The following is an advanced version of a chapter published in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies. Edited by Martin Goodman. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2002. Chapter 11, pp. 241-294
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The Study of the Hebrew Literature in the Middle Ages: Major Trends and Goals
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Tova Rosen
Eli Yassif
Introductory Survey
Our survey aims at a critical examination of modern research on medieval Hebrew literature. However, for the sake of the non-specialist, we would like to offer here a most general outline of medieval Hebrew literature itself. Our definition of “medieval Hebrew literature” excludes writing in Jewish languages other than Hebrew, and singles out “literature” from other types of non-literary Hebrew writing. The variety of literary types included in our survey ranges from liturgical and secular poetry to artistic story-telling and folk literature.
When does medieval Hebrew literature begin? Rather than trying to pinpoint a beginning (or beginnings, since each literary type has its own, sometimes vague, historical beginning), it will prove more fruitful to employ here a genealogical approach. Both early liturgical poetry (known as the Piyyut) and the medieval Hebrew story are rooted in the soil of the Talmudic period. Liturgical poetry, believed now to have emerged at the end of the Talmudic period (around 500) in Byzantine Palestine, was the earliest literary genre of medieval Hebrew literature.
i.e., some century and a half before the Muslim conquest of Palestine. According to the now widely- accepted definition of historian Hayyim Ben Sasson, the Jewish Middle Ages began with the Muslim conquests in the seventh century and ended with the turbulence in the Jewish world in the wake of the Sabbetaian movement in the seventeenth century. And although heavily absorbed in the mentality and language of the contemporary Midrash, the piyyut had carved its own independent forms. The beginnings of the medieval Hebrew storytelling were even more deeply connected to the narrative traditions of the Talmud. However, the constitutive moment of the birth of the Piyyut and the narrative as distinct medieval genres had to do with their separation from the encyclopedic, all-embracing nature of the Talmud. Unlike the Talmud, in which all branches of knowledge and creativity were contained in one and the same composition, and were subjected to the Rabbis wholistic approach to learning, medieval literature is characterized by the separation and independence of its genres. Hence, the beginning of medieval Hebrew literature coincides with the emergence, each in its in due time, of independent compositions dedicated to liturgy, poetry, story-telling, philosophy, religious law (halacha), biblical commentary, linguistics, mysticism and historiography. The first separate compositions of Hebrew prose appeared first in the Jewish communities in the East – Iraq, Iran and Palestine – and were certainly effected by earlier and similar developments in Arabic culture.
From here on we shall follow the separate paths of evolution of the different genres and sub-genres of poetry and prose.
Medieval Hebrew poetry
The inception of the Piyyut is intimately linked to the development and customs of the Jewish prayer. The basic assumption is that the piyyutim could not have entered the synagogue prior to a relative maturation and crystalization of the prayers themselves. The first paytanim (liturgical poets) were cantors who offered their communities a poetic alternative to the standard prayers. The intricate structures of the paytanic compositions correspond to the complex compositions of the prayers themselves. The vast number of extant early piyyutim (most of them discovered during the last century in the Geniza) testifies to the great need for a constantly renewed repertory. Their sophisticated formal arrangements (rhyme, acrostics, sound devices), their enigmatic language (often incorporated with Midrashic allusions), and their use of Hebrew neologisms, indicate the intellectual and aesthetic demands of their audiences. Some common features between Jewish and Christian liturgy promoted the assumption that they either influenced each other, or at least developed along analogous lines.
After having its apex (roughly between the mid-sixth century and the second half of the eighth) in Palestine the piyyut shifted to centers in the Diaspora; to eastern communities (Syria, Egypt, North Africa and especially Iraq) and to Central Europe (Italy, from where it spread later to Germany and southern France, constituting the Ashkenazi School).
Secular poetry does not enter the scene until the tenth century. Its most renowned practitioners were the Hebrew poets of the Andalusian Golden Age. However, of critical importance to the understanding of the growth of the secular poetry in Spain are cultural developments which took place in Iraqi Jewry during the tenth century. The Babylonian leader Saadia Gaon (an innovative paytan in his own right), initiated a revolutionary proposal for Jewish writing, which yielded far-reaching results in all spheres of Jewish learning (grammar, philosophy, poetics and more). His project involved, among other things, the re-modeling of Jewish writing upon literary models adopted from Arabic culture. Following Arabic puristic ideals, his treatise on poetry (indeed the first Hebrew poetics) required, that Hebrew poetry be written in pure biblical Hebrew. Although Saadia referred mainly to the Piyyut, his poetic vision effected mainly secular poetry. And despite modest sporadic attempts at secular poetry in the Jewish East, Saadia’s ideal did materialize in the farthest West of the Jewish world – in Muslim Spain.
The agent of change was Saadia’s student, the poet and grammarian Dunash ben Labrat, who immigrated to Cordoba in the middle of the tenth century, at the call of the Jewish courtier Hasday Ibn Shaprut. Dunash’s “invention” – to scan Hebrew poetry in Arabic meters – despite the opposition it aroused, can be considered as the founding moment of the Hebrew-Andalusian school of poetry. This courageous move paved the way for other poetic developments, namely, the adoption of the Arabic rhyme system, Arabic verse forms, thematic genres, rhetoric and poetic tenets. The revival of “pure” biblical Hebrew as a poetic language – often seen as a manifestation of renewed national awareness – was itself modeled upon the puristic linguistic ideals cultivated by Arabic poets and linguists.
From Dunash on, Hebrew poetry in Spain will thrive in the ambience of the Spanish-Jewish arabicized elite of courtiers and rabbis, and will take on the characteristics of Arabic courtly poetry. Professional Hebrew poets, involved in the circles of the Jewish courtiers serving the Andalusian rulers, will write, like their Arabic peers, poems of love and wine, friendship and praise, lament and complaint (and in the case of Samuel ha-Nagid, the vizier of Granada, even war poems) reflecting the interests and moods of their social circle.
From the echelons of these courtiers-rabbis-poets come also the Spanish liturgists.
Major poets (like Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Moses Ibn Ezra, Judah ha-Levi and Abraham Ibn Ezra) as well as lesser-known poets, were also most prolific in liturgy. Spanish liturgical poetry is divided between a conservative trend preserving features of the Old Eastern Piyyut, and an innovative trend introducing to Jewish religious poetry Arabic formal features as well as certain philosophical and ascetic influences from Arabic poetry and thought.
Migrations of Hebrew authors out of Spain dispatched the achievements of the prestigious Andalusian school to other Jewish communities who were to become the heirs of the Andalusian center. Judah ha-Levi left Spain for Egypt in 1140. In the same year Abraham Ibn Ezra left for North Africa and Italy, and later wandered also in Provence and France. Alharizi voyaged in Iraq, Syria and Egypt around the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Their visits effected the productivity of both secular and religious poetry in these eastern centers, with each center gradually developing its own local style.
Following the migration of Jews to Christian Spain (during the Berber invasions and the first Christian re-conquest in the second half of the twelfth century), a second Jewish-Spanish school evolved in Castille, Catalonia (and Provence), and will continue to exist until the Expulsion in 1492. Though generally adhering to the prosody, genres and themes of their predecessors, the poets of the new school seem to depart from the Andalusians in several ways. Firstly, there is a marked decrease in creativity in the field of religious poetry. This occurs parallel, and perhaps also due to, the increase in Kabbalistic activity. Secondly, a new secular genre is introduced in this period – artistic narratives in rhymed prose. The most famous variant of rhymed prose is the Hebrew maqama modeled upon the Arabic genre. In translating narrative compilations (especially from the Arabic), and in incorporating motifs culled from Jewish and Arabic folktales as well as from contemporary Romance literatures, these rhymed Hebrew narratives constitute an interesting locus of intercultural contacts. The development of artistic Hebrew narratives participates in and contributes to a new revival of the Hebrew language. The puristic biblical style so idealized in Andalusian poetry gives way to a more versatile Hebrew, infused with mishnaic, talmudic and medieval layers, used not only in narratives but also in translations and original works of a speculative nature.
The waves of refugees spreading north and south after the 1492 Expulsion join the existing literary centers around the Mediterranean. A revival of a new trend of poetry, imbued with Kabbalistic air, is characteristic of the poetry written from the sixteenth century on. Its effects are especially felt in North Africa, Turkey, and even in remote Yemen. Religious poetry continued to be written by Jews in the East until the beginning of the twentieth century. Though it exceeds by far the bounds of the definition of “medieval” this later poetry is medieval in spirit, theme and form, and is thus being studied by scholars of medieval poetry.
Ashkenazic piyyut ceased to be a productive school much earlier. It is accepted that the invention of printing in the sixteenth century which brought about the standartization of Ashkenazic rite, blocked new piyyutim from entering the prayer book. Of all poetic schools it was the Ashkenazic one which remained most loyal to the tradition of the Ancient Piyyut, and thus, also, the most isolated. Only minimal influence of the Spanish school may be discerned (since the thirteenth century). It is especially notable for its lamentations reflecting the turbulence of German Jews during the Crusades.
The first stage of the Italian school, beginning around 800 as a follower of the Palestinian Piyyut, is considered as belonging to the Ashkenazic school, from which it departed in the late twelfth century. During the thirteenth century it was under the poetic influence of the Andalusian school. Since the beginning of the fourteenth century it combined the Andalusian poetics with influences of contemporary Italian literature, adopting its themes and forms of Renaissance, Baroque and Classicist trends. Italian Jewish authors produced secular and religious poetry, narratives, plays, etc. The Italian school persisted until the nineteenth century, with its last phase being parallel to the birth of Modern Hebrew literature of the Enlightenment.
The Hebrew Story in the Middle Ages
The Hebrew story in the Middle Ages was, especially in its beginning, under the heavy influence of the previous period: the haggadic story in the Talmud and Midrash. The development of the Hebrew story in the Middle Ages was long and complicated, because of the rich narrative world of Rabbinic sources, in the domain of genres, thematic diversity, literary style and complex function. This is visible in the fact that many medieval compositions are still called "midrash", and that a high percentage of the stories in these compositions were adapted from the Talmud and Midrashim and were not medieval in origin.
The first Hebrew composition we know of, from the 8th-9th century, in which typical medieval characteristics can be observed, is the "Midrash of the Ten Commandments". Its author, as well as its readers, saw in it a continuation of midrashic literature. It is built around the biblical verses and their midrashic interpretation, and include in the course of its discussion some narrative illustrations to support it. It is possible to see in each of the ten chapters of this composition a separate "midrash", based upon one the Ten Commandments. Here, however, lies the main difference. The midrashic-ethical component in this composition is very limited, and the readers feel that this part is not important and that the author pays here his debt to his cultural and religious norms (so that his composition will be legitimized), but he rushes to get to the stories, which receive the main artistic emphasis. While the midrashic sections of the composition are borrowed from talmudic literature, most stories are new and unknown previously in Jewish literature, and are long and developed narratives. The "Midrash of the Ten Commandments" is a typical example of the process of "continuation and change" marking the emergence of Hebrew prose in the Middle Ages.
In accord with this process, most of the Hebrew narratives appear not in independent narrative composition as the "Midrash of the Ten Commandments", but in commentaries, historical books, moralistic treatises, travel itineraries, or hagiographical accounts of holy men. However, the literary uniqueness of the period lies in the courageous departure from the literary norms of the previous period.
The genre of the "rewritten biblical story" is the main component of the midrashic literature, and continues to be created extensively in the Middle Ages. However, when the biblical stories are told in the Middle Ages it appears not in the context of a homily, as in the midrashim, but as full prose narrative which tore itself from the bounds of the biblical verse, and created an almost independent narrative. Such are compositions as "Midrash Vayosha", "the Chronicles of Moses", "Ma'aseh Avraham", and especially "Sefer ha-Yashar", written in the end of the Middle Ages. Each one of these compositions, as well as many others, use the biblical story as a nucleus for a new, developed and independent fictive narrative, which its world and style is that of the Middle Ages.
The next important prose genre in this period is the collection of stories. These compositions from the beginning of the Middle Ages, bring together different stories from various sources and different topics. They express, maybe more than any other literary genre of the time, the emergence of Hebrew prose as a unique creation. Compositions like "The Alphabeth of ben Sira", built as a framework narrative and includes outstanding subversive stories; "An Elegant Composition Concerning Relief after Adversity", by Rabbi Nissim of Kairuan in the 11th century, composed as a moralistic work, but positioning in its center the stories, not the mores; "Sefer ha Ma'asim" from 12th century France, constructed according to the literary patterns of European exempla literature, and the most important "Sefer Hasidim" – the basic document of the German Pietists in the 13th century. It was not intended to be a literary composition, however its author, Rabbi Judah the Pious, included here about 400 original stories, thus creating one of the most interesting narrative compositions of the Middle Ages.
Another important genre of the Hebrew prose is the historical narrative. Although generally the tendency was to consider this genre as belonging to the historiographical writing, it is clear today that most of the compositions in this genre are fictional, styled creations, not historical "documents". First and foremost of these compositions is "Sefer Jossipon", the 10th century Italian story of the second Temple. It is based on the historical narrative of Josephus Flavius, but it selects portions from his book, adds to the narrative rabbinic and medieval material, and creates a "historical novel" typical of the Middle Ages. Another historiographical work, the 11th century "Megilat Ahima'az" from southern Italy, is a saga of the Ahima'az family in the last 300 years. Its author, Ahima'az ben Paltiel collected family traditions, committed them to writing in a highly stylized Hebrew, and in rhyme. It is thus the first rhymed prose in the Hebrew literature of the Middle Ages. Another historical narrative is "Sefer ha-Zichronot" (Book of Memory), from early 14th century Germany. It tells the history of the Jewish people from the creation of the world to the end of days – the messianic period – and thus belongs to the popular historiographical genre in its period – the universal history. Another important characteristic of this work is that it is a collection of dozens of full or fragmentary medieval compositions which the author of "Sefer ha-Zichronot" considered as "authentic documents", which he organized and framed as a part of Jewish historical memory. In the later Middle Ages, one of the refugees from Spain, Gedalya Ibn Yahya, wrote "Shalshelet ha-Kabbalah", one of the most controversial historical books of the time. Gedalya presented here the intellectual history of the Torah sages from the beginning to his own days. When he described the history of the great sages of the Middle Ages – Rashi, Maimonides, Nachmanides and others – he used dozens of saints' legends he heard and read, and so he became one of the most important contributors to Jewish hagiographical writing in the later Middle Ages.
Another popular genre of the time was the bestiary and fable. Medieval people were fascinated with the origin, character and behavior of animals, and even more of their resemblance to human beings. In the Hebrew prose of the time, the earlier bestiaries were created in the East – the "Alphabeth of ben Sira" and "Igeret Ba'aley Haim". Fables appeared also in the context of another works, as in the Talmudic commentaries of Rav Hai Gaon of Iraq and Rashi in France. However, the peak of this genre in Jewish culture was the 13th century French author Rabbi Berechia ha-Nakdan, who created "Mishlei Shua'lim" (Fox Fables) – one of the largest, most sophisticated collections of fables in European literature.
The Study of Hebrew Literature
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Like literature itself, the study of literature cannot be detached from historical and cultural contexts. In this essay we wish to outline the development of the modern scholarship of medieval Hebrew literature (starting from its widely-acknowledged beginnings in the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement of the early nineteenth century) in three main contexts:
(1) The context of its internal development, based on its own goals, necessities and achievements.
(2) The context of contemporaneous developments in the general discipline of literary criticism. To what extent does the scholarship of medieval Hebrew literature correspond with trends and currents that have been prevalent in literary criticism and research in other languages in general, and in the study of medieval literatures in particular; and to what extent does it share the aesthetic assumptions and intellectual views accepted in the general field?
(3) The context of modern Jewish history. The scholarship of medieval Hebrew literature has developed concurrently with certain historical processes (the struggle of Western European Jews for cultural recognition; the attempt to establish a new cultural center for the Jewish People in Palestine in the beginning of the twentieth century; the establishment of the State of Israel; relationships between Israel and the Diaspora; tensions between religious and secular Jews; the Israeli-Arab conflict, etc.). We must ask, then, whether and how such ‘external’ historical contexts affected currents and trends in the development of the research, and whether and how different scholars attempted, explicitly or implicitly, to participate in and shape cultural life.
Our review of the principal currents in the study of medieval Hebrew literature is divided into two sections: the study of medieval Hebrew poetry and the study of the medieval Hebrew prose. With the exception of a few scholars who tackled both forms (particularly in the early phases of the research), the study of medieval Hebrew prose and poetry has developed into two distinct, separate disciplines. As in the study of non-Jewish medieval literatures, this may be due to such external factors as the perceived elitism of poetry, as opposed to the more “popular” and “folkloristic” qualities of medieval prose, or to internal factors, including the considerable differences in forms of aesthetic expression, target audiences and social functions. Although medieval literatures—Jewish, Christian-European and Arabic alike—do include hybrid-forms like the maqamas and the romance, which explicitly tread the line between poetry and prose (and have been studied as such), the existence of such hybrid-genres should not blur the reality of two distinct disciplines in the study of medieval literature—hence the bifurcated structure of this essay.
Medieval Hebrew Poetry
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The modern scholarship of medieval Hebrew poetry had two constitutive moments: whereas the first—the Wissenschaft des Judentums enterprise of the mid-nineteenth century—gave the field its impetus and raison d’être, the discovery of the Cairo Geniza at the end of that century transformed the study of medieval Hebrew poetry by supplying it with a vast abundance of research material (which is yet to be exhausted) and making possible a new array of syntheses and conclusions.
The latter half of the nineteenth century constituted the first chapter in the history of this academic field. The great figures of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Zunz, Steinschneider, Luzzatto) placed the research of Hebrew literature—and of Hebrew poetry in particular—at the core of their scholarly agenda. Leopold Zunz’s research aims, as formulated in his 1818 program for the Wissenschaft des Judentums, were emblematic of the emancipatory apologetics of this agenda: since actively religious Jewish life, and the literature produced under its wings, have come to an end, they should henceforth be scrutinized using scientific tools; the Science of Judaism should devote itself to the study of Hebrew literature, in which the unique character of Judaism has been preserved; such an endeavor would not only stimulate intellectual vigor and fill a spiritual void in modern Judaism, but would also raise a contribution to general Humanistic studies, thus helping to promote equal rights for the Jews. For Zunz, not the Talmud and the Kabbala, but rather the Midrash and the Piyyut—those two literary genres whose primary locus of vitality (“Sitz im Leben”) was the synagogue—were the forms most representative of the Jewish genius. Zunz’s three great works on the piyyut brought medieval liturgy to the center of Jewish scholarship. Whereas the first of these volumes (1855) was devoted to the penitential piyyutim, the second (1859) included kerovot by numerous paytanim (liturgical poets) and examined the role of the piyyutim in Jewish life. Zunz’s third great book (1865) was a pioneering attempt to lay down a systematic, chronological bio-bibliography of hundreds of poets and thousands of piyyutim, from the beginnings of the genre to the sixteenth century.
