Tag Archives: Coplas de Yosef

Fighting over scripture: polemical retellings of the Hebrew Bible in medieval Iberia

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Lately I’ve been looking at how retellings of the Hebrew Bible by medieval Iberian Jews, Christians, and Muslims reflect the mutual influence and tension between the three traditions (one on Adam and Eve, another on shared Biblical storyworlds). Here I am focusing on how the religious debates of the age play out in these texts, or rather: what do these retellings show us about how Medieval Iberians argued over which of these three faiths was supreme?

Rabbi debates Priest under arches of Church interior

Nahmanides debates Friar Paul in the 1263 Disputation of Barcelona, from the graphic novel ‘Debating Truth’ by Nina Caputo and Liz Clarke (Oxford UP 2016)

Medieval Iberians of all religions engaged in polemics with their spiritual rivals. In the later Middle Ages, actual live disputations and debates (and some shouting matches that ended in fistfights or worse) fueled a genre of polemical treatises meant to legitimize one tradition at the expense of others. In the age of Christian crusade against Granada and an increasingly strident campaign to convert Muslim and Jewish subjects of Christian monarchs, these polemics were both increasingly reflective of daily practice and increasingly engaged with the actual exegesis, doctrine, and practice of rival groups, rather than shadowboxing a spectral abstraction of Christians, Jews, or Muslims.

While explicitly polemical treatises written expressly against one or another of the traditions put scripture in service to theological arguments, the polemical retellings of the Hebrew Bible we are about to see instead deploy theological arguments to reinforce their interpretation of scripture, privileging the narrative. Scholars of polemics point out that the polemic spirit infused many genres, especially biblical commentary (Talmadge 17; Trautner-Kromann 5), and we see these examples in that line of thinking. We are dealing with polemical Biblical narratives that demonstrate an awareness of and engagement with their sibling traditions. This engagement takes various forms, specifically in the representation of rival traditions, and through polemical representations of specific doctrines and practices meant to legitimize one tradition at the expense of the others.

fifteenth-century painting of feast with one man seated by himself to the right

‘The Feast Given by Joseph for his Brothers’ Francesco Morandini (1549). The Walters Art Museum art.thewalters.org. As in the General estoria, Joseph sits to one side by himself

One way of representing a given religious tradition is to identify a medieval religous group with a Biblical character or characters. The 13th-century Castilian universal history General estoria, compiled by Alfonso X of Castile, retells the story of Joseph in Egypt as an allegory for contemporary laws mandating that Jews and Christians not eat together. In the retelling, Joseph seats his Israelite brothers at tables separately from the Egyptians dining with them, explaining that Egyptian law forbade Jews to eat at the same table as Egyptians (Alfonso X I:8, xxi, 453), thus projecting the contemporary polemical atmosphere backward in time onto the Biblical text:

he ordered the tables set, his to one side, as if we were a man from a different religion and a strange land, and that of the Egyptians, who ate with him on his side, as befits natives of the land, and that of his brothers on their side, as befits foreigners, for at that time in Egypt it was an infraction of the law and as nonsensical that Egyptians eat with Jews who were not of their religion

mandó poner las mesas, la suya apartada, assí commo de omne d’otra ley e de agena tierra, e la de los de Egipto que comién con él en su cabo, assí commo de naturales del logar, e la de sos hermanos a su part, assí como de avenedizos, ca por quebrantamiento de ley e por cosa sin razón tenién estonces los de Egipto de comer ellos con los judíos que non eran de su ley. (Alfonso X I:8, xxi, 453)

We can see a similar process at work in the Jewish retelling of the Joseph story in the fourteenth-century Castilian Coplas de Yosef, which repeatedly refers to individual Israelites as judíos (‘Jews’) as opposed to Israelites or ‘Sons of Jacob,’ and collectively as judería (‘group of Jews’ and also ‘Jewish neighborhood’) (Minervini and Girón-Negrón 171, st. 216a, 173 n 216a).

left panel: moses holds three tablets, with one falling to ground. Right panel: moses holds two tablets

stills from ‘History of the World, Part I’ (dir. Mel Brooks, 20th Century Fox, 1981)

