and feel all, yet [You are] without body or figure And we barely fathom to understand Your creation. Nothing rules You, [no] how, why, where, when Yet You are, and everything is guided by Your command (Gaon 99)

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Gaon maintains the same meter and rhyming couplets (e.g., giado/setiguado;

misterio/penserio) that structures the rest of the poem. Although the translation does not

produce rhyming hemistichs, Gaon divides the clauses of most of the translated lines into

equal halves (e.g., A ti Dio es la firmeza, // por ti todo es giado). In effect, these lines revive

the musical quality of the Hebrew, implicitly shifting the function of the Ladino language to

sound more like a lyrical prayer.

In a fascinating complication, the palimpsest of the poem extends beyond a poetic

dialogue between Gaon and Ibn Gabirol, for a new layer of text emerged with the republished

edition of Poezias, edited and translated by the Jerusalem-born, multilingual Sephardi scholar

and director of the Ma‘ale Adumim Institute for the Documentation of Judeo-Spanish

Language and Culture, Avner Perez. Like Gaon, Perez’s writing career has revolved around

the scholarship and preservation of Ladino culture, translating and/or editing classic Western

literature into Ladino (e.g., The Odyssey, The Iliad, Alice in Wonderland, The Little Prince),

translating important works of Ladino literature into Hebrew (e.g., romansas, biblical plays,

messianic songs from the followers of Sabbatai Zvi), compiling a comprehensive Ladino

dictionary and language textbook, and publishing his own Ladino poetry. Wedding linguistic

acuity with poetic craft, Perez’s edition of Poezias continues his efforts to introduce

contemporary Israeli readers to the aesthetic qualities of a once-common vernacular language

of diasporic Sephardim, now severely at risk of extinction.

As a result, Perez transcribes the Ladino (replacing the less accessible Rashi script of

the original printing for Hebrew square letters) on one page, with a mimetic translation that

meticulously renders the rhyme schemes, terse syllables, and even meters of Gaon’s original

poetry into modern Hebrew on the corresponding page. Perez, in other words, accomplishes a

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kind of inverse-pedagogical translation from the classic Ladino model, one built on aesthetic,

rather than utilitarian, goals. A brief comparison of the “Shelomo Ibn Gabirol”’s opening

lines in the Ladino original and the new Hebrew exemplifies Perez’s method of translation:

סאזוייריטסימ סאסריאו׳פ סאל רופ ודידנירפ וייל האיס סיטנא .סאזור סאל ןיסירק ימ רופ יק ודיסני׳בנוק ירפמייס הריא ודאנירטסיא יאו׳פ לאמ הראפ סויינא סייד יד ויינינ סוניא .ודאנוקניא ןי׳בא ימ יק סויינאגניא סול וייל רידניטניא סאדא׳זיראפא ימ הראפ סאניפ סאליד וייל רי׳באס ןיס .סאדאליי יא סיטניילודרי׳ב סאני׳ב סימ ריס ןא׳באסיפמיא

Antes sea yo prendido por las fuersas misteriozas era siempre konvensido ke por mi kresen las rozas. Inos ninyo de diez anyos para mal fui estrenado entender yo los enganyos ke me avan enkonado. Sin saver yo delas penas, para mi aparejadas empesavan ser mis venas verdolientes i yeladas. Before I am caught by mysterious forces I was always convinced that for me the roses grow. Just a boy of ten years when I was exposed to evil I understood the deceptions that had defiled me. Without knowing the pains that await me My veins start to turn green and cold. (Gaon 97)

,תחצונ האיגש דיב ,יתבאשנ םימסק לא םרט .תחרופ ירובעב קר ,יתבשח ,הנשושה וז .יתעדותה רבכ הערל ,רענ ידוע ,רשע ןב קר .יתעדי ,קבדת הללקכ ,רעצ ברב ,וז הימרו ,יל הפצמה באכה המ תעדל ילב ,ללכ רעש ילב .יל הפרמ ןיאו ידירו תא תעגנמ תקלד רבכ

Terem el ksamim nishavti, be-yad sagi’a notzaḥat, zo ha-shoshana, ḥashavti, raq ba-‘avuri poraḥat. Raq ben ‘eser, ‘odi na‘ar, la-ra‘a kvar hitvada‘ti. U-rmiya zo, be-rov tza‘ar, kiqlala tidbaq, yada‘ti. Bli sha‘er klal, bli lada‘at ma hake’ev hamtzape li, kvar daleket menaga‘at et vridai ve-ein marpe li. Before I am sucked into magic, in the hand of an eternal mistake, This rose, I thought, is blooming only for me. Only ten years old, still a boy, already I came to know evil. And this deception, regretfully, as a curse will stick, I knew. Utterly without assuming, without knowing what pain awaits me,

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Already inflammation afflicts my veins and there is no release for me. (Perez 96)

Perez maintains the same eight syllables per hemistich as in the original Ladino,

according to modern Hebrew pronunciation (e.g., ksamim as two syllables), rather than

quantitative medieval practice. Even though he formats each line without hemistiches, the

Hebrew echoes the Ibn Gabirol quotations in their halved clauses. As the bolded text in the

transliteration above demonstrates, Perez’s Hebrew rhyme scheme follows Gaon’s Ladino, in

this case an abab pattern of initial and secondary hemistiches rhyming per couplet. Most

impressively, Perez adopts Gaon’s Ladino prosody while maintaining in translation the

meaning of the Ladino text. Indeed, the above citation highlights Perez’s mirroring skill

throughout Poezias; the second poem that appears in Poezias, “Songs of Youth [ הל יד סיטנאק

סי׳ביסנאמ ],” for example, begins with stanzas of four-syllable verses, which Perez replicates in

Hebrew.

In all but “Shelomo Ibn Gabirol,” Perez need only reflect the intricacies of Gaon’s

original Ladino. But how does a Hebrew translator reproduce the long quotations of Ibn

Gabirol’s poetry, originally written in medieval Hebrew, loosely reconceptualized by Gaon

in Ladino rhyming couplets, and now meant to be redirected back into Hebrew for a modern

Israeli readership? To quote directly from the original Ibn Gabirol would conceal Gaon’s

creative efforts as poetic translator, but to solely translate from Gaon’s Ladino would ignore

the Hebrew source that it echoes.

To navigate through these layers of Hebrew-Ladino-Hebrew texts, Perez appeals to

both source texts. He closely translates into Hebrew Gaon’s free Ladino translation, but also

reproduces the original Hebrew poems of Ibn Gabirol immediately following his translation,

a system he hopes “maintains the distance [ ימוגרתב הז קחרמ רמשל ידיב הלע יכ הוקמ ינא ]” between

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the two texts (Perez 34). The editorial method thus leaves the reader of the republished

edition with a palimpsest of four types of texts interwoven onto the pages that make up the

poem “Shelomo Ibn Gabirol”: Gaon’s meditations on reading and thinking about Ibn

Gabirol, Gaon’s lyrical translations of poems in Ladino, Ibn Gabirol’s original Hebrew

poems, and Perez’s lyrical translations of Gaon’s Ladino translations back into Hebrew! The

translator/editor/Sephardi scholar Perez so thoroughly intervenes in reproducing the poem

that his own poetic voice entangles with the dialogue between Gaon and Ibn Gabirol,

complicating hierarchies of authorship, translation, and editorship between the three men.

Perez’s involvement in Gaon’s Poezias exposes another facet of the Sephardic

palimpsest, that of contamination. Latinist James Zetzel, in his overview of the editorial

challenges to reconstructing classical texts out of medieval manuscripts, introduces the issue

common to the palimpsest, whereby “the descendant of the contaminated manuscript

will...include readings from more than one tradition, and its precise affiliations cannot then

be determined...[showing] how unlikely it is that any one witness will be the consistent

bearer of a single text” (115n5). The Judeo-Spanish romancero, for example, has generated

the most prevalent type of contamination among Sephardic palimpsests. A collection of sung

narrative ballad poems (or romansas) first produced in medieval Spain, the romancero

exemplifies the challenge of locating a single, ur-text, since a song found throughout the

Sephardic diaspora will often contain many alternative versions with textual intrusions from

other songs, to the extent that the juxtaposition between its original and external texts will

“achieve new and successful poetic nuances that can alter, in a significant way, the song’s

poetic direction and its poetic message” (Armistead 83). Likewise, although Gaon’s long ode

repeatedly underscores the poet’s close relationship with Ibn Gabirol, especially as its

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quotations of the medieval poetry reinforce the speaker’s authoritative position as an

ancestral and literary descendant, a closer examination of Gaon and Perez’s translations

reveals a palimpsestic contamination that both destabilizes and broadens such claims.

As mentioned, Gaon’s translation of Ibn Gabirol contrasts with liturgical translations

meant to meticulously convey the literal meanings of each Hebrew word. Instead, Gaon

focuses on the meter and rhyme of the Ladino, which usually require doubling the amount of

lines from the original Hebrew, replacing or adding words to maintain the rhythm of a line,

and eliminating the medieval system of Arabized quantitative meters in favor of familiar,

accentual-syllabic verses. A specific section in the poem illustrates this, in which the speaker

recalls the arrogance and piercing lines of a self-praise poem, before quoting that very poem:

וליאי׳פ ןורטאפ וס וייל יא ו׳ברייס ימ סיא ואימלאס ליא וליאוסנוק יילארט ימ יא סינוייסאפ סימ הייסנוניד ליא סאטיאס יק סאמ ודוגא ואימלאס ליא יד ייר וס וייל סאטיאופ סול סודוט הראפ ולפמיזגיא וייל הריל וס וייל יטנימאלוס יסרוט יס יק ופריאוק ימ סיא הרייט הל רופ יטניי׳בומזיא סארי׳פס רופ סיא וניטנוקיד המלא ימ המ ודארודאמ וזיס ימ המ סויינא ןיא וייל וס וייניקיפ .ודאדיאא ייוא וייל הריאו׳פ הטני׳גוא יד יס ומוק סיא

El salmeo es mi siervo i yo so patron fielo El denunsia mis pasiones i me traye konsuelo Yo so rey de el salmeo agudo mas ke saetas Yo so lira yo exemplo para todos los poetas. Por la tierra es mi kuerpo ke se torse solamente Ma mi alma dekontino es por sferas ezmoviente Pekenyo so yo en anyos ma mi sezo madurado Es komo si de ochenta fuera yo oy aedado. My psalm is my servant and I am its faithful master He shows my passions and brings me comfort I am king of the psalm, sharper than arrows I am a lyre, I exemplify for all the poets. On earth it is solely my body that meanders, But my soul is constantly along the stirring spheres Small am I in years, but my intellect mature

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As if I were eighty years old (Gaon 111)

Gaon’s quotation roughly corresponds to a famous Hebrew poem, a short secular

piece by Ibn Gabirol known in the first quarter of the twentieth century when Gaon wrote his

poem:

םינגונו םירש לכל רונכ ינא ,דבעל יל רישהו ,רשה ינא םינגסה ישארב תועבגמו םיכלמל תרטעכ ירישו .םינומשה ןב בלכ יב יבלו - יתונש הרשע ששו יננהו

I am the prince – and the song my slave,

I am a lyre to all singers and players And my song is like a crown to kings

and turbans to head rulers And here I am, sixteen years old –

but my heart within me is like the heart of an eighty-year-old. (Ibn Gabirol, Shirei Ha-Ḥol Yarden I:109, p. 225)

The original Hebrew poem, despite its brevity and apparent simplicity, poses various

challenges for the reader/translator. When un-vocalized in manuscript form, the second word

( רשה ) means either “the prince,” “the singer” or “the song,” and as Cole notes in his

translation of the poem, “Schirmann uses all three at different points in his career” (Cole,

Dream 394).7 Similarly, manuscripts and later printed editions differ in the spelling of a word

in the last line ( יב/ןב ), to either render “my heart understands” or “my heart within me.” The

last line’s reference to the speaker’s age has led the majority of literary historians to conclude

that the poem represents Ibn Gabirol’s earliest available poetry, although the text borrows

from the Talmudic story of the ageing appearance of Rabbi El‘azar ben ‘Azaria, appointed to

head the Yavne Yeshiva at the age of sixteen (cf. Y. Ber. 7:4).

7 Indeed, the Brody and Schirmann edition of Ibn Gabirol’s poetry, the most authoritative edition of its kind, uses “the song,” ha-shir (cf. no. 129, p. 77). I have selected the Dov Yarden edition above to draw a closer parallel with Gaon’s Ladino.

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In translation, Gaon clarifies and expands upon every line; רשה here refers to a person

of authority (i.e., patron fielo), and the last line of the heart refers to the speaker’s mature

intellect (i.e., sezo madurado). Gaon doubles the amount of lines in the original Hebrew, a

technique that affords extra room to amplify Ibn Gabirol’s metaphors, such as the reference

to arrow-sharp poems. While these slight additions and change in form obviously contrast

with the Hebrew, the quotation departs most significantly in its incorporation of two lines

that do not correspond at all to the original, and as such do not appear in the standard critical

editions of Ibn Gabirol’s poetry from the twentieth century (i.e., Brody and Schirmann,

Yarden, Levin). Indeed, for a conventional self-praise poem ( תוראפתה ריש in Hebrew; رخف in

Arabic), focused on images of authority (i.e., prince, slave, kings, rulers), a line echoing a

Neoplatonic division of body and soul in the heavens and earth, does appear out of place.

To unpack this strange couplet, one must recall that it had been a few years following

Gaon’s Poezias when David Tzemaḥ first discovered in Baghdad Ibn Gabirol’s dīwān from a

seventeenth-century manuscript of Andalusian poetry, now known as Schocken 37. Until

then, the majority of Ibn Gabirol’s poems, and certainly those not reproduced in Jewish

prayer books, were either unknown or insufficiently and sloppily organized by nineteenth-

century scholars, who published collections of Ibn Gabirol’s poetry by assembling

fragmented manuscripts. Unsurprisingly, these collections produced many errors. In the

present case, Gaon appears to have relied on Shaul Pinḥas Rabinowitz’s 1894 Hebrew

translation of Graetz’s Geschichte der Juden. With the encouragement of Graetz, Rabinowitz

supplemented his translation with additional information and texts on top of the original

German, as evident in the biographical section on Ibn Gabirol. There, to illustrate the poet’s

“personal characteristics [ ושפנ תנוכת ],” Rabinowitz cites a poem he read in Leopold Dukes’s

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1858 Songs of Shelomo ( המלש יריש ), the first collection of Ibn Gabirol’s secular verses ever

printed, culled from manuscripts in Oxford, Parma, and Vienna:

,דבעל יל רישהו רשה ינא םינגונו םירש לכל רונכ ינא – המדאה – לע ךלהי יוגו םיננעה לע הלעת יחורו .םינמשה -- ןב בלכ ןב יבלו

I am the singer and the song is my slave, I am the lyre to all singers and players My body walks on – the earth – And my spirit rises onto the clouds And my heart understands like the heart -- of an eighty-year-old. (Rabinowitz 38)

The poem here, more so than authoritative versions of the medieval text, closely

aligns with Gaon’s Ladino rendering. Like Gaon’s quotation, the text elides the metaphor of

royal headgear, as well as the speaker’s declaration of being sixteen. The extraneous Hebrew

text about the body and soul, also quoted here, actually belongs to an unrelated panegyric by

Ibn Gabirol, “Don Glory [ דוה הטע ],” and reading the immediately preceding line that appears

there explains Dukes’s editorial confusion:

םינמשה-ןב ומכ ןב ובבל / דלהי םרט רשא ןבה ינא םיננעה-לע ךלהת ישפנו / המדאה-לע ךלהי יוגו

I am the boy who, before he was born had a heart that understood like an eighty-year-old.

My body walks on the earth while my soul strolls through the clouds. (Ibn Gabirol, Shirei Ha-Ḥol Brody

and Schirmann, no. 132, p. 79)

As discussed in the previous chapter, nineteenth-century Jewish scholarship produced

problematic source material for diasporic Sephardim interested in reclaiming Andalusian

Hebrew poetry. In this case, an editor conflated a line from one poem (i.e., “but my heart

understands like the heart of an eighty-year-old”) with a very similar line belonging to

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another (i.e., “had a heart that understood like an eighty-year-old”), leading to the

appropriation of the subsequent line from the latter poem.

This confusion results in an interesting contamination in the palimpsest of Gaon’s

poem, as presented in the republished Poezias. Not only does Gaon rewrite the line in the

Ladino based on faulty nineteenth-century research, but Perez, by mimetically translating

Gaon’s Ladino, supplies the “original” Hebrew text with the extraneous line included; what

should be a simple three-line poem as correctly formatted by twentieth-century anthologists,

instead repeats a nineteenth-century error, appearing as a four-line amalgamation of two

discrete poems. Perez’s editorial intervention to expose the Hebrew poems beneath Gaon’s

Ladino ostensibly offers an authoritative version of Ibn Gabirol, in contrast to Gaon’s first

edition of Poezias, which blurred distinctions of primacy; on the Hebrew page of the

republished edition, Perez asserts this authority by labeling “Rashbag [Rabbi Shelomo Ibn

Gabirol], Free Translation: M. D. Gaon [ ןואג .ד .מ :ישפח םוגרת ,ג״בשר ]” under the translated

Ladino quotations, as opposed to “Rashbag” when directly quoting the medieval Hebrew;

Perez, in other words, positions himself as the poetic arbiter of what is authentic and what

has been contaminated (110). However, by so rigidly following Gaon’s reading, and without

noting discrepancies from Ibn Gabirol’s dīwān, the Hebrew source texts in the republished

Poezias do not purely provide the roots to the Ladino, but are themselves newly layered

products of palimpsestic contamination.

The most visible mark of contamination in the Ibn Gabirol-Gaon-Perez poem,

however, appears in its final section. In the introduction to Poezias, Perez concedes that he

could not locate the original, medieval texts of two out of the seven poems quoted by Gaon.

As a result, rather than supplying an ostensibly authoritative Hebrew, Perez only produces a

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translation from Gaon’s Ladino. The two quotations—the first a fourteen-line Zionide elegiac

(“How was this disaster [ ירטסאזיד הטסיא יאו׳פ ומוק ]”), the second a fourteen-line devotional

(“Us always impatient [ הייסניסאפיד ןוק סונ ירפמייס ]”) mark the last words from the “voice” of

Ibn Gabirol, leaving the modern Hebrew reader with a rather indeterminate impression of the

temporal and linguistic layers that separate the multiple poets and translators involved in

producing the poem (Gaon 125; 129).

Like Perez, I have also yet to uncover Gaon’s original sources from Ibn Gabirol’s

dīwān. Perhaps, considering the messy literary transmission evident in the other quotations,

Gaon again relied on nineteenth-century scholarship, which often misattributed the authors of

discovered poems; or, less likely, Gaon had special access to texts unavailable to the

contemporary reader; or, the most artful alternative, the last quoted poems may wholly derive

from Gaon himself, planted in the mouth of a reconjured medieval poet. Whatever the case,

Perez’s closing translations of Gaon’s quotations reposition Ladino as the final authoritative

and original language of an Andalusi proto-Romantic progenitor, with Hebrew now

functioning as handmaid to comprehension. The Hebrew poems now solely model after the

Ladino, and not vice-versa, with rhyming couplets and a stress-accented meter wholly

unfamiliar to the medieval Hebrew poetry Gaon rewrites.

The repositioning of Ladino over Hebrew appears in another poem in Gaon’s

Poezias, again constructed out of an Andalusian hypotext. “The Judgement of the Faith [ לא

יי׳פ הל יד וייסיאו׳ג ]” adapts one of the most significant works of medieval Jewish philosophy,

Yehuda Halevi’s Book of Refutation and Proof on Behalf of the Despised Religion [ באתכ

לילדלא ןידלא יפ לילדלאו דרלא ], more commonly known by Yehuda ben Shaul Ibn Tibbon’s title

in the first Hebrew translation in 1167, The Book of the Kuzari [ ירזוכה רפס ]. Composed in

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Judeo-Arabic in stages before Halevi voyaged to the Holy Land, and drawn from the

legendary, eighth-century Jewish conversion of the Turkic people known as the Khazars, the

Kuzari largely consists of a dialogue between a Khazar king ( ירזכלא ) and a Jewish rabbinic

scholar ( רבחלא ). Over the course of five sections, the two men enagage in a platonic-style

dialogue over various positions in rabbinic Judaism, such as the chronology of the world, the

efficacy of prayer, the position of Aristotelian physics, the importance of oral traditions, and

the commandment of living in the Holy Land.

Halevi’s dialogue has been read and rewritten throughout Jewish literary history. In

Sephardic communities, multiple translations have been produced in Ladino and Spanish,

serving as responses to contemporary religious challenges. When Sephardi scholar Moshe

Lazar transcribed and published the Kuzari from a mid-fifteenth century manuscript (Madrid,

B.N., Ms. 17812), arguably one of the oldest surviving texts in Ladino and the first

vernacular translation of the Kuzari, he asserted that it served “as a polemical tool and as a

spiritual balm to the plight and strife” of Jews and crypto-Jews in pre-Inquisition Spain

(Lazar xviii). Two centuries after the Ladino manuscript, the Sephardi scholar Jacob

Abendada produced a Spanish translation of the Kuzari in Amsterdam in 1663 as a direct

response to the ceaseless proselytizing of Christian Hebraist Antonius Hulsius. In 1714,

David Nieto, rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in London, published his

bilingual (Hebrew and Spanish) work of apologetics, The Rod of Judgement – The Second

Kuzari [ ינשה ירזוכה – ןד הטמ ], recreating the king-and-rabbi dialogue to apply to contemporary

ex-conversos increasingly skeptical of the Oral Law. The goals of printing these texts

throughout the Sephardic diaspora echo the inspiration of the original Kuzari, since

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correspondence unearthed by the Cairo Geniza revealed that Halevi began writing his

rabbinic apologetics as a response to questions from a skeptical Karaite from Christian Spain.

These editions presuppose the Kuzari’s religious authority among Sephardim, in

which vernacular translations, like Ladino versions of Kingdom’s Crown, keep coreligionists

in the Jewish fold by conveying accessible theological texts. None of these printings rendered

the dialogues into poetry. Unlike Ibn Gabirol’s liturgical contributions, Halevi’s choice of

Judeo-Arabic, the conventional language of philosophy and science for Andalusi Jews—

rather than Hebrew, the primary language of Jewish medieval poetry—certainly does not

suggest, prima facie, the text’s lyrical potential. Nevertheless, Gaon’s poem, while

substantially shorter and divergent in content, offers a new interpretation of Halevi’s

philosophic work that prioritizes the value of its translation over the original.

The original Kuzari begins after the king dreams of an angel criticizing his actions,

which prompts him to hear from a philosopher, a Christian, and a Muslim. He quickly

dismisses them all before hearing the persuasive words of the rabbinical scholar, with whom

he converses at length until the latter, foreshadowing Halevi’s own biography, departs for the

Holy Land. Gaon’s Kuzari poem, however, restructures the dialogues into four sections. In

this version, Bulan the king debates Osman the Muslim Ottoman, Constantin the Christian, a

philosopher, and Yitzḥak Sangari the Jewish sage. As in the original Kuzari, the characters

personify generalized ideologies without revealing much personality; the names in the poem

allude to important historical figures, such as Yitzḥak Hasangari, the name medieval Jewish

sources attributed as the rabbi responsible for the conversion of the king.

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Gaon’s reworked dialogues subvert much of the structure, style, and purpose of

Halevi’s original work. The Muslim, Christian, and philosopher do make passing references

to the mystery of the Jewish people, and in the final dialogue, the rabbi does convince Bulan

of the truth of Jewish theology, but “The Judgement of the Faith” does more than advocate

religious doctrine. Although Bulan finds fallacies in each argument—that Islam derives its

teachings from previous religions, that Christianity considers an omnipotent God a weak

human, that rational discourse anticipates a sacred universal creator—his early debaters are

eloquent defenders of their respective faiths and given, unlike Halevi’s Kuzari, equal space to

make their cases. More significantly, Gaon treats each position as an exercise in aesthetic

form, creating, not unlike Ibn Gabirol’s liturgical poetry, a literary style unprecedented in

Ladino poetry, what might be considered verse philosophy.

When Bulan challenges the philosopher to explain the Prime Mover of the universe,

the latter affirms the coexistence of rational thinking and religious conviction with a speech

that, above all, points to the language of its poetry:

הגייניר יא וסקאט וריביל וייריסניפ ליא הגייס יטני׳ג ה׳גומ וסיפורטניא ליא המ וטסירא יא ןוטאלפ הרודאירק ה׳ביאונ .וטסיא ןוראטסיטא – הדיסונוק יאו׳פ ונ וריציצ ,הקיניס סונאמור סול ןייבמאט ורי׳ב סיא וטסיא יק סור׳ביל סוס ןיא ןיזיד הדא׳בוניר ייל סוס ןוריאולקנוק ונ המ .הדארגאס הסריאו׳פ הל ןוראטקיפסיר ודנייס

El penserio libero takso i renyega ma el entropeso mucha djente siega nueva kreadura Platon i Aristo no fue konosida – atestaron esto. tambien los romanos Seneka, Tsitsero dizen en sus livros ke esto es vero ma no konklueron sus ley renovada siendo respektaron la fuersa sagrada.

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Free thought taxes and renounces [one’s faith] But many blind people are ensnared Plato and Aristotle: creation ex nihilo [lit. new creation] Unknown before – they attested to this. The Romans as well, Seneca and Cicero They say in their books that this is true But they didn’t dissolve their renewed law Because they honored the sacred force. (Gaon 159)

Less interesting or innovative are the philosopher’s positions than the way in which

he expresses them, turning names of Greek and Roman philosophers into rhymes. The

original Aristotelian philosopher in Halevi’s Kuzari bears little resemblance to Gaon’s

character, but slight traces appear. Halevi’s philosopher, for example, also haughtily rolls off

celebrated names to support his positions. In the Judeo-Arabic original, quoted below

alongside the medieval Ladino translation for reference, the circumlocutory philosopher

contends that a perfect person shares a divine Active Intellect with others who have attained

true wisdom:

סילאטוטסראו ןוטאלפאו טארקסו סויבאלקסאו סמרה הרמז יפ ראצ דא האיחלא יפ הספנ תבאטו יפ ןאכ ןמ לכו םהו וה לב

His soul sweetens his life, since it enters the company of Hermes, Asclepius, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle; furthermore, he and they and everyone in like degree, and the Active Intellect, are all one thing (Halevi, Kitāb 5). delos quales ya se fallaron munchos enla conpaña delos filosofos, asi commo Hermes y Esc[u]laujo, y Socrates y Platon, y Aristotiles, y otros que llegaron a este grado; y estos son por qujen se dize estar en el querer de nuestro Señor a mo[do] largo. (Lazar 4)

The medieval Ladino translation, despite minor modifications, generally corresponds

to the original Judeo-Arabic; considering the medieval scribe’s marginal glosses to

Boethius’s Neoplatonist De Consolatione Philosophiae that appear throughout the Castilian

manuscript, the philosophic-minded translator does not condense the philosopher’s speech in

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the way he does other sections of Halevi’s work. Gaon’s Ladino, on the other hand,

transforms winding sentences into neat, rhythmic phrases, implicitly subverting the source

text. Like Ibn Gabirol, whose derision of Romance-speaking Saragossans contrasts with

Gaon’s translation of the medieval poet’s voice, the main interlocutors of Halevi’s original

text protest against the very form Gaon implants into their mouths. In the second section of

the original Kuzari, the rabbinic scholar makes the case for the superiority of the divinely-

created Hebrew language, since the Hebrew Bible—with its various types of speech and

cantillation notes—facilitates an understanding of ideas much more clearly than the artificial

expressions of sweet-sounding, rhymed poetry that adulterate other languages. When the

king notes that Jews also create poetry, imitating foreign meters to fit into Hebrew, the

scholar concedes:

עצו דספנ אנא אלא הרוכדמלא הליצפלא הדהל אנחארטא יפכ אמא אנפאלכו אנפלכת ןמ אדהו .תאתשלל אהדרנפ הפלאלל תעצו יתלא אנתגל

This is because of our negligence and recalcitrance. Is it not enough that we hurl off the superiority mentioned, but that we also corrupt the foundation of our language, which was created to unify. Yet we have caused division. (Halevi, Kitāb 82)

The language of contemporary Jews, scattered and confused, reflects their

assimilation in exile. The irony of the rabbinic scholar’s words of criticism, composed by the

most celebrated poet in medieval Hebrew, has not been lost on critics. As Ross Brann asserts,

Halevi, “like other Andalusian Hebrew poets, wrestled with the conflict of cultural

ambiguity, but could not accommodate the impossible” (Compunctious 117-118). Despite

advocating in his critical writing a return to pure, biblical forms of Hebrew, Halevi’s

poems—even those final ones discovered from the Cairo Geniza, composed during his pious

voyage to the Holy Land—exemplify a consistent binding to Arabic meters and styles.

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Nevertheless, the text of the Kuzari maintains a clear position against such rhymes, only to

be redefined in Gaon’s version.

Halevi also signals the purity of Hebrew expression in the Kuzari by maintaining

biblical quotations in their original language, a common practice in medieval Judeo-Arabic

literature. By contrast, Gaon maintains a consistent use of rhymed Ladino, even when

quoting biblical passages. In the final couplet of the poem, Bulan accepts the rabbi’s

convincing positions and proclaims that the world will one day realize the truth of the

biblical prophets:

ונוייא ןיא ןאגיד וקאס יד סאדי׳בלוב .״ונוא ירבמונ וס יא ונוא סיא ינודא״

bolvidas de sako digan en ayuno: “Adonai es uno i su nombre uno”. Wearing sackcloth, they will say in unison: The Lord is one and His name is one. (Gaon 171)

Ladino readers would have been familiar with the Hebrew scriptural allusion, from

Zechariah 14:9, since they close the daily morning, afternoon, and evening Jewish prayers.

Other than the preservation of the Hebrew word Adonai, the designated name for God

without a Ladino equivalent, the quotation has been translated. In its traditional usage within

the Jewish prayer book, the passage belongs to the Aleinu ( ונילע ) section, which details a

longing for the day when the nations of the earth, preceding a messianic era, will unify by

declaring the greatness of God. In Gaon’s rendering, the nations will still realize that

universal truth, but, astonishingly, they will utter this realization not in the sacred language of

a Hebrew prophet from the biblical Kingdom of Judah, but in the vernacular language of

diasporic Sephardim.

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Returning to the hypotext, the conflict of cultural ambiguity not only appears in

Halevi’s juxtaposition of poetry and philosophy, but in the way the text’s Judeo-Arabic

incorporates non-Jewish principles. Ever since Shlomo Pines’s groundbreaking research on

the subject, modern scholarship has uncovered the Islamic influences underlying the Kuzari.

In his comprehensive examination of Shī‘ī theology in the work, for example, Ehud Krinis

has noted that the rabbinic scholar’s defense for embarking on such a dangerous journey

employs various terms (such as sabq [ قبس ], the religious precedence for a formative event,

and jihād [ داھج ]) that betray Halevi’s familiarity and appropriation of an “intra-Islamic

legitimacy discourse” popular in al-Andalus at that time (256). Alternatively, Diana Lobel’s

study of Sufi terminology found throughout the Kuzari reveals “to what extent Ha-Levi has

internalized and identified with certain Sufi spiritual ideals” (Lobel 159). Both studies further

indicate Halevi’s ambivalent dependence on the majoritarian Islamic culture he seeks to

escape.

To provide an intertextual reading of Gaon’s poem likewise implicates the cultural

ambiguities in the modern rendering as much as it does the medieval hypotext. If Halevi’s

Judeo-Arabic advocates for a Jewish expression in spite of itself, displaying Islamic terms

and ideas throughout the text, Gaon’s poem, while seemingly an imitation of a Sephardi

literary progenitor, sounds more like an adaptation of an English or German Romantic lyrical

drama. Consider, for example, the similarity between Gaon’s poem and Percy Shelley’s 1821

Hellas, inspired by the contemporary Greek Revolution and modeled after Aeschylus’s

tragedy, The Persians. Like the Kuzari, Hellas centers around a distraught king—the

Ottoman Sultan Mahmud—and three religious stereotypes that comment upon the future of

civilization: the Muslim assistant Hassan, the Wandering Jew seer Ahasuerus, and the Chorus

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of Greek captive women, whose rhyming songs mythologize the advancement of European

Christendom. Shelley’s drama and “The Judgment of the Faith” do share similarities in

narratives—consulting with the Jew, for example, leads Mahmud to a realization, of

Constantinople’s eventual destruction rather than a religious epiphany—but one does not

necessarily derive from the other. Rather, Gaon applies a poetic language for philosophic

discourse that more closely aligns with the nineteenth-century singing chorus than anything

written by Jewish writers in al-Andalus. The Greek women close Hellas, for example, with a

cry for the future of civilization in its propensity for war: “The world is weary of the past, /

Oh, might it die or rest at last!” (Shelley 53). The famous words parallel the end of the

Jewish prayer in Zechariah’s declaration for a peaceful humanity, but here, as with Gaon’s

king, the chorus tidily seals the work with the resolution of a rhyming couplet.

To read “The Judgement of the Faith” as a kind of Romantic lyrical drama requires an

evaluation of its aesthetic design, what Perez notes in his introduction as the poem’s

“command of perfect symmetry [ תטלחומ הירטמיס תטלוש ]” (35). In each of the four sections, a

character speaks in eight lines of rhyming couplets of twelve syllables per line, after which

the king responds in like form, back and forth, totaling twelve speeches of identical length

per dialogue; ninety-six syllables of a speech-stanza corresponding to ninety-six lines per

dialogue, meticulously reproduced four times in the sections of the Muslim, Christian,

philosopher, and Jew. In effect, the poem’s exacting, even form highlights the significance of

its language as much more than what the speakers actually have to say. Indeed, despite the

trajectory of the king’s conversion, the symmetrical format emphasizes a harmony amongst

speakers of all the represented faiths, who maintain their convictions in a shared, equal

setting alongside the king. The importance of this symmetry corresponds to Oliver Clarkson

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and Andrew Hodgson’s suggestion that rhyme for the Romantic poets “becomes something

like a mode of intuition, a means through which a poem listens to the world and even

overhears itself doing so” (118). Instead of channeling the music of the natural world à la

Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” or John Clare’s various bird poems, the rhymes of “The

Judgement of the Faith” overhear the majestic harmony of the spiritual world; not unlike the

“chordal” harmony of the saj‘ in Ibn Gabirol’s Kingdom’s Crown, Gaon’s interlocuters

define the essence of the world and its creator in a musical flow that reflects their subjects.

Finally, reading Romantic-era literature in a modern Ladino poet rewriting an

Andalusian philosophical dialogue once again highlights the varied layers of temporality and

contamination that appear in the Sephardic palimpsest. In his sweeping reception history, The

Kuzari and the Shaping of Jewish Identity, 1167-1900, Adam Shear has noted that since the

Kuzari was translated into Hebrew within a generation of the original, and since “[m]ost

European readers of the work in this period (Jewish and Christian) did not read Arabic,” Ibn

Tibbon’s medieval Hebrew translation was, until the twentieth century, “nearly synonymous

with the work itself” (12). Gaon most likely read the Kuzari in Hebrew as well, yet the

process of rewriting Halevi’s discourse into poetry is also unusual for its layers of translation;

starting and ending in languages especially common in the Sephardic diaspora (Arabic and

Ladino), maintained in Hebrew through most of its reception—a language Halevi’s original

text prioritizes and Gaon’s text supersedes—and influenced by the poet’s reading of German

and English; in other words, a multilingual palimpsest whose texts the reader unveils by first

encountering the hypertext that rests on the page.

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2.3 Angelina Muñiz-Huberman and Mystical Textuality

The writers so far discussed in this and the previous chapter reflect the reach of the

modern Sephardic diaspora: a traditional Spanish and Portuguese community in Victorian

London (Aguilar), an assimilated elite class in Gilded Age New York (Lazarus), an Arabic-

speaking Zionist in Jerusalem (Burla), and a Ladino emigre from Bosnia (Gaon). The

Mexican author and scholar Angelina Muñiz-Huberman broadens the definition of Sephardi

by incorporating modern Spanish, crypto-Jewish, and Latin American qualities to this literary

trajectory. Born in 1936 to Spanish parents fleeing the Spanish Civil War and eventually

settling in Mexico, Muñiz-Huberman learned as a child from her mother that, as she has later

recounted, “we had always been Jews, that we descended from Spanish Jews who had not

obeyed the Edict of Expulsion in 1492 and who had led a double life in order to survive”

(“From Toledo” 209). The discovery of her family’s centuries-preserved crypto-Jewish

heritage sparked in Muñiz-Huberman a lifelong academic and spiritual interest in Judaism,

particularly Jewish mystical teachings of the Kabbalah.

The effect of Muñiz-Huberman’s double diaspora from a national and spiritual

homeland, what Judith Payne has called the author’s internalized “connection between the

Sephardic exile of 1492 and the Spanish Republican exile of 1936-1939,” has led the author

to write a series of novels set in medieval Spain, often involving Jews and crypto-Jews (435).

