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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 October 2009
In a work of moral philosophy which first appeared in the year 1168, Moses Maimonides finds that human speech, when considered from the standpoint of religion, is divisible into five categories: the prescribed; the cautioned-against or prohibited; the rejected; the desired; and the permitted. For each classification he provides appropriate examples, then he stops to observe a difficulty that may seemingly be posed for this entire scheme by one highly particular form of speech, which is poetry. Maimonides begins to resolve the difficulty as follows:
Know that poetical compositions, in whichever language they may be, should be examined with regard to their themes in order to determine whether they follow a manner of speech which we classified. Indeed, I explain this even though it is clear, inasmuch as I have seen elders and saintly men of our coreligionists when they are at a wine banquet, such as a wedding or some other occasion, and were a man to wish to recite an Arabic poem, even if the theme of that poem were the praise of courage or generosity, of the category of the desired, or the praises of wine, of the category of the permitted, they would protest it with every manner of protest, for in their opinion it is not permitted to listen to it. However, were the bard to recite any manner of Hebrew poem, they would not protest it, and it would not be evil in their sight despite there being in those words themes that pertain to the categories of the cautioned-against or the rejected.
1. Commentary to Mishnah Avot 1:17, trans. David, Arthur, The Commentary to Mishnah Aboth (New York, 1968), pp. 18Google Scholar22. See Schirmann, Chaim (Jefim), “Maimonides and Hebrew Poetry” (Hebrew), Moznayim 3 (1935): 433–36.Google Scholar
2. Compare, on the relation of biblical language to classical literary conceptions of the sublime, and on religious rhetoric in general, the wholly different approach of St. Augustine in On Christian Doctrine, especially Book 4. For a critical discussion of Augustine's argument there, see Auerbach, Erich, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York, 1965), pp. 25–66.Google Scholar
3. The classical “library” available to the Arabic-speaking world in this period is catalogued in Walzer, Richard,Greek into Arabic (Oxford, 1962).Google Scholar
4. The text in Plato is the Symposium. Gaon, Saadia renders a judgment on this repulsive subject, as he calls it, in 10:7 of his Book of Beliefs and Opinions, trans. Samuel Rosenblatt (New Haven, 1948), pp. 373ff.Google Scholar
5. Such poems exist by the score, the best of them in the work of Moses ibn Ezra and Judah Halevi. Schirmann, Chaim (Jefim) has written on the figure of the boy in these poems, “The Ephebe in Medieval Hebrew Poetry”, Sefarad 15 (1955): 55–68.Google Scholar
6. Ezra, Moses ibn, The Secular Poems (Hebrew), ed. Heinrich Brody (Berlin, 1935), p. 321.Google ScholarDavidson, Israel, Thesaurus of Mediaeval Hebrew Poetry (New York, 1924–1938; reprint ed., New York, 1970), letter n, no.173 (2:123).Google Scholar
7. This discussion of the place of the Bible in the mental universe of the Andalusian Jewish courtier owes much to Cohen, Gerson D., “The Typology of the Rabbinate,” in his edition of Sefer ha-Qabbalah by Abraham ibn Daud (Philadelphia, 1967), pp. 263–303Google Scholar
8. Baer, Yitzhak, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, trans. Louis Schoffman (Philadelphia, 1961), 1:64.Google Scholar
9. Scholem, Gershom G., Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, 1941), p. 17. Judah Halevi asserts the pristine nobility of the Hebrew language of the Bible in the Kuzari 2:66–70.Google Scholar
10. Scholem, Major Trends,p. 14.Google Scholar
11. This was of course the scheme favored by the mystics themselves. See Ginzberg, Louis, “Allegorical Interpretation of Scripture,” included in his On Jewish Law and Lore (Philadelphia, 1955), p. 144, andGoogle ScholarScholem, Gershom G., “The Meaning of the Torah in Jewish Mysticism,” On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York, 1965), especially pp. 50ff. For an interesting imaginative application of similar principles of exegesis, by the greatest of Christian poets, see Dante's analysis of the verse from Psalms 114, “When Israel went out of Egypt,” in his Tenth Epistle to Can Grande della Scala. In the same letter, Dante explains the applicability of such principles to his own poetry; in the Convivio and On the Vulgar Tongue, to poetry in general.Google Scholar
12. As Eliot does in elucidating his notion of the function of “tradition” in the consciousness of a poet, the reader must clearly be ready to distinguish when the past is operating as a living thing and when it is mere pedantry and a mechanical show of knowledge. This distinction, which can be made in the reading of any poem, will no doubt be found in turn to influence our judgment of the poem's success or failure in other respects as well. “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” inEliot, T.S., Selected Essays (New York, 1950)Google Scholar
13. The term appears to have been coined by David Yellin as a Hebrew equivalent for the generally accepted Musivstil (“mosaic style”). Yellin's discussion is in his Theory of Spanish Poetry (Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1940; 2d ed., 1972), pp. 118ff. See also Pagis, Dan, Innovation and Tradition in Secular Poetry (Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1976), pp. 70ff., and, for the use of the device in sacred verseGoogle ScholarFleischer, Ezra, Hebrew Liturgical Poetry in the Middle Ages (Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1975), pp. 103–4. Moses ibn Ezra calls attention to the device in his work of aesthetic theory, Kitab al-Muhddara wal-Mudhdkara, Hebrew translation by Ben-Zion Halper (under the title The Poetry of Israel, Leipzig, 1924), pp. 205–6; Hebrew translation and critical edition by Abraham Halkin (under the title Book of Reflections and Deliberations, Jerusalem, 1975), pp. 297–99.Google Scholar
14. Exodus 39:9–13.
15. See Dan Pagis, Innovation and Tradition,p. 72.
16. Exodus 39:2–3.
17. Moses ibn Haviv's observations occur in his Paths of Pleasantness, cited by Chaim (Jefim) , Schirmann in his General Introduction to Hebrew Poetry in Spain and Provence(Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1954, 1960), p. 31.Google Scholar
18. Moses ibn Ezra, The Secular Poems, p. 5; in Davidson's Thesaurus of Mediaeval Hebrew Poetry, letter 3, no. 578 (2:490).Brody, Heinrich's comments on the poem appear in his Commentary to the Secular Poems of Moses ibn Ezra (Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1941), pp. 8–9Google Scholar. David Yellin discusses the poem, Theory of Spanish Poetry, p. 129, as does Pagis, Dan (who points out the “royal” theme in it) in The Secular Poetry and Poetic Theory of Moses ibn Ezra and his Contemporaries (Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1970), pp. 265–266.Google Scholar
19. Genesis 37:3.
20. Leviticus 6:3; Exodus 28:4.
21. Isaiah 14:9.
22. Micah 2:13.
23. 2 Samuel 23:1.
24. 2 Kings 25:27–30.
25. Genesis 41:14, 41–43.
26. Ezekiel 16:10.
27. Numbers 9:13.
28. Mishnah Yadayim 3:5, and Midrash Rabbah to the Song of Songs, passim. Saul Lieberman, “Mishnat Shir ha-Shirim” (Hebrew) in Scholem, Gershom G., Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition (New York, 1960), pp. 118126.Google ScholarCohen, Gerson D., “The Song of Songs and the Jewish Religious Mentality,” in The Samuel Friedland Lectures(New York, 1967), pp. 1–21.Google Scholar
29. Guide of the Perplexed3:51.
