Ross Brann, "Hebrew Literary Culture in Spain (al-Andalus) in the Age of the Geniza"
David Shasha
Hebrew Literary Culture in Spain (al-Andalus) in the Age of the Geniza
By: Ross Brann
Too often our sense of Jewish life in the Middle Ages is shaped by somber images of a society and culture completely dominated by reflexive piety as much as by persecution. Such representations in fact do little justice to the complexity, vitality and creativity of Jewish culture in medieval Iberia. If you have never read a Hebrew poem from medieval Iberia you might be surprised to discover that Jewish culture in al-Andalus (or Muslim Spain as it is more commonly called) was hardly one-dimensional. Torah study and religious devotion simply did not exclude different types of experiences and other forms of expression.
Consider, for instance, the routine of a typical Jewish literary and religious intellectual of the period coinciding with the European High Middle Ages (10th-12th centuries). On any given day we might find this figure in a surprising variety of settings and engaged in a broad range of activities. He could be lounging in a garden-courtyard discussing the works of Aristotle in Arabic translation, deliberating the meaning of an obscure biblical phrase or debating the application of a fine point of Talmudic law. He could be discoursing on the very latest thinking about the relationship between God and man, or between God and his people, Israel. All the while our representative man of letters would be ensconced among refined, elegant and eloquent people who, like himself, knew how to enjoy the minstrel’s tune or the rapturous melody of the songbird in the trees. He also appreciated being mesmerized by the fiery hue of fine wine viewed through a meticulously crafted crystal goblet. And perhaps he would flirt innocently with a beauteous singing girl, or even with the youthful and handsome cup-bearer. Each of these experiences served as a mere prelude to the most significant activity for members of his social class: extemporaneous poetic competition among the assembled company.
An account of such a competition is preserved in the diwan (collected poems) of Samuel the Nagid (993-1056), chronologically the first of the four greatest Hebrew poets of the period, and a Hebrew grammarian, Talmudic scholar and communal authority. In his spare time the Nagid (head of the Jewish community) also served as prime minister for the Berber governor of Granada. In Iberia, the custom was more relaxed than in more traditional Islamic societies and Jews could advance to positions of extraordinary importance without having converted to Islam. What is remarkable in this case is the literacy, and more generally, intellectual sophistication of a Jewish public figure who found favor among the Muslim authorities for his political skills. Samuel was once in attendance at a literary gathering during which some luscious apples were served. To one of the poets in the group the apples suggested a line of Arabic verse, which he naturally recited. A second poet proceeded to attempt a poetic Hebrew translation. The company then apparently goaded the Nagid into composing his own Hebrew rendition of the original line, whereupon the masterful poet improvised not one but two versions. A moment later, the Nagid upstaged himself by rattling off thirteen more variations on the theme!
Perhaps we can best begin to capture a sense of the unique ethos of Andalusi-Jewish culture by following the example set by our typical courtier and reciting from and commenting briefly on several Hebrew poems. Here is our first specimen, a witty provocative epigram by the thirteenth-century poet Judah Alharizi (d. 1229):
Had Moses seen my beloved’s face
Flush from quaffing ale,
His beauteous curls and handsome majesty,
His Torah would not decree “Don’t do it with a male!”[1]
In this ditty, the type of poem that has been called an “elegant trifle” (something the poet might jot down on a napkin while in attendance at a soiree), the poet describes the transforming effect his dazzling male beloved would have had even on the prophet Moses. The translation has helped us out by clarifying some obscure biblical references and by supplying a few additional words only suggested in the Hebrew. The original text actually requires the listener to recall a complete verse from the priestly code in the biblical book of Leviticus in which illicit types of sexual intercourse are catalogued (Lev. 20:13). It is also worth mentioning that the book by Alharizi in which the poem appears ascribes these lines to “a blasphemous man” whose indecency was denounced in verse by ten upstanding Jewish poets. For all its literary insolence toward Jewish piety, the poem is written in a highly refined Hebrew style, and, as the biblical allusion indicates, the poem is learned even in, or better, precisely in its whimsical and mocking impiety. This fusion of the sacred and the profane became the touchstone of Jewish culture in Iberia from the tenth through the twelfth centuries during the period frequently referred to as the “Golden Age of Jewish culture.”