A professor of comparative literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico,

Muñiz-Huberman has written scholarly works, including La lengua florida (The Florid

Language), an anthology of Andalusian poetry, Ladino proverbs, teachings from the Zohar,

and other texts, and Las raíces y las ramas: Fuentes y derivaciones de la Cábala

hispanohebrea (The Roots and Branches: Sources and Derivations of the Hispano-Hebraic

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Kabbalah), that provide critical introductions to Jewish literature from both al-Andalus and

Christian Spain for a modern Spanish readership.

Much of her creative writing, including her collected short stories and poetry,

incorporate themes and genres derived from medieval Iberian texts, but the last section of

this chapter will specifically focus on El mercader de Tudela (The Merchant of Tudela), a

1998 novel about the journey of a medieval merchant, as it amalgamates two disparate

sources of Jewish medieval literature: geography and mysticism. To unravel the layers of

Muñiz-Huberman’s novel first requires an examination of the geographical literature, with its

fairly simple usage of quotation, before moving on to the more complex role of mystical

textuality.

The novel’s eponymous merchant, Benjamín, refers to Binyamin of Tudela, the

historical Jewish traveler from the Iberian Kingdom of Navarre who recorded an itinerary of

Jewish communities in major and minor cities throughout Europe and the Middle East that he

visited around the 1160s to 1170s. The Hebrew text of his itinerary, commonly titled The

Book of the Travels of Benjamin of Tudela ( הלדוטמ ןימינב לש תועסמ רפס ), tersely notes the

Jewish populations and broader political activities of many cities, the routes to travel,

substantiates various historical events and provides some of the only information available on

smaller communities from the Middle Ages. Various fantastical or inaccurate descriptions

indicate places Benjamin probably did not directly visit, and the text includes interpolations

from sources that clearly succeeded the traveler’s original recording, which might originally

have been a fuller account and the available itinerary text a summary.

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The corruption of external writers in the medieval text complicates Binyamin’s route,

particularly the question of his return to Spain; the itinerary abruptly ends in a section on

France probably not composed by the traveler, even though the text begins by noting that

Binyamin “brought this book with him on his return to the country of Castile, in the year

4933 (C. E. 1173) [ גלקתת ׳ד תנשב הליטשק ץראל ואובב ומע הזה רפסה איבההו ]” (Adler 1; ב). Most

mysterious of all, the itinerary largely avoids any information about the traveler himself, and

scholars can only speculate the reason for the journey as a merchant’s commercial route, a

rabbi’s religious pilgrimage, or both.

As noted in a prefacing credits page, Muñiz-Huberman directly quotes from two

sources throughout the novel, both critical translations of the Hebrew text: Marcus Nathan

Adler’s English translation, The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, published in 1907, and José

Ramón Magdalena Nom de Déu’s Castilian translation, published in 1982. In the novel,

Benjamín writes down passages in his travel book with impressions of each new city,

replicating the original medieval text. These quotations, such as the descriptions of Jerusalem

and Baghdad, occasionally go on for pages of block paragraphs. But the novel’s narration

also incorporates details from the voyage. Magdalena Nom de Déu’s translation of the

Travels specifically echoes throughout the novel, as a quick comparison between the opening

sentence of the fourth chapter in the novel and the Castilian translation illustrates:

BENJAMÍN DE TUDELA se despidió de los santos varones de Narbona y retomó con bríos la ruta adelante. De allí a la ciudad de Beziers recorrió las cuatro leguas que las separan sin ningún esfuerzo. Se entretuvo con Salomón Halafta, con José y Natanel, los más renombrados eruditos de Beziers. Benjamín of Tudela bid farewell to the holy men of Narbonne and briskly resumed the route forward. From there to the city of Beziers he effortlessly traveled the four leagues that separate them. He entertained Salomón Halafta, José and Natanel, the most renowned scholars of Beziers. (Muñiz-Huberman, El mercader 33)

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Desde allí hasta la ciudad de Béziers hay cuatro leguas. Hay allí una comunidad de eruditos, a cuya cabeza están: R. Šelomoh Ḥalafta, R. Yosef y R. Netan’el. From there [Narbonne] to the city of Béziers is four leagues. There is a community of scholars, at the head are: R. Šelomoh Ḥalafta, R. Yosef and R. Netan’el (Magdalena Nom de Déu 54).

Muñiz-Huberman thus closely follows the sites and details from the itinerary as a

narrative outline for the novel—from the opening description of Tudela to replicating the

Travel’s closing words, “Terminado y completo [Finished and complete]” (Muñiz-

Huberman, El mercader 306). Fascinating details from the itinerary, such as the story of the

false messiah David Alroy, receive longer quotations, but Muñiz-Huberman primarily

invents a narrative on top of these details, focusing on the interior and spiritual journey of the

protagonist. On the direction of an angel, Benjamín leaves his hometown to travel the world.

He gathers companions who accompany him along the way, such as the Druze sidekick

Farawi and a Moorish lover Alucena, who eventually carries and raises his son. Although he

constantly sells merchandise, engages in trysts with multiple lovers in different cities, and

records the travel routes and sights in his travel book, Benjamín eventually learns the reason

of his voyage from his accompanying angel: he must share a collection of mystical

manuscripts given to him at the beginning of his journey with rabbis of Jewish communities

around the world.

In addition to its many printings and translations from the sixteenth century onwards,

The Book of the Travels of Benjamin of Tudela has inspired various modern Jewish literary

adaptations. The nineteenth-century Moldavian traveler Yisrael ben Yosef Binyamin, who

renamed himself Binyamin the Second, reenacted the medieval journey to produce Five

Years of Travel in the Orient, 1846-1851 (Cinq années de voyage en orient 1846-1851);

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Mendele Moykher Sforim followed this with his 1878 satire, The Travels of Binyamin the

Third ( ישילשה ןימינב תועסמ ), centered on a kind of Yiddish Don Quixote who ridiculously fails

to retrace Binyamin’s original routes while stuck in Eastern Europe; in modern Israeli poetry,

Natan Alterman’s folk song “The Travels of Binyamin of Tudela [ הלדוטמ ןימינב תועסמ ]” and

Yehuda Amichai’s long, autobiographical meditation, “The Travels of the Last Binyamin of

Tudela [ הלדוטמ ןורחאה ןימינב תועסמ ],” further popularized the medieval icon in contemporary

Hebrew. None of these works, however, imagine the medieval Iberian culture that would

have informed the worldview of the original, mysterious travel.

The collection of manuscripts that the character Benjamín carries reflects that

medieval worldview as Muñiz-Huberman imagines it, serving as the other primary source

material that frames the novel. Never named, the manuscripts generate magic and give the

protagonist a sense of purpose throughout his journey. After a friar in Italy temporarily steals

the manuscripts, his quick dismissal of their contents comes closest to identification:

Relatos de caballeros enamorados de doncellas veladas en castillos de difícil acceso. Doncellas ciegas que iluminan y enseñan. Fuentes de sabiduría bajo los árboles. Árboles plenos de atributos. Sellos que lacran grandes misterios. Cerraduras que hay que abrir para conocer el cofre de las joyas del saber. Letras que explican palabras. Nuevas maneras de contar historias. Y una frase que se repite en todos los manuscritos: “Fuego negro en fuego blanco”. Tales of knights in love with veiled maidens in hard to reach castles. Blind maidens who enlighten and teach. Springs of wisdom under trees. Trees full of attributes. Seals that hold great mysteries. Locks that must be opened to know the jewelry chest of knowledge. Letters that explain words. New ways to tell stories. And a phrase that is repeated in all of the manuscripts: “Black fire on white fire”. (Muñiz-Huberman, El mercader 83)

In a piece of memoir, Muñiz-Huberman complained that Mexican reviewers—

presumably unacquainted with medieval Jewish history—failed to mention the most obvious

detail of El mercader, “that the book is about a historic Jewish figure” (“From Toledo” 212).

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If even this went ignored, it is unsurprising that reviews of the novel in Spanish-language

journals largely pointed to Don Quixote and the broader picaresque novel as its template,

even though the El mercader lacks many of the genre’s features (i.e., satire, realism, class

and social commentary, a rogue antihero, etc.). Instead, the novel—alongside Binyamin of

Tudela’s Travels—mirrors the mysterious manuscripts, and the contents hinted at in the

above passage points to the magnum opus of the Kabbalah, The Book of Radiance ( רפס

רהוזה ), or the Zohar. A medieval collection of Aramaic midrashim, stories, and teachings

largely framed as commentary around the weekly Torah portion, the Zohar loosely revolves

around a group of second-century rabbinic companions led by Shim‘on bar Yoḥai, who teach

and encounter mystical secrets in travels around the Galilee.

In contrast to Lazarus, whose unfamiliarity with her source texts opens new practices

for intertextual readings, Muñiz-Huberman’s quotations of recondite texts tease of a hypotext

buried beneath the travel narrative. As if signaling the medieval initiate with subjects too

sensitive for written text, the terse summaries quoted above all allude to specific teachings in

the Zohar. The “veiled maidens in hard to reach castles” and “blind maidens” allude to the

section in the Zohar known as Sabba de-Mishpatim ( םיטפשמד אבס ) (cf. 2:95a; 2:99), where a

mystic elder’s erotic parable of a blind maiden in a palace symbolizes the scholar’s pursuit of

mystical secrets. The “trees of attributes” allude to the divine emanations, known as the

sefirot ( תוריפס ), which flow in a system likened to an inverted tree (cf. 1:29a; 1:35b). The

locked “jewelry chest of knowledge” alludes to a metaphor of the sefira known as wisdom

( המכח ), acting as a key to hidden treasures (cf. 1:3b). Finally, the phrase “black fire on white

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fire,” does, as the quotation indicates, repeat throughout the Zohar (cf. 2:84b, 2:114a, 2:226b,

3:132a, 3:154b).8

Identifying Binyamin of Tudela as a disseminator of the Kabbalah stretches

historicity. Nothing in the Travels itinerary suggests that the traveler had any knowledge or

involvement in mysticism. The zoharic circle of mystics responsible for the manuscripts the

character Benjamín carries began composing the alluded texts around a century after the

historical Binyamin of Tudela allegedly returned to Spain (and they were centered in Castile,

not Navarre). Despite the anachronism, by imagining Benjamín as a product of an Iberian

culture flush with mystical teachings, Muñiz-Huberman in turn rewrites the Zohar. Like the

Zohar, El mercader involves a group of companions led by a charismatic figure who learns

mystical knowledge while wandering through various locales. Furthermore, the

pseudepigrapha of both works sanctify the ancient past as contemporary – for thirteenth-

century Castilian mystics through the guise of second-century Mishnaic sages in the Holy

Land, and for a twentieth-century Mexican writer as twelfth-century Spanish.

As in the bifurcated citation of the Travels itinerary, which both exists in the novel as

a book that Benjamín writes in and which simultaneously structures the narrative, Muñiz-

Huberman references zoharic manuscripts while reenacting its contents. For example, while

in the Holy Land, Benjamín meets a long-haired fisherman named Asael, who reveals that he

is an angel. He shows Benjamín the “true manuscripts” that, unlike what the diasporic rabbis

8 Interestingly, Muñiz-Huberman elaborates in her scholarly writing many of the mystical concepts only hinted at in the novel. In Las raíces y las ramas, for example, Muñiz-Huberman fully quotes the zoharic maiden parable in Spanish translation (19-20).

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handle, will preserve the Jewish people. Asael soon slips into a river that kills him, but years

later, magically reappears to court the deserted Alucena and teaches her from the Kabbalah.

Although never explicitly cited, this strange character evokes the apocryphal rabbinic legend

of Azael, elaborated in the Zohar as one of the pre-diluvian fallen angels who appear as

humans:

וליכי אלו היב ומייקתאו אעראב ומילגאו ה"בק ןול ליפאו אליעל ודרמד לאזעו אזע ינהו ינבל ןישרח יפלואו ימייק ןוניא אמוי ןעכ דעו ,אמלע ישנ רתב ועט רתבלו .הינמ אטשפתאל .אשנ

These are Uzza and Azael, who rebelled above, were cast down by the blessed Holy One, and materialize on earth, abiding on it, unable to strip themselves of it. Subsequently they strayed after earthly women, and to this day they endure, teaching sorcery to human beings. (Zohar 1:58a, p. 113; Matt 330)

Locating this intertextual relationship heightens the suspense in El mercader, since

the reference exposes the danger Benjamín and Alucena face in dealing with a demonic

trickster; the “true manuscripts” he attempts to give Benjamin, like what he teaches Alucena,

are not from the Kabbalah, but from the insidious darker world of sorcery.

Despite Muñiz-Huberman’s incorporation of zoharic texts and ideas, much of the

poetry and conventions used throughout El mercader sound undeniably modern. If Lazarus’s

medievalist poetry draws upon the Wissenschaft historians, and Gaon the Romantic poets,

then Muñiz-Huberman’s intertextual reading of kabbalistic literature heavily draws from

French deconstructionist poetry and Latin American writing. Interstitial poetic dialogues

between lovers and meditations about a metaphysical Book echo the modern Sephardi

French-Egyptian poet Edmond Jabès’s multivolume work Livre des Questions (The Book of

Questions), largely comprised of detached lovers, mystical rabbis, and meditations on The

Book that all echo zoharic commentary. More obvious is the influential role of Jorge Luis

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Borges. The conceit for adopting and improving upon Binyamin of Tudela’s medieval

itinerary parallels Borges’s story “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,” about a fictional

modern French scholar whose marvelous translation of Don Quixote “is almost infinitely

richer [and] more ambiguous [es casi infinitamente más rico...Más ambiguo]” than

Cervantes’s original text (Borges 449).

Borges’s own fascination with the imaginative worldview of the Kabbalah, mostly

drawn from the exciting, contemporaneous studies of Gershom Scholem,9 inspired magical-

realist stories whose themes and motifs reappear in El mercader. Consider the novel’s motif

of the Hebrew letter Aleph: its form appears in the Tudela sky as confirmation of the Angel

of Truth’s covenant with Benjamín, it is the name for Benjamín’s primary horse, it appears in

the names of his lovers, and its soundlessness consumes his mystical meditations. This

obsession with the Hebrew letter recalls Borges’s famous short story, “El Aleph,” in which a

narrator discovers a small portal into infinite space and time. These modern influences

complicate Muñiz-Huberman’s direct identification with medieval Iberian Jewish literature,

similar to the issue of problematic historiography discussed in the first chapter.

Nevertheless, to suggest that Muñiz-Huberman’s kabbalistic narrative solely

appropriates modern imaginations of the Kabbalah ignores her attentive reading of primary

medieval material. A new generation of scholars of the Zohar has moved beyond the

historical and theological questions inaugurated by Gershom Scholem—such as the date of

its composition, its shrouded authorship, its religious syncretism—to more closely examine

9 For more on the Jewish and kabbalistic literature that inspired Borges, see Alazraki; Aizenberg.

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the texts within narrative and literary studies. For example, in The Art of Mystical Narrative:

A Poetics of the Zohar, Eitan Fishbane has suggested examining the Zohar as a proto-

magical-realist work, since many of the stories of the traveling zoharic rabbis are “grounded

in an enchanted realm—one where the veil that divides the natural and the supernatural is

frequently lifted, allowing for the one to cross into the other” (225). Such a claim implies that

El mercader de Tudela does not strictly follow a modern Latin American style paved by

Borges, but also mirrors its medieval source. Among other things, the rabbinic figures in the

Zohar slip into fantastic caves, use magic herbs and fragrances, ascend to heavenly

dimensions through meditation, and talk to angels, the dead, and animals. Likewise, the

narrative of El mercader often breaks from the itinerary to imagine a magical worldview of

the Middle Ages. Here, angels stalk, anchorites fly on harnessed wings, rabbis conjure

golems, and alchemists use alabaster cups to ensnare lovers. While these extraordinary

experiences do not necessarily share the religiously didactic tone that accompany parables in

the Zohar, the novel nevertheless mirrors a zoharic imaginary of medieval wonder.10

The metaphor of the palimpsest has so far offered new approaches to reading modern

Sephardic literature, from the queer palimpestuous (Lazarus) to textual hierarchies and issues

of contamination (Gaon). Muñiz-Haberman expands upon the metaphor by writing a novel

focused on the textuality of the palimpsest. Sarah Dillon has sketched the history of

nineteenth-century paleographers, whose “sorceries” experimenting with gallic acids and

other chemicals exposed the faded ink from palimpsest manuscripts (Palimpsest 17). Such

10 Again, considering the critical reception of the novel as a picaresque, it is tempting to suggest that Muñiz-Huberman positions herself like a medieval kabbalist, writing for a select audience privileged with obscure source material.

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alchemy, later replaced with less invasive methods like ultra-violet light photographs, helped

resurrect long-lost classical and sacred literature. Coupled with the unification of disparate

texts separated by centuries, this paleographic process illustrates the magical qualities

suggested of the palimpsest.

Muñiz-Huberman conveys the magical textuality of palimpsests in the manuscripts

Benjamín carries. Over the course of the novel, Benjamín becomes “a traveling library [una

biblioteca ambulante]” for rabbis throughout the Jewish diaspora to learn from and contribute

to one another (Muñiz-Huberman, El mercader 55). Along the way, the mystical manuscripts

accumulate, get disorganized, damaged in storm-ridden ships, lost and found, and edited by

rabbis. Not only do these constant changes signify the dynamic evolution of Jewish

knowledge through space and time, but they also affect the narrative’s world in multiple,

hidden ways. In the mountainous Sinon Potamo in Greece, for example, Benjamín meets

Captain Dacio, the leader of the nomadic Vlachs. Over the course of a month, Benjamín

teaches Dacio Hebrew and studies the manuscripts with him. When he finally reunites with

his companions, however, Benjamín learns that instead of a month, only a single day has

passed since he vanished into the mountains, a temporal confusion only clarified when he

notices an alteration in the manuscripts:

Benjamín se sienta a revisar los manuscritos y la palabra que indica el tiempo, zman, no aparece por ningún lado. “Es imposible, es una palabra necesaria: la recuerdo: estaba escrita. Como si alguien la hubiera borrado. ¿Adónde habrá ido a parar?”, piensa Benjamín.” Benjamín sits to review the manuscripts and the word that indicates time, zman, does not appear anywhere. “Impossible, it’s a necessary word: I remember it: it was written. As if someone had erased it. Where could it have gone?”, thought Benjamín. (105).

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Erasing the Hebrew word for time affects time itself, as if the manuscripts connect to

forces of the natural world. The scene literalizes the palimpsestic quality of the novel, which

collapses the temporal distance between the medieval itinerary with a post-modern poetic

sensibility.

But Muñiz-Huberman also characterizes the palimpsest by evoking Jewish mystical

traditions that refer to Hebrew textuality as such. For example, “black fire on white fire,” a

phrase that—like in the Zohar—recurs throughout El mercader in the voices of various

characters, alludes to a midrash found in the Jerusalem Talmud, that “the Torah given to

Moses by the Holy One, Blessed be He, was white fire engraved in black fire, a fire mixed in

fire, hewn from fire and given from fire [ שאב התורח הנבל שא ול הנתנ השמל ה"בקה ול ןתנש הרותה

שאמ הנותנו שאמ הבוצח שאב תללבומ שא איה הרוחש ]” (Shekalim 6:1). The image metaphorizes the

sacred letters that comprise the Torah, traditionally written by a scribe in blank ink on white

parchment, with the implication of layers of texts enmeshed with one another. This idea of a

hidden layer within the Torah served medieval rabbis who juxtaposed the kind of writing

addressed for the masses (i.e., in visible black ink) with mystical teachings meant for a select,

learned few (i.e., in invisible white ink). The thirteenth-century Gironese sage Naḥmanides,

for example, cited the above midrash to introduce the two types of biblical commentary he

provides, that of the literal understanding of a text and the mystic “hints in which I write the

hidden matters of the Torah [ הרותה ירתסב בתוכ ינא רשא םיזמרה ]” (Naḥmanides 7).

The medieval exegetical system referred to as PaRDeS ( סדרפ ), often credited to the

thirteenth-century Saragossan rabbi Baḥya ben Asher ibn Ḥalawa, further expands this

palimpsestic model of biblical commentary. In this fourfold method, interpretations do not

compete with one another to arrive at a true scriptural meaning, but overlap as layers in the

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fabric of the text. Following the mnemonic, biblical commentaries range from the most

superficial understanding of the text (Peshat ( טשפ ), or literal), to the philosophically allegoric

(Remez ( זמר ), or hint), to the midrashic (Derash ( שרד ), or homily), and finally to the most

buried, mystical interpretation (Sod ( דוס ), or secret). These layers inform one another, and

like a hypotext in the palimpsest, even the most inaccessible interpretation, according to

Michael Fishbane, “considers the text’s surface sense to be hinting at esoteric elements or

events in the divine realms” (xxxvii). For example, while a peshat interpretation of Genesis

1:1 might simply clarify the text’s order of God’s creation, a sod interpretation—as reflected

in the opening of the Zohar—might hint at the concept of six sefirot channeling into the

divine presence, a mystical concept not at all apparent, but implicit in the division of letters

( תיש-ארב ) that form the Hebrew Bible’s first word (cf. Zohar 1:3b).

The medieval typology of PaRDeS illuminates the stark juxtaposition of narrative

tone in El mercader de Tudela. Muñiz-Huberman replicates the Zohar by foregrounding

mystical teachings throughout the novel, occasionally at the expense of coherence. Shifting

away from the details of the travel itinerary, the narration often slips into surrealistic poetry

that seems to reflect the protagonist’s interiority. Streams of thought echo the sort of elusive

references typical of early kabbalistic texts, as when Benjamín emerges from a room while

sequestering in Montpellier:

Ha abierto la puerta por primera vez en nueve días. Nueve días redondos como un círculo. Nueve días como nueve emanaciones divinas: como nueve sefirot. Nueve días como una luna llena. Nueve de tres veces tres. Nueve es un círculo y una línea: una cabeza y un cuerpo: el dígito más elevado y el último de la serie. Nueve días oscuros como el final de los tiempos. Nueve mágico: multiplicado por cualquier otro número la suma de los dígitos del resultado será también nueve. Si se invierte el resultado, la cifra será también un múltiplo de nueve. Nueve días. Nueve noches. Nueve meses. Nueve angélico. Nueve benéfico. Nueve peligroso. El nueve envolvente del misterio.

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He has opened the door for the first time in nine days. Nine days round like a circle. Nine days like nine divine emanations: like nine sefirot. Nine days like a full moon. Nine from three times three. Nine is a circle and a line: a head and a body: the highest digit and the last of the series. Nine dark days like the end times. Magic nine: multiplied by any other number, the sum of the resulting digits will also be nine. If the result is reversed, the number will also be a multiple of nine. Nine days. Nine nights. Nine months. Angelic nine. Beneficial nine. Dangerous nine. The enveloping nine of the mystery. (Muñiz-Huberman, El mercader 37)

What does this long, enigmatic meditation have to do with Benjamín’s travels

through southern France? The passage resembles medieval Jewish teachings that appear in

medieval mystical works like Sefer Yetzira (The Book of Creation), Sefer Bahir (The Book of

Illumination), and the Zohar, in which numerology, particularly related to the symbolic value

of Hebrew letters, demonstrates the meticulous divine order embedded in the creation of the

universe. Reading the narrative of the novel through a PaRDeS typology, the quoted passage

assumes a sod interpretation of the medieval itinerary’s brief description of Montpellier.

Benjamín’s stay hints at hidden, mystical meanings not at all apparent or even logical from

the literal geographical description of the city originally recorded by the historic traveler. If

the novel’s incorporation of a medieval itinerary recreates the technical routes for traveling

the world, then adaptations of medieval Kabbalah, as cited above, serves as another guide,

elucidating the spiritual world reflected everywhere.

El mercader de Tudela, in other words, does not just convey a story about the

Kabbalah and mystical experiences, but—again resembling the Zohar—is often written as if

it were a mystical text. In the above passage, a meditation on a single number mixes real

ideas found in kabbalistic literature (e.g., the collected channeling of nine sefirot enveloped

in the tenth) with other approaches (e.g., the shape of writing the digit and its mathematical

properties). This zoharic formula, in which a description of an episode shifts into mystical

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language, appear throughout the novel, constantly gesturing at the medieval itinerary’s richer

symbolism; Benjamín’s descent into the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, for example, turns

into a meditation on the sefirot, and a whole chapter is devoted to the cosmic symbolism of

the word “semilla [seed]” after Alucena and Benjamin’s sexual union.

The novel’s use of layered texts also appears in the form of multiple narratives

intruding upon the main plot around Benjamín’s journey. As with the previous sections in

this chapter, an examination of one palimpsest can reveal a constellation of others. Scholars

have defined the Zohar, which comprises some two-dozen disparate manuscripts (e.g.,

Midrash Ha-Ne‘elam, Idra Raba, Idra Zuta, Sitrei ’Otiyot, Sifra di-Tsni’uta, etc.) written by

various Jewish Castilian writers over generations, in terms that refer back to the metaphor of

the palimpsest. Ronit Meroz, for example, has summarized the Zohar as “entirely composed

of different strata that were stacked one upon the other, texts and their commentaries, texts

and their reworkings” (qtd. in E. Fishbane 39). Similarly, Boaz Huss asserts that while the

manuscripts were only collated and imagined as a single book by a single author decades

after their compositions, the zoharic circle in Castile originally wrote “ancient” texts to

“break through the entrance barriers of the kabbalistic production field” previously

dominated by the Catalonian Naḥmanides school of mysticism; these texts, in other words,

were written over previous texts, just as writers subsequently imitating the Zohar (e.g.,

Tiqqunei Ha-Zohar) attempted to penetrate the canon after its collation (Huss 66). Finally,

Daniel Matt, who has produced the most authoritative critical edition of the Zohar to date,

evoked the etymology of the palimpsest by describing his work as having “to scrape away

some seven hundred years of accretion and corruption, [to] at least approach that elusive,

hypothetical original” (xviiii).

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Like the many components of the Zohar—represented by the many manuscripts

Benjamín carries—El mercader de Tudela also appears as a composite of multiple texts from

multiple authors. As previously mentioned, scholars have asserted instances of textual

corruption in the medieval Hebrew itinerary of Binyamin of Tudela, noting that the original

traveler likely never visited places that either do not follow the logic of the itinerary’s

trajectory or contain inaccurate descriptions. Muñiz-Huberman utilizes this complication of

her source text as part of the novel’s magical world. While in Syria, the accompanying Angel

of Truth responds to Benjamín’s urgent need to rest by disguising as a person, traveling in his

stead, and later implanting the information about distant cities into the dreams of Benjamín,

who thinks they are his own. The historically corrupted text thus illustrates voices that did

not appear through generations of textual transmission, but incorporated by magical means.

Muñiz-Huberman’s most compelling textual layer in the novel’s palimpsest involves

her playful use of metafiction. In the twenty-eighth chapter, while Benjamín languishes in

Damascus over friends who have since died, he receives encouragement from the presumed

author, Muñiz-Huberman herself:

(Benjamín, ¿por qué no dejas de preocuparte por un rato? Tranquilízate. No pienses. Disfruta nada más.) (¿Quién me habla?) (Yo, Benjamín. Tu proveedora de papel.) (Es decir: ¿quién?) (Quien te ha provisto de pluma y te ha puesto a caminar. Te ha dado dos caballos, una carga preciosa y muchos amores.) (Pero me has hecho dudar y sufrir.) (Bueno, también te he dado alegrías: ¿has olvidado los barcos y tus viajes por mar?) (No.) (¿Entonces?) (¿Cuándo descansaré?) (Cuando yo descanse.) (Pero si tú estás ordenándome es porque yo escribí antes.) (Pero yo me aproveché y eres ahora mi pacto.)

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(Benjamín, why don’t you quit worrying for a while? Calm down. Don’t think. Just enjoy.) (Who speaks to me?) (I, Benjamín. Your paper supplier.) (That is: who?) (The one who has provided you with a pen and set you to move. Who has given you two horses, precious cargo, and many lovers.) (But you made me doubt and suffer.) (Well, I have also given you happiness: have you forgotten the ships and your sea voyages?) (No.) (So?) (When will I rest?) (When I rest.) (But if you are ordering me it is because I previously wrote.) (But I made use of it and now you are my covenant). (Muñiz-Huberman, El mercader 216)

Further breaking the parameters of realism, Muñiz-Huberman’s persona appears like

a godlike figure who, in the spirit of kabbalistic literature’s emphasis on the creative power

of Hebrew letters, can conjure people out of words. Parentheses mark an intimate, unspoken

conversation between Benjamín, who is both real (in history) and imagined (in the novel),

and Muñiz-Huberman, who is both the author and reader of Binyamin of Tudela; both rely on

one another for the creation of the novel, forging a sacred covenant that preserves his

medieval text for modern times.

After a tryst with yet another lover at the end of the novel, a woman tells Benjamín

that he will have a final, eternal lover who will, after a thousand years, write about him;

Benjamín’s acknowledgement here that his main lovers all have aleph names (e.g., Alucena,

Alouette, Agdala), symbolizing that they “live in separate worlds [viven en mundos aparte],”

only anticipates the task of a future Angelina Muñiz-Huberman (303). By entering the

narrative and thereby acknowledging the existence of El mercader de Tudela as a novel,

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Muñiz-Huberman creates the final textual layer in the palimpsest of Binyamin of Tudela’s

itinerary.

To make matters more confusing, the latter part of the novel contains chapters that

break from the omniscient narration centered on Benjamín, instead presenting the voice of

Alucena writing to the reader. Back in Navarre and separated from Benjamín, Alucena

announces that she will inaugurate the historical novel by writing the other story of

Benjamín—not the brief and mundane itinerary, but “THE ONE THAT WAS NOT

WRITTEN [LA QUE NO SE ESCRIBIÓ]” (255). The claim recalls the midrash’s image of

“white fire,” as if her story—like the body of Alucena herself—accompanies and lies under

Benjamín throughout his voyage. She writes the deeper, sod layer, unlike the itinerary, with

its total lack of “emotional parts, doubts, fantasies [las partes emotivas, las dudas, las

fantasías]” (249). Alucena’s description of her new writing project—a project which sounds

quite like El mercader de Tudela—appears to align the character with Muñiz-Huberman,

another instance of magically stretching the temporal and realistic parameters assumed of a

novel (i.e., how can a twentieth-century author simultaneously write about and exist inside of

a fictional medieval world?). But Alucena’s strange name gestures at this conceit; it recalls

both Lucena, the site of the Andalusian rabbinical academy where many of medieval Hebrew

poets discussed here studied, and, more significantly, the Spanish word alucinar (to

hallucinate, be delusional). Her name, in other words, marks the illusion of her existence,

highlighting its similarity to the composition of the medieval Zohar as a a mystical creation

of pseudepigrapha.

Another aspect of this metafictional motif closes the novel. Following the Hebrew

itinerary, the narrative abruptly ends mid-voyage, but an epilogue allows every character in

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the novel to make with a final statement on their future endeavors (e.g., Alucena will stop

writing, Benjamín will head for Narbonne, the Angel of Truth wishes to join in love affairs

with human beings). Through the voice of Benjamín’s faithful Druze sidekick, the final

words of the novel question the reader’s understanding of the narrative as a whole:

Según Farawi: He amado toda mi vida a Benjamín de Tudela. Lo he cuidado. He sido su sombra. Pongo punto final a su libro:

LOS MANUSCRITOS NO EXISTEN According to Farawi: All my life I have loved Benjamín of Tudela. I have taken care of him. I have been his shadow. I put an end to his book:

THE MANUSCRIPTS DO NOT EXIST (308)

Considering the irony of a fictional character denying the existence of manuscripts

that, as previously established, represent an actual corpus of medieval Spanish kabbalistic

literature, what does this stunning claim suggest? Perhaps the words again emphasize the

novel’s fictionality, disclaiming Benjamín’s impetus for travel as a literary conceit to explain

the mystery of the twelfth-century journey. But by tracing Muñiz-Huberman’s careful

incorporation and rewriting of the Zohar, I interpret the metafictional statement as creative

evidence that the novel has indeed been inscribed with “black fire in white fire.” The

unlearned Farawi has no business interfering with Benjamín’s studies in the Kabbalah, so he

cannot see or access that invisible, mystical world that surrounds the traveler’s plain

narrative. If the magical-realist novel reflects the zoharic manuscripts that Benjamín carries,

then Muñiz-Huberman has afforded the implied reader access to the sod layer buried in a

mystical palimpsest originally titled The Book of the Travels of Benjamin of Tudela.

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2.4 Conclusion

This chapter has examined three cases of medievalist writing by modern Sephardim.

Mastery in the breadth of medieval literature and its types enables modern Sephardim to

access a spectrum of possibilities in reclaiming a literary heritage, each mirroring aspects of

the writer’s sense of identity. A discovery of unabashed homoeroticism in Andalusian poetry

offered Lazarus a way of locating and articulating her own Jewish queerness as ethnically

Sephardic. For Gaon, an identification with Ibn Gabirol as a Romantic poet, and an interest in

Halevi’s Kuzari, inspired poetry and translations that privileged the status of the vernacular

language of Ladino over the traditionally sacred position of Hebrew. Finally, Muñiz-

Huberman reclaims a crypto-Jewish heritage in Spain by rewriting and implanting herself

inside a historical itinerary layered with Spanish Kabbalah. Each of these writers reinforce

the vitality of the metaphor of the palimpsest, as the incorporation of medieval texts into their

modern works illustrate the dynamic process, authority, and mystic textuality that connects

Sepharad with the Sephardic diaspora.

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Chapter Three: Andalusian Forms in Modern Hebrew Sephardic Literature

This chapter will compare medieval and modern Hebrew literature that focuses on the

relationship between modern Sephardi writers and their imagined literary predecessors who

produced poetry during the Hebrew Golden Age of al-Andalus. Such a study will draw on the

work of medieval Hebrew poets, as well as important literary scholarship, to understand how

modern Sephardim engage with the medieval Hebrew poetic past. As in the second chapter

on palimpsests, I specifically choose works that emphasize the diversity of Andalusian

conventions available to modern Hebrew writers when imitating medieval poetry. These

conventions include the qina form of the qaṣīda, reimagined by A. B. Yehoshua in his

medievalist novel, A Journey to the End of the Millennium ( ףלאה םות לא עסמ ), Amnon

Shamosh’s usage of the Andalusian muwashshaḥ in his book of poetry, Sephardic Dīwān

( ידרפס ןאויד ), the liturgical baqasha in the poetry of Almog Behar, and finally, the rhyming

prose maqāma in Yehuda Burla’s historical novel These are the Journeys of Rabbi Yehuda

Halevi ( יולה הדוהי יבר יעסמ אלא ). All of these Hebrew writers identify with a personal Jewish

heritage in Spain, which they articulate by reproducing and playing with literary poetic forms

developed and exemplified in medieval Spain. Their works not only provide helpful

definitions of Sephardic literature—as in, writing by Sephardim about Sepharad—but also

broaden the scope of modern Hebrew literature to incorporate medieval forms of poetry.

Modern literary theory has always produced a rich and generative focus on form,

from Coleridge’s distinction of organic and mechanical forms, to the modern schools that

identify and interpret the structural features of texts (Formalism, New Criticism), to

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postmodern dismissals of such traditionally stabilized structures of language and thought.11

My interest in the “shape and structure and to the manner in which [a literary work] is made”

specifically lies with the choices Andalusi Hebrew writers made to compose their poetry and

prose —genres innovative in the development of Hebrew literature, but almost all adopted

from Arabic literary conventions—, and how these forms typify for modern writers a

particular medieval time and place (Cuddon). Form, in other words, situates, and thus plays a

critical role in the composition of medievalist literature.

Without the assistance of primary source material, Grace Aguilar, in “Song of the

Spanish During Their ‘Golden Age,’” redirected the English Romantic pastoral to convey the

voice of the Andalusi Hebrew poet. Emma Lazarus similarly gave voice to medieval Spanish

characters through her talent as an English poet. In his reading of Lazarus’s “An Epistle,”

Gregory Eiselein highlights the speaker’s critique of the converted teacher, Paulus de Santa

Maria, through the poem’s ottava rima, which in English poetry traditionally “uses the final

couplet to surprise and amuse readers with an ironic turn” (24). The form there anticipates

the speaker’s most sarcastic lines about Christianity, even though, as with Aguilar’s poem, it

does not accurately reflect the epistolary writing of the historical figure Lazarus evokes, nor

conventions of Hebrew writing in Christian Spain generally. Aguilar and Lazarus’s writing

11 For an overview on the evolution of the term, see Wolfson. In classical thought, form belonged to the realm of metaphysics, represented as an essentialized, transcendent ideal (Platonic) or the organizing agent of matter (Aristotelian). More recently, Caroline Levine has broadened the study of form to entail “all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference,” compounding aesthetic, political, and societal systems into a tradition of close reading (3). That a diverse group of literary scholars has criticized overdetermined assumptions, facile generalizations, and political misreadings undergirding Levine’s study, points to the continued relevance and vitality of form in comparative literary studies. See, for example, the vol. 132, no. 5, 2017 issue of PMLA, devoted to the critical reception of Levine’s Forms.

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thus exploit contemporary poetic forms that highlight their linguistic displacement as modern

diasporic Sephardim, reimagining ancestral verses in a diasporic language.

