The survey course of literature was originally designed to give students an introduction to the major authors, genres, and works of a given time period. It is a performance of literary history. The idea is for students to have a general familiarity with a national canon before they progress to the higher-level courses that specialize and go in depth into the study of a more specific time period, artistic movement, genre, author, or work.
Don José says read this
This makes sense if you approach the study of literature as literary history. But the recent social science and cultural studies turn in literary studies has created different expectations and habits of thought among students and professors alike. Some are beginning to find the traditional survey course out of step with expectations and current practice.
In a recent discussion with some students in my survey course on Peninsular Spanish literature (1100-1600), I found that very few of them thought that a Spanish major was essentially (as I had always imagined it) an English major, but in Spanish. That is, they did not feel that the purpose of the Spanish major is to learn the literary history of Spain and Latin America, and to learn about the formal aspects and critical approaches to the literary critical study of poetry, fiction, drama, and film. In short, they didn’t care about literary history; they wanted to ‘learn Spanish.’ One stubborn student admitted that he liked to read books and write essays about them. But the rest saw it differently.
I am always tinkering with my survey course. I teach it at least twice a year, so I have lots of opportunities to swap readings out, fine-tune the written assignments, and update my lecture notes and activities. In light of this recent discussion with my students, I decided on a more radical overhaul this time around.
Fond memories of 3rd-year Spanish
Many students in survey courses of Spanish and Latin American literature (in US universities) are language learners who are in their third or perhaps fourth year of study. They are not anywhere near as proficient in Spanish as the average English major is in English. It makes sense that the survey courses they take would not simply be a Spanish-language version of a survey of English literature. Many third-year language textbooks rubricate readings thematically, opening the unit with a general discussion of the theme (migration, women’s rights, pollution, family structure, etc) then progressing to a related reading with activities and written assignments designed to reinforce student’s understanding of the theme and their command of key vocabulary.
I adopted this approach in structuring my survey courses. I maintain a chronological structure that begins in the eleventh century and ends in the seventeenth. The main difference is in the presentation of the texts. The syllabus introduces each reading with a ‘big question,’ designed to point up the broader social, religious, or political significance of the text. In formulating the questions, I asked myself “what is interesting about this text?” (Not “how have literary historians explained the significance of this text” or “why is this text important for the development of Spanish literature?”).
What's interesting about this text?
For example, the unit on Marian miracles (we read one of the miracles in Gonzalo de Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora) asks “Why do we want God to be a woman?” For many of the readings, there is an excerpt of a contemporary essay on a related topic, and an additional primary text from the period on the same subject, and the occasional excerpt of a secondary literary critical essay.
The Question-driven syllabus
The ‘big question’ for each reading sets the agenda for the class meetings, discussion section meetings, and written assignments. For each syllabus entry, there is a question, key terminology or themes, a debate topic, and a creative assignment (práctica). In a given lecture meeting you might begin with an individual writing exercise and/or small group discussion of the question, then segue into coverage of the excerpt of a modern essay on a related topic (for the Catholic Monarchs’ Edict of Expulsion we’ll read an excerpt from an essay on ethnic cleansing) or a related primary text from the same period. Discussion section leaders can choose to assign students to prepare both sides of the debate based on textual evidence from primary and/or secondary texts. Alternatively they can choose to have students prepare the creative assignment, which can in turn form the textual basis for activities conducted during section.
None of these adjustments in approaching classic texts means that literary history is consigned to the dustbin. They still learn about Gonzalo de Berceo’s biography, about the emergence of Castilian as a literary language, about Catholic Mariology and popular Marian practices. It is still a survey course of (mostly) canonical texts; one geared for students who do not necessarily see themselves first and foremost as lit majors.
There will be skeptics. They will accuse me of pandering to students’ obsession with ‘relatability,’ of giving in to the tyranny of present-ism. But I think leading with the question is simply good humanism. It helps remind us of how these texts we love to read and teach speak to the human condition. And if our students, even our Spanish majors, are not necessarily presold on the humanities, I don’t see any harm in reminding them why they should be.
Our undergraduate program in Spanish literature has three courses at the third year level focusing on the study of a given genre: poetry, narrative, drama. This summer I taught “Introduction to Narrative” during summer session. It is a 4-credit course that meets four days weekly for sessions of 1h 50m over four weeks [click here to see syllabus].
In the past when I have taught the course I have had the students read a series of short stories and introduce a critical vocabulary of narratological concepts (plot elements, characterization, point of view, etc.). This time I gave them a selection of classic short stories from canonical Spanish and Latin American authors (Don Juan Manuel, Pardo Bazán, Rulfo, Matute, Borges, etc).
Typically I would assign a series of writing assignments geared to demonstrate an understanding of how the authors make use of the various narratological resources (theme, tone, narration, dialogue, plot, etc) and to what effect. The final assignment was usually a 5-7 page literary critical essay focusing on one or more of the texts.
There are two things I wanted to accomplish in designing this course the way I did:
Give the students some models for academic literary criticism
Provide an opportunity to produce a literary critical project that went beyond the traditional literary critical essay.
For the first three weeks we read one story per class session from the popular anthology Aproximaciones al estudio de la literatura hispánica (Approaches to the Study of Hispanic Literature). For the first class session, the students were responsible for reading the introductory essay on narratology and familiarizing themselves with key critical terms for the study of narrative. Before each class they took a short online quiz (4 strictly factual true/false questions) to make sure everyone had done the reading. In class we reviewed the stories and relevant critical concepts, and workshopped close readings, applying concepts, selecting textual examples, and explaining their importance for understanding the concepts.
In past classes, when reading students’ literary criticism I have been getting the (unscientific) impression that they do not have a strong sense of what professional literary criticism sounds like. That is, they are unfamiliar with the style, the rhetorical strategies and structural conventions of the genre.
It occurred to me that I have never required my third-year students to read literary criticism. I’d always assumed that assigning them professional literary critical essays would either overwhelm them (if in Spanish) or derail the pedagogical mission (if in English). I myself remember college professors of 300-level survey courses in English literature saying that they preferred we focus on writing our own criticism rather than read what other people thought about the texts.
But it is fair to ask someone to imitate a model they have not seen? Probably not; but in any event, I still thought that assigning long literary critical essays in Spanish might not be productive. So this time around, I compromised. For each short story on the syllabus, I located a published literary critical essay, and included 2-3 short selections in a one-page handout [click here to see one]. These extracts satisfied a number of requirements: they are short enough to be easily digestible for in-class discussion of how to deploy textual examples, they were short enough to satisfy most working definitions of fair use (and so could be included in a course reader without incurring additional copyright fees), and they were mostly in Spanish, the language of instruction for the course.
Because the articles are all about the stories the students read in preparation for the lesson, they help bolster their understanding of the material and give them specific examples for how to approach the texts critically. These models of criticism help to give students an idea as to what they are shooting for. I don’t expect them to start writing immediately like professional critics, but better to aim high.
At the end of weeks 1-3 students handed in a short (min 500 words) critical essay written on one of the week’s four texts explaining the author’s use of at least two of the critical concepts discussed in class.
For the final project, the students (working in groups) produced a film adaptation of one of the stories. Students were assigned randomly in groups of four and were responsible for submitting a script (guión) of their adaptation, then a storyboard (guión gráfico), and then the final cut video in .mp4 or .mov format.
To familiarize ourselves with the new format (video) we watched a series of similar video adaptations produced by AP Spanish students in US high schools. We also read Gerardo Sánchez’s short, self-published Como escribir un guión(How to write a script) and looked at examples of professional screenplays in Spanish. They built their skills in a series of in-class exercises in which they practiced conceiving and scripting short scenes from the readings in formal screenplay format.
The students spent week 4 (the final week) of the course workshopping their project in groups of 4 or 5. They spent the weekend working on their screenplay. On Monday they turned in the screenplay, with the storyboard due the following day. Wednesday they finished shooting and editing their short films. On Thursday, I booked the (very swanky) screening room of the new UO Cinema Studies Lab for a Spanish 333 film festival. Each group gave a short introduction to their film and fielded questions after the screening. The groups decided collectively whether or not they wanted to publish their shorts on YouTube.
It may seem counterintuitive to spend three weeks studying literary critical essays and then not require them to write a substantial literary critical essay. This was an experiment. My hope was that by combining traditional literary criticism with cinematic adaptation, the students would:
Reinforce their understanding of narrative and narratological concepts by approaching the material in a creative, productive assignment.
Come to a better comparative understanding of literary and cinematic approaches to narrative by having to experience, first-hand, the possibilities and limitations afforded by the film medium.
Experience something different in one of their Spanish classes, and maybe even have some fun (is that wrong?)
The adaptations were pretty good overall. I made it clear that I did not want them to spend lots of time mastering the equipment or the editing software. I wanted them to tell a story. A couple of the projects were shot entirely on an iPhone or iPod Touch, with pretty impressive results on both video and audio (the Rulfo adaptation below was shot entirely on an iPhone, including the audio). I’ve embedded two examples in this post, adaptations of story no. 35 from Don Juan Manuel’s Conde Lucanor (Spain, 14th c.) and Juan Rulfo’s “No oyes ladrar los perros” (Mexico, 20th c.)
Grad seminar at London School of Economics, circa 1981
What is the point of a graduate level seminar in literature? In a Masters-level class in, for example, medieval Spanish literature, there are two goals.
The first is to help students achieve mastery of a corpus of texts that will provide them with a broad familiarity with Hispanic cultural production. This way, when they are looking for work as instructors at the post-MA or postdoctoral levels they will have a familiarity with major works and movements in their historical contexts. To this end we require them to read and demonstrate critical understanding of primary works and secondary essays.
The second is to help them develop professional skills. To achieve this, I feel it is helpful to draw on communities of practice pedagogy, which in a nutshell suggests that if you want to be a chemist you should do chemistry and not just learn about it.
In literary criticism this generally means engaging with texts and eventually producing a critical essay that is essentially a Fisher-Price version of an academic journal article. I feel this is a reasonable goal for a graduate class but that ten weeks of furious reading followed by a week or so of scrambling to put together an acceptably rigorous essay is not a fair approximation of professional academics.
We all have different working methods, but generally the road from reading to finished manuscript is more iterative. We read, take notes, discuss with students or colleagues, write abstracts, give papers, respond to questions, rework ideas, hand a draft to a colleague, perhaps blog a preliminary version, submit a manuscript for peer review, incorporate readers’ comments, and then —hopefully— have a finished manuscript.
In a traditional graduate seminar there are far fewer formal occasions to articulate and reflect on the ideas you are forming. This is partly due to time constraints: in ten or fifteen weeks it is difficult to both get through a list of books and drill down onto one of them in particular.