The Hebrew poets’ fascination with generating literary pleasure (evident in Alharizi’s tongue-in-cheek exercise) is vividly illustrated in another anecdote that has come down to us from medieval Spain. Judah Halevi (d. 1141) was the last of the four stellar poets and arguably the most artistically accomplished poet of the period. During a literary gathering Halevi’s party was engrossed in conversation when the company gawked at an unusually stunning woman strolling past. Praising the Creator of heaven and earth for His masterpiece, they recoiled in horror when the woman spoke to her conversation partner: her grating voice and vulgar speech were most unattractive. Whereupon Halevi blurted out a double entendre typing a talmudic legalism to a figure of secular love poetry: “The mouth that bound is the mouth that set free!” The account of this episode concludes: “And all who heard it enjoyed his application of a rabbinic saying in its poetic sense.”[2]
Just for the sake of balance and so you can appreciate that the Hebrew lyric attaches no particular importance to the beloved’s gender, let me cite several lines by the thirteenth-century troubadour Todros Abulafia (b. 1247) in which a woman is the object of the poet’s affection. Notice that the etiquette of love poetry requires that the beloved be utterly cruel and the lover completely frustrated. The poet can demonstrate that he is truly a lover only if he is prepared to sacrifice everything for love and his anguish is absolute:
Fire flows from my heart and a river from my eyes;
there is a hell in my heart but my eyes are like
seas.
My tears are pure, yet red as blood.
Parting has set my bones on fire and mixed my tears
with my heart’s blood.
They were purified in the crucible of anguish and
leaped to my eyes as my heat rose….
She burnt my heart and there was no one who could
help me.
I said: “How can you, in the fire of your fury,
Burn my heart that has always been your footstool?”
To which she answered: “What concern is it of yours if
I burn my own footstool?
Sing out, my heart, rejoice as I burn it in my rage!”
O come, my lovely doe, if only in a dream.
Give yourself to me, if only in sweet speech.
Even if a few words would put out the flaming furnace
within me…[3]
The reader must take care not to be misled by the figure of a woman so empowered as to hold the poet’s life in the balance. She is a woman as imagined by men, an ideal and objectified figure whose frequent appearance in love poetry underscores the fact that real women were most often denied such power in Jewish society and were altogether silent in its literature, though not in our Geniza documents.
Perhaps even more surprising than the existence of such Hebrew love poems, abundant parallels for which exist in Arabic and in various European languages, is that the lyrics were not composed by bohemians living on the margins of the Jewish world. Rather, they were composed by communal leaders and learned scholars of Jewish law and lore who stood at the very center of Jewish life. Unlike their counterparts in northern European lands, the Jews of al-Andalus organized their cultural life around two sets of opposing principles. On the one hand they were completely absorbed by the life of the spirit (or as some would put it, the life of the mind) and the fulfillment of their religious obligations. Their devotion is understandable because like everyone else in the Middle Ages they knew that God would judge them when they died. On the other hand the same people were devoted to the “ideal of beauty as a rule of life.” Accordingly, they were open to the pursuit of the many pleasures available in this world and more so to celebrating those delights in their Hebrew verse.
Occasionally, Hebrew poetry appears to suggest that the attainment of pleasure acquired a near religious urgency. In the following lyric the eleventh/twelfth century scholar, philosopher, literary critic and poet, Moses ibn Ezra (d. 1138), lays out the essential elements of the good life. Adopting the persona of a moralistic preacher, the poet implores the listener/reader to join the congregation of revelers:
Caress a lovely woman’s breast by night
And kiss some beauty’s lips by morning light….
Immerse your heart in pleasure and in joy,
And by the bank a bottle drink of wine,
Enjoy the swallow’s chirp and viol’s whine.
Laugh, dance and stamp your feet upon the floor!
Get drunk, and knock at dawn on some girl’s door.
This is the joy of life, so take your due.
You too deserve a portion of the Ram
Of consecration, like your people’s chiefs.
To suck the juice of lips do not be shy,
But take what’s rightly yours – the breast and the thigh![4]
In addition to singing the praises of wind and love, the Hebrew poets developed many other genres of Hebrew verse all of which follow Arabic models. They lamented their dead, lampooned their personal enemies and bemoaned the brevity of earthly existence. Here is a poignant meditative poem on the subject by Samuel the Nagid, apparently written at the time of his fiftieth birthday. With its existential sensibility and concern for the life of the moment, the poem sounds almost modern. Notice the artful manner in which the poet conveys the insignificance of time by reducing years to days to an hour to but a moment that in turn disappears:
She said: Rejoice, for God has brought you to
your fiftieth year in the world!