Modern Hebrew, however, the language obviously closest for adapting medieval

Hebrew literature and the subject of this chapter, is another matter. In the early twentieth

century, Hebrew poets began to acknowledge and even experiment formally with the poetry

of their medieval forebears. Although the critic Ziva Ben-Porat asserts that “most secular

Israelis do not really see the poetry of al-Andalus as an integral part of their cultural

heritage,” pioneering modern Hebrew poets of various ethnicities have imitated or emulated

this canon as a spiritual extension of Israeli lyric (128). Tova Rosen has demonstrated that

the existentialist poetics of Yehuda Amichai—one of the most influential Hebrew poets of

the twentieth century—reflected his own reading of the Andalusi poet Shemuel Hanagid (cf.

“Kemo be-shir”). Sara Katz has similarly produced comparative research on Ibn Gabirol’s

influence on formative Hebrew writers like Ḥ. N. Bialik and S. Y. Agnon, while Samuel

Werses has provided a helpful overview of the many modern Hebrew writers who have

reimagined the poetry and legend of Yehuda Halevi (cf. Katz, Bialik; “Ibn Gabirol”; Werses).

These efforts, as well as this chapter on Sephardic writing, provide a grander revisionist

interpretation of Israeli literary history, one that does not simply distinguish modern Hebrew

literature from biblical antiquity, but flows through the innovative Arabized forms of poetry

developed in al-Andalus, from the Córdovan Caliphate until the decline of the Almoravid

dynasty (ca. 950-1140).

3.1 A. B. Yehoshua’s Journey to the Beginning of Sephardic Poetry

Although Burla’s historical novel, published in 1959, chronologically precedes the

other works discussed in this chapter, I begin with a novel that imagines the earliest medieval

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setting—the year 999—A. B. Yehoshua’s A Journey to the End of the Millennium, as it

anticipates the early development of Andalusian Hebrew writing. A fifth generation Sephardi

Jerusalemite on his father’s side, and the son of a Moroccan mother, Yehoshua is

undoubtedly one of the most famous and celebrated Sephardi writers in Israel today. While

his novels often center on Sephardim—a diasporic, multi-generational family (Mar Mani ( רמ

ינאמ )), a widowed Israeli bureaucrat (Five Seasons ( וכלומ )), an actress and screenwriter at the

heart of an Israeli filmmaker’s atonement (The Retrospective ( ידרפס דסח ))—A Journey

showcases a pre-modern representation of Jews who yield, yet precede, classifications as

Sephardim.

The medievalist novel depicts a bigamous Jewish merchant, Ben Attar, who sails

from his verdant home in Tangier to the foreign, dreary Rhineland in order to restore a

broken commercial partnership with his nephew Abulafia. Having moved to Paris to expand

Ben Attar’s mercantile network, Abulafia meets and marries Esther-Minna, a pious woman

from the historical Kalonymus rabbinic dynasty of Ashkenaz, and she subsequetly cuts the

family’s business ties when hearing of the uncle’s marriage to a second woman. In response,

Ben Attar sails northward to prove the legitimacy of his new union and demand a legal

reversal of the costly repudiation. Accompanied by his two wives, his Muslim partner Abu

Lutfi, the ship’s Muslim crew, and a black slave, Ben Attar also recruits Elbaz, a widowed

rabbi from Seville who can expertly defend the case of bigamy in Jewish law.

The novel has sparked plenty of interesting literary criticism, from psychoanalytic

readings of the protagonist’s bigamy to Orientalist readings to issues in gender studies (cf.

Shamir and Doron’s collected essays). By setting the novel at the end of the first millennium,

Yehoshua anticipates modern lines of Jewish difference—Ashkenazic, Sephardic, East,

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West—in their most nascent stage. Preceding both communities’ destruction and exile—the

horrors of the eleventh century’s Crusader Rhineland massacres and the Almoravid conquest

loom throughout the historical novel—stern Frankish-speaking Jews clash with tolerant

Arabic-speaking Jews in a diaspora that unsubtly evokes the dangers of ethnic

marginalization and religious-secular tensions in contemporary Hebrew-speaking Israel. Yael

Halevi-Wise has generally argued that Yehoshua’s “representation of Sephardic history and

identity is concerned not with ethnic identity itself, but rather with refracting Israeli society

through this compounded cultural prism” (“Where” no. 2). But if the novel translates a

contemporary culture through a medieval lens, it also prefigures the work of Yehoshua the

novelist through the representation of Rabbi Elbaz, a progenitor related by an imagined line

of ethnic transmission. Elbaz, like Yehoshua, is distinguished by his writing. The famous

Sephardi Hebrew writer of today thus imagines the temporal point of departure in the

millenium-long trajectory of Sephardic literature, when tenth-century rabbis in Sepharad first

experimented with Hebrew poetic forms.

The novel’s first depiction of Elbaz alludes to the birth of the Hebrew Golden Age in

al-Andalus. Sailing on Ben Attar’s ship with his young son, Elbaz does not bother reviewing

the Talmudic literature necessary for his halakhic defense, having been swept by a more

alluring and creative thought process:

וא לגוסמ אהיש רעיש אל םלועמש ,זבלא ברה יניעב איה האלפומ ריש תביתכ םצע אולהו םילוקשו םיזורח ,תירבעב םלוכ ,ריש יתב השיש םהל ופרטצה ןורחאה עובשב הנהו .ךכל הוואתי ,Yehoshua, Masa‘ 37( .היסולדנאל חרזמה ןמ טרבל ןב איבהש ,שדחה ןינרמה חסונה יפ-לע

emphasis added(

For the rabbi, the mere fact of writing a poem was something wonderful; he had never imagined that he himself would be able or eager to do such a thing. But during the previous week six lines had put themselves together, all in Hebrew, following the

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meter and rhyme scheme that had been brought to Andalus from the east by Dunash Ben Labrat. (de Lange 26)

The journey here begins in the generation following the stunning disruption of

Dunash Ben Labrat, who traveled from Córdoba after training in Baghdad with the polymath

Sa‘adya ben Yosef al-Fayyumi Gaon and famously introduced Arabic meters into Hebrew

poetry, discussed in more detail below. Despite objections from the established Hebrew

poetry school at the time on the profane use of the holy language, Ben Labrat’s innovation

quickly sparked new forms of Hebrew poetry based on existing Arabic conventions;12 by the

time of the novel’s setting, Andalusi rabbis such as Yosef Ibn Avitor expanded the range of

Hebrew poetry to include unprecedented secular topics built around personal themes.

Elided in Nicholas de Lange’s English translation, the Hebrew narration cited above

specifies Rabbi Elbaz’s first poem as written in the “rhymes and meters of the new style of

ha-marnin.” The term refers to a quantified meter in Hebrew Andalusian poetry adopted

from a popular Arabic meter known as hazaj ( جزھ ). Of his dozen or so poems known today,

Ben Labrat composed his most famous “ ארקי רורד (He Shall Proclaim Freedom)”—popularly

sung around Sabbath tables in virtually every Jewish community today—in the meter of ha-

marnin, and it soon developed into a conventional meter in Andalusian Hebrew poetry,

particularly for elegies. Yehoshua does not offer the text to that first poem conceived by the

character Elbaz, but Ben Attar, to his disappointment, uncovers its contents when locating the

parchment: an erotically charged poem about the two wives onboard. The poem, “which

began in Arabic and continued in the holy tongue [ -ןושלל עתפל ףלחתה ךכ-רחאו ,תיברעב חתפש

12 Cf. Drory, Models 193-207 for a useful overview on this metrical controversy.

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שדוקה ],” underscores the undeniable atmosphere of Arabic poetry in al-Andalus, as

demonstrated in the previous chapter with Halevi’s Hebrew translation of al-Mutanabbī’s

qaṣīda. (Yehoshua, Masa‘ 40; de Lange 30).

Unlike Mr. Mani, Yehoshua’s novel constructed out of fragmented conversations,

Journey substitutes dialogue and quotation for omniscient narration, and so mostly references

Elbaz’s “poetic intoxication [ הרישה ןורכשמ ]” rather than displaying it (Yehoshua, Masa‘ 89;

de Lange 81). Nevertheless, being quoted more than any other character in the novel—

particularly in the speeches during the trials—Elbaz’s words specifically carry weight,

highlighting the significance of Andalusian poetry in Jewish history and reflecting

Yehoshua’s imagined literary lineage. In a chapter wholly comprising a twenty-four-line

poem, Elbaz, the presumed poet, offers his loftiest, most organized form of expression. The

poem appears toward the end of the novel, after the rabbi’s initial victory at an improvised

village trial gets reversed in a subsequent trial in Worms. The second wife, now pregnant,

catches tetanus after giving her own disastrous, and unquoted, testimony to a judge. The

Andalusi crew stops in Verdun at the onset of Yom Kippur to have her tended to by an

apostate doctor, and Rabbi Elbaz, who over the course of their journey secretly yearns for her

and even fantasizes of “wedding her himself and taking her into his home in Seville [ אשייש

היליבסב ותיבל התוא ףוסאיו ,השאל ומצעב התוא ]”, composes a poem befitting the grim occasion

(Yehoshua, Masa‘ 219; de Lange 213).

This poem imitates the Hebrew qina ( הניק ), or the Arabic marthiya ( ةیثرم ), an elegy

for a loved one or respected leader. Ibn Gabirol’s poem for his patron Yequtiel Ibn Ḥasan—

later creatively translated by Moshe David Gaon and discussed in the previous chapter—

exemplifies this type of qaṣīda, but the subject for Elbaz’s composition, strange as it may

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appear, matches literary history. While polygamous marriages were not frequent for Andalusi

Jews,13 Hebrew poets did write poetry for many kinds of family and friendly affiliations,

including women and children. Tova Beeri, for example, has written about the nearly two

hundred and fifty medieval elegies discovered in the Cairo Geniza that cover a spectrum of

female subjects, from educators to household slaves (i.e., presumed concubines); similarly, in

the canon of the great Andalusi poets, elegies for maidservants appear (cf. Beeri; Halevi,

Dīwān I:31, pp. 40-41).

As if drawn from a dīwān, Rabbi Elbaz’s poem appears on the page with a brief title

and the following sub-header, presumably lost on many contemporary Israeli readers

unfamiliar with medieval Hebrew poetry:

םילעפנ/םילעפתמ/םילולעפ/םילעפתמ mitpa‘alim/pa‘alulim/mitpa‘alim/nif‘alim (Yehoshua, Masa‘ 253)

Understanding the sub-header and its application in Yehoshua’s poem requires a brief

overview on medieval Hebrew prosody.14 Influenced by Arabic Arūḍ prosody ( ضورعلا ) that

Ben Labrat championed from his learning in the East, Andalusian Hebrew poetry broke away

from biblical and Byzantine models of rhyme and rhythm, and, as Yosef Tobi asserts,

replaced it with a system of quantitative meter that “was inserted artificially, as a sudden,

13 See Assis, who covers the historical record on polygamous marriages in medieval Spain, as well as the impact of Gershom ben Yehuda’s ban on polygamy in Ashkenaz, which influenced the social setting of the historical novel. 14 The sub-header, like Muñiz-Huberman’s obscure references to the Zohar, again raises questions about the novelist’s imagined readership. That many Hebrew readers would not understand its meaning, yet register it as a code to the poem, supports my assertion below that Yehoshua publicly positions himself as a writer with intimate knowledge of Andalusian poetry.

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almost brutal act, which wholly altered its appearance” (301). In this new system, certain

vowels (namely, the sheva na‘ (◌), ḥataf ( ◌, ◌, ◌ ), and shuruk (ו)) became short vowels and

all other vowels long, an arbitrary designation, since Hebrew, unlike Arabic, does not

naturally produce such measured sounds.

The names for the units of Hebrew quantified meters were further borrowed from

terms in Arabic prosody, first categorized by the Iraqi grammarian and philologist al-Khalīl

ibn Aḥmad al-Farāhīdī in the mid-eighth century. Al-Khalīl, “using Arab desert imagery of a

tent,” measured individual units as either a cord ( ببس ) or peg ( دتو ), each consisting of various

sequences of long and/or short syllables (Harshav 98). These metrical units form feet labeled

in mnemonics derived from the term fa‘al (e.g., the trochaic fa‘ūlun, the anapestic

mustaf‘ilun, the amphibrachic fā‘ilātun, the dactylic mutafā‘ilun, etc.), and the sequencing of

those feet formed sixteen identified Arabic meters. Hebrew poets adopted Arabic

morphology for quantitative feet as their own, such as referring to a short-long sequence of

vowels as a peg ( דתי ) and transliterating the Arabic fa‘al ( لعف ) into Hebrew ( לעפ ).

In his short treatise on Hebrew poetics, for example, Yehuda Halevi laid out twelve

types of meters (with lines from his own poetry that exemplify their application), the second

type—identical to ha-marnin— labelled as “ ןליעאפמ ןליעאפמ .ןליעאפמ ןליעאפמ ,” a transliteration

of the Arabic term for the first epitrite, mafāʿīlūn ( نلیعافم ) (Rosen, “Ha-mahalakh” 326). The

terms for measuring these quantified feet evolved by the time Sa‘adya Ibn Danaan—one of

the last Hebrew poets in medieval Spain—composed in 1468 his own Judeo-Arabic treatise

on Hebrew prosody. Still betraying its pre-Andalusian Arabic system, Ibn Danaan

transformed the repeating mafāʿīlūn in the ha-marnin meter with a term more approximate to

Hebrew grammar, mefo‘alim ( םילעפמ ) (cf. Ibn Danaan 167-169).

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Vocalized, the term mefo‘alim starts with a short vowel—a sheva (מ)—followed by

three long vowels—a ḥolam, kamatz, and ḥiriq ( םילעפ ). Modern Hebrew literary scholarship

often replaces these medieval terms for the symbols conventionally used in the scansion of

Western qualitative poetry, even though quantitative meters are distinct from metrical rhythm

of stressed and unstressed syllables. Since a peg consists of a short-long sequence (- ◡), and

a chord consists of one long vowel (-), we can define the first meter that captivates Elbaz at

the start of his journey as a repeated sequence of a peg and two cords per foot, or, in the

modern notation—from right to left—as short-long-long-long ( - - - ◡); the meter usually

contains two feet per hemistich, conveniently labeled as a mnemonic ( םילעפמ םילעפמ םילעפמ

םילעפמ [mefo‘alim mefo‘alim mefo‘alim mefo‘alim]).

Returning to the elegy in the novel, the sub-header provides the code for the sequence

of long and short syllables that structure the upcoming verses. If the vowels in the word

mitpa‘alim break into two cords and a peg (- ◡ - -), pa‘alulim into a cord, a peg, and a cord

(- - ◡ -), and nif‘alim into three cords (- - -), then Yehoshua’s poem, announced as

mitpa‘alim/ pa‘alulim/ mitpa‘alim/ nif‘alim, results in the following meter:

- - - / - ◡ - - // - - ◡ - / - ◡ - -

The poem both appropriates and innovates medieval prosody. At first glance, the

Arabized terms introducing the poem resemble the quantified meter of ha-qatu‘a ( עוטקה ),

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derived from the Arabic meter ( ثتجم ),15 a compact pair of hemistiches built on two cords,

followed by a peg, a cord, a peg, and a cord, or more simply:

- - ◡ - / - ◡ - - // - - ◡ - / - ◡ - -

The choice is peculiar, since ha-qatu‘a does not reflect conventional Andalusian

poetry. Likely invented by al-Khalīl, and later adopted in modern Arabic drama for its

“rhythm resembling that of the language of speech,” ha-qatu‘a very rarely appears in either

medieval Arabic or Hebrew poems (Moreh 168; cf. Halper 214). Schirmann’s four-volume

anthology, for example, spanning the entire five-century literary history of Hebrew poetry in

Spain, contains only four poems in this meter. Variations of ha-qatu‘a do exist, such as the

substitution of a short vowel to begin either hemistich or in the expanded form of three- or

four-feet hemistiches, but Yehoshua here creates something wholly original. In addition to a

scheme of rhyming couplets and occasional internal rhymes, the elegy’s last foot replaces the

conventional foot of pa‘alulim (- - ◡ -) with nif‘alim (- - -), forging a pattern of

asymmetrical distiches apparently without precedent.16 Indeed, I have yet to locate a single

instance in which a Hebrew poet ever used this particular meter composed by Yehoshua and

notionally imagined by Rabbi Elbaz.

If Andalusian Hebrew poetry projects an elite courtier culture, of men well-versed in

Arabic prosody and scriptural fluency, then modern adaptations of medieval writing similarly

15 The meter means “amputated” in both Hebrew and Arabic, referring to the elimination of the conventional third foot of both hemistiches (cf. Yellin 50) 16 For example, the last word of the fifth line of Yehoshua’s elegy, le‘afar ( רפעל ), contains three syllables of three long vowels, a segol, kamatz, and another kamatz ( ◌◌◌ ).

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underscore the prowess of the writer, so familiar with its archaic, rigid forms that s/he may

innovate a rare meter in the conventionally acceptable form of altering the final prosodic

foot. Yehoshua’s strange display of the poem’s orthography reinforces this claim of poetic

prowess. With the exception of children’s books or as a way to clarify an ambiguous word

with multiple meanings, modern Hebrew prose generally does not display vowel markers.

Poetry, however, is commonly written fully vocalized to emphasize its orality; a work

vocalized as it should be spoken. In the novel, however, Yehoshua goes half-way with the

poem’s vocalization. The markers that appear don’t clarify ambiguous language. Instead,

they stress Yehoshua’s consistency in composing a poem according to this new-medieval

meter of short and long vowels. The header (“And he said to himself”) implies that the

character Elbaz composed the poem orally, so the vowel markers scattered throughout each

line call attention to the authorial figure of Yehoshua himself, the modern Sephardi

descendant of the imagined Sevillian rabbi, capable of channeling and improving upon

Andalusian poetry.

Having introduced Yehoshua’s meter and its application, we can now examine the

Hebrew elegy as it appears on the page, followed by my literal translation below:

הפגב תבזענ איה :ומצעל רמאו םילעפנ/םלעפתמ/םילולעפ/םילעפתמ .רק התמילג שרפימ .הפגב תבזענ איה .רכזנה הלעב לומ .התמו הינש השא .ףושח טושמכ לגר .הטימל הניפס המש .ףוסא ןיידע םפוס .םיכושח םידודנ עסמ

.רפעל ךתדמח תפטענ טאל התע .רפותו השלתנש היזה הגומנ המע .הנויה החלסנ אל .המולש לע הרפכ אל .הנרה ךותב לער .המקנ ליטהל הסט .רתסב הפטל .ךתבהא הגגומתה .רתכה םולח היה ןנוחל הדומח לגר

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.תדדוב התיה אל םש הלעבנ רשאכ ףא .תדערמ הרתתסה הינש הקושת תחבא .הרזומ םירצונ ריע .הרופא ךביבס ןדרו .הרמ הרעס ריחשמ םיהו הקוחר רי׳גנט .לבקתמ שונא יפמ הבושתה ישקב ךא .לבקתמ ןיאו קשוח .יינש לעבכ הכוב

.ועיגה ליחב בנז יטומש םרחו יודינ .ויעבה םידחפ בלמ הרומח הכלה יבלכ .הנשונ תורבחתה םלועל גלפל רתלא .הנושאר ראפ תשא .הדידיה לשו ךלש .לקעתמ תושדקתה עסמב ךמצעל וישכע .לכאתמ אלו רעוב לש ושחל-ןוקצ הטוע ,התימצמ תופקתשה .הינש השאל ןמלא .התימב ןמאנ שיא .ךבקעב ךלאו יכח

And he said to himself: She is abandoned and alone mitpa‘alim/pa‘alulim/mitpa‘alim/nif‘alim She is abandoned and alone, the sail of her cape cold. A second wife and dead, facing her remembering husband. She placed a ship for a bed, a leg like an exposed oar. A journey of dark wanderings, their end still gathered.

Now, slowly, your beloved is enveloped by the earth. With her fades a hallucination that was ripped away and shall be erased. She did not atone her peace. The dove was not forgiven. She flew to throw revenge, poison within the joy.

Your love dissolved, caressed in concealment. A coveted foot to behold was the dream of the crown. Even as she was taken to wife there, she was not alone. The threat of a second passion hid shaking.

Verdun surrounds you in grey. A strange city of Christians. Tangier is far and the sea blackens a bitter storm. But ask from the mouth of a grieving man for an answer. Weeping like a second husband, desiring yet rejected.

Banishment and excommunication, surrendered tails arrived with trepidation. Dogs of stern rule expressed heartfelt fears. At once to separate forever an ancient connection. Yours and that of the friend, the first wife of glory.

Now for yourself, on a winding journey to sanctification. Shrouded with a whispered prayer, burning but not consumed. A widower to a second wife. A reflection annihilated, Wait and I will follow in your footsteps. A man faithful in death. (Yehoshua, Masa‘ 253-254)

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The elegy’s meticulous attention to meter produces a practically impossible task for

the skilled, official translators of the novel. In Spain, the modern land of Rabbi Elbaz’s

medieval home, translators Sonia de Pedro and Raquel García Lozano provide a literal,

unrhymed Spanish translation that elides the subheading of metrical terms and revises the

poem’s heading (i.e., “Y él piensa [And he thinks]”), rendering the poem into a series of

unorganized thoughts (Pedro and García Lozano 325-326; emphasis added). Nicholas de

Lange, a scholar of medieval Jewry and an English translator of the great modern Israeli

novelists (e.g., Amos Oz, S. Yizhar), provides an intermediate approach; eliding both header

and metrical sub-header, the English translation lacks rhythm or rhyme scheme, but

maintains a fairly consistent length (i.e., nine to eleven syllables per line) and a lyrical

alphabetic acrostic that circumvents the literal Hebrew (e.g., “Loved in her lord’s arms, never

alone, / Moves now the curtain another’s desire. / Now in the northlands somber and sad, /

Ocean-wide grimness holds thee from home.”) (246; emphasis added).

The challenge of translating Rabbi Elbaz’s poem into other languages illustrates the

singular resource of modern Hebrew to convey the cultural atmosphere of Hebrew poets

influenced by the popular Arabic conventions of poesy in al-Andalus.17 The Andalusian

culture of Elbaz inextricably weaves Muslim and Jewish expressions together, just as Muslim

characters sail and peacefully work with Ben Attar, and—as previously discussed in the

rabbi’s first composition—just as Elbaz composes Hebrew poetry from preexisting Arabic

words.

17 Only perhaps in Arabic, the primogenitor of Hebrew Andalusian prosody, could a quantitative meter parallel Rabbi Elbaz’s poem. To date, however, no such translation of the novel has been published.

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The Arabized meters of Elbaz’s poetry thus encapsulate the novel’s political

foregrounding of societal tensions in contemporary Israel. In a nonfictional essay, Yehoshua

has argued that modern Sephardic identity must be understood through the culturally

symbiotic relationship of Christians, Muslims, and Jews of medieval Spain. So intertwined

were Christian and Muslim cultures, Yehoshua speculates, that a “consciousness of the Other

became a structural element that enriched and fertilized Sephardic identity, even as the reality

of the Other became foggy and vanished altogether” (“Beyond Folklore” 128). This hybridity

idealizes Sephardim for their tolerance, a model for which Yehoshua envisions a

“Mediterranean identity” that can peacefully draw contemporary Arabs and Jews together.

The elegy from A Journey to the End of the Millennium spells out this internalization,

incorporating classical Arabized meters and modern Hebrew rhyme in the pen of an Andalusi

character within the undeniably European phenomenon of the modern novel. These temporal

and social juxtapositions generate exciting, new forms of Hebrew literature that point to a

symbiotic relationship between Andalusi Jews and Muslims, in contrast to the obdurate

religious Ashkenazic community of the European East.

Despite the attention to medieval form in the meter, the poem also betrays

Yehoshua’s modern hand. In an essay on the novel, Ephraim Ḥazan, one of the foremost

living scholars on medieval Hebrew hymns, criticized the poem’s use of rhyme (e.g., qar and

ha-nizkar in the first two lines), which reflect a “modern Israeli rhyme [ ינרדומ ילארשי זורח ]”

that “would generally not be accepted in medieval Spanish poetry [ תרישב ללכ ולבקתי אל

דרפס ],” just as the poem’s scheme of rhyming couplets, while a feature in sacred poetry,

“would absolutely never appear in classical secular poetry, which demands a monorhyme

[ חירבמ זורח שרדנ הבש ,תיסלקה לוחה תרישב אל ןפואו םינפ םושב ךא ]” (85).

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Furthermore, the poem almost entirely avoids shibbutzim ( םיצוביש ), the crucial

rhetorical device in Andalusian Hebrew poetry of borrowing and reinterpreting phrases from

the Hebrew Bible in which, depending on their fluidity, frequency, and innovation inside the

lines, a poet would display his creative talents. While biblical citations would certainly signal

a medievalist narrative—and was indeed exploited in the early Hebrew literature of the

Jewish Enlightenment—the novel largely does not bother with this device. Instead of citing

biblical texts, the poem lyrically paraphrases the major plot points of the narrative, perhaps a

way to contextualize the deep societal upheavals involved in the composition of the

Andalusian qina. The line on atonement and the unforgiven dove does not recall the

Tabernacle service in Leviticus so much as the novel’s setting on Yom Kippur, when the

second wife falls ill. Only in the line, “Shrouded with a whispered prayer, burning but not

consumed,” does Yehoshua gesture at medieval Hebrew rhetorical practice, combining a

reference to Moses’s encounter at the burning bush (Exo. 3:2) with an unclear phrase ( ןוקצ

שחל ) from biblical prophetic language (Isa. 26:16) that, at least by time of the sixth-century

Byzantine liturgical poet El‘azar HaQallir, became a term for prayer. Andalusian Hebrew

poetry avoided explicit references to diasporic cities (e.g., Verdun, Tangier),18 just as names

for other social groups (e.g., Christian) would have been substituted for their biblical

progenitors (e.g., Edomites). In other words, the text of the poem—as opposed to its

meticulous meter—belies specifically Andalusian characteristics otherwise assumed of the

fictional rabbi; a modern poem cloaked in medieval prosody.

18 Jonathan Decter discusses the first instance of Hebrew transliterations of Andalusian city names, in Avraham Ibn Ezra’s elegy, “Woe, Descended upon Sepharad [ דרפס ילע דרי ההא ],” a development Decter suggests points to the poet and Jewish communities’ exile from al-Andalus following the Almohad invasion (Iberian 68).

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The Andalusian qina also varied in the sophistication of its structure. Moshe Ibn Ezra,

for example, composed many poetic variations for the occasion of a person’s death. They

range from a series of two-distich elegies composed for his departed son Ya‘aqov to more

comprehensive treatments, such as a thirty-six line poem on the death of an acquaintance’s

wife (cf., Ibn Ezra, Shirei I:32, p. 33; I:3, pp. 5-7). The latter exemplifies the fullest structure

of an elegy following Arabic conventions, beginning with a preface on the fickle nature of

the world (eleven lines), before specifically eulogizing the beauty and modesty of the

departed wife (nine lines), consoling the mourner (thirteen lines), and closing with a blessing

for the mourner and his wife. The novel’s elegy for the second wife barely aligns with this

Andalusian template, but does shift in its subject matter: a description of the woman at the

moment of her death, a brief mention of the mourning husband, a broader description of the

local setting and its stern people, and lines about the speaker himself, who yearns to join her.

The poem does not offer the expected gnomic remarks on life, death, and the world, nor does

the presumed poet offer any consolation, a chief responsibility in Jewish eulogies for the

dead. However, Rabbi Elbaz’s divulged sentiments for the second wife in the closing volta

does, interestingly, reflect the occasionally ambiguous tone of the Andalusian elegy’s

speaker.

The section of eulogies in Andalusian elegies, not unlike the homoerotic longings for

killed soldiers in World War I poetry, afforded male poets a sanctioned platform to

intimately describe and extol actual people, even married women; this subgenre contrasts

with Andalusian Hebrew erotic poetry, whose animal metaphors and objectified descriptions

conceal any identification of the woman subject, if they ever even existed. We may consider

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the following lines from a long elegy that Moshe Ibn Ezra composed about his niece, who

died in childbirth, as an example of the unusually passionate expression of the speaker:

תקבח היהת-אל רשא רכז / לבא הטילמהו רבשמ ילע הדמע תקפרתמו הדוד ילע הטנ / איהו הימעפ ובס לואש ילבח תקפד הבהא די יהת רבק / ירעש-לע טאו רענ-תירב הרכז תקרפתמו םהמ העסנ םא / ירחא תומהל יתנומא רמשו תקשנ ידעב ושפנב התיה / דודנה שא יכה ידוד ילא בתכו תקפס דדנ ךרי-ילע קוצמ / ףכו תורג רובב רגסנ רשא רגה תקתמנ יהת והמכל ןוסא / סוכו ול םיברע תוסכ תותש באתי

She stood on a birthstool and, however, bore

a son she could not hold The snares of Sheol encircled her feet and she

leans on her beloved and pleads with him Remember the covenant of [our] youth, and gently on the gates

of my grave knock, with a loving hand And keep your faith in me for those [my daughters] who yearn for

a mother parting from them And write to my beloved, indeed, because of me the passion of wandering

was kissed upon his soul [He became] The stranger enclosed in the pit of strangeness, and other

troubles were ladled upon his travelling thigh He will be repulsed by drinks which would bring him pleasure, and a cup

of disaster, to one like him, shall taste sweet (I:203, lines 40-46, pp. 205-206)

Like the elegy of the second wife, the qina here depicts the subject’s death in situ

(i.e., on a birthstool, leaning on her husband), who then directs her attention to the mourning

speaker (lines 44-46), not unlike Elbaz’s redirecting line, “But ask from the mouth of a

grieving man for an answer.” The dying woman in Ibn Ezra’s qina appears to thank the

speaker for enduring hardships on her behalf, not unlike Elbaz’s complaint of the

“Banishment and excommunication, surrendered tails arrived with trepidation.” In both texts,

a solipsistic shift in the poem identifies the personal bond between the poet and his subject. I

specifically highlight Ibn Ezra’s poem to illustrate the slippery intimacy common in elegies.

S. D. Luzzatto, one of the first scholars of Ibn Ezra’s poetry, read the lines cited above as

proof that Ibn Ezra had a secret love affair with his niece, and that the family scandal from

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such an affair accounted for Ibn Ezra’s famous departure from Granada!19 In A Journey,

Elbaz’s infatuation with the second wife is not speculative; the narration depicts the second

wife as a kind of muse, whose very presence generates erotic poetry and later invigorates the

rabbi to speak at the first trial. Nevertheless, the speaker’s expressed longing for the deceased

does recall the intimate tones common in Andalusian elegies, which, when addressed to

women, were potentially read as romantic.

Despite Elbaz’s preoccupation with writing new lines of poetry, the novel does not

offer any other output from him, with the exception of a poetic snippet on the last page. With

the death and burial of the second wife, the mercantile partnership is restored, and Esther-

Minna agrees to raise Elbaz’s feverish son for a year while Elbaz sails back to Seville on Ben

Attar’s return voyage. On a ship somewhere in the Atlantic, deep in the night, Elbaz hears the

lament of the defeated Ben Attar, and starts to imagine the future of his son whom he has left

in Paris in the care of Esther-Minna:

.יעיבר ,ףסונ ריש בותכל ,טויפה רצי וב ררועתמ בושו ,לצינש ןבה לע ויניעב תועמד תולוע זאו ןיא לבא .ויד לש תסקו הנשי הצונ התוא אתה תורוק ןיב ורתונ םא אוצמל וביבס ששגמ אוהו הרוש וחומב רמשל ,רטע-ןב לש תכשמנה יהנה תניק בגא ,ץלאנ אוה ןכלו .רבד אצומ אוה ‘Yehoshua, Masa( ...ךתולחל הטא אלו ,ךניבו יניב םיה :וכותב הטייפתה רבכש ,הנושאר

318( Then tears welled in his eyes for the child who was saved, and once more the poetic urge woke within him, to write one more poem, the fourth. He felt around him to see whether that old quill pen and inkwell were still there among the timbers of the cabin. But he found nothing. And so he was compelled, to the accompaniment of Ben Attar’s long drawn-out keening, to save in his head the first line that had composed

19 See Brody, “Moses” 309-310; Rascoff 6-7. Luzzatto’s speculation—first offered in 1839—continues to fuel biographies of Ibn Ezra, such as that in Curt Leviant’s anthology, Masterpieces of Hebrew Literature: “Ibn Ezra was in love with his niece, and the ensuing disappointment when his family forbade the marriage is evident in much of his melancholy-laden poetry” (173).

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itself inside him: Is there a sea between us, that I should not turn aside to visit thee . . . (de Lange 309)

With a lyrical flourish, the novel ends as Rabbi Elbaz captures his emotional

separation from his son, who will surely travel by horse with Abu Lutfi to Seville next

summer to reunite. The beginning of the imagined poem forms in Elbaz’s mind while hearing

Ben Attar’s spontaneous elegy (qinat ha-nehi) for the death of his pregnant second wife,

even though the poem addresses the image of his son studying in Paris, an image for which

“the little rabbi was filled with joy [ רשוא ןטקה ברה אלמתמ ]” (Yehoshua, Masa‘ 318; de Lange

308). This amalgamation of elegy and aspiration becomes clearer when reviewing its source.

Although Yehoshua composed original lines and a new meter in the previous poem, the

ending line here borrows from an existing elegy. Upon passing by his older brother’s

burial—as the Arabic superscription of the poem notes—Shemuel Hanagid stopped and

composed a fifteen-line elegy, the first lines of which begin:

ךתולחל הטא אלו / ךניבו יניב םיה ?ךתרובק לע בשאו / דרח בלב ץורא אלו !ךתוחאב דגוב יהא / תאזכ השעא םא ,תמא ,ךתמעל ךרבק ילע / בשוי ינא ,יחא ,ההא .ךתתימב יבואכמכ / יבל ךותב בואכמ ךל

Is there a sea between you and me / that I should not turn to visit you? And should I not run with trembling heart / and sit by your grave? In truth, if I should not do so / I would be a traitor to your brotherhood! Ah, my brother, I am sitting / by your grave, beside you, anguish for you within my heart / like my anguish on [the day of] your death. (Schirmann, Ha-shirah I:30.5, p. 108)20

20 Yarden (Ben Tehillim no. 99, p. 246) vocalizes the poem slightly differently, but Yehoshua’s quotation follows Schirmann’s version.

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Hanagid composed at least eighteen elegies for his brother Yitzḥaq, who died of

illness in 1041, and these moving poems reenact the unreciprocated conversations between

the living mourner and the dead. In this elegy, Hanagid emphasizes the irony of the current

relationship: sharing a physical propinquity to a brother he cannot see, speak to, or awaken.

The metaphor of the original poem renders a meaning opposite the literalized setting of the

ship-riding Elbaz (i.e., since we are not separated by sea, with you buried so close to where I

live, I can certainly visit you). As illustrated in his poem, “The Miracle at the Heart of the

Sea [ םיה בלב סנה ],” in which a speaker recounts surviving a mythical all-consuming monster,

the sea for Hanagid evokes that impassible barrier his brother’s soul has transcended, while

his body remains.21

A skilled craftsman of both Arabic and Hebrew grammar and poetry, Hanagid—more

so than any other Andalusi Hebrew poet—experimented with a wide variety of quantitative

meters. However, unlike Yehoshua’s innovative meter previously discussed, this elegy does

follow a simple, conventional form: ha-marnin. The cited elegy marking the end of the

rabbi’s poetic journey thus subtly circles back to the beginning of the novel—mirroring the

cycle of the journey on ship—when the rabbi first considered the “rhymes and meters of the

new style of ha-marnin.” The same Arabized meter that sparked Elbaz’s interest in

composing poetry reanimates the rabbi again, and the juxtaposition between the second

wife’s death and the son’s future reunion reflect the dual-sided characteristic of the meter:

ha-marnin, literally “the one that causes joy,” has conventionally been associated with

21 This poem, and another by Yehuda Halevi, is also the namesake for Agnon’s 1935 novella In the Heart of the Seas ( םימי בבלב ), a predecessor of sorts to Yehoshua’s novel, about the fantastical voyage of nineteenth-century Hassidim sailing to Jerusalem.

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elegies, such as Hanagid’s elegies for his brother. As in the case of the second wife’s elegy,

this selection of poetry displays Yehoshua’s familiarity with Andalusian meters that

metatextually bridges the modern Sephardic writing process with its ancestral initiator.

3.1.1 Performing Yehoshua’s Journey

A Journey to the End of the Millennium bore a new, strange life after its publication.

To commemorate its twentieth anniversary, the Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv ( תילארשיה הרפואה )

commissioned a ten-scene adaptation of the novel, first performed on May 21, 2005, that

continued for several seasons. With music by Georgian-Israeli composer Joseph

Bardanashvili, direction by Omri Nitzan, and, surprisingly, a libretto produced by Yehoshua

himself, the opera A Journey to the End of the Millennium reconfigures the novel with sharp

contrasts.

Why would Yehoshua turn his novel into an opera? Would not this type of theatre, so

emphatically European (i.e., its Early Modern Italian origins, its orchestra and its arias, even

the system of European modern staff notation dictating the music), belie the medieval, un-

symphonic and microtonal Andalusian culture embodied in the novel’s traveling

protagonists? Such an adaptation entails the transformation of a novel that is almost entirely

devoid of dialogue into a plot starkly conveyed by the singing words of its characters. The

two wives, so objectified that the novel does not even offer them names, now play starring

roles, singing dialogues and soliloquies alongside Ben Attar and the rest of the crew.

