Introduction
Background1
The ‘Golden Age’ (of Hebrew literature) is a label German Jewish historians in the nineteenth century attached to the period between the mid-tenth and the mid-twelfth centuries in al-Andalus. The period has rightfully earned this name. The cultural interaction between the Jewish and Muslim communities, the emergence of a class of Jewish courtiers who spent their time not only in a courtly manner, but in the society of Muslim courtiers (while remaining Orthodox Jews with a profound interest in and impact on their communities), the affluence (even if affecting only a small section of the community) that facilitated patronage of poor but talented poets (in addition to some viziers, generals, and physicians who were themselves great poets) – all these factors brought about a revolution in Hebrew letters. As Maria Rosa Menocal puts it ‘Hebrew was redefined, and cultivated as a language that could transcend the devotional and theological uses to which it had been limited’ (Ref. Reference Menocal2, p. 109). She also points out the particular role that the ‘tolerance and openness of the universe of Arabic Poetry’ played in that revolution. ‘At some profound level a pious Jew could unashamedly recite a pre-Islamic ode or homo-erotic poem because a pious Moslem could’ (Ref. Reference Menocal2, p. 108).
Such interaction, however, aroused competition as well. These Andalusian Jews did not only want to write Arabic poetry in Hebrew; they wanted to equal or surpass the achievement of their admired model. The fact that this model was grounded in the Koran and in pre-Islamic (al Jahiliya) poetry was one of the reasons that led them to choose Biblical Hebrew (to the exclusion of other registers of Hebrew) as their aesthetic vehicle, a choice that had many consequences for them and for later generations. At the time, for example, this choice allowed for the easy allegorization of homoerotic poetry, as God has already been called a buck or a faun in many books of the Bible, and the secular Song of Songs gained admission into the Biblical canon through precisely such allegorization. For today’s reader, that choice might mean an association of a modern text with a Biblical passage with which the reader is familiar, rather than with the medieval text it might be echoing. This choice also meant that during the revival of Hebrew in the modern era, with its turn to Biblical Hebrew as the basis on which to construct modern poetry and a modern vernacular, the Hebrew poetry of al-Andalus would become a canonized point of reference. This means that its value as ‘cultural capital’ is high. Presumably, players in the literary field would gain by referring to Andalusian poetry or identifying themselves with its tradition.
However, this potential gain is not easy to come by, mainly because most secular Israelis do not really see the poetry of al-Andalus as an integral part of their cultural heritage. They certainly do not own this canonic corpus as an active part of their cultural memory. The situation is different for orthodox Jews, because many ‘Golden Age’ poems – even secular ones – found their way into the Sidur (the prayer book). The reason for this estrangement is not so much the affinity between this body of poetry and the Jewish religious tradition, nor is it the association of this poetry with Arab culture, although these facts might certainly have played a part in view of the political situations (internally – the rift between ‘secular’ and orthodox; externally – the rift between Israelis and Palestinians), but, rather, the language used by ‘Golden age’ poets.
The adaptation of Biblical Hebrew to Arabic prosody (i.e. metres and rhyming systems) led to many verbal choices and grammatical constructions that were to become very strange and difficult to modern Israelis. For example, the ‘bolting’ rhyme, the phoneme (distinct group of sounds) that marks the end of verses in ‘Golden Age’ poetry, is almost always a syntactic morpheme signifying gender and number (e.g. ‘hem’ signifies plurality and masculinity) and is perceived as an awkward mode of rhyming by modern readers. As a rule, poets and literary scholars, who admire the ability of writers to grapple with artistic constraints, appreciate and love ‘Golden Age’ poetry; but most graduates of Israeli secular schools, although they are taught a number of these poems and encounter the names of the poets that wrote them, as well as some of the latter’s best-known texts on street signs and trivia cards, find this poetry hard to understand and consequently to relate to. As a result, they fail to see the universal relevance of themes written in rigid forms and employing a fixed reservoir of images and metaphors.
Andalusian Genres
Hebrew poetry in al-Andalus assimilated a number of genres made up of stable configurations of themes and images. These particularly concern various kinds of secular poetry, dealing with themes such as love and desire, homoerotic love, wandering (in relation to parting and exile), praise of others and self-praise, complaints, wine and wine parties, meditative epigrams, and dirges. Each of these genres came with a relatively closed set of formal options, sub-themes, images, and rhetorical figures – in short, a generic model. Thus, for example, the love-object in a typical short amatory ode (Ghazal) is always a young doe or a faun; the beloved is most often hard to get or unfaithful; the lover is despondent, and so forth.