But she had no inkling that for my part
there is no difference at all between my own days
which have gone by and the distant days
of Noah in the rumored past.
I have nothing but the hour in which I am;
It pauses for a moment, and then, like a cloud, moves
on.[5]
The poets employed literary archetypes to describe their ideal world in other genres besides love poetry. Like Keats’ famous “The Eve of Saint Agnes,” Solomon ibn Gabirol’s (b. 1021) lyric, “Come, my friend, and friend to the spheres,” takes us into the most exquisite garden courtyard beyond which we discover and resplendent castle whose perfect opulence is examined in fine detail.
Come, my friend, and friend to the spheres,
come, we’ll rest by fields as we go –
for winter has passed, and again we hear
the call of swifts and doves.
We’ll lie in the shadow of the apple and palm.
Pomegranate trees and citrus.
We’ll walk in the shade of the grapevine’s trellis,
longing for sight of illustrious faces
high on the hill over town in the palace
with massive foundations and towering walls.
Around them galleries run looking out,
while rose-filled courtyards open within…[6]
Appearances can be deceiving, for despite the imposing nature of the structure described the poet is really in complete command of the scene and the poem which ultimately turns to praise of the poet’s patron:
And birds sang from the uppermost boughs,
looking out over the palms,
and the fine shoots of the budding lilies,
and those of the camphor and nard,
one overcoming the other in boasting –
all in excellence before our eyes - …
And virgins came, and the marvelous deer
covered their splendor with splendor,
and over the others they lorded their glory
for they’re like young gazelles.
When the sun started rising across them I said:
Be still, don’t go any further!
Admit that there’s a lord who darkens your light
with a glow that cancels the heavens’…[7]
But not all of Andalusi-Hebrew verse seems so successful in recreating an ideal universe of such consummate beauty. Much of what has come down to us would strike the reader as too conventional in its content and stylized in its form to be very appealing.
The fullness of the Andalusi-Hebrew poets’ remarkable creativity cannot be appreciated sufficiently unless it is realized that their poetry represents a fusion of biblical Hebrew diction and imagery with Arabic style and form, the complex details of which need not concern us here. As we have already seen, its modes of expression and choice of themes were generally lyrical and descriptive and its immediate purpose was to entertain and persuade. Love poetry, the urban garden in spring, the wind song, meditative poetry, lament and lyrical complaint are among the well-represented genres. Manneristic virtuosity and rhetorical ornamentation (that is, technique) were highly prized in social poetry. But among the more accomplished poets, the importance of conventionality and rhetorical style did not preclude the expression of intense feelings, particularly in poems of a personal or occasional (epistolary poems of friendship, a lament for a dead relative or friend and lyrical complaints concerning personal sorrow) rather than professional nature. In general, Andalusi-Hebrew poetry can be said to represent a set of delicate balances between formulaic and expressive lyrics and between representation of the communal (that is, class) ideals and values and individual self-expression.
One of the most important genres of medieval Hebrew verse qualified as “professional poetry” – verse composed by poets singing stock praises of their patrons. Poems of praise for the great and famous or for those hoping to be counted among them served the same function as political propaganda, press releases and advertising in our society. In this respect the poets served as “spin doctors” of their age as well as its literary artists. As you could see from a complete reading of Ibn Gabirol’s poem devoted to the garden and the castle, panegyric also survives in compound poems in which a wine poem or a lyrical complaint, for instance, serves as a mood-enhancing introduction to praise of the patron.
Until the emergence of the Andalusi-Hebrew poets in the tenth century, poetry for synagogue use in the liturgy, or piyyut, predominated in Hebrew writing to the complete exclusion of the social and personal. Piyyut was conceived as an ennobling poetry given over to the passion for the synagogue community to draw closer to God. In their liturgical compositions the Andalusi-Hebrew poets utilized many of the forms and genres of traditional synagogue piyyut but also created new ones that spoke to the ardent religious yearnings of the individual. Furthermore, the poets revamped the language and poetics of early medieval piyyut tradition by emphasizing the biblical purism and stylistic intelligibility they propagated in their social and occasional verse.