We can, however, take steps to offer our students a more graduated experience, one more in line with the experience they are likely to have as an academic literary critic. One way to increase the intensity of a course is to limit the syllabus to one or two major works to be read in full over the term. This way, students can spend less time frantically trying to cram themselves full of Canonical Works and spend more time understanding a single work in its particular context. They can read selections of related works or source texts, historical documents, and secondary essays. And they can work on a series of close readings of the week’s section of the work. All of these, hopefully, contribute to a deeper and more intensive understanding of the work in question.
This format is also more conducive to a critical practice that anticipates the work of a humanities researcher. Students can develop a concept or theme over the course of the term, in a series of related writing assignments, in a conference abstract, in a short paper delivered in class, and then in a term paper.
The communal focus that comes from all students focusing on different aspects of a single work creates a group of critics who all have a stake in the conversation that is based on a deep and sustained reading they have undertaken together. When they present papers, all of their interlocutors are similarly critically engaged in the same text, as in a conference panel where the audience has all read, taught, and written on the text in question.
There are, of course, tradeoffs involved. The monographic course does not get you much closer to the bottom of your exam reading list. You could argue that by showcasing a single work, students who are not likely to take more than a single course in (for example) medieval Spanish literature will not get a sufficiently broad understanding of the period from their subsequent individual readings of the rest of the works on their list from that period.
This can be allayed somewhat by making an effort to bring the work into dialogue with other major works of the time. In one course I required each student to present on a related work of the same period in order to get a better idea of the intellectual context of the times. This provides some synthetic overview of the period, but does not go into much detail about the related works.
This past term I taught a seminar on Fernando de Rojas’ Celestina (1499) putting some of these ideas into practice. It yielded some fine results. There was sustained, insightful discussion in every class session, and all students participated very actively. I could see the students developing their critical voices over the course of the term, and by the end of the ten weeks they were able to write with some authority on their selected themes. The Q&A sessions after the short 10-minute mini-conference papers were lively, and the resulting essays seemed more interesting and more rigorously thought out than the kinds of essays I would receive when the syllabus was more ambitious. For now, at least, I’d say that’s a case for slow reading in graduate education.
What do you think? Have you had success designing (or taking) courses focusing on one work? Courses with graduated assignments that take students through various steps of the idea-mongering process? I look forward to your comments.
This post was originally given as a conference presentation at “Scriptures in Medieval Iberia: Language, literature, and sacred text in a multi-religious society” (Monday, 6 June, 2011, Iona Pacific Inter-religious Centre, Vancouver School of Theology). I’ve also posted a pdf of the handout, including full versions of the texts referenced, along with their translations.
The idea of intertextuality is very useful for understanding the importance of the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh in Spain’s medieval Hebrew literature. Intertextuality is the site of a good deal of theorizing, and while time constraints do not allow a full accounting of this discussion, I would like to borrow from Michael Worton and Judith Still’s understanding of the term in its most basic sense as it has been used by various literary critics and theorists. They write that “the writer is a reader of texts…before s/he is a creator of texts, and therefore the work of art is inevitably shot through with references, quotations, and influences of every kind.” This means that each work of art is a sort of group discussion, a collaborative process in which various texts, authors, experiences, and readings participate. The text is a fabric, a weave of a number of threads which in turn are pulled from other texts. Today I would like to talk about the processes by which this pulling and weaving happen in medieval Spanish-Hebrew texts, paying specific attention to the role of Biblical language and source texts.
Reading in the medieval period, especially of literary and poetic texts, was a very different experience from what is generally understood as reading in the modern age.
In this image, a miniature from a mansucript of the maqamat of al-Hariri of Basra, who wrote in the eleventh century, illustrates a literary gathering, where a popular preacher regales a crowd of listeners with his displays of rhetorical prowess.
There is not a book, page, or pen in sight. The experience is live, oral, aural, and judging from the hand gestures and gazes of both orator and audience, interactive. It is a social event.
This setting is recorded in the maqamat as well as in other genres of literary texts, and many of the structures of medieval literary texts and textual practices derive from a literary culture that is chiefly oral-aural as opposed to written.
By ‘scriptural textuality’ I mean the ways in which scripture is practiced and experienced by the community. This includes the visual reading of the text but also extends to the physicality of the text, its support and packaging, the physical and social contexts of its practice, and the aural-visual memory of its practice.
All of these contribute to biblical intertextuality in medieval Spanish-Hebrew literary texts, as we shall see.
Michael Sells has written about the ways in which Muslim communities experience the Qur’an and describes what he calls the ‘sound vision,’ the relation of sound to meaning, or the combined experience of seeing, hearing, and understanding the Qur’anic text in recitation.
Such recitations form part of the soundscape of a Muslim community, just as public recitations of the Tanakh form part of the soundscape of the writers whose texts we are about to examine.
Here is a demonstration of the idea of a sound vision of a text. This is Surat al-Qariah , “the Day of Reckoning” from the Qur’an, in a traditional modern printed edition. Take a look at the text.
Now, when the recitation and text are experienced together, the impression is quite different. And if the listener comprehends the text, the experience is one of layered visual, auditory, and narrative apprehension. This is the ‘sound image’ that Michael Sells is talking about – the multisensory record of the experience of hearing the text recited.
This understanding of reading as a verbal experience or embodied sensory event is recorded even within the Hebrew Bible itself, where according to Daniel Boyarin, the act of reading is nearly always described as a speech event meant to elicit action. A king reads from a scroll and people act upon the words. Prophets recite to exhort proper behavior from errant fellow Hebrews. Reading is not merely scanning a text but participating in a community, whether political or religious.
By way of demonstration I would like to try to illustrate or at least suggest the various forms of intertextuality that might obtain in any given reading of a biblical text. I’ll take the example of the Hebrew Shir HaShirim or Song of Songs. This text is a frequent source of language and imagery for medieval Hebrew love poetry, and also forms part of the liturgy for the Passover holiday, or Pesah. Here is an image of the opening verses of chapter one as they are written in a modern Torah scroll. The person reciting the text would be using this type of document as a visual support and would supply the vowels, which are absent from this text, and cantillation marks, or trope, from memory.
Any reference to the words of the Song of Songs in a poetic context would evoke, certainly for the poet and most likely for much of his or her audience, this text and its traditional recitation, the sound image similar to the Quranic example we have just seen.
For the poet and his audience that understands the meaning of the Hebrew text, the allusion would also rely on the literal meaning of the text in addition to the sound image of its recitation. This would seem to be obvious but is worth pointing out when one considers that the majority of the audience of such a recitation would likely consist of worshippers who might recognize the sound of the Hebrew words but would not necessarily understand their meaning. There are some billion Muslims worldwide who learn to recite the first chapter of the Qur’an, but only a relatively small percentage of them understand the meaning of the classical Arabic text.
In addition to the sound image of the recitation and the accompanying sensory memories of the gathering in the synagogue where it takes place, the allusion would also carry with it associations with the traditional exegetical interpretations of the passage. In this case, I bring examples from the commentary of Abraham ibn Ezra, a Sephardic rabbi who lived from the end of the eleventh century to the beginning of the twelfth. The traditional rabbinic interpretation of the Song of Songs is that, far more than a mere love poem, the text is an allegory of the love between God and the community of Israel.
To the sound image, literal meaning, and exegetical meaning, we might also add the liturgical context of the texts recitation as part of the Passover liturgy, with all the affective cathexis that attends the celebration of a major religious holiday: the specialness of the occasion, the hope for a good growing season, the spring fever that inevitably strikes the youth any community at this time of year. In this particular photo we see Samaritans celebrating the Passover in the West Bank.
In the same vein, the Song of Songs might well recall for poet and audience the social and familial context of the celebration: the foods, songs, and customs related to the celebration of Passover, the gathering of relatives and friends, the Seder or traditional ritual meal, the new clothes. In this photo we see a scene from a Passover Seder of the Jewish community of Manila in 1925.
All of these associations come bundled with poetic allusions to a biblical text: the textual image, the sound image, the literal and exegetical meanings, the lived experience of liturgical and social events related to the text. All of these may be indexed, consciously or otherwise, when a writer deploys biblical text in an original poetic composition, as well as by readers and listeners of that composition.
Let’s see how this intertextuality obtains in a specific example from a strophic poem, a muwashshah, by the same Abraham ibn Ezra who wrote the commentary on the Song of Songs that we have just seen. As you probably are aware, Ibn Ezra, like many of the prominent Jewish intellectuals of al-Andalus, was a gifted polymath who is also a noted exegete. He was highly educated in rabbinics as well as in secular Arabic poetry, lore, and science. The worlds intermingle in this poem, in which a number of intertexts are juxtaposed with the language of the Song of Songs.
The complete poem is number one in your handout. In this particular stanza, ibn Ezra juxtaposes language drawn directly from Shir Hashirim with a closing couplet or ‘kharja’ in Andalusi vernacular Arabic. The poetic image of the apple as a perfume for, or alternately a substitution for, the mouth of the beloved resonates both with the biblical text as well as with Arabic poetic tradition.
In the literal sense of the Shir Hashirim, the poetic voice describes the body of the beloved in a series of agricultural metaphors that suggest fertility and echo the idyllic setting of the love encounter.
In Ibn Ezra’s own commentary, he explains the literal sense of the text: the lover wants to climb up the body of the woman as if she were a grapevine or a tree, so that he can enjoy the fruit (her breasts) and smell the sweet scent of her breath, which is like apples.
He goes on to explain the religious allegory of these images: that the scent of apples from the beloved’s mouth represents the burnt offerings and incense burned by the High Priest or Kohen Hagadol in the Temple in Jerusalem, both of these being sweet to God.
Abraham ibn Ezra drew not only on Biblical language but was also consciously participating in a well established Arabic poetic tradition of using the apple as a locus of amorous discourse. Arabic, and later Hebrew poets frequently employed descriptions of apples in their poetry. The eleventh-century poet and vizier of Granada, Samuel Hanagid, wrote a series of 15 descriptions of apples, and Solomon ibn Gabirol likewise tried his hand at the genre.
Like the Shir Hashirim itself, this poem is a text written to be performed, and not just to be recited, as would have been the Arabic poem by Abu Nuwas. The muwashshah in particular was a poetic genre written for musical performance, and even for dancing, and so ibn Ezra’s text would have also been set to music something like what you are hearing now. This deployment of biblical allusion in an original musical poetic setting amounted to a kind of unofficial exegesis. In this recording, the contemporary Spanish ensemble Altramar performs their interpretation of a muwashshah by Andalusi poet Ibn Zuhr (1091-1161). Most experiences of Ibn Ezra’s poem would have been live, accompanied by music and dancing as well. These corporeal readings of the text brought new intertexts to the biblical sources he employed.