This configuration is well known in Europe as the model actualized by a number of Provencal poets, by Petrarch and Dante, some English sonneteers, all the way down to pop and rock lyrics (again, beautifully demonstrated by Menocal in Shards of Love Reference Menocal3). Formally these models are actualized (i.e. articulated) in two forms: short and long poems. Short poems usually comprise one theme only, are not divided into stanzas and all the verses are linked (bolted) by the same rhyme. Long poems can be written either with one ‘bolting’ rhyme (Qasidah) or divided into strophes defined by distinct ‘bolting’ rhymes (Muwashshah or girdle song). The latter is al-Andalus’ contribution to the poetics of Arabic and Hebrew poetry.
One illustration is all I have room for in this paper to give an idea of what an actualized model might look like. It is important to be aware of two things: with relation to the historical genre we must note that while the translation exhibits the prosodic features (the opening verse decides the rhyme of all the refrains, in each stanza all the verses are linked by the same rhyme), it does not exhibit the linguistic register that might make even such a simple love poem difficult to understand. With respect to the evolving tradition one should note the similarity between this structure (short 3–4 line stanza and a 2 line refrain) and pop songs on love (in this case) or other themes. It should also be mentioned that the illustrated type is not as prevalent as those amatory poems that could be allegorized and in this way gain respectability even in a community that did not think aesthetic achievements a satisfactory justification for such a pastime.
Two stanzas and refrain from an Amatory Muwashshah by Shmuel Hanagid:
In addition to the linguistic difficulties and changing tastes, we must remember that ‘light’ Andalusian poetry is not privileged school material. Poems that are more serious, personal or Jewish in character are studied more often and are therefore better known to people educated in secular Israel. One could think of such examples as Zion songs by Yehuda Halevi, which are probably the best known and have supplied Israeli culture with a number of phrases that people know even when they do not remember in their entirety the poems from which the phrases have been taken.
Theoretical Framework
To understand the implications of the estrangement between contemporary secular Israelis and ‘Golden Age’ poetry on the latter’s functional presence in contemporary Hebrew poetry, we must look at the complex relations that different characteristics of texts or groups of texts maintain in a literary system. Canonicity, centrality and activity do not necessarily apply to the same text. Different combinations are possible.
I present the options in a schema, showing the two poles of a spectrum of possibilities: on the left-hand side I list the major characteristics of canonized texts that become ‘dinosaur-like’ museum pieces – that is, everyone recognizes their images, knows that they have existed and even what they looked like, and admires their grandeur; yet hardly anyone has first-hand knowledge of them. Of course, this is where the analogy does not hold. For while it is a fact that no one knows dinosaurs intimately (so to speak), there certainly are readers who are intimate with canonic texts of the ‘Golden Age.’
On the right-hand side, I list the characteristics of those texts that even after their canonization remain a living part of the literary system – the lions or any other animal that occupies a prestigious place and is known to any member of the relevant cultural group from first-hand experience
The lower part of the schema presents as dichotomies the two polar options for generic models (i.e. sets of relations between themes, images, and formal features) extracted from canonic texts (sometimes laid down by authorities, such as Aristotle’s model of tragedy and its actualizations in Neo-classical French tragedies; most often resulting from many interpretations and re-usages that make them part of a culture’s cognitive memory). Models, then, are, ontologically, abstractions that can be actualized by authors and, cognitively, memory structures that can be activated by users.
On the left-hand side are the most typical characteristics of dinosaurs: petrified models, genre configurations that are no longer active knowledge structures and therefore hardly ever employed in the cognitive processes of composition or interpretation. On the right-hand side, I list the characteristics of active models that, because of continuous activity, may be concretized in new forms, actualized as poems whose readers may relate to other genres or traditions, but will use the original models as cognitive structures during the interpretation process, just as the writers will do in the composition process.
Illustrations
Let me illustrate the dinosaur-like status of ‘Golden Age’ poetry by showing the inactivity of the model, manifested distance, and the explicit and explicated mode of alluding.