In Muslim retellings of the Hebrew Bible, representation of Jews or Biblical Hebrews (standing in for contemporary Iberian Jews) reinforces the doctrine of taḥrīf (corruption of the Hebrew scriptures by Jews and Christians) and the moral and spiritual inferiority of non-Muslims in general. The doctrine of taḥrīf is allegorized in the sixteenth-century Aljamiado Dialogue of Moses with God on Mount Sinai, written for clandestine Muslims living under the prohibition of Islam in the age of Inquisition. Their Moses comes down from the mountain with ‘seven [not two] tablets of pearls and coral, on which the Torah was written’ (“Siete tablas de perlas y coral, en que ellas estaba escrito el at-tawrah” (Vespertino Rodríguez 174). This reinforces the traditional Muslim view that the Jews changed the Torah after it was received at Sinai.

two women studying torah at a table

Students studying Torah at Midreshet Aviv in Tel Aviv (timesofisrael.com 2013)

At other times, these retellings shift their focus to specific ritual practices, representing these in polemical ways to exalt one’s own or discredit those of others. In the 14th-century Jewish versification of the Joseph story, the Coplas de Yosef, Joseph asks his brothers to travel back to Canaan and prove to his father that Joseph is still alive by reminding his long-lost father Jacob of a study session the two had when Joseph was still living at home. The anachronic representation of Joseph studying Torah with Jacob (the events of the Joseph story in the Bible occur before those of the book of Exodus from which Jacob and Joseph here read) is meant as a bona fide to prove Egyptian Joseph’s identity both as a Jew (who studies Torah) rather than an Egyptian, and as the living brother of Jacob’s sons. He reminds his brothers:

He who loved me, my father the great scholar,
when he sent me to get you, and sent me away from his side, at the time, I read with him from a very precious book [Exodus]

Aquél que me deseava, mi padre el gran letrado,
que cuando [a] vós me inviava espartióme de su lado, estonces con él meldava en un livro muy preçiado [Éxodo]” (Minervini and Girón-Negrón 175, st. 229).

This type of representation and instruction in ritual practice and prayer through Biblical narrative takes on a more crucial role in the Morisco community in the sixteenth century. With few opportunities for formal organized religious education, Moriscos depended in part on Aljamiado Biblical legends to reinforce Islamic doctrine and ritual praxis in context of persecution and Inquisition (Wood 43). In the 15th-century aljamiado Leyenda de Yusuf (‘The Legend of Yusuf’), the angel Gabriel visits Joseph in the pit into which his brothers have thrown him and teaches him Muslim prayers (Klenk 16–17; McGaha 174).

interior of one-room mosque at summit of Mount Sinai

Interior of Mosque at the summit of Mount Sinai (photo: Premiero, 2007, wikipedia.org)

In the Diálogo de Moisés (‘Dialogue of Moses’) written in the same period, Moses ascends the mountain and spends forty days purifying himself spiritually before receiving the law. The scene describes him performing Muslim prayer, using the Arabic terms to describe the act of prayer: ṣalla (prayer), rakʿa (prostration), and sajada (to prostrate one’s self):

he went up to Mount Sinai and performed aṣ-ṣala in two rakʿas, and when he was sajjada’ed, Allah taʿāla approached him and said….

Subió al monte de Turiçina’a (Sinai) y hizo assala (oración) en el dos arrak’as (postraciones), y como estaba aççajado (postrado), acercólo Alla ta’ala, y díjole…” (Vespertino Rodríguez 168)

These examples of the representation in retellings of the Hebrew Bible of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, as well as their rituals and practices, demonstrates the extent to which the practices of the three traditions were at least as interdependent in their struggles with one another as they were in their common languages and vernacular culture. Against the backdrop of public disputations and written treatises reflecting this activity, polemical retellings of the Hebrew bible served as a common narrative stage for the drama of the three religions.