Modern critics of medieval Hebrew literature have suggested that these poetic reworkings of biblical language amounted to a form of creative exegesis, not strictly rabbinical but nonetheless significant in that they expanded both the semantic fields attached to the words themselves and the hermeneutics of the biblical texts.
In a 1977 article in AJS Review, Neal Kozodoy suggests that this creative exegesis was an important part of medieval Hebrew poetry, relying as it did almost exclusively on biblical poetic language for its lexical building blocks.
Abraham ibn Ezra lived during the waning of Andalusi political hegemony on the Iberian Peninsula, and by his death Christian monarchs had conquered large sections of what had been al-Andalus.
The generations of Hebrew poets who were raised in Christian Iberia, despite being educated in Arabic, had a very different linguistic experience than their grandparents who were raised in a country where Arabic was the official language of the court, the mosque, and the majlis or literary salon.
They were native speakers of romance vernaculars such as Catalan, Galician, Aragonés, and Castilian. They sang ballads and songs, and told stories that were common to all of their countrymen regardless of religious tradition. In some cases they were familiar with vernacular versions of biblical texts, either from paraliturgical contexts such as the vernacular versions of the Book of Esther that were performed as part of the celebration of Purim, or from popular ballads and other vernacular reworkings of familiar biblical stories.
By way of example I would like us to examine some texts and intertexts from Vidal Benvenist’s text Melitsat `Efer ve-Dina, the tale of Efer and Dina. Benvenist wrote Efer ve-Dina in Zaragoza around 1400, and it was first published by Gershom Soncino in Rimini in 1521.
The story tells of the misadventures surrounding the marriage of the rich widower Efer to the young girl Dina. The eminent scholar of medieval Hebrew literature, Hayim Shirmann, has called Efer ve-Dina a “tragicomedy” (which should resonate with those of you who are familiar with the late fifteenth century work by Fernando de Rojas, Celestina).
In the story, Dina’s impoverished father seeks to better his position by marrying Dina off to the elderly, wealthy widow Efer. Despite Dina’s protests, the two are married, but Efer is unable to fulfill his conjugal obligations to his young wife. He sends one of his servants to procure for him an aphrodisiac, but misjudges the effective dose and dies of a fatal overdose.
Benvenist explains in a lengthy excursus that the tale is a moral allegory, in which one should read Efer as the weakness of the human soul and Dina as the temptations of the material world that ultimately bring one no lasting benefit and in fact may lead to one’s moral demise.
At the time when Benvenist wrote the Jewish communities of Aragon and Castile were under tremendous pressure to convert to Christianity and those who did often enjoyed far higher standards of living than those who chose to remain Jewish, so Benvenist’s message is timely.
Like the poem of Ibn Ezra, the biblical language and allusions in Efer ve-Dina coexist with and interact with a number of intertexts, including the Dina story in Genesis, the Spanish ballad version of that story, the traditional Spanish malmaridada songs in which a young girl laments her marriage to an older man who does not love her, and lastly a kind of situational affiliation with the biblical Esther story and celebration of Purim that I like to call the Esterismo of Dina. Let’s now have a look at these intertexts and how they might have impacted readings of Efer ve-Dina by Benvenist and his audiences.
The ballad of El robo de Dina or the Rape of Dina circulated in Spain in the fifteenth century and probably dates approximately to the time when Benvenist wrote. It is attested in both Peninsular and Sephardic oral traditions as well as in editions printed in Spain in Early modernity. The text follows the story as it is told in Genesis 34, but as is characteristic of the narrative style of Spanish ballads, leaves off in medias res, as Jacob sends messengers to King Hamor to legitimize the relations between their children. The common thread between the biblical Dina and that of Benvenist is the idea that the moral integrity of the community is threatened when a young woman is married off to a man for material reasons. Both are moralizing tales. That of Benvenist is explained at length in his allegorical epilogue, and that of the Genesis version most succinctly in the protest of Simeon and Levi to Jacob: “Should one deal with our sister as with a harlot?” (Gen 34:31)
The biblical Dina intertext is woven together with the popular songs of the malmaridadas, the mis-married young girl who laments her unhappy state. These songs are attested in many western Romance versions, including those in Galician, Catalan, French, Castilian, and Italian. Both ballads, El robo de Dina and La bella malmaridada, were so popular that they were dramatized by the indefatigable Lope de Vega (1562-1635), who wrote thousands of plays during his lifetime.
In this version, the full text of which is at number four in your handout, the malmaridada is depicted in conversation with a knight who promises to take her away from her abusive husband. The husband discovers the two lovers and threatens to kill his wife, who for her part would prefer to die for her newfound love than to continue to live with her husband.
Benvenist’s Dina similarly laments her situation à-la-malmaridada, but with a decidedly more pro-active agenda. She (correctly) fears that a man of Efer’s age will not be able to fulfill his conjugal obligations to her, and lobbies her father in vain to cancel the marriage before it is too late.
Her protestations also echo with the biblical Dina. In Efer ve-Dina, Dina’s father is creating a situation in which Dina will be easily tempted to seek fulfillment outside the context of her marriage. This constitutes a sin on her father’s part, one which resonates with the protests of Simeon and Levi that their father should not put their sister Dina in a situation where her honor might be compromised.
The text is number five on your handout. I will read only the beginning that you see on the current slide, and then I would like to call your attention to two examples of biblical allusions in Efer ve-Dina and their specific intertextualities.
The original of this text is found at number six on your handout. Here, the allusion is to Hoshea 4:12, where the prophet describes how Israel has alienated itself from God through its practice of harlotry, fornication, and other types of poor behavior. The idea is that they are so misguided they seek advice from a piece of wood, which in the context of Biblical Israel would be a reference to idolatry.
So the first resonance of this description of Efer is that of the morally irresponsible Israel described in Hoshea. In addition, there is a double entendre: Efer’s “staff” speaks to him, or rather, he is thinking with his penis, his actions are motivated by his lust, not by correct moral values.
This second example is from the description of the wedding party of Efer and Dina, found at number seven in your handout. The celebratory noises of the wedding party are juxtaposed with the Biblical context, the unnatural (and in the original text synesthetic) sound of thunder coming from Mount Sinai in Exodus 20:15 (kol ha`am ro’im et ha-kolot), In the biblical passage, the unnatural sounds strike fear into the hearts of the Israelites, but here, the sense is that the wedding party sees marriage between the old man and the young girl as unnatural, and views it with disgust (ed. Huss 172 n 254). Benvenist ironically characterizes what should be a happy, natural occasion by using language describing a scene of fear of the unnatural.
The final biblical intertext for Efer ve-Dina I would like to consider before concluding is the Book of Esther or Megillat Ester, which is traditionally recited in the liturgy for the holiday of Purim, which corresponds roughly to carnaval in the liturgical cycle, and like carnaval, is a time to enact inversions of the accepted social order, to drink to excess, and to perform vernacular versions and parodies of traditional liturgies.
Like the story of Dina, that of Esther is like a European novella or comedia in that a woman’s honor or romantic fate determine both the dramatic outcome and in a larger sense, the fate of the community. Dina’s marriage imperils the moral health of both her father and according to Benvenist’s allegory, the entire community. Esther’s marriage to King Ahashverosh, as we all know, turns out to be the saving grace of the Jewish community of Shushan.
Despite Benvenist’s assurances that his text is meant as a serious moral allegory, in 1521 his publisher Gershom Soncino markets Efer ve-Dina as a Purim entertainment in the tradition of Purim literature that parodies the Talmud, the Prophets, and other traditional Jewish texts. He maintains in his introduction that he means for audiences to “delight in the tales of love and in words of silliness during the days of Purim.” Whatever Benvenist’s intentions may have been, at least some of his readers saw the Esterismo in Efer ve-Dina and sought to capitalize on it.
In conclusion, I hope to have demonstrated from these examples the following:
Biblical intertextuality is more than a simple matter of the recycling of words from the Hebrew bible. I see it much more (secundum Kozodoy 1977) as the metaphor suggested by the Latin etymon textus, a cloth woven from a number of threads, each one a metaphor for a different allusion, reference, sensory experiences, or memory. Together, these intertexts form a new text that in turn acquires its own life, much as the life of a garment as it is worn and passed from one owner to the next comes to mean much more than a simple combination of threads woven together.
Finally, it is important to recognize that Spanish Hebrew authors, even when drawing on Biblical texts for inspiration or for raw materials, were also placing these texts into discussion with the secular vernacular texts and traditions of their particular time and place. The resulting poetic exegesis was one that was filtered through vernacular artistic sensibilities, much as the Rabbis drew on vernacular culture and reality in their formal exegesis and jurisprudence.
This is the slidecast from a Work in Progress talk I gave last week at the Oregon Humanities Center, where I was Ernest Moll Fellow in Literary Studies during Winter term 2011. You can also listen to the .mp3 here.
‘Double diaspora’ is an idea that I am using to better understand how the experiences of living in diaspora shaped the ways in which Sephardic (Jewish Spanish) writers told stories and sang songs in literary texts from the 13th century to the 16th century.
What is diaspora?
‘Diaspora’ means a lot of things to a lot of people. Most people understand it as a dispersion of a people from their traditional homeland to a bunch of other places. The term was first used to describe the history of the Jews after they were dispersed from Judea/Palestine first by the Babylonians in ca. 600 BCE and then by the Romans in ca. 70 CE. Since then people have used it to describe other groups who experienced similar dispersions: Armenians, Greeks, Indians, Chinese, Africans, and others.
In academic writing, until the last thirty years or so ‘diaspora’ almost always referred to Jewish history, and much of the academic thinking about the idea of diaspora has been shaped by the particulars of the Jewish example: a people unified by a common religion and official language who were expelled forcibly from the land where they were once sovereign.
Diaspora and Galut in Jewish History and Culture
‘He who dispersed me will gather me in,’ from cover of Isaac Cardoso’s ‘Excelencias de los Hebreos’ (Amsterdam, 1679)
In Jewish tradition (as opposed to in histories of Jews written by modern academics), the Rabbis have used the idea of galut (‘exile’) to explain the history of the Jews along prophetic lines. According to this idea, the Jews were exiled from their homeland because it is their destiny, and part of the privileged relationship they enjoy with God, who protects them in their exile among foreign nations. Galut is not just a historical accident, but part of a divine plan. According to some interpretations of galut, the Jews have the task of helping to prepare the world for the arrival of the messiah by performing good works and setting an example for the other nations of the world. It is for this purpose that God dispersed them among the other nations. Once the world is ready, the messiah will arrive and the Jews will be allowed to re-establish their kingdom in Zion (Judea/Palestine).