Our overview wishes to highlight trends and achievements in the field in the latter half of the twentieth century, especially in recent decades. For information on the development of the research in the more distant past and for bibliographical references, the reader is thus referred to previous, more or less comprehensive surveys about the state of the art. On the Wissenschaft des Judentums research, see Davidson 1930 and Schirmann 1970. Schirmann 1942 focuses primarily on the study of Spanish poetry between the two world wars. Schirmann 1967 and Pagis 1979 include short historical surveys, but they focus mainly on methodological difficulties, lacunas and future tasks.
Preceding Zunz’s great works on the piyyut were pioneering attempts by other scholars, of whom we shall at this point mention Franz Delitzsch, a protestant missionary associated with the Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars whose volume on post-biblical Jewish poetry appeared already in 1836. Parallel to Zunz, Moritz Steinschneider had published his Jewish Literature (1857), which in addition to liturgical poetry examined also a variety of Jewish writings (including non-liturgical poetry and speculative prose). Of interest for us are his chapters on the poetry of Muslim Spain (where he laid the foundation for scrutinizing it vis-à-vis the contemporaneous Arab literature) and the rhymed prose of Jewish writers from Christian Spain and Provence (which he discussed against the background of Spain’s Christian literature). Among his other bibliographical endeavors, Steinschneider edited the catalogues of Hebrew manuscripts in five major European libraries (including Leiden, Berlin and Oxford’s Bodleian Library), where his uncovering of hidden literary treasures earned him the justified title “the Father of Jewish Bibliography.”
Another great contributor to the bibliographical and textological research in this field was the Italian scholar Samuel David Luzzatto (ShaDaL), who indexed, identified, described, published and commented on hundreds of piyyutim. His introduction to Mahzor bene Roma (1856) is a thorough examination of the history of the piyyut. Although Luzzatto had close links with the German Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars, he was a traditionalist who did not share their views on emancipation and on (?) reform in Judaism. Because of his ideas concerning national and cultural revival, several modern critics (Bialik 1924, Schirmann 1942) preferred Luzzatto to scholars like Zunz, to whom Judaism was in the process of being “lowered to its grave.” Luzzatto, in contrast, stressed Judaism’s vitality and originality and emphasized the role of the Hebrew language and literature in cultivating the Jewish spirit: treating those as a living literary tradition, thought Luzzatto, would reinforce the commitment of Jews to Judaism. Luzzatto’s profound identification with the national ideology of Judah ha-Levi, whose poems he published (Luzzatto, 1840; 1864), contributed considerably to ha-Levi being perceived not just as Spain’s greatest Jewish poet, but also as a pre-Zionist national and cultural icon.
The products of the Wissenschaft des Judentums research fluctuated between two poles: on the one hand, ambitious, wide-ranging projects which, although based on the incomplete research materials available at the time, aimed at a bibliographical and historical mapping of all post-biblical Jewish literature, and on the other, sporadic publications of poems discovered in prayer-books and manuscripts. Already in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and increasingly so in later decades, various scholars began publishing a myriad of single piyyutim (an effort soon to include secular poems as well) in the major periodicals of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, as well as in more obscure journals associated with the Jewish Enlightenment movement (the Haskalah), in jubilee volumes and in self-published pamphlets. Hevrat Meqizei Nirdamim (literally translated, “Society for the Awakeners of the Asleep”)—a society dedicated to the publication of significant Hebrew manuscripts—was established in 1862, with Luzzatto among its founders. Its publications, which were for the most part sporadic and fragmentary (and at times even amateurish and sloppy), were harshly criticized by later scholars. Bialik (1924), to quote just one such critic, chastised their “miserable work,” calling it “an insipid and negligent collection of bits and pieces” (an accusation from which he excused Luzzatto, however). Most attempts by late-nineteenth century scholars to publish complete diwans, especially by Spanish-Hebrew poets, also resulted in deficient, incomplete products. However, as deeply flawed as such efforts were from the perspective of later critics—due either to methodological difficulties or to the limited available knowledge—they incontrovertibly laid the indispensable bibliographical and paleographical foundations for the discipline.
The main difficulty facing the early generations of scholars was the physical condition of the material that was to serve as the empirical foundation of their research. The majority of the poetic material (both liturgical and secular) resembled an archipelago submerged underwater. The initial task was to discover the lost islands of that archipelago, combine the visible segments, and deduce whatever remained hidden. This undertaking was somewhat simpler regarding the liturgical material, which was partially preserved (albeit in altered versions after years of incessant modification) in prayer books that were still in use in the nineteenth century. It was much more difficult regarding the secular poems, which had sunk to oblivion and only gradually began to surface in obscure collections. The fragmentation of the material, its dispersal in libraries, archives and private collections, as well as the sometimes-damaged condition of the manuscripts, all contributed to the difficulty. There were cases where pages containing different parts of the same poem would be discovered in different places by different scholars, over the span of several decades. The evolution of the field has thus been intertwined with the continuous (and still ongoing) discovery and mapping of the research-material itself. The Thesaurus of Medieval Hebrew Poetry, edited by Israel Davidson and published in New York between 1924 and 1938, supplied scholars with a significant bibliographical tool. The work was incomplete, however—even at the time of its initial publication—since it only listed already-published poems. Only a small appendix catalogued a small part of the then extant manuscripts. The Thesaurus included roughly 36,000 poems, listed alphabetically by their first words. Each entry cited the editions in which the poems had been published, and included references to earlier indices by previous scholars (Zunz, Luzzatto, Landshuth) who had begun indexing the material.
These material difficulties, which were only exacerbated following the discovery of the Geniza (see below), held back the research agenda considerably. For decades, scholars were weighed down by the feeling that any attempt to recapitulate the available knowledge on a poet, school or era, would inevitably remain incomplete and tentative. In the absence of catalogues and additional bibliographical tools, even the publication of critical editions based on a maximal number of extant manuscript versions was deemed a goal hard to achieve.
Nevertheless, quite a number of editions (not all of them complete) were published during the last century, of which will be mentioned here: D. Yellin, Todros Abulafia (1932-1937); H. Brody, Meshulam DaPierra (Yedi’ot 1938); D. Jarden, Mahberot Immauel (1956); A. Mirsky, Ithak Ibn Khalfun (1961); A. Mirsky, Yose ben Yose (1977); D. Jarden, Samuel ha-Nagid, 1-3 (1966-1983); D. Pagis, Levi Ibn al-Tabban (1967); D. Jarden, Secular and Liturgical Poetry of Solomon Ibn Gabirol, 1-3 (1973-76); H. Brody and J. Schirmann, Ibn Gabirol: Secular Poems (1974); I. Levin, Abraham Ibn Ezra: Religious Poems (1976-1980); M. Schmeltzer, Isaac ibn Ezra (1979); D. Jarden, The Liturgical Poetry of Judah ha-Levi, 1-4 (1980-86); Y. David, Joseph Ibn Zaddik (1982); idem, Isaac Ibn Ghiyyat (1987); B. Bar Tikva, Liturgical Poems by Yitzhak Hasniri (1986); Important bodies of work that still await publication in standard editions include the liturgical poems of Moses Ibn Ezra and the secular poems of Abraham Ibn Ezra. The absence of such editions is also felt in the field of rhymed prose. Other editions are mentioned throughout the essay. Also see note 30, on editions of liturgical poets based on the findings of the Geniza. And in the absence of standard editions, scholars were discouraged from attempting to write extensive histories or monographs, not to mention explications, interpretations or literary analyses.
The story of two editions—one deficient, the other a success, both edited by Heinrich Brody, a scholar who focused on textual criticism—will illustrate the aforementioned difficulties. The Divan Judah ha-Levi, on which Brody labored for decades (1894-1930), was a flawed edition marred by numerous textual mistakes and by the erroneous inclusion of poems by other poets. It was also far from including ha-Levi’s complete oeuvre. Additional manuscripts—which included different versions from the ones already published, as well as hitherto-unknown poems by ha-Levi—continued to surface gradually while the edition was being prepared and after it was published (first in the Cambridge collection of the Geniza, and lately in the Geniza collection at the Library of St. Petersburg). Even today, nearly a century after Brody’s effort, there is still no authorized edition of Judah ha-Levi’s work. The absence of such an edition has been, and will continue to be, an obstacle toward the completion of any creditable study of ha-Levi’s poetry. Brody’s three-volume edition of Moses Ibn Ezra’s secular poems is regarded in contrast as a masterpiece of scholarship. Brody’s work on the edition began at the end of the nineteenth century, met with numerous difficulties and setbacks, and remained unfinished when he died at 1942. The delay turned out for the better, however, since in the meantime the important Ms. Schocken 37, which includes copies of numerous diwans by Andalusian poets (including Ibn Ezra), was discovered. Brody himself died while working on the second volume, and the work was completed by other scholars from the Schocken Institute (see below), including Zulay, Schirmann and Habermann. The Ginzburg manuscript from Moscow was discovered after Brody’s death, and the ‘new’ poems included in it were published in the third volume of the edition, which was completed by Dan Pagis in 1970 (around the same time he was working on his dissertation). It would not be far from the truth to contend that this outstanding critical edition, assembled by the great aforementioned scholars, also helped yield Pagis’s own masterful literary study on Moses Ibn Ezra (Pagis 1970, see below).
The emergence of a scholar of Brody’s stature, after a period of mediocrity and stagnation (1870-1890), greatly encouraged the study of medieval Hebrew poetry. More than any other scholar, Brody emblematized the giant leap in the evolution of the field between the end of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. Another revolutionary event—whose full significance and consequences regarding Jewish Studies in general, and the study of Hebrew poetry in particular, were difficult to envisage at the time—was the unearthing of the Cairo Geniza in 1896. Among the myriads of documents brought to Cambridge by Solomon Schechter (roughly 100,000 fragments according to his own estimate), pages of poetry were second only to biblical fragments. Other assortments of Geniza fragments were scattered earlier in various libraries around the world. Additional unopened boxes of documents brought by Schechter were discovered in various Cambridge storerooms at the end of the 1950’s; these included yet more poetic treasures, which were catalogued as the “new series” (T.S.–N.S.) and outnumbered the old one.
Davidson was the first scholar who, by publishing his Mahzor Yannai (1919), drew attention to the revolutionary potential of the Geniza. Nevertheless, the study of the liturgical poetry of the Geniza began in earnest only in 1930, with the establishment of the Research Institute for Hebrew Poetry in Berlin (founded by S. Z. Schocken). The Institute’s aim was to assemble all the important manuscripts (or photocopies thereof) scattered around the world, and by the 1940’s it managed to collect no less than 25,000 photocopied pages. In their joint activity, the scholars gathered in the Institute realized Bialik’s concept of kinnus or “ingathering” (see below). In retrospect, the two main foci of research in the twentieth-century history of the discipline—the study of secular Andalusian-Hebrew poetry on the one hand, and the study of the Geniza and the liturgical poetry on the other—were already becoming distinct through the Institute’s activity. The divergence—and to some extent even antagonism—that began developing between these two major trends, would only intensify toward the end of the twentieth century (see below). Heinrich Brody, who was the Institute’s first director, and the young Jefim Schirmann who worked with him, concentrated their efforts on the Spanish poetry. At the same time, other scholars—among them Menahem Zulay—began cataloguing the liturgical poetry of the Geniza and were laying the foundations for the systematical research of the piyyut by publishing single piyyutim, critical editions and studies. Important works on Spanish Hebrew poetry (Brody, Schirmann), on the liturgical poetry of the ancient East (Zulay), and on the liturgical poetry of Ashkenaz (Habermann) were published by the Institute’s publishing house and appeared in its periodical, Yedi’ot ha-machon le-heqer ha-shira ha-‘ivirt, seven volumes of which were issued in Berlin and Jerusalem between 1933 and 1958.
From the 1920’s, Jewish Studies became entangled with the ideological aims of the Zionist cultural revival. With the founding of the Institute for Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1925), the field’s center of gravity shifted from the Diaspora to mandatory Palestine, and the Wissenschaft des Judentums became “ Jewish Studies”. Also contributing to this development was the relocation of the Schocken Institute from Berlin to Jerusalem in 1934. In his essay surveying the state of the art between the two world wars, Schirmann (1942) explicitly connects the “impetus for the study of Spanish poetry […with] the Zionist idea as broadly construed and […with] its partial realization following the Balfour Declaration.” The most obvious representative of this trend—the engagement of academic research in the service of national ideology—was no other than national poet Ch. N. Bialik. In the introduction to his edition of Ibn Gabirol’s poems (1924), Bialik announced the centrality of Spanish Hebrew poetry to the modern enterprise of the Jewish revival. In insisting that only this chapter of Jewish creativity in the Diaspora can fill “the empty void between the poetry of the Bible and that of our own time,” Bialik in fact issued an astoundingly harsh verdict on almost two thousand years of Jewish literature. Demanding that the poetry of Spain be read as a living body of literature—and not as research material for scholars— Bialik condemned the Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars for their “Diasporic” and “Western” mentality, which in his view left them “without an audience, without a national language, without a central, overarching idea, entrenched in foreign tongues.” Their studies he called “a desolate valley strewn with dry bones […] and filled with ruins.” Bialik thus harnessed contemporary research to the urgent task of what he termed the kinnus—the ingathering, anthologizing and popularizing of treasures from the Jewish past. For this goal Bialik founded in Odessa the Dvir publishing house (which he later moved to Berlin and Tel Aviv), in which—together with Rawnitzki—he edited and published Sefer ha-Aggada (see below), and the poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol.
Despite Bialik’s subtle intuition in determining the version of the text and in the commentary, this edition does not meet the rigorous criteria of philological research (Schirmann, 1942). Bialik’s prestige contributed to the popularity of the Spanish poets and to the inclusion of Jewish poetry from Spain in high school curricula. (Schirmann himself contributed to this effort by publishing small booklets of poems by Ibn Gabirol and ha-Levi for high school students.)
The “obvious” manner in which the Hebrew poetry of the Spanish period was linked to the Zionist reconstruction of Jewish culture may be explained in various ways. Although the secular Hebrew poetry of Spain was not “secular” in the modern sense of the word—written as it were by religious authors, and functioning in the context of a religious culture—its most representative students and scholars tended to emphasize (perhaps overemphasize) its “secular” aspects and the “universal” values (beauty, humor, passion, hedonism—or alternatively, pessimism) which it shared with other literatures. The Spanish Jews, as apparently portrayed in these poems, were described as being ‘at home’ in gentile culture (while also retaining their ties with their ancient tradition), and as possessing a wider spectrum of human interests and dispositions than their “exilic” counterparts. In other words, they seemed more “normal,” more eligible to serve as role-models for the “new Jew.” The precedent of the revival of the Hebrew language in Spain contributed undoubtedly as well to the “Zionization” of the Spanish poetry. Biographical details concerning Spain’s Jewish poets were appropriated by the new national narrative. Judah ha-Levi, who in the nineteenth century was considered a romantic poet, was subjected (already in the early days of Zionism) to this ideological transformation, and was made to become the “first Zionist aliyya-maker” Similarly, Samuel ha-Nagid was later portrayed as a prototypical courageous Jewish warrior.
On Judah ha-Levi, see S. Werses, “Judah ha-Levi in the Mirror of the Nineteenth Century,” Trends and Forms in the Literature of Enlightenment [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1990, 50-90. Samuel ha-Nagid remained unknown to scholars until 1924, when D. S. Sassoon publicized the fact that a manuscript of the diwan had been in his possession. The diwan was published in 1934, and was followed two years later by Schirmann’s great essay on ha-Nagid’s war poems (1936, reprinted in Schirmann 1979). Samuel ha-Nagid, military leader of Granada, is the protagonist of a nationalistic children’s poem by Nathan Altermann (Sefer ha-tevah ha-mezameret, Tel Aviv 1963, 79-86).
Concurrently with (though certainly independently of) the Zionization of Spanish Hebrew poetry, there was voiced the call to study Arabic poetry as its comparative background. The first scholar who devoted himself to the systematic comparison of Arabic and Hebrew poetry was David Yellin, who was familiar with both poetries on a first-hand basis, and who in 1926 became the first lecturer of medieval literature in the Hebrew University. His 1941 book was the first detailed and systematic inquiry into stylistics, poetics and rhetoric of its type. Yellin drew upon Moses Ibn Ezra’s book on poetics—the only theoretical essay on poetry written (in Arabic) by a Jewish Andalusian poet
Translated to Hebrew twice: Halper 1924 and Halkin 1975.—and demonstrated how Ibn Ezra drew his ideas from Arabic books of rhetoric.
In his excellent edition of the Diwan Todros Abulafia (1932-1937), Yellin’s commentary pointed to Abulafia’s close affinity to Arabic poetics. Yellin’s survey of rhetorical devices is organized taxonomically, with each trope and figure explained separately and illustrated using analogous Hebrew and Arabic examples. Yellin, who was also the first to coin Hebrew terms for rhetorical concepts in Arabic, immersed himself in the medieval Arabic poetics, which he considered to be an indispensable key for understanding and enjoying the contemporary Hebrew poetry. In his introduction to Yellin’s book, Brody noted that familiarity with the Arabic poetics is essential to an understanding of the Hebrew poetry. Schirmann (1942), on the other hand, had reservations regarding the scholastic nature of the Arabic poetics, leading him to claim that it can in no way contribute to the enjoyment of the Western reader and should be subjected “to all due criticism.” An inconspicuous tension between scholars of European versus oriental origins comes here to the fore.