Yet, the adapted opera provided the novelist another opportunity to access and

channel Andalusian poetry. In an essay published on the Israeli Opera’s website, Yehoshua

explained that writing the novel originally offered him the chance to imitate his favorite

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poetry from al-Andalus by writing new poetry in quantitative meters. While he consulted

with various historians to accurately depict the medievalist setting, the project to produce

original poetry in medieval form was nevertheless too challenging, and only one poem from

his attempts surfaced (i.e., the second wife’s elegy). Nevertheless, Yehoshua continued, “the

poetry that did not find its overt expression remained preserved in the book [ האצמ אלש הרישה

רפסה ךותב השובכ הראשנ ,יולגה הייוטיב תא ],” and when the idea for an adapted opera arose, so too

did “the opportunity to turn my “medieval poetry” into actual poetry [ ימי תריש״ל תונמדזה תאז

שממ לש הרישל ךופהל ילש ״םייניבה ]” (“Me-roman”). In other words, it is through an opera that

Yehoshua could finally voice the Andalusian poetry that inspired and infused the atmosphere

of his novel.

While Yehoshua’s novel gestures at conventions of Andalusian poetics (e.g., in the

sub-header of the novel’s elegy for the second wife, in the narration of Dunash Ben Labrat’s

influence on Rabbi Elbaz), the opera makes no reference—either in the performance or in the

text or paratext of the published libretto—to the poetry that pervades the opera. Similar to the

uncited quotations of kabbalistic literature in Muñiz-Huberman’s historical novel on

Binyamin of Tudela, the poetic allusions would likely fly by the opera’s audience, unless

they were otherwise versed in medieval Hebrew poetry. The opera does not include the

elegies from the novel, since the second wife does not die and Rabbi Elbaz travels as a

childless bachelor.22 Nevertheless, the opera is saturated with quotations from Andalusi

Hebrew poets, specifically Hanagid, Ibn Gabirol, and Halevi.

22 By having the character sing entirely in an effeminate, high falsetto, the composer Bardanashvili appears to justify Elbaz’s bachelorhood by challenging his interest in women.

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The first scene, for example, depicts the wedding of Ben Attar to the second wife in

Tangier—another innovation in adaptation—with a chorus of women singing of the bride’s

beauty under the wedding canopy:

הייפהפי הלכ / ךדוד תומד תאז ימ :םישנ .והחקו החלש / ילא ירמאת יכ יאור בוטו םודא / ןיע הפי אוהה .והחשמ אנ-םוק / הז יערו ידוד

Women: What form is your beloved, beautiful bride, That you say to me, “Send for him and take him?” Is he beautiful-eyed, ruddy and well-loved That is my beloved and lover, rise and anoint him. (Yehoshua, Libret 15)

The chorus surrounds the canopy as wedding attendees collectively celebrate the

sacred event with words that apply to the newly married couple. The original lines, from a

liturgical song by Ibn Gabirol, “Closed Gate [ רגסנ רשא רעש ],” imagines a dialogue between

the congregation of Israel and God through the conventional midrashic metaphor of two

lovers. The song illustrates the importance of contextual contrast that pervades the opera.

“Closed Gate” is still traditionally sung by North African and Middle Eastern Jews during

baqashot ( תושקב ), when men gather in synagogues before dawn to sing liturgical

supplications. From the synagogue to a shore in Tangier, from a divine relationship to a

physical couple, and from singing men to singing women, Yehoshua creatively appropriates

medieval poetry by placing them in the mouths of new voices in new contexts.

The fourth scene in the opera, set on the ship while Ben Attar’s team sails to Paris, is

entirely comprised of monologues taken from Yehuda Halevi’s sea poems. Halevi composed

the poems either on the ship or upon arriving in Egypt, and captured the psychological

turmoil of uncharted sea travel in old age. Once again, by placing the Hebrew words in the

mouths of the two wives and a Muslim captain, in addition to Elbaz, Yehoshua broadens the

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imagined Andalusian culture of courtier rabbi-poets to more inclusively embrace women and

non-Jews, both groups historically unlikely to have been fluent in the biblical Hebrew

scattered throughout the poems.

At the end of the opera, the second wife, alive and unwell—the opera avoids the fatal

tetanus infection from the novel—yearns to die for the shame of having caused the ban on

Ben Attar’s business and the ruinous attempt to restore it, and wails another elegy from

Hanagid:

יתדוקפ םוי רהמי :היינשה השאה יתדילי םוי דבאיו .רפע ילא לבוא שיח

The Second Wife: Hurry the day of my fate And perish the day I was born Quickly set a grave on earth. (53)

In performance, Bardanashvili’s dramatic, operatic melody overshadows the poem’s

symmetrical rhythm, and in the published libretto, the lyrics do not adhere to the typical

vocalization or format found in modern publications. In his authoritative edition of Hanagid’s

dīwān, for example, Dov Yarden spaces each word to align the poet’s methodical structure of

the ha-marnin meter (see fig. 1).

Figure 1. First lines of Hanagid’s elegy in Yarden’s Ben Tehillim, no. 90, p. 239.

Yarden directs the reader to the textuality of Hanagid’s poetry, arranging each line’s

metrical foot into neat columns to show the precise sequencing of a short syllable (i.e., ו ,פ ,י )

followed by three long syllables; since these sounds, as previously mentioned, are not heard

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in pronunciation, Yarden’s critical edition displays this prosody on the page. By contrast, in

the opera adaptation of Journey, not only do the second wife’s words not sound like an

Andalusian elegy—performed by an operatic soprano evoking an Italian diva—but, in the

published libretto, they do not read like a medieval poem either. The “overt expression” that

Yehoshua desired in the novel is indistinguishable from any other lyric sung throughout the

opera. The libretto for A Journey to the End of the Millennium thus bridges medieval al-

Andalus with modern Israel as a published work solely attributed to the novelist. A project to

convey ancestral Jewish identity, projected onto both stage and page, here blurs temporal and

regional markers of difference otherwise distinguished by the small graphic symbols above

words on a page.

3.2 The New Tunes of Amnon Shamosh

While A. B. Yehoshua’s novel recreates a single type of medieval poem in the elegy

for the second wife, Amnon Shamosh, another celebrated Sephardi novelist in Israel, has

published a variety of modern-Andalusian poetry. Born in Aleppo, Syria in 1929, Shamosh

immigrated to Israel as a child and spent most of his life on the kibbutz he helped found,

Ma‘ayan Barukh, located near the border of Syria and Lebanon. Like Yehoshua, his writing

often centers on Sephardim, and he is most famous for Michel Ezra Safra and His Sons

( וינבו ארפס ארזע לשימ ), a novel about a Jewish family in Syria during World War II and their

relocation to Israel. The novel was adapted into a popular television miniseries in 1982,

actually the first of its kind in Israel, helping to spotlight what film critic Yvonne Kozlovsky

Golan calls “the repressed and silenced stories of the Mizrahi community” for a broader,

primetime viewership (140). Broadly speaking, Shamosh fits alongside a generation of

Hebrew writers (e.g., the Baghdadi-born writers Nissim Rejwan and Shimon Ballas, the

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Alexandrian-born novelist Yitzḥak Gormezano-Goren, the Sanaʽa-born poet Brakha Serri)

whose writing of the predominately Arab cultures they immigrated from helped expand and

redefine Jewish Israeli literature.

In his autobiographical writing, Shamosh described his worldview as an accumulation

of three metaphorical lenses that he acquired over the years: that of the Arabic-speaking

youth in Syria, the Hebrew-speaking educator resettled in Israel, and the idyllic shepherd on

the kibbutz (“Opto-biographiya” 12). Each of these identities inform the various subjects of

his writing. This includes Shamosh’s novella about crypto-Jews in Spain, Marrano Mountain

( םיסונאה רה ), in which he identifies medieval ancestors through the first lens of Syrian

Jewishness. The Arabic, Spanish, and Hebrew surnames in his mother’s family, for example,

point to a grander Sephardic heritage rooted in Iberia:

הנח דדנ שוריגה רחא ודדנו דרפס תולגב ויחש ,דמחנו וסאבק-איחי-ןבא תוחפשמל תב ימא .ריעה בלחב הבישי ןהל ונקו ואבש דע םיל ןופצמש תוצראב

My mother is a descendant of the Ibn-Yaḥya, Cabasso and Neḥmad families, who lived in exile in Spain, and after the expulsion wandered and stayed in lands north of the sea, until they came and acquired a settlement in the city of Aleppo. (12)

This heritage is most clearly articulated and celebrated in an innovative collection of

Shamosh’s poems published in 1981, titled Dīwān Sepharadi ( ידרפס ןאויד ). As the Arabic and

Persian word dīwān (plural dawāwīn) refers to a collection of writing by a poet, and when

used in Hebrew specifically refers to the collected poetry of a medieval poet from an Islamic

land, Shamosh’s title already betrays a conceit for medievalist writing. Paralleling his three-

fold Syrian-Israeli-Kibbutz identity, the book is divided into three dawāwīn. A “French

Dīwān [ יתפרצ ןאויד ],” about his visits to Paris, and an “Israeli Dīwān [ ילארשי ןאויד ],” about life

on the kibbutz, contain poems Abraham Marthan calls modern for their “Western devices and

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techniques,” such as ambivalence, irony, and free verse (60). These poems contrast

considerably from the first section, the “Spanish Dīwān [ ידרפס ןאויד ],”23 which recreate a

variety of conventional Andalusian poetry, as apparent from generic titles such as “Wine

Poem [ ןיי ריש ],” “Complaint Poem [ הנולת ריש ],” and “Desire Poem [ קשח ריש ].” Each entry in

the “Spanish Dīwān” exemplifies the adoption of medieval form by Hebrew-writing

Sephardim, but I will focus here on two poems that specifically draw on the speaker’s

identification with an Andalusian heritage.

Shamosh initiates his book of poems with a hitpa’arut ( תוראפתה ), a poetic genre

developed by Andalusi Hebrew poets and derived from an old Arabic convention known as

fakhr ( رخف ). In his multi-volume analysis of the poetic genres in Andalusian Hebrew poetry,

Israel Levin distinguishes the hitpa’arut for its “superlative egocentrism, evident in the

presence of the self in every ornament of speech, in its arrogance about everything, and a

degree of pride that knows no bounds [ תומקיר לכב ינאה לש ותוחכונב תרכינה ,תגלפומ תוירטנצוגאב

לובג תעדוי הניאש המר הוואגבו לכה לע תואשנתהב ,ןושלה ]” (Me‘il 152). In pre-Islamic Arabic poetry,

the fakhr might appear as a motif at the end part of a qaṣīda or as its own poem, in which the

poet might boast of himself, the invincibility of his tribe, or the beauty of his poetry. While

the tenth-century Babylonian polymath Sa‘adya Gaon appears to have been the first to adopt

the Arabic fakhr into Hebrew, Yosef Tobi notes that “Hebrew poetry attained its fullest

exposition of the motif of self-praise only in Spain” (247). The canon of Hebrew Andalusian

23 I use “Spanish” to fit alongside the other national dawāwīn. Sepharadi in modern Hebrew, of course, also means Sephardic.

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poetry offers only a small fraction of these self-praise poems, but the most distinguished

poets did experiment with it.

The eleventh-century Shemuel Hanagid was of the first Andalusi Hebrew poets to

employ the hitpa’arut, a motif expected of someone who identified as “my generation’s

David [ ירודב דוד ינא ]” and considered his work the successor of Davidic and Solomonic

literature, titling his dawāwīn The Son of Psalms ( םילהת ןב ), The Son of Ecclesiastes ( תלהק ןב ),

and the Son of Proverbs ( ילשמ ןב ) (Hanagid no. 7, line 38, p. 33). Hanagid’s motifs of self-

praise often project a glorious family lineage to substantiate his poetic talents, such as the

following lines in a long self-praise poem:

,םימעטה יביטמ ,םשה יתמ ,יררמ ראשו תהק דכנ ינא ,םימדב םימד ורעה םינפל לאומש ףוצ-ןבמו יבאמו ,םימוחלה תברקו רשב ראש לא איבנ השמ ןיבו יבא ןיבו ,םיממע ץבקהב ארקי ׳ינב׳ יל אוהו ׳יבא׳ ומש ארקא ינא !םימומב אלמ שונא אצמת רקח - הצמשל םומ יסחיב איצוי ימו

I am a scion of Kohath and relative of the Merarite, men of renown, best in melodies And bloods flow between my father and Samuel son of Tzuf of yore And between my father and the prophet of God, Moses, a flesh and blood relative I will call him “My father” and he will call me “My son,” at the nations’ gathering So anyone who will defamatorily expose a blemish in my lineage – search and they will find themselves filled with blemishes! (no. 131, lines 37-41, p. 282)

Despite his unusually powerful station as a vizier, military general, and patron of

Hebrew poetry, Hanagid’s boasting here specifically focuses on his distinguished pedigree,

which Tobi considers one of the “chief themes in his self-perception” (255). To descend from

the Temple-singing tribe of Levi, such as the clans of the Kohathites and Merarites (cf. Num.

3:27; 33), equates to a God-given talent for song. Hanagid goes further by claiming a family

relation between his father and two of the greatest Levite prophets, Moses and Samuel.

Hanagid’s boast stops one degree shy from equating himself to a prophet, a biblically-

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mandated prohibition, yet the lines of self-praise still project the kind of arrogance

reminiscent of a Bedouin tribe’s fakhr; none can compare to the pure tribal pedigree of

Hanagid, superior by its absence of a non-Levite blemish.

In addition to mythologizing family lineage, Andalusi Hebrew poets incorporated the

hitpa’arut by boasting of their poetic prowess, another motif well-established by Arabic

poets. No Hebrew poet is as famous in this regard as Ibn Gabirol, who from a young age

distinguished his talents from others in Saragossa. Ibn Gabirol’s self-praise poem, discussed

in the previous chapter as it related to Moshe David Gaon’s Ladino translation, compactly

exemplifies this convention:

םינגונו םירש לכל רונכ ינא ,דבעל יל רישהו – רשה ינא םינגסה ישארב תועבגמו םיכלמל הרטעכ ירישו .םינמשה-ןב בלכ יב יבלו - יתונש הרשע ששו יננהו

I am the prince – and the song my slave,

I am a lyre to all singers and players And my song is like a crown to kings

and turbans to head rulers And here I am, sixteen years old –

but my heart within me is like the heart of an eighty-year-old. (Shirei Ha-Ḥol Yarden, I:109, p. 225)

The speaker boasts of his lyrical talents with metaphors of royalty. He surpasses and

inspires all other poets in the land (i.e., “singers and players”) because of his mastery in

poesy (“the song my slave”). Unlike his one-time benefactor Hanagid, an actual royal

authority with a proud pedigree, the poor, orphaned, and young Ibn Gabirol has only his own

lyrical genius to achieve renown. Nevertheless, it is this genius that allows him to transcend

the expectations of teenagerhood for that of a wise elder, composing songs that deserve a seat

on the highest echelons of royalty (“a crown to kings / and turbans to head rulers”). Ibn

Gabirol self-reflexively illustrates this talent by incorporating word play (e.g., ha-sar/ha-

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shir), rabbinic legend (cf. Y. Ber. 7:4), a rhyming quantitative meter (known as ha-

merubbeh), and plenty of biblical inlays (e.g., II Sam.19:7; I Sam. 16:16; II Sam. 12:30; Ezra

9:2) in a mere three lines.

In his own “Self-Praise Poem [ תוראפתה ריש ],” Shamosh amalgamates Hanagid’s

boasted family pedigree with Ibn Gabirol’s poetic prowess to adopt the medieval form into

modern Hebrew. Similar to Yehoshua’s signposting of quantitative metrics in his elegy,

Shamosh informs the potentially unacquainted reader on the first page that his writing

deliberately adapts Andalusian poetry, offering a footnote that “hitpa’arut poems are an

accepted genre - a literary convention - in the Hebrew poetry of Spain [ גוס םה תוראפתה יריש

דרפסב תירבעה הרישב – תיתורפס היצנבנוק – לבוקמ ]” (Dīwān 7). Unlike Yehoshua’s elegy, the

poem does not comply with the rigid demands of a quantitative meter, or even a consistent

meter, but does break each line into hemistiches to produce internal and external rhymes. The

poem can be categorized as a hitpa’arut by its foregrounding the speaker’s egocentrism, a

technique allowing Shamosh to introduce himself as a poet of Syrian and Andalusian roots:

םייובח ינוימדב ירישו / םייודב ינורכזמ ירופס םייונב םילת ילת יתבו / םייודע םילוסלסב יטפשמ ירבע לכמ / ינפיצמ ירבע ירמא תוסכב / ינפטוע ידיתע ירבא םיעגי / בטוחכ ינא בתוכ ירדנ בטימ / םיקמכ םיסמ יניעמ שאר הבוצ-םרא / יבבלב הלבאו בלח ינבו יתונב םע םלוח / יבא לע ,ןיעמב יח תיברעב תירבע לבתא / החנמו תירחש טיברשה ידיב יטע / החונז תוכלמב בצוחכ ינאו / םירהכ ירוה בצעמ ינאו / םירמח המה הכלמה הנימ עמש / הנר המש ימא הכרד יכרד ריאמ / הנח קרב רהז השמ אל הלאג / השמ ומש יבא השבכש הז ומכ / ן״ונ-ןב םויה ינא ןראו רפסא / ןורחא םוי אובי דע

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ןורכז ביצה הז / ןוראה יאשונ אנ ורמאי

From my imagined memory are my stories / and my songs hidden in my imagination My sentences adorned in trills / and my stanzas built on piles upon piles My past floods me / from all directions My future wraps me / in the garment of my words I write like a sculptor / my limbs wearied Concluding as fulfilling / the best of my vows Aleppo and Ebla are in my heart / Aram Tzova the top of my priorities Living in a wellspring, dreaming / of my father, with my daughters and my sons Morning and afternoon / I will spice Hebrew with Arabic In an abandoned kingdom / my pen in my hand is the scepter My parents are like mountains / and I like a carver They are the earth / and I mold My mother’s name is Rina / learn from her, the queen The bright radiance of her grace / lights my path through hers My father’s name is Moshe / he did not reap redemption Today I am fifty [Bin-Nun] / like he who captured her Until my last day / I will tell and I will rejoice The carriers of the ark will say / this one left a memory (7)

The poem begins by praising the speaker’s mind as a fount for creative expression,

capable of producing an endless stream of stanzas with “sentences adorned in trills.” The

speaker displays his poetic prowess with word play recalling Ibn Gabirol’s combination of

prince and song (ha-sar/ha-shir); here, parents are like mountains (horai ke-harim), Moses

does not reap (Moshe/masha), and a surname simultaneously signifies an age (Bin-Nun). This

word play extends to Shamosh’s knowledge of other languages. He boasts that “Morning and

afternoon / I will spice Hebrew with Arabic,” playing with the Hebrew terms for the three

daily Jewish prayer services, Shaḥarit, Minḥa, and ‘Arvit, the latter of which shares a

homonymic pun with “Arabic.”

A convention for creative word pairings thus allows Shamosh to proudly identify

himself as a complex configuration of Arab Jew. He pines for both Aleppo—using the

Arabic name Ḥalab—and Aram Tzova, the Hebew title Syrian Jews use to refer to the same

city; Ebla is both an ancient kingdom that marks some of the earliest records of what is now

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modern-day Syria, and, as a footnote on the poem elaborates, archeological excavations done

there in the 1970s revealed “tablets that mentioned Abraham and Eber [ םהרבא םירכזנ היסרחב

רבעו ]” (7). To claim ancient and modern Syria as historically Jewish reframes the social

stigma commonly associated with Israeli immigrants from Arabic-speaking countries.

Instead, to come from Syrian stock means enhancing the flavor, or “spice,” of the Hebrew

language.

But Shamosh does not only claim Syria in the poem. Shamosh’s phrase, “Aleppo and

Ebla are in my heart,” borrows from the famous line of Yehuda Halevi’s Zionide poem, “My

heart is in the East and I am at the ends of the West [ ברעמ ףוסב יכנאו חרזמב יבל ].” The Syrian

cities are actually north of Shamosh’s home in Ma‘ayan Barukh (alluded to in the subsequent

line, “Living in a wellspring”), but rephrasing “My heart is in the East”—a phrase commonly

associated in modern Hebrew as a Zionist slogan for the Holy Land—constructs a dizzying

geography. Shamosh reverses the trajectory of a Jewish ancestral homeland, not anticipating

a future journey East and South to the land of Israel (à la Halevi), but nostalgically imagining

a past back to the North and West of Syria and al-Andalus. The speaker’s earlier line, “My

past floods me / from all directions,” reinforces the diasporic narrative associated with

Sephardim, who assert a heritage in Spain before branching out following the fifteenth-

century Jewish expulsion.

Shamosh does not boast of a distinguished poetic pedigree,24 but does attribute his

creative writing to the memory and guidance of his two parents. Andalusi Hebrew poets

24 It is interesting to note Shamosh’s missed opportunity to parallel Hanagid’s motif, since the maternal Andalusian name Shamosh boasts of in his non-fiction writing, Ibn Yaḥya, was also Ibn Gabirol’s Arabic name.

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never referred to their mothers in a hitpa’arut, but the reference in Shamosh’s poem helps

amplify the speaker’s elevated status, since Rina resembles in sound the unrelated Spanish

word for queen, reina (i.e., “learn from her, the queen”). The association recalls Ibn

Gabirol’s use of royal imagery, since it implies a princedom in Shamosh, who already writes

from an “abandoned kingdom / my pen in my hand is the scepter.”

His father Moshe, who died in Syria when Shamosh was a child, did not have the

opportunity to immigrate with the rest of the family to Israel. If Hanagid boasted of

descending from a father related to Moses, Shamosh here directly equates his father to his

biblical namesake in order to identify himself as Moses’s successor, Joshua Bin-Nun, who

does merit entrance to the Promised Land after the prophet’s death in the wilderness. If

Moshe the father did not directly instruct his child to write, his loss nevertheless thematically

appears throughout Shamosh’s other writings, substantiating the final boast of having “left a

memory.”

3.2.1 Shamosh’s Muwashshaḥ

While Shamosh boasts of his Arabic in “Self-Praise Poem,” his multilingualism

comes to best use when adapting the form of a type of poem known as the muwashshaḥ

( حشوم in Arabic, commonly transliterated into Hebrew as חשוומ or translated as רוזא ריש ).

Unlike other genres only accepted by Andalusi Hebrew poets after centuries of development

in eastern lands—such as the pre-Islamic fakr discussed above—the strophic, complex-

metered muwashshaḥ (plural muwashshaḥāt) specifically arose in al-Andalus, and was

promptly incorporated by Hebrew poets for both liturgical and secular use starting in the

tenth century.

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The form of the Hebrew muwashshaḥ is distinguished by three unusual features. Its

name, likely an Arabic derivation for a “girdle,” alludes to the scheme of a master rhyme

throughout the poem that chains each strophe to one another. Ornate rhyme schemes parallel

unusual meters of each strophe, as the Hebrew muwashshaḥ offers some of the most

experimental quantitative meters known; individual poems, such as those by Hanagid, may

contain intricate sequences of long and short vowels never again reproduced in Hebrew

poetry. Finally, and most famously, the muwashshaḥ often closes with a final strophe known

as the kharja ( ةجرخ ), or exit. In Arabic muwashshaḥāt, the kharja often switches the speaker

of the poem, most clearly signaled through a change in the language of the verse. Given its

sacred role, liturgical muwashshaḥāt maintained a consistent Hebrew for the kharja, which

often is comprised of a biblical quotation. On the other hand, secular Hebrew muwashshaḥāt

adopted erotic or panegyric themes from Arabic models, and often closed with a kharja

transliterated in Hebrew letters from either vernacular Arabic or Hispano-Romance; instead

of a biblical quotation, the kharja in this case likely quotes or alludes to a popular Andalusian

folk song.

An example of a conventional, medieval Hebrew muwashshaḥ will elucidate the way

its form fits into Shamosh’s modern dīwān. The muwashshaḥ “Desire Lodged in the Heart

[ בלב הנל הואת ]” comes from Yosef Ibn Tzadiq, a twelfth-century Córdovan judge who wrote

over twenty secular and liturgical Hebrew muwashshaḥāt. The poem contains six strophes,

each comprising four lines with the peculiar quantitative meter of five vowels for each initial

hemistich (- - - ◡ -), and eight for each secondary hemistich (- - - ◡ - ◡ - -). It is “girdled”

by a strophic rhyme scheme of ab ab ab CD / ef ef ef CD / etc., closing with a non-Hebrew

kharja that maintains the CD master rhyme. The poem imagines a dialogue between the poet

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and his lover, both lovesick from separation. The last two stanzas of the poem illustrate the

muwashshaḥ form, including the characteristic linguistic shift of the kharja:

םיחלדב יחלה לע םיחא יכבמ םיחא ילחגכ םימח םיחל ודרי םיחמרלו ,ודפר לד םיחופתב אנ .הנצ דעב ואש יבל המלע ידשמ קפדתמו יבצ דקוש התלד ילע םוי קפרתתו ,לוקב אשת התבש רדחמ :קפאתהל הלכוא אל - התדלי לע .הנאי דאתשא ביבחלא וימ המאמ ירפכ

From weeping come sibling crystals on the cheek Falling wet, hot like the coals of ovens Please, with apples refresh this sickness, and the spears of the maiden’s breasts lift a shield to protect my heart. The day he came upon her door her wakeful beloved knocks From her sitting room she raises her voice, and clings To the one who birthed her [Saying] I cannot restrain myself:

Qué faray, mamma, meu al-ḥabīb estad yana. (Ibn Tzadiq, no. 12, lines 17-24, p. 46)

In this secular muwashshaḥ, the penultimate strophe conveys the speaker’s suffering

with conventional motifs (e.g., crystal tears) and biblical allusions (e.g., refreshing apples

from Song 2:5). The final strophe shifts to the young woman whose restiveness upon hearing

a knock at the door compels her to voice the closing words of the kharja. The line, clearly

transliterated into Hebrew from another language, distinguishes between the voices of the

scripturally-fluent man and the vernacular-speaking (and presumably illiterate) woman. What

the woman actually says has, like so many kharajāt, been the subject of scholarly debate (an

issue discussed further below). Certain words seem to point to Arabic (e.g., ביבחלא ≈ al-

ḥabīb), others to Romance (e.g., דאתשא ≈ estad), or perhaps even both ( המאמ ≈ mamma). In

his groundbreaking research on the kharja, Samuel M. Stern carefully transliterated the

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Hebrew letters (i.e., “Kfr’ m.mh myw ’lḥbyb ’sht’dy’nh.’”), which he interpreted to mean,

“What shall I do, mother, my friend is at the door?” (Stern 120; 145).

Ibn Tzadiq’s kharja clearly borrows from imagery in the Song of Songs of a lover

knocking at the door (5:2), but Stern pointed to the frequency of the phrase, “What shall I

do,” that appears in various kharajāt, as well as subsequent medieval Galician-Portuguese

courtly poetry known as cantiga de amigo (cf. Stern 59-60). The identification of this phrase

and his translation of the kharja were part of Stern’s efforts to uncover the type of vulgar

Hispano-Romance (commonly called Mozarabic) spoken by medieval Iberian Muslims,

Jews, and Christians before the Castilian expansion tied to the Reconquista. Whatever the

line means or references, the “poetic diglossia” of a kharja such as Ibn Tzadiq’s underscores

Tova Rosen’s assertion that the muwashshaḥ is “a literary embodiment of the different

languages and ethnic groups of al-Andalus; it is what makes these poems so quintessentially

Andalusian” (“The Muwashshah” 168).

An Andalusian form evoking different languages and ethnic groups aptly fits into

Shamosh’s poem about multinational peace, “Voice of the Turtledove [ רותה לוק ].” Originally

published in the Yedi‘ot Aḥronot newspaper on May 11, 1979, a month and a half after the

signing of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty and some two and a half years before President

Anwar Sadat’s assassination, the poem represents the short-lived optimism expressed by

some Israeli writers at the time.25 Shamosh celebrates the potential for peace as an imagined

25 Editorials from contemporaneous Israeli newspapers range in opinions on the subject. For example, for the March 26, 1979 edition of Ma‘ariv, dedicated entirely to the peace treaty signed that day, Shemuel Segev writes, “Let us tonight raise a toast for peace [ םולשל סוכ ברעה םירנ הבה ],” adjacent to Moshe Shamir’s cynical editorial on the irrevocable dangers to follow (Segev).

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return to an al-Andalus often mythologized as a utopic era of religious coexistence during

tolerant Muslim rule. The structure of the muwashshaḥ allows Shamosh, an Arabic and

Hebrew-speaking Israeli, to at once address the Egyptian and Israeli nations in their official

languages while underscoring a shared ancestral heritage in the Sephardi public figure whose

quote comprises the kharja. In my English translation, I elide the refrain (i.e., “Earrings of

gold”), which reappears after each three-line stanza:

תחכשנ םולש תנוי / ךל השענ בהז-ירות החרזמ בושי ףועי / ףלא ןב בהזה-רות ףס לע ביבא םידקה / ול ךלה ףלח םשג ףסכנ םימע ביבא / עיצפה שדח ןדע ושע ידי ודער / עימשה ולוק רותה תחכשנ םולש תנוי / ךל השענ בהז-ירות החרזמ בושי ףועי / ףלא ןב בהזה-רות ת״יב ד״מל תב הלותב / ךייחל וואנ םירת תאבחנ םילכה לא / םיתשו םישולש םינש תיברה אל ןה תותשל / ךייחל סוכ אנ םירנ תחכשנ םולש תנוי / ךל השענ בהז-ירות החרזמ בושי ףועי / ףלא ןב בהזה-רות לינ-א-רחב לחכ לע / ךיפנכ אנ וניבלי לילג דעו ןאווסא ןמ / ךיבהוא וילשי לילכ הצמ החמת / םינזאמה לע הצונ תחכשנ םולש תנוי / ךל השענ בהז-ירות החרזמ בושי ףועי / ףלא ןב בהזה-רות תוניעמ ימ באשל / ונתריש הבושת תוניי הברה ורמש / ארזע-ןב ג״בשר שנוד תונכשה הנזלעת / גזמה םש-ינב ותשי תחכשנ םולש תנוי / ךל השענ בהז-ירות החרזמ בושי ףועי / ףלא ןב בהזה-רות ךירצ ןתויחהל / וניפב תויחא תופש ךיראת-לא סר׳ג ןמ / הדיד׳ג תאמ׳ענ עמסנ ךיראי וימי םשה / ונאישנ ןובנ םואנ

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תחכשנ םולש תנוי / ךל השענ בהז-ירות החרזמ בושי ףועי / ףלא ןב בהזה-רות לאעמשי ול קחצי / -ו קחצי קוחש לא עמשי לאוג ןויצל אב / -ו קחרי בסי ושע

Rings of gold we will make for you / a forgotten dove of peace A thousand years old is the Golden Age / that will fly and return eastward The rain has gone away / early spring is on the verge A new era has emerged / the yearning spring of nations

The voice of the turtledove has sounded / the hands of Esau trembled

Your cheeks are lovely with looped earrings / a virgin of thirty-two Years thirty and two / hidden among the gear Let us raise a glass for your life / they do not drink much

Your wings shall turn white / over the blue Baḥr-e-Nīl May your lovers rest tranquil / from Aswan to the Galilee A feather on the scales / shall entirely erase Matza Return our songs / to draw water from wellsprings Dunash, Ibn Gabirol, Ibn Ezra / preserved many wines The children of Shem shall drink the pouring / the neighbors shall rejoice Sister languages in our mouths / we must revive Nisma‘ na‘māt jadida / min jaras el-tārikh [Hear the bell of history which rings with new tunes] Our president Navon’s speech / may the days of his name lengthen Listen to Isaac’s laughter and / Ishmael making him laugh Esau will turn away and / a redeemer come to Zion (Shamosh, Dīwān 12-13)

Similar to Shamosh’s “Self-Praise Poem,” the refrain from “Voice of the Turtledove”

relies on word play drawn from biblical phrases. A tor refers to some kind of circlet (Song

1:10), as well as a turtledove (Song 2:12). Additionally, torei zahav alludes to the common

phrase for the so-called Golden Age of Jewish Spain ( דרפס ידוהי לש בהזה רות ), so that the

speaker at once amalgamates the rhetorical use of biblical inlays, erotic song, and the

imagined site of Jewish-Muslim coexistence. Nationalist combat with Israel, stretching back

to the civil war sparked by the 1947 United Nation Partition Plan for Palestine, has given

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birth to an era likened to a thirty-two-year-old virgin; the image implies a new phase

unpenetrated by conquering nations, lovers of the region who will instead “rest tranquil.” A

renewed Andalusian ideal, Shamosh suggests, will usher in a messianic period of peace (i.e.,

“a redeemer come to Zion”) and multilingualism (“Sister languages in our mouths”), that will

even nullify the biblical legacy of Hebrew slaves in Egypt (i.e., “will entirely erase Matza”).

In modern Hebrew, Shamosh modifies some of the rigid demands of the

muwashshaḥ’s form. A two-line refrain with an imperfect rhyme (nishkaḥat/mizraḥa)

substitutes a master rhyme at the end of each stanza; the poem maintains a conventional

hemistich arrangement, but the initial and secondary hemistiches inconsistently shift rhyme

schemes with each three-line strophic verse (e.g., ab cb cd / ef gf ef); a rhythm loosely

structured around seven-syllables per hemistich substitutes a challenging quantitative meter

expected in Andalusian poetry. Despite these modifications, the poem still resembles its

medieval template, implicating Shamosh as the Sephardi successor to Andalusi lyrical

forbears (“Dunash, Ibn Gabirol, Ibn Ezra”).

A quotation in Arabic (i.e., “Hear the bell of history which rings with new tunes”)

toward the end of the poem functions as the kharja. Although capable of printing the line in

its original Arabic script (i.e., خیراتلا سرج نم ةدیدج تامغن عمسن ), or translating its meaning into

the body of the Hebrew poem, Shamosh presents the Arabic in Hebrew script (i.e., “ עמסנ

ךיראת-לא סר׳ג ןמ / הדיד׳ג תאמ׳ענ ”), effectively manifesting an Andalusian ideal of coexistence

through a language––medieval Judeo-Arabic––that linguist Joshua Blau defined as “the

symbiosis of of two separate cultures” (35). Of course, the issue of multilingualism played a

vital role in the delicate formation of peace between Egypt and Israel, from Sadat’s 1977

Arabic speech to the Israeli Knesset that helped initiate formal negotiations to the final

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signed document of the peace treaty, printed “in triplicate in the English, Arabic, and Hebrew

languages, each text being equally authentic” (“The Egyptian-Israeli” 329). The function of

communicating and translating secondary languages similarly underlies the significance of

Shamosh’s kharja, derived from a speech delivered by the Israeli President Yitzḥak Navon

just hours before the White House signing of the peace treaty on March 26, 1979.

Speaking from Jerusalem on Israeli television, Navon delivered a speech in Arabic

specifically broadcast for Israeli Arabs, Palestinians, and the broader Arab world, in which he

praised the glory of Egyptian culture, its people and president, and optimistically appealed

for a new era of peace between other Arab nations and Israel. A scholar of Arabic literature,

Navon proved instrumental in his capacity as president—a typically ceremonial position—

since he could at once represent Israel while directly appealing to Arab leaders like Sadat,

with whom he delivered Arabic speeches on the importance of Egyptian culture in

subsequent diplomacy tours in Egypt.

The origins of Shamosh’s kharja recasts the politically-charged question surrounding

the origins of the muwashshaḥ itself and the development of the kharja, issues that spawned

a nearly century-long scholarly debate generally divided into the so-called Romance and

Arabist schools.26 Asserting Galician or Roman oral antecedents, links to European vulgar

song traditions, and a syllabically-stressed (rather than quantitative) prosody in the kharja,

Spanish philologists and Arabists like Julián Ribera y Tarragó, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, and

Dámaso Alonso identified within the muwashshaḥ a point of origin for modern Spanish

26 See Rosen, “The Muwashshah,” pp. 176-185, for a historical overview of this debate.

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language and culture (cf. Ribera y Tarragó; Menéndez Pidal; Alonso). In his analysis of the

scanion and musical history of muwashshaḥāt, the American Arabist James T. Monroe

similarly asserted that the kharja’s “origins were Hispano-Romance, but that it had become

intensely Arabized” (Monroe and Swiatlo 163; cf. Monroe). Emilio García Gómez, one of

the most vociferous advocates of the Romance school, deduced that the Romance language

pervasive in the kharja exposed an autochthonous source for Spanish popular poetry, “a

constant in Iberian soil [una constante en suelo ibérico]” (García Gómez 32).

This scholarship was fiercely contested by literary scholars from the Arabist school,

such as Jarir Abu Haidar, Alan Jones, and Phillip F. Kennedy, who read and interpreted the

kharja as primarily Arabic lyrics, an Andalusian development inextricably drawn from

Arabic poetic traditions and quantitative meters (cf. Abu Haidar; Jones; Kennedy). In the

schools’ extreme polarities, the kharja limns a pure trajectory from medieval Romance to

modern nationalism (read: Christian, Western, Spanish), or antithetically back to classical

poetry (read: Islamic, Eastern, Arab).