Works cited

  • Alfonso X. General estoria. Edited by Borja Sánchez-Prieto, Fundación José Antonio de Castro, 2009.
  • Klenk, Ursula, editor. La Leyenda de Yusuf. M. Niemeyer, 1972.
  • McGaha, Michael D. Coat of Many Cultures: The Story of Joseph in Spanish Literature, 1200-1492. Jewish Publication Society, 1997.
  • Minervini, Laura, and Luis Girón-Negrón. Las Coplas de Yosef. Entre la Biblia y el Midrash en la poesía judeoespañola. Gredos, 2006.
  • Talmadge, Frank. “Introduction.” The Book of the Covenant of Joseph Kimḥi., translated by Frank Talmadge, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1972, pp. 9–26.
  • Trautner-Kromann, Hanne. Shield and Sword: Jewish Polemics against Christianity and the Christians in France and Spain from 1100-1500. Mohr, 1993.
  • Vespertino Rodríguez, Antonio. Leyendas aljamiadas y moriscas sobre personajes bíblicos. Gredos, 1983.
  • Wood, Donald Walter. “‘Tengo feuza en la piyadad de Allāh’: Piety and Polemic in an Aljamiado-Morisco ‘Companion in Paradise’ Narrative.” Medieval Encounters: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim culture in confluence and dialogue, vol. 26, 2020, no. 1, 2020, pp. 22–48, https://doi.org/10.1163/15700674-12340059.

This post is a version of a paper given at the 2022 meeting of the Medieval Academy. Thanks to Brian Catlos for organizing the panel on “Religious Texts and Confessional Integration in a Plural Mediterranean” (a session sponsored by the Mediterranean Seminar).

Shared Storyworlds in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Retellings of the Hebrew Bible in Medieval Iberia

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Adam and Eve from the Alba Bible

Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden in the Alba Bible (15th c.)

Medieval Iberians of all three religions participated in a common culture of retellings of material from the Hebrew Bible that fused the doctrines of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity with the vernacular languages and cultures common to all three groups. This shared storyworlding is expressed in a body of texts that includes versifications, chronicles, translations, art, and exegesis. Here I will discuss how the use of a vernacular common to all three religious groups shapes the creation of a shared storyworld that brings together Jewish, Muslim, and Christian audiences, at times through Biblical traditions, languages, and vernacular culture.

Cain bites Abel on neck

Cain bites Abel on neck, Alba Bible (15th c.)

It makes sense that vernacular retellings of the Hebrew Bible, as opposed to those written in classical languages of a given religious group (Hebrew, Classical Arabic, Latin) were the most accessible to members of all three groups who shared a common language. This is not true in every circumstance, however. Not all Granadan Muslims, for example, were speakers of Castilian in the year 1300 (when Andalusi Arabic was still dominant), and so would not comprehend retellings in Castilian. Most Jews were not likely to hear Castilian or Catalan Biblical tales in sermons by Christian priests except when they were mandated to attend sermons preached by Dominicans and Franciscans. However, there are many retellings that are linguistically, culturally, and situationally accessible across groups, and this access makes it possible for these groups to develop a shared understanding of the storyworld of the Hebrew Bible.

picture of Story World create-a-story kit

Storyworld Create a Story Kit (source: https://www.candlewick.com/)

What is a storyworld? The idea of storyworld grows from the reader reception theory of the 1970s and 80s in which the object of study is not only the text, but rather extends to the experience of the audience as part of the constitution of the literary work. That is, the text is only one part of the work. We can think of the storyworld as a collaboration between text and audience. This approach is useful for studying the interactions between different religious traditions, because the focus on audience experience helps us conceptualize the continuity of experience between texts and audiences representing distinct religious traditions but shared literary experiences.

One of the earlier theorists of the storyworld, Seymour Chatman, posited the binary of discourse and story, in which the discourse refers to the text, and the story is “the continuum of events presupposing the total set of all conceivable details actually inferred by a reader [audience]” (Chatman 28; Thatcher 28). For the narratologist David Herman, storyworlds are simply “the worlds evoked by narratives” (Herman 143).  María Ángeles Martínez builds on these ideas, adding that “storyworlds are mental models of situations and states of affairs which are linguistically or multimodally prompted by narrative discourse” (Martínez 28).