For all its wit and whimsy, the poetry of the Jews of Spain was by no means without its expressions of profound sorrow or dire hopes for speedy redemption of the Jewish people and its return to the land of the forefathers. Particularly in liturgical poetry produced for recitation in the synagogue, but also in religious verse composed for private meditations, the burden of life in exile is ever present. One of the most famous lyrics on this theme belongs to Judah Halevi, composed as that “prisoner of hope” contemplated abandoning Sefarad (Spain) for the sacred precincts of Jerusalem. By setting up an escalating series of oppositions, the poem dramatizes the gap between the poet’s religious ideal and the very real obstacles impeding his quest:
My heart is in the East and I am at the edge of the
West.
How can I savor what I eat, how find it sweet?
How can I fulfill my vows and my pledges while
Zion is in Christendom’s fetter, and I am in Islam’s
shackle.
It would be easy for me to leave behind all the good
things of Spain;
It would be glorious to see the dust of the ruined
Shrine.[8]
To understand fully the revolution in Hebrew letters brought about by the appearance of this school of poets, we must speak of the momentous socioeconomic changes that transformed Andalusi-Jewish society of tenth-century Islamic Spain, in particular the rise of a class of influential Jewish courtiers. As Andalusi-Jewish society came of age the members of this class came to regard themselves as descended from the elite of Judea and as the heirs of the cultural legacy of biblical Israel, especially its learning and eloquence of Hebrew expression. Like their Muslim counterparts in the state chancery, the courtiers became the patrons of poets and scholars and took upon themselves the responsibility for establishing and maintaining renowned centers of Jewish learning at Cordoba and later Lucena. They belonged to the western branch of what the great social-historian S.D. Goitein called “bourgeois revolution” of medieval Islamic civilization. It was a revolution in which the transmission of goods, services and ideas by the men of industry and religious and secular learning transformed and enriched the socioeconomic and intellectual life of all of Mediterranean Islam, including the Jews. Andalusi-Hebrew literature would hardly have taken the form it did or adopted the values it expresses were it not for this socioeconomic revolution and the intellectual ferment it engendered within Islam and among the Jews of Islamic lands.
A good deal of Andalusi-Jewish culture actually drew upon ideas first articulated and methods initially developed during the ninth and tenth centuries among the Karaite Jews and the great rabbinic centers of the Muslim East. Nevertheless, the Jews of Muslim Spain were the first community of the Middle Ages fully to combine a program of traditional religious study with research into all the arts and sciences and to cultivate a wide range of secular forms of poetic expression alongside poetry for recitation in the synagogue. Andalusi-Hebew literary-religious intellectuals were among the first Jewish scholars to compile codes of religious law, engage in systematic study of Hebrew grammar, philology and lexicography, and devote themselves to philosophy and rational theology. Under the influence of Islam, they were also pioneers in producing linear commentaries, which explicated the Hebrew Bible line by line and, especially from the twelfth century onward, engaging in mystical speculation. In varying degrees all of these intellectual ventures reflect an Arabo-Muslim cultural background.
It is worth observing that during the Middle Ages knowledge was not nearly so fragmented a commodity as now we are accustomed to think. The distinctions we commonly make between various cultural and intellectual activities would seem absurd to the Jews of al-Andalus. We have already noted the comprehensive literary and intellectual profiles of Samuel the Nagid and Moses ibn Ezra. But those two poets were by no means unique in this regard. Solomon ibn Gabirol was a singularly philosophically-minded scholar who also seems to have been involved in grammatical research as a young man; Judah Halevi was a physician, theologian and businessman; and Abraham ibn Ezra (d. 1167) was a biblical exegete, grammarian, philosopher, scientist and astrologer. In all of these fields of endeavor the works of the Hebrew literary intellectuals became classics of Jewish literature. Many still enjoy canonical status in traditional culture; none of that would have been possible without interaction with the world of Muslim letters and scholarship.
The biblical commentary of Abraham ibn Ezra, for example, is emblematic of the richness and complexity of of Andalusi-Jewish literary and religious culture. Ibn Ezra wrote not one but three commentaries on that most charming of biblical books, the collection of Israelite love poems known as the Song of Songs. In the first recension, he explains the unusual grammatical and lexical features of the text in the manner of Andalusi-Hebrew scientific linguistic tradition, borrowed from the Arabic philologists. In the second commentary, Ibn Ezra treats the Song as a piece of literary art much as one might examine one of the poet’s own secular love poems. Only in his third “reading” does Ibn Ezra treat the Song of Songs as an allegory of the love between God and His people Israel after the fashion of traditional rabbinic exegesis. Poets, too, gave voice to the inter-penetration of the secular and the religious in lyrics about the love between God and the soul. Thus, liturgical poetry can seem even more passionate and brazen than secular love songs such as those cited above. While its language, imagery and religious associations were derived from the Hebrew Bible (principally the Song of Songs) it also drew upon elements whose ultimate source was Arabic poetry.