Active and Inactive Models: Reading Al-Kilani’s ‘Greetings from the Nakeb’
An encounter with a Palestinian poem, written in the 1980s, made me aware of the difference between active and inactive models. This encounter also taught me to what extent the Andalusian models are inactive even in the brain of a literary scholar (myself) with no expertise, but with a relatively high degree of familiarity with them.4
Greetings from the Nakeb
(My literal translation from a Hebrew translation approved by the poet. Explanations in square brackets are also mine.)
A discussion of the poem took place during a tri-partite meeting of German, Arab and Hebrew poets, where the Palestinian poet Sami Al-Kilani read his poem. In response to comments and questions addressed to him by me and by others, he informed the participants that he composed ‘Greetings from the Nakeb’ when he, then a prisoner in a detention camp located in a desolate part of the Negev, was looking at the sky at nightfall. He conceived of it as a personal poem, written as an expression of the liberating experience of relief in the midst of quotidian suffering: dryness and thirst for lack of water were facts, not fiction; the reviving effect of the breeze at nightfall was a reality, not a metaphor. Al-Kilani insisted that the blooming cool desert symbolized personal relief, a vision of peace and happiness.
From biographical circumstances surrounding the poem’s composition, al-Kilani moved to literary traditions. According to al-Kilani, Arabic representations of a desert do not present it as a place of romantic vistas of freedom and wilderness (as I imagined within the constraints of my ‘orientalistic’ background), but as a land in which it is difficult to survive. It is a place which forces wandering on its dwellers, and therefore is often associated with partings, with longing for distant loved places and people, as well as with images of ruined and desolate places that need to be restored.
On the basis of the combined literary and biographical information, it is not difficult to interpret the poem in terms of the Arab (or, for a Hebrew speaker, Andalusian) literary tradition, perceiving the traditional themes and images as ‘ready-mades’ that an author can use in order to develop either a literal or a metaphoric image. The ‘desert caravan,’ for example, can be read as a metaphorical description of clouds moving in the evening sky. But as its additional load, the caravan carries a complete schema of desert, tents, ruined dwellings, the enemy that destroyed the dwellings, far away beloved, and so forth – all of which appear in the poem at some point. The ‘wound’s lips’ can be literally read as parched fissured lips and figuratively as dry cracked land. The caravan that moves over the wound can also do it both literally, in terms of a desert representation, and figuratively, in terms of the wind that blows the clouds, alleviating the pain rather than causing or enduring it. The crying of the humps and the groaning of the hoofs expand the metaphorical vehicle while the tenor, the prisoner’s suffering is projected onto them. ‘Camel-driver’ is not only a realistic feature of a desert caravan, but also the carrier of messages, both in the form of today’s mail and of yesterday’s poetic letters (the Bedouin Qasida).
The same is true of the interpretation of the following stanzas through the interplay of the realistic (Palestinian imprisoned in the desert) and the conventional (the topos of wandering) frames. Once we have activated the conventional frame of ‘the hardships of living in the desert’, the source of pain, figuratively presented as the ‘whip of hell’s fire,’ becomes the actual heat although it can still represent the jailer or the enemy. The tents whose proud heads covered ‘the view of the jail and its jailers’ can represent traditional Arab dwellings, a successful tool in nomad survival, as well as the actual tents of the detention camp. They could be transformed into emblems of the missed home by the victorious imagination and memory of the prisoner.
Composed and interpreted in a context that has kept the Arab models alive and active, as proven by the poet’s remarks as well as those of some other Arab participants, this poem that originated in an individual experience, defined in the context of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, becomes a poem about fortitude, about survival, about human imagination and love, as much as it is a poem about the Palestinian battle for national independence. The traditional components endow, then, the particular individual experience of the detainee with historical depth and wider human significance.
In spite of my academic acquaintance with the Hebrew poetry of al-Andalus, and a number of years of teaching its best-known texts in a high school, my initial reading of this poem did not take into account the interpretive potential of the traditional elements. In what can be taken as a proof of the model’s inactive presence in my reservoir of literary models, my initial reading of the poem was quite different and could be termed ‘A Zionist Reading.’