In modernity, Jewish scholars began to work in both the rabbinate and the university, where this idea needed some retooling. The earliest histories of the Jews written by academics (as opposed to rabbis) looked more or less like other national histories written during the 1800s. But the widespread notion of the Jews’ ‘chosenness’ and the uniqueness of their history (especially in the European and North American Context, where most Jewish historians worked) was difficult to shake completely. As a result, historians (most of them Jewish themselves) continued to treat Jewish history as if it were essentially different from the histories of other peoples and nations. This trend persisted into the second half of the twentieth century, when the establishment of the modern state of Israel forced some rethinking of key issues in Jewish history.
Other diasporas
Armenian community of Singapore in 1917
Historians of other diasporas, especially those that took place in the early modern (ca. 1500-1700) or modern eras, began from a very different starting point. They were pretty clear from the start that God does not make diasporas, people do. Scholars of various modern diasporas, therefore, did not have the same ideological baggage as those working on Jewish history. Working in the 1960s, 1970s, and especially in the 1980s and 1990s, they approached their subject with modern tools in a postmodern world, where people had been theorizing about nationhood, imperialism, political economy, race, gender, class, and many other aspects of human experience. This produced a great amount of scholarship of on a wide array of modern diasporas, including, but not limited to: Armenian, Indian, Sikh, Irish, Chinese, African, Palestinian, and Israeli.
Scholars in the humanities likewise began to approach the literature, film, folklore, and other kinds of cultural production as products of a disasporic culture, that gave voice to the experiences and ideas specific to peoples living in diaspora. Today there is an enormous bibliography on diaspora history and culture (click here to see the first page of results from a search of books.google.com using the keyword ‘diaspora’). Many of these scholars disagree as to what ‘diaspora’ means, which groups qualify as a disapora, and how one should go about discussing the term properly. Accordingly there is a whole subset of scholarship on diaspora that is dedicated to discussion of what the term means and how it should be used.
What’s double diaspora?
El sabor de diáspora
Double diaspora is a term that refers to a group that has gone through two successive diasporas. I have seen it applied so far to Indians from Tanzania (who then scatter throughout the anglophone nations of the developed world), to Haitians (diasporic Africans who form a new diaspora as Hatians in France, Canada, and the US), to Israelis (who returned from diaspora to Zion, then scattered again), and to Jamaican Rastafarians (diasporic Africans who then dispersed throughout the Anglophone world – see image above). Other examples continue to emerge.
Sephardic Jews lived for well over 1,000 years in Spain as part of the Ancient Jewish diaspora. After their expulsion from Spain in 1492 they formed a new, second diaspora, throughout the mediterranean and Europe, turning this time both to Zion and to Spain in their imaginations and longing for not one, but two homelands. Double diaspora, Sephardic style.
Why double diaspora for Sephardic literature?
Most studies of Sephardic literature focus on either pre-1492 or post-1492. The concept of double diaspora is a good way to bring the two periods together, one that helps us to maintain continuity while at the same time pay attention to how a new diaspora, from Spain, changes how Sephardic writers worked and wrote. In Spain, Sephardic writers worked around one symbolic homeland, one idea of homeland — Zion. I use the word Zion instead of Judea, Palestine or Israel because that is the biblical name most often used to refer to the symbolic center of the community, the homeland to which one dreamt of returning from somewhere else.
The idea of Zion is a symbolic touchstone that (among many, many other manifestations) lent its name to the Zionist movement, stands at the center of the Rastafarian belief system, and continues to captivate the artistic imagination, for example in 1999 film The Matrix, where in a world overrun by despotic robots, Zion is the last redoubt of humanity.
In the next post I will give a series of specific examples of how the double diaspora of the Sephardim, the twin suns of Zion and Spain, help shape the way in which Sephardic writers tell stories and sing songs.
Bibliography
Baer, Yitzhak. Galut. New York: Schocken Books, 1947. (the classic study of the question of galut in Jewish philosphy and history)
Boyarin, D., and J. Boyarin. “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity.” Critical Inquiry 19.4 (1993): 693-725. (reassessment of the idea of diaspora in modern Jewry after the establishment of the state of Israel)
Braziel, Jana, ed. Diaspora: An Introduction. Malden Mass.: Blackwell Pub., 2008. (anthology of key texts and introductory study)
—, and Anita Mannur. Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. (anthology of key texts by academics in the social sciences and humanities)
Clifford, James. “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994): 302-338. (assessment of the scholarship of diaspora, focusing on different theoretical understandings by social scientists – Clifford is an anthropologist)
Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: University Collge of London Press, 1997. (Taxonomy and overarching theory of the different types of diasporas spanning from Ancient to Modern world)
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. (now-classic study of African diaspora in Caribbean and theory of diasporic identity in modernity)
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural identity and diaspora.” Identity: community, culture, difference. 2nd ed. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. 222-237. (seminal essay on diasporic identity politics)
Mishra, Sudesh. Diaspora criticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. (comprehensive critical intellectual history of diaspora studies)
Ray, Jonathan. “New Approaches to the Jewish Diaspora: The Sephardim as a Sub-Ethnic Group.” Jewish Social Studies 15.1 (2008): 10-30. (argues for productive application of recent scholarship on diasporas for understanding 16th century Sephardic society in century following expulsion from Spain)
Spero, Shubert. Holocaust and Return to Zion: A Study in Jewish Philosophy of History. Hoboken: KTAV, 2000. (Academic expansion of Baer’s Galut with selections from classic texts by Jewish writers on the question of galut from the Middle Ages to Modernity)
This post was made possible with the support of an Ernest Moll Fellowship in Literary Studies from the Oregon Humanities Center.
Special thanks to artist Lois Cordelia for permission to reproduce ‘Jah Rainbow’ in this post.
In a previous post I discussed two poems of Todros Abulafia in the context of the troubadour poetry of his day. This post is the text of an academic conference paper that grew out of the previous post on Abulafia. I presented this paper at this year’s meeting of the Mid-America Medieval Association (MAMA) in Kansas City, Missouri (26 Feb 2011). Your comments are welcome. You can also view this paper as a slidecast (slides + audio) in .mov format.
MLA Citation format: Wacks, David A. Recycling the Troubadours in Hebrew: Todros Abulafia, Hebrew Troubadour at the Court of Alfonso X. 35th Annual Meeting of the Mid-America Medieval Association (MAMA). University of Missouri, Kansas City. 26 February 2011. Conference paper.
Many of you know a lot about trouabadour poetry – in fact most of you probably know a lot more about it than I will ever know. But I’ll bet that fewer of you are familiar with the activities of the troubadours in Spain, and even fewer with the Hebrew poets of Spain, and that is where I would like to take you today, to the crossroads of medieval Hebrew and troubadour poetry, in Toledo, Spain, in the late thirteenth century. The Hebrew poet in question is named Todros ben Meir Halevi Abulafia. We’ll call him Abulafia. He was a notable of the Jewish community of Toledo, which at the time was a very well established community boasting a centuries long history. During Muslim rule, Jewish courtiers had served the Muslim rulers of Tulaytula, and after the Christian conquest, under Christian monarchs as well.
Abulafia was active at the court Alfonso the tenth of Castile, known as ‘the Learned,’ who reigned from 1252-1284. During Alfonso’s reign there were several court Jews who served as financiers, outfitters, tax farmers, and the like. He himself served Alfonso as a tax farmer and was a sort of notorious man about town, womanizer, and partier who did not hesitate to report on, and probably embellish, his exploits in his poetry. Aside from his choice of language, what sets Abulafia apart from his counterparts writing in Provencal and Galician-Portuguese is Todros’ status as a member of a diasporic religious minority. As such, he is oriented toward two symbolic centers: the biblical homeland of Zion, or Palestine, and the ancestral hostland of Sefarad, the Hebrew word for the Iberian Peninsula. This dual orientation is helpful in understanding why he writes in Hebrew, and how he adapts contemporary poetic practice into his verse.
In al-Andalus, which is the Arabic word for the Iberian Peninsula, the Jewish elites participated quite fully in secular intellectual culture. They received classical Arabic educations, mastered the works of the Arab poets, and wrote treatises on philosophy, the sciences, even Jewish exegesis, in classical Arabic. They were on equal footing with their Muslim and Christian peers in the official language of the dominant culture, a language that boasted a very prestigious poetic tradition spanning centuries and drawing on the brightest minds of the Muslim world, which at the time reached from The Atlantic in the West to the Indus River in the East.
The ideology that underpinned Jewish participation in the dominant poetic culture of Islam was the Quranic doctrine of dhimma, or protected religious minorities. Under Islam, Jews and Christians were guaranteed the right to practice their religions, provided they paid the jizya, or poll tax, and complied with certain social and economic restrictions. Like any other doctrine, it was applied variously and was in no way a blanket guarantee of the well-being of every Jew or every Christian in a Muslim kingdom, but it did provide a robust juridical framework for the treatment of Jews and Christians in al-Andalus, and justified their participation in all aspects of public life excepting Islamic scholarship and leadership.
In the sphere of literature this meant that Jewish writers in al-Andalus were active at court in the dominant language of the court. This included poetry, and Jewish poets were regularly included in medieval anthologies of Andalusi poetry.This is the diasporic moment in al-Andalus, when Sephardic poets begin to adapt Arabic poetic practice in Hebrew, and invent a diasporic poetics with a double orientation: the symbolic homeland Zion gave them their words, drawn directly from the Hebrew Bible. Their hostland al-Andalus gave them another layer of poetics, and they drew freely and effortlessly from the Andalusi repertory of imagery, rhetorical figures, metrics, and poetic practice. The result was a thickly intertextual, intercultural poetic corpus. For Jewish audiences, Andalusi Hebrew poetry resonated with both the synagogue and the court.
This is the poetic tradition that Abulafia inherited. However, he lived in Christian Iberia and worked at the court of a Christian monarch. Under Christianity, the situation was different. Unlike their Andalusi grandparents, Sephardic Jews under Christian kings were not typically familiar with the classical language of the dominant culture. In the 13th century, even in the face of the vernacular revolution taking place at the court where Abulafia worked, Latin was the prestige classical language, the language of the Church and of most intellectual activity in Western Christendom. Sephardic Jews were not a part of this activity.
In the context of Christian government, the Andalusi literary legacy of Sephardic Jews was foreign. Prestigious, perhaps, but ultimately foreign to the great majority of Christian elites, who valued Arabic learning but were most likely to consume it in Latin or Castilian translations. The diasporic moment had changed, and the cultural terms of engagement needed to be renegotiated.At this very moment of renegotiation, a new Romance vernacular poetic practice is emergent in Castile. Just as Sephardic poets are no longer practitioners of the dominant intellectual tradition, they are becoming practitioners of the emergent poetic tradition, by virtue of their romance-language nativity. While to us this may seem like a boon, to them it was a conundrum. Before Abulafia’s time, Andalusi Jewish were both connoisseurs and producers of Arabic poetry. Nonetheless, when writing in Hebrew they sometimes made a show of denigrating Arabic tradition, in an effort to exalt Hebrew.