Following two successive Berber invasions and occupations of Muslim Spain at the end of the eleventh and the middle of the twelfth centuries the centers of Andalusi-Jewish culture shifted from the south to the Christian north. In that new social and cultural environment Hebrew literary intellectuals began to cultivate imaginative narratives in rhymed Hebrew prose interspersed with poignant and strategically placed lines of verse. Apparently they were hoping to reach an audience wider than elite courtly circles alone. This new-to-Hebrew literary vehicle aimed to edify, entertain and satirize all at once. There are enchanting stories that represent Hebrew translations and adaptations of international lore such as the legend of the Buddha and collections of fables and allegories, some derived from ancient Sanskrit tradition of India via Arabic. We also find a rich variety of original imaginative Hebrew narratives devoted to personal quests, romance, adventure and intrigue in the harem that would remind you of Chaucer, Boccaccio or Cervantes.
One of my favorite tales is found in a collection of rhetorical anecdotes (chapter 24) by Judah Alharizi, the first poet from whom we hear. It concerns the devout cantor of Mosul, Iraq, whose beard extends down to his navel and who wraps himself in a prayer shawl so long that he trips on its fringes. He fancies himself the grandest voice and most pious hazzan in all of Jewish history, but he makes so many dreadful mistakes that he is actually in desperate need of a course in remedial Hebrew grammar. It would be an exercise in futility to attempt to capture in translation the brilliant and outrageous linguistic hoops through which the author of this burlesque tale takes the Hebrew language:
Instead of … praise Him with stringed instruments and pipes [Haleluhu be-minim we-‘ugav] he said, praise Him with cheese and crackers [be-gvinim we-‘ugah]…
And instead of ‘And it is in Your power to make and to give strength to all [le-gadel u-le-hazzeq]’ he said, ‘And it is in You rpower to malign and do injury to all [le-gaddef u-le-hazziq].[9]
When the cantor continues in this manner with no end in sight the narrator reports that:
some of the people remained seated, some slept reclining in undisturbed sleep. But some of them fled and did not return … and when he turned back to complete the prayer, there was not a man left in the synagogue because the entire congregation had gone home to sleep.
You need not feel too sorry for this incompetent hazzan because he was by no means singled out for ridicule. Since men of that communal office were expected to compose Hebrew verse for incorporation during the recitation of the synagogue liturgy, literary-minded Hebrew poets such as al-Harizi may have been quick to mock them because they saw hazzanim as potential if unworthy rivals. The Cairo Geniza, that treasure trove of documentary and literary material discovered nearly one hundred years ago in the attic floor of a synagogue in old Cairo, suggests that cantors around the Mediterranean during the Islamic Middle Ages were not infrequently the butt of communal gossip and sometimes jokes. In truth, everyone was fair game for the poets’ barbs. Samuel the Nagid, for example, composed a poem mercilessly lampooning Talmudic scholars in a Granadan study house.
Let me now cite a passage from another narrative, also by Alharizi, in which the central character is the houseguest of a nouveau riche merchant who possesses an extremely gauche sense of Middle Eastern hospitality. The host takes his sweet time serving his visitor some refreshment because he cannot contain his enthusiasm for first conducting him on a grand tour of the mansion. He must, after all, show off his neatly appoint state-of-the-art bathroom facility and describe in oh so intimate detail the rather raucous and raunchy goings on in the master bedroom:
Look sir alone, on naked beauty bare: the water basin
firm and fair, the marble floor inlaid with Ivories
Rare.
Indeed here one would crave to dine, so fair a place it is
and fine! Said I to him: sir, I had thought my
reckoning complete;
but Truth to tell it had not reached unto the Privy
Seat!
There stands by my bed of bliss – my wife’s room this.
Ah, could you but see me alone outstretched with my
Dear bride at my side, her cheeks the light of my
eyes,
her arms tight round my thighs
and her lips like honeyed pies;
and she sans restraint, kissing and hugging and
panting and tugging and bobbing and sobbing
until my very bones be throbbing.
