Poetry

A new music for Hebrew. In the tenth century, Dunash ben Labrat, born, by one medieval account, in Fez to a family from Baghdad, and a student of Saadia Gaon, became the first to adapt an Arabic meter to Hebrew verse. Saadia is said to have marveled, “Such a thing has hitherto been unknown in Israel.” Dunash settled in Córdoba, and his innovation shaped Hebrew poetry for centuries. A poem attributed to his wife, whose name we do not know, survives on a page from the Cairo Geniza: a woman's farewell to her departing husband, asking if he will remember her and their son.

Secular and sacred. Poets wrote about love, wine, gardens, friendship, and grief, and they praised their patrons. The same poets wrote piyyutim for the synagogue, drawing their language from the Hebrew Bible. Scholars note that these poets did not draw a sharp line between “secular” and “religious”; a poet's collected works, the diwan, held both.

How a muwashshah works

The muwashshah (in Hebrew, shir ezor, “girdle poem”) was a strophic form first developed in al Andalus, with three to five stanzas.

Its final two lines, the kharja, were usually not in Hebrew but in the Romance vernacular (an early form of Spanish), Arabic, or a mix, and may have quoted popular songs. Scholars count the Romance kharjas, some from the eleventh century, among the oldest surviving lyric verses in a Romance language, which makes Hebrew and Arabic poems an important part of the story of European poetry.

Shmuel HaNagid: the warrior poet

Vizier and army commander of Granada, HaNagid wrote poems from the battlefield about campaigns and victories of his own day, gathered in English in a section titled “After Psalms.” He also wrote witty proverbs, elegies for his brother, and reflections on growing old.

Solomon ibn Gabirol

Born around 1022, Ibn Gabirol borrowed Arabic meters, rhymes, and imagery and wrote sharp satires of court life alongside devotional poems. His long poem Keter Malkhut (“Kingdom's Crown”) appears in many prayer books for Yom Kippur.

Moses ibn Ezra

Born in Granada around 1060, he fled to Christian Spain after the city fell to the Almoravids and spent the rest of his life in exile. He wrote secular poems, penitential poems (selihot) on death and the vanity of the world, and, in Arabic, an early book about how to write Hebrew poetry.

Yehuda HaLevi: Songs of Zion

HaLevi wrote love poems and wine songs, but he is best remembered for his poems of longing for Zion. In the most famous, his heart is in the East while he lives at the far edge of the West. In 1140 he set out for the Land of Israel.

Israel Najara: Safed and Damascus

Probably born in Damascus, Najara published Zemirot Yisrael in Safed in 1587 with 109 poems; a later edition held 346. His Aramaic Sabbath song “Yah Ribbon Olam,” with his name in an acrostic, is sung by Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews alike. Some rabbis criticized him for borrowing popular melodies.

Shalom Shabazi: Yemen

The greatest poet of Yemenite Jewry wrote about 550 poems in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, often weaving his name into them as an acrostic. His themes include exile and redemption, the Sabbath, festivals, and weddings. Sarah Sassoon places his life alongside the Mawza exile of Yemen's Jews in 1679 and 1680.

David ben Hassine: Morocco

Born in Meknes, David ben Hassine (1727 to 1792) has been called the most celebrated poet of Moroccan Jewry. Communities as far away as Gibraltar invited him to sing his piyyutim, and his collection Tehilla leDavid was printed in Amsterdam in 1807.

Shahin and Imrani: Persian epics

Writing in Judeo Persian in the 1300s, the poet known as Shahin (“falcon”) retold Genesis, the life of Moses, and the Book of Esther as long epics in rhymed couplets, the Persian masnavi. Imrani of Isfahan continued the tradition in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Ladino koplas and romansas

Koplas are rhymed Ladino poems in stanzas, often with refrains or acrostics, first written by rabbis to teach holidays, history, and ethics; Purim koplas were the most famous. Romansas are narrative ballads from medieval Spain, in long lines split into two eight syllable halves, often sung by women at their household work.

Bridges across centuries

Emma Lazarus, of Portuguese Sephardic descent, translated Ibn Gabirol and HaLevi into English in the 1800s. Avraham Shemuel Recanati of Salonica translated HaLevi into Ladino, and Sarah Sassoon also writes about the Iranian rabbi and poet Yaghoub Rashti.

Erez Biton, born in 1942 in Oran, Algeria, to Moroccan parents, came to Israel as a small child and lost his sight at age ten. His first book, Minkha Morokait (A Moroccan Offering), appeared in 1976. In 2015 he received the Israel Prize. Sarah Sassoon calls him the founding father of contemporary Mizrahi poetry.

Ronny Someck, born in Baghdad in 1951, writes about everyday life and memory, and his work has been translated into 22 languages. Almog Behar, whose family roots include Iraq, Turkey, and Germany, writes Hebrew poems threaded with Arabic and finds a model in the poets of Spain. Sarah Sassoon, a poet of Iraqi Jewish descent born in Australia and living in Israel, won first place in a prize for Jewish women writers for her chapbook This is Why We Don't Look Back. In New York, spoken word poet Vanessa Hidary, a descendant of Syrian Sephardim, performs as “the Hebrew Mamita.”

Common misconceptions

• “Medieval Hebrew poetry was all prayer.” Poets of al Andalus also wrote about wine, love, friendship, and war.
• “European lyric poetry began with the troubadours.” Scholars count Romance kharjas preserved in Hebrew and Arabic poems among the oldest Romance lyric verses.
• “Sephardic poetry ended in 1492.” It continued in Safed, Yemen, Morocco, Persia, the Ottoman world, and today.
• “Jewish poets wrote only in Hebrew.” They also wrote in Aramaic, Arabic, Judeo Persian, Ladino, and English.

In the public school classroom

• Compare a war poem by Shmuel HaNagid with a Psalm or an Arabic poem of the era. What images and feelings do they share?
• Write a “muwashshah” in English that ends with a two line kharja in another language students speak at home.
• Read a Songs of Zion poem and a modern poem about home or migration; discuss how poets write about longing.
• Retell a familiar story in rhymed couplets, as Shahin did, or perform a spoken word poem about identity.
• Study liturgical poems as literature; students analyze them rather than recite them as prayer.

In Jewish schools and communities

• Pair a piyyut sung in your community with its poet's secular poems.
• Read Sarah Sassoon's Distinctions essay and trace the theme of return from HaLevi to Biton.
• Hold a poetry evening where students read their own work beside the medieval masters.
• Use the Sephardi & Mizrahi Education Toolkit to bring these poets into the school year.

At home and with family

• Ask elders for proverbs, songs, or poems they remember, and write them down.
• Write a family acrostic poem using a grandparent's name.
• Read a poem aloud at a holiday table and talk about what it means to each person.
• Share your family's story with JIMENA.

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