Cultural Achievements in the Early Medieval Islamic World

The Shift from Aramaic to Arabic

By the tenth century, Jews throughout the Near East had largely abandoned Greek and Aramaic, the main languages of the region since antiquity, having adopted in their place Arabic, the language of their new Muslim overlords. The embrace of Arabic occurred gradually and unevenly. Jews in urban settings probably began speaking Arabic as early as the eighth century (the first surviving examples of Jewish writing in that language date from about that time), whereas those living in rural areas were slower to adopt the language. 

Hayya Ga’on comments on this complex reality, noting that in his day, the late tenth century, Jews in Baghdad spoke Arabic, but “in all of the smaller towns, everyone, both Jew and non-Jew alike, continues to speak Aramaic.” Hayya’s observation reinforces the impression that changing settlement patterns during the Abbasid period—the shift from rural to urban living—went hand in hand with a range of other cultural adjustments for the Jews, principal among them being their Arabicization. 

But if the Jews’ embrace of Arabic as a written language was not instantaneous, it was wholehearted; once adopted, Arabic was quickly put to use for almost every conceivable kind of writing, whether secular or religious, literary or prosaic. It is hard to overstate the impact of this linguistic transformation, which enabled literate Jews not only to absorb the rich cultural offerings of the medieval Islamic world but also to take an active part in literary and scientific investigations.

Arabic and Judeo-Arabic

The Abbasid period thus marks the beginning of an explosion in Jewish literary activity, much of it in Arabic. Jews typically wrote Arabic using Hebrew letters (structurally, the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets are remarkably similar, making the substitution of one for the other relatively straightforward), a scribal custom paralleled in the practice of some eastern Christians who wrote Arabic in their traditional Syriac script. 

Unlike the Ladino spoken by Jews in the Ottoman Empire, for example, or the Yiddish spoken by Jews in Eastern Europe, which came to be distinct Jewish languages and marked their speakers’ linguistic isolation from their surroundings, Judeo-Arabic (linguistically, a type of Middle-Arabic) was essentially the language of the surrounding society, albeit interspersed with an occasional word or phrase in Hebrew. In this, Judeo-Arabic was similar to the medieval Judeo-Spanish and Judeo-German languages that formed the bases for Ladino and Yiddish respectively, but, unlike them, was used for “highbrow” writing as well as for practical purposes or popular literature. 

Indeed, the term Judeo-Arabic is of modern vintage; medieval Jews had no special way of distinguishing the Arabic they wrote in Hebrew characters, calling it simply “Arabic.” To be sure, not all Jewish writers mastered the complexities of the highest registers of classical written Arabic (though the best did), but even the colloquial elements that many fell back on underscore the essential reality that Jews and Muslims were in effect speaking the same language.

The Impact of Arabic on Jewish Literary Activity

The impact of Arabic on Jewish literary activity registered in many realms. First, Jews began to cultivate entirely new genres of writing under the influence of developments in contemporary Arabic intellectual culture, works in such fields as science, theology, medicine, literature, and grammar. 

The Abbasid authorities had eagerly supported the translation of a great deal of the Greek classical tradition into Arabic. This remarkable undertaking under their patronage revitalized the legacy of ancient Greece, placing it at the center of a thriving intellectual culture now grounded in Arabic. 

Reading these works, Jews, Christians, and Muslims were exposed to new and sometimes challenging ideas, including explanations of the natural world that conflicted with the accounts in their scriptures; conceptions of ethical behavior that were predicated on altogether unfamiliar ideas about the nature of the human soul; and descriptions of laws governing the cosmos that left little room for an active, miracle-working deity. These works also introduced readers to new forms of argumentation and analysis that placed particular emphasis on the role of human reason as the arbiter of truth. 

Se‘adya Ga’on’s Book of Beliefs and Opinions

Se‘adya Ga’on’s Book of Beliefs and Opinions (933) was among the earliest Jewish works produced amid this stimulating intellectual ferment. Drawing on the arguments and methods of contemporary practitioners of kalām—an intellectual movement that marshaled rational proofs in support of the claims of revealed religion—the book seeks to resolve critical theological issues using rationalist tools. Following an introductory chapter that elucidates the importance of reason within a religious system, it provides arguments to support the theory of a divinely created universe (chapter 1), offers rational justifications for the Torah’s legislation (chapter 3), attempts to reconcile God’s foreknowledge with human free will (chapter 4), and lays out a basis for belief in a world to come (chapter 9), to mention but a sampling of the topics covered. In its structure, methodology, and overall apologetic treatment of religious doctrines, it bears a striking similarity to works produced by contemporary Muslim and Christian theologians active in Iraq. 

The Encounter with Arabic Intellectual Culture

Jews’ direct encounter with Arabic science and philosophy, which began during the early Abbasid period, continued for at least the next three centuries, as writers like Solomon Ibn Gabirol an accomplished Andalusian poet and Neoplatonic philosopher, Judah ha-Levi, another brilliant poet and author of the Kuzari, and Moses Maimonides each in their own way engaged and responded to a variety of intellectual currents circulating within the Arabic-speaking world.

The impact of Arabic intellectual culture was also felt in more traditional or internal fields of Jewish scholarship, such as biblical exegesis and the study of Jewish law. Beginning in the tenth century, Jews began composing systematic commentaries in Arabic on entire books of the Bible. Although their theological concerns differed, the organization and scope of these works and their demonstrable interest in philosophical, philological, and literary questions reveal their involvement with some of the same methodologies that were central to contemporary Islamic (and, presumably, Christian) exegetes. In similar fashion, the first halakhic monographs, which appeared at roughly the same time and in Arabic as well, utilized the theoretical approaches and terminology of Islamic legal literature.