Your thoughts would be staggered by such glorious
intimacy that you would go mad at the sight of your
eyes.[10]
For those of you aghast that medieval rabbinical scholars could even imagine such things, let alone commit them to writing, let me try to reassure you by noting that according to medieval European and Arabic standards the Hebrew writings seem altogether modest. They would earn only a “PG” rating at best.
What sorts of significance have scholars uncovered in the culture of the Jews of Spain? Most often, the significance is found in the eyes of the beholder rather than the object of study itself. For European Jewish intellectuals of the nineteenth century committed to the “Science of Judaism,” Andalusi-Jewish culture represented a credible medieval Jewish revolt against the exclusive absorption of traditional culture and correspondingly, an awakening to participation in the wider culture of an “interfaith utopia.” By the same token, the Hebrew poets signaled to the enlightened modern orthodox a way of maintaining a commitment to Jewish tradition along with pursuing an avid interest in science, technology and the humanities. Several Israeli literary historians have taken our Hebrew poetry with its emphasis on cultural “nationalism” and competition with Arabic as evidence of the poets’ pre-modern proto-Zionism. And a distinguished American scholar suggested that the Andalusi-Hebrew poets may serve as a historical model for what is possible in the way of creative interaction between Jewish culture and the culture of the majority in which the Jews live.
What is the historical significance of the literary legacy of the Jews of Spain? With respect to the richness of its cultural productivity, the career of Sefardi Jewry is without parallel in Jewish history at least until the Italian Renaissance, perhaps even until the German Jewish Enlightenment. Indeed, the cultural values, texts and verse forms produced by the Jews of Spain were subsequently preserved, studied, imitated and transformed during the Middle Ages and Renaissance by Jews of every other Mediterranean land. And the production of Hebrew literature itself continued unabated until 1492, some three hundred and fifty years after the end of the “Golden Age.” In all their varied activities the Hebrew literary intellectuals demonstrated a self-confidence and an openness to the wider Arabo-Islamic society without compromising their personal piety, devotion to traditional learning, and what we would call today their “Jewish identity.” By composing their poems in classical Hebrew, in reviving the language of the Bible as a medium for the description of diverse experiences and the expression of personal feeling, the poets emphasized the significance of the individual and revitalized the Hebrew literary tradition. Perhaps the ethos of the Andalusi-Hebrew poets’ complex culture was best captured in a clever epigram attributed to Dunash Ben Labrat (died c. 990), the first poet of the school:
Let your Garden be the Books of the Pious
your paradise the books of the Arabs![11]
Originally published in The Solomon Goldman Lectures, Volume VIII, Edited by Dean Phillip Bell and Hal M. Lewis, The Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies Press, Chicago, Illinois, 2003, pp. 1-16.
Ross Brann: Further Reading
For those who wish to delve deeper into the subject, I strongly recommend both of Ross Brann’s excellent books, The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain (1991) and Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Jews and Muslims in Eleventh and Twelfth Century Islamic Spain (2002). They are essential reading for those wanting to learn more about the Sephardic heritage
Here are links to purchase the books:
http://www.amazon.com/Compunctious-Poet-Cultural-Ambiguity-Hopkins/dp/0801840732
[1] Judah Alharizi, Tahkemoni, edited by Y. Toporovsky (Tel Aviv: Mahbarot Le-Sifrut and Mosad Ha-Rav Kook, 1952), p. 418.
[2] Joseph ibn Aqnin, The Revelation of the Secrets and the Appearance of the Lights [Arabic], Edited by A.S. Halkin (Jerusalem, Mekize Nirdamim, 1964), pp. 176-178.
[3] The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, Edited and Translated by T. Carmi (New York, 1981), pp. 412-413.
[4] Raymond P. Scheindlin, Wine, Women and Death: Medieval Hebrew Poems on the Good Life (Philadelphia, 1986), pp. 90-91.
[5] The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, p. 285.
[6] Selected Poems of Solomon ibn Gabirol, Translated by Peter Cole (Princeton, 2001), p. 63.
[7] Selected Poems of Solomon ibn Gabirol, p. 64.
[8] The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, p. 347.
[9] Judah Alharizi, Tahkemoni, p. 224.
[10] David S. Segal. “Of a Host Bombastic and a Feast Fantastic,” Prooftexts 3 (1983), p. 52.
[11] Teshuvot Yehuda Ben Sheshet, Edited by Encarnacion Varela Moreno (Granada: Universidad de Granada and Universidad Pontifica de Salamnaca, 1981), p. 26.