Although these polarizing positions have since toned down in what Rosen calls “a

more integrated and multilevel view of the subject,” it is worth recalling them here (“The

Muwashshah” 185). The simple yet challenging questions of a kharja’s source, its form, and

the relationship between language and nationality illuminate the political stakes of

Shamosh’s modern muwashshaḥ, whose poem was printed contemporaneous with the most

heated critiques between the Romance and Arabist schools (i.e., late 1970s). In this case,

instead of a lover’s unbridled voice (e.g., Ibn Tzadiq) quoting a popular vulgar lyric, “Voice

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of the Turtledove” reproduces a voice that at once points to and yet defies the expected

spoken language of both poet and president.27

Among the many messages offered by Navon in his Arabic speech, Shamosh chose to

quote a phrase (“Hear the bell of history which rings with new tunes”) specifically

recapitulated in an opposite direction; at a welcome ceremony three days after the White

House signing of the peace treaty, Navon delivered a public speech in Hebrew directed at

Prime Minister Menaḥem Begin, announcing that “Again I call upon the honorable Arab

kings and presidents to hear the bell of history, which today rings new tunes [ לא הנופו ינא רזוח

Why .(Navon 207) ”[ םישדח םילילצ םויה עימשמה הירוטסיהה ןומעפ לא ןיזאהלו היאישנו ברע יכלמ דובכ

does Shamosh highlight a phrase publicly spoken in both Hebrew and Arabic? Would the

preferred language of the modern kharja reveal the nationalist affinities of its speaker, a

figurehead representing the State of Israel?

In contrast to the divisive kharja debates, I would argue that the quotation from

Navon glorifies the non-nationalist aspiration for social harmony personified in descendant

Sephardim. In addition to his duties as President, Navon, a Sephardi Jerusalemite, also

played a critical role in the representation of Sephardic culture in modern Israel. Among

many other things, he organized in 1968 a repertoire of Ladino and Hebrew performances, A

Sephardic Romerancero ( ידרפס ורסנמור ), wrote in 1970 the popular and long-running musical

play about a Sephardic neighborhood in Jerusalem, A Sephardic Orchard ( ידרפס ןתסוב ), later

27 In an interesting parallel to the problem of original source texts in medieval kharajāt, I have yet to locate a recording or copy of Navon’s speech in its original Arabic language, only derivations. The Israel State Archives, for example, contains an official translation of the transcript in English, but not the original (cf. “Nasi” 206).

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organized commemorations and documentaries for the quincentennial anniversary of the

Jewish expulsion from Spain, and chaired Israel’s National Authority for Ladino. Shamosh’s

kharja thus highlights the fruit of a Sephardic heritage from two positions; for Navon, who

can bridge cultural and political divides with Israel’s neighbors because he can—like his

Andalusi ancestors—authentically address and identify with the perceived Other, and for

Shamosh, who becomes part of Navon’s Arabic-speaking audience and thus may appropriate

his speech.

In place of a scholarly school using the kharja to advance nationalist claims into

modernity, Navon’s Arabic points to a medieval Spain defined by interethnic commonality.

More than any other poem in the dīwān, “Voice of the Turtledove” most clearly asserts the

poet’s modern-Andalusian project as the renewal of a Sephardic legacy. Shamosh’s

illustration of the muwashshaḥ indeed exemplifies the “new tunes” engendered by Jewish-

Muslim coexistence, since it celebrates the fruit of Jewish acculturation in al-Andalus. As

Andalusi Hebrew poets of the tenth through twelfth centuries produced innovative writing

out of pre-existing Arabic forms, a historical development dependent upon the proximity and

fluency of Arabic culture and language, so too can modern Israeli Hebrew writers weave new

texts through a peaceful engagement with neighboring Arabs; Sephardim already brought up

in Arabic-speaking societies (Shamosh) or educated in Arabic literary history (Navon)

demonstrate this promise of a revived Andalusian culture.

3.3 Almog Behar and the Intimate Proximity of al-Andalus

Born in 1978, Almog Behar is one of his generation’s most prolific Mizraḥi writers in

Israel today, having published several collections of poetry, short stories, a novel, and

scholarly articles. Descended from Jews from Iraq, Turkey, and Germany, he has received

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noticeably more attention in the Israeli public sphere for his efforts in highlighting the

political positions of Arabic-speaking Jews. His story about an Israeli man haunted by the

ghost of his Iraqi grandfather, “I Am One of the Jews” (transliterated from the Arabic as אנא

דוהי-לא ןמ ), has been adapted both for the screen and the theatre, while his novel Rachel and

Ezekiel ( לקזחו הלח'צ ), about a poor Mizraḥi couple in Jerusalem, similarly incorporates Arabic

dialogue.

The political significance of Behar’s Hebrew-Arabic multilingualism has been the

spotlight of several critical treatments. Regarding “I Am One of the Jews,” Lital Levy

discusses how the story “confronted Israel’s erasure of Arabic as a Jewish language and

explored the inheritance of linguistic memory” (259-260). Karen Grumberg reads Behar’s

representation of this Arabic erasure as a form of “autospectrality,” the haunting of both

Judeo-Arabic and Palestinian alterity to exemplify a new configuration of gothic literature

(226). Finally, Michal Raizen examines the rare Egyptian-Arabic translation of Rachel and

Ezekiel as a model for how “Arab-Jewish literary memory is made visible to an Arab

readership” (31). Each of these treatments demonstrate how Behar, succeeding writers like

Shamosh, plays with and complicates the privilege and status of the Arab-Jew in the Middle

East.

In addition to creatively exploring his Arabic-speaking, Iraqi heritage, however,

Behar has also engaged with the Sephardic legacy of his Turkish family. In an essay for an

anthology on young Mizraḥi writers, for example, Behar has described interviewing

countless Ladino speakers in Israel following the death of his grandfather, to re-inherit the

diasporic Sephardic culture suspended by his family’s immigration to Israel (cf. “Ḥalomot”).

In another essay, Behar explains how traveling to the Spanish city of Béjar—his ancestral

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namesake—offered a new phase in his development as a poet, deepening his relationship

with the Andalusi Hebrew poets he first encountered in high school:

ךרדו ,הלש הרישהו תיברעה הפשה ךרד ראשה ןיבו ,הכורא ךרד דוע תושעל ךירצ יתייה תא תוצחל ידכו ,תאז הריש םע תימיטניא הברקל עיגהל ידכ ,םאקמה תומלוסו תיברעה הקיזומה ףוסב יכונאו חרזמב יבל״ רישה ומכ ,ולא םיררושמ לש ״םייסיסב״ םיריש םתוא לש לובגה האלפומ הריש םכותב םירצואה ,ולא םיררושמ לש רתוי םימולעה תורצואה לא עיגהלו...״ברעמ .אלמ םלועו

I had to travel another long way, through the Arabic language and its poetry, and, among other things, through Arabic music and the maqām scales, in order to reach an intimate proximity with this poetry. In order to cross the boundary of the “fundamental” poems of those poets, like the poem “My Heart is in the East and I am at the ends of the West,” ... and reach the more obscure treasures of these poets, the curators of a marvelous poetry and a full world (“Yeqirkha”).

As a result of these personal experiences, Behar has expressed his Sephardic identity

in poetry on various subjects, such as his visits to modern Spain, translations and meditations

on the Ladino language, and reconstructions of Andalusian poetry. The latter includes such

poems as “For Yehuda Halevi, In His Own Words [ ויתולימב ,יולה הדוהיל ]” and “For Shemuel

Hanagid, In His Own Words [ ויתולימב ,דיגנה לאומש יברל ],” medievalist variations that maintain

the styles of the poets. For this section, however, I will focus on Behar’s rewriting of Ibn

Gabirol’s masterpiece, Kingdom’s Crown ( תוכלמ רתכ ), a long, philosophical and meditative

supplication often regarded as the paragon of Andalusian Hebrew religious poetry, printed

for centuries in Sephardic prayer books for Yom Kippur, and in contrast to the hitpa’arut

adopted by Shamosh, delivered through a highly personal, yet self-effacing, speaker.

Ibn Gabirol organized Kingdom’s Crown into three sections that narrow in scope as it

progresses, from a portrayal of God, the infinite and transcendent Creator of the universe

(nine chapters), to the works of God’s creation, the planets, stars, and heavenly realms

(twenty-three chapters), to the confessional prayer of the individual speaker (eight chapters).

The poetic form of Kingdom’s Crown has been briefly discussed in the previous chapter,

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regarding the literary history of Ladino literal translations and Moshe David Gaon’s lyrical

rewriting of the poem. To review, the long Hebrew poem abides by two key elements: the

Arabic convention of repetitive, non-metrical rhyming known as saj‘ ( عـجـس ), and a

magisterial inlay of biblical quotations, a medieval Hebrew rhetorical device known as

shibbutz ( ץוביש ). I will examine these two elements in order to compare Kingdom’s Crown

with two of Behar’s poems, “Supplication on the Soul [ המשנה לע השקב ]” and “Another

Supplication on the Soul [ המשנה לע השקב דוע ].”

3.3.1 The Waves of Saj‘

The development of saj‘ and its significance in Ibn Gabriol’s poem requires some

discussion to appreciate Behar’s poems. Often labeled “the oldest form of poetic speech in

Arabia,” saj‘ most famously appears throughout the Qur’ān, which greatly influenced its use

by Islamic preachers and royal secretaries in the mid-ninth century (Nicholson 74; cf. 328).

The utility of rhymed prose would become so popular that by the tenth century, saj‘ would

appear in every Arabic form of public speech and writing not defined as poetry, “sermons

and prayers, proverbs and aphorisms, epistles, maqāmāt, biographies, and histories” (Stewart

102).

Hebrew adoption of this style of writing did not spread as quickly or as

comprehensively, but did similarly spring out of religious expression. Not a component in the

poetry, narratives, or wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible, free rhyme did appear in the

closing section of qedushta’ot ( תואתשודק ), the earliest genre of Hebrew liturgical poetry sung

by a cantor around the Jewish prayer service and composed by sixth-century Byzantine

Palestine poets, such as Yannai and El‘azar Qillir (cf. Weinberger 50-56). According to

Schirmann, Ibn Gabirol’s use of rhyme as it applies to the intimate voice of a speaker likely

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derives from the confessions (vidduyim ( םייודיו )) and supplications (baqashot ( תושקב )) of

ninth- and tenth-century Babylonian Hebrew poets, such as Sa‘adya Gaon and Nisi ben

Berekhyah al-Nahrawani, who incorporated rhymed prose, by then a popular Arabic

convention, into Jewish individual recitations (Toledot 331-332; cf. Fleisher 412; Haberman).

Israel Levin contests this claim, however, suggesting that Ibn Gabirol was likely influenced

by contemporary Arabic literature in al-Andalus (cf. Keter 19-22).

Andalusi Hebrew writers adopted saj‘ for epistles and, as will be discussed in the next

section of this chapter, the genre of fictional stories known as maqāmāt, but not until a

century after the composition of Kingdom’s Crown. How then to explain the exception of Ibn

Gabirol, whose magnum opus departs from classical Hebrew liturgical poetry or the popular

Andalusian trend of adapting secular genres of Arabic quantitative poetry, such as the qaṣīda

and muwashshaḥ, for new liturgical poetry? Scholars and translators have offered a variety of

explanations to understand the use of saj‘ in Kingdom’s Crown. Schirmann claims that the

form allows Ibn Gabirol to “variegate his words in a spectacular manner in terms of sounds

and their rhythm [ םבצקמו םילילצ תניחבמ הביהרמ הרוצב וירבד תא ןווגל ],” which helps illustrate the

diverse content of the verses; Schirmann gives the example of the poem’s twenty-fifth

chapter, which describes angels in short rhymes, as if evoking “the commotion of the

heavenly army of heaven and their rapid movements [ תוריהמה םהיתועונת תאו םימשה אבצ תלומה ]”

(Toledot 335). For Bernard Lewis, the repetitive rhyming gives the poem “a Biblical

simplicity,” while for Peter Cole it makes for an “incantatory free verse... [to] be taken in, or

offered up, quite literally as a music of the spheres” (Lewis 8; Cole Selected 23).

The short epigraph for the poem “Supplication on the Soul” not only signals Behar’s

source material, but helps introduce the music in Ibn Gabirol’s poem. The quotation comes

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from the thirty-third chapter of Kingdom’s Crown, which initiates the last section of the

speaker’s meditative confessional:

המוד ןבא / המלכ אלמ ילכ / המדאה ןמ רפע / ,המרו שוג ינאו

va-’ani gush ve-rima, / ‘afar min ha-’adama / keli maleh kelima / ’even duma I am lump and maggot, / dust of the earth / a full vessel of shame / a mute stone (Ibn

Gabirol qtd. in Behar, “Baqasha”) Having outlined the complex “Neoplatonic metaphysics and the ptolemaic

cosmology” of the created universe, the speaker now asks how such a lowly soul dare

approach his Creator (Loewe 106). Regarding its prosody, the short lines are not consistent

by any measure; according to the quantitative metrics most commonly used by Andalusi

Hebrew poets, the epigraph’s sequence of long and short vowels would appear like this:

- - ◡ - - ◡ - / - - - - ◡ - - / ◡ - - - ◡ - - / - - - -

The asymmetry of Ibn Gabirol’s verses explains why modern critical editions and

Jewish prayer books often print the poem in block paragraphs without line breaks (see fig. 1).

Figure 1. Block format of Kingdom’s Crown’s thirty-third chapter, as printed in Yarden’s

critical edition of Ibn Gabirol’s sacred poetry, Shirei Ha-Kodesh I:22, ch. 33, p. 58.

Behar’s epigraph illustrates an alternative format, highlighting the poem’s saj‘ with

slashes, which show phrases or clauses separated by rhyme endings. Here, the Hebrew rhyme

ending -ma links a sequence of phrases that together form a unit on the speaker’s self-

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deprecation (i.e., “I am maggot and lump, / dust of the earth / a full vessel of shame / a mute

stone”). This system of rhyming continues throughout the poem. The same chapter, for

example, ends with the speaker lamenting “A stricken body, filled with a rabble, increasing

and unceasing [ ףוסי אלו ףיסוי ,ףוספסא אלמ ףוגנ ףוגו ];” here, the rhyme ending -oof ties each

description (i.e., an affliction, a profusion of lusts or pains, an unrelenting rate) to the subject

of the speaker’s physical body (Ibn Gabirol, Shirei Ha-Kodesh, I:23, ch. 33, lines 10-11, p.

59). Since such rhymed groupings do not follow a particular meter or order, the saj‘ in

Kingdom’s Crown presents the speaker’s ideas in a coherent, yet dynamic and fluid delivery.

In “Supplication on the Soul,” Behar continues the rhyme from the Ibn Gabirol

epigraph to an excessive degree, composing a poem of forty-nine verselets with -ma endings

and internal -ma rhymes as well. Much more compact than the outline of the universe laid

out by Ibn Gabirol, Behar’s elastic rhyming chains individual clauses and phrases to

epitomize the individual worshiper’s expression from the third section of Kingdom’s Crown.

Separated by slashes, clauses flow like a ceaseless, undulating river, corresponding to the

poem’s lack of line breaks. For the sake of space, I provide the first half of the poem

alongside my literal English translation:

עדוי יניאו / המילכמ תושוב םייניעבו / המרמ אלמ בלב / המשנה לכ יהלא יהלא ךילא ינא הנופ םדוק ךילא הנפא אל םאו / המדאה ןמ רפע לא רפע / המיר ינא טעמ דועו / המלו המ תונע דמוע ךילא ינא הנופ ןכ לע / המוד דרא דע ךילא הנפא אלש ינא ששוח / המימת ישפנ היהתש הלואג ןיידע יל הנכומ אלש ינא עדוי / המולעתה ןורתפ ןיא ילו / המכחה לכ ךל / המילב לע ינאו וישכע ךילא ינא הנופ ןכ לע / המוד לבהל יתמשנ וישכע ינלאוג התא ןיא םא ךא / המלש םילהנמ ישפנ ךותב יאטח / המ לעו המשא אלמי אל םא ךילא הנפי ימ יכ / המשא אלמ ןיידע ינא יב םחלנ התא םאו / הממדב ךללהא ךיאו ףלוח ינא ירובעב םחלנ אל התא םאו / המחלמ רומא םילימב וישכע ךילא הנפא אל םאו / המות דע / המד םות דע תכפוש ישפנו / הממש ךפוה המכ ןיתמהל יל רומא ךילא הנפא וישכע אל םאו / המב יל

I turn to You, my God, the God of every soul / with a heart full of deceit / and with eyes ashamed from disgrace / and I do not know how to answer what or why / and soon I am a maggot / dust upon dust of the earth / and if I do not turn to You before I

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have an innocent soul / fearful am I that I will not turn to You before I descend in death / therefore turn I to You and stand on nothingness / You have all the wisdom / yet I have no solution to the mystery / I know that complete redemption is yet unprepared for me / yet if You do not redeem me now my soul will be like unto breath / therefore I turn to You now while I am still full of guilt / for who shall turn to You if they have not been filled with guilt and whatnot / my sins within my soul wage war / and if You do not fight for me I pass over and how shall I praise You in silence / and if You fight me I become desolation / and my soul pours all its blood out / all to its end / and if I shall not turn to You now in words, tell me with what / and if I shall not turn to You now, tell me how long to wait (Behar, “Baqasha”)

Thematically, the poem mirrors the third section of Kingdom’s Crown by repeatedly

emphasizing the speaker’s conundrum: despite the immeasurable contrasts that separate each

other, how does a person approach the Creator they yearn for? Unlike the saj‘ of Ibn Gabirol,

who shifts subjects by rhyme groupings, Behar’s consistent rhyme reads more like a stream-

of-consciousness prayer than a text destined for canonized liturgical use. At the same time,

the poem should not be confused with Andalusian poems in other poetic forms, such as the

mono-rhymed qaṣīda, particularly because of the unpredictable scansion of the verselets.

One verselet occupies ten Hebrew syllables that lyrically imagine the effect of God’s wrath

(i.e., “ve-nafshi shofekhet ‘ad tom damah [and my soul pours all its blood out]”), before

immediately emphasizing that diminishment with a three-syllable coda (i.e., “‘ad tomah [all

to its end]”). Such rhythms could only approximate the singular delivery of Ibn Gabriol’s

saj‘.

Additionally, the poem presents a modern configuration of saj‘ through the anaphora

of phrases. Through the refrain, “I turn to You,” the speaker performatively reenacts his

oscillating relationship with God, coming back again and again to his subject like the

rhyming wave in saj‘’s undulating river. In other words, the refrain does not regenerate each

verselet’s -ma rhyme in terms of sound, but does correspondingly integrate the prayer’s

theme throughout the body of the text as if it were an echoing rhyme. In other instances,

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Behar stacks clauses together that also functionally rhyme with each other (e.g., and if You

do not fight for me / and if You fight me; and if I shall turn to You now / and if I shall not

turn to You now). The slight modifications in these near-identical clauses not only harmonize

in the sound of their pairings, but similarly tie antithetical consequences to one other. In this

new saj‘, the speaker’s speculations highlight an ineluctable orientation and yearning for

God, regardless of God’s positions toward the speaker. By adopting Ibn Gabirol’s poetic

form and broadening its application, Behar presents a renewed Andalusian baqasha in the

language of his forbears.

3.3.2 Behar’s Inlays

In addition to saj‘, Behar’s Ibn Gabirol poems call attention to a rhetorical device

present in the medievalist Hebrew poems previously discussed and essential to Andalusian

poetry, shibbutz. As Dan Pagis has pointed out, biblical quotations appear as early as the

Hebrew Bible itself (e.g., Torah passages quoted in the prophetic and hagiographic

literature), and might appear in the final lines of early liturgical poems from the fifth and

sixth centuries. It was in al-Andalus, however, that a biblical quotation “was considered a

rhetorical ornament [ ירוטר טושיק בשחנ ],” instrumental in the composition and quality of a

Hebrew poem (Pagis, Ḥidush 70). Drawing from the deep well of biblical Hebrew—from

prosaic descriptions of the tabernacle to the lamentations of Jeremiah to the erotic metaphors

of the Song of Songs—Andalusi Hebrew poets crafted new poems on new subjects.

While ubiquitous, the shibbutz in an Andalusian Hebrew poem varied in length (i.e.,

as short as a couple of words and as long as a full line), frequency, and application.

Regarding the latter, modern scholars of medieval Hebrew poetry have identified various

types of shibbutzim. Most commonly, a medieval Hebrew poet incorporates a phrase, whose

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beauty and utility facilitates the description of a subject in a poem, but which does not

engage at all with the biblical context in which it originally appears; Pagis defines this as “a

neutral inlay, whose primary function is linguistic [ ינושל שומיש ורקעש ,ילרטיינה ץובישה ]” (71).

Other times, a poet inlays a quotation to actively engage with its original biblical context, a

rhetorical device Shulamit Elizur calls a “charged inlay [ ןועט ץוביש ]” (III:377). These

shibbutzim might allude to the unquoted section of a biblical verse, or produce a radically

opposite meaning or ironic interpretation of the original context. Some shibbutzim transform

the simple meaning of a biblical passage into a metaphor, others showcase the poet’s talents

for wielding challenging rhymes or hapax legomena, while other shibbutzim draw historical

connections between biblical antiquity and the poet’s contemporary moment. All of these

creative possibilities presuppose a fluent command of the Hebrew Bible by the poet and the

reader, who either weaves or discerns the fruits of primary religious instruction.

The employment of shibbutz may be gleaned from its usage in “Another Supplication

on the Soul,” Behar’s poetic sequel in rewriting Kingdom’s Crown. An epigraph from Ibn

Gabirol again introduces the text, here selections of verselets from the thirty-fifth, thirty-

seventh, and thirty-eighth chapters. My English translation adds the biblical references of Ibn

Gabirol’s Hebrew shibbutzim:

תומה חכשיו ...םדאה המ יכ ...הבהאו ןוצרב םא יכ חרכהב אלו / הבדנ קר ךרצל אל ינתארב יכ ול בשוי ברואהו / רבע לכמ םירמוש הבריו / וירדחב תומהו / וירעש יחירב קזחיו ...וירחא אוהו ךאלמל רמאו / ידבעמכ ינלמגת לאו / ךמעז ילע הלכת לאו / ךימחר ילע ומהי יהלא ...רדחב יד תיחשמה

You had no need to create me, it was only generosity / and not out of necessity as out of will and love... for what is man [Ps. 144:3]... and he forgets the death that is after him...and he strengthens the bolts of his gates [Ps. 147:13] / but death is in his chamber [Deut. 32:25] / and he increases the guards from all sides / but the ambush sits in his chamber [Judg. 16:9]... / my God, waken your mercy [Jer. 31:19] / and do not consume Your wrath against me [Lam. 4:11] / and do not reward me according to

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my deeds [Ps. 103:10] / but tell the angel of destruction: Enough [2 Sam. 24:16] (Ibn Gabirol qtd. in Behar “‘Od Baqasha”)

Almost every verselet chosen by Behar for the epigraph contains some type of

biblical reference, and Kingdom’s Crown generally uses shibbutzim in every possible

application; they appear as verbatim quotations, manipulated quotations, metaphors,

innovative interpretations, and biblical allusions. The first reference from the epigraph, “for

what is man,” exemplifies a neutral inlay. The full verselet from Kingdom’s Crown restates

Psalms 144:3, but this phrase actually appears throughout the Hebrew Bible [e.g., Ps. 8:5;

Job 7:17; Job 13:25] and even in Ibn Gabirol’s other poems (e.g., “O God, What is Man [ יי

םדא המ ]”); it does not so much engage with an original biblical context as much as it

appropriates a familiar rhetorical question.

The next reference offers a more sophisticated type of shibbutz. By rewording the

psalmist’s verse that originally describes God’s protection of Jerusalem (i.e., “For He has

strengthened the bolts of your gates”), Ibn Gabirol renders a new, antithetical meaning to

illustrate a person’s futile attempts to avoid death (i.e., “and he strengthens the bolts of his

gates / but death is in his chamber”). Another verselet demonstrates the poet’s skill at ellipsis,

condensing a protracted verse from 2 Samuel 24:16 on a heavenly confrontation (e.g., “And

the angel reached out his hand against Jerusalem to destroy it, and the Lord regretted the evil

and said to the angel who was sowing destruction among the people, ‘Enough! Now stay

your hand.’ [ ףרה התע בר םעב תיחשמה ךאלמל רמאיו הערה לא יי םחניו התחשל ם לשורי ךאלמה ודי חלשיו

ךדי ]”) into the modest speaker’s appeal in four Hebrew words (i.e., “but tell the angel of

destruction: Enough”).

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Finally, the quotation embedded in “and he increases the guards from all sides / but

the ambush sits in his chamber” presents the most intricate type of shibbutz, interpreting the

original biblical reference to complicate the meaning of other verselets that appear in the

same chapter of Kingdom’s Crown. The clause, “but the ambush sits in his chamber,”

borrows a contextually discordant passage from the story of Samson. To recall, Philistine

overlords bribe Samson’s new lover, the prostitute Delilah, who then asks Samson how he

may be bound and tortured; after she binds him, “the ambush was laid in her chamber,” but

Samson deceives her, and he breaks away from the enemy nation. At first glance, the two

texts bear hardly any similarity with one another. The thirty-seventh chapter of Kingdom’s

Crown, from which the shibbutz appears, centers on the existential plight of the individual,

who constantly pursues nothingness while being pursued by a lifetime of afflictions and

death. Death is metaphorized as the cunning nemesis, who neutralizes the individual’s

useless attempts for preservation. By contrast, Samson does evade an ambush from within,

conducted not by death, but by men of inferior capability. He has no need to strengthen the

bolts of his gates, as the previous verselet suggests; in fact, so confident is he by his own

power that, prior to the ambush, he removes the bolts and doors from the Gazan town gate,

“and took them up to the top of the mountain that faces Hebron [ ינפ־לע רשא רהה שאר־לא םלעיו

ןורבח ]” (Judg. 16:3).

How then to reconcile the scene in Delilah’s chamber with the metaphor presented by

the confessional speaker of death terrorizing man? To remind the reader of Samson’s crafty

escape is to enrich Ibn Gabirol’s baqasha with the broader themes of a biblical narrative, in

which a man driven by self-assurance and lust does ultimately entrap himself, to tragically

succumb to blindness, slavery, and suicide. Not only does the clause “the ambush sits in his

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chamber” evoke a poignant example from the chapter’s theme on life’s inexorable afflictions,

it also charges neighboring verselets with additional signification. As the speaker goes on to

describe, “and when he thinks his glory is great, and mightily did his hand reach, peacefully

does the destroyer come at him, and he opens his eyes and there is nothing [ ,ודוה בר יכ ובשחבו

ונניאו חקפ ויניעו ,ונאובי דדוש םולשב ,ודי האצמ ריבכ יכו ]” (Ibn Gabirol, Shirei Ha-Kodesh I:22, ch.

37, lines 18-19, p. 65). While these verselets would not otherwise relate to biblical prose—

they actually incorporate shibbutzim from the wisdom literature of Job—the previous

association with Delilah’s chamber produces a fascinating encapsulation of the Samson

story: a mighty man loses his glory (i.e., his hair) when peacefully sleeping in the lap of his

duplicitous lover, which results in the gouging of his eyes (i.e., he opens his eyes and there is

nothing). The short biblical inlay is indeed charged, since registering the original context in

relation to its usage in Kingdom’s Crown releases new layers of biblical interpretation and

provides nuance to the poet’s statements on human mortality.

These brief examples of shibbutzim from Kingdom’s Crown, quoted as the epigraph

of “Another Supplication on the Soul,” anticipate Behar’s adoption of the medieval rhetorical

device. Behar’s sequel poem is again comprised of a series of rhyming verselets of

inconsistent meter (marked by slashes), but more closely matches medieval saj‘ than the

previous poem with shifts in rhyme groupings (marked by double slashes). Again, for issues

of space, I quote the first third of the poem, and my literal English translation inserts the

biblical references unmarked in the original Hebrew, as well references to Kingdom’s Crown

(abbreviated as KC):

ןומהו / וילג ןואש ךותב עמשנ ןיא יכ / וילא םיהלאה הנפיש השקבב / ויהלא לא םדא הנופ יהלא התאו // ויאורב רחא הכיא ארוקו / וינגב םויה חורל ךלהתמ םיהלאה לוק / וילגלגו וישעמ דסח םוי םוי חכוש ינאו / הבדנ קר חרוכ אלל םייח יב תעטנ // / ילא תונפל ךילא הנופ ינאש /

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/ ןמוזמו ןכומ בל יב תתל תלוכי יכ ךל ינא ריכזמו // הבאד ינממ תוקיחרמה / הבהאב ךיתולועפ // ןמה לע ןעשנו םירז ףוצמ קחור / ןמזה ייותיפמו אטחה ןמ ימצע קיחרמו דימת רכוז היהאש יבל קילחהל שקבת םאו // ןבתה לצא יוצמו רבה ןמ קוחר / ןבא יושע השק בל יב תתנ לבא ךנעמל ןכ לע // םימיה ףוס דע יביאכהל ץלאית ךכ םשל יכ התא עדוי / םימדהו תועמדה ףטשב / ינודז תליחמ שקבלו ךילא בושל לכואש / ינווע קתמהו יבאכל םוסחמ השע / ינעמל אלו // ינועו ץחלמ האיציו החוורהו החונמ לש עגר אלל ךילא בושל לוכי ינא ןיאש / ינודמ תקיחמו ןושאר התאו / רצק ינמזו קירו לבה ינאש // ןטשל יל היהתש / ןטקה ימשב לודגה ךמשל המו רצ ךילעש ימ ןיאו ןורחאו

Man turns to his God / with a request that God turn to him / unheard within the roar of His waves [Ps. 65:8] / and the multitude of His works and His spheres [KC sec. II] / the voice of God walking about in the daily breeze of His garden [Gen. 3:8] / calling out, “where are you?” to His creation [Gen. 3:9] // and You are my God [KC ch. 33] / that I turn to You to turn to me [Zec. 1:3] // You instilled life in me not out of necessity, only generosity [KC ch. 35] / and I forget every day the loving-kindness of your actions of love / keeping anguish from me // and I remind You that You could have given me a ready and willing heart [Gen. 41:9] / so that I will always remember and distance myself from sin and from the temptations of time / distancing myself from idolatrous nectar and relying on manna // but You gave me a hard heart made of stone [Ez. 36:26] / far from grain and found near straw [Jer. 23:28] // and if You shall wish [KC ch. 38] to smoothen my heart in the flux of tears and blood / You know that for that end, You will have to hurt me until the end of days // therefore, for Your sake, and not for mine / make a barrier for my pains and sweeten my sin / that I can return to You and ask for forgiveness for my transgressions / and the obliteration of my strife / for I cannot return to You without a moment of rest and comfort and the departure of stress and poverty [Lam. 5:5] // and what of Your great name in my little name [Jos. 7:9; KC ch. 38] / that You will be for me an adversary [KC ch. 36] // that I am useless and void and my time is short [Is. 30:7] / and You are first and last and without foe upon you [2 Sam 1:26] (Behar, “‘Od Baqasha” 46)

Along the vein of categories offered by modern scholars discussed earlier, the poem

can be read as operating according to two distinct categories of shibbutzim, medieval and

modern. Following the medieval model, Behar fills his verselets with phrases from biblical

literature. Dan Pagis has noted that while some modern Hebrew poets do quote from biblical

texts, “the possibilities have been greatly reduced, since such poetry is intended for a reader

not expert in Jewish texts, yet not a complete stranger to every source [ ומצמטצנ תויורשפאה

םלוכל רז וניא תאז-לכבו ,תורוקמב יקב וניאש אורקל תנווכמ וז הריש יכ ,דואמ ]” (Ḥidush 77). A good

example of such an inlay appears in the verselet, “far from grain and found near straw.”

Readers might not discern the verselet’s biblical context—of the prophet Jeremiah comparing

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the difference between false and true prophets to straw and grain—but they might recognize

the modern Hebrew idiom derived from the verse, “What does straw have to do with grain?

[ רבה תא ן בתל המ ],” colloquially said when conflating incomparable subjects.28 Whichever the

source text, Behar shifts the direction of rebuke, not toward false prophets or confused

interlocutors, but toward the speaker, who aptly belongs amidst worthless straw instead of

valuable grain.

But the poem also incorporates other biblical verses, both familiar and obscure, that,

like Ibn Gabirol, diverge in their application. The allusion from Genesis of God seeking

Adam after the eating of the fruit (i.e., “the voice of God walking about in the daily breeze of

His garden / calling out, ‘where are you?’ to His creation”), closely maintains the language

and context of the reference, yet metaphorizes the biblical scene into God and the speaker’s

search for one another. Other shibbutzim, by contrast, reinterpret a quotation from their

original context. The last verselet quoted here, “and You are first and last and without foe

upon you,” borrows from the Jewish morning liturgy following the Shema prayer (i.e., “it is

You who are first and it is You who is last [ ןורחא אוה התאו ןושאר אוה התא ]”), as well biblical

prose (2 Samuel 1:26). Regarding the latter, Behar appears to borrow a phrase from the

apostrophe of David, who, upon hearing of the death of Jonathan, cries out, “I grieve for you,

my brother, Jonathan. Very dear you were to me. More wondrous your love to me than the

love of women [ םישנ תבהאמ יל ךתבהא התאלפנ דאמ יל תמענ ןתנוהי יחא ךילע יל־רצ ].” Since the

Hebrew word tzar means both grief and foe, the speaker in Behar’s poem considerably alters

28 Behar’s shibbutz here is thus a degree below the obscure references in the novels of Muñiz-Huberman and Yehoshua, signaling a reader familiar with biblical quotation and/or a popular expression in Modern Hebrew.

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the subjects of the David narrative, from an ardent partnership between two men to the

impossibility of a celestial adversary of God;29 besides this skillful reconfiguration, the

shibbutz exemplifies the poem’s theme of addressing the seemingly inaccessible subject

through speech, praying to God in this baqasha as David verbalizes his love to a man already

buried.

Alongside the medieval rhetorical device of inlaying biblical quotations, Behar

fabricates a modern form of shibbutz, inlaying the poem with quotations from the medieval

poem that inspired it. As with “Supplication on the Soul,” this poem frequently appropriates

Ibn Gabirol’s language. These include minor allusions to the subjects of Kingdom’s Crown,

such as God’s “spheres [ םילגלג ],” whose descriptions comprise the bulk of the poem’s second

section on cosmology, and phrases that appear in the confessional, third section (i.e., You are

my God; and if You shall wish; Your great name).

While some of these “neutral” shibbutzim share biblical references, the speaker does

reproduce phrases solely by Ibn Gabirol. The verselet, “You instilled life in me not out of

necessity, only generosity,” echoes the original verselets quoted in the epigraph, “You had no

need to create me, it was only generosity / and not out of necessity as out of will and love.”

In an expansive poem overflowing with biblical quotations in almost every half-verselet, the

original verselets quoted here identify some of Ibn Gabirol’s only original words;

furthermore, as depictions of God’s volition, the verselets represent “[o]ne of the essential

features of the thought of ibn Gabirol” (Lewis 162). This shibbutz, in other words,

29 Since tzar additionally means narrow, the verselet can be understood, “and no one is narrowing in on you.”

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demonstrates the poet’s close reading of Kingdom’s Crown and his deft distinctions of

biblical verses from original medieval phrases. The pervasive inlays of both biblical and

medieval texts belie Pagis’s assertion on the limitations of shibbutz in modern Hebrew

poetry, offering a medievalist poem perhaps too arcane for some readers, yet a creative

exercise for reaching that “intimate proximity” of Andalusian poetry Behar previously wrote

about.

Regarding this last point, it is significant that both “Supplication on the Soul” and

“Another Supplication on the Soul” channel a medieval poem in such personal terms. The

poems’ un-vocalized words, lack of spacing between verselets, and self-effacing speaker all

suggest a personal confession of immediacy and interiority, confounding for their date of

publication. Modern Hebrew poets often use colloquial language and free verse to address

such traditionally weighty subjects as God; in another poem from his collection of poetry, for

example, Behar depicts an introduction between God and his young son that archly

juxtaposes the seriousness of a high Hebrew register from Jewish liturgy with a

conversational tone that depicts the puerile curiosity of a young boy. Behar’s new baqashot,

by contrast, bear no hint of ironic humor or colloquial playfulness. Abiding by medieval

form, in both the rhyming waves of saj‘ and the intricate mosaic of shibbutz, these poems

convey a neo-Sephardic spiritual expression that implicitly claims a poetic tradition—long

sustained in the Sephardic prayer book—as the poet’s own.

3.4 The Modern Maqāma of Burla

I turn to a final stage of Andalusian literature—principally developed by exiled

Andalusi Jews—as it relates to Yehuda Burla’s novel, These are the Journeys of Rabbi

Yehuda Halevi. The Hebrew maqāma ( המאקמ ), alternatively referred to as maḥberet ( תרבחמ ),

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a “composition,” principally derives from the Arabic genre it is transliterated from ( ةماقم ),

meaning “assembly” or “session.” First composed as oral narrations in the late tenth century

by the Iranian belle-lettrist Badi‘ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī, and developed into a sophisticated

literary genre a century later by the Iraqi poet and government official Abū Muhammad al-

Qāsim ibn ‘Alī al-Ḥarīrī, the Arabic maqāma (plural maqāmāt) quickly reached al-Andalus

and other Islamic lands for its entertaining, elegant, and secular contributions to the ideals of

Arab refinement known as adab ( بدأ ).