Yellin was born in Jerusalem to a mother of Iraqi origin. The first-hand, on-going familiarity of Eastern Jews with Spain’s secular Jewish poets (whose diwans they copied continuously), as well as with Arabic literature, yielded several scholars. Preceding Yellin was Saul Abdullah Yosef, a Baghdad-born merchant who lived in Hong Kong, where he closely followed the publications of nineteenth-century scholars and regularly sent corrections of his own to the journals in which they appeared. In reaction to Brody’s Diwan Judah ha-Levi, Yosef published his own interpretative work (Giv’at Shaul), in which he cited Arabic verses corresponding to the Hebrew ones. Because of his Arabic education, Yosef considered himself a more competent commentator than his Western counterparts. The Arabic context of Spain’s Hebrew literature had been noted earlier by Steinschneider, and even Luzzatto sensed intuitively that the Hebrew rhetoric has its origin in Arabic poetry. In the introduction to his book, Yosef Tobi (2000) surveys the history of the Hebrew/Arabic comparative scholarship. More on this topic below. (It is not accidental perhaps that Schirmann, who by that time had spent only a few years in Palestine, chose to interpret this aesthetic opposition as one between Western and Eastern tastes, rather than between medieval and modern ones.) Schirmann (1967) still regarded Yellin’s method as a hindrance to proper literary criticism: “an antiquated ‘Poetics’ held sway amongst us […] which has not as yet entirely disappeared from the work of our literary critics.” In his own writings, Schirmann seldom compared the Hebrew texts with their Arabic counterparts, referring only to an Arabic “influence” and “atmosphere” apparent in the Hebrew poems. One scholar who indeed subjected Yellin to “all due criticism” was Dan Pagis, who—in his introduction to the second edition of Yellin’s book (1970)—criticized Yellin for his treatment of isolated figures without emphasis on their contexts and relations to each other. Pagis did admit that acquaintance with the Arabic poetics was indispensable, but blamed Yellin for ignoring the poets’ broader poetic considerations, their views on the linguistic uniqueness of their own work, and the relation between rhetoric, subject matter and poetic genres—topics to which later works by Pagis (1970) and Levin (1980, 1995) would be devoted (see below).
Yellin’s successor at the Hebrew University was Brody’s greatest student, Jefim Schirmann—who, as the foremost scholar of medieval and Renaissance-era Hebrew poetry, determined to a great extent the shape and character of the field in the twentieth century. Schirmann consolidated the instruction of the subject at the Hebrew University, and from amongst his students emerged some of the discipline’s greatest scholars in the latter half of the century. The most widely influential of his numerous publications
Schirmann’s works span the entire range of Hebrew poetry from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance. In addition to the poetry of Spain and Provence, which occupied the center of his work, Schirmann devoted his scholarly attention to the Hebrew poetry and drama and the Jewish music of Italy. He also wrote on ancient liturgical poetry and authored a few essays on Ashkenaz and Yemen. In addition, he published poems from manuscripts in critical editions (Schirmann 1965; 1974), edited anthologies for schools, wrote monographic essays, and so forth. Also of note is his bibliographical project of annual indices of studies in medieval literature, published continuously in the periodical Kiryat Sefer from 1950 to 1978. For An Accumulated Index of his annual lists, see Schirmann 1989. For a list of Schirmann’s own studies (up to 1970), see Mirsky & Abramson 1970, pp. 413-427. was Hebrew Poetry in Spain and Provence (1st edition 1954, 2nd edition 1961). This four-volume anthology, compiled according to criteria of both historical representation and aesthetic merit, was acknowledged immediately upon its publication as the accepted canon of Hebrew masterpieces written in Spain over a period of five hundred and fifty years. Bialik’s call—expressed in his concept of the kinnus—for the propagation of academic knowledge throughout the wider circles of the learned public (without a dilution of academic standards) found its most perfect realization in this anthology, whose large circulation and accessible nature helped establish the study and instruction of Spain’s Hebrew poetry as the main axis and center of gravity of the medieval field. In addition to the major poets of Al-Andalus, the anthology provided the general public with a first glance into the works of countless “minor” poets. It also represented poets who wrote in Christian Spain before the Expulsion, and compiled important pieces of rhymed prose. In his separate introductions to the selected texts of each poet, Schirmann clarified historical and biographical matters, related the works and their authors to various literary traditions, and took first steps at setting principles of aesthetic judgment. These introductions served as embryonic seeds for Schirmann’s great historical opus, which was published posthumously.
Already in a 1965 lecture before the Israeli Academy of Sciences (Schirmann 1967)—or even earlier, in fact, in an essay from 1942—Schirmann lamented the lack of a broad, systematic monograph on the poetry of Spain: “The time has not yet come to describe the history of Hebrew literature from a new viewpoint. We are still far from completing the bibliographical and historical part of our work, which is the foundation on which we can build.” Schirmann himself did not get around to writing such a monograph until the final years of his life. Drafts found in his legacy and based on his lectures at the Hebrew University were the source for two large volumes published in recent years, The History of Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain (Schirmann-Fleischer 1996) and The History of Hebrew Poetry in Christian Spain and Southern France (Schirmann-Fleischer 1997). Both volumes were edited by Schirmann’s student Ezra Fleischer, at that time already one of the foremost scholars in the field, who completed some missing sections and added detailed bibliographical notes in order to bring the work up-to-date. Thanks to Fleischer’s generous supplements, this book will no doubt continue to serve as a comprehensive introduction and a useful and accessible textbook for many years to come. The volumes are organized according to the same biographical-historical method Schirmann employed in his aforementioned anthology. The major poets are discussed in extensive monographic chapters, which survey their historic and biographic backgrounds, topical subject matter and formal and thematic innovations (as well as their non-literary writings, if any. Smaller chapters on minor poets are woven into the chronological presentation. The second volume devotes additional chapters to the later poetry of Christian Spain and Provence, with a special emphasis on rhymed prose.
The dated literary approach of these volumes should not be ignored, however.
Scheindlin (1999) discusses this extensively in his review-essay on the book. Although they were published at the very end of the twentieth century—a quarter of a century after the groundbreaking work of Schirmann’s students (see below) and approximately fifteen years after the great scholar himself passed away (1981)—they represent a previous phase in the history of the discipline. In fact, they embody the philological bearings characteristic of orientalist studies in the German universities of the early twentieth century, as well as the biographical inclination prevailing then in literary research. . In the absence of solid biographical facts about the medieval poets—and based on the romantic assumption that “poetry is biography,” with no consideration of the fictional dimension—Schirmann drew biographical conclusions from the texts themselves. Furthermore, the eclectic internal structure of the chapters prevents any treatment of synchronic phenomena (e.g. generic typology or the use of figurative language) or description of the development of these literary phenomena in diachronic cross-sections (e.g. the evolution of each thematic type, the genealogy of forms, fluctuation of conventions and literary tastes, linguistic and formal developments, background for innovations, etc.). The first volume devotes separate sub-chapters to the secular and liturgical poems of each poet. This poses a twofold difficulty: on the one hand, the focus on individual poets prevents the author from delineating the discrete evolutionary paths of these two very distinct poetries; on the other hand, the individual chapters do not coalesce into integrative monographs. The bookshelves of Hebrew literature still await holistic monographs (of the type extant in other literatures) that would crosscut between interpretations of single texts, observations on literary style, biographical facts, individual psychology and general socio-cultural considerations. The mental phenomenon that produced bodies of work as diverse and imbued with contradictions as Ibn Gabirol’s or Judah ha-Levi’s still remains a challenge. Schirmann’s second volume also contains separate chapters on individual poets, and, with the exception of a few sporadic remarks, lacks a comprehensive discussion of socio-cultural contexts or of the significant literary changes that occurred in this school of poetry following its migration from Al-Andalus to Christian territories.
The significant academic revisions that changed the face of the discipline were made in particular by two of Schirmann’s disciples, Dan Pagis and Ezra Fleischer, who began their work at the end of the 1960’s. As much as Pagis and Fleischer were Schirmann’s successors, however, they also diverged from the path laid out by their revered teacher. Whereas Pagis devoted his efforts to the secular poetry, Fleischer dedicated himself to the liturgical corpus. This clear division of labor underscored the perceived separation between these two fields—which, owing perhaps to the prominence of Spain in Schirmann’s work, had not been so stark before. Pagis’s and Fleischer’s two respective seminal books on the liturgical (Fleischer 1975) and the secular poetry (Pagis 1976) open with similar statements that justify the demarcation of distinct histories and poetics for each field. Both scholars wished to provide a comprehensive portrayal of the different centers and schools, Spain being just one of them. Furthermore, both shared the fundamental assumption that the history of poetry is not one with “the lives of the poets.” Employing formalistic methods that had begun to take root in literary research in Israel at the end of the 1960’s, Pagis and Fleischer turned their attention from the authors to the texts, and from a general historiographic approach to the inner evolution and deep structures of the literary phenomena. Henceforth, our review of research trends in the last thirty years will be divided into separate discussions of secular and liturgical poetry.
In the study of secular poetry, the following directions and trends have emerged in recent decades: (1) historical-literary research: surveys of centers and schools; (2) comparative research (against the background of Arabic and Romance literatures); (3) studies with emphasis on aesthetics, poetics and rhetoric; and (4) application of contemporary theories (New Criticism, formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, cognitive theories, feminism). Needless to say, any clear-cut distinction between the aforementioned trends is artificial, since more than one direction of research can often be discerned in the work of a single scholar.
The crossroads in which the scholarship of medieval poetry found itself in the 1960’s was identified in a 1967 essay by Schirmann, in which he lamented not only the absence of a comprehensive history (see above), but also the lack of tools for “the analysis of a poem as a literary, artistic creation.” He also suggested the relative backwardness of the Hebraic field in this respect, in comparison with advancements in the scholarship of other medieval literatures: “For a number of years now, there has been an upheaval in literary research in Europe and successful attempts have been made to bridge the generations to apply new methods of examining the literary writings of old. Let us hope that we shall arrive at a similar change in the field of Hebrew literature.”
In this context, a short but seminal essay by Joseph Weiss (1952) should not go without mention. In his explication of the relation between “Courtly Culture and Courtly Poetry”, in which he demonstrated how poetry and language served not only to reflect courtly reality but to shape it as well, Weiss attempted, for the first time in the history of this field, to utilize methods from the “sociology of culture” and free the research from its fixation on the then-current philological-textological and biographical methods.
It was Dan Pagis who took on the challenge of applying newer theories to the field. In the introduction to his book on Moses Ibn Ezra Secular Poetry and Poetic Theory (1970)—which may be considered a post-Schirmannic manifesto—Pagis forged and legitimized the use of modern theoretical and methodical tools for the study of medieval Hebrew poetry. Like Schirmann before him, Pagis rejected Yellin’s relativist approach—according to which an ancient poetry may only be comprehended in relation to its own explicit poetics. In Pagis’s opinion, when a work of art is judged solely by the standards of its own era, it may force on the modern reader criteria that differ from his or her own insights and tastes. On the other hand, Pagis remained faithful to Schirmann’s caveat that the “transfer of foreign concepts” should “proceed carefully and with circumspection.” He rejected previous attempts by modern Hebrew literary critic Eddy Zemach (1962) to offer readers New Criticism-style close readings of secular (and liturgical) medieval poems. Whereas in the United States and Europe New Criticism was already superseded in literary research by formalism and structuralism, in the study of Hebrew literature Zemach’s interpretations were considered a bold innovation. For the first time, medieval Hebrew poems were presented as works of art bearing aesthetic values. Pagis, however, opposed Zemach’s a-historic attitude, which in his opinion ignored medieval poetics and mentalities.
See also Pagis 1979. Zemach’s interpretations nevertheless had a decisive influence on the teaching of this poetry in Israeli universities and high schools, as well as on its appeal for modern Israeli poets. In a way, one could say that the wide acceptance of this poetry among teachers and students fulfilled Bialik’s demand to “remove the poetry of Spain from […the realm of] scientific research and bring it to the public domain of current literature […in order to] let it imbue contemporary literature with its scent” (Bialik 1924). For additional interpretations of single poems see Rosen-Moked - Zemach (1983) and Scheindlin (1986). Tzur (1987) uses his interpretations of medieval poems for illustrating cognitive theories of reading. Although he calls his approach “perspectivist”, it is entirely a-historic.
In Pagis’s view, modern readers could be brought closer to the ancient texts through what he called a “perspectivist” approach, combining an acquaintance with medieval poetics and other classical poetics with modern theories of poetry. Only such a combination would enable the modern critic to elucidate the relation between conventions and single poems, and between form, content and style. Pagis’s book is the finest demonstration of this method, confronting the explicit poetic views articulated in Ibn Ezra’s theoretical essay on poetics with the poetic assumptions and aesthetic criteria implicit in Ibn Ezra’s own poetic praxis, and using modern tools to examine both. Pagis also distinguished between descriptive poetics and aesthetic judgment. Rather than attempting to bring the medieval poetry closer to contemporary modern tastes, he tried to enhance our understanding of its otherness and exoticness.
In this book—which in the years following its publication had a profound influence on the approach of other scholars of medieval poetry—Pagis concentrated on the poetry of Moses Ibn Ezra, whom he considered to be the most characteristic representative of classic Andalusian poetry. In describing the morphology of the different genres and their rhetorical and figurative forms, Pagis applied structuralist methods and created a critical foundation that enabled him (as well as other scholars) to portray and evaluate the poetry of the entire school.
Rosen (1985) utilized similar structuralist tools in her analysis of the Hebrew muwashshah genre.
Pagis’s second book, Change and Tradition (1976) represents yet another phase in the study of genres and their consideration from a historic perspective. It was the first attempt since the general introductions of the Wissenschaft des Judentums to portray the history of this poetry in broad strokes. (Schirmann’s two great historical volumes, it should be remembered, were published roughly twenty years after Pagis’s book.) In contrast with Schirmann’s chronological-monographic approach, Pagis’s book is a historical investigation into poetics. He describes not only the evolution of the literary genres, their prosody, morphology, thematic, rhetoric, etc. but also the evolution of the literary phenomena themselves. Thus Pagis follows modes of representation, poetry’s perception of itself, fluctuations in literary tastes, social changes that affected the authors and their audiences, the developmental dynamics of the Hebrew language vis-à-vis the poetry, contacts with other literatures and cultures, and so forth. These are shown to be a dynamic chain of traditions and innovations, continuities and ruptures, reactions and interactions. Here, as in his book published in English (1991) and in the collected essays (1993) published after his premature death, Pagis offers an expansive thesis that argues for a dynamic historical continuity through transformations and modifications, extending from mid-tenth century Spain to the origins of the Haskalah poetry. In addition to his exposition of the various types of poetry in Spain and Italy, Pagis made an important contribution to the study of the rhymed prose genres that evolved in Christian Spain (and crossed to Italy as well), and discussed their literary pluralism and social functions.
Mati Huss, Pagis’s student, has devoted his research to rhymed prose, examining its immanent poetics as well as its relation to contemporary narratology. See Huss 1994, 2000). Raymond Scheindlin and Judith Dishon have also published studies in this field. Tova Rosen (Rosen 2000a; 2000b) discussed works written in rhymed prose from a feminist perspective. Pagis’s refusal to consider the maqama a “pure” genre whose “rules” should dictate the evaluation of other, more hybrid forms of prose, captures his literary approach in a nutshell. Pagis similarly rejected normative rhetoric as a sole aesthetic standard. He opposed the employment of the Andalusian tradition as a set of criteria for the evaluation of other schools, and in the focus on generic “conventions” he saw a restrictive method. His repeated plea to consider literary reality in all its plurality, hybridity and dynamism is part of his important legacy. (Also see Pagis 1979.)
The chapters in Change and Tradition that discuss the two Latin-Romance centers of Hebrew poetry—Christian Spain and Italy—were the first general expositions of these two schools. For the first time, the Hebrew literature of Christian Spain was presented as an independent school bearing its own characteristics. (Schirmann [1997], who, as already mentioned, devoted an entire volume to the poetry of Christian Spain, did not include in it a general introduction or summary.) Unlike previous scholars, Pagis did not portray this school as an inferior, epigonic sequel to the poetry of Muslim Spain, but as a departure to a new poetics. Schirmann’s and Pagis’s works on Christian Spain still require completion, elaboration and summation. The conjecture (expressed repeatedly by both scholars, and by others as well) that starting from the thirteenth century Hebrew poetry and rhymed prose interacted with Romance literatures (Provençal, Catalonian and Castillian) has been heretofore explored in a few isolated studies, with merely tentative conclusions.
Doron 1989; Scheindlin 1994; Sáenz-Badillos 1996. A more precise and general picture is yet to be drawn, and the field awaits comparative studies by scholars well versed in Hebrew and Romance languages. We can only assume that such a contribution would come from contemporary Spain, which hosts an active center of research in the field of medieval Hebrew poetry. Unlike its Israeli and American counterparts, the Spanish research community includes many non-Jewish scholars, who view medieval Hebrew culture as an integral layer in Spain’s multi-lingual and multi-cultural history.
Several journals (Al-Andalus, Sefarad and others) devoted to the history and culture of Jews and Arabs in Spain have been active in Spain for decades. Conferences on Spain’s three cultures have been held regularly in recent years. Poesía Estrófica is the result of a conference devoted to strophic poetry in the three cultures. The view that Hebrew poetry is one component of Spain’s multicultural mélange received its first explicit articulation in S.M. Stern’s studies on the muwashshah (Stern 1974). Spain’s most active and prolific scholar of Hebrew poetry at present is Angel Sáenz Badillos. Among his many publications we shall mention here only his critical editions of the grammatical essays of Dunash, Menahem and the disciples of Menahem, and his bilingual (Hebrew-Spanish) editions of poems by ha-Nagid and ha-Levi.
Pagis’s book also includes the first—and so far the only—general exposition of the secular Italian poetry, whose origins can be traced to the early Spanish influence of the thirteenth century, and whose branches extend to the nineteenth century.
Also see Pagis’s writings on Italy in his books from 1991 and 1993. Schirmann, who did not include the poetry of Italy in his historical volumes, did devote many studies to it (see Schirmann 1979, as well as his bibliography in Abramson and Mirsky). Already in 1934, Schirmann published an anthology of Italian poetry as well as the first Hebrew play written in Italy. Pagis laid emphasis on the new metric, formal and thematic syntheses between Jewish-Arab elements and the dominant Italian influence, and demonstrated how Italy’s Hebrew writers subsequently developed independent styles removed from the Spanish models. Pagis’s work on Italy continued in his 1986 book on a unique genre of complex poetic and graphic riddles, common among Jewish Italian authors until the nineteenth century Italy. Another contribution to the study of Italy was made by Pagis’s student, Dvora Beregman, especially in her studies on the Hebrew sonnet in Italy (Bregman 1985; 1986). The Italian center (whose origins as a center of piyyut date back to the ninth century
See also the chapter on Italian piyyut in Fleischer 1975.) lasted roughly a millennium, during which it underwent numerous changes and transformations that are yet to be comprehensively examined.
