Early Medieval Poetry

The Birth of Hebrew Poetry under Arabic Influence

One of the newly fertile areas of early medieval Jewish literary production was poetry. In al-Andalus (the areas of the Iberian Peninsula under Muslim rule), an innovative form of Hebrew poetry emerged, founded on prosodic principles adapted from Arabic quantitative metrics. Despite some initial resistance, the styles proved wildly popular. Spreading quickly to the Middle East and beyond, they eventually became the model for nearly all nonliturgical (and sometimes liturgical) poetry written in Hebrew until the Italian Renaissance. The poems can be lyrical, witty, sometimes touching, and they span a wide variety of topics, including love poetry, celebrations of wine, philosophical meditations, panegyrics (praise poems), and laments. They deal with diverse subjects, such as personal relationships between friends, lovers, or patron and poet, descriptions of nature and natural beauty, meditations on the nature of the soul or death. 

Some of these poems were written for ritual events, such as circumcisions or weddings, that took place outside the synagogue, but they are not, strictly speaking, liturgical poetry, called in Hebrew piyyut (pl. piyyutim), which was composed as an integral part of communal prayer and experienced in that context by its audience.

Rhyme, Meter, and the New Arabic Styles

Before the sixth century, Hebrew poetry was not rhymed, and Hebrew-language poets continued to write in unrhymed styles, imitating that very early poetry, at least through the eleventh century. As for meter, before this period, poems were not metered in either the quantitative or the syllabic sense, but rather, if at all, in word counts (which one might call rhythm rather than strict meter). Very often they were not metered at all, in any sense. But in the new Arabic style, poetry was, by definition, both rhymed and metered. In addition, poems were usually rhetorically ornamented, with biblical allusions, metaphors, and striking imagery. Hebrew poems in the new style came in a few primary forms. 

The first, called the qiṭ‘a, was short, between two and twenty verses. Each line had the same meter and carried the same end rhyme, and the poem was usually devoted to a single topic, such as the delights of wine or the inevitability of death. 

The second, the qaṣīda, was also monorhymed, meaning that the entire poem had the same end rhyme, and each line again had the same meter. This form was especially popular for panegyrics. The qaṣīda was conventionally broken into three parts: an opening passage, with a theme ostensibly unrelated to the subject, then a clever one-line segue to the actual focus of the poem, and then the main section. The opening themes typically draw on classical Arabic poetry and are often considered the most appealing part of the poem. 

A third popular form, first developed in early medieval al-Andalus, is the muwashshaḥ, or shir ezor (“girdle poem”) in Hebrew. This form is strophic, consisting of three to five stanzas that share the same meter, each with its own end rhyme. At the end of each of these stanzas is a usually two-line mini-stanza sharing the same meter and rhyme scheme. The poem ends with two lines, termed a kharja, which were usually written not in Hebrew, like the rest of the poem, but in the Romance vernacular, standard written Arabic, a local spoken Arabic dialect, or a mix of languages. It is thought that the kharjas might have been quotations from current popular songs. In later poems of this form, however, the last two lines are usually in Hebrew. 

A fourth, much less popular form, the urjūza, was used almost entirely for didactic poems. It had a simple meter (rajaz in Arabic) and was made up of a series of rhymed couplets, allowing for poems of great length.

The Hebrew Language in Poetry

The language used for these poems was a consciously neo-biblical Hebrew that usually eschewed the Aramaic and rabbinic Hebrew forms found in the Talmud and in some classical piyyut. The idea was to use the Hebrew Bible as the source of a pure, elegant Hebrew in the same way that the Qur’ān was the source of and model for pure, classical Arabic. In this way, Jewish poets sought to demonstrate the perfection of the Hebrew Bible and the Hebrew language. These poems were artifacts of the interplay between the dominant Islamicate culture and Jewish culture, but curiously they were also instruments for poets to explore that very cultural interplay. The writers often seemed to delight in the resulting contrasts and paradoxes, as when they explicitly juxtaposed allusions to the moral strictures of Jewish law with a celebration of the pleasures of the flesh in Hebrew love poetry that used tropes and metaphors drawn directly from Arabic love poetry.

Love Poetry and the Song of Songs

Love poetry directed toward God, by contrast, which might be part of a synagogue service, very often explicitly evoked the love language of the biblical Song of Songs, even accentuating its erotic aspects, and played on the traditional interpretation of the Song of Songs as an allegory for the love between God and the Jewish people. In later medieval interpretations, the Song of Songs came also to be read as an allegory for the dialogue between the soul of the individual worshiper and God, or between the human intellect and the active intellect, or, in the kabbalistic tradition, between different sefirot within the divine hierarchy; these allegories informed the religious poetry of those centuries as well.

Biblical Language in Hebrew Poetry

The Hebrew Bible served as a wellspring for medieval Hebrew poets, manifest in both direct quotations and glancing allusions, many of which produced a host of contextual echoes. These were related not only to the original biblical setting of the verse but also, in some cases, to the later interpretation of the verse through midrash, lexicons, and commentaries. These allusions would have intensified the power of the text, enriched its conceptual depth, and offered humorous or satirical charm.

Literary Contexts for Early Medieval Poetry

In the medieval period, poetry was used in a far wider range of roles and contexts than it is now. It was an elevated form of literary writing, far above expository prose; accordingly, formal, elegant openings to prose texts of all kinds, including personal letters and even halakhic monographs, could be written instead in florid Hebrew verse. In addition, verse was considered both pleasing and easily memorized, which was useful in a society where oral transmission of texts coexisted with the written, and where books were expensive and not easily acquired. It was thus used as a vehicle for learning; important information was encoded in didactic poetry. So, too, fixed meter and rhyme helped preserve texts from scribal corruption.