What does a storyworld do? How is it a useful tool for reading retellings of the Hebrew Bible? Scholars of contemporary media use it as a construct to study audience interaction with coherent multi-platform or ‘transmedial’ narrative worlds (Ryan), such as Star Wars narratives that proliferate across film, novels, graphic novels, and videogames.

cover of Lego Star Wars videogame showing lego minifig characters holding light sabers

Lego Star Wars video game (source: https://starwars.fandom.com/)

The Bible already does this by lending coherence to its many books (‘Biblia’ is the Greek plural for ‘book’) and the multiple, sometimes contradictory traditions on which it draws. The canonical and apocryphal books of the Hebrew Bible texts are the base, and the various retellings in theater, legend, chronicle, and verse expand and innovate. Storyworlds provide us with a conceptual frame to organize and provide coherence for our readings of the individual texts, and a lens through which to view questions of how narrative works.

I’ll give a few examples to show three different ways in which this happens in the texts: (1) the expression of emotional states, (2) the description of shared material culture, and (3) the use of genres, tropes, and forms common to vernacular narrative genres across religious traditions.

manuscript illumination showing Abraham about to behead Isaac while angel descends from heaven to stop him

The Binding of Isaac, in Les anciennes hystoires rommaines, MS Royal 16 G VII, f. 28, 14th c. British Library (source: thetorah.com)

One story very familiar to all three groups is the story of the aqedah or binding of Isaac (Ishmael in Islamic tradition) told in Genesis 22.  We know the story: God commands Abraham to offer Isaac as a sacrifice. Abraham complies, and just as he is about to bring the knife down on Isaac’s throat, God sends an angel to stop him, telling him that he has passed God’s test.The 15th-century Valencian biblical play Sacrifiçi de Isaac (Sacrifice of Isaac) takes some dramatic liberties with this scene, taking it in a more burlesque direction, and adding more affective detail in the representation of both the Angel and Abraham, couched in familiar vernacular tropes of badgering and annoyance:

Angel [in the voice of an old lady]: Abraham! Abraham!
Abraham: What do you want, sir?

L’Àngel, a to de ‘Vexilla.’: “Habram! Abram!”
Habram: “Què vols, senyor?” (Huerta Viñas 128)

The voice of the Angel is cast in the misogynist trope of the meddling older lady, and Abraham’s response is not the obedient “here I am” of the bible, but rather què vols?  the Valencian equivalent of “whattaya want, already” of the stereotyped man chafing at a female questioning his actions.  I argue that it would be far more difficult to communicate these affective states in Biblical Hebrew or Latin, and that it is the vernacular medium that opens the traditional text to this affective texturing of the story, a vernacular experience that is shared by Jews, Christian, and Muslims in the street watching the drama.

antique hetchel for processing wool or flax (18th c.?) (source: pinterest.com)

Elsewhere authors of biblical retellings use material culture as a reference point in describing things that might be unfamiliar to audiences. The 13th-century Castilian General estoria, compiled under the direction of Alfonso X of Castile, in an excursus in the Joseph story on the Nile river adapted from Pliny, describes the crocodile (cocodriz): The compilers write that

 

on both jaws are many strong teeth, that are fashioned and positioned just like they are on the iron combs used to process wool.

en amoz los carrirellos á muchos dientes e muy Fuertes, e tiénenlos assí texidos e puestos eguales como están los dientes en  los peines de fierro que lavran la lana. (Alfonso X I:8, xiv, 435-436)

Here the compilers draw on the vernacular material culture, one shared across religious groups, to help audiences perhaps not personally familiar with crocodiles to populate parts the Joseph storyworld.

workers preparing bread from ancient Egyptian mural

And Jacob saw there was grain in Egypt
Senet’s Tomb (TT60), Luxor, Egypt, 20th c BCE (source: https://stravaganzastravaganza.blogspot.com/)

Our sources also share folkoric tropes and motifs drawn from the vernacular culture shared by Muslims, Jews, and Christians. The retelling of the Joseph story in the fourteenth-century Coplas de Yosef, a Hebrew aljamiado versification in mester de clerecía tells of how Jacob learns about the stores of grain in Egypt during the famine in his homeland of Canaan:

Jacob, there in that land where he dwelled [Canaan],
Went to the river and looked at the water:
He saw a lot of straw floating along in the river,
The same straw that Joseph had spilled [upriver in Egypt].