While Schirmann and Pagis viewed Hebrew poetry in a European context, other scholars continued in Yellin’s footsteps in examining the Hebrew poetry vis-à-vis its Arabic counterpart. This trend has grown and evolved in recent decades—perhaps also due to the realization that the Hebrew-Arabic literary synthesis created in Al-Andalus was part of an entire Jewish-Arab cultural space that existed in the East (and which also included writing in Judaeo-Arabic).
The most comprehensive work of comparative criticism after Yellin was done by Israel Levin, who focused exclusively on the poetry of Spain. In his essays, which he began publishing in the 1960’s, and in the three volumes of his The Embroidered Coat (1980; 1995), Levin devised a consistent method for examining the relation between the Hebrew genres of Andalusian secular poetry and their Arabic models. Unlike Yellin and Ratzaby, Levin did not make atomistic comparisons, but rather generated a systematic thematic typology of entire genres (praise, bravado, love, wine, meditative and moralistic poetry, etc.),
A similar path was taken by Arie Schippers (1994). Yellin’s disciple, Nehemia Allony, continued his mentor’s comparative method, but in several of his essays discussed also the more fundamental question of how the Hebrew poets confronted the Arabic poetry, drew upon it and competed against it (Allony 1991). Dozens of essays by Yehuda Ratzaby, a Yemen-born scholar versed in Arabic poetry, are comparative lists of Hebrew and Arabic motifs. For a bibliography of Ratzaby’s essays, see Hazan and Dishon 1991. in which the Hebrew types are examined for their proximity to (and sometimes divergence from) their Arabic models. Although Levin aimed for a synchronic-normative exposition of the genres, his method allowed him to sometimes underscore the different personal styles of individual poets within the typological conventions.
Levin’s other works include monographs on Samuel ha-Nagid (1967) and Abraham Ibn Ezra (1970) and a book on the Mysticism of Ibn Gabirol (1986). He also edited a critical edition of Abraham Ibn Ezra’s liturgical poems (1976-1980). In several essays he noted echoes of medieval poetry in the work of modern poets. For a bibliography of his writings, see Rosen and Tzur. Several chapters also include mini-anthologies of Arabic (particularly Jahilic and Abassid) poetry translated into Hebrew. On many occasions, Levin stresses the process of “Hebraization” and “Judaization” of these poems. When describing the thematic genres, Levin also discusses the cultural mentality they convey (courtly hedonism in the wine poetry; Sufi, ascetic and adab views in the moralistic poetry, and so on). Also stressed in Levin’s work are the relations between liturgical and secular poetry (e.g., Levin 1971).
Another scholar bringing his Arabic scholarship to the study of Hebrew literature is Raymond Scheindlin, whose first work (1974) had an Arab-Andalusian poet (Al-Mu’tamid) for its subject In his books on the secular Hebrew poetry (Wine, Women and Death, 1986) and the liturgical Hebrew poetry of Al-Andalus (The Gazelle, 1991), Scheindlin combined his profound knowledge of both literatures with refined literary taste and keen interpretative skills. His excellent English translations of selected poems in these two volumes,
Also noteworthy is the rather extensive selection of medieval Hebrew poetry that appeared in the bi-lingual anthology Hebrew Verse, translated by T. Carmi, Penguin, 1981. and his interpretations, which combine close readings with a familiarity with the poets’ mental and cultural worlds, have contributed greatly to the proliferation of medieval poetry in Western universities.
The United States has been a prominent center for the study of Hebrew poetry throughout the twentieth century. The first medievalist stronghold in the United States was founded by Solomon Schechter, discoverer of the Geniza, who in 1902 was appointed Provost of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Schechter moved parts of the Geniza collection from Cambridge to the JTS and published selections from it. Also active in New York in the beginning of the twentieth century was Israel Davidson. Shalom Spiegel arrived at the Seminary in 1929. His studies on the liturgical poems of ha-Qallir were not published, but he became known for his outstanding study on the Ashkenazi liturgical poetry, The Last Trial (Philadelphia 1967). The Institute for Medieval Hebrew Literature in the JTS in New York is named after him and is currently headed by his disciple, R. Scheindlin. Another scholar active in the United States today is Ross Brann (below). Characteristic of Scheindlin (as well as of Levin) is the holistic literary approach to liturgical and secular poetry (in this respect, see his monograph on Moses Ibn Ezra, Scheindlin 2000).
Another scholar who stresses the indispensability of intimate acquaintance of the modern critic with medieval Arabic poetry and thought is Yosef Tobi. In his book Proximity and Distance (2000), he insists that the Hebrew poetry must be compared not just generally to Arabic poetry but specifically to its temporally and geographically close Andalusian counterpart (a demand that he himself was only partially able to fulfill). Like Levin, he emphasizes the “influence” of Arabic literature on Hebrew poetry and the “assimilation” and “imitation” of Arabic forms and conventions by Hebrew poets; unlike his predecessor, though, he is more drastic in stressing the Jewish character of that poetry. He draws attention to literary motifs and conceptual elements from Arabic culture that were rejected by the Jews, yet gives this rejection a rather simplistic religious explanation; in his view, the Hebrew poets embraced “foreign” themes only when these did not conflict with their own Jewish worldview. Studies by Brann and Drory, which offer more intricate theoretical explanations for such rejection mechanisms, are not taken into consideration in Toby’s discussion of the problem.
Another Hebraist-Arabist, Ross Brann, uses deconstructive methods to examine the Hebrew poets’ own perceptions of their poetry. In his 1991 book, Brann shows how these poets adopted the negative (“poetry is untruth”) or ambivalent (“poetry is beautiful in spite of its untruth”) attitudes toward poetry prevalent in the Arabic poetics and poetry. He examines how they appropriated the topos of The Compunctious Poet (as is the title of his book), looks for the specificity of that topos in its Hebrew renditions, and discusses its different uses by different Hebrew poets. He also points to the poets’ own ambivalence regarding the Arabic element in their poetry. In exposing the intricate and organic manner in which a minority culture becomes enchanted with the dominant culture and appropriates its values—while at the same time continuing to fence off against it and struggle for its uniqueness, using methods borrowed from the dominant culture itself—Brann presents here an elaborate alternative to mechanistic (or impressionistic) theories of “influence.” Owen and Brann’s 1997 study is another elaboration on questions of cultural interaction, contact and conflict—this time involving the three cultures of Muslim Spain. The volume Al-Andalus (Menocal et al. 2000), from the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature series, includes chapters on Hebrew literature (by Brann, Scheindlin, Drory and Rosen), as an integral part of the cultural history of Muslim Spain.
Taking a similar approach are Rina Drory’s studies on intercultural contacts (1988; 2000). Adopting formalist-functionalist theories, Drory substitutes the obsolete notion of “influence” with the more useful term “interference,” and with the view of literature as a function of socio-cultural relations. Unlike others who strive to prove the “Judaization” of Arabic culture, Drory’s chapters on Saadia, Dunash, Moses Ibn Ezra and Alharizi investigate the Arabicization of Jewish culture and the role of the dominant Arabic literature in the reconstitution of Jewish literature between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries. Drory is not interested in the migration of themes or ideas from one literature to another, nor is she busy source-hunting. She rather asks: under what cultural conditions does a group (in this case a minority group) borrow literary models, linguistic practices and textual functions from another (majority) group? And how do the adopted elements then function in their new social or literary environment? What are the mechanisms of selection or rejection?
In recent years—after such literary aspects finally received due attention—historiographic questions seem to have returned to the forefront of the research agenda, albeit in a more complex and intricate manner. These questions involve the history and development of the different literary centers, the contacts between them and their divergence from one another, as well as an evaluation of their contribution. Also involved are various scholarly interests, which verge on present day controversial issues as the Arab/Jewish “symbiosis” or the secular/religious synthesis. New studies—in particular the considerable progress in the study of the Geniza and the piyyut in the last three decades—have shed new light on these questions. Is the scholarship of Spain indeed, as Schirmann claimed, “a field in its own right,” and is it still justified to consider Spain the focal point of the discipline? Did the secular poetry of Al-Andalus emerge ex nihilo, as various scholars previously claimed? Can the literary centers that developed in Christian Spain, Provence, Italy and the Muslim East starting from the thirteenth century be construed as branches of an original Spanish center, or did they function as independent centers with their own distinct histories (which also happened to include contacts with Muslim Spain)? Should the poetry of Spain be discussed in the context of European centers of Hebrew poetry, or in the context of Hebrew poetry written in the Muslim world? And, finally, how do new findings in the liturgical field help shed light on the secular poetry?
Reevaluations concerning the place of Spain have emerged from several directions. Scheindlin (1999) asserts that Schirmann—in his anthology and later in the two History volumes—founded a historiographic tradition which placed the poetry of Al-Andalus in a Western European context. (Pagis, who followed in Schirmann’s footsteps, stretched the geographic canvas to include Italy, and the historic one to include the beginnings of the Haskalah poetry in the early eighteenth century). In Scheindlin’s view, however, the use of the modern term “Spain” to designate a single geographic-cultural unit ignores the Eastern context in which the poetry of Al-Andalus should be considered. The Jewish poets of Al-Andalus did not perceive themselves as the progenitors of “Spanish poetry,” but as the culmination of a literary development that began in the East. The innovations of the Andalusian Golden Age were facilitated by the much earlier Arabicization of Jewish culture in Iraq at the end of the Gaonic period (Drory); the Andalusian style began spreading to the Maghreb, Egypt, Iraq and other locales well before the expulsion of the Jews from Spain; many works by poets from Spain were discovered in the Geniza, and entire Andalusian-style diwans were written in the East. All the above—in addition to the persistence of the Andalusian style (albeit in modified forms) in all Mediterranean countries (and even in Yemen) long after the Expulsion and until the twentieth century—support, according to Scheindlin, the construal of the Andalusian center as a Western branch of an Eastern Jewish world, and of the Eastern centers of poetry that followed it as its legitimate successors, no less (and perhaps more) than their European counterparts.
The eastern poetry, both before and after the Golden Age, has not been sufficiently studied. Yahalom and Be’eri have published works on Hebrew poetry in the Ottoman Empire after the expulsion from Spain. Ratzabi and Tobi have studied and published selections from the poetry of Yemen, Ephraim Hazan from the poetry of North African Jews.
The greatest twentieth-century scholar of Hebrew liturgical poetry, Ezra Fleischer, has also focused primarily on the East. Adding the religious/secular opposition to the Eastern/Western one, Fleischer suggests seeing Spain as an anomalous “secular” branch of a religious Jewish world. In his view, the Spanish poetry is a unique chapter in the history of this world, the product of a “non-traditional Jewish society” with a “‘secular’ worldview.” Yet, from the panoramic perspective of the history of Jewish creativity, Spain is merely “a chapter, not a new beginning” (Fleischer 1998). Spain’s diminished importance in Fleischer’s eyes corresponds with the smaller role he ascribes to the Arabic element in its poetry. In his opinion, the “mental turn” that occurred in Spain (and was reflected in its poetry) “did not stem from the contact with the Arabic poetry” of Al-Andalus, but originated ever earlier in the East (ibid). By calling this culture “‘secular’” (the inverted commas are Fleischer’s), he certainly does not intend to claim it was anti-religious; what he presumably means is that the Jewish-Arab symbiosis affected not only aspects of everyday life, and not only the non-liturgical poetry, but also religious thought and culture. This symbiosis was in Fleischer’s view “alien” to traditional Judaism and therefore “unauthentic” (an expression he uses frequently). “The Arab-Jewish symbiosis was an utter mirage” (Schirmann-Fleischer 1997, 92)—and the evidence, according to Fleischer, is its collapse at the end of the Golden Age. Fleischer bases this dialectical interpretation of the Spanish poetry—as both a continuation and a revolution—on the findings of the Geniza, which reveal the sheer wealth of the liturgical poetry, as well as its longevity and the extent of its expansion, and thus, in Fleischer’s view, counterbalance the distorted enchantment of many a modern scholar with the aestheticism and secularity of the Spanish poetry. Thanks to the Geniza, writes Fleischer, “the secular Hebrew poetry of Spain has been assimilated in the grand expanse of our ancient poetry and has become an authentic part of it” (Fleischer 1998). Fleischer’s conclusions thus seem to indicate another swing of the pendulum. Whereas early scholars (Zunz, Luzzatto and others) sought to establish the piyyut as the focus of research—only to have Bialik and Schirmann stress the centrality of Spain—Fleischer has now restored emphasis on the liturgical poetry.
The diminution of Spain’s dominance is demonstrated in the relatively short chapter on liturgical Spanish poetry in Fleischer’s seminal Hebrew Liturgical Poetry in the Middle Ages (1975), which offers the first systematic exposition of liturgical poetry since the great studies of the mid-nineteenth century. Introducing a new historical account of over a thousand years of Hebrew liturgical poetry, the book describes the different eras and centers in the development of this poetry, from its fifth-century origins in Palestine, through its extensions in Iraq, to its various European branches in Spain, Italy and Germany. However, unlike the great works of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, Fleischer’s book is not a chronological listing of poems and poets, but a historical poetics that attempts to examine the liturgical genres, their genesis and ritual functions, their typical structures, prosodies, rhetoric and dynamic transformations they underwent in different generations and schools. The gist of Fleischer’s innovative thesis on the genesis of this poetry is as following: (1) the monumental compositional structures of the ancient liturgical genres correspond to the sequence of the different sections in the prayer cycle;
For instance, the Qerova, Qedushta and Shiv’ata genres correspond to the ‘Amida prayer, whereas the composition of the Yotzer genre correspond to the blessings of the Shema’. (2) starting from the fourth century, these genres developed from the praxis of prayer in Palestinian synagogues; (3) the first liturgical poets or paytanim were cantors who performed their liturgical pieces as alternatives to their own (but not to the audience’s) established prayer. Fleischer’s structural-genealogical approach and his attention to poetic elements (rhyme, strophic patterns, ornamentation, etc.) allow him to periodize the formal development of the genres, based on which he provides his chronology of ancient liturgical poetry in Palestine and in the Eastern and European schools that followed. In his second book (1984), Fleischer focuses on the characteristics of Yotzer-type compositions through different eras.
All this would not have been possible if not for the Geniza. “The Geniza was a constitutive element of primal importance in the study of this poetry; not only did it complement what had already been known, it also provided the foundations for the field” (Fleischer, 1989). The scarce material available to nineteenth-century scholars consisted of texts from (mostly European) prayer books, which had been abridged and muddled by later copyists. The vast (and more authentic) material of the Geniza had already been subjected to the scrutiny of earlier scholars (the most important of whom was Menahem Zulay) during the first seventy-five years of the twentieth century.
Schechter (on his publications from the piyyutim of the Geniza, see Fleischer 1998, note 7); Davidson (ibid, note 8, and also Davidson 1919); Shalom Spiegel, Yedi’ot 5 (1939) pp. 269-291; Zulay (Fleischer 1998, notes 10, 11, 12, 20; also Zulay 1964, Zulay 1995). Also noteworthy are Geniza scholars Alexander Scheiber from Budapest and Arie (Lev) Wilsker from Leningrad. However, the scholarly edifice erected by Fleischer was entirely new. In his books and numerous articles
For a list of Fleischer’s books and nearly two hundred articles, see Elitzur-Be’eri, 1994. Fleischer has not only contributed myriads of new syntheses and conclusions, but also introduced revolutionary changes to the approaches and perceptions prevalent in the field.
The work of modern scholars investigating the liturgical poetry of the Geniza may be likened to that of an archeologist, who unearths concealed items in order to reconstruct an entire lost culture on their basis. The sorting, listing,
So far, the Piyyut Project has recorded close to 60,000 whole poems and fragments (thus doubling the amount of material that had been included in Davidson’s Thesaurus). Additional materials from the Geniza that had not been available to Western scholars have been recently discovered in the St. Petersburg Library (Leningrad). paleographic deciphering and attempted dating of manuscripts and poems, their description based on formal criteria, the combination of fragments to form complete works, the preparation of critical editions, etc.—all these are still a work in progress. Teams of tireless scholars have been laboring on this colossal task for years, first in the Schocken Institute, then as part of the Project for the Research of Poetry and Piyyut, founded in 1967 by the Israeli Academy for Arts and Sciences and headed since its inception by Ezra Fleischer.
This institute emerged in 1950 from The Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts in Jerusalem, whose activity was supported by David Ben-Gurion, and which so far has microfilmed 90% of all known Hebrew manuscripts from collections around the world. This foundational work helped complete and correct jumbled texts, provide additional information on known poets, unearth countless works by newly discovered ones, and generate monumental, surprisingly complex compositions—based on which scholars have been able to pinpoint styles, reconstruct schools and eras, and shed new light on the entire history of the piyyut. Pioneering contributions to the stylistically-based periodization of different eras in the history of liturgical poetry were made by Zulay (see Zulay 1964),
For a philological study on the language of the ancient Piyyut, see Yahalom 1985. On the relation between the payetaic rhetoric and the language of the Midrash, see Mirsky 1969. whose conclusions were later elaborated and perfected by Fleischer’s structurally-based periodization.
Space does not allow a complete exposition of the entire inventory of places, eras and individuals illuminated by the Geniza. Hence, we shall only mention a few of the Geniza’s general and specific contributions to the study of medieval poetry and piyyut. First of all, the Geniza unearthed 600 years’ worth of pre-Andalusian liturgical poetry. The first edition of Yannai’s piyyutim (Davidson 1919) not only brought to light a great poet, but also drew scholarly attention to the vast potential of the Geniza. Gradually, more ancient paytanim were discovered—some previously unknown, some the true value of whose work was revealed for the first time.
A partial edition of Yannai’s work was edited by Zulay (1938). A critical edition was published by Z.M. Rabinovitz (1985-87). Other poets whose work was salvaged from the Geniza include Josef Ibn Avitur (an unpublished dissertation by Fleischer), The Anonymous (Fleischer 1974), Rav Saadia Gaon (Zulay 1964 and Y. Tobi, an unpublished dissertation), Shim’on bar Megas (Yahalom 1984), and a series of paytanim edited by S. Elizur: El’azar birrabi Qillar (1988), Yehuda birabbi Binyamin (1988), Yehoshua bar Khalafa (1994), and Yosef ha-Levi ben Khalfon (1994). Elizur has also contributed to the scholarship on one of the greatest paytanim, El’azar birrabi Qillir, whose full work remains unpublished. Additional editions of other paytanim still await publication. The Geniza refuted the earlier assumption that Babylonian Jews did not write piyyutim. This theory was based on the explicit rejection of the Palestinian piyyut by Babylonian rabbinical authorities. The Geniza, however, provided scholars with liturgical works composed in Iraq during the Gaonic period.