The genre typically centered on fictional escapades of a disguised, eloquent trickster

hero, relayed through a friendly narrator, who both reveal their identities by the end of each

episode. Written in saj‘, loaded with poems, and constructed around fifty separate episodes,

al-Ḥarīrī’s maqāmāt dazzled with their variety of plots and rhetorical devices. As if

demonstrating the personality of a trickster through literary tricks, al-Ḥarīrī’s hero, Abū Zayd

al-Sarūjī, improvises palindromes, poems loaded with double meanings, sermons using only

particular letters of the Arabic alphabet, and riddles, while the merchant narrator al-Ḥārith

ibn Hammām relates Abū Zayd’s cons throughout his travels from Alexandria to Tbilisi.

Al-Ḥarīrī’s collection of maqāmāt was widely read and imitated in both Arabic and

Hebrew. For example, the Toledo-born poet and translator Yehuda al-Ḥarizi (1165-1225)

first composed a loose Hebrew translation of al-Ḥarīrī’s before composing his own

collection, the Taḥkemoni ( ינומכחת ), the most significant exemplar of the classical Hebrew

maqāma and which builds off of al-Ḥarīrī’s fifty-episode framework. In addition, Jews in

Christian Spain, Provence and Eastern lands developed texts less bound by the Arabic genre

of the classical maqāma and partly influenced by the chivalric adventures of Christian

Romance writers. This new kind of secular Hebrew prose ranged from allegories of life (e.g.,

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Ibn Falaquera’s Book of the Seeker), picaresque novels (e.g., Ibn Zabara’s Book of Delight),

satirical stories of love and marriage (e.g., Ibn Shabbetai’s The Offering of Yehuda, the

Woman Hater), to translations of Eastern folk literature (e.g., Ibn Ḥasdai’s The King’s Son

and the Ascetic), all still generally humorous, didactic, and constructed around frame

narratives.

The preface in Yehuda Burla’s historical novel on Yehuda Halevi identifies the

forthcoming narrative as a maqāma. The comparison to the medieval genre presents various

challenges, beginning with the very Arabic term, whose characteristics evolved as Hebrew

writers continued to write rhymed prose long after the Middle Ages and into the last era of

modern Hebrew.30 In modern usage, the genre designates a range of literature composed over

the last century and a half, from a children’s story by Ḥ. N. Bialik, to a medieval pastiche by

Natan Alterman, to the folktales of Shimshon Meltzer, to Israeli songwriter and poet Ḥaim

Ḥefer’s newspaper satires on the daily news, to Ya‘aqov Orland’s poetic memoirs of growing

up in Jerusalem. These works, which all assume the term maqāma in their titles or subtitles,

have little in common with each other apart from the broadly consistent saj‘. Thus, in place

of a classical narrative with conventional characters, plots, and literary devices, a recent

dictionary of Modern Hebrew has recast the genre as “rhymed prose, a witty story written

with rhymes and plenty of adventures and humor; a political satire written in rhymes [ הזורפ

םיזורחב הבותכה תיטילופ הריטס ;רומוהו תואקתפרה עפושהו םיזורחב בותכה ןונש רופיס ,תזרוחמ ]”

(Choueka 1113).

30 See Ratzaby for a chronological survey of Hebrew maqāmāt. His anthology covers the medieval Andalusian period and continues onto the Early Modern era, the Jewish Enlightenment, and ends at modern Hebrew poetry with Ḥ. N. Bialik.

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Setting aside the evolution of the genre, Burla’s novel as a classical Hebrew maqāma

presents further anachronisms, since the novel poses as a narrative written in the final stage

of the life of Halevi, who died in 1141. Halevi never wrote a maqāma, and with the exception

of the first-known example of the genre, a raunchy harem-escapade by the mid-twelfth

century Andalusi writer Shelomo Ibn Tzaqbel, Hebrew maqāmāt are not contemporaneous

with Halevi. Instead, such narratives appear a generation after Halevi’s death as part of the

literary production following the Almohad invasion that displaced Jews from al-Andalus.

The genre thus represents what Jonathan Decter asserts as both “an outgrowth of the Hebrew

poetry of al-Andalus,” and a “literature in transition,” first developed in the estranged

environment of Christian Iberia and Provence (Iberian 105). Thus, Burla’s novel, although

assuming a variety of conventions from medieval poetry and prose, does not smoothly fit

within the context of the first Hebrew maqāmāt; actually, in the conceit of its

pseudepigrapha, the narrative would mark the very first Hebrew maqāma, written not in the

northern exilic locales of Barcelona or Toledo, but Halevi’s land of pilgrimage, Jerusalem.

As opposed to some of the previous modern Sephardi writers discussed in this

chapter, whose adoption of medieval literary forms barely receive any critical attention, the

question of Burla’s novel as a maqāma has been sufficiently debated. First, in a critical essay

on the novel, Lev Ḥakak, an Iraqi-Israeli writer and scholar of Mizraḥi literature, highlighted

the dissonance between the modern adaptation and its medieval paradigm. The pensive

Halevi character, for example, contrasts with the trickster hero of the classical maqāma, a

sequential plot replaces a collection of isolated episodes, and the novel almost entirely avoids

humor. As Ḥakak claims, “whoever considers a structure of independent chapters, a hero and

narrator, an orientation of entertainment in its essence, involving a great variety of

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narratological features and rhetorical brilliance as conditions to the maqāma’s form – will not

see a maqāma in the novel of our study [ םיקרפ לש הנבמ המאקמל היתויומדמ םיאנתכ האורש ימ

אל - תוירוטר תוקרבהו רופיסה ירמוח לש בר ןוויגב הכורכה הרקיעב תעשעשמ המגמ ,דיגמו רוביג ,םייאמצע

המאקמ וננויעבש ןאמורב הארי ]” (Ḥakak 61).

The issue was further examined by Almog Behar, who in addition to writing the kind

of creative poetry discussed earlier, has produced important scholarship on Sephardic and

Mizraḥi literature. His long essay, published in a collection of new scholarship on piyyut

( טויפ ), Hebrew liturgical poetry, actually amounts to the most extensive treatment on Burla’s

novel to date. Behar emphasizes the particular position of Burla, a Sephardi Zionist Hebrew

writer, whose novel not only projects a non-Ashkenazi Zionist hero into modernity—a topic

addressed in the next chapter—but also the rich cultural atmosphere that historically

enveloped Sephardim and Mizraḥim. So, while variously anachronistic to the kind of Hebrew

literature composed in the mid-twelfth century, the novel does more broadly merge the

modern author’s literary objectives, “a turn to the historical novel within a Zionist lineage of

the history of the Jews of Spain, and a turn to the genres of the East, among them the piyyut

and the maqāma [ םירנא'זל היינפהו ,דרפס ידוהי לש הירוטסיהל תונויצה סוחיי ךותמ ירוטסיהה ןמורל היינפה

המאקמהו טויפה םהבו ,םייחרזמה ]” (Behar, “Mi-Yehuda” 242).

Adding to the comparative criticism of Ḥakak and Behar, I would note that the genre

of the classical maqāma specifically belies the aims of a historical novel. Unlike the Arabic

maqāma, which had to confront a literary history that equated fiction with deceit, Hebrew

writers emphatically addressed the fictive nature of the story being read. An early Hebrew

maqāma, for example, might present a realistic narrative that would end with the writer

delightfully surprising the reader of its story’s lies, employing phrases like, “it never

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happened, nor did it ever exist [ ארבנ אלו היה הל ]” and “none of these words were made by

someone, as I contrived them from my heart [ םאדוב ינא יבלמ יכ םדא םניכה אל הלאה םירבדה לכו ].”

As Matti Huss has demonstrated, this crucial self-reflexive device of authorial revelation

distinguished Hebrew writers from their Arabic forbears, creating a “new poetics [ הקיטאופה

השדחה ],” “designed to prevent the reader from attributing the story before them as historical

truth, while simultaneously canceling the possibility that they treat it as a false fiction [ דעונ

סחייתי אוה יכ תורשפאה תא לטבל תעב הבו ,תירוטסיה תמא לש דמעמ וינפלש רופיסל סחייל ארוקה ןמ עונמל

תבזוכ הידב לאכ וילא ]” (62).

By contrast, Burla’s novel, from start to finish, poses as a narrative of unimpeachable

accuracy and historicity. As discussed in the first chapter, Burla presents the text of the novel

as a preserved medieval manuscript originally written by a travel companion of Yehuda

Halevi. Moshe Yehuda Elishama‘, the presumed author, opens the narrative with a preface

that emphasizes the accuracy of the events to come, the product of an eyewitness who would

generally record events on the same day they occurred. Once finally settled in Jerusalem,

Elishama‘ reviewed the whole work, without changing a single detail, “but resorted to the

writing style in the language of the maqāma, not because of any great power of mine for

rhyme, just that my quill found it in its grasp to write and recount about our rabbi—who is

the source of poetry and illuminating adages—at least in a language approximating poetry

[ בותכל הזיחא הב יסומלוק אצמ יכ קר ,הזירחב לודג יחוכ תויהמ אל המאקמה ןושל הביתכה ןונגס יתטקנ לבא

הרישל הבורק ןושלב תוחפל ,הריהזמה הצילמהו הרישה רוקמ אוהש ,ונבר לע רפסלו ]” (Burla, ’Ele 10).

The turn toward rhymed prose—that poetic language evokes the central figure of the

narrative—does not contradict assertions of factual reporting. The narrator repeatedly

concludes chapters with reminders of an episode’s accuracy, and the novel ends with an

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epilogue from the narrator in Jerusalem, updating on events “some five years since I have

finished writing this book, These are the Journeys of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi [ םינש שמחכ הז

יולה הדוהי יבר יעסמ הלא רפסה תביתכ יתרמג ]” (267). Unlike the medieval maqāma, in other words,

Burla never metafictionally unmasks himself as the author of the text; instead, the status of

the medieval narrator as author exposes Burla’s modern sensability in constructing a

historical novel.

Burla’s maqāma differed in style from other contemporaneous Hebrew narratives in

rhymed prose. His novella, Shaul and Linda: A Novel in Rhymed Prose ( ןמור :הדנילו לואש

הזורח ןושלב ), written several years before his historical novel on Halevi, marked the writer’s

first attempt to write and define a modern version of saj‘. To introduce a tragic love story

about a Jewish man and a Karaite woman, set in Jerusalem at the end of the nineteenth

century, the narrating father of the protagonist calls attention to the story’s prose:

רובעב ?המל הז לכו .״המאקמה״ איה – זורחה ןונגס אלא ,הליגר אל ןושל הליגמה תאזל יתרחב יתאב ולש ,הרוציקב הקיודמ התויה רובעב רקיעבו ,הרודהו הפי המצעלשכ ןושלה תאז תויה :יתרמא ןכ-לע .אתכירא אתכסמ בותכל יתכרצוה זא יכ ,הטרופמ ,הליגר ןושלב לכה בותכל הברא אלש ימצעל יתעבקו .םתוכיאב םיאנ ויהיש דבלבו םתומכב םיטעומ םירבדה ויהי בטומ אוהש ימ ,יתלוז ירבד איבאש לכ לבא .זונג קוספה ביט היהי ןהב ,זורחה תרושב םילמ עבשמ תעשל ירופיס ךרדב עיגאשכ וא ?ילע זורחה חרוט אהי המל .ונושלכ אוה רבדי – ילא רבדמ ?רעס הכומ ינא תע זורחב לסלסא הכיא – רעצו הלהב

I chose for this story not a regular language, but a rhyming style – that it is “the maqāma.” And all this for what? Because its language is beautiful and elegant, especially for the precision in its brevity. For if I wrote everything in a plain, detailed language, I would then have to write a lengthy tractate. So I said: it is better to have things few in quantity as long as they are pleasant in their quality. And I set for myself not to add more than seven words per rhyming line, each with the essence of a stolen verse. But whenever I quote the words of others, when someone speaks to me – they will speak verbatim. Why should the rhyme burden me? Or when I reach a moment of alarm or distress – how should I curl in a rhyme when I am battered by a storm? (Burla, “Shaul” 131-132)

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The novella’s introduction offers a fascinating glimpse into Burla’s narratological

technique. Coupled with shibbutz (i.e., “the essence of a stolen verse”), saj‘ offers the

beautiful sound of the lyric and distills the essence of a narrative—as evident by the very

rhyming clauses the narrator uses to describe this writing—but should be used up to a point.

The narrator resists rhyme for quotations or for depicting emotionally weighty scenes in the

story, a decision that evokes accepted conventions of the modern novel (e.g., a realistic

representation of social dialogue). The plot of Burla’s novella, however, bears little

relationship to the plot and rhetorical conventions of the classical maqāma, providing yet

another example of a modern Hebrew writer conflating the genre with its most conspicuous

component, saj‘.

Turning to the Middle Ages, the narrator of These are the Journeys of Rabbi Yehuda

Halevi is even less moored by the parameters set in the modern novella, Shaul and Linda.

Certain climactic moments, such as a heavenly vision of the prophet Elijah, do occasionally

interrupt sections of rhymed prose, in parallel to the previous rule of “a moment of alarm or

distress,” but the novel unpredictably shifts in narrative style throughout. Some chapters of

the novel signal rhymed prose with phrases separated by slash marks (/), others by vocalizing

the Hebrew words alongside slash marks, while other sections are completely narrated

unrhymed. More significantly, Burla does not necessarily tone down poetic language during

dialogues for the sake of historical realism. A section from the beginning of the novel serves

as such an example, when Halevi, in his first spoken words, addresses his community in a

synagogue in Granada. Having been openly castigated by fellow rabbi Abu Suleiman on the

impending departure, Halevi eloquently defends his decision. In an attempt to convey the

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rhythmic pulse of Burla’s saj‘, I provide a rhyming English translation that loosely

corresponds with the Hebrew:

:ותרמא חתפו הביתל הלע ,ותא טקשו הולש ,וטאל םק ונברו .ועמש ,ידימלתו ירבח ,יתובר ןה .יל הלילח .הדיערו זגורב הדימ דגנכ הדימ ,המיחבו ףאב המחלמ בישהל יתמק רשא ומדת לא יולגב ירבד שארב םידקאו .וניילח לע קועזלמ איה תבש םגו .ונילגר תודמוע וניהולא-תיבב הבוחו הוצמ ומצעל האורו הבוט ותנווכש יתעדי רשאב ,ןובשח אלב לחומ ינירה :שרופמבו הנעא אלו .לארשי תיב לע טיממ לארשי יפלאב ריעצה ינא רשא הער וז לע הלקתה לע ריהזהל .םירורב םיטושפ םירבדב קר םירוטנקו םינינצב ותלעמ דובכל הלילח

Our rabbi arose slowly, calm and lowly, and to the podium ascended, delivering words holy: My teachers, my friends, my students, hear. Imagine not a war that I have arisen to wage, retaliating with matched gauge, with fury and rage, in shaken rampage. Heaven forbid! For as our feet stand in our Lord’s house, refrain, and on the Sabbath, of our disease we shall not complain. So I must preface my address openly and explicitly: I hereby forgive without reservation, for I know that good is his intention, and he sees his responsibility to warn of the danger, that I, a stranger, young among thousands of Israel, bring upon the house of Israel. And I shall not respond to his highness in prickle and teasing, only in words that are simple and clearing. (Burla, ’Ele 15)

In introducing the fictionalized character of Halevi, Burla depicts a poet in the vein of

the refined maqāma protagonist, who elegantly extemporizes a speech in rhymed prose and

archaic verbiage. The speech, as with many other instances throughout the novel,

incorporates shibbutz, with Halevi creatively reinterpreting a rather obscure Talmudic

discourse that a person should not cry out in prayer when visiting a sick person on Shabbat

(cf. Shabbat 12a). Furthermore, the speech signals from the outset a narrative disjunction

unlike that of Shaul and Linda: consistently asserting the truth of the narratives in the

historical novel while presenting a fanciful configuration of the words and actions of the

historical poet. Even the fictional Halevi’s vow to speak “in words that are simple and

clearing” are at odds with the delivery of such words, since they complete yet another rhyme

scheme in the speech (qinturim/berurim). Unlike the classical maqāma protagonist, however,

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in which poetic speech comedically illustrates the protagonist as a disingenuous rogue, the

gap between surface simplicity and formal complexity reveals the incommensurate

temporality of a modern historical novel constrained by medieval literary form.

Specifically focusing on the novel as it relates to rhymed prose, however, misses

Burla’s innovative adaptations of the classical maqāma genre, which allow for a great

number of literary forms and styles. In the introduction to Taḥkemoni, for example, al-Ḥarizi

boasts that his collection of maqāmāt amounts to much more than a string of narratives, but

virtually every type of writing imaginable, so that “everyone who reads it / will find what he

desires in it [ וברקב ויצפח אצמי / וב ארוקה לכו ]” (al-Ḥarizi 76). Al-Ḥarizi’s last chapter, a

compilation of his poetry on a plethora of subjects, bears no relation to the adventures of his

protagonist. Thus, the ideal classical maqāma gathers what David Simha Segal calls a

“cornucopia of themes and genres,” comprising “chicanery, romance, proverbs, moral

exhortation, history, prayer, debauchery, travel, panegyric, and more,” embedded within and

surrounding the main trickster narratives (xiv). These varieties also extend beyond the

humorous tone of the eloquent rogue protagonist, as elegiac poems and theological debates

further display al-Ḥarizi’s creative talents.

Not so dissimilar, Burla provides a modern version of the classical maqāma if

considering his novel’s “cornucopia” of various literary forms. Despite Ḥakak’s assessment

to the contrary, Burla does include “a great variety of narratological features” that venture

well beyond rhymed-prose. For example, the novel offers a diverse set of liturgical and

secular poetry from the historical Halevi, poetry composed by Burla that imagines the new

poetry of Halevi in Jerusalem, commentary for poems, theological debates modeled after

Halevi’s Kuzari, a modernist turn in a section comprising the fictional Halevi’s unadorned

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journal entries, prophetic speech, a medieval travel itinerary, dream vision, and other types of

writing. These various components distinguish the novel from Burla’s other historical novels,

which generally follow a straightforward structure of modernist narration over sequential

events.

While some of the narrative components from the novel certainly belong to modern

literature, Burla does adopt a variety of medieval genres that either appear conventionally in

classical maqāmāt, or more broadly appear in medieval Hebew literature. For the remainder

of this chapter, I will examine the forms of two medieval genres less frequently discussed in

Hebrew literary studies—the riddle and the epistle—as they appear in These are the Journeys

of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi.

3.4.1 The Medieval Hebrew Riddle

The Hebrew riddle technically stretches back to biblical literature, when Samson first

stumped Philistines in verse (cf. Judg. 14:14-18). Largely abandoned in the Middle Ages,

Andalusi Hebrew poets revived the genre, undoubtedly acculturating the lughz ( زغل ), a genre

of the riddle with a rich history in classical Arabic literature and popularized in the poetry of

Andalusi Muslim Arabic writers (e.g., the tenth-century Córdovan poet Ibn ‘Abd Rabbih)

and in the maqāma that reached the peninsula from the East (e.g., al-Ḥariri’s maqāmāt).

Unlike Samson, whose grotesque riddle of honey in a lion’s corpse “depends on unique

circumstances known only to the riddler, [with] nothing in its formulation provid[ing] a clue

to the solution,” Andalusi Hebrew poets playfully teased answers from within the text of

their riddles (Alter II:133n14). To compose a riddle around a particular object (e.g., a pen,

pomegranate, cloud, etc.) or a person’s name (e.g., a biblical figure), Andalusi Hebrew poets

employed a range of poetic tricks at their disposal, such as linguistic and numerological letter

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and word plays, biblical allusions, and various rhetorical devices (e.g., ekphrasis, metonymy,

oxymoron).

Nineteenth-century Wissenschaft scholars did publish sets of medieval Hebrew

riddles—sometimes accompanied by suggested solutions—and riddles were sometimes

included in surveys of Andalusian Hebrew poetry (cf. Yellin 279-287). Nevertheless, no

serious critical study on the genre appeared until the 1980s, first in an essay by Tova Rosen

and later as part of Dan Pagis’s final scholarship before his untimely death in 1986. The

scholarly lacuna is peculiar, since every significant Andalusi Hebrew poet, including Ben

Labrat, Hanagid, Ibn Gabirol, Moshe Ibn Ezra, Halevi, and Avraham Ibn Ezra composed

riddles (cf. Aluny; Rosen-Moked 179-183). Furthermore, despite their relationship to

allegories,31 folkloric riddles and other types of epigrammatic speech (e.g., proverbs, idioms),

the medieval riddles in question function as high-register literary poetry, as Rosen asserts:

תומרונה לכב תודמוע ןהו ,ןמזה-תב הרישה לש הפוגמ רביא ןה בהזה רות לש תוירבעה תודיחה ירישה הנבימה ;םייתומכה םילקשמב תולוקשו תחרבמה הזירחב תוזורח ןה :הלש תויטאופה איה ןנושל ;תודיחב םיחוורה םייטתיטנאה םינבימה תא בטיה תרשמ רגוסו תלד לש לבוקמה .ףופצ אוה ןהלש יביטארוגיפה םקרימהו ,תיארקמ

Hebrew riddles from the Golden Age [of Spain] are an organ of the body of its contemporaneous poetry, meeting all of its poetic norms: they rhyme in [the closing-rhyme form known as] ḥaruz hamavraḥat and are metered as quantitative meters; the conventional poetic structure of the first line’s opening and closing hemistiches [delet ve-soger] serve well with the antithetical structures prevalent in riddles; their language is biblical, and their figurative texture is dense (Rosen-Moked 169).

31 The medieval Arabic riddle was also informed by rhetorical texts that understood it as expressions of allegory, symbolism, and metonymy (cf. Smoor). For an example of Aristotelian rhetorical influence on the Hebrew riddle, see Maimonides’s understanding of the riddle as allegory in Klein-Braslavy, pp. 66-69.

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On the other hand, medieval riddles operate differently from any other kind of poem

found in a poet’s dīwān in the implicit social function of the reader/listener to decode clues

provided in the text. As Pagis has explained, this game “between concealing and conveying

information is one of the defining qualities of the riddle and reflects the play between riddler

and riddlee in the riddling situation” (“Toward” 90).

In editing Yehuda Halevi’s dīwān, Brody published forty-nine riddles attributed to the

poet. The riddles usually range from two to four lines long; his longest, however, about a

pomegranate, stretches to seventy-two lines long. Each riddle abides by a rigid poetic form

Halevi generally maintained throughout his literary life, at least in following a quantitative

meter and some kind of rhyme scheme. The following literary poem by Halevi offers an

introduction to the conventions of the genre:

ינלאשת ןחה תלעי תואבצב ת -קשח ימ תא יעדת אל-םא הל רמאו .תואמ ששה -תא יריסה

A graceful doe asks me, “Who do you desire among the gazelles?” And I tell her, “if you do not know remove the six hundred.” (Halevi, Dīwān II: Riddle 42, p. 209)

The solution to the riddle depends upon an unexpected reading of the last line, a

reading which does not make for smooth translation. The letter vav (ו)—the sixth letter in the

Hebrew alphabet—equates to the number six, and the Hebrew word for hundreds ( תואמ ) can

alternatively split into two words, “from [מ]” and the word “’ot [ תוא ].” To remove the letter

vav embedded in the word ’ot, as the riddle subtly instructs, will thus reveal whom the

speaker desires: You ( תא )!

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In its compact form, the poem evokes conventional Andalusian Hebrew secular

poetry, with its animal imagery for lovers, rhyme scheme of second and fourth lines, and

hemistiches composed of exclusively long-vowel pairs (a quantitative meter known as

mishqal ha-tenu‘ot). But as a riddle, the poem also implicitly demands the reader or hearer to

investigate the opaque hint of the last line (i.e., “remove the six hundred”) in order to unveil

the encoded solution to the problem. Rather than charge words with literary allusion (i.e.,

shibbutz), this encoded solution relies on a simple understanding and application of Hebrew

numerology and word game. Halevi exemplifies his skill for the short literary riddle by

embedding the solution in ’ot—the Hebrew word for alphabetic letter—a linguistic

combination of terms that signals the riddle’s key (i.e., to distinguish a letter from a word).

Most medieval Andalusian Hebrew riddles rely on such playful games with the

Hebrew language. In contrast to subsequent developments in the Hebrew riddle (e.g.,

emblem riddles from Baroque Italy), the Andalusi poet rarely incorporates multilingualism

for a solution, as will appear in Burla’s novel. I have, however, found one example composed

by Halevi that does this:

הרתי הבר הבהא שא החק הרתפ ךל תיברע שאה תאזו הלחת ףוק הב םישו הרתפ ךפה .ארקמ םשה הזב ךמש יהי

Take a fire of great, exceeding love And this Arabic fire will be your solution Reverse its solution and place an eye of a needle at its opening In this may your name be the read name. (Halevi, Dīwān II: Riddle 34, p. 206)

Structurally, most of the lines of the short poem maintain -ra rhyme endings, abide by

the popular quantitative meter known as ha-merubbeh (- - ◡/- - - ◡/- - - ◡), and displays a

quick use of shibbutz. The first line tangentially evokes Song of Songs 8:6 (i.e., “For strong

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as death is love... its sparks are sparks of fire, a fearsome flame [ יפשר היפשר...הבהא תומכ הזע יכ

היתבהלש שא ]”), a biblical quotation that perhaps alludes to a hinted solution; the word for

“read” in the last line might alternatively refer to the title for the Hebrew Bible, miqra ( ארקמ ).

The mechanism to unlock the encoded message, however, with its strange references to an

“Arabic fire” and “eye of a needle,” differs from the previous riddle’s use of numerology,

hinting instead at word play in the Arabic language. Brody supplied answers to most of the

riddles in his edition of Halevi’s dīwān—even qualifying shakier speculations with question

marks—but this riddle proved particularly challenging, and he conceded that “its solution

escapes me [ ינממ םלענ ונורתפ ]” (Brody, Dīwān II: Notes to Riddle 34, p. 153).

The mystery ended a half-century later, in 1956, when Shemuel Ben-Shabbat

published his solutions to unanswered riddles by Halevi and Ibn Gabirol. Ben-Shabbat

demonstrated that the key to the riddle lies in the Arabic word for fire, nār ( ران ), which, once

reversed as instructed (i.e., rān), and supplemented with an initial Qoph—not an “eye” of a

needle, as Brody had vocalized the text, but the Hebrew letter (ק)—does a word form: Qur’ān

( ןארק ) (cf. Ben-Shabbat 386). It would seem the riddle posed was less indecipherable for

Ben-Shabbat, an Arabic-speaking Moroccan Jew with a career partly devoted to Arabic and

Hebrew linguistics. Whatever the case, Ben-Shabbat’s solution to the multilingual riddle

again highlights Halevi’s skill for word plays; both Hebrew and Arabic refer to religious

canons as publicly read texts, and, as Semitic languages, these terms are uncoincidentally

related (miqra ≈ Qur’ān).

For all of their playful, rhetorical devices, medieval Hebrew riddles easily fit into the

umbrella category of the maqāma. Following al-Ḥarīrī, riddles appear throughout al-Ḥarizi’s

Taḥkemoni, with one chapter entirely devoted to a disguised Ḥever and his son trading off

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riddling descriptions of various objects. While the riddle in a maqāma naturally highlights

the wisdom and poetic talents of the protagonist, such as Ḥever, the riddle that appears in

Burla’s novel glorifies the fictional character Ruḥiya, a beautiful and witty woman that the

fictional Halevi falls in love with during his stay in Egypt. Over the course of a few festive

nights, the Alexandrian Jewish community celebrates alongside Halevi’s crew, with Ruḥiya

offering such impenetrable riddles to the men as the following:

דחאכ ינעו רישע ימ דרחי ינשבו עגר טקשי ובל הארי אל תחאו תובר הארי ןעי .האדיו לחזי תחאכ ןכ-לע הדיחיו תחא הלמו .הדיחה וז ןורתפ

Who is wealthy and poor alike One moment his heart tranquil, the next trembling For he will see many, but one he will not see Therefore, he will at once crawl and glide. And one, single word Is the solution for this riddle. (Burla, ’Ele 93)

Burla’s adaptation to the form of the Andalusian Hebrew riddle deserves mention

before addressing the solution. That the fictional narrator originally hears Ruḥiya relay the

riddle in Arabic, before reconstructing it himself into his own loose, rhyming Hebrew,

absolves Burla of replicating the rigid forms of medieval poetry. Indeed, Elishama‘

apologizes that out of the riddles originally delivered during the festivities, “almost all were

metered as quantified poems [ תודודמ ריש לקשמב ןלוכ טעמכו ]” (93). This narrative mediation

appears throughout the novel, such as the nonfictional anecdote discussed in the first chapter,

when the narrator overhears parts of a conversation about Halevi once cleverly upbraiding

the repellent voice of a beautiful woman in Granada years before his journey. In contrast, the

woman at the center of this event shines in both beauty and brilliance—eventually smiting

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the fictional Halevi with desire—which the narrator attempts to capture by imitating the

playful poetic eloquence of the imagined original version.

Structurally, the riddle follows Halevi’s model of a short poem of rhyming couplets, a

posed question, and a solution as a single word. In place of linguistic and numerological

tricks, the riddle relies on another convention common in many Andalusian Hebrew and

Arabic riddles, what Peter Cole calls “an often deliberately misleading presentation of

apparent paradoxes and oppositions, the solution of which usually lies in unraveling the

metaphorical code of the poem” (Dream 443). The apparent paradoxes here (i.e.,

wealthy/poor, tranquil/trembling, many/one, crawl/glide) might suggest an impossible or

mythological creature in its literal reading, but will coexist once the listener unlocks the

poem’s “metaphorical code.”

As text in a diwān, a literary riddle by the historical Halevi only offers one side of an

exchange—the initiating position of the riddler—but the poem here imagines the social

environment that would have received the challenge. Alongside a courtly atmosphere of wine

drinking, lustful gazing, and the improvisatory poetry that stems from both, Burla includes

the pleasure of a woman teasing a concealed object before a group of men. The scene

anticipates the erotic climax of a man penetrating through the poem’s textual barricades, but

Ruḥiya’s riddle, like her body, remains that night inaccessible to all:

)תוצע-דבוא שיא( ןאריח לא :איה התליגש דע / תוצח רבכו הנורתפ םיבוסמה לכ ונאצמ אלו אל םילמה תופי ברע-ןושלבו )ןאריחלא( תוצע דבואה לש וחור דמעמ הדיחה תולמב אצמתו קוד .ןריחמ זפב הלוסי

All of us participants could not find its solution. It was already midnight / until she revealed it: al-Ḥairān (a bewildered man). Examine and you will find in the words of the riddle the temperament of bewilderment (al-Ḥairān). In the beautiful Arabic language these words were priceless (Burla, ’Ele 94).

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If Elishama‘, the fictional narrator, relays the entire event and the riddle itself into

rhyming Hebrew, why is the provided solution an Arabic word? Unlike the previously cited

riddle by the historical Halevi, the poem does not require any knowledge of the Arabic

language to arrive at the metaphorized individual. Furthermore, Burla could have emphasized

the Arabic word in Arabic letters, a shift he occasionally makes in the novel,32 instead of

Hebrew transliteration. It appears that Burla uses the conventions of the riddle to gesture at

another monumental Andalusi, born in Córdoba shortly before Halevi’s historical voyage and

who also journeyed Eastwards, albeit by force, following the Almohad invasions of al-

Andalus. The riddle’s solution, from the Arabic word for perplexity ( ناریحلا ), evokes

Maimonides’s Judeo-Arabic philosophical work Dalālat al-ḥā’irīn ( ןיריאחלא תלאלד ),

commonly known in English as The Guide for the Perplexed, originally written in Egypt a

half-century after the imagined events of Halevi’s Egyptian adventures. By providing the

solution to a challenging riddle, Ruḥiya indeed provides a guide for the perplexed. Like the

historical Halevi’s literary riddle addressed to and implicating the second person, a

metalinguistic riddle addresses imagined listeners, who here enact the very dilemma posed in

the riddle (i.e., dawdling in bewilderment).

Significantly, the narrator translates the solution as a popular biblical phrase for

bewilderment or helplessness, ’oved ‘etzot (cf. Deut. 32:28), rather than the closer translation

of nevukh ( ךובנ ), a term that would overtly signal for the modern reader the standard Hebrew

title of Maimonides’s work ( םיכובנ הרומ ). The synonym ’oved ‘etzot at once facilitates the

32 For example, the page numbers of the fictional Halevi’s journal are written in Arabic numerals, as is the title for a fictional Arabic book that Halevi writes while in Egypt (cf. 141-151; 160).

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rhymed prose of the chapter (ḥatzot/‘etzot) while operating within the game of a textual

riddle, as it encodes a reference to medieval Jewish Egyptian culture for the discerning reader

to decode. Of course, Maimonides and his rationalist explication on Jewish Aristotelian

theology plays no role in the historical novel about the poet Yehuda Halevi, except that the

allusion of the Arabic title further expands the panoramic scope of the genre in discussion.

As José Faur has argued, Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed is indeed structured

like a riddle. In his work, Maimonides the teacher guides the student reader through

metaphysical concepts as if in an “intellectual maze;” topics are introduced but not fully

elaborated on, and scattered contradictions and esoteric clues purposefully provoke a crisis of

perplexity for the reader, which “only the qualified student can discover and decode” (Faur

Homo 35; cf. Golden Doves 75-76). In other words, the seemingly diametric categories of

texts in discussion here—one as short as a rhyming, lyrical couplet, the other as long and

dense as the three books of Judeo-Arabic theological exposition—intersect precisely when

examining their form.

To extend the Maimonides reference further, Burla also serves as a literal guide for

the perplexed reader by formatting the riddle with explanatory footnotes after each line. For

example, the reader understands from a footnote that the perplexed man is both wealthy and

poor “in paths, in conjectures, as he has many paths and conjectures, but no one to trust him

[ וב חטבי דחא ול ןיאו םיבר תורעשהו םיכרד ול שיש ,תורעשהב ,םיכרדב ];” for the line, “Therefore, he

will at once crawl and glide,” a footnote explains, “the image of his spirit will crawl from

despair and glide because he found what he sought [ אצמ יכ ותומדכ וחורב האדיו שואימ לחזי

ושקובמ ]” (Burla, ’Ele 93n2; 93n5). These modern footnotes puncture through the opaque

structure of the literary riddle, whose game relies upon an initial distance between reader and

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solution; indeed, even the narrative only divulges Ruḥiya’s solution once the reader turns the

page.

This commentary resembles the use of footnotes for various poems that appear in the

novel, and which derive from the historical Halevi’s dīwān, in which Burla clarifies difficult

phrases and obscure allusions. That Burla replicates Halevi’s poetry and his own original

commentary in his nonfictional biography of Halevi, Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, published a year

after the novel, again blurs the lines separating author, editor, historian, narrator, and poet.33

In the case of Ruḥiya’s riddle, the textual intervention of footnotes conjures Burla the

novelist as something of a Halevi and a Brody, both artful medieval poet—the weaver of

paradoxical metaphors versed in Hebrew and Arabic—and scholarly modern editor—

skillfully interpreting his own character’s dense metaphors.

3.4.2 Medieval Epistolary Writing

If the definition of the maqāma shifted for modern Hebrew writers, it is interesting to

note that medieval Arabic writers also conflated the genre with its progenitor: the medieval

epistle, known in Arabic as risāla ( ةلاسر ). As a result of translating Greek and other classical

epistles,34 medieval Arabic writers developed a genre difficult to delineate, since the risāla

would encompass a broad range of prosaic writing, such as political essays, treatises on

poetics, theological discourses, and autobiographical letters. Nevertheless, many types of

33 For example, in the novel, shortly after Ruḥiya confounds her audience with the riddle, the participants celebrate an event by reciting an actual poem from the historical Halevi. The poem, which appears in the novel with extensive explanatory footnotes, reappears in Burla’s biography of Halevi with identical footnotes for the poem (cf. Burla, ’Ele 95-96; Rabbi 106-109). 34 See Swain, for example, for the Arabic reproduction of the pseudonymous “Letter of Aristotle to Alexander,” translated or edited by the eighth-century Umayyad secretary Sālim Abū l-‘Alā’.

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risālāt betray a high-literary style, not only employing the expected saj‘, but also maintaining

a “distilled language, laden with tropes, fine allusions, plays on words, verbal tricks and

metalepses” (Arazi et al.). These characteristics, of course, recall the myriad rhetorical

devices of the maqāma genre that would follow, and when the maqāma expanded beyond the

humorous trickster narrative (e.g., the didactic maqāma), the two genres were commonly

mislabeled for one another (cf. Arazi et al).