Hebrew Israeli culture provided me with at least three active models onto which the various images of the poem could be mapped in the process of interpretation: redeeming the dry land, transforming the desert into a garden, and waging war against the desolation. As the central theme of a poetic model, each of these has a reservoir of images.
The dry land as a thirsty person, probably the most popular image, is prevalent in Israeli songs, and consists of a presentation of the Negev as a thirsty person praying for water, as in this popular song:
The transformation of the desert into a blooming garden happens miraculously without the laborious intervention of the pioneers. This image has its roots in the Bible, where it is symbolically related to national revival. It is no wonder that the first two lines and the last two of the following selection of the Biblical verses became a popular dance song in modern Israel:5
The image of the desert as an enemy on whom the pioneer wages war dominates the political discourse of the pioneering period. This topos includes images of pain and suffering as well. A folksong of the 1930s tells the story of building roads over sand dunes in these terms:
The ease with which Zionist cultural frames could accommodate the interpretation of this poem completely subdued the Andalusian frames that could have changed or qualified my interpretation. The ‘Zionist’ reading did not obliterate for me the fact that the poet was a Palestinian. On the contrary, bringing my awareness of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and my knowledge of the poet’s biography into my reading of the poem, I made the conflict its implicit subject. However, this was at the expense of the personal aspect immediately present if a model of a poem of wandering and being separated from your loved ones is activated. Unfortunately, this known Andalusian model exists as an inactive model in my brain, requiring stronger triggers for its activation.
Proclaimed Affiliation and Response: Shamosh’s ‘Minkha’
Writing within a living tradition, al-Kilani is not obliged to state in his poem his relations with the Arab (Andalusian for me) tradition. Those Israeli poets who are not marginally situated epigons do exhibit the need to do so.6 They may have various reasons for doing so. Full awareness of the cultural capital attached to Hebrew poetry of al-Andalus as well as of its essential qualities and values, combined with the realization of the dinosaur-like status of its texts as well as of the models abstracted from them, can yield interesting combinations of consciously and explicitly imitative (but not epigonic) serious poems. But the distance projected by a conscious imitation always holds a parodic potential. My second example is a serious dialogue of a contemporary poet with Yehuda Halevi, one of the greatest ‘Golden Age’ poets, a poem that underlines the distance and takes advantage of its comic potential.
In 1981, Amnon Shamosh published a volume of poetry entitled Spanish Diwan. This title is, by itself, a declaration of the choice of a marginalized tradition, almost a battle cry in the Israeli cultural arena. However, written from the position of belonging to what used to be the social elite of pre-1977 ‘Socialist’ Israel (the Kibbutz), the Diwan itself is far from bellicose. The poet is detached from the tradition he chose to proclaim his own, even if his is a choice gendered by love and respect.
The second poem in the Diwan presents a complex combination of being simultaneously within and without the Andalusian tradition.
Minkha
(Shamosh, 1991, 8–9, my translation for use in the 2007 Academia Europaea Toledo Conference.)
Written in the form of a muwashshach this poem dialogues with one of the best known Zion poems by Yehuda Halevi (before 1075–1141):
The first verse of Shamosh’s poem reverses completely the situation of the Jew in Exile, of which Halevi’s poem is the ultimate articulation. In the same way it reverses the image of ruined Zion. The speaker is situated in the East, in the Land of Israel, where he lives the idyllic life of a farmer. Having achieved Halevi’s dreams, he can afford to look back at Jewish history and challenge many of Halevi’s basic tenets. The Jews’ unremitting longings for Israel are juxtaposed with the poet’s longings for his family roots. Now in the desired East he is looking westwards, pondering the question of the source and meaning of such longings, as well as their psychological and national functions. Juxtaposing his mother and his daughter at the end of his poem, he seriously poses the question whether secular Israeli identity (represented by the kibbutz and the different outward appearance) has replaced the Jewish identity of the Diaspora (represented by Aram TZova and its famous scroll, as well as by Halevi’s ‘Discourse of Exile’ and the Andalusian format)? The very option of posing such a question signals distance. The general familiarity of Israelis with Halevi’s poem or, at least, with the disengaged phrase ‘my heart is in the East, but I am in the edge of the West’) brings forth the minimal parodic potential. A secular Israeli reader might smile at the reversal of positions and attitudes and take the puns or other comic language usages to be indicative of the poem’s lighter thrust. But whether readers take the poem seriously or with a smile, they are bound to acknowledge it as a conscious manipulation of the Andalusian poetic tradition. Proclaiming affiliation is, then, very different from being inside a tradition. Thus, while seemingly employing the tradition as if it still is a lion, an active model, the distance reveals its dinosaur-like position even for this true descendant of Andalusia.