In the Andalusi context this bluster was mostly a rhetorical trope that authors deployed as a kind of accessus in introductions to works Hebrew poetry and prose. Though motivated by a kind of linguistic proto-nationalism, it was ultimately the kind of good-natured brinksmanship one might read in medieval debate poetry of any tradition. But in Christian Iberia, this exaltation of Hebrew poetics took on a new urgency, now that Sephardic intellectuals were estranged from the dominant intellectual tradition. It may well have been sour grapes: in Toledo, for example, between the Christian conquest of 1085 and the beginning of the reign of Alfonso X in 1252, there was no thriving poetic scene in which a Jewish poet might participate. By the late thirteenth century, Poetic production in Arabic outside of Granada and Valencia had virtually ceased, and Sephardic poets had not, for whatever reason, taken to composing courtly poetry in the vernacular.
Even Abulafia, whom his Jewish peers considered a notorious assimilationist and who did not hesitate to socialize, and fraternize, with Christians, he did not, as far as we know, compose in the vernacular. For him it is not really an option to adopt the poetic language of the moment. Perhaps the vernacular had not yet achieved enough prestige or historical weight for Jewish poets to adopt it wholeheartedly. It may be that Jewish poets, as a diasporic minority, felt insecure about adopting the dominant poetic language because they had no history of participating in Latin intellectual life. Perhaps the admonishments of their grandparents’ generation kept them away. In any event, it was not happening.
Abulafia’s renegotiation of the Sephardic diasporic poetics was going to be different. And, while he did not compose in the vernacular he did participate in vernacular poetics. By this I mean that he expressed his orientation toward hostland poetics by adapting the themes, habits of expression, and poetic ideologies of his peers who composed in the Romance vernaculars. As we will see, Todros creates a new poetic voice that grows naturally from both the Andalusi Hebrew and vernacular troubadour traditions of courtly love. Some of this innovation is original and probably unrelated to what was going on in vernacular troudabour poetry. Todros was very creative in his use of the stock imagery and poetic strategies of Andalusi Hebrew tradtion. But in some cases it is very clear that he is in some ways, a Hebrew troubadour.
This should come as no surprise, as Alfonso’s court was an important center of troubadour poetry. Some of the poets that served at his court include Bonifaci Calvo, Arnaut Catalan, Guiraut Riquer, Peire Cardenal, Cerverí de Girona, and Airas Nunes (Alvar 1977; O’Callaghan 1993: 144). Alfonso regularly employed troubadours as a sort of propaganda corps. Galician-Portuguese troubadours regularly promoted Alfonso’s various political projects on the peninsula, while those writing in Provencal publicized designs on the Holy Roman Imperial throne (Beltrán 2006: 155-56).
On a more formal and specific level, Abulafia adapted some of the same generic conventions used by the troubadours. The Spanish hebraist Ángel Sáenz-Badillos (1996) has demonstrated that some of Abulafia’s invective poetry is structurally and thematically very similar to the tensós and sirventeses of the troubadours among whom he moved at court. The one critic to thoroughly tackle the question of Todros’ involvement with vernacular poetics is Aviva Doron, who in 1989 published a Hebrew language monograph titled A Poet in the King’s Court (Incidentally, in the entire WorldCat system, only a single copy of Doron’s book is available, from Karl Ebershard University in Germany).
Doron deals with a few different aspects of Abulafia’s work, focusing mainly on his poems dedicated to Alfonso and his love poetry. Her main points of reference are Carlos Alvar’s books on troubadouresque poetry in Spain. She makes some interesting points about Abulafia’s take on courtly love, but I would like to build on her observations today and go into more specific detail about how Abulafia’s poetry is in dialogue with the troubadouresque discourse of courtly love. His adaptation of the conventions of fin’amors is where he is at his most innovative, and where he least resembles his predecessors in Hebrew poetry.
Two of his poems in particular, numbers 714 and 715 in the authoritative 1932 Hebrew edition of David Yellin express a number of aspects of courtly love unique to troubadouresque fin’amor and absent from Andalusi Hebrew tradition. In order to better make my point, I choose examples almost exclusively from Provencal and Galician-Portuguese troubadours who also wrote at Alfonso’s court and who may well have known Todros and perhaps even written and recited alongside (or in competition) with him. I have selected a series of quotes expressing commonplaces of troubadouresque fin’amor, or courtly love. In each case, Abulafia follows the lead of the troubadours very closely, and in the final example, as we will see, he takes it to the next level.
In this first example, Bonifacio Calvo, an Italian who wrote in Provencal, performs a standard heresy of courtly love in which he imagines God himself falling in love with his beloved:
Que si plagues amar a dieu / Dompna del mon, avinen plai / Auri’ en leis, que chausid ai (‘if it pleased God to love a woman of the world, he would have a pleasant delight in her whom I have chosen’) (ed. Horan 1960: 34, no. 5, vv. 30-32; trans. Horan 1960: 36)
Abulafias’s heresy is a bit more complex. He imagines a cult of his beloved complete with holidays and a Temple:
My soul celebrates her as a holiday! See how, for her sake my soul sings the name of God! / And so on this holiday I will visit her Temple, and perhaps I will steal a word from her! (no. 715, vv. 9-10)
How will I ever choose another, while God himself exalts her? (no. 715, v. 18)
Another commonplace of the fin’amor of the troubadours is the emphasis on the nobility of all aspects of the beloved: her lineage, her conduct, her very soul. Calvo’s example focuses on the conduct of his dompna, or lady:
E·l sieus hontraz chapteners / Es tant genzer dels gensors (‘her honored conduct is so much more noble than the noblest’) (ed. Horan 1960: 24, no. 1, vv. 36-37, trans. Horan 1960: 25)
Abulafia’s example contrasts his indiscrete younger self with his more mature self who realizes the values of nobility in a beloved. Borrows a phrase from the Song of Songs to describe the beloved as an army bearing a standard. It is common in Andalusi Hebrew poetry to describe the beloved using martial imagery, and here Abulafia gives it a courtly twist that is probably reminiscent of the banners used in knightly tournaments. The second example describes three aspects of his lady’s nobility: lineage, and soul:
[When I was young and foolish] I did not distinguish between commoner and high born, or even the daughter of a nobleman, terrible with banners (Song 6:4) (no. 714, v. 4)
I fell in love with a real damsel, an honorable girl, with a noble soul (no. 714, v. 7)
One of the characteristics of the courtly lover is refined, eloquent, morally correct speech. All three of our poets describe this in their ladies:
Pero García Burgalés:
Qual dona Deus fez melhor parecer
e que fezo de quantas outras son
falar melhor, e en melhor razon
(Jensen 1992: 308, no. 45, cantiga 1, vv. 1-3)
‘the lady whom God gave greater beauty,
and whom he endowed with more eloquent and judicious speech, than all the other ladies in the world
(trans. Jensen 1992: 309, no. 45, cantiga 1, vv. 1-3)
Bonifacio Calvo:
Sos senz e sas granz lauzors (ed. Horan 1960: 25, vv. 36-37)
(‘for her noble speech, [and] her intelligence’) (trans. Horan 1960: 25)
In Abulafia’s case, his lady’s speech is so pure that it motivates and upflits:
“her speech raises up the fallen” (no. 714, v. 20)
Particular to troubadouresque fin’amor is the idea that spiritual love is enough to sustain the lover, who might even prefer to desire the mere idea or memory of his beloved, or perhaps to simply see her or hear her voice, without the possibility of physical union. In this example, Peire Cardenal, writing in Provencal, declares that he actually prefers desire over physical love:
voil ades mais desirar
Que tener ma dona e baisar
‘I still prefer to desire [her]
than to hold my lady and kiss [her]’
(ed. Lavaud 1957: 24, no. 5, vv. 2-3)
Que, ja plazer no-m fezés
Eu fora sos homs adès
‘Though she never grant me pleasure,
I should still be her man forever!’
(ed. Lavaud 1957: 16, no. 3, vv. 12-13)
Abulafia likewise is happy (or happily miserable) to pine away without actually touching his lady, and espouses (at least in this verse) a purely spiritual, hands-off kind of love:
I shall not think ever to touch her
even though I spend my life sobbing over her
(ed. Yellin no. 714, v. 15)
I have no desire to have her, to delight in her body,
only to delight in her soul
(no. 714, v. 21)
In these final texts, I’d like to show you an example of how Abulafia sometimes takes fin’amor to the next level. In this case, he elaborates and builds upon a courtly love trope found in one poem of Pero García Burgalés: that of the skeptic converted, the naysayer who scoffs at the poet’s dedication and suffering, but who, when faced with the irresistible beauty and nobility of the lady in question, finds himself equally if not more enthralled. In this cantiga, Burgalés imagines what would happen to the skeptic if he should be so lucky to catch a glimpse of the poet’s lady:
Ca ben sei eu, u outra ren non á,
que tal esforç’ averá qual eu ei
quando a vejo, que per ren non sei
que lhi dizer: e el assi fará!
Se per ventura lhi dizer quiser
algũa ren, ali u estever
ant’ ela, todo lh’ escaecerá!
(ed. Jensen 1992: 308, cantiga 1, vv. 22-28)
For I know for certain, that, where nobody else is present,
he will have the same courage I do,
when I see her, for I do not in any way know
what to say to her then: and the same thing will happen to him!
If, by chance, he wanted to tell her
something, as soon as he finds himself
in her presence, everything will slip from his mind!
(trans. Jensen 1992: 309, cantiga 1, vv. 22-28)
In this poem of Abulafia it seems as if he is responding directly to Burgalés, elaborating and dramatizing an entire scene, complete with dialogue, using Burgalés’ verses as an outline. The poet and the skeptic are in the middle of a heated exchange over the futility of the poet’s unrequited love, when the lady herself happens by, trailing with her a cloud of perfume, and illuminating the dark night with her radiance. As you can see, the skeptic is completely won over, and his exuberance exceeds even that of the poet himself in these final verses. I’ll let Abulafia speak for himself here….
When he saw her, even as he spoke ill of her,
His soul began to enter into her light…
Suddenly, his soul was bound to hers
And his heart was locked in the heart of her prison
And even the splendor of her cheek, in its radiance, prevented
his pupils from looking upon her brilliance
The I fell upon my face, and my soul
was like a woman in her first childbirth who fears the pain
And I would have died, had he not
Reminded me of her, and I woke up thinking of her,
When he said: “What is with you, sleeper? (Jonah 1:6) Look: There goes ‘that certain lady,’ Arise! Behold her beauty!
I give praise and confess to your beloved hind,
I am her ransom and her sacrifice!
