Letter: On Arabic Meter

This excerpt from the response of the students of Menaḥem Ibn Sarūq to Dunash ben Labraṭ concerns the propriety of deploying Arabic poetic meter in Hebrew poetry, as Dunash did. Classical and postclassical Hebrew poetry used what came to be seen as inexact standards of meter, as their authors were more interested in what might be considered a poem’s tempo than what was allowed by the more formal and rigid rules of Arabic poetics. In the end, the system of Arabic quantitative meter was used by medieval Jewish poets for centuries.