Tova Be’eri is about to publish a new edition of piyyutim by Baghdadi poet Yosef Albaradani (also see Be’eri 1999). According to Fleischer, the meteoric rise of Spain could not have been fully comprehended, had the Geniza not revealed the full extent of the stagnation of the late Eastern piyyut (ninth to eleventh centuries) and the innovations of Sa’adia Gaon, which led to those of the Andalusian poets. The Geniza also included surprising material on pre-Andalusian secular poetry, refuting the view that the secular Andalusian school emerged ex nihilo (Fleischer 1998, p. 264). New material was also discovered about the first Andalusian poets of the tenth century
Fleischer’s articles on this topic are listed in Fleischer 1998 note 30. and the first Italian paytanim of the ninth century (ibid, p. 263). No current edition of Andalusian diwans can be imagined without using the remains of such diwans as the ones found in the Geniza (Yahalom 1999). Andalusian poems from the Geniza were published by Schirmann (1965). Also unearthed in the Geniza were documents (some autographic) concerning the life of Judah ha-Levi, making him the most extensively biographically-documented poet (also see Fleischer in Rosen & Tzur). New poems by ha-Levi were discovered as well. The Geniza also included many works by Eastern poets and paytanim, contemporaries of the Geniza itself. Yosef Yahalom has written about the role of this poetry in Eastern society starting from the twelfth century, as it is reflected in the poems themselves.
In addition to the abundant poetic material provided by the Geniza or to any literary and historical conclusions drawn from it, the Geniza provides insight into the social world and mentalité of the poets and their audiences in Palestine between the fourth and eighth centuries (Fleischer 1999). The sheer quantity of the piyyutim implies their widespread dissemination, which probably reached the common population as well. The complex poetic practices implicit in the piyyutim (structure, prosody, rhetoric, ornamentation) indicate the high aesthetic demands of their audiences—suggesting that despite the absence of a formal poetics, the piyyut was not just a devotional form, but an art form as well. The neologistic language and the learned references to Midrashim indicate a high level of literacy. Fleischer also maintains that the poems’ strophic structures and use of refrains are suggestive of the choral music of the ancient synagogues.
A different approach is prevalent in Yosef Yahalom’s discussion of the relation between Poetry and Society (as is the title of his 1999 book). Unlike Fleischer, who bases his examination of poetry’s place in society and the nature of its audience on the poetic qualities of the works, Yahalom chooses to interpret the ancient piyyutim as historical documents reflecting the real world (customs, beliefs, language, material culture, etc.) in which the poets and their audiences lived.
In conclusion, much progress seems to have been made in the last few decades, especially in the field of liturgical poetry, where new editions have been published and new syntheses have been introduced based on the study of Geniza. The scholars of the piyyut are no longer satisfied with philological and historical research, but also explore historical poetics and discuss the piyyutim as literary works. In the study of secular poetry, on the other hand, relatively little progress has been made since Pagis’s breakthrough in the 1970’s. In contrast with much of the contemporary research on other medieval European literatures, where the newest modern and postmodern critical approaches are applied, most scholars of medieval Hebrew literature remain faithful to approaches that were new three decades ago. True, the material problems that encumbered the field from its inception still exist. Important critical editions are yet to be published. Some literary centers, schools, genres and intercultural interactions (which have been mentioned throughout this article) have not been sufficiently studied. Also from a technological and bibliographical perspective, the study of Hebrew literature lags behind that of other medieval literatures, where all the literary material is available on CD-Rom and research-facilitating concordances have been published. But even beyond such material difficulties, the theoretical questions which preoccupy current literary criticism—discourse and reality, fictionality, theories of reading, ethnicity, power structures, gender relations, sexuality and others—have hardly been explored in our field.
With the exception of the aforementioned studies by Brann and Drory. Tova Rosen’s book on genre and gender in medieval Hebrew literature will be published shortly. It seems to be time for a new breakthrough of the type made by Pagis—one that would bridge the thirty-forty year gap that persists between the study of medieval Hebrew poetry and the current approaches prevalent in the general field of literary research and criticism.
Medieval Hebrew Narrative
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The term “medieval Hebrew prose” is a relatively new one. Whereas medieval Hebrew poetry was acknowledged even by early scholars as a unique and distinct cultural field, one of great importance to the world of Jewish letters, no such recognition was awarded to its prosaic counterpart. While some scholars regarded medieval Hebrew prose as a direct, uninterrupted continuation of the prose literature of the preceding era—the midrashim—others defined it as “late Midrash,” with unique characteristics distinguishing it from the “classic” midrashim. Both approaches, however, regarded the narrative prose literature of the Middle Ages as belonging to a body of “midrashic” texts typified by certain historiographic, exegetic, moral and mystical characteristics, and did not consider it an autonomous body of work, as they did the contemporaneous Hebrew poetry.
The work of the two major scholars of ancient Hebrew literature in the first half of the nineteenth century was emblematic of this attitude, and constituted one of the reasons for its emergence. Leopold Zunz’s masterly book on the subject, published in Berlin in 1832,
On the historical and biographical background of this book and the evolution of the second edition, on which Chanoch Albeck’s Hebrew translation (Jerusalem 1946) was based, see: N. N. Glatzer, Leopold Zunz: The Man, His Life and Creation, Jerusalem 1988, pp. 29-38. was written on two different levels and with two different aims in mind: one scholarly, delineating the historical-philological foundations for the study of the midrashim, the other polemic and apologetic, seeking to establish the rituals prevalent in the Central European synagogues of his time as a continuation of the Jewish liturgy of the Talmud and Midrash period. For both of these reasons, Zunz considered it a task of utmost importance to establish the historical continuity of the different midrashic works. Indeed, the entire history of the Midrash—from such ancient Midrashim as The Fathers According to Rabi Nathan and Midrash Genesis Raba, to later medieval compositions such as Midrash Vayisa’u and The Chronicles of Moses—was presented in his book as one continuous sequence. Although Zunz was well aware of the temporal gap between the different midrashic works—in fact, he was the first to point out these gaps, and insisted on their consideration when discussing the midrashim—he did not consider it important to date the different compositions or to periodize different genres as belonging to distinct eras.
For a summary of this topic, see M. R. Niehoff, “Zunz’s Treatment of the Aggadah as an Expression of Jewish Spirituality,” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 64 (1995), pp. 423-460. Zunz did mention differences between “ancient Midrash” and “later developments in the Aggadah,” or between “the first and the second rabbinical periods;” these, however, were merely general distinctions, used by Zunz in order to differentiate earlier works from later ones, and especially in order to demonstrate that the Midrash—as both a textual tradition and a social practice—enjoyed a never-disrupted historic continuity. The inclusion in one chapter of Midrash Temurah, dating from the thirteenth century, alongside such ancient midrashim as The Fathers According to Rabi Nathan and Tana debei Eliyahu; or of The Scroll of Fasting (Megillat Ta'anit)—one of the earliest texts of Rabbinic literature—alongside such typical medieval narrative texts as The Itinerary of Eldad the Danite, Midrash of the Ten Commandments, Midrash Vayisa’u, The Chronicles of Moses and the Book of Jossipon,
Pp. 51-67: all references to the Hebrew edition (see note 33 above). is indicative of Zunz’s perception of continuity, which despite its failure to discern the distinct and unique character of the medieval Hebrew prose continued to have a profound influence on the study of Hebrew literature in the following generations.
When the Hebrew translation of Zunz’s book was published in 1946 (and later in additional editions), the elaborate task of updating his findings and conclusions was undertaken by the most prominent scholar of ancient Hebrew literature at that time, Chanoch Albeck. Albeck’s updated version of Zunz’s book is still considered to be the most authoritative work on the times, character and evolution of the midrashic literature, and for many years served as the basic textbook for generations of students and scholars of the Aggadic literature. Albeck’s additions, which constitute an important scholarly apparatus in their own right, survey the literature written on the topic until the 1950’s and delineate the main parameters for future research on the Aggadic literature. But rather than criticizing or qualifying Zunz’s conclusions regarding the continuity between the medieval compositions and the Aggadic literature of the Rabbinic period, Albeck reinforces them by adding medieval works unknown to Zunz, providing numerous references to manuscripts and first editions, and offering additional comments that present the Aggadic literature as a cohesive body of work, with no distinction from later medieval works. Needless to say, this agreement between two such authoritative figures as Zunz and Albeck—who represent two different eras in the history of the discipline and mark its transition from Europe to Israel—has had a decisive effect on the almost total overlooking of medieval Hebrew prose in the study of Hebrew literature.
The second major scholar who contributed considerably to the acceptance of this misconception of the medieval Hebrew prose was Moritz Steinschneider, whose monumental work Jewish Literature—originally written as an encyclopedic entry—was published in book-form in 1850 (and translated to English in 1857).
On the book and its background, see A. Marx, Essays in Jewish Biography, Philadelphia 1947, pp. 147-149. The book was deeply influenced by Zunz’s opus, and although its emphases were different—for instance, in examining Jewish literature in other languages and discussing the influence of foreign cultures, especially the Arabic, on Jewish authors—Steinschneider made no new distinctions regarding the medieval Jewish prose. He, too, considered the medieval Aggadic literature to be a natural continuation of Rabbinic literature, and in the medieval midrashim he saw no formal or thematic novelty that would justify their construal as harbingers of a new literary era. Even in his series of lectures on medieval Jewish literature, given between 1859 and 1897 in the theological seminary he headed in Berlin (Steinschneider 1938)
On this series of lectures, see Marx (note 3 above), pp. 139-141.—in which he distinguished between different types of works on national, geographical, religious, political, cultural, linguistic, scientific and philosophical topics—prose was not discussed as an independent field worthy of research in its own right, but was simply mentioned in the context of the above topical fields.
Although Zunz and Steinschneider, through their decisive influence on the development of Judaic studies, helped establish medieval Hebrew prose as an important field worthy of discovery, publication and research, their approach hindered almost completely any attempt to study this form as a literary expression of medieval Jewish creativity, the way its poetic counterpart was studied. Thus, the great philological task of discovering works in manuscript libraries and publishing them—either as single texts or in critical editions compiling all extant versions of the same work—became the focus of research in the generations of scholars following Zunz and Steinschneider.
Single texts were published throughout this period in various journals and periodicals—among them Steinschneider’s bibliographically orientated Hebräische Bibliographie and the main journal of Judaic studies, the Monatschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums—as well as in dozens of other publications. One publishing project devoted mostly to medieval Hebrew prose was Adolph Jellinek’s monumental series of pamphlets (the first of which was published in 1853), in which he published what he called “small midrashim” (“kleine Midraschim”), taken mostly from manuscripts, but also from rare first printed editions. Jellinek edited six such compilations, the last of which was published in 1877. Hundreds of texts, accompanied by short introductions about their history and versions, were published in these pamphlets over a quarter of a century.
M. Niehoff, “Jellinek’s Approach to Aggadah,” Jewish Studies 38 (1998), pp. 119-128.
Jellinek’s own use of the term “small midrashim” to denote works of medieval Hebrew narrative prose reinforced the views of his predecessors. The word “small” here indicates the limited scope of these compositions, which, unlike the “classic” midrashim, usually embraced no more than a few pages. Jellinek, however, also used the term in order to denote their post-Rabbinic medieval origins. Jellinek’s fourth pamphlet, for example, included the following texts: Midrash ‘Agadat Bereshit, Rabi Simeon bar Yohai’s Prayer, ‘Agadat Shamhazai and ‘Azael, Life of Enoch, Midrash of the Ten Exiles, Midrash ‘In the Eighth Day’, Midrash of Golite the Philistine, Tales (ma’asiyot), and Parables of Solomon. Only three of these works may be classified as Midrashim—and even they differ essentially from the ancient Midrashim and have typically-medieval literary characteristics. The other six are clear cases of narrative texts—new thematically as well as in their narrative structure—which in no way “continue” the midrashic literature.
Jellinek’s pamphlets, which have been compiled and republished in three new editions, were among the most important works enabling modern scholars to examine medieval Hebrew prose from a broader, more comprehensive perspective. Jellinek’s project drew attention, even if inadvertently, to the impressive scope of the medieval Hebrew prose, its incorporation of numerous spiritual and social facets of medieval Jewish life, and its diverse and significant literary qualities. Jellinek’s work was the basis for Y. D. Eisenstein’s epigonic edition, distributed in his ultra-orthodox encyclopedic project Otzar Yisrael (Eisenstein 1915), which apparently enjoyed an even wider circulation than that of the original work. This edition included most of the texts published in Jellinek’s pamphlets, organized alphabetically and accompanied by additional versions of the same compositions that were compiled from various sources. Eisenstein, too, classified these texts as ‘small midrashim’ and attributed their significance to their supposed continuation of ancient midrashic literature.
Also influential, though hardly flawless, was Louis Ginzberg’s monumental The Legends of the Jews (Ginzberg 1909-1938), which presented—in a paraphrased English translation—the expanded biblical narrative as rewritten through the ages, from the literature of the Second Temple era to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century folklore. The Legends of the Jews includes such medieval tales and legends as The Chronicles of Moses, Alphabeth of Ben-Sira, Midrash of the Ten Commandments, Midrash Vayosha, Midrash Vayisa’u (or the Wars of Jacob’s Sons) and many others—presented almost in their entirety and accompanied by detailed comparative notes which contribute considerably to our understanding of them. The approach implicit in Ginzberg’s work was ambiguous. On the one hand, by placing these texts directly after the ancient midrashim in each chapter, it portrayed the medieval narratives as lacking any historical distinction: thus, for example, paragraphs from the medieval ‘Chronicles of Moses’ immediately follow the Midrash on Exodus (Shemot Raba), as if they belonged to the same period and were characterized by the same creative approach. On the other hand, Ginzberg’s comparative notes draw attention to the folkloristic nature of the medieval texts, the remarkable development of their narratives and the considerable difference between them and the ancient midrashim. This view is also manifest in Ginzberg’s important essays on the subject.
L. Ginzberg, “Jewish Folklore: East and West” (a lecture given in 1938), On Jewish Law and Lore, Philadelphia 1955, pp. 61-73; L. Ginzberg, “Fragmentary Haggadot,” Halakha and Aggadah, Tel-Aviv 1960, pp. 220-250 [in Hebrew], and the important folkloristic overview of The Legends of the Jews in B. Heller, “Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews,” Jewish Quarterly Review 24 (1933-34), pp. 51-66; 165-190, 281-307, 393-418; 25 (1934-35) pp. 29-52. Ginzberg’s work became not only one of the pillars for the comparative study of Aggadic literature in the twentieth century, but also the most popular and influential Western anthology of Jewish legends, making medieval Hebrew prose the subject of unprecedented interest and scholarly attention.
The origins of this development can be traced to a trend that preceded The Legends of the Jews, yet stemmed from a similar methodical background—the definition of medieval Hebrew prose as part of the period’s Jewish folk culture, i.e. as folk literature. Folklorist Moses Gaster, who published two comprehensive volumes of medieval prose—a collection of stories (Gaster 1924) and a translated anthology (Gaster 1899)—was among the first scholars to make this transition. Gaster had the lamentable habit of dating the texts he discovered and published to impossibly early periods—perhaps in order to magnify the importance of his discoveries. For instance, he claimed that the collection of stories he labeled The Exempla of the Rabbis predated the Talmud and the Midrash and was in fact the original source for the stories including in them—whereas in reality it could not possibly predate the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. It is, nonetheless, a medieval anthology of great importance, in which not only the repertoire of medieval oral and written prose finds expression, but also the history of Hebrew prose in general.
J. Dan, “Ms. 803182 of the National Library,” Kiryat Sefer 51 (1976), pp. 492-498 (Hebrew); P. S. Alexander, “Gaster's Exempla of the Rabbis: A Reappraisal,” in Gabrielle Sed-Rajna (ed.), Rashi 1040-1990, Paris, 1993, pp. 793-805. A similar treatment was given to “The Chronicles of Jerahme'el,” one of the most important and comprehensive anthologies of Hebrew prose. Although Gaster published just part of the work—namely the first section, which revolves around the expanded biblical narrative—and in English translation only, his effort has contributed much to our acquaintance with medieval Hebrew prose. Again, Gaster dated the work to the sixth century—although the text itself includes the explicit statement that it is the combined effort of eleventh/twelfth-century Italian poet and scholar Jerahme'el Ben Shlomo and fourteenth-century German author Elazar ben Asher ha-Levi.
More on this text, see below.
Gaster also published dozens of texts in his numerous articles, later compiled in the third volume (the appendix volume) of his collected essays (Gaster 1928)—an important resource on the different types of medieval Hebrew prose. Gaster’s significant work was not limited to his publishing efforts, but included commentary as well. His comprehensive introduction and comparative notes to The Exempla of the Rabbis are among the most important contributions to the scholarship of medieval Hebrew narrative literature. Through his comparisons of Hebrew stories and their analogues in European and Arabic folk literatures, Gaster highlighted the contacts between the medieval Hebrew prose and the host cultures in which it operated. As we shall see, this relation to European and Eastern literatures is one of the defining characteristics of the Hebrew prose of the period. Gaster also stressed the complex relationships between written and oral forms of medieval Hebrew prose. Although he pointed out the oral characteristics of the stories, he traced their widespread dissemination to the circulation of popular booklets and pamphlets (which he found in manuscripts)—and later of first printed editions—which introduced these stories into the repertoire of Hebrew literature toward the end of the Middle Ages. The texts published in the third volume of Gaster’s collected essays were often included as appendices to research articles that had been previously published in various publications—especially ones devoted to international folklore. In these articles, Gaster situated the medieval Hebrew texts in the more general context of narrative literature, identified character types common to other literatures (e.g. “the child-stealing witch”), and discussed various theoretical questions, among them the relation between oral and written versions of the same stories, as well as the Indo-European hypothesis—a frequently discussed theory at the time, which regarded Indian folk tales as the origin of European folk literature. Like Ginzberg after him, Gaster regarded the Hebrew folklore of the Middle Ages as strong evidence in support of this hypothesis—particularly in light of the Jews’ unique position between East and West.
This thesis appears in an important essay that for some reason was not included in Texts and Studies: M. Gaster, “Jewish Folklore in the Middle Ages,” a paper read before the Jews’ College Literary Society, December 1886, published in The Jewish Chronicle, 31.12.1888, 7.1.1887, 21.1.1887. Thus, although seemingly inadvertently, Gaster helped define some of the chief parameters for the study of medieval Hebrew prose in the following generations.