Ya’aqob en esa tierra, allá donde estaba,
al río se fuera y las aguas miraba:
mucha paja viera que en el río andaba,
esta paja fuera que derramó Yosef.
(Girón-Negrón and Minervini 141, st. 76).

While Genesis 42:1 relates only that Jacob “saw there was grain in Egypt” (וַיַּ֣רְא יַעֲקֹ֔ב כִּ֥י יֶשׁ־שֶׁ֖בֶר בְּמִצְרָ֑יִם), Rabbinic sources provide various explanations: Jacob saw it in a vision (Bereshit Rabbah); Jacob lost his prophetic vision after Joseph was sold and only saw the ‘hope’ of bread in Egypt (Rashi); Jacob literally saw men with wheat and asked them, then understood that they had bought it in Egypt (David Qimhi). None of these account for the novel solution of the Coplas de Yosef, but the editors of the Coplas, Laura Minervini and Luis Girón-Negrón, locate the motif in a folktale collected in Burgos, Las señas de la batalla:

They threw the straw in the river for them to see the sign of what they were going to do. When the river water with the staw reached them, they knew that they had won the battle.

Les echaron al río [las pajas] para ver la señal de lo que iban a hacer. Cuando llegaba el agua del río con las pajas es que habían ganao la batalla. (Pedrosa 95; Girón-Negrón and Minervini 249 n 74–78)

This motif is adapted in the Coplas as a novel interpretation of Genesis under the influence of regional vernacular culture shared across religious communities, and its use in building out the storyworld of the Joseph narrative connects Jewish, Muslim, and Christian speakers of Castilian familiar with it from oral tradition [I have written about the transmission of narrative across religious groups via oral tradition here and here].

Hopefully these few examples begin to paint for you the picture of a community of Biblical interpretation at once divided by religious tradition and bound together by common vernacular language and culture, one that facilitated the practice of a shared Biblical storyworld. Stay tuned for more in future posts on this topic!

Works cited

  • Chatman, Seymour Benjamin. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Cornell University Press, 1978.
  • Girón-Negrón, Luis M., and Laura Minervini. Las Coplas de Yosef: Entre La Biblia y El Midrash En La Poesía Judeoespañola. Gredos, 2006.
  • Herman, David. Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates. Ohio State University Press, 2012.
  • Huerta Viñas, Ferran. Teatre Bíblic: Antic Testament. Editorial Barcino, 1976.
  • Martínez, María-Ángeles. Storyworld Possible Selves. De Gruyter, Inc., 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uoregon/detail.action?docID=5156565.
  • Pedrosa, José Manuel. Héroes, santos, moros y brujas : Leyendas épicas, históricas y mágicas de la tradición oral de Burgos : Poética, comparatismo y etnotextos. Elías Rubio Marcos, 2001.
  • Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Transmedial Storytelling and Transfictionality.” Poetics Today, vol. 34, no. 3, Sept. 2013, pp. 361–88.
  • Thatcher, Tom. “Anatomies of the Fourth Gospel: Past, Present, and Future Probes.” Anatomies of Narrative Criticism: The Past, Present, and Futures of the Fourth Gospel as Literature, edited by Tom Thatcher and Stephen D. Moore, Brill, 2008, pp. 1–35.
  • Ukas, Catherine Vool Rytell. The Biblia Rimada de Sevilla: A Critical Edition. University of Toronto, 1981.

This post is a version of a paper given at the 2022 MLA Convention, in the panel “New Currents in Medieval Iberian Studies” organized by the Medieval Iberian LLC Forum and presided by Robin Bower.