Jewish Sufism

Somewhat later, Jewish writers composed ethical treatises and manuals of pietistic practice that mirrored and freely borrowed from works in the Islamic mystical tradition, known as Sufism. Among the earliest examples is Baḥya Ibn Paqūda’s The Book of Direction to the Duties of the Heart, completed in Muslim Spain around 1040. The true measure of Sufism’s appeal for Jews, however, becomes clear only when we look to the East. Writings preserved in the Cairo Geniza demonstrate the presence in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Egypt of a multigenerational movement of self-styled pietists (ḥasidim; no relation to the eighteenth-century East European movement) whose religious outlook and rituals were explicitly grounded in Sufi texts and practices.

Golden Age Hebrew Poetry

Another striking literary development was the creation of a new form of poetry, the centerpiece of a dazzling period of cultural creativity most closely associated with tenth- to twelfth-century al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) frequently dubbed “the Golden Age of Hebrew literature.” From al-Andalus, the new poetry spread throughout the Islamic world and was adopted in Christian lands as well. 

Up until the tenth century, poetry in Hebrew was primarily devotional in nature and composed for use in the synagogue. The origins of this older liturgical poetic tradition, called piyyut, reach back to late antiquity, when its major forms and conventions were established in tandem with the evolution of the liturgy.

In the early part of the tenth century, writers in the circle of Ḥasday Ibn Shaprūṭ, a Jewish official at the court of Abd al-Raḥman III, the ruler of Muslim Spain, began to experiment with the genres, rhythms, and themes of Arabic poetry. Going as far back as the odes of pre-Islamic Arabia, poetry had occupied a unique and revered place as a literary form among Arabic speakers, and it is therefore little surprise that cultured Jews living in Islamic lands should have fallen under its spell. The result was a remarkable breakthrough: verse written in Hebrew but according to the intricate meters and literary conventions of Arabic poetry. While poems addressing a host of worldly themes—descriptions of the natural world, the pleasures and torments of sexual desire, and the transience of human life, to name but a few—written in this new mode stand out as especially novel in the history of Hebrew literature, synagogue verse was no less affected, as it too adopted the aesthetic sensibilities and formal features of Arabic poetry.

Women in the Poetic Tradition

This new poetry was created by and geared to the tastes of erudite men. While women’s bodies and voices appear everywhere in these texts, almost invariably they are the products of a male poet’s imagination. In general, love poetry was a highly stylized form that did not presume a real female subject. We do, however, have several poems written by men for real women. 

Mourning poems seem to have been written to eulogize actual women; examples range from a wistful elegy for a young woman who died unmarried to a rather heartbreaking poem couched as a dialogue between the poet and his dead mother.

Given this lopsided reality, evidence, limited though it is, of the verse creations of two women poets from our period is truly remarkable. The unnamed wife of the famous tenth-century Andalusian poet Dunash ben Labraṭ left us a single Hebrew composition, a touching poem lamenting her husband’s impending departure on a journey. Two Arabic poems by the twelfth-century Jewish poet Qasmūna bint Ismā‘īl have also been preserved, these in the works of later Muslim literary anthologists. In one deeply moving couplet meditating on loneliness, a woman compares herself to an orchard whose fruit has ripened, without a gardener to reap the harvest.

The Hebrew Language

The allure of belles lettres for Jews and Muslims related to a broader fascination with language and literary refinement. Integral components of the humanistic educational ideal were expressed by the Arabic term adab. Responding to the same cultural cues as their Muslim neighbors, Jewish writers began composing—again, primarily in Arabic—the first studies of the Hebrew language. Among such pioneering works were grammatical treatises, dictionaries, and works on literary theory. And it was within this matrix that Solomon Ibn Gabirol wrote “The Necklace.” A grammar of the Hebrew language set in verse, the work is at once exceptional and entirely representative, reflecting the way Jews had come to express pride in their religiocultural heritage by drawing on the aesthetic ideals and literary models of their Muslim neighbors.

Alongside the formal genres of writing we have been discussing, thousands of pages of everyday writing—among them, letters, legal documents, communal records—were preserved in the Cairo Geniza. 

The Cairo Geniza

Typically, a geniza is used as a repository for respectfully discarding worn-out writings of a religious nature. For reasons that are still not entirely clear, the Jews of medieval Fustāt, then a separate town but now part of modern-day Cairo, deposited a great deal of what we might consider secular writing in their geniza as well. (In reality, there were multiple genizot in Fustāt, but as a matter of convention scholars continue to refer to the Geniza in the singular.) The discovery of these records in the nineteenth century provided modern historians with an unparalleled view of daily life in a medieval Jewish community. 

In these documents, which are most abundant for the years 1000 to 1250, we learn about the myriad struggles that ordinary Jews confronted on a daily basis. The findings enable us to encounter precious details about the lived experiences of women and children. 

Of particular importance are the many letters by women that have been preserved in the Geniza, which is, as a consequence, the most abundant source of writing by Jewish women, and perhaps by women in general, from the entire medieval period. Several examples of Jewish mothers writing to their sons reveal amusingly familiar patterns: expressions of affection, reproaches for the son’s absence, and warnings against excessive drinking. Women also wrote to their siblings and husbands, relaying local news and gossip, or complaining about money. Letters have survived, although fragmentary, written to Maimonides himself, by both his brother David and his sister Miriam.