Explicit and Explicated Allusions: Amichai’s ‘Tel Gath’
Coming from a different tradition, the German-born Yehudah Amichai, the leading Israeli poet of the second half of the twentieth century, has on numerous occasions expressed his admiration and love for ‘Golden Age’ poetry in general and that of Shmuel HaNagid (Ibn Nagrila) in particular. Amichai claims that ‘Golden Age’ poetry was the most important experience of his university studies of Hebrew literature. Tova Rosen, in a seminal article from 1995,Reference Rosen8 describes in detail all the references to Andalusian poetry in his work: poems on Andalusian poets (Yehuda Halevi and Ibn Gabirol), quotations, structural similarities, echoes and allusions.
Allusion to an earlier text is most often an explicit expression of rhetorical inter-textuality. Following a trigger in a text they are reading, readers are expected to activate their memorized knowledge of an invoked text. They are also expected to bring semantic material from the earlier text into their reading of the later text. From this angle the very use of an allusion indicates at least an assumption that the earlier text is still active in cultural memory and, hence, in readers’ minds; a ‘lion-like’ status, if you like. In her discussion of Amichai’s 1990 poem ‘Tel Gath’, Rosen points out this inter-textual aspect of the poet’s ‘most explicit articulation of his close relations with the poetry of HaNagid’ (Ref. Reference Rosen8, p. 97). I’d like to follow her discussion and use this example as a test case for my claim, trying to answer the question: how can a ‘dinosaur-like’ canonic text be employed in an allusion?
Tel Gath
Amichai cites, within quotation marks, a phrase from a short poem by Ha-Nagid (993–1055 or 1056), a vizier of the ruler of Granada and commander of his Army, head of the Jewish community, grammarian, and author of three volumes of secular poetry in Hebrew. Like many of HaNagid’s poems, particularly in ‘Ben-Kohelet,’ this poem opens with a factual description. HaNagid and his soldiers are camped for the night on a hill. The men sleep on the ground while many others, soldiers and ordinary people, sleep eternally underground. This descriptive beginning leads already in the third verse to a meditation, three times longer than the opening, on the universality and inevitability of death.
The allusion’s trigger, comprising the graphically marked quotation and the identification of its source, makes clear the fact that Amichai does not expect his readers to recall HaNagid’s text. They are in fact directed towards external information. HaNagid, like Amichai, is a man of many layers (the defining feature of a mound) and a man of many wars. Even the evocation of HaNagid’s typical poetic structure – the movement from a concrete description of the particular context to a generalized meditation – is spelled out, in order to establish the difference between them: ‘Yet I did not talk to my heart, as he did,/ But to my children.’ Needless to say, this negative comparison has important thematic and ars-poetic functions. It clarifies the difference between Amichai, who embraces the eternity of life, and HaNagid who embraces that of death.