Truly, it is enough for the man who loves her
to see her or to hear her words!
It is doctrine for every nobleman to make his life
a treadstone for her, and to lick the dust from her foot!
To suffer completely for her love,
for truly then God shall multiply her reward!
I shall set my heart to serve my love for her for ever
Never shall I ask for her to set me free!
As long as the sun rises in the East, or
As long as the birds sing of her!”
Conclusions
I think that these examples speak for themselves quite well, and from them I believe we can take away three conclusions:
Neither Abulafia’s religion nor his choice of poetic language prevented him from participating in vernacular poetic practice, even if Abulafia was not composing in the vernacular.
While much of Abulafia’s divergence from Andalusi poetic conventions were idiosyncratic, in some poems, his discourse of courtly love bear clear influence of contemporary troubadours who worked at the court with him.
For a diasporic writer working between a diasporic classical tradition and an emergent vernacular tradition, the question of influences is not a zero sum game. This is typical of any case of cultural production where an artist is drawing on more than one linguistic or religious tradition. The Sephardic case is distinct only in the specifics, but there is nothing structurally unique about Abulafias position as a diasporic poet.
While far from exhaustive, I believe the examples we have seen today are sufficient to demonstrate Abulafia’s participation in the troubadour poetics of his day in Alfonso’s court. He has moments of unadulterated fin’amor (pun intended) cast in Hebrew, giving expression to a vernacular love aesthetic in a classical language that is unknown to his peers composing in the vernacular. His is a uniquely diasporic poetics in which the voices of troubadours, Andalusi poets and Biblical prophets echo back and forth in time, and across the mediterranean.
Bibliography
Abulafia, Todros Ha-Levi ben Yehudah. The Garden of Parables and Saws, A Collection of Poems [Hebrew]. Jerusalem, 1932.
Alvar, Carlos. La poesía trovadoresca en España y Portugal. Madrid: Editorial Planeta; Real Academia de Buenas Letras, 1977.
Alvar, Carlos, and Vicente Beltrán, eds. Antología de la poesía gallego-portuguesa. Madrid: Alhambra, 1985.
Beltran, Vicenç. “Trovadores en la corte de Alfonso X.” Alcanate: Revista de estudios Alfonsíes 5 (2006): 163-190.
Calvo, Bonifacio. The poems of Bonifacio Calvo a critical edition. Ed. and Trans. Robert Horan. The Hague: Mouton, 1966.
Cardenal, Peire. Poésies complètes du troubadour Peire Cardenal (1180-1278). Ed. René Lavaud. Toulouse: É. Privat, 1957.
Doron, Aviva. A Poet in the King’s Court: Todros Halevi Abulafia, Hebrew Poetry in Christian Spain [Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1989.
Jensen, Frede. Medieval Galician-Portuguese Poetry: An Anthology. New York: Garland, 1992.
O’Callaghan, Joseph F. The Learned King: The Reign of Alfonso X of Castile. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.
Sáenz-Badillos, Ángel. “Hebrew Invective Poetry: The Debate Between Todros Abulafia and Phinehas Halevi.” Prooftexts 16 (1996): 49-73.
The debate over the relative roles of military force and political rhetoric in governance is very, very old. And while the familiar dictum “the pen is mightier than the sword” may now be received wisdom, for hundreds of years it was a site of contention. In Spain during the 12th-14th centuries, authors wrote version after version of the literary debate between the pen and the sword in Arabic and Hebrew.
The relative merits of the sword and the pen were frequent subjects of Classical Arab poets during the Umayyad and Abbasid periods, but it was not until the 11th century in Spain when the Pen and Sword come forward to speak for themselves as protagonists in a literary debate. Ahmad ibn Burd the Younger wrote the first such debate as part of a panegyric (a poem written in praise of an individual) dedicated to King Mujahid al-Muwaffaq of Denia around the year 1040.
Ibn Burd, a Muslim writing for a king (who as a monarch would probably identify with the sword to some degree, even if he were a bookish kind of king), came to a safe conclusion: the Pen and the Sword are both worthy instruments, and both occupy an honored place at court. In his version, the two instruments trade barbs but eventually work out a downright Utopian love-fest of an ending in which each recognizes the value of the other’s contributions:
What a beautiful mantle we don, and what excellent sandals! How straight the path we walk and how pure the spring from which we drink! A friendship, the train of whose garment we let drag [i.e. ‘in which we luxuriate’] and a fellowship whose fruits we pick and whose wine we taste. We have left the regions of sin a wasteland and its workmanship in ruins, we have wiped out every trace of hatred and returned sleep to the eyelids!
At the end of the 12th or beginning of the 13th century, the Sephardic writer Judah al-Harizi adapted Ibn Burd’s debate in chapter 40 of Tahkemoni, a collection of rhyming prose narratives. Al-Harizi wrote in Hebrew for a Jewish patron who, unlike Ibn Burd’s patron King Mujahid, was not a military leader and whose relationship to sovereign political power was that of a minority courtier, a member of a diasporic culture. Al-Harizi is writing some 50 years before Todros Abulafia penned his troubadouresque verses at the court of Alfonso X. His prose, like that of all Hebrew authors of his time, is shot through with words, images, and set phrases lifted directly from the Hebrew bible.
Jews in 13th-century Toledo did not fight in wars. They provided financial and logistical support for wars, but they were not marching into battle. So, what does a sword mean to a writer who belongs to a community that does not wage war but that is dependent upon the monarch who does?
It should not, therefore, surprise that Al-Harizi’s debate looks a bit different from that of Ibn Burd. He is writing for an audience that typically does not bear arms themselves and who have suffered violence at the hands of the majority time after time. The massacres of Jews in Granada in 1066, in France and Germany in 1096, and the periodic violence against Jews in Christian Iberia were very real reminders that swords were not just something to write about.
Accordingly, the Pen comes up winner in al-Harizi’s version. This is not surprising – in Latin debates between clerks and knights (written by clerks), the winners were always the clerks. But before ceding the field, the sword reminds the pen:
The king reigns through my power: I shout, his enemies cower, leap, and pull down turret and tower. I am my monarch’s shield against all foes: my fear precedes him where’er he goes. His rivals I efface, their camps erase without a trace. All tremble at my blade’s command, before me who can stand?
The Pen counters the he not only provides right guidance for those in power, but is also the instrument of Divine Will and of religion:
My words bind monarch’s heads with light,
my proverbs, the heart with joy.
I cover the earth with the mantle of Law
and no evil stains that cloak;
Through me, God hewed the Tables Two
at Sinai for His folk.
Al-Harizi’s narrator is won over by the pen, who he describes with sword-like attributes:
When I had heard this well-honed story, this sharp-edged allegory, I inscribed his words on my heart with iron pen, that never they might part.
Al-Harizi here reworks Ibn Burd’s debate in a diasporic key. The Jewish community, a class of administrators, financiers, scholars, and merchants, lives by the pen, yet sometimes dies by the sword despite a (usually) privileged relationship to sovereign political power.
Jacob Ben Elazar, writing in Toledo some years after al-Harizi, takes this diasporic interpretation of the debate a step further. His debate is more than a competition for superiority, it is a moral manifesto for a time of intellectual and religious decadence. His pen not only wins the debate, it serves as the moral compass for what Ben Elazar describes as a “generation of fools.”
The debate begins like the others, with each instrument bad-mouthing the other and pointing up their respective weaknesses and faults. The sword calls the pen weak, empty, and inconsequential, while describing himself as the “glory of kings.” The pen tells the sword to “get back into your sheath and calm down,” reminding him that he is abusive and unjust, he spills innocent blood and undermines justice. He holds that he has power that far transcends the temporal powers of the sword. The pen, he explains, can form reality, teach history, morals, and law:
My mouth (i.e. the split opening of my quill where the ink flows) will cause you to know what has happened in the past, the history of princes, kings, and priests who came before us, to the point that you will feel you have been friends with every one of them. Its mouth will speak to your mouth and will inform you about their justice and loyalty, their perversity and their sins. From my mouth you will learn doctrine and wisdom and it will teach you mysteries and deep knowledge.
Moses ben Maimon aka Maimonides aka The Rambam
But then the pen changes the rules of the game. He explains that what is at issue is not whether the pen is better than the sword, but whether humans can live righteously according to God’s law. Both pen and sword are mere instruments, and that neither intelligence nor might are of lasting value. He then launches into a sort of Aristotelian sermon on the unity of God dense will allusions to Sephardic scholarship and worthy of Maimonides, the Spanish-born Rabbi and physician who changed Jewish life forever by continuing the work of Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in reconciling Jewish religion and Greek philosophy:
The principles of all the unities are Eight,
but only of he in whom there is no plurality
you may proclaim that he is truly One, and is the only true God,
who is a refuge since times gone by;
He is not found in any place, only in the thoughts
of the wise man and in the forge of Reason….
Here Ben Elazar is weighing in on a philosophical debate that was causing a serious political rift in the Jewish communities of Castile in the mid-13th century: the Maimonidean Controversy. This debate divided Jewish communities in Spain and Southern France into two camps: those who favored a Judaism that could adapt to the advances in science and philosophy made possible by the translations of Aristotle’s works into Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin (Maimonideans), and those who preferred a more traditional interpretation of Jewish law that shunned any reconciliation with Greek philosphy (Traditionalists).
Creationism, Evolution, or Lunch?
In broad strokes, this is a debate that should be familiar to those of us living in the US (and other countries) in the 21st century. Many communities are simliarly torn today by debates between believers of Creationism and Evolution, and more generally between various bands of Fundamentalists and Rationalists.
Ben Elazar continues to expound on the unity of God, and his insistence in following this line makes me think that he is circling back to yet another meaning of the Pen versus the Sword, one particularly suited to a diasporic Jewish audience living under Christian rule:
The Almighty truly must be called One
you cannot divide him into pieces, nor can you join him
all of him is that is called One
is indivisible once it is united.
The One that cannot be divided remains
eternally, but the unity that is created, perishes.
Why, in the context of a debate between Pen and Sword, this insistence on God’s essential unity? It doesn’t seem to make sense for either of the interpretations we have so far discussed. The question of God’s unity seems irrelevant to the traditional interpretation by which the Pen represents letters and the Sword arms. Even when the Pen represents Maimonideans (science) and the Sword traditionalists (fundamentalism), it doesn’t add up: neither side is advocating for a plural God.