It seems, however, that the greatest contributor to the changing status of medieval Hebrew prose was one who did not consider himself a typical scholar. Although M. J. Berdyczewski (Bin Gorion) did not use the term “medieval Hebrew prose,” his great anthology Mimekor Yisrael (Bin Gorion 1938) was compiled with the clear intention of presenting the Hebrew prose literature of the period in its full diversity and distinctiveness. As with many other ‘revolutions’ in the cultural sphere, the main (though certainly not sole) motivation for his work came from his critical reaction to yet another effort—Bialik’s and Rawnitzki’s Sefer ha-Aggadah (“The Book of Legends”)
H. N. Bialik & Y. H. Rawnitzki (eds.), The Book of Legend (Sefer ha Aggadah), trans. W.G.Braude, New York 1992—which already then was considered the canonical anthology of Hebrew legends. Berdyczewski’s explicit criticism of their work touched on two central issues: “In our opinion, any book that compiles the words of the ancients and wishes to provide us with original selections from their literature, must to some extent point out temporal and generational differences, and should not—if it is to fulfill its aims in full and not in approximation—mix everything in one pot.”
From his critical essay on Sefer ha-Aggadah in The Writings of M.J. Bin Gorion (Berdyczewski), Vol. 2, Tel Aviv, 1956, p. 249 [in Hebrew]. In other words, Berdyczewski protested against the aforementioned tendency to ignore the autonomy and originary thrust of the medieval stories and present them merely as “midrashim.” Berdyczewski also criticized Bialik and Rawnitzki for including in their anthology much non-narrative material—midrashic homilies and Rabbinic sayings—and ignoring the all-important narrative distinctiveness of the Aggadah vis-à-vis the Halakha. Berdyczewski’s main point of criticism, however, concerned what he considered to be the conservative character of Sefer ha-Aggadah—its emphasis on normative values, on accepted Jewish morality, on the rational—which ignored other elements responsible for magical, erotic and sensual literature. The main thrust of this literature was to be found in the medieval prose, which Berdyczewski wished to salvage from its obscurity by highlighting what Sefer ha-Aggadah tried to conceal and suppress.
Mimekor Yisrael is indeed a vast collection of stories compiled from every possible source: first printed editions, scholarly publications, halakhic documents, medieval exegetic texts, historical writings, moralistic works and philosophical compositions. The book represents an almost complete array of narrative genres: expanded biblical stories and exempla, historical legends, stories of magic and sorcery, animal fables, travel stories, mystical parables and didactical moralistic tales.
The work was published after Berdyczewski’s death by his son, Emanuel bin Gorion, in six volumes between 1938-1945. An updated edition was published in 1965. Selections from the book were published during Berdyczewski’s lifetime in a German translation, under the title Der Born Judas und die Sagen der Juden (1913-1927). Also published was a complete English translation, Mimekor Yisrael: Classical Jewish Folktales, Collected by M.J. bin Gorion, trans. by I. M. Lask, Bloomington 1990. Berdyczewski’s aims were cultural rather than scholarly: in his view, Sefer ha-Aggadah was only an example for the partial and selective representation of ancient Jewish literature. In Mimekor Yisrael he saw the means for a more complete and faithful portrayal of medieval Hebrew literature, underscoring aspects of Jewish culture that previous scholars had tended to conceal and efface.
See Dan Ben-Amos’s important introduction to his annotated edition of Mimekor Yisrael: Classical Jewish Folktales, Abridged and Annotated Edition by Dan Ben-Amos, Bloomington and Indianapolis 1990, pp. xxiii-xliv.
Joseph Dan’s The Hebrew Story in the Middle Ages (1974) was probably the first work in the study of Hebrew literature devoted exclusively to prose, and also the first to use that term in relation to its subject matter. The book’s basic premise is that the medieval Hebrew story is essentially different from the Hebrew prose that preceded it, mainly because of its literary autonomy and liberation from the chains of historic, halakhic and theological contexts. This autonomy was responsible for the evolution of new narrative themes and forms and for a growth in narrative complexity. The chapters of the book are eclectic, dealing with different phases in the history of medieval narrative literature, including the narrative literature of the German Pietists, narrative elements in Jewish philosophy and the Kabbalah, and stories by Renaissance-period Italian Jews. Also discussed are such topics and genres as biblical stories in the Middle Ages, the myth of the Messiah and the legends Isaac Luria (the Ari), as well as single stories (The Tale of the Jerusalemite, the tale of King Arthur, the Legend of Joseph dela Reina) and collections of tales (Alphabeth of Ben Sira, Tales of Sendebar, Midrash of the Ten Commandments). There is a certain contradiction between the book’s basic assumption regarding the autonomy of the medieval prose literature, and the supposition, expressed throughout the book, that most medieval Hebrew stories were not written independently, but rather emerged as part of certain exegetic, historical, moralistic and mystical contexts and practices. The main causes for the evolution of the Hebrew prose literature of the period may be related to other factors than the literary autonomy of this form—the influence of European and Arabic literatures, changes in the leisure culture of the Jews, their search for new expressions for their everyday life, and other socio-historical factors. At any rate, Dan’s work paved the way toward the acceptance of medieval Hebrew prose as an independent field of study and research.
Three main trends that have considerably changed the study of the medieval texts emerged in the last half of the twentieth century. The first of these is the historiographic trend. The interest of historians in the Jewish tales of the Middle Ages is obvious. Since many events have no existing documentation, historians have to resort to such literary texts, which are often fictional and supernatural in content and nature. The use of such tales for historical research ranges from the pole of naïve positivistic treatment to that of total rejection: while some scholars have regarded the texts as representing factual occurrences, others have categorically refused to consider them as significant historical documents. Such conflicting approaches are prevalent in biographies about medieval authors, very little documentation of whom remains outside their own writings. Typical in this respect are studies on the life of Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki (Rashi). While some biographers have resorted to the many known tales on Rashi’s life (for instance, that Rashi’s father was a wealthy trader of precious stones; that Rashi traveled extensively from community to community to spread his writings, etc.) in order to write certain sections of his biography, other scholars—prominent among them Zunz—completely rejected the historical significance of these stories, denouncing their promulgators as ignorant distributors of lies.
See E. Yassif, “Rashi Legends and Medieval Folk Culture,” Rashi 1040-1990, G. Sed-Rajna ed., Paris 1993, pp. 483-492.
This approach did not change until the 1960’s, when seminal works by G. D. Cohen and A. Graboïs were published. In his study of ‘The Story of Four Captives,’ from Sefer ha Kabbalah (The Book of Tradition) by Andalusian author Abraham ibn Daoud,
G. D. Cohen, “The Story of the Four Captives,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research XXIX (1960-61), pp. 51-131; compare also Cohen 1967. Cohen contends that this tale on the dissemination of the Torah among Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean—by Eastern scholars who were captured by pirates—should be read as a document of cultural rather than factual significance. The story indicates the changing attitudes of Spanish Jews toward the authority of the important Eastern centers of Torah scholarship, and toward their own place in the contemporary Jewish world. Thus, as a historian taking advantage of literary tools, Cohen uses his precise and detailed analysis of the tale to point out the mental (rather than external) processes that occurred in a particular historical period—the principal surviving evidence for which can be found in the literary material. A similar approach characterizes Graboïs study on Jewish stories about Charlemagne.
A. Graboïs, “Representations of Charlemagne in Medieval Hebrew Sources,” Tarbiz 36 (1967), pp. 22-58. Sharing Cohen’s view, Graboïs insists that such stories cannot be taken to represent any factual events related to the conquests of Charlemagne and the founding of his kingdom, in which Jews may have been involved; they do however attest to attempts made by Jews hundreds of years later—at the time the stories were written—to receive legitimization from Christian authorities and secure their property rights and political status. In this case, the textual analysis of a work of prose exposes the ways in which such texts can express mental attitudes and serve as exclusive means for the communication of communal anxieties and desires.
This trend, which continued well into the 1970’s, was carried on by Ivan Marcus’s studies on the chronicles of the 1096 Crusade Riots. Before Marcus, the historical content of the chronicles—published in critical annotated editions by Stern and Neubauer (1892) and Habermann (1971)—had hardly been disputed. No one considered treating the chronicles themselves as “tales” or narrative works of prose. Marcus drew attention to their literary style, to the residues of older, mostly midrashic traditions in the plot, and to the fact that the voice of later generations—and not the ones involved in the depicted events—is represented in the chronicles. Marcus’s literary analysis of the texts led him to the conclusion that the chronicles were a cultural construct, through which later communities wished to express their identity and anxieties.
I. Marcus, “From Politics to Martyrdom: Shifting Paradigms in Hebrew Narratives of the 1096 Crusade Riots,” Prooftexts 2 (1982), pp. 40-52; idem., “The Representation of Reality in the Narratives of 1096,” Jewish History 13 (1999), pp. 37-48. Historian Robert Chazan, who insisted on the importance of the chronicles not just as cultural constructs but as historical documents as well, started a major polemic with his harsh criticism of Marcus’s approach.
R. Chazan, “The Facticity of Medieval Narrative: A Case Study of the Hebrew First Crusade Narratives,” AJS Review 16 (1991), pp. 31-56. The historical significance of medieval narrative prose—and in particular the legitimacy of literary (stylistic, structural, comparative) analysis as part of the historical discussion—lies at the center of this controversy and its various offshoots.
The most comprehensive—and perhaps most important—narrative prose compositions of the Middle Ages are historiographic works, which recount Jewish history in the Second Temple era, the Rabbinic period and the Middle Ages in extensive, complex and detailed narratives. Like the ‘independent’ tales discussed above, these compositions pose a similar dilemma for scholars. On the one hand, they are the major historiographical works provided by the Jewish culture of the period; on the other, they deviate enormously from currently accepted norms of historiographic writing, and should therefore be treated as works of narrative prose rather than historiography—or in modern terms, as something resembling a historical novel. These literary and folkloristic aspects of the historiographical Hebrew writing of the Middle Ages are highlighted in S. W. Baron’s monumental historical opus, A Social and Religious History of the Jews. Baron regarded these texts not as historiographical achievements, but as expressions of the period’s imaginative and creative thrust, reflective of what he calls “the historical folklore” of medieval Jews.
S. W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol VI, New York 1958 (“Laws, Homilies and the Bible”), pp. 152-233; vol. VII ("poetry and Belles Lettres"), pp. 135-215.
Perhaps the most distinctive example for such a text is The Chain of Tradition by sixteenth-century author Gedalya ibn Yihya. The book documents the generations of scholars from the Rabbinic era to ibn Yihya’s own period, on the basis of both written and oral evidence. In addition, the work is strewn with dozens of hagiographic stories about such great medieval scholars as Rashi, Maimonides, Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra, Rabbi Moshe ben Nahman and others. Most describe the supernatural miracles performed by their protagonists and reflect medieval Jewish folklore. Nevertheless, The Chain of Tradition is presented by its author not as a folkloristic collection of tales but as a historiographic work. Its inclusion of fabulous narratives and factual inaccuracies aroused the rage of historically sensitive Jewish scholars, who dubbed it ‘The Chain of Lies.’ Modern scholars commend it, however, for its seminal significance in the evolution of the Jewish hagiographic literature starting from the sixteenth century, and also for its revelation of a cultural phenomenon—the adulation and worship of holy figures in medieval Jewish culture—that may have remained little-known if not for ibn Yihya’s book.
See J. Dan, “Hagiographic Literature: East and West,” Pe'amim 26 (1986), pp. 77-86; Yassif, 1999, pp. 322-331. It is lamentable that to this day, no authorized and reliable critical edition of this important book is available—one that would examine ibn Yihya’s original work and distinguish it from the supplements and modifications added to his widespread book in later generations.
Other medieval narrative-historiographic works have been published in laudable critical editions. First to be mentioned is the Chronicle of Ahima’az ben Paltiel, also known as Megilat Ahima’az. This historical chronicle, which dates from 1054, is exceptional for several reasons. Firstly, it remained unknown to Jewish scholars until the middle of the nineteenth century, when its manuscript was discovered by Adolph Neubauer, librarian of Hebrew manuscripts at the Bodleian library, in the cathedral of Toledo. Secondly, it is the most narrow and specific historical chronicle available to us—the story of one family from the Apulia region of Southern Italy, which lived there for three centuries before the writing of the chronicle by one of its members, Ahima’az ben Paltiel. The chronicle is unique from a literary perspective as well—it is written entirely in rhyme, a rare phenomenon in the Jewish historiography of the period. A first edition of the text, based on the manuscript, was hastily published by Neubauer shortly after his discovery. A more creditable edition of the work was published by Benjamin Klar in 1944. Klar’s exemplary edition is annotated, vocalized and systematically edited, with a detailed critical epilogue that examines the work in the literary and historic context of Jewish culture in Southern Italy during the first millennium. Also of great scholarly importance is the collection of piyyutim appended to the text, which indicates that the protagonists of the Chronicle were poets whose liturgical poems reached numerous communities. The events depicted in the Chronicle (which, as already mentioned, remained unknown until modern times) are alluded to in various piyyutim, as well as in historical and literary documents whose historic context and significance can only be understood now, after the publishing of this work. Thanks to its historic and literary importance, the Chronicle of Ahima’az has been studied by several other scholars, including Yassif, who examines the work’s literary structure and its relation to contemporaneous Jewish and Christian folk literatures, and Bonfil, who in his seminal work discusses the system of mythical symbols on which one of the stories in the Chronicle is based, and explores its historical significance.
E. Yassif, “Studies in the Narrative Art of Megilat Ahima’az,” Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature 4 (1984), pp. 18-42 [in Hebrew]; R. Bonfil, “Myth, Rhetoric, History?: A Study in the Chronicle of Ahima’az,” Culture and Society in Medieval Jewry: Studies Dedicated to the Memory of Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, Jerusalem (1989), pp. 99-136.
Another historiographical work that has long been regarded as a narrative text is Shevet Yehuda by Solomon ibn Verga (1554), which describes the violent actions taken against the Jews of Spain in the few generations preceding their final expulsion. The text, which advances from minor disasters and tragedies to the cataclysmic calamity of the expulsion, presents these events dramatically through a narrative reenactment of the relationships within the Jewish communities and between the Jews and the Christian rulers of Spain. Some of the stories are meticulously structured and presented in a highly sophisticated and accomplished Hebrew style. Several scholars have called the stories of Shevet Yehuda ‘novelistic’ and emphasized their deep affinity to contemporary Italian and Spanish novels.
See I. Baer, Untersuchungen ueber Quellen und Komposition des Schebet Jehuda (1923); Y. H. Yerushalmi, The Lisbon Massacre of 1506 and the Royal Image in the Shebet Yehuda, Cincinnati 1976; J. D. Abramsky, “On the Essence and Content of Shevet Yehudah,” On the Paths of the Eternal Jew, Tel-Aviv 1985 [in Hebrew]. Many other stories are short and concise, and center on supernatural occurrences: the salvation of a community from a blood libel, a supernatural assault on Christian rulers, Jewish mystics and holy men using their supernatural powers for the benefit of their communities. All these are typical folktales handed down to the author—according to his own claims—from the oral traditions of different communities. As such, they divulge the topical interests and character of the folk literature of the Jewish communities in Spain before the expulsion.
I. Loeb, “Le Folk Lore Juif dans la chronique du Schébet Iehuda d'Ibn Verga,” REJ 24 (1892), pp. 1-29; Yassif, The Hebrew Folktale, pp. 298-301. Rather than focusing on its significance as a historical document, the studies of Shevet Yehuda have stressed the aesthetic qualities of the work and the emphasis laid by its author on literary style no less than on informative content.
The most important achievement in the research and publication of medieval historiographic prose is David Flusser’s edition of the Book of Jossipon. For hundreds of years—from the eleventh century to early modern times—this tenth-century text was for European Jews the authoritative history of the Second Temple period. It was considered the Hebrew substitute for the historical works of Josephus Flavius, and was even thought to be the “original” book written by Flavius in Hebrew for his own people. The text’s many different manuscripts and printed editions—as well as its relation to Flavius’s work and unique status in the historical memory of the Jews—made the publication of a critical edition an extremely important, yet difficult and intricate task. The commentary and alternative versions accompanying the text are a masterwork of precision and attention to detail. Flusser paid particular attention to the differences between the Book of Jossipon and Josephus Flavius’s historical narrative, and elucidated them in thousands of notes and explanations (Flusser 1978-1980). These comments are of utmost importance to the study of medieval Hebrew prose: they reveal the differences in historical outlook and narrative methods between the ancient world and the Middle Ages, and disclose the uniqueness of the Hebrew prose of the latter period. Flusser’s second volume (most of which is devoted to his studies on the Book of Jossipon) includes two chapters of essential relevance to the study of Hebrew prose. The first, “The Literary Project of the Author of the Book of Jossipon,” examines the differences between Flavius and Jossipon, the latter’s use of other sources, both Jewish and European, and his methods as a historian-narrator. In the second chapter, “The Book of Jossipon as a Work of Art,” Flusser analyzes the unique style of the author (which in his view belongs to the contemporaneous Italian tradition of “sublime prose”), the text’s structural approach and the psychological residues that influenced the author’s historical interpretation and narrative considerations. It is indisputable that Flusser’s edition of the Book of Jossipon is among the finest critical editions of any medieval historiographic text—Jewish or otherwise—and offers a unique contribution to the study of the narrative prose of the period.
Another historiographic work of direct relevance to the Book of Jossipon is The Book of Memory (also known as The Chronicles of Jerahme’el), the last ‘layer’ of which was written around the year 1300, in Germany. The manuscript, which traveled extensively before being purchased in 1898 by the Bodleian Library, was well-known even before it reached Oxford, and sections of it had been studied earlier. The Book of Memory includes an entire copied version—one of the earliest and most reliable ones—of the Book of Jossipon, which Flusser used extensively in his edition. This work is unique for combining two literary-historiographic genres of great importance: universal history—the chronicles of Man from the Creation to the historian’s own time (or to the coming of the Messiah)—a historiographic genre that was popular in Central Europe precisely at the time of El’azar ben Asher ha-Levi, author of The Book of Memory; and the literary anthology, which collected complete texts as well as fragments in single volumes. The author of The Book of Memory offers a chronicle of the Jewish people, from the Creation of the world to the coming of the Messiah, by copying historical, midrashic and narrative texts (in part or in full) and presenting them in chronological order—purportedly without any rewriting or adaptation of the authentic documents. Hundreds of texts, representing various types and generations of medieval Hebrew prose, are thus copied and compiled according to Ele’azar’s unique structural and historical approach. Interestingly, the literary basis for The Book of Memory is an older text, probably from the eleventh or beginning of the twelfth century, written by the Italian Jewish scholar and poet Jerahme’el ben Solomon. Thus, the text’s two main strata represent two distinct phases in the evolution of medieval Hebrew prose—the first, which has its origin in eleventh-century Italy, is closer in spirit to the Book of Jossipon, whereas the second, from fourteenth-century Germany, marks later development in the Hebrew prose of Northern and Central Europe. A partial English translation of The Book of Memory was published at the very end of the nineteenth century.