This form of activating an earlier text should be contrasted with two other allusions. The first refers the readers to the Bible. ‘As dandelions in multitude’ activates in the mind of Israeli-schooled readers the covenant between Abraham and God. The promise of plentiful offspring is given twice in the form of a simile: ‘as grains of sand’ (Genesis 13,16) and ‘as stars in the sky’ (Genesis 16,5). Indeed, in the covenant scenes the articulation is different, but the image is repeated several times in the form ‘as grains of sand on the beach in multitude’ (Joshua 11,4; Judges 7,12; 1 Samuel 13,5; 2 Samuel 17,11, 1 Kings 4,20), and ‘as stars in the sky in multitude’ (Deuteronomy 1,10; 10,22; 28,68), as well as in many modern Hebrew texts. And so, in spite of the fact that those other references are often negative (either descriptions of enemy forces gathered to wage war on Israel or threats to the Children of Israel if they do not fill their part of the covenant they have with God), secular Israelis respond to Amichai’s phrasing as a trigger to the divine beneficial promise. The ironic belittling effect of the inter-textual construct is very typical of Amichai’s attitude towards the important little things life is made of in opposition to big aspirations and ideologies. The second allusion, although its trigger is even weaker, is to Amichai’s own poetry. Whereas it is difficult to imagine Ha-Nagid’s soliloquy as a ‘lullaby [sung] to his soldiers before the battle’, many of Amichai’s war-related poems carry this quality (such as, ‘Rain on the Battlefield’) both because Amichai often perceives soldiers as children and because he writes about their sacrifices and death in an understated and restrained, quiet manner. The poet can count on most of his readers to be familiar with his earlier poetry and to relate his expressed views on wars, identity, culture, history and religion to ‘the things he did and did not do’ mentioned in the opening stanza.10
Ultimately, while it is evident that an intertextual relation obtains between the two poems – a reader who activates HaNagid’s poem gains a richer text and achieves a richer interpretation, the mode of activating the Andalusian text proves its dinosaur-like status. The explicit and explicated mode of Amichai’s allusion to HaNagid’s poem is then the exact converse of the activation of models in the process of interpreting a text: the first represents the problem from a reader’s point of view; the second – from a writer’s. Dinosaur-like texts and models need strong triggers; sometimes they require supplying readers with all the necessary information
Conclusion
While the analysis of ‘Golden Age’ poetry as a literary ‘dinosaur’ is innovative in terms of literary theory, the claim itself is not new. Almost a hundred years ago, the leading poet of the Jewish revival, the national poet Haim Nachman Bialik, set a goal for Hebrew men of letters; to bring Medieval Hebrew poetry back into the blood circulation system of Hebrew literature, from which this poetry has been completely excluded. Almost 80 years later, one of the major contemporary Hebrew poets, Yitzhak Laor, in a review celebrating the recent publication of a new selection of poems by Ibn Gabirol, complained that in spite of clichéd speeches about 3000 years of Hebrew literature, ‘Golden Age literature is excluded and unknown more than ever.’ Laor contrasts the Hebrew situation with that of readers of Arabic poetry, who because they have never been outside the tradition ‘swim like fish in the rich water of this poetry.’ He suggests that the situation in Israel might be the outcome of a 200 years’ long process of dissociating Hebrew literature from its heterogeneity and imprisoning it in the confining borders of Western culture.Reference Laor15 In the same daily newspaper, Almog Behar (31 August 2007) repeats the argument in even stronger terms, when he claims that we need ‘to return to the Arab soul and the Arab-Jewish soul in order to understand our history, our culture. – Even before addressing the Palestinians, we need Arabic in order to converse with previous generations, with our cultural treasures, with our Jewishness.’ Essentially, both writers call for – or dream about – a restoration of the hybrid culture of al-Andalus, to which Menocal applied the expanded term ‘mudejar’, in modern Israel. Can this dream come true?
Politically, I believe this is bound to happen, though I cannot say when or how. But in terms of Israeli culture in general and its literary system in particular I think we can see it happening. Some of the most innovative and impressive voices in contemporary Israeli poetry are ‘orthodox’ or ‘religious’ poets who use Biblical and post-Biblical linguistic registers, as well as texts and models. Secular poets not only challenge the medieval model, manipulating it while maintaining their distance from the tradition, but also begin to revive it in various ways. For example, Ilan Sheinfeld writes homoerotic poems using the language and prosody of Golden Age Poetry for realistic descriptions of contemporary unabashed homoerotic love relations; certainly an example of reviving and innovating a model from within. Piyutim (religious songs) are set to music and performed by rock or ethnic music pop singers (Idan Reichel’s project, for example). These may be small beginnings, and there is still a long way to go before the language, the texts, and the models become generally accessible again. But these steps mark the way and prove that just as lions can with time become dinosaurs, dinosaurs can rise like lions once again.
Ziva Ben-Porat is Professor of Poetics and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, and the Director of The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics at Tel Aviv University, Israel. She has published extensively in the area of intertextuality, specifically about literary allusion, parody and imitation. Her most recent publication in this area is ‘Rewriting’ – a special issue of the Journal of Romance Studies. Another area of interest is semiotic theory of realism, in particular the way cultural concepts of seasons and locales are formed in different cultures. In recent years, she has been working on problems of cultural memory and the potential use of hypertext technology for preserving, disseminating and activating the conventional European Canon.