It is almost as if Ben Elazar here is suggesting a third interpretation: the Pen is the diasporic Jewish community, and the Sword Christian sovereignty, a double-edged sword (pun intended) that presents both a theological threat in the form of the Trinity (the division of God into parts), and a political threat in the form of the ever-present possibility of violence, perhaps violence in the name of same Trinity.
al-Harizi, Judah. The Book of Tahkemoni: Jewish Tales From Medieval Spain. Trans. David Simha Segal. London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001. [Chapter 40 containing the debate between the Sword and the Pen is found on pages 303-306]
Ben Eleazar, Jacob. The Love Stories of Jacob Ben Eleazar (1170-1233?) [Hebrew]. Ed. Yonah David. Tel Aviv: Ramot Publishing, 1992. [Chapter 4 containing the debate between the Pen and the Sword is found on pages 32-40]
de la Granja, Fernando. “Dos epístolas de Ahmad ibn Burd al-Asgar.” Al-Andalus 25 (1960): 383-418. [includes Spanish translation of Ibn Burd’s Risalat al-sayf wa-l-qalam on pages 399-406]
Popular audiences in Jewish communities across the world are practically addicted to images of Spanish Jewry’s “Golden Age.” The idea of a Jewish community that was rich, powerful, and intellectually talented has been pretty compelling to the modern Jewish imagination. That whole expulsion/inquisition thing at the end kind of messes things up, but we’ll leave that aside for the time being. As far as most modern Jews are concerned, Spain was the best keg party ever, and like most great keg parties, it got ugly at the end.
The point here is that for the most part, world Jewry is happy to claim the Sephardim as a shining example of Jewish cultural achievement. This was not really ever in question as long as I have been paying attention. But working as a Hispanist and reading a lot of studies by Spanish scholars on Spanish Jewish (Sephardic) topics, I began to wonder if Spain was also eager to claim the Sephardim as Spanish. One way to find out is to read what literary historians have to say about Jewish authors who lived and wrote in Spain.
In two recent posts I wrote about the medieval Sephardic poet Todros Abulafia (late 1200s) and some of his modern critics’ opinions of Abulafia’s troubadour-flavored poetry. In this post I would like to discuss a related case, that of the Sephardic author Shem Tov (‘Santob’) ben Isaac Ardutiel of Carrión (mid 1300s). Like Todros Abulafia, most Jewish authors at this time wrote almost exclusively in Hebrew. Many Jewish intellectuals translated works from Arabic and occasionally Hebrew into Spanish, Catalan, or Portuguese, but when they did their own work it was almost exclusively in Hebrew. As far as we know, Shem Tov Ardutiel is the only Jew of his time to write an original book in the vernacular, the Proverbios Morales (‘Moral Proverbs’).
The book is a collection of wise sayings in verse, an original work of what scholars like to call ‘wisdom literature,’ which during the Middle Ages was a well-cultivated genre. Medieval writers had good models for their books of wisdom literature in the Biblical Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, as well as Greek and Latin collections of philosophical musings, proverbs, aphorisms, and exemplary tales. Shem Tov’s Proverbios was an original, innovative work that incorporated a variety of sources from the bible, rabbinical literature, and folklore. It was not, however, in any way a Jewish text. That is, it did not cite either the Hebrew Bible or the Rabbis, and did not present any specifically Jewish lessons. It was basically a secular book of wisdom or popular philosophy, written in Castilian, the dialect that would eventually come to be called Spanish.
Without going into the question of why medieval Jews didn’t write original work in Spanish (though I write about it a little bit in here on pages 183-185), I would rather like to look at what Shem Tov’s Spanish readers had to say about this rare bird of a book, and whether they considered it (and him) to be, like them, Spanish.
A little caveat: in the 1300s, there was, strictly speaking, no ‘Spain.’ The idea of Spain as a nation state comes later, some say with the reign of the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, some say even later. So to refer to any author writing in Toledo or Barcelona or Seville in 1300 as ‘Spanish’ is a convenient anachronism. Shem Tov was a subject of the Crown of Castile and León, and he probably considered himself to be sefardí, or a Jew from the Iberian Peninsula, but he had no notion of Spain as a modern nation state and could not have considered himself Spanish in that sense. My question is, do his Spanish readers consider him Spanish?
A while back I wrote an article titled “Is Spanish Hebrew literature ‘Spanish?’” in which I looked at what Spanish scholars of Hebrew had to say about the Hebrew literature written in Spain during the Middle Ages. Did they consider it to be part of their national heritage? Did they view the Jewish authors who wrote in Spain as part of their nation’s medieval past or where they part of a foreign culture that happened to live in Spain?
Like most questions, the answer depends on whom you ask. Shem Tov himself seems to have anticipated this problem, and in the introduction to his work he asked his readers not to judge his work by the religion of its author. He says that even if his book was written by a Jew, it’s still worthwhile. Can you imagine an American Jewish author writing these lines today?
Non val el açor menos por nasçer de mal nido,
nin los enxemplos buenos por los dezir judío
The falcon is not worth less for having been born in a poor nest
nor the good proverbs for having been told by a Jew
Íñigo López de Mendoza, Marqués de Santillana
So it seems Shem Tov imagined that Christian readers might think poorly of his work because of his religion. His fears were not always realized. Early on, Spanish literati praised the Proverbios. One of the most influential figures in the Spanish literary scene in the 1400s, the Marquis of Santillana, called Shem Tov a ‘very great troubadour poet’ (“muy grant trobador”).
In modern times, Shem Tov’s readers are divided on the question of the “Jewishness” or “Spanishness” of both the man and his book. As in the case of Todros Abulafia’s Israeli critics, a lot of this division is tied to contemporary politics and professional formation.
José Rodríguez de Castro, wrote during the late 1700s, when the Spanish Inquistion was still officially on the books (it was abolished in 1834). Like Santillana, he praises Shem Tov’s poetry, calling him ‘one of the most famous troubadour poets of his time’ (“uno de los Trobadores más célebres de su tiempo”). However, he also thought that Shem Tov was a converso, or a Jew converted to Christianity. It may not have been a good idea in Rodríguez de Castro’s day to celebrate a Jew as a great national poet.
José Amador de los Ríos was a liberal 19th-century scholar who wrote the first major Spanish-language treatise on Spanish Jewry. He makes it clear that Shem Tov is a national poet, in fact ‘the most accurate interpreter of the general feeling of the Castilians’ of his time’ (“el más fiel intérprete del sentimiento general de los castellanos”)
Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo
On the other side of the aisle, the rather more conservative Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, perhaps the most influential intellectual of his time, exoticizes Shem Tov and places him outside of the national culture. Far outside:
[His work] has an oriental flavor so distinct, both in its language and its imagery, that at times it seems to have been written originally in Hebrew and later translated by its author into Castilian. . . . it is difficult to believe that this book, so profoundly Semitic, so denuded of all classical and Christian influences, might have been created in the Campos region of Castile.
tiene un color oriental tan marcado, así en la lengua como en las imágenes, que á ratos parece escrita originalmente en hebreo y traducida luego por su autor al castellano….cuesta trabajo creer que este libro, tan profundamente semítico, tan desnudo de toda influencia clásica y cristiana, haya nacido en tierra de Campos.
Under Franco, this orientalizing of Shem Tov becomes the norm. In 1943 Juan Hurtado y Jiménez de la Serna writes of Shem Tov’s ‘oriental-flavored exotic character’ (“carácter exótico de sabor oriental”), and Juan Luis Alborg (writing in 1970 in the US but publishing in Spain) says that Shem Tov’s style is ‘unique to Hebrew literature’ (“peculiar de la literatura hebrea”), and, it follows, out of place in Spanish literature.
Américo Castro
In exile from Franco’s Spain, Américo Castro, whose controversial theory of convivencia (Spain’s essential Semitic and Christian hybridity) continues to divide scholars of Spanish culture, combines both approaches. For him, Shem Tov is a Semitic and therefore authentically Spanish author. On the one hand, the folksy tone of his Proverbios is ‘Sancho Panza-like’ (“sancho-pancezco”) (1948); On the other, he writes that Shem Tov is a writer who ‘gazes steadily toward the East, and not toward Christian Europe’ (“sigue sigue mirando hacia el Oriente, y no a la Europa cristiana”) (1952).
The debate over Shem Tov’s “Spanishness” or “Jewishness” is just one small piece of the much larger discussion of the role of Spain’s Semitic cultural history. For those outside of Spain, it is a simple matter to celebrate the accomplishments of Spain’s Jews (maybe too simple at times). But for Spaniards themselves, it’s complicated. There is a lot of history, much of it unpleasant, surrounding Spain’s Jews.
For hundreds of years, Spanish identity was not simply about being Catholic, but about not being Jewish or Muslim (think about pork everywhere all the time). From 1478 to 1834 there was a government agency (the Spanish Inquisition) whose only job was to enforce this identity. And despite various experiments in religious freedom during the late 1800s and early 1900s, Spain did not disestablish official Catholicism until 1978. Given this history, it is logical that there would be some ambivalence in embracing Sephardic culture as part of the national heritage.
Nowadays, some thirty years after Franco, things have changed a great deal. In 1992, King Juan Carlos officially welcomed the Sephardic Jews to apply for fast-track citizenship along with Latin Americans, Filipinos, and other ex-colonials (but not Muslims descended from those expelled from Spain). There has been a bit of a Renaissance of Jewish life in Spain, and the numbers of Jewish immigrants to Spain from North Africa and elsewhere have been bolstered by a slow stream of Catholic Spaniards who have converted to Judaism.
The Jewish ‘question’ in Spain continues to be lived and debated, and part of this process is an ongoing rethinking of the role of Spain’s Jews in the story of Spain’s history. Shem Tov’s Proverbios is not widely read by Spaniards today. He does not generally show up in high school literature classes, and there are no popular editions of the Proverbios for sale in bus-stop kiosks. His book may never gain wide appeal, but it will be interesting to see if and how Spanish readers return to him and to other Iberian Jewish and Muslim authors as they continue to rethink their nation’s cultural heritage.
Bibliography:
Alborg, Juan Luis. Historia de la literatura española. Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1970.
Amador de los Rios, José. Historia crítica de la literatura española. Madrid: J. Rodríguez, 1861.
Ardutiel, Shem Tov ben Isaac. Provberbios morales. Ed. Paloma Díaz Mas and Carlos Mota. Madrid: Cátedra, 1998.
—. The moral proverbs of Santob de Carrión: Jewish wisdom in Christian Spain. Trans. T. Anthony Perry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Castro, Américo. España en su historia cristianos, moros y judíos. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1948.
—. “Un aspecto del pensar Hispano-judío.” Hispania 35.2 (1952): 161-172.
Hurtado y Jiménez de la Serna, Juan. Historia de la literatura española. Madrid: Tip. de la “Revista e arch., bibl. y museos”, 1921.
López de Mendoza, Iñigo (Marqués de Santillana). Obras completas. Ed. Ángel Gómez Moreno & Maximiliaan Paul Adrian Maria Kerkhof. Madrid: Fundación José Antonio de Castro, 2002.
Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino. Estudios de crítica literaria. Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1893.
Rodríguez de Castro, José. Biblioteca española. Madrid: Imprenta Real de la Gazeta, 1781.
Troubadours were Western Europe’s first highbrow poets to sing in the vernacular (French, Portuguese, German, etc.) as opposed to in Latin.
Troubadours did not invent vernacular poetry. People have always sung in whatever language they spoke. What has new about the troubadours’ work was that they wrote and performed songs in the vernacular language for kings, queens, and other super-élites. Why was this new, all of a sudden, at the end of the 11th century? Before that time, sophisticated poetry written by educated people was written in a classical language such as Latin, Greek, Hebrew, or Arabic (depending on what part of Europe you were in). Songs sung in the languages that people actually spoke in daily life were everywhere (as they are now), but it was not the type of thing that was acceptable to perform at court, and even if it were no kings were paying poets to write down and perform original songs in French or Portuguese or Italian. Not until the troubadours.
Back in the 11th and 12th centuries when troubadour poetry first flourished, poetry played a very different role from nowadays. These days we tend to think of poetry as some kind of rarefied activity that takes place in dusty libraries or snooty salon parties, or at its most accessible in live performances of slam poets at bars and coffee houses. In medieval Europe, court poets were more like high-profile media figures whose verses communicated political propaganda, shaped the habits of speech and thought of the upper classes, and were rewarded with salaries and bonuses comparable to those of a modern day business executive. They were like studio executives, Mad Men, and rock stars rolled into one. While today we might trot out a poet laureate once or twice a year to recite a few lines at a presidential inauguration or other ceremonial event, medieval troubadours were in the news constantly. They were celebrities.
The first courts to support troubadours who wrote and sang in the vernacular were in the south of France, in places like Aquitaine and the Midi. The first such poet was himself a nobleman of very high rank, William IX of Aquitaine (try to imagine Al Gore making records as good as those of Jay-Z and you’re getting warm). Like modern pop stars, the troubadours cultivated dynamic stage persona, penned autobiographies or had them ghosted by others (razós), and tended to embellish their personal lives in their songs. And much like our hip-hop artists, they matched wits in poetic battles (tensós) that often turned ugly and left participants with hurt feelings.
The troubadour style spread from the south of France north into Germany (minnesingers) and south into the Catalonia and Castile regions of what is now Spain (trovadores). Some 150 years after the whole troubadour style got started, a number of troubadours from France, Spain, and Portugal found their way to the court of Alfonso X ‘The Learned’ of Castile. Alfonso was a prodigious patron of the arts and sciences who himself was an accomplished poet who composed some 200 songs in praise of the Virgin Mary in Galician-Portuguese dialect. At the time of Alfonso’s reign, Castilian (aka Spanish) was used for a lot of things. There were law books, scientific manuals, philosophy books, and works on astronomy, for example. However, when it came to lyric poetry such as love poetry, the languages of choice were Galician-Portuguese and Provencal. Because of this, all the poets at Alfonso’s court, and even Alfonso himself, wrote and performed their work in these languages instead of in Castilian, which was the language of nearly everything else that went on at court.
Modern portrait of Alfonso X of Castile
The one exception at court was a Jewish poet named Todros Abulafia [see my last post on Abulafia and his modern critics], who wrote (as all Jewish writers did in the 13th century in Spain) in Hebrew. He wrote poems on nearly every subject imaginable, leaving behind a collection of some 1200 poems that he himself edited in 1298. He wrote a number of poems dedicated to King Alfonso, and one must wonder if he actually performed them at court in Hebrew for an audience who in all likelihood wouldn’t have understood a word of them (except for the Jewish courtiers who probably would have).
Abulafia was a notable of the Jewish community of Toledo, which at the time was a very well established community that boasted a centuries long history and was regularly represented at court since long before the Christian conquest of Muslim-ruled Toledo (Tulaytula in Arabic) in 1085. Under Alfonso’s administration there were several court Jews who served as financiers, outfitters, tax collectors, and the like.
As a poet Abulafia was heir to a very rich tradition of Sephardic (Spanish Jewish) Hebrew poetry that dates at least back to the 10th century, when Andalusi courtier Dunash ben Labrat first began to adapt classical Arabic poetics to Biblical Hebrew language. This combination, something that was possible only in a tolerant, sophisticated courtly milieu such as that of ninth-century Córdoba, was cultivated by a series of major eleventh and twelfth-century Andalusi (al-Andalus was the Arabic name for Spain) Sephardic poets who are now considered the grandfathers of Hebrew literature: Moses ibn Ezra, Samuel Hanagid, Judah Halevi, and a host of others. If you attend high school in Israel you are tested on them in your exit exam (Hebrew Bagrut). So when Abulafia wrote of love, he often used a Hebrew style was based on the Andalusi Arabic poetry written in Spain in the 900s, 1000s and 1100s. Most of his love poems use this style, but at least a couple of them sound a lot more like the songs the troubadours were writing about their undying love for super-beautiful ladies.
Abulafia’s experimentation with troubadour style was kind of a big deal. Jewish poets in the area around Toledo had been living in a Christian-dominated society for over 150 years when Abulafia wrote. Despite this, they pretty much stuck with the Andalusi style they had inherited from Jewish poets who had lived in Muslim Spain, or al-Andalus. In the eyes of most Jewish writers, the vernacular (Spanish, Catalan, etc) was not a language that was appropriate for writing poetry, and so they tended to downplay the importance of the troubadours, even if their Christian kings and queens thought otherwise. Abulafia was the exception. He was a master of the old Andalusi style, but was also an innovator who was not afraid to go out on a limb and try something new. This did not impress some of his modern critics, but it did not appear to have slowed him down when he was living and working at court. Quite the contrary. He was a popular man, and even accompanied King Alfonso on diplomatic missions abroad.
So, you are probably thinking at this point, what was this troubadour poetry like? How did they sing about love? And how did Abulafia adapt their style in his Hebrew poems?
Troubadours wrote about love in a way that has come to be known as ‘courtly love,’ a kind of poetic game with strict rules about how lovers behave and how they talk about the experience of love. This courtly love style has survived to the present day, and popular songs on the radio still use some of its language and themes.
The courtly lover served his lady like a knight serves a king. He sometimes sang of being her slave, of submitting himself completely to her. This adoration sometimes went over the line into a kind of heresy where they actually took to worshipping the lady instead of God. He would perform any service for her to prove this love, even if she never granted him physical affection. Troubadours described of a spiritual love that made them better people, more noble and pure. Here are a few examples of how troubadours at the court of Alfonso X sang of love, and how Abulafia followed their lead.
(the original texts are from the editions cited below. Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.)
For Peire Cardenal, writing in Provencal, the act of desiring his lady is even better than kissing her (if you can believe that):
Desirat ai, enquer desir
E voil ades mais desirar
Que tener ma dona e baisar
E luec on m’en pogues jausir!
I have desired, and desire still,
and I wish to go on desiring
rather than to hold my lady and kiss her
in a place where I might enjoy her!
Todros is in complete agreement; this love thing is not about physical gratification. He’s in it for the pain:
I shall not think ever to touch her
even though I spend my life sobbing over her.
And in another poem:
I have no desire to have her, to delight in
her body, only to delight in her soul.
And Pero García Burgalés, a Castilian who wrote in Galician Portuguese, gets indignant when others suggest he is wasting his time. Pero begs to differ: “Sure she takes my breath away. And if he saw her too,” he sings, “he’d be speechless just like me”:
quando a vejo, que per ren non sei
que lhi dizer: e el assi fará!
Se per ventura lhi dizer quiser
algũa ren, ali u estever
ant’ ela, todo lh’ escaecerá!
when I see her, for I do not in any way know
what to say to her then: and the same thing will happen to him!
If, by chance, he wanted to tell her
something, as soon as he finds himself
in her presence, everything will slip from his mind!
(trans. Jensen 1992: 309)
Todros takes the ball and runs with it. It’s as if he is responding directly to Airas Nunes in his Hebrew poem (my translation), expanding and dramatizing the scene between the poet and his friend who thinks he’s wasting his time on a woman who won’t even talk to him:
When he saw her, even as he spoke ill of her,
His soul began to enter into her light…
Suddenly, his soul was bound to hers
And his heart was locked in the heart of her prison
And even the splendour of her cheek, in its radiance, prevented
his pupils from looking upon her brilliance.
The I fell upon my face, and my soul
was like a woman in her first childbirth who fears the pain
And I would have died, had he not
Reminded me of her, and I woke up thinking of her,
When he said: “What is with you, sleeper? (Jonah 1:6) Look:
There goes ‘that certain lady,’ Arise! Behold her beauty!
I give praise and confess to your beloved hind,
I am her ransom and her sacrifice!
Truly, it is enough for the man who loves her
to see her or to hear her words!
It is doctrine for every nobleman to make his life
a treadstone for her, and to like the dust from her foot!
To suffer completely for her love,
for truly then God shall multiply her reward!
I shall set my heart to serve my love for her for ever
Never shall I ask for her to set me free!
As long as the sun rises in the East, or
As long as the birds sing of her!”
Here Abulafia doesn’t just follow the lead of the troubadours he worked with at court, he takes it to the next level, describing the scene in great detail, exaggerating, even parodying the skeptical friend who is converted to the same religion of love the poet practices.
This is a bold move for a poet who comes from a scene where imitating your Christian neighbors is not usually rewarded. But then, he’s on the royal payroll, and isn’t dependent on the Jewish establishment of Toledo for his livelihood. This autonomy and bravado gets him into trouble in the Jewish community, but it does make for some pretty interesting poetry.
Further reading on Alfonso X, troubadour poetry and on the poetry of Todros Abulafia:
Bonner, Anthony. Songs of the troubadours. New York: Schocken Books, 1972. (Anthology of English translations of troubadour poetry).
Calvo, Bonifacio. The poems of Bonifacio Calvo: a critical edition. The Hague: Mouton, 1966. (Original Provencal with English translations)
Carmi, T. The Penguin book of Hebrew verse. New York: Viking Press, 1981. (Contains a selection of Abulafia’s poems translated into English on pages 410-16)
Cole, Peter. The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. (Contains English translations of excerpts of Abulafia’s poems on pages 256-69)
Jensen, Frede. Medieval Galician-Portuguese Poetry: An Anthology. New York: Garland, 1992. (Original Galician-Portuguese with English translations)
Lowney, Chris. A Vanished World: Medieval Spain’s Golden Age of Enlightenment. New York: Free Press, 2005. (Chapter 18: “Alfonso the Learned King”)
Peire Cardenal. Poésies complètes du troubadour Peire Cardenal (1180-1278). Ed. René Lavaud. Toulouse: É. Privat, 1957.
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