M. Gaster, The Chronicles of Jerahme’el, London 1899. The complete critical edition (edited by Eli Yassif), with alternate versions, parallel texts, annotation and a comprehensive introduction examining the work’s narrative structure and artistic qualities, has been recently published (Yassif 2001).
The second trend in the study of medieval Hebrew prose focuses on relations between the Hebrew prose and other cultures and literatures—particularly those of the Christian-European and Muslim-Arabic world. In contrast with the aforementioned tendency to regard medieval Hebrew prose as a continuation of the earlier Jewish literature of the Talmud and the Midrash, most of the scholars taking the second approach tend to examine the Jewish literature in the context of its creation, stressing the relationships between the Jews and the highly-developed dominant majority-cultures in which they lived. Historically, the comparative approach to the study of Hebrew prose developed concurrently with the rivaling “isolationist” approach. Emblematic of the former was the pioneering work (1880-1888) of Moritz Güdemann—Chief Rabbi of Vienna toward the end of the nineteenth century—which led to one of the major breakthroughs in this direction. The main goal of Güdemann’s work was to demonstrate the similarity and interdependence of Jewish life and culture in Western Europe and the life and culture of the Christian majority. Güdemann drew attention to similarities in educational systems, customs, biblical exegesis, folk beliefs and literature, insisting that the evolution of medieval Hebrew prose cannot be comprehended without its examination vis-à-vis other Western European literatures. From this perspective he discussed, for instance, the tale of the Jewish Pope, which was directly linked to ideological and political controversies in the Christian world. He also discussed magical tales that had emerged in both cultures, as well as many of the stories that appeared in the books of the German Pietists (especially in Sefer Hasidim) and were closely related to the European exempla literature. The fact that the Christian exempla literature, which encompassed thousands of oral homilies and dozens of written collections of exempla, blossomed in Germany in the thirteenth century, at precisely the same time Sefer Hasidim was written, indicates the close relation between the two literatures. The similarities between the Christian exempla texts and the stories that appear in Sefer Hasidim indeed call for a close scrutiny of this relationship. Güdemann’s monumental work soon paved the way for studies by other scholars who related the medieval Hebrew stories to their counterparts in the rich European literature of the period.
See for instance: J. Dan, “Rabbi Judah the Pious and Caesarius of Heisterbach—Common Motifs in Their Stories,” Scripta Hierosolymitana 22 (1971), pp. 18-27; E. Yassif, “The Exemplary Story in Sefer Hasidim,” Tarbiz 57 (1988), pp. 217-256. Among these were Moses Gaster, whose numerous works have already been mentioned, and Israel Lévi—founder, editor and frequent contributor to the journal Review des Etudes Juives—who discovered the European sources for many Jewish folktales.
A. Scheiber, “Le Folklore Juif dans la Revue des Etudes Juives,” REJ 139 (1980), pp. 19-37. Lévi published an important Hebrew edition of the Romance of Alexander the Great, based on the prevalent medieval Hebrew version (Lévi 1887), and studied the enigmatic origins of various narrative texts, as well as the changes in their social significance and role.
A more current contribution to the comparative approach is the series Between Jews and Christians, published by the Open University of Israel and edited by Orah Limor. The series examines the complex relationship between the two cultures on several different levels, one of which involves “representations of the past,” i.e. the literary expressions of this relationship. Orah Limor and Yisrael Yuval (1997), who wrote the volume on this topic, offer three models for the literary relation between the two cultures. The first of these is “the shared representation,” in which Jews and Christians adopt the same text (the example here is the Romance of Alexander the Great) and regard it as a common expression of both cultures’ view of the past and of their cultural origins. The second model is “the parallel representation,” in which each culture generates “parallel” narrative texts, clearly related to each other, yet modified to express the different interests and mentalities of each culture. The examples offered for this model are the stories on Titus and the mosquito, the departure of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakhai from Yavne, the killing of infants (in the New Testament and in the biblical story of Moses in Egypt) and the blood libels. All have different Jewish and Christian versions, whose discrepancy points to the distinct interests and views of each culture. The third model is that of “the opposed representation,” in which one culture generates a narrative diametrically opposed to the super-narrative of the other. The most obvious example is The Chronicles of Jesus (Sefer Toldot Yeshu), which retells the story of Jesus from a Jewish perspective. This text offers a critical and irreverent alternative to the fundamental Christian myth, with a narrative structure that closely follows the Christian one, while at the same time subverting it and undermining its basic assumptions.
Studies dealing with Islamic culture pose different questions and challenges. Here, the starting point for many studies is the classic question What did Muhammad Take from Judaism? (as is the title of a book by Abraham Geiger
Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen? was Geiger’s doctoral dissertation (Geiger 1833).)—the assumption that the fundamentals of Islamic literature are derived from Jewish culture, especially from the Hebrew tales that infiltrated Islamic culture via the Jewish tribes of the Arabian peninsula. The possible influence of the medieval Jewish Aggadic literature on Islamic culture is not relevant to our present discussion, unless we assume—as many studies have—that Islamic sources preserve traces of such Jewish stories as the magical tale of the Queen of Sheba, the stories of Abraham or the tales of King Solomon, for which no other evidence has survived. But here, of course, we must ask whether these stories are of Jewish origin at all—whether they did not in fact emerge independently in Islamic tradition, and only then crossed to Jewish culture. Such questions of historical precedence, which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were at the forefront of the research in this field, seem now more like polemical squabbles than like research problems of essential importance.
Nevertheless, such studies have drawn attention to the fact that much medieval Hebrew prose has its origin in Islamic culture, or in the intensive contacts between Judaism and Islam throughout the Middle Ages. The genre where this influence was particularly felt seems to have been the biblical tales. Both cultures, Jewish and Islamic, acknowledged the primacy and sacredness of the Bible. In fact, the forefathers of the Hebrew nation were regarded in Islamic culture as prophets, who both preceded and heralded the appearance of Muhammad. It should not surprise us, then, that expanded biblical stories enjoyed widespread circulation in Islamic culture as part of the genre of ‘prophetic stories’ (kisas al’anbiya). The significance of this genre to our understanding of the contemporaneous Jewish culture lies in our ability to reconstruct lost ancient Jewish tales on the basis of their Muslim counterparts. On the other hand, the Islamic ‘prophetic stories’ were also an endless source of material for Jewish storytellers, who identified in these tales their own consecrated biblical figures, and adopted them with certain necessary modifications. Several classic studies discuss the biblical and post-biblical residues in the Koran and in exegetic Islamic literature. Among these are works by Weil (1846), Speyer (1931), Schwarzbaum (1982) and Rubin (1999), which offer general and comprehensive expositions of the similarities between the biblical narrative and the Koran, and studies by Salzberger (1907) and Seymor (1924), which focus on specific figures—particularly King Solomon, who was a central protagonist in the stories and legends of both cultures.
Whereas such early studies focused on comparative aspects, which in the early decades of the twentieth century received the majority of scholarly attention, later studies have dealt with questions of more essential significance. Aviva Schussman’s doctoral dissertation (1981) discusses the religious and social contexts in which the literatures of both cultures evolved, the similarities and relation between Rabbinic exegetic methods and the narrative characteristics of the ‘prophetic stories,’ the modification of Hebrew biblical tales by Muslim storytellers, and the adaptation and alteration of Islamic traditions in Jewish culture. The changing approaches of late-twentieth century research are demonstrated in two works that discuss the novella of the Queen of Sheba. An important volume of essays edited by Pritchard (1974) includes several essential studies that examine references to the Queen of Sheba in the Bible, in Islamic, Jewish and Christian traditions, and in Ethiopian culture. These comparative studies provide the full array of sources from all the relevant cultures, but are predominantly informative, and for the most part discuss questions of similarity and influence. Another recent work (Lassner 1993) examines significant Jewish and Islamic texts about the encounter between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba from a more fundamental perspective, which manages to transcend the merely comparative approach. In Lassner’s view, this encounter represents not only a confrontation between two rulers, but also one between a man and a woman. Both cultures model their respective narratives of this encounter on their perceptions of gender relations and male-female distinctions. The analysis and comparative discussion of the different versions shed light not only on the texts themselves, but also on the different images employed by each culture to represent gender and power relations. Such matters could not have been tackled by scholars in the first half of the twentieth century; the changes in the interpretation of the narrative texts, so evident in the later studies, clearly illustrate the changing interests and perspectives in the study of medieval Hebrew prose in the last quarter of the century.
The third trend in the research of medieval Hebrew prose is the folkloristic approach. The basic assumptions underlying this approach may be regarded as one of the main reasons for the failure of medieval Hebrew prose to assume its proper place in modern scholarship. From a typical nineteenth-century viewpoint, the medieval prose was classified, both explicitly and implicitly, as folk literature rather than belletristic, as the kind of literature that appealed to the lower, uneducated classes of Jewish society and was characterized by a magical and fantastical worldview—an utter abomination for nineteenth-century Judaic scholars. Although such assumptions were never well-founded, they had a considerable effect on the scholarly agenda. Indeed, with the exception of one known case—a collection of stories by one of the greatest rabbinic authorities of the eleventh century, Rabbi Nissim of Kairouan
Nissim Ben Jacob ibn Shahin, An Elegant Composition concerning Relief after Adversity, trans. from the Arabic by W. M. Brinner, New Haven and London 1977. —the vast majority of medieval Hebrew prose was not written by great scholars. On the contrary, some of the greatest medieval Jewish scholars were known for their hostility toward these stories, which they regarded as vain works of mere sensual pleasure.
See for instance: E. Yassif, “Leisure and Generosity: Theory and Practice in the Emergence of the Hebrew Tale at the Close of the Middle Ages,” Kiryat Sefer 62 (1988-89), pp. 887-905 [in Hebrew]; J. Elbaum, Medieval Perspectives on Aggadah and Midrash, Jerusalem 2000 [in Hebrew]. Indeed, this literature enjoyed widespread popularity across broad sectors the Jewish population—and not necessarily the most learned and educated ones. The medieval prose was typified by a simple, functional narrative style characteristic of folk literature, which paid little attention to artistic ornamentation. In addition, the bulk of the Hebrew prose of the period was anonymous—its authors did not deem it necessary to add their names to it, and thus remained unknown. This is of course typical of the fundamental anonymity and the communal—rather than individual—nature of folk literature. All these significant traits of the medieval Hebrew prose were identified by scholars early on; but whereas early scholarship regarded them as shortcomings and as a legitimate reason for ignoring these narrative works, the recent folkloristic approach views them as the forte of this literature.
From among the dozens of studies taking this approach—either intentionally, or inadvertently via their conclusions—a few of the more deliberate and methodical ones shall be mentioned. Haim Schwarzbaum’s excellent work on the fables of Berechiah ha-Nakdan (1979) is emblematic of this approach. Schwarzbaum was one of the most important scholars of comparative folklore. His earlier work on the stories of the convert Petrus Alphonsi—one of Spain’s most important Christian theologians in the turn of the eleventh century, and a founder of the novelistic genre in European literature—won international recognition thanks to its great erudition and foundational contribution to any later study of European folk prose.
H. Schwarzbaum, “International Folklore Motifs in Petrus Alphonsi’s ‘Disciplina Clericalis’,” in Jewish Folklore Between East and West, ed. E. Yassif, Beer Sheva 1989, pp. 239-358. Schwarzbaum’s study of Berechiah ha-Nakdan—a Hebrew fabulist who lived in France, probably in the thirteenth century—examines in meticulous detail each of Berechiah’s 119 parables, using the folkloristic approach prevalent in the first half of the twentieth century. Schwarzbaum compared Berechiah’s version of each parable with all the corresponding variants, starting from the Ancient Near East and going through every known culture (including ones from East Asia). He discussed the evolution of each fable and its modifications in every culture, focusing in particular on the role of Hebrew parables in the fable-literatures of the Middle Ages. In this respect, Schwarzbaum’s work is not only the greatest contribution to the study of Hebrew parables in medieval times, but also a significant contribution to the comparative study of parable literature in general. Like many other comparative scholars, Schwarzbaum ignored fundamental questions such as the social contexts, literary structures and symbolic language of the fables, opting to focus on the comparative aspect, which he considered to be of paramount importance. Nevertheless, the modern scholarship of Jewish fable-literature cannot be imagined without his essential and fundamental contribution.
A combination of a philological study—a critical edition of a medieval text based on extant manuscripts—with the folkloristic approach is offered by Yassif’s edition of one of the boldest narrative texts in the entire medieval Hebrew literature—the Alphabeth of Ben Sira—which dates from the ninth or tenth century (Yassif 1984). This edition, which is based on all the extant manuscripts, examines the narrative structure of the text as a frame-story, and offers a detailed folkloristic comparison between the stories included in this work and folk Arabic-Persian traditions from the same period of time. The comparative study shows that the Hebrew prose of the late Gaonic period was an integral part of the folk culture of the region, and that the Jews utilized these narrative traditions in a functional, intricate and fascinating manner that had a substantial influence on the later development of Jewish prose in the East and in Europe.
The comparative aspect is central to Zfatman’s work (1993), albeit from a more historical and linguistic perspective. Zfatman wishes to examine the relationship between medieval Hebrew and Yiddish prose through the prism of one central story. Her discussion of the story’s different versions is adorned, however, by her flexible and versatile use of different folkloristic methods, including comparative, structural and contextual research. She highlights the complex generic transition, from the legend (“aggadah”)—the constitutive narrative on which the Jewish community attempts to base its legal status in a certain locale—to the fairy tale (“ma’asiya”), on which the community later relies in order to determine its social boundaries and norms. Zfatman employs her intricate folkloristic analysis in order to understand the society in which these stories were told and the mental undertones experienced by Jewish communities in the process of transition between early and late medieval times—processes which found their chief expression in folktales rather than in official, historical or halakhic documents.
Another distinctive folkloristic study that applies advanced methods of folkloristic research is Tamar Alexander’s work (1991) on the stories of Sefer Hasidim (dating from thirteenth century Germany). Alexander examines three narrative models on which the stories of Sefer Hasidim are based: the traditional pattern, the adaptive pattern and the unique pattern. Although this study—like the last two aforementioned works—is based on a comparative analysis of different versions, it employs a contextual-functional method of research, which starts from a detailed scrutiny of the contexts in which each story appears: the immediate context—the story’s location in the full text, and the broader context—the story’s place in the belief system of the German Pietists. Although Alexander’s study discusses only four of the hundreds of stories included in Sefer Hasidim, it demonstrates how a detailed examination of the different contexts in which a story appears may serve as an important tool for deciphering its meaning and conceptual significance. The three models she suggests for examining the relationship between the stories and their real historical and ideological backgrounds should be the starting-point for any future examination of folktales within an ideological context.
In the fifth chapter of his 1999 book, Yassif attempts to classify medieval Hebrew prose according to generic principles, and finds that the Jewish folktales of the Middle Ages fall into the following genres: (1) The expanded biblical story, which is a distinctive cursor of internal Jewish tradition and a continuation of the talmudic-midrashic tale or Aggadah. (2) The exempla story, which served as a narrative tool for observing social norms, securing the stability of religious institutions and ensuring the cultural cohesiveness of the Jewish community. (3) The historical tale, which was the principal means for shaping the collective memory of the Jews, in Eastern and European communities alike. The historical tales, however, exposed individual and communal tensions and anxieties that could not find expression in any ‘proper’ historical document, but only in the semi-fictional narratives of the historical tale. (4) Hagiography, which—since the adulation of saints and holy figures did not exist, to the best of our knowledge, in the Rabbinic era—constituted an important innovation in medieval Jewish culture. Although the infiltration of hagiography into Jewish culture, especially in the late medieval period, was undoubtedly affected by the Christian hagiolatry, these stories did fulfill internal Jewish societal needs. (5) Novellas and gender stories, which shed light on another side of contemporary Jewish life—folk culture’s treatment of family life and the complex representations of women (some of which were derived from ancient Jewish traditions, others from later medieval developments). (6) Stories of magic and demonology, which were one of the most popular and widespread narrative genres in the two dominant cultures of the period. The Jewish tales of magic do not just attest to Jewish “superstitions,” however, but are primarily an expression of the tense confrontation between Jews and gentiles, and as such can shed light on the grueling existential problems that preoccupied the Jews in that period.
The attempt made in the aforementioned essay to define the language of medieval Hebrew prose through generic classification, enables us to locate the main spheres of contact between the narrative works and the existential, spiritual and psychological reality of the period, and helps us realize that regardless of its folk origins, this literature can shed light on dark—yet highly important—corners in medieval Jewish culture.
The trend discernible in recent studies combines the classic philological study of manuscripts—which are virtually the only authentic documents that remain from medieval Jewish culture—with literary and folkloristic research. This trend, which employs structural, functional and contextual research methods in order to shed light on the deep structures of the narrative texts, is the direction in which the study of medieval prose should proceed in the future. By combining studies on medieval prose with work by historians, students of folk culture, psychologists and anthropologists who discuss the same subject-matter from different perspectives, these rich and fascinating texts will assume their proper place in our understanding of Jewish life and culture in the Middle Ages.
Select Bibliography
1. Hebrew Poetry
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S. Abramson and A. Mirsky (eds.), Hayyim (Jefim) Schirmann Jubilee Volume [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1970.
Al Andalus 2000
M.R. Menocal, R.P. Scheindlin, and M. Sells, The Literature of Al-Andalus, Cambridge 2000.
Allony 1991
N. Allony (ed. Y. Tobi), Studies in Medieval Philology and Literature: Collected Papers, IV Hebrew Medieval Poetry, [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1991.
Beeri 1999
T. Beeri, “Hebrew Poetry in Babylonia During the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries as Portrayed in Geniza Manuscripts” [Hebrew], Te’uda 15 (1999), 23-36.
Bialik & Rawnitzky 1924
Ch.N. Bialik and I.Ch. Rawnitzki (eds.), The Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Berlin 1924.
Brann & Owen 1997
R. Brann and D. Owen (eds), Languages of Power in Islamic Spain, Bethesda, Maryland 1997.
Brann 1990
R. Brann, The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain, Baltimore 1990.
Bregman 1985
D. Bregman, The Golden Way: The Hebrew Sonnet during the Renaissance and the Baroque [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1985.
