The Jewish people is rescued

This is the only poem to survive from the southern Italian poet Shefatiah. It is a seliḥah, a poem for the penitential prayers recited on Yom Kippur, the penitential days leading up to it, or a fast day at some other point in the year. The poet presents the Jewish people

as being in a desperate situation, at serious risk from their oppressors, with God as their only hope. In the fifth stanza, he refers to “Seir and his father-in-law”; “Seir” refers to Esau, who lives on Mount Seir (see Genesis 36:8), and “his father-in-law” is Ishmael (see Genesis 28:9). In accordance with the medieval Jewish understanding of these biblical fgures and the nations descended from them, “Esau” refers to the kingdoms of Christendom and “Ishmael” to the Muslims. The expression “Seir and his father-in-law” was imitated by a number of later Hebrew poets in southern Italy, refecting their experience in a land that saw ongoing conficts between Byzantine and Norman Christians and raiding Muslim armies.