The Andalusian Hebrew ’iggeret ( תרגא ), or epistle, clearly models after the Arabic

risāla. Like the Hebrew riddle, it has not received nearly the kind of critical attention as other

Andalusian genres, despite its ubiquity among the significant poets, such as Halevi and

Moshe Ibn Ezra. Furthermore, geniza scholars have unearthed just how pervasively the ideals

of the risāla were transmitted to Jews in Islamic lands. Even Maimonides, deriding

contemporary trends of poetry from Spain and criticizing the stylized language of men with

whom he corresponded, succumbed to this popular convention by similarly initiating various

epistles, such as his epistle to the scholars of Lunel, with saj‘ and shibbutz.35

For Rina Drory, the writing of medieval Jews from Islamic lands bifurcates according

to language; Arabic writing, for subjects like philosophy and poetics, served a

“communicative function” in which “the author was chiefly concerned that his words be well

understood,” while Hebrew writing, such as poetry and maqāmāt, served a “festive and

grandiloquent function” in which “the author’s priority was that his words be beautifully put”

35 For Maimonides’s complicated attitude toward poetry, see Tobi pp. 422-466, especially pp. 444-451, as it relates to epistolary writing; see also Sheer pp. 7-20, for the poetic language in Maimonides’s own epistle to the scholars of Lunel.

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(Models 171). In an essay on letters from the Cairo Geniza, Mark R. Cohen modifies Drory’s

generalization to consider a “middle ground,” in elite Hebrew epistles, which “possess

artistic quality (rhymed prose), yet were also intended to convey information...even if some

of the clarity got lost in the complexity of the literary style” (“On the Interplay” 22).

Epistolary writing was made more intricate through a protocol of introductory

blessings, formulations and epithets, courteous and self-deprecating statements, remarks on

the date of composition, and fulsome praise of the addressee, all before shifting to the main

subject of a letter. Florid prosaic and lyrical compositions exemplified ideals first laid out by

the eighth-century Umayyad secretary ‘Abd al-Ḥamīd’s “Epistle to the Secretaries [ ىلإ ھتلاسر

باتكلا ],” a risāla that spawned a sub-genre of other medieval Arabic manuals on scribal

epistolography. Judeo-Arabic transcriptions of such manuals found in the Cairo Geniza have

definitively established the influence of Muslim Arabic scribal ideals for elite Hebrew

writers, as have an abundance of Hebrew correspondence that incorporates “the same

technical jargon used in the Arabic epistolographic literature” (M. Cohen, “Correspondence”

40).

Critics of Burla’s novel, who marked the anachronism of defining a narrative on

Yehuda Halevi a “maqāma,” ignore Halevi’s own penchant for prosed rhyme in composing

epistles. As discussed in the first chapter, Burla relied on information based on the fresh

scholarly work published around documents discovered from the Cairo Geniza. Brody’s first

volume of Halevi’s dīwān, published around the turn of the twentieth-century, already

included several of Halevi’s epistles, but it was in the decade leading up to the publication of

Burla’s novel that scholars like Shraga Abramson, Yehuda Ratzhaby, and S. D. Goitein

published new, critically-edited chains of correspondence. Burla’s careful adaptation of

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epistolary forms illustrates yet another effort of the historical novel to read as medieval. As

one example, the head rabbis of the yeshiva in Granada address the Alexandrian judge

Aharon al-‘Ammanī in an epistle later transcribed “word for word [ הלמב הלמ ]” by the

accompanying narrator (Burla, ’Ele 58). The epistle goes on to announce Halevi’s voyage to

Egypt, but I wish to focus here on the use of abbreviations that consume the introductory

address, since they cleverly adopt formulas from medieval epistles and responsa literature:

דרפס תלוגב רשא הטנרג ת״יע הפ ושע ימע וניב

ה״ה הליהתל ןטייפ תרטעו הלודגו הרות רתכ ול הלעמב ןושאר הבר הנייד אלפומה ברה תלעמ דובכל א״ריכ י״נ ינאמעלא ןורהא ןויצ-ןב ר״ומ

Here, ‘y”t, Granada, which is in the exile of Spain

binu [understand] ‘ammi [my people] ‘asu [do] In honor of the virtue of the great wondrous rabbi, the first rate high judge, a crown of Torah and greatness, and a wreath for the glory of the composer, h”h mo”r, son of Zion, Aharon al-‘Amannī, n”y kyr”a (59)

The sprinkling of abbreviations, which I transliterate in the English, assumes a

rabbinic code of familiar epistolary conventions. Much of the Judeo-Arabic correspondence

related to the historical Halevi during his stay in Egypt, as well as many others types of

letters found throughout the Cairo Geniza, begin with the abbreviation ׳מב , short for “In Your

name, the Merciful [ אנמחר ךמשב ],” a direct translation of the Islamic introductory prayer

formula known as the basmala ( ةلمسب ) that conventionally initiates an Arabic epistle. Burla

adopts a lesser-used Hebrew basmala, the acronym spelling out the words “understand, my

people, do,” which nevertheless does appear in geniza literature as an accepted convention

for initiating a letter.36 As Burla’s footnotes guide the modern reader, this basmala formula

36 The Princeton Geniza Project database has so far transcribed eleven geniza letters and petitions that begin with the basmala formula ימע וניב ושע or ושע ימע .

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stands for, “with the help of God, we will do and succeed [ חילצנו השענ ׳ה תרזעב ],” “Our help is

from God [ ׳ה םעמ ונרזע ],” “Maker of heaven and earth [ ץראו םימש השוע ]”, the last two

acronyms derived from Psalms 121:2.

Burla’s footnotes once again gesture at the expectations of what a modern Hebrew

reader does and does not know about medieval writing. Like the basmala, they might not

know that the letters n”y kyr”a stand for “may his candle illuminate; yes, may it be Thy will,

Amen [ ןמא ןוצר יהי ןכ ריאי ורנ ];” even though these abbreviations still appear in modern

rabbinic literature, they too receive an editorial footnote (58n4). On the other hand, an

abbreviation for the date of the epistle’s composition—‘y”t, for the “Ten Days of Repentance

[ הבושת ימי תרשע ]” between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur—and laudatory descriptions

directed toward the addressee— h”h mo”r, for “the honorable master, our master and rabbi

[ ונברו ונרומ דבכנה ןודאה ],” apparently require no assistance.

To further compare how Burla’s novel echoes medieval epistolary writing, we may

turn to an actual epistle by the historical Halevi, first published by Luzzatto in 1840 and

republished in Brody’s dīwān in 1894. In the example below, Yehuda Halevi writes to the

very same Aharon al-‘Ammanī that the fictional Granada rabbis address in the novel, using

flowery saj‘ and an abundance of laudatory phrases toward the addressee:

,ונרומ רורצ ,ונינושל קתמו ,ונינזא םענו ,וניניע דמחמ לא ,תרתעו םולשב ,תרגאה לבות ׳דק ׳דג ׳בכ ןב ,אלפומה ןיידה ,הלעמה רבחה ןרהא ׳רו ׳רמ ,ונצרא דובכ ,ונצפח ,ונרויו ונשוקלמ העושי ׳רו ׳רמ ,הלעמה אפורה ,אלפומה םכחה ,לודגמה זעמה ,לודגה רשה תראפת תריפצ לא ףאושה ,ומולשל לאשה ,ומשב ארקה ,ותלדגב לדגתמהו ,ותלהתב ללהתמה תאמ .ה״בצנת .ע״נ לאומש ׳רב יולה הדוהי ,ומוקמ

The letter shall be delivered, in peace and abundance, to the apple of our eyes, and the pleasure of our ears, and the sweetness of our tongues, the bundle of our myrrh, our outpouring and our first rain, our desire, the honor of our nation, mr’ and r’ [my teacher and my rabbi] Aharon, the outstanding friend, the wonderous judge, son of

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kv’ gd’ qd’ of the siren of glory for the grand minister, the strong and mighty, the wonderous sage, the excellent doctor, mr’ and r’ [my teacher and my rabbi] Yeshu‘a, tntzb”h [May his soul be bundled in the bundle of life]. From he who is glorified by his glory, who is learned from his wisdom, who calls his name, who asks for his health, who aspires to reach his place of dwelling, Yehuda Halevi son of R’ Shmuel, n”‘ [whose soul is in Eden]. (Halevi, Dīwān I: Letter 1, lines 1-8, p. 207)

The published epistle presents yet another instance linking Burla to the last editor of

Halevi’s dīwān, Ḥayyim Brody, as the editor similarly ignores commenting on abbreviations

the scholarly reader should know—such as the titles “my teacher and my rabbi” and the

conventional Jewish epitaphs for the late fathers of the addressee and sender. His short

commentary does, however, elucidate the less common kv’ gd’ qd’, short for “great, holy

honor [ תשדק תלדג דובכ ]” (Brody, Dīwān I: Notes to Letter 1, p. 316). Burla’s praises

reverberate when reading the historical epistle, particularly Halevi’s original reference to al-

‘Ammanī as “the wondrous judge,” highlighting the role of panegyrics in the formation of an

epistle’s introductory address.

Ubiquitous in medieval epistolography, the genre of the panegyric was first

introduced in the previous chapter on Sephardic palimpsests, as it related to the Halevi-Ibn

Ezra-Ibn al-Mu‘allim correspondence through panegyric and panegyric-in-reply qaṣīda

poems. Whether a fully-formed poem or a section of prose, the medieval panegyric offered

writers a procedure to display categorical respect to an addressee through idealized, lyrical

descriptions, a rhetorical tactic particularly expected for the composition of petitions to men

of higher social rank. In his study of the subject, Jonathan Decter asserts that with all of its

hyperbolic metaphors, the medieval panegyric was instrumental in representing and

legitimizing roles of authority; all the more so for “Jewish leadership in the medieval

Mediterranean, which had no military, no real territory, and few means of coercion, such

metaphors were sometimes all that existed for the constitution and promulgation of power”

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(Dominion 6). Geniza letters from Halevi demonstrate the role of panegyrics to distinguish

various members in the Alexandrian Jewish community, from the short, boilerplate

introductions sent to friends to the exceedingly lavish praise, comprising rhymed prose and a

long poem, addressed to Shemuel ben Ḥananya, the Fatimid courtier physician and most

powerful Jew in Egypt during Halevi’s stay.

While the Granada rabbis’ address offers a few choice labels to al-‘Ammanī, Burla

constructs a more sophisticated epistolary panegyric in a chapter actually titled “The Epistle

[ תרגיאה ].” Having arrived in Jerusalem after a trek throughout the Holy Land, the fictional

Halevi recounts his adventures, dreams, and a mystical experience with the biblical prophet

Elijah in the form of an epistle addressed to his close friend Shelomo ben Yosef al-

Mu‘allim—the same name, to recall from the previous chapter, as the historical Almoravid

court physician from Seville who first composed a panegyric qaṣīda on the occasion of

Halevi’s departure for Granada.37 The fictional epistle that consumes the chapter goes on to

use various literary devices, but again I wish to specifically focus on the introductory

address, as it most clearly adopts the form of medieval epistolary panegyric for a powerful

Jewish figure in discussion:

תראפתה ול רשא םיעושב ליצאו םיעורה ריבא לא הנומאבו הרותב לודג ,תרטע טילשלכ דמחמ ונשפנ בוהא ,הנומא רקחמו רישב וידיו ונתבהא הקוקח וב ,ונבלמ שומי אל וניניע ומש תלעמ דובכ ונתורחב ימיבכ הזע המלש יבר

37 While Ibn al-Mu’allim’s panegyric to Halevi had long been known, and included in Schirmann’s 1954 anthology of Hebrew poetry in medieval Spain, Halevi’s reply was not, until it was discovered and published by S. M. Stern in 1963. Thus, Burla’s prose panegyric anticipates Halevi’s actual panegyric poem to Ibn al-Mu’allim by four years.

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ףסוי ונבר הלעמה םר תלודג דובכ ןב ריתעמה תאמ םלעמלא ,םימי לע םימי ףיסוי םימורמ ןכושל וילע הליפת .לאומש ןב הדוהי לארשי יפלאב ןטקה

To the shepherds’ hero and aristocrat of noblemen whose majesty is as a crown for a ruler, highly versed in Torah and faith his hands in poetry, a prober of faith, beloved of our souls, a desire of our eyes will not wander from our hearts, in him our love is engraved fierce as the days of our youth, the honor of thy holy name

Rabbi Shelomo son of our honorable highly elevated rabbi Yosef al-Mu‘allim from the one who entreats a prayer for him upon the Dweller of Heights, shall He add days upon days, the smallest amongst thousands of Israel, Yehuda ben Shemuel. (Burla, ’Ele 245)

Formatted with line breaks between clauses and indentations, the printed text mimics

the imagined handwriting of Halevi. As expected, the introductory address uses the rhymed

clauses of saj‘ (i.e., ha-ro‘im/ba-sho‘im; ha-tiferet/‘ateret; nafsheinu/‘eineinu/me-

libeinu/ahavateinu) and biblical shibbutz (e.g., “a desire of our eyes, their soul’s longing

[ םשפנ אשמ תאו םהיניע דמחמ ]” from Ezekiel 24:25) as the proper mode for highly eloquent

prose. Like the historical epistle from Halevi, this epistle ensures that the addressee bears all

of the important qualities an honorable man of authority should possess: nobility, Torah

learning, poetic skill, faith, public approbation, beauty (i.e., “a desire of our eyes”), and an

unwavering loyalty amongst his admirers. The fictionalized poet further demonstrates his

admiration by incorporating word plays on the addressee’s name (i.e., “highly elevated,” a

phonetic approximation of the Arabic name (ha-ma‘ala/al-Mu‘allim)), as well as his father’s

name (i.e., “shall He add,” based on the verb in the Hebrew name (yoseef/Yosef)).

Comparatively, both fictional and historical epistles above share a bank of

conventional praises, such as the “great, honorable [ תלודג דובכ ]” formula, abbreviated in the

historical Halevi’s epistle; both similarly represent ardor for the addressee as an experiential

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apex (cf. Halevi’s original epistle’s “our outpouring and our first rain” with the novel’s “love

is engraved fierce as the days of our youth”). Structurally, both epistles also begin with a

string of praises directed to the addressee that will eventually transition to the humble

identification of the sender, yet another component in the intricate etiquette of the Hebrew

epistle. In the historical epistle, Halevi identifies himself only in subservient relation to the

greatness of the addressee (i.e., “From he who is glorified by his glory, who is learned from

his wisdom, etc.”), but the fictional epistle goes further by contrasting the addressee’s

greatness with the sender’s insignificance (i.e., “the smallest amongst thousands of Israel”).

Burla’s epithet corresponds to the sender’s conventional self-deprecation that again

aims to highlight the addressee’s authority, a rhetorical practice scaled by the relationship

and status of the correspondents. Imagined in the novel as old friends—the narrator refers to

al-Mu‘allim as Halevi’s “beloved soulmate [ ושפנ-דידי ]”—the fictional Halevi would not need

to diminish himself as one petitioning a higher authority figure (Burla, ’Ele 245). In a letter

to Shemuel ben Ḥananya, for example, published from geniza research in 1952, the historical

Halevi follows a panegyric introductory poem with a more extreme epithet befitting

Ḥananya’s station: “Peace, peace, from the Lord’s slave and the lord’s slave, Yehuda Halevi,

Spain his land and Jerusalem his direction [ דרפס ]יו[לה הדוהי ינודא דבעו יי דבע תאמ םולש םולש

ותמגמ םילשוריו ,ותמדא ]”; here, Halevi equates his relationship to God with Ḥananya, using the

traditional term of the former for the latter (Adonai/adoni) (Abramson 142).

The turn to panegyric rhymed-prose, with its delay in identifying addressee and

sender, emblematizes the middle register of epistolary writing asserted by Cohen, displaying

a type of performative obscurantism that Raymond P. Scheindlin, in his study of Halevi’s

Egyptian correspondence, claims “elite writers strived for in a culture that was founded on

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widespread knowledge of a uniform body of classical texts” (114). These are the Journeys of

Rabbi Yehuda Halevi does not evenly align with the tone of the classical maqāma, and the

Hebrew epistle as reconstructed by Burla differs considerably from its predecessor’s

humorous depictions. The panegyric epistle in al-Ḥarizi’s Taḥkemoni, for example, mocks

the conventional form through linguistic trickery—as a “reversible epistle [ תכפהתמה תרגיאה ],”

the protagonist Ḥever’s praise to a prince produces antithetical, disparaging meanings when

the same words are read from the end of the text to the beginning (cf. al-Ḥarizi, ch. 7, pp.

153-160). However, the novel’s epistle does, at least, model after the same style of writing

composed by its historical figure, conveying for the modern Hebrew reader a lesser-known

genre of writing beyond Halevi’s recognizable lines of proto-Zionist poetry.

3.5 Conclusion

This chapter offers only a small selection in a spectrum of modern “Andalusian”

writing. Future comparative research might illuminate a broader network of ties between

medieval and modern Hebrew literature not mentioned here, such as Hanagid’s war poetry

vis-à-vis Israeli war poetry, the courtly homoerotism of wine poetry vis-à-vis Israeli queer

literature, or Halevi’s Zionide poems vis-à-vis nationalist and post-Zionist poetry on living in

the State of Israel. Nevertheless, this chapter’s focus underscores the significance of literary

forms for modern Hebrew writers who identify as living descendants of the medieval Jews

from Spain.

To close this chapter, I refer to a passing reference Almog Behar notes in his essay on

Yehuda Burla, a scene written by yet another Sephardi Israeli writer, the Ḥalabi rabbi

Ḥayyim Sabato (cf. Behar, “Mi-Yehuda” 260). In his nostalgic novel on the Syrian Jewish

community living in Jerusalem, Like the Eyelids of Dawn ( רחש יפעפעכ ), Sabato depicts the

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modern Sephardi scholar in the character Doctor Yehuda Tawil, a pious man intimately

familiar with Andalusian poetry as a result of both Sephardic upbringing and university

education. Dismissed by the Ashkenazi scholars with whom he works in the academy,

Doctor Tawil hosts a gathering to reveal to them a new, unpublished series of poems by

Yehuda Halevi that he discovered and spent years editing. In a prank to prove his mastery,

Doctor Tawil reveals to his colleagues that he himself actually composed one of the poems

from the new set they have been studying during that evening, a poem that adopts the same

medieval forms used by Halevi. The prank crumbles, however, when he embarrassingly

cannot find the forgery amidst the real poems, a personal failure that stings him long after the

colleagues leave:

ריש .שקבמ אוה וריש תאש אלא ,וירבחמ שייבתנש השובה ינפמ אלו .ןיע םצע אל הליל ותוא יכו .םיירהצב שמשכ רבדה ול ירב .היה ולשו .וב זורחו וב לקשמו ,וב םייומידו ,היה אלפנ וריש המדנש ול אוה לודג חבש ,ורמאת ?יולה יריש ןיב ול דבא ךיאו ?ותעד וילע השבתשנ ישעמ תאו הצור אוה ומצע תא ,חבש אל וא חבש ,ןכ־יפ־לע־ףא .םינטייפבש ראופמה ירישכ )Sabato 87( .םירחא ךותב תעקושמ ותומצע היהתש אלו ,וידי

That night he slept not a wink. Not for the shame of humiliation before his colleagues but because he yearned for his own poem. It had been an outstanding poem, replete with images, ordered according to a rhyme scheme, and adhering to a strict meter. And it was his own. The matter was as clear to him as the afternoon sunshine. Had his mind become utterly confused? How could he have lost it amongst HaLevi’s poems? You might think it was a great honor for him to imagine his own poem as a poem by the finest of the medieval poets. Nevertheless, whether an honor or not, he wanted to reclaim his own work, not to have it submerged under the work of others. (Dweck 95)

The fictional incident perceptively captures the work of the Sephardi writers

discussed in this chapter, who demonstrate a patent capability of writing like a medieval

Andalusi in order to craft their own, original work. Unlike Doctor Tawil, however, none of

the Sephardi writers aim to completely transcend the temporal distance that separates them

from their ancestral poets; instead, they assert a transmitted lineage of medieval culture that

always leaves traces of their modern positions. Yehoshua’s qaṣīda relies on a modern Israeli

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rhyme scheme, Shamosh’s muwashshaḥ lauds an Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, Behar’s

baqashot develop a new type of shibbutzim out of the medieval lines he imitates, and Burla’s

maqāma straddles medieval poetic convention and the modern historical novel. These traces

do not indicate a failing of the writers to achieve a fully realized medievalist project, but

rather reveals the complicated process of articulating their own modern Sephardic identities,

mediated by both medieval and modern forms of Hebrew literature.

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Conclusion: The Search for a New Homeland

Previous chapters have demonstrated how modern Sephardi writers have read,

remembered and imitated the texts, figures, and experiences of medieval Spain. In a global

diaspora separated by language, locale, and era, Sephardim relate most broadly to one

another through an ancestral lineage tied to a former homeland. Unlike the first generations

to follow the Spanish expulsion of 1492, in which exiled Jews maintained cultural, linguistic,

and economic ties to Spain upon arriving in the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and

elsewhere, the modern landscape of Sephardic writing surveyed here reveals a far deeper

chasm. These writers must reconstruct a culture long obscured and mythologized over the

centuries, and complicated—as the first chapter has shown—by the historiography available

to them. Such sustained communal claims to an identity rooted in the medieval past have also

informed and founded conceptions of modern Sephardic—or, more specifically in the case of

Shamosh and Behar, Arab Jewish—identity.

The practice of palimpsestic writing discussed in the second chapter, or the imitation

of medieval Hebrew literary forms discussed in the third chapter, illustrate some of the ways

in which Sephardim attempt to situate themselves into the medieval past. A homoerotic

sonnet or a Ladino ode might reveal a poet’s autobiographical experiences, but it is in the

incorporation of text originally written by Andalusi writers that allows Sephardim like Emma

Lazarus and Moshe David Gaon to claim an inherited poetic sensibility. Likewise, an elegy

composed by A. B. Yehoshua or a liturgical supplication by Almog Behar, both of which

conform to the challenging constrictions of a largely-abandoned Hebrew medieval poetics,

exemplify the continuation of a particular cultural legacy.

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In addition to informing a writer’s self-proclaimed identity, the constructed memory

of these ancestral histories can also be deployed as a critique directed at modern societal

conditions. The politicization of medieval Spain returns us to the broader literary practice of

sephardism, which, as Yael Halevi-Wise asserts, “sets up comparisons between historical

periods and national identities anchored in the political preoccupations of the present, where

the role of Jews and Jewish history is legitimized or delegitimized according to changing

attitudes towards coexistence between nations or within them” (Introduction 30). While

Halevi-Wise’s edited collection demonstrates the pliability of the medieval Iberian

Jew/converso/crypto-Jew for writers of any background or nationality, this dissertation has

attempted to restore and emphasize the specifically personal relationship between Sephardim

and Spain.

The political trope of sephardism, whether projecting a modern version of an

Andalusian golden age or its inverse, an Inquisition in Christian Spain, has also shaped

nationalist ideals for Sephardim. Each of the writers discussed in this dissertation have

incorporated their medieval heritage in some way in order to comment and critique their

particular stations in a broad Sephardic diaspora. Politicized writings include the Zionist

poetry of the Bosnian immigrant Moshe David Gaon; the Jewish Syria of Amnon Shamosh; a

critique of Israeli ethnic divisions in the cultural clashes of A. B. Yehoshua’s medievalist

novel; or the autobiographical displacements captured in Angelina Muñiz-Huberman’s

mystical travel narrative, El mercader de Tudela.

For this conclusion, I will revisit the constellation that began this study—Grace

Aguilar, Emma Lazarus, and Yehuda Burla—to consider the ways in which Sephardim

imagine the potential for a modern homeland that can overwrite/replace Spain. In each case,

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these writers open up trajectories that move from medieval Spain to their own contemporary

cultural and political contexts. Aguilar uses the torture of the Spanish Inquisition to advocate

for Jewish emancipation in England, while Lazarus’s depiction of the Jewish expulsion leads

to the discovery of an exceptionally pluralist America. The Zionist message of Burla’s These

are the Journeys of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, by contrast, lionizes the Andalusi protagonist to

idealize the central role of modern Sephardim in the development of the State of Israel. Each

of these writers metaphorizes medieval Spain to critique the nationalist movements in

Victorian England, Gilded-Age America, and modern Israel that provided for Jews

immigrating to potentially new homelands. Finally, I will conclude by considering the future

of literary Sephardic studies, emphasizing the vitality of medieval Spain in broader

comparative directions.

4.1 Grace Aguilar and the Gradual Emancipation Anglo-Jewry

In a June 1836 issue of The Hebrew Review and Magazine of Rabbinical Literature, a

briefly-run weekly publication that offered unprecedented translations of Jewish texts into

English, Grace Aguilar appears to have composed a “Lament for Judea.”38 The poem revives

a literary canon of Jewish liturgical dirges, such as the book of Lamentations traditionally

read on the Ninth of Av. The speaker, assuming the collective voice of diasporic Jews

throughout the world, finds no solace anywhere, and so laments:

A scatter’d race, we have no home, No monarch of our own;

Amidst the nations where we dwell,

38 Cynthia Scheinberg attributes the poem to Aguilar (251n12). The journal, however, only provides the initials of the author, “G. A.”

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We stand apart—alone— (Aguilar, “Lament,” lines 81-84, p. 334)

If Aguilar wrote this dirge, at what would have been close to the beginning of her

publishing career, it helps mark her evolution to describe the social and political position of

Jews in England. In virtually every genre in which she wrote, Aguilar contrasted the

tumultuous experience of ancestral Sephardim with the yet unfulfilled promise of a homeland

for Jews in contemporary England. Protagonists in short stories (“The Fugitive”), novellas

(The Escape), and historical novels (The Vale of Cedars) escape the devastations of Spanish

and Portuguese Inquisitions for England. Similarly, Aguilar compared and contrasted

medieval Spain with modern England in poetry (“Song of the Spanish Jews, During their

‘Golden Age’”) and in historical surveys and essays (Women of Israel; “The Jews of

Continental Europe”). In 1843, Aguilar published The Perez Family, a novella of domestic

fiction about a contemporary Sephardi family in Liverpool, whose travails and eventual

prosperity spotlight the reality of Jewish assimilation of contemporary England. By 1845, she

would write that Jews, “respected and at peace as we are,” live “in free and happy England;”

two years later, in one of the final publications before her death, she asserted that Jews were

“Jews only in their religion—Englishmen in everything else” (Aguilar, Women II:11;

Aguilar, “History” 332).

How to account for Aguilar’s incremental embrace of England, where, in little over a

decade’s time, Jews went from having “no home” to becoming indistinguishable citizens?

England in the first half of the nineteenth century had substantially progressed since the

1650s, when the Sephardi Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel—the first openly Jewish person on

English land since the 1290 English expulsion of Jews—publicly advocated for the

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readmission of Jews before Cromwell’s Protectorate.39 While the Whitehall Conference of

1655, established as a result of the Dutch rabbi’s mission, determined that Jewish residence

was technically legal, public opinion, expressed in polemical printings, argued against Jewish

resettlement, so that the identity of London crypto-Jews and Jews subsequently entering the

country remained, as James Shapiro has summarized, “troublingly indeterminate, not

English, but not exactly ‘not-English’” (191). De facto legal toleration brought in hundreds

more Jews to England throughout the late seventeenth century, and the restored King

Charles’s decision not to implement any new anti-Jewish measures alleviated this slow

immigration period. However, it would take two centuries of legal disputes, waves of

immigration, and incremental cultural assimilation for Jews to achieve official recognition as

English citizens.40

Early nineteenth-century Jews edged ever closer to total emancipation in England.

Despite receiving a number of civil rights during Aguilar’s lifetime—such as freedoms of

religious practice, buying land, and licensing businesses—Jews were still legally limited

from participating in the highest echelons of English society; they were still barred from

entering Oxford and Cambridge, for example, and were unable to serve in Parliament. The

latter political disability specifically revolved around the burden caused by the 1828 repeal of

the Test and Corporation Acts, when a previous sacramental test to take the Anglican

39 For a history on the Ben Israel’s mission and the Whitehall Conference, see D. Katz.

40 For a legal history of Jewish emancipation, see Henriques.

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Communion was replaced with an Oath of Allegiance, an alternative affirmation of English

loyalty, sworn over a Holy Bible, in which an official would verbally declare:

I, A.B., do solemnly and sincerely in the presence of God profess, testify, and declare upon the true faith of a Christian, That I will never exercise any power, authority, or influence which I may possess by virtue of the office of ____ to injure or weaken the Protestant Church as it is by law established in England, or to disturb the said Church or the Bishops and Clergy of the said Church in the possession of any rights or privileges to which such Church or the said Bishops and Clergy are or may be by law entitled. (qtd. in Henriques 251-252; emphasis added)

While the oath—demanded of anyone joining a municipal or political office—paved

the way for the public participation of Roman Catholics and Nonconformists, English Jews

were now specifically hindered due to the sheer technicality of having to utter the words

“upon the true faith of a Christian” prior to entering their service. Anglo-Jewish periodicals

like Voice of Jacob and the Jewish Chronicle illustrate communal critiques toward the

disability caused by the Oath of Allegiance,41 as does Aguilar’s short literary career, which

neatly matches the political trajectory of Jewish emancipation regarding this specific issue. In

1835, the year of her first printed work—The Magic Wreath of Hidden Flowers, a collection

of riddle poems—David Salomons was elected Sheriff for the city of London, an

unprecedented elevation for an English Jew, only possible after the passing of a special bill—

The Sheriffs’ Declaration Act—that allowed Salomons to circumvent the “true faith” clause.

Throughout the following decade, several pro-Jewish measures were debated while Jews

increasingly rose to prominent municipal positions. By 1847, just weeks before Grace

Aguilar’s death, Lionel de Rothschild was elected the first Jewish parliamentary

41 For a social history of Anglo-Jewish opinion of emancipation from 1828-1858, see Finestein.

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representative, for the City of London, but could not serve in the House of Commons until

1858—when special accommodation finally allowed him to swear on a Hebrew Bible (i.e.,

an Old Testament) and avoid the “true faith” clause; the clause was only formally removed

by the Parliamentary Oaths Act Amendment of 1866.

Grace Aguilar was well-informed of the history and obstruction caused by the Oath of

Allegiance and wrote about it during this interim struggle for political emancipation. In her

last essay, “History of the Jews in England,” printed in Chambers’s Miscellany several

months before her death in Frankfurt, Aguilar lamented the nation’s “last relic of religious

intolerance,” citing the oath at length as the chief complaint in the struggle for Jewish

equality in Great Britain. Her advocacy for the removal of the oath also appears in her

creative fiction, most dramatically in the climactic scene of her Inquisition romance novel,

The Vale of Cedars.

The political privileges offered to Victorian baptized Jews like Benjamin Disraeli—

who would eventually rise in rank to become Prime Minister—or Jews who could effectively

conceal their identity by acquiescing to the public oath, easily lends itself to metaphors of

conversos and crypto-Jews in Inquisitional Spain. By fictionalizing the author’s Sephardic

heritage, The Vale of Cedars offers a distorted mirror of English religious discrimination.

Unfortunately, scholars have yet to correctly identify the date of the novel’s composition.

Galchinsky refers to Vale as juvenilia only brought to light posthumously by Aguilar’s

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mother, Sarah,42 and virtually every other Aguilar scholar has repeated this claim.43 In fact,

Aguilar printed The Vale of Cedars—originally titled The Martyr—as a serialized novel in

The New Monthly Belle Assemblée, a literary and fashion magazine edited by an

acquaintance, Camilla Toulmine, a year before her death, from January to September 1846.

Internal evidence also suggests that Aguilar composed, or at least continued writing and

editing the novel, shortly before its appearance in Belle Assemblée.44

I offer this bibliographic revision to emphasize Aguilar’s unique position in

portraying Jewish identity and history in a largely Christian public space. Appearing on the

very next page after Aguilar’s second installment of her novel in February 1846, Julia

Maynard’s poem, “The Jewess,” depicts the physiognomy of someone like Aguilar—“The

small nose, chisell’d aquiline,/ Thy beauty and thy race!”—that perpetuates objectifications

of Jews as ancient, static, and exotically not English (Maynard). By contrast, Aguilar’s own

agency as a writer in Belle Assemblée and other women’s magazines, offered a fresh counter-

narrative of Jews participating and contributing to English culture.

42 In his edited collection of her writings, Galchinsky notes that Aguilar started writing the novel at “age fifteen...[and] would take four years to write,” a posthumous work of “Aguilar’s manuscripts” (19; 29). Galchinsky substantiates these claims by citing Sarah Aguilar’s “Memoir of Grace Aguilar,” a brief biography of Aguilar’s life that only obliquely refers to the novel. In the memoir, Sarah Aguilar lists The Martyr among Grace’s “literary pursuits and labors” written in the intervals between her mother’s infirmity (viii). 43 For examples of the scholarly consensus that Grace Aguilar wrote the novel as a teenager and only published it after her death, see Abrahams 147; Gertner Zatlin 33; Ragussis 141; Valman 103; Scheinberg 152. 44 For example, Aguilar cites the August 1845 edition of the Art Union Journal when depicting the style of Segovian murals in a castle room (cf. 60). Epigraphs that introduce each chapter similarly conflict with claims that Aguilar, born in 1816, wrote the novel as a teenager. The epigraph for the thirteenth chapter cites Bulwer’s poem “Eva: A True Story of Light and Darkness,” first published in 1842, whereas the sixth chapter cites Felicia Hemans’s De Chatillon, a tragic play first published, posthumously, in 1839.

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More significant to the subject of politicized metaphors, reading Aguilar’s own

Jewess, the novel’s heroine Donna Marie Henriquez Morales, as a product of the 1840s,

contextualizes the writer’s attitude to the contemporary parliamentary debates concerning the

Jewish challenge to the Oath of Allegiance. The Jewish Disabilities Removal Act of 1845,

for example, offered new, alternative language for Jews serving municipal offices by first

declaring, “I, A.B. being a person professing the Jewish religion,” and thus allowed

Salomons, by then already elected Alderman for Portsoken Ward, to serve without needing to

disingenuously refer to himself as a “true Christian” (qtd. in Henriques 255). Aguilar’s

serialized novel thus appears precisely when English Jews were given the opportunity to

declare their identities in the service of representing their nation.

In The Vale of Cedars, the conflict confronting a Jew declaring a similar allegiance

oath propels the novel’s climax. Halfway through the novel, Arthur Stanley, the English

Christian nobleman in love with the crypto-Jewish Marie, finds the murdered body of his

enemy Don Ferdinand Morales, a crypto-Jewish confidant of King Ferdinand who also

happens to be Marie’s husband and cousin. While Queen Isabella comforts Marie after

delivering the tragic news of her husband’s death, Stanley is imprisoned, tortured, and

eventually given a royal trial—with the king helping to interrogate—on the charge of murder.

As the last witness, Marie is summoned to testify over any motives that might implicate

Stanley’s actions toward her husband, but must first deliver the “customary oath” in front of

a monk holding a crucifix, who asks Marie to

[s]wear by the Holy Symbol which I support; by the unpronounceable name of the Father, by the flesh and blood, the resurrection and the life of our Lord and Saviour Christ Jesu; by the Holy Spirit; by the saving and glorious Trinity; by the goodly army of Saints and Martyrs; daughter, swear, and the blessing or the curse be with you as you swear true or falsely. (Aguilar, Vale 144)

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The gothic scene offers a grotesque projection of the terror facing a Jewish member of

parliament in mid-nineteenth-century England. In place of the Holy Bible, which, of course,

includes the New Testament that Jews reject, Marie must swear upon a crucifix; in place of

uttering the words, “upon the true faith of a Christian,” Marie hears what that faith explicitly

entails; and, in place of serving under an English constitutional monarchy, Marie must assist

a Spanish Catholic monarchy. These substitutions amplify the predicament of repeating a

seemingly innocuous oath, since the English formality belies the integrity and freedom of a

Jewish identity in a non-Jewish public sphere. Despite her survival tactics as a crypto-Jew,

Marie exploits the demands of the oath to openly declare her true identity for the first time,

declaring:

My evidence is valueless. I belong to that race whose word is never taken as witness, for or against, in a court of justice. I cannot take the oath required, for I deny the faith in which it is administered. I am a JEWESS! (144-145)

The confession propels the action for the rest of the novel’s plot, from Marie’s

confinement by the Holy Office of the Inquisition, to Queen Isabella’s futile attempts at

converting her, Marie’s commitment to Judaism by rejecting marriage to Stanley, and her

eventual death by heartbreak. In contrast to the objectified, orientalist figure of Julia

Maynard’s poem, Aguilar offers an assertive voice to her Jewess, reminding her readers of

the unjust obstacles still facing English Jews from fully expressing theirs. Noticing the

relationship between Marie’s trial and the Oath of Allegiance, Michael Ragussis asserts that

conversion “represents the price the Jew must pay for the protecting embrace of the

Englishman in an otherwise hostile world” (145). Aguilar does more than depict the

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expediency of conversion or the fleeing to a more tolerant land.45 Instead, Aguilar offers a

narrative of Jewish sacrifice on the precipice of a population’s mass expulsion. Viewed

through a nationalist lens, The Vale of Cedars creatively advocates for the total emancipation

since Jews resettled in England two centuries ago by offering its magazine readers a radically

medieval and—perhaps most frightening of all—Spanish reflection of English

disenfranchisement. Indeed, a character’s subsequent explanation for why a virtuous Jewess

did not take the oath, “on plea of not believing in the Holy Catholic Church,” substitutes

language from the Oath of Allegiance—“the Protestant Church as it is by law established in

England”—to equate one with the other (Aguilar, Vale 152).