Bregman 1988
D. Bregman, A Bundle of Gold: Hebrew Sonnets from the Renaissance and the Baroque [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1988.
Brody-Judah ha-Levi
H. Brody (ed.), Divan Judah ha-Levi, 1-4, Berlin 1894-1920.
Brody-Moses Ibn Ezra
H. Brody (ed.), Moses Ibn Ezra: Secular Poems, I, Berlin 1935; II Jerusalem 1942; III (ed. D. Pagis) Jerusalem 1978.
Davidson 1919
I. Davidson, Mahzor Iannai, New York 1919.
Davidson 1924-1933
I. Davidson, Thesaurus of Medieval Hebrew Poetry, 1-4, New York 1924-1933. Supplement in HUCA 12-13 (1937-38), 715-823. Reprinted edition (with introduction by J. Schirmann), New York 1970.
Davidson 1930
I. Davidson, “The Study of Mediaeval Hebrew Poetry in the Nineteenth Century,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 1 (1930), 33-48
Delitzsch 1836
F. Delitzsch, Zur Geschichte der jüdischen Poesie, Leipzig 1836.
Dishon & Hazan 1991
J. Dishon and E. Hazan (eds.), Studies in Hebrew Literature and Yemenite Culture: Jubilee Volume Presented to Yehuda Ratzaby [Hebrew], Bar Ilan 1991.
Doron 1989
A. Doron, Todros Ha-Levi Abulafia [Hebrew], Tel Aviv 1989.
Drory 1988
R. Drory, The Emergence of Jewish Arabic Literary Contacts at the Beginning of the Tenth Century [Hebrew], Tel Aviv 1988
Drory 2000
R. Drory, Models and Contacts: Arabic Literature and Its Impact on Medieval Jewish Culture, Leiden 2000.
Elizur-Beeri 1994
“E. Fleischer’s List of Publications” (prepared by T. Beeri and S. Ben-Ari) in Sh. Elizur et al. (eds.) Knesset Ezra: Studies Presented to Ezra Fleischer [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1994.
Fleischer 1975
E. Fleischer, Hebrew Liturgical Poetry in the Middle Ages [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1975.
Fleischer 1984
E. Fleischer, The Yozer: Its Emergence and Development,
Jerusalem 1984.
Fleischer 1988
E. Fleischer, “Perspectives on Our Early Poetry After 100 Years of Studying the Cairo Geniza,” Mada’e ha-yahadut 38 (1988), 253-265.
Fleischer 1999
E. Fleischer, “The Cultural Profile of Eastern Jewry in the Early Middle Ages As Reflected by the Payetanic Texts of the Geniza,” Te’uda 15 (1999), 1-22.
Halkin 1975
A.S., Halkin (tr.), Sefer ha-iyyunim ve-ha-diyyunim (kitab al-muhadara wa’l-mudhakara) by Moses Ibn Ezra [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1975.
Halper 1924
B.Z. Halper (tr.), Sefer Shirat Israel (kitab al-muhadara wa’l-mudhakara) by Moses Ibn Ezra, Leipzig 1924.
Hazan 1986
E. Hazan, The Poetics of the Sephardi Piyyut, [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1986.
Hazan 1995
E. Hazan, Hebrew Poetry in North Africa [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1995.
Huss 1994
Huss 2001
M. Huss, “Allegory and Fiction: Problems in the Determination of the Allegorical Mode in the Hebrew Rhymed Narrative in Spain” [Hebrew], in Rosen & Tzur (eds.), Israel Levin Jubilee Volume, 1, Tel Aviv, 1994, 95-126.
M. Huss, “It Never Happened Nor Did It Ever Exist: The Status of Fiction in the Hebrew Maqama,” Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature, 18 (2001), 57-104.
Levin 1963
I. Levin, Samuel Hanagid: His Life and Poetry [Hebrew], Tel Aviv 1963.
Levin 1970
I. Levin, Abraham Ibn Ezra: His Life and Poetry [Hebrew], Tel Aviv 1970.
Levin 1971
I. Levin, “I sought the One Whom My Soul Loveth”: A Study on the Influence of Erotic Secular Poetry on Hebrew Religious Poetry” [Hebrew] Hasifrut 3/1 (1971), 116-149.
Levin 1986
I. Levin, Mystical trends in the Poetry of Solomon Ibn Gabirol [Hebrew], Lod 1986.
Levin 1995
I. Levin, The Embroidered Coat: The Genres of Hebrew Secular Poetry in Spain [Hebrew] 1-3, Tel Aviv 1995. (Vol. 1, 1st ed. 1963).
Luzzatto 1840
Luzzatto S.D. (ShaDaL), Betulat bat Yehuda, Prague 1840.
Luzzatto 1856
Luzzatto S.D. (ShaDaL), Mabo le-Mahzor Bne Roma, 1856. (ed. by D. Goldschmidt, Tel Aviv 1966).
Luzzatto 1864
Luzzatto S.D. (ShaDaL), Diwan Yehuda ha-Levi, Lyck, 1864.
Mirsky 1969
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Pagis 1970
D. Pagis, Secular Poetry and Poetic Theory: Moses Ibn Ezra and His Contemporaries [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1970.
Pagis 1976
D. Pagis, Change and Tradition in the Secular Poetry: Spain and Italy [Hebrew], Jerusalem, 1976.
Pagis 1979
D. Pagis, “Trends in the Study of Medieval Hebrew Literature,” AJS Review 4 (1979), 125-141.
Pagis 1986
D. Pagis, A Secret Sealed: Hebrew Baroque Emblem Riddles from Italy and Holland, Jerusalem 1986.
Pagis 1991
D. Pagis, Hebrew Poetry of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Berkeley 1991.
Pagis 1993
D. Pagis (ed. E. Fleischer), Poetry Aptly Explained: Studies and Essays on Medieval Hebrew Poetry [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1993.
Poesía Estrófica 1991
F. Corriente and A. Sáaenz-Badillos (eds.), Poesía Estrófica Árabe y Hebrea y sus Paralelos Romances, Madrid 1991.
Rosen & Tzur 1994
T. Rosen and R. Tzur,. Israel Levin Jubilee Volume: Studies in Hebrew Literature 1 [Hebrew], Tel Aviv 1994.
Rosen 2000a
T. Rosen, “Sexual Politics in a Medieval Hebrew Marriage Debate,” Exemplaria 12 (2000), 157-184.
Rosen 2000b
T. Rosen, “Circumcised Cinderella: The Fantasies of a Fourteenth Century Jewish Author,” Prooftexts 20 (2000), 87-104.
Rosen-Moked & Zemach 1983
T. Rosen-Moked and E. M. Zemach, A Sophisticated Work: Close Readings in Samuel Ha-Nagid [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1983.
Rosen-Moked 1985
T. Rosen-Moked, The Hebrew Girdle Poem (Muwashshah) in the Middle Ages [Hebrew], Haifa 1985.
Sáenz-Badillos 1994
A. Sáenz-Badillos, “Hebrew Invective Poetry: The Debate between Todros Abulafia and Phinehas Halevi” Prooftexts 16 (1996), 49-73.
Scheindlin 1986
R.P., Scheindlin, Wine, Women and Death: Medieval Hebrew Poems on the Good Life, Philadelphia 1986.
Scheindlin 1991
R.P. Scheindlin, The Gazelle: Medieval Hebrew Poems on God, Israel and the Soul, Philadelphia 1991.
Scheindlin 1994
R.P. Scheindlin, “Two Love Stories of Jacob ben Eleazar: Between Arabic and Romance,” Proceedings of the Eleventh World Congress of Jewish Studies, Division C/ 3, Jerusalem 1994, 16-20.
Scheindlin 1999
R.P. Scheindlin, Review-essay on Schirmann-Fleischer 1996 and Schirmann-Fleischer 1997 [Hebrew], Zion 64 (1999), 384-400.
Scheindlin 2000
R.P. Scheindlin, Moses Ibn Ezra, in Al-Andalus 2000 (above), 252-264
Schirmann 1934
J. Schirmann, Anthologie der Hebräischen Dichtung in Italien, Berlin 1934
Schirmann & Brody 1974
H. Brody and J. Schirmann (ed.), Solomon Ibn Gabirol: Secular Poems [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1974.
Schirmann 1942
J. Schirmann, “The Research on Spanish Hebrew Poetry (1919-1939),” Sdarim, Measef Sofre Eretz Israel [Hebrew], Tel Aviv 1942, 475-481.
Schirmann 1961
J. Schirmann, Hebrew Poetry in Spain and Provence, 1-4 [Hebrew], Jerusalem & Tel Aviv 1957 [2nd ed. 1961]
Schirmann 1965
J. Schirmann (ed.), New Hebrew Poems from the Genizah [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1965.
Schirmann 1967
J. Schirmann, “Problems in the Study of Post-Biblical Hebrew Poetry,” The Israel Academy of Science and Humanities Proceedings, II/12, Jerusalem 1967.
Schirmann 1970
J. Schirmann, Introduction to 2nd edition of Davidson’s Thesaurus 1970.
Schirmann 1979
J. Schirmann, Studies in the History of Hebrew Poetry and Drama, 1-2 [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1979.
Schirmann 1989
J. Schimann’s Bibliography of Studies in Hebrew Mediaeval Poetry 1948-1978: Accumulative Index. Compiled and edited by E. Adler, G. Davidson, A. Kehath and P. Ziv, Beer Sheva 1989.
Schirmann-Fleischer 1996
J. Schirmann (edited supplemented and annotated by E. Fleischer), The History of Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1996.
Schirmann-Fleischer 1997
J. Schirmann, (edited, supplemented and annotated by E. Fleischer), The History of Hebrew Poetry in Christian Spain and Southern France [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1997.
Steinschneider 1857
M. Steinschneider, Jewish Literature from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Century, London 1857.
Stern 1974
S.M. Stern, Hispano Arabic Strophic Poetry: Studies (ed. L.P. Harvey), Oxford 1974.
Te’uda 1999
Te’uda 15 (1999), A Volume Dedicated to A Century of Geniza Research (ed. Mordechai A. Friedman).
Tobi 2000
Y. Tobi, Proximity and Distance: Medieval Arabic and Hebrew Poetry [Hebrew], Haifa 2000.
Tzur 1987
R. Tzur, Mediaeval Hebrew Poetry in a Double Perspective: The Versatile Reader and Hebrew Poetry in Spain: Papers in Cognitive Poetics [Hebrew], Tel Aviv 1987.
Weiss 1952
J. Weiss, “Courtly Culture and Courtly Poetry” [Hebrew], Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies 1 (1952), 396-403.
Yahalom 1985
J. Yahalom, Poetic Language in the Early Piyyut [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1985.
Yahalom 1999
J. Yahalom, “Remains of the Collected Poetry of Jewish Andalusian Poets in the Cairo Geniza” [Hebrew], Teuda 15 (1999), 37-46.
Yahalom 1999
J. Yahalom, Poetry and Society in Jewish Galilee of Late Antiquity, Tel Aviv 1999.
Yahalom 2001
Y. Yahalom, Judaeo-Arabic Poetics: Fragments of a Lost Treatise by Elazar ben Jacob of Baghdad [Hebrew], Jerusalem 2001.
Yedi’ot
Yedi’ot ha-machon le-heqer ha-shira ha-ivrit, (Proceedings of the Schocken Institute; 7 volumes), Berlin-Jerusalem, 1933-1958.
Yellin 1932-1937
D. Yellin (ed.), Gan ha-meshalim ve-ha-hidoth: Diwan of Don Tadros Abu-el-Afia [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1932-1937.
Yellin 1941
D. Yellin, Introduction to the Hebrew Poetry of the Spanish Period [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1941 [2nd ed. 1972]
Zemach 1962
E. Zemach, Ke-shoresh etz: New Readings of Eleven Secular Poems by Solomon Ibn Gabirol [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1962.
Zulay 1964
M. Zulay, The Liturgical Poetry of Sa’adia Gaon and His School [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1964.
Zulay 1995
M. Zulay (ed. E. Hazan), Eretz Israel and Its Poetry: Studies in Piyyutim from the Cairo Geniza [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1995.
Zunz 1855
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Zunz 1859
L. Zunz, Die Ritus des synagogalen Gottesdienstes, Berlin 1859.
Zunz 1865
L. Zunz, Literaturgeschichte der synagogalen Poesie, Berlin 1865.
2. Hebrew Narrative
Alexander-Frizer 1991 T. Alexander-Frizer, The Pious Sinner: Ethics and Aesthetics in the Medieval Hasidic Narrative, Tübingen 1991.
Baron 1952 S. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vols. VI & VII, New York 1958.
Bialik & Rawnitzki H. N. Bialik and Y. H. Rawnitzki, The Book of Legend (Sefer ha-Aggadah), trans. W. G. Braude, New York 1992.
Bin Gorion 1938 M.J. Bin Gorion (Berdyczewski), Mimekor Yisrael [Hebrew], Tel-Aviv 1938.
Cohen 1967 G. D. Cohen, The Book of Tradition: Sefer ha-Qabbalah by Abraham ibn Daud, London 1967.
Dan 1974 J. Dan, The Hebrew Story in the Middla Ages [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1974.
Eisenstein 1915 J. D. Eisenstein, Ozar Midrashim [Hebrew], New York 1915.
Flusser 1978-1980 D. Flusser, The Josippon [Hebrew], Edited with an Inroduction, Commentary and Notes, Jerusalem 1978-1980.
Gaster 1899 M. Gaster, The Chronicles of Jerahmeel, London 1899.
Gaster 1924 M. Gaster, The Exempla of the Rabbis, London 1924.
Gaster 1928 M. Gaster, Texts and Studies, London 1928.
Geiger 1833 A. Geiger, Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthum aufgenommen, Bonn 1833.
Ginzberg 1909-1938 L. Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, New York 1909-1938, 7 vols.
Güdemann 1880-1888 M. Güdemann, Geschichte des Erziehungswesens und der Kultur der abendländischen Juden während des Mittelalters, Berlin 1880-1888, 3 vols.
Habermann 1946 A. M. Habermann, Sefer Gzerot Ashkenaz ve-Tzarfat [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1946.
Jellinek, 1853-1877 A. Jellinek, Bet ha-Midrasch: Sammlung kleinen Midraschim.. aus der ältern jüdischen Literature [Hebrew], Leipzig 1853-1877.
Klar 1944 B. Klar, Megilat Ahimaaz: The Chronicle of Ahimaaz, with a collection of poems from Byzantine Southern Italy and additions [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1944.
Lassner 1993 J. Lassner, Demonizing the Queen of Sheba: Boundaries of Gender and Culture in Postbiblical Judaism and Medieval Islam, Chicago and London 1933.
Lévi 1887 I. Lévi, Le Roman d'Alexandre, Paris 1887.
Limor & Yuval O. Limor & I. Yuval, Jews and Christians in Western Europe: Encounter between Cultures in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance [Hebrew], Unit 8: Images of the Past, Tel-Aviv 1997.
Neubauer & Stern A. Neubauer & M. Stern, Hebräische Berichte über Judenverfolgungen während der Kreuzzüge, Berlin 1892.
Pritchard 1974 J. B. Pritchard (ed.), Solomon and Sheba, London 1974.
Rubin 1999 U. Rubin, Between Bible and Qur'an, Princeton 1999.
Salzberger 1907 G. Salzberger, Die Salomo-Sage in der semitischen Sagenkunde, Berlin 1907.
Schussman 1981 A. Schussman, Stories of the Prophets in Muslim Tradition [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1981.
Schwarzbaum 1979 H. Schwarzbaum, The Mishlei Shu'alim (Fox Fables) of Rabbi Berechiah ha-Nakdan, Kiron 1979.
Schwarzbaum 1982 H. Schwarzbaum, Biblical and Extra-Biblical Legends in Islamic Folk Literature, 1982,
Seymor 1924 St. J. Seymor, Tales of King Solomon, London 1924.
Speyer 1931 H. Speyer, Die Biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran,
Steinschneider 1938 M. Steischneider, Allgemeine Einleitung in die Jüdische Literatur des Mittelalters, Jerusalem 1938.
Weil 1846 G. Weil, Biblical Legends of the Mussulmans, New York 1846.
Yassif 1984 E. Yassif, The Tales of Ben-Sira in the Middle Ages [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1984.
Yassif 1999 E. Yassif, The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning, trans. By J. S. Teitelbaum, Bloomington and Indianapolis 1999.
Yassif 2001 E. Yassif, The Book of Memory, that is The Chronicles of Jerahme'el. A Critical Edition [Hebrew], Tel-Aviv 2001.
Zfatman 1993 S. Zfatman, Between Ashkenaz and Sefarad: The Jewish Tale in the Middle Ages [Hebrew], Jerusalem 1993.
Zunz 1832 L. Zunz, Die Gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, historisch Entwickelt, Berlin 1832.
Zunz 1946 L. Zunz, Hadrashot be-Yisrael ve-Hishtalsheluta ha-Historit [Hebrew], trans. By M.A. Zack and Completed by Ch. Albeck, Jerusalem 1946.
Suggested Reading on medieval Hebrew poetry:
For introductory reading on medieval Hebrew poetry English readers are referred to the following items in the bibliography. Brann 1991, Scheindlin 1986 and Scheindlin 1991, and to articles by Brann, Drory, Rosen and Scheindlin in the Al-Andalus 2000 volume. These, however, cover only the Hebrew poetry, secular and religious, written in Spain. For secular literature (poetry and rhymed narratives) in Spain as well as in Renaissance Italy see Pagis 1991 (and Pagis 1976 [Hebrew]). For a comprehensive survey of liturgical poetry in its Eastern as well as its European centers throughout the Middle Ages see Fleischer 1975 [Hebrew].
Suggested Reading on medieval Hebrew narrative:
On the general theme of Jewish cultur and literary creativity in the Middle Ages, the best introductory-comprehensive survey is still, Baron 1952. Two important collections of texts traslated into English are: Gaster 1928 (texts and studies), and M. J. Bin Gorion, Mimekor Yisrael – Classical Jewish Folktales, Prepared by Dan Ben-Amos, Boomington and Indianapolis 1990. On the midrashic backgroud of medieval Hebrew narrative see the classical Zunz 1932&1946 (in German and Hebrew). The first comprehensive surveys of story collections and specific stories in medieval Jewish culture are Dan 1974 (in Hebrew), and Yassif 1999. Encyclopedia Judaica, Jerusalem 1973, although not updated, has good scatered information on specific books, authors and themes of the Hebrew narrative in the Middle Ages, in English.
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