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Yehuda Halevi and the poetry of the Judeo-Arabic Age. (Review Essay).

Article Excerpt
For those of us who are desperately searching the Jewish tradition for a rational, yet reverent past, the recent appearance of several books highlighting the Hebrew poets of the Judeo-Arabic age is an encouraging sign.

Most of the great Hebrew poets of the 10th to the 13th centuries (and the myriad minor poets whose names and works are familiar only to scholars of the period) were neither obscurantists nor enthusiasts of a vague spirituality. Among them were courtiers, diplomats, tax-farmers, businessmen, public administrators, doctors, and perhaps even a military man--a hard-headed lot, proudly, learnedly, and punctiliously Jewish. Their culture was also a hardheaded one, demanding a great deal of very specific and hard-earned knowledge reaching into three quite different spheres of learning. It embraced the Jewish sciences, including the Bible, the Talmud, and Hebrew grammar; the Arabic sciences, including classical Arabic poetry and even some Islamic lore; and the Greek sciences, including medicine, astronomy, mathematics, and metaphysics--as well as the miscellaneous lore of all three traditions. The Jewish elite of the Judeo-Arabic age were masters of a literary culture that was not a vague and passive adoration of the arts, but an active commitment to the hard work of making poetry according to prescribed rules and within the framework of well-defined conventions.

The rules of metrics and the fixed repertoire of thematic conventions afforded the true poets in this culture of habitual versifiers a vehicle for self-expression such as was hardly known to Jewish culture until the 10th century, when the Arabization of Jewish life that had been under way for several centuries finally reached the point of affecting Hebrew literature. Out of the anonymous mass of liturgical poetry emerged a new liturgical poetry with forms and themes grounded in the Jewish and Arabic literary traditions and reflecting distinct religious personalities--all Jewish, but each with its particular way of looking at and experiencing the tradition. Even more striking is the Hebrew secular poetry of the age, a poetry--that is sometimes very conventional, seeming merely to carry into Hebrew the standard themes and genres of Arabic poetry as if the two languages had merged, but a poetry that served individual poets as a medium in which to express individual attitudes and sensibilities, each in his own distinctive voice.

Jewish historians and educators once regarded the poetry of the Judeo-Arabic age as the high-water mark of Jewish cultural creativity in premodern times; in the 1920s, no less a figure than the poet...