Furthermore, it is the political atmosphere surrounding Aguilar that helps explain why

oaths play such a significant role throughout the novel, with almost every significant

character using it. King Ferdinand convenes the royal trial after Don Luis Garcia—the Grand

Inquisitor and actual murderer—“declared on oath that he saw Stanley draw his sword upon

Morales”; Queen Isabella offers to allow Marie to avoid appearing at the trial if she only

testify privately to her directly, preceded by an “oath administered by one of the holy fathers,

with all the dread formula of the church”; Stanley, stacked with inconvenient evidence

against himself, “cannot so perjure myself as to deny one word of the charges brought against

me, save that of murder”; Marie’s uncle vows to avenge his father’s death by “a secret,

though solemn oath”; and Marie, at the end of the novel, is given permission by the Queen to

45 For example, at the end of Ivanhoe, the medievalist template for Vale, the Jewess Rebecca departs, telling Rowena that England “is no safe abode for the children of my people” (Scott 499).

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return to her childhood home after “pledging herself never to leave it” (116; 122; 131; 186;

242).

All of these examples expose a principal distinction between the medieval Spain that

Aguilar reconstructs and the modern England she seeks to improve. For Aguilar, the memory

of the Spanish Inquisition recalls a familial history of survival through clandestine means,

nominally conforming as a public Catholic while navigating an interior Jewish spirituality

within the home. The novel’s namesake, the Vale of Cedars, literalizes this fractured

existence, as Marie’s family strictly observes the Jewish holidays while safely hidden inside

the rocky and virtually uninhabited Sierra Toledo. In modern England, Jews need not survive

by bifurcating their public and private identities. They may, like characters in The Perez

Family, live in the cottages of Liverpool and work in bustling London as open Jews.

The performative mechanism of oaths, however, depends upon the validation of an

individual within the public sphere. Words of testimony, and the oath that attests to their

veracity, outwardly travel from within an individual’s heart to a space sanctioned by

witnesses, a procedure from concealment to revelation. It is unsurprising, then, that a public

speech act by crypto-Jews and conversos in Aguilar’s Spain signify the threat of conversion.

By the end of The Vale of Cedars, Queen Isabella repeatedly adjures Marie to merely take

the vows of baptism, since “[l]ove on earth and joy in Heaven, depends upon one word:

refuse to speak it, and thou knowest thy doom!” (232). To speak “one word” is,

metonymically, to convert to Catholicism and confirm one’s national loyalty.

Victorian England, however, does not—with the significant exception of the Oath of

Allegiance—demand that a Jew sequester her identity to the confines of one’s home and

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assume a Protestant public persona. In the semi-autobiographical narrative, “The Escape,”

Aguilar describes the cathartic experience of a Sephardi family’s arrival to England from the

Portuguese Inquisition in Lisbon as an aspirational representation of Anglo-Jewry:

The veil of secresy was removed, they were in a land whose merciful and liberal government granted to the exile and the wanderer a home of peace and rest where they might worship the God of Israel according to the law He gave; and in hearts like those of Alvar and his Almah, prosperity could have no power to extinguish or deaden the religion of love and faith, which adversity had engendered. (Aguilar, “Escape” 138)

For the daughter of Spanish-Portuguese emigrants fleeing the Inquisition, a modern

homeland for Jews requires the removal of that historical “veil of secresy.” Although Aguilar

did not survive to see the culmination of Jewish emancipation in Parliament, the ideal of a

“merciful and liberal government,” one in which Jews smoothly operate within the public

sphere, is partially attested by the very literary production of Aguilar herself; in the non-

Jewish magazine, The New Monthly Belle Assemblée, English readers would find the printed

words of one of the nation’s first Jewish women writers, lauding the heroic declarations and

persistence of a Jewess from the writer’s ancestral homeland.

4.2 The American Dream of Emma Lazarus

Unlike Grace Aguilar, whose sentimental writings proved unpopular to twentieth-

century audiences, Emma Lazarus has become an icon of American Jewry. Upon reading

newspaper accounts of the pogroms in Eastern Europe, Lazarus published a series of essays,

titled “An Epistle to the Hebrews,” that both condemned the violence and emphasized the

Jewish American responsibility to help admit these far-away brethren. This responsibility

derived from America’s democratic foundations, and Lazarus’s articles on visiting destitute

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Russian Jewish immigrants arriving in New York’s Ward’s Island demonstrate the poet’s

active promotion of the fulfillment of these demands.

The American playwright and novelist Constance Cary Harrison evoked the new

Jewish immigrants to convince Lazarus to compose the poem undoubtedly tied to her legacy,

“The New Colossus” (cf. Schor 187). Lazarus’s sonnet was publicly read for an 1883

exhibition aimed at raising funds for the building of a pedestal that would support France’s

giant gift, a neoclassical statue honoring American independence called La Liberté éclairant

le monde. Two decades later, a plaque of the poem was affixed beside the Statue of Liberty

near the Ellis Island station for new American immigrants, thus emblematizing a concept of

American nationality with Lazarus’s sonnet:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” (Lazarus, Emma 233)

Over the decades, the poem, particularly its famous lines, “Give me your tired, your

poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” would appear both on Broadway (in

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Irving Berlin’s Miss Liberty, for example) and in the speeches of countless politicians,46

compactly distilling an ideal of America as a nation of liberty-seeking immigrants. The

poem’s lines, as Lazarus’s biographer Esther Schor notes, now “belong to the ether,” so often

quoted that they transcend their original subjects: the Jewish immigrants escaping

antisemitism in former homelands (258).

Consequently, the popularity of “The New Colossus” would conflate the poem’s

Poetess, crying out for indigent exiles, with Lazarus herself. Decades after her death in 1887,

Lazarus would become another Lady Liberty, her name attached to book club circles and

socialist organizations.47 Since 1986, the American Jewish Historical Society has awarded an

“Emma Lazarus Statue of Liberty Award” to individuals for extraordinary humanitarian

work, and in 2020 the Society initiated an “Emma Lazarus Poetry Contest” for young adults

and emerging poets to rewrite and perform a contemporary “New Colossus” for today’s

diverse American landscape.

If Lazarus is today remembered as Jewish, it is in celebration of the poet as a secular

activist or proto-Zionist,48 while the literary embrace of her Sephardic identity has received

46 To give only two recent examples, the poem was cited by President Barack Obama, in a 2015 speech commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma Montgomery Marches, to reaffirm the inclusive character of America; contrastingly, in a press conference two years later, Trump White House advisor Stephen Miller defended new anti-immigration policies by denying the poem’s cultural significance, claiming that it “is not part of the original Statue of Liberty” (Italie). 47 Throughout the 1890s, The American Hebrew published advertisements for evenings organized by the Literary Circle of the Emma Lazarus Club. Esther Schor also discusses the Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women’s Clubs, an offshoot of the International Workers Order (cf. 256-257) 48 I do not have sufficient space for a discussion of Lazarus’s late interest, directly inspired by reading George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, of a Jewish return to the Holy Land. This does not easily resolve Lazarus’s position of

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little attention. Nevertheless, Lazarus’s self-understanding as a descendant of Iberian Jews

does play a significant role in her famous advocacy for Jewish immigration to America. As

with Aguilar, Lazarus not only imagined an ancestral Sephardic voice, but medievalized a

contemporary political crisis. Specifically, her sequel poem to “New Colossus,” titled

“1492,” again heralds America as a new promised land, but here through the experience of

Iberian Jewish exiles:

Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate, Didst weep when Spain cast forth with flaming sword, The children of the prophets of the Lord, Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate. Hounded from sea to sea, from state to state, The West refused them, and the East abhorred. No anchorage the known world could afford. Close-locked was every port, barred every gate. Then smiling, thou unveil’dst, O two-faced year, A virgin world where doors of sunset part, Saying, “Ho, all who weary, enter here! There falls each ancient barrier that the art Of race or creed or rank devised, to rear Grim bulwarked hatred between heart and heart!” (Lazarus, Emma 233-234)

Written in the same month as the pedestal fundraising exhibition, “1492” closely

corresponds with its more famous precursor. Both poems mythologize the land of America

through parallel imagery (e.g. “sunset gates”), metaphorize exile through the symbolic figure

of a nurturing Mother (i.e., the mother of an exiled people; the mother of time situating an

exiled people), and both end with a quotation that assertively embraces the foreign

immigrant. “1492,” however, shifts from the experience of contemporary refugees to

reimagine the trajectory of the Sephardic diaspora, directly linking the Spanish expulsion of

America as its own modern Zion for Jews. For Lazarus’s conflicted diasporic yearnings vis-à-vis the Holy Land and America, see Omer-Sherman, pp. 15-67.

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Jews with the European discovery of America. Evoking Adam and Eve’s expulsion, who

were cast out of the Garden of Eden with a “flaming sword” (Gen. 3:24), Lazarus presents

Spain as a paradise lost to medieval Jews. But like the Janus-faced year of 1492 that signifies

both expulsion and discovery, Lazarus’s locus of utopia is both a starting and ending point.

The biblical allusion portrays Spanish Jews as the original inhabitants to an American,

“virgin,” Eden, an anachronistic depiction that conveniently elides the indigenous presence

on the land.

Projecting a modern ideal onto the year 1492, when a creed of democratic tolerance

dismantled “race or creed or rank,” recasts Columbus’s voyage, originally sponsored by the

same monarchy responsible for the Jewish expulsion and which initiated the expansion of

Catholicism, inquisitions, and colonization in the Americas. Nevertheless, seen in its most

expansive lens, the poem “1492” signifies Columbus’s voyage for its ultimate historical

outcome, rendering the Sephardic diaspora a synecdoche for a modern, inclusive American

society. Lazarus repeated this celebration of Columbus in “By the Waters of Babylon,” one

of her final compositions and, apparently, the first prose poem ever published in the English

language (cf. Schor 194). The poem begins with a section titled “The Exodus. (August 3,

1492),” describing the Sephardic plight of the “uptorn roots of home” caused by the

Alhambra decree, before ending with an aspirational gesture toward a future of American

privilege:

O bird of the air, whisper to the despairing exiles, that to-day, to-day, from the many-masted, gayly-bannered port of Palos, sails the world-unveiling Genoese, to unlock the golden gates of sunset and bequeath a Continent to Freedom! (Lazarus, Emma 243)

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As depicted in “1492,” Spain is responsible for both the traumatic exile of Jews, but

also for their ultimate redemption—in addition to the redemption of all peoples collectively

known as American. The ironic commemoration of the “port of Palos,” after listing the

humiliations and sufferings of Spanish Jews forced to leave their homeland, hints at the racial

component undergirding Lazarus’s concept of modern Sephardic identity. This concept

similarly appears in the supercilious distinction between contemporary Sephardim and

Ashkenazim, between the “wretched refuse” implied in the “The New Colossus,” and the

“children of the prophets of the Lord / Prince, priest, and people” in “1492.” A wealthy,

educated Jewish woman, descended from the first Jewish community to ever arrive in

colonial America, Lazarus occasionally reiterated nineteenth-century stereotypes that

distinguished noble Sephardim from their destitute Ashkenazi brethren.

The conservative English prime minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) offers an

accessible case to understand this distinction in Jewish identity. Although baptized to the

Anglican Church as a teenager, Disraeli celebrated his Sephardic Jewish heritage in both

autobiographical49 and fictional writing. In his 1847 orientalist romance novel Tancred,

about an English lord’s voyage to the Holy Land, Disraeli distinguished between the

“benignant nature” of the winsome Sephardi from that of the uneducated and grimy

Ashkenazi, an object “of prejudice, dislike, disgust, perhaps hatred” (152; 153-154). In an

essay on Disraeli for the April 1882 issue of The Century Illustrated Magazine, Lazarus

reignited these stereotypes to limn the racial character of the English politician:

49 See, for example, pp. xxi-xxii of Disraeli’s biography of his father Isaac Disraeli, published in the 1849 publication of the latter’s collected Curiosities of Literature.

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He knew himself to be the descendant, not of pariahs and pawnbrokers, but of princes, prophets, statesmen, poets, and philosophers, and in his veins was kindled that enthusiasm of faith in the genius and high vocation of his own people which strikes outsiders as an anomaly in a member of an habitually despised race. Indeed, in reading the annals of the mediaeval Jews of Granada, we meet with more than one instance of a career ascending from the humble station of the Hebrew scribe or shopkeeper to the premiership of the kingdom...a proof of historic superiority. (“Was the Earl” 941)

The description of Disraeli offers the most explicit account by Lazarus of Sephardic

identity. The “historic superiority” of medieval Spanish descent running in Lazarus’s own

kindled “veins” perhaps explains some of the poet’s bold publication titles (e.g., Songs of a

Semite), interest in medieval Iberian literature, and commemoration of Columbus before he

became a popular nationalized hero of America. The description of Disraeli, with its

reference to “pariahs and pawnbrokers,” problematizes Lazarus’s maternal embrace of

Eastern European Jewish refugees, signified in “The New Colossus” and her various essays.

Nevertheless, regarding American immigration, Lazarus stresses that both Sephardim and

Ashkenazim— reframed as privileged American and persecuted Russian Jews—share a story

that only varied temporally. In a January 26, 1883 column for The American Hebrew,

Lazarus clarified, “We know what it means to have been exposed to the tossings of wave and

tempest, to have been cast by fate upon a shore other than our own, which by friendly chance

has proved a kind and hospitable refuge” (“An Epistle”). Advocacy for the immigration and

humanitarian support of Russian Jews in America thus stems from the poet’s impression of

an ancestral inheritance of the American dream, in which noble, medieval Sephardim

similarly lost one homeland in order to find another, that “Continent to Freedom,” across the

shores.

4.3 Yehuda Burla and the Zionist Yehuda Halevi

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While Emma Lazarus supported Jewish immigration to America through volunteering

at Ward’s Island, Yehuda Burla, one of the most politically active Sephardi writers in modern

history, worked for decades on Zionist causes prior to Israel’s independence in 1948. Among

other activities, Burla advocated that his students immigrate to Palestine while teaching

Hebrew for years in a Zionist school in Damascus after World War I, served in various roles

under the Histadrut, and traveled throughout South America in 1946 to raise funds for

Palestine.

Like Lazarus’s colonial pedigree, Burla’s nationalist claims to a modern homeland

stretch to extraordinary lengths. In his memoir, The Cross and the Pear: A Sephardic

Journey, Victor Perera, a great-nephew of Burla, describes a family tree “that traced the

Burlas’ residence in Jerusalem to the 1680s” (142). However he internalized his familial

rootedness to the land, Burla’s career as a writer of new Hebrew literature corresponded to

his advocacy for a Jewish state, not only in the content of his novels and stories—often set in

Mandate Palestine/Israel—but for the various literary organizations he helped found or

served as president, such as the Hebrew Authors’ Association.

By the time of his death in 1969 at the age of eighty-three, Burla had published a

dozen novels, many volumes of novellas and short stories, and received every possible

literary award in Israel. Despite this prolific career and historical significance as one of the

earliest Sephardi Hebrew authors in Mandate Palestine, few monographs have arisen

specifically devoted to his writing.50 This reception somewhat parallels Aguilar’s sentimental

50 Exceptions include Mordekhai ‘Ovadyahu’s Master of Abundance: Yehuda Burla and his Work (Galim, 1961) and Ḥassia Ḥanani’s Fashioning Primary Characters in Yehuda Burla’s Stories (U of Tel Aviv P, 1978).

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fiction in the twentieth century. As one scholar noted, Burla’s propensity for simplistic

moralism, romantic and folkloric narratives on singular characters, and a traditionalist

aversion to modern literary devices (e.g., irony), amounts to a literature that “belongs to the

pre-modern world” (Yudkin 96).

Nevertheless, Burla’s writing provides some of the earliest examples of Sephardi

representation in modern Hebrew fiction, and his historical novels emphasize and foreground

Sephardim in the development of modern Zionism. The project to reimagine such a

foundational collective history began with On the Horizon ( קפואב )—a trilogy of the novels

Yearnings ( םיפוסיכ ) and the two-volume Struggle ( קבאמ )—published from 1943 to 1947. The

trilogy largely centers on the historical Yehuda Alkalai (1798-1878), a rabbi from Sarajevo

who published various Ladino and Hebrew works on the religious imperative to resettle the

Holy Land, founded organizations throughout Europe to stir up popular support for the idea,

and eventually moved to Jerusalem toward the end of his life in 1874. The trilogy also

portrays the wealthy Farḥi dynasty, particularly Ḥayyim Farḥi (1760-1820), the Syrian

advisor and treasurer to the Ottoman governor, Aḥmad al-Jazzār Pasha, in Acre.

Just as Burla’s corpus broadly introduced Middle Eastern Jewish characters to an

emerging modern Hebrew literature primarily occupied with Ashkenazim, these fictionalized

biographies offer counternarratives to Zionism beginning at the end of the nineteenth century

with the First Aliyah of Russian Jews and Theodor Herzl’s initiatives to establish a Jewish

national state. Alkalai’s mission, which preceded Herzl’s by half a century, comprised a

specifically religious ideology that contrasted with more popular, secular visions of Jewish

nationalism conceived by European Jewish thinkers (e.g., Labor Zionism, Cultural Zionism,

etc.). Similarly, Farḥi, who helped raise money for synagogues in the Holy Land, fought

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against Napoleon’s unsuccessful Siege of Acre, and faced torture and eventual execution for

his service, offered a model of political Jewish martyrdom for the Holy Land.

These are the Journeys of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi continues the trilogy’s central

themes—individual heroism, religious mission and patriotic martyrdom—to portray the

ultimate Sephardi progenitor of modern Zionism. Burla explicitly defined Halevi as such in

the conclusion of his nonfictional biography of the poet, published a year after his

fictionalized novel:

גשומה לש ועמשמ אולמב ן ו ש א ר ה י נ ו י צ ה ,ץראל ותיילעב ,יולה הדוהי יבר היה ןכב הווצמ יהוזש ,הרכה ךותמ ,הלוגה תוצופתמ הילעל םעב בלה תוררועתהל םרג ועסמ םנמאו .הזה .הלענו הנוילע תיתד-תימואל

So, by immigrating to the land, Rabbi Yehuda Halevi became the FIRST ZIONIST in the full sense of the word. And indeed, his journey awakened the heart of the nation in the diaspora, through a recognition that this is a supreme, national-religious commandment. (Burla, Rabbi 123)

To project nationalism onto a medieval figure, of course, conflates the modern,

antisemitic crises affecting Jews with the actual historical factors that informed Halevi’s

extraordinary voyage in 1140 to the Holy Land, such as the Christian Reconquista campaigns

from northern Iberia, the political upheaval of the Almoravid dynasty’s takeover of al-

Andalus at the turn of the eleventh century, the Crusaders’ siege of Jerusalem in 1099, and

the conquest of the North African Almohad Caliphate that would replace the Almoravids in

1130. Medievalist scholars have similarly illuminated the ideological atmosphere influencing

Halevi’s worldview, in stark contrast to modern nationalism. Joseph Yahalom, for example,

asserts “the intellectual affinities which existed between Halevi and Karaites,” whose

Mourners of Zion movement similarly advocated for praying at the site of the destroyed

temple in Jerusalem (Yehuda 94). Alternatively, in his study on Halevi’s voyage, Raymond

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P. Scheindlin consistently parallels Halevi’s Zion poetry with Islamic concepts of ascetic

piety, while scholars Diana Lobel and Ehud Krinis, as discussed in the second chapter, assert

Sufi and Shī‘ī influences in Halevi’s philosophical writing.

In Israeli popular culture, however, Halevi is certainly identified as a proto-Zionist

icon. The famous poems of Zion and the philosophical Kuzari—whose converted king

character departs for the Holy Land by the end of the dialogues—has intrigued Hebrew-

writing Zionist and post-Zionist public intellectuals for over a century, from Ben-Zion Dinur

to Yeshayahu Leibowitz to Micah Goodman, who have invariably wrestled with Halevi’s

expressions of Jewish national chauvinism (cf. Halkin 264-281; Goodman). The incredible

voyage and legendary martyrdom in Jerusalem also explain why Halevi has become, perhaps

more than any other medieval figure, ubiquitous in the contemporary State of Israel. His

name appears on countless streets throughout the country, his poetry taught in high schools,

rewritten by lauded Israeli poets, covered in popular music, and chanted throughout the

Jewish liturgy. In other words, the mystery following Halevi’s final arrival in the Holy Land

from his prolonged stay in Egypt is immaterial. The enduring cultural legacy that grows out

of his intention to reach the Holy Land attests to the power of his Zion-focused journey.

Written throughout the 1950s and published in 1959, Burla’s historical novel not only

reaffirms the symbolic ideals of Halevi’s voyage in the first decade of Israel’s independence,

but specifically and implicitly endorses another watershed from this era: the mass

immigration of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries. Coinciding with heightened anti-

Zionist violence circa 1948, hundreds of thousands of Jews from Yemen, Iraq, Morocco,

Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Iran, and other locales would resettle in the new state, often to

immediately face transit camps, socioeconomic hardships, and the racialized disparity of civil

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rights at the hands of a largely-Ashkenazic political establishment.51 Many of these

communities claim a direct ancestral lineage and/or religious heritage—namely, the far-

reaching influence of the Sepharadi prayer rite and usage of Golden Age liturgical poetry—

to medieval Iberian Jewry, so that the championing of Yehuda Halevi as the first Zionist

validates a new class of citizenry entering the bottom of a social hierarchy.

That, in a 1957 newspaper interview, Burla pointed to the new wave of immigration

when asked why he wrote about Halevi’s voyage—while also asserting, in the same

interview, the Sarajevan Sephardi Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai’s influence on Herzl—helps

contextualize the novelist’s political aspirations to link medieval origins to a burgeoning

Israeli society (Pelli).52 According to Stacy N. Beckwith, Burla was specifically

commissioned by the publisher ‘Am Oved to produce a historical novel that would “shore

up...confidence in Zionism as the proven guarantor of modern Jewish statehood and as the

best steward of the country’s future development” (172). Burla himself later noted that “the

redemption will arrive when the people will walk, step by step, day by day, by any means

[ איהש ךרד לכב ,םוי םוי ,דעצ דעצ דעצי םעהשכ אובת הלואגה ]” to the promised land, following the

footsteps of Halevi’s pioneering journey (Elḥanani 14). If the State of Israel signals the end

of a global Jewish diaspora, then Burla’s novel—like his earlier work as a Zionist envoy—

assumes a literary extension of his mission to welcome and inspire Jews to immigrate.

51 For a history of the social challenges facing these immigrants during this period, see Roby; Chetrit; Zamkanei. 52 Of course, in writing novels to national acclaim, Burla was also likened to Halevi. After receiving the Israel Prize for literature in 1961, for example, a journalist credited him with being “the first Sephardi in our literature after the Spanish Era [ דרפס תפוקת ירחא ונתורפסב ןושארה ידרפסה ],” as if Burla arrived, parallel to Halevi, onto a modern Hebrew landscape before anyone else (Karu).

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For Lazarus and Aguilar, the historical sites of the Spanish Inquisition and Jewish

expulsion provide metaphors for the contrasting experience afforded to liberated Jews in their

new modern locales. In Burla’s narrative, departing medieval Spain precipitates death. In this

reversed trajectory, it is the comfortable familiarity and rich community of al-Andalus that

the character Yehuda Halevi leaves in order to arrive at a site occupied by religious

intolerance: a Holy Land ruled by Crusaders. At the beginning of the novel, Halevi leaves in

Granada his family and friends, a comfortable Jewish community that sings his liturgical

songs, and rabbis who plead with him to stay. By the end of the novel, left with only a small

crew of faithful friends, he must delicately weave through dangerous relationships with a

Christian king and Muslim residents, and is ultimately killed in Jerusalem when publicly

praying by the Western Wall.

Burla’s nexus of medieval and modern homelands not only recalibrates Aguilar and

Lazarus’s temporal and cultural sites of departure—the mythic Andalusian convivencia three

and a half centuries prior to the Christian Inquisition—but shifts the focus from a communal

experience to one of individual heroism. Constructing the foundations for a new Jewish

homeland does not begin with the mass suffering and expulsion of Spanish Jews in 1492, in

other words, but with a singular Jew’s self-imposed departure from al-Andalus in 1140. The

import of a national heroism appears throughout These are the Journeys of Rabbi Yehuda

Halevi, from the novel’s dedicatory epigraph (i.e., “to the dear and revered David Ben-

Gurion [ ןוירוג ןב דוד ץרענהו רקיל ]”) to the gasping last words of Halevi (i.e., “the

exchange...the redemption...I am blessed...that is how it came to me---a day will come...and

Israel...multitudes of multitudes [ םוי---יל התלע ךכש...ינירשא...הלואגה...הרומתה

םינומה-םינומה...לארשיו...אובי ]”) (Burla, ’Ele 265).

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A medieval narrative of personal initiative, rather than passive messianic anticipation

for a future redemption, validates the modern nationalist development of a Jewish state.

Thus, although Burla relied on contemporaneous historiography for his medievalist novel, as

discussed in the first chapter, the perpetuation of the folkloric legend of Halevi’s martyrdom

provides a paradigm for a primeval Sephardic Zionism. As the biblical prophet Elijah

informs Halevi in an angelic vision shortly before his death toward the end of the novel:

ורסוה / .םימש ידיב אל / לארשי תלואג / האלהו הז םוי ןמ / .לארשי תולג ןיד-רזג / םויה ערקנ לארשי תלואג / רודו רוד לכב ךא / ,בייח ולוכש רודב אל / םיתע וחמנ / םירשק ולטוב / םיאנת רוא תויהל / ותדועת םורל / לארשי הלעי םרטב יכ / .םלוע תוכרעמ / ודדוש ךנעמל / .ודיב .הלא לכ תוביסה ה ת א / .ושדק תלחנ לא ם ד ו ק הלעי / תומדא ילע םייוגל

For today Israel’s decree of exile is torn. From this day onwards, Israel’s redemption is no longer in the hands of heaven. Conditions have been removed, knots canceled, seasons have been wiped away. Not in a generation where all are liable, rather in each and every generation the redemption of Israel is in its hands. For your sake the battles of the world have been robbed. For before Israel elevates to its high purpose to be a light upon the nations of the earth, it will FIRST ascend to its holy inheritance. YOU are the reason for all of this. (252)

For the historical and fictionalized Yehuda Alkalai, an innovative interpretation of the

Hebrew word for repentance—a word that literally means return ( הבושת )—substantiates the

rabbi’s religious contention that a Jewish commandment exists to resettle the Holy Land. In

These are the Journeys, Yehuda Halevi receives a far clearer validation for his arduous

journey: encouragement from a prophet who, in Jewish tradition, will accompany the future

messiah. The words from a man whose very presence signals the collective ingathering of the

nation of Israel here endorses Halevi’s pilgrimage as the initiation of a centuries-long process

toward national redemption. This fictionalized prophecy illustrates the sharpest evocation of

the contemporary Israeli moment, as Burla endorses the modern development of Jewish

statehood and the new wave of Jews from Muslim lands as a holy fulfilment.

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A comparison between the new immigrants of the 1950s and Halevi’s journey is also

suggested in the novel’s epilogue. Several years after Halevi’s death, the narrator Elishama‘

reports that after Halevi’s tragedy, the small crew accompanying him have been given the

authority to stay in Jerusalem and invite around ten Jews each year to settle with them. Thus

begins, in Burla’s retelling, the first wave of Jewish immigration to the Holy Land, not a

mass movement following pogroms in the nineteenth-century Russian Empire, but a tiny

initiative achieved by Halevi’s friends writing “letters to Spain and to Egypt [ דרפסל תורגיא

םירצמלו ]” (267). The martyrdom of Yehuda Halevi, born and raised in medieval Spain, is

redeemed principally by medieval Iberian Jewry—and by extension, all Jews from Muslim

lands—whose immigration will provide the first and last seeds for a prophetically fulfilled

Jewish homeland.

4.4 Future Directions: Inter- and Intra-Communal Sephardic Studies

The imagined Jewish departure from medieval Spain allows writers like Aguilar,

Lazarus, and Burla to engage in modern political discourse rooted in their Sephardic identity.

The metaphor of sephardism conforms to the particular nationalist context of each writer,

whether that involves the ongoing advocacy for emancipation in Victorian England, a

glorification of ethnic pluralism in Gilded Age America, or the revision of Zionist

foundations in the State of Israel’s formative years. In each case, references to medieval

Spain and the experience of Spanish Jewry presupposes a more inclusive nation-building that

specifically embraces these Sephardi writers and their fertile cultural heritage.

If the subject of medieval Spain provides a vantage point into the diverse modern

experience of Sephardim, then comparative literary studies should also illuminate broader

relationships affecting Sephardic identity. A sustained analysis of this theme of immigration

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would, ideally, be grounded in an engagement with the vitality of medievalism among

Sephardim, both in inter- and intra-communal terms. By inter-communal, I refer to the

friction and/or cooperation caused by modern Sephardim encountering other modern

Sephardim. By intra-communal, I refer to the interactions between modern Sephardim and

other groups that similarly assert a communal inheritance to medieval Spain.

Inter-communal Sephardic dynamics In Israel appears, for instance, in activists like

Eliyahu Eliachar, the cofounder of the World Sephardi Foundation, who denounced Yehuda

Burla as a Sephardi “Uncle Tom” for offering “lip service to solidarity with North African

and Oriental Jews,” while becoming one of the “leading spokesmen for the state’s

discriminatory policies” against these marginalized communities (qtd. in Perera 28).

Eliachar’s critique of the segregation between Burla, a Ladino-speaking Sephardi of

distinguished pedigree, and the immigrant “blood brothers” who “never lived in the Iberian

Peninsula,” highlights the ways in which generational political shifts reframe or even dispose

of noble Sephardic affiliations to medieval Spain and/or Israel. The Israeli Black Panther

movement, which protested the state’s disenfranchisement of Mizraḥim in the 1970s,

similarly provides a stark contrast to the overtly Zionist rhetoric of Burla’s writing.

These tensions belie simplifications of Israeli Sephardim and Mizraḥim as a social

monolith, an issue also witnessed by the contrasting theological worldviews of two former

Sephardi Chief Rabbis of Israel. Ovadya Yosef (1920-2013), repurposing a Talmudic

expression, sought “to return the crown to its former glory [ הנשויל הרטע ריזחהל ]” by

advocating a unified halakha for all Sephardim and Mizraḥim immigrating to Israel (and

establishing the Shas political party for similar ends); Mordekhai Eliyahu (1929-2010), by

contrast, supported the preservation of distinct customs of individual communities. The

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former’s messianic drive, as Zvi Zohar asserts, that Jews “abandon their ethnic diasporic

identity [ תיתדעה תיתולגה םתוהז לע רתוול ]” upon arriving in Israel, once again raises questions as

to the Sephardic conformity of new immigrants within an established social hierarchy (336).

This distinction between the old and the new does not only implicate Israeli societal

rifts. As noted in the introduction, in the early part of twentieth-century America, the

established Spanish and Portuguese Jewish community—from which Emma Lazarus

descended—encountered, assisted and clashed with other Sephardim arriving from Levantine

and Balkan countries. Scholars such as Aviva Ben-Ur, Joseph M. Papo, and Rabbi Marc D.

Angel have highlighted the estrangement experienced between these broad communities of

Sephardim, separated by profound religious, linguistic, cultural differences (Ben-Ur; Papo;

Angel). Central to these clashes was the question, ignited by the established American

Sephardim, over whether these new immigrants were actually historical, pure Sephardim.

The effective initiatives in the 1910s by David de Sola Pool, the chief minister of New

York’s Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, to rename the newly formed “Federation of

Sephardic Societies” to the “Federation of Oriental Jews” and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid

Society’s “Committee on Sephardic Jewish Immigrants” to the “Committee on Oriental

Jewish Immigrants,” exemplifies a certain sensitivity over who may claim Sephardic identity

(Ben-Ur 98). Whereas Lazarus repeated stereotypes of Sephardic superiority in relation to

Russian Ashkenazim, these subsequent encounters provided another classist and racialized

discourse on the mythic belonging to medieval Spanish royalty.

The more recent controversy of crypto-Judaism could provide another opportunity to

reexamine the dynamics of Sephardic communal affiliation. Since the 1980s, individuals

asserting a transmitted, concealed heritage of descending from medieval conversos have

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sparked intense scholarly debates between social scientists and historians (cf. Kunin;

Neulander). The specific case of crypto-Jews from Latino communities in the American

Southwest revives familiar questions around Jewish racial difference and acceptance, yet the

reception of these emerging voices from open, established Sephardic communities (including

those Ladino-speaking Jews who were themselves previously dismissed) has been missing

from the larger academic discourse over the authenticity of crypto-Jewish claims.

Contemporary crypto-Jewish descendants partly substantiate their identities in public by

writing about the history of Spanish Jewry—as evident here in the medievalist work of

Mexican writer Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, herself a descendant of Spanish crypto-Jews,

and explored further in Dalia Kandiyoti’s study of the subject—and a comparative study

between various communities relating, for example, to the converso experience of the

Inquisition, could demonstrate new parallels in defining Sephardic identity.

Finally, Sephardic literary scholarship would benefit from an intra-communal study

that engages with other ethnic, national and/or religious groups that associate with medieval

Spain. Peter Cole already hinted at this by shrewdly titling his translated anthology of

Hebrew poetry from medieval Spain, The Dream of the Poem, a phrase derived from the

Palestinian national poet, Maḥmoud Darwish, who defined al-Andalus in an interview as “a

meeting place of strangers in the project of building human culture...the realization of the

dream of the poem” (qtd. in Cole 359n72). Mining the shared cultural heritage of al-Andalus

destabilizes the familiar territorialism that divides much of the modern political discourse

relating to Jews and Arabs. Expanding upon research first explored by Ammiel Alcalay, Gil

Anidjar, and Ella Shohat to foreground the historical ties between Arabs and Jews from

Muslim lands, a comparative work on the sustained significance of the utopia-charged

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imagined homeland of al-Andalus might yield fruitful directions in achieving fresh dialogues

with a perennial other (cf. Alcalay; Anidjar; Shohat).

Such a study on the Palestinian and Israeli longings for a return to Andalusian

coexistence, of course, inverts Yehuda Burla’s Zionist ambitions to depict Yehuda Halevi’s

voyage, an inversion that perhaps explains why the novelist avoided the thorny question of

Muslim preservation in the Holy Land. In the Gnazim Archive of the Hebrew Writers

Association in Israel, one of several organizations Burla served as chairman, I found that

Burla deposited his original handwritten manuscript of These are the Journeys of Rabbi

Yehuda Halevi. The manuscript provides a fascinating glimpse into a modern Hebrew

writer’s edits, with strikethroughs, rewrites, and original ideas intact (see fig. 1).

Figure 1. Burla’s original, handwritten epilogue of These are Journeys of Rabbi Yehuda

Halevi, from the Gnazim Archive of Hebrew Writers.

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In the epilogue, for instance, Burla originally wrote that Jews began to resettle their

ancient promised land only after the ruling Crusaders “expelled and drove out all of the

Muslims from the country [ הנידמה ןמ םימלסומה לכ ודרטו ושרגש רחאו ]” (Burla, Manuscript 283b).

The clause does not appear in the final publication, leaving the status of medieval Muslims—

whom Halevi befriends and with whom he initiates an interfaith dialogue in Jerusalem—

unresolved. For a Sephardi novelist who previously fictionalized the intimate lives of

Bedouin Arabs, and even the interfaith love affairs between Jews and Druze and Armenians,

the elision exposes just how politically volatile and historically erroneous a Zionist origin

story would be if predicated on Muslim dispossession.

Quoted throughout Burla’s depiction of Halevi’s voyage, however, lies the medieval

proto-Zionist’s Arabized quantitative poetry, which as discussed in the third chapter, resulted

from the Jewish acculturation to a predominantly Arab culture. To return to the land Halevi

yearned to leave does not ignore the twentieth-century history of a Middle Eastern conflict,

nor does it rewrite the incompatible ancestral claims that legitimize Israeli and Palestinian

sovereignty. Instead, the myth of al-Andalus provides an alternative, productive site for

imagining intra-communal recognition. To compare expressions of Andalusian culture

between Sephardim and Middle Eastern Muslim Arabs (e.g., the popular Arabic musical

performance of medieval muwashshaḥāt and the contrafactum of these songs in Syrian

Hebrew liturgical supplications) means to respect multilingual and multiethnic entanglements

for their symphonic harmony, rather than their dissonance.

Amnon Shamosh’s celebration of the Egyptian-Israel peace treaty underscored how

the past of al-Andalus signals a future return to Jewish-Muslim interaction. The Fall 2020

normalization of relations between Israel and two Gulf States, to give another recent

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example, has inevitably provoked comparisons to the medieval past, particularly for its

aspirational shift to redefine Middle Eastern society. As noted by Eli Abadie, the Sephardi,

Arabic-speaking Senior Rabbi of the newly-formed Jewish Council of the Emirates, “it’s

meaningful and very significant to start a Jewish community in an Arab country, and in a

sense relive that golden age of the Andalus era in which Jews, Muslims and Christians lived

together, interacted together, exchanged ideas and philosophies, and lived peacefully”

(Sharon). Time will tell whether these Jewish-Arab interactions will yield the kind of cultural

production reminiscent of a convivencia or an inquisition, but the idea of medieval Spain will

continue to nurture pathways for Sephardim to relate to themselves and others, especially

when—to rephrase a famous poem by Yehuda Halevi—the heart is still in Sepharad.

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