Sacred Trash (27 page)
Authors: Adina Hoffman
With his work as a whole, and almost single-handedly, said one of Schirmann’s most distinguished students, the Romanian-born former
prisoner of Zion Ezra Fleischer—who would eventually oversee the publication of Schirmann’s grand history of the entire period—“he shifted attention from the interesting or unusual to the beautiful.” Schirmann was, Fleischer added, “the type of character about which novels might be written.”
O
ver the decades following Schirmann’s encounter with the Dunash heading, a few more of Dunash’s poems were discovered (some from the Geniza), though his long wine poem remained among his most important works. More spectacular than the identification of its author, however, is the story of another misattribution that involves the poet.
In 1944, working from a photostat, a Jerusalem scholar named Nehemia Allony published a fragment of a Hebrew poem that had been torn vertically down the middle. The surviving left flank of the page contained a little more than half of the lyric, which had probably been raised from the Old Cairene graves that furnished much of the material for the Mosseri collection. The fragment had a Judeo-Arabic heading, which read: “Dunash ben Labrat to him.” Allony extrapolated from the extant part of the poem that the lines in question were in all likelihood part of a wedding song composed by Dunash in honor of a local groom and his non-Iberian bride.
Some forty-one years and several wars later, Ezra Fleischer came across a complete version of the same lyric as he sat wading through the then seventy thousand microfilmed copies of poems housed at the Israel National Academy’s Geniza Research Institute for Hebrew Poetry, which Schirmann had established in 1967 and which Fleischer himself would go on to direct for four decades. (The Institute’s extensive index of meters, refrains, genres, opening lines, rhyme schemes, stanzaic structures, and scriptural citations—all of which are cross-referenced in an effort to map a fragment’s “genetic” identity—today lists some ninety thousand titles.) The lines revealed by the reproduction of this tiny (5 × 3½−inch)
scrap of rag paper from the Taylor-Schechter collection also bore a heading, but it was indecipherable, at least on film. The poem, however, was as clear as could be and, moreover, it was extremely moving in that clarity, which told not of a wedding but of a couple’s painful separation:
Will her love remember his graceful doe,
her only son in her arms as he parted?
On her left hand he placed a ring from his right,
on his wrist she placed her bracelet.
As a keepsake she took his mantle from him,
and he in turn took hers from her.
Would he settle, now, in the land of Spain,
if its prince gave him half his kingdom?
As Fleischer describes it, the poem’s pacing and development, its transitions and rhetorical ornaments of intensification, along with its central silence and choreography framed by opening and closing questions, all combine to powerful effect and make for a small tableau of striking beauty. The find was all the more intriguing because none of the extant work by Dunash had given any indication that he was capable of writing poems as poised as this one.
Spurred by his discovery, Fleischer went back to the Mosseri collection and, working from new microfilm, within a short time he was able to find the second half of the vertically torn page Allony had published. As if in a made-for-TV
National Geographic
special, the two fragments came together before Fleischer’s eyes like pieces of a map pointing to a long-lost
treasure—though what they yielded was itself the treasure, and, in its way, priceless. It seems that the 1944 fragment had been missing only a single Judeo-Arabic word in the heading, but that word was critical:
lizawjat,
meaning, “By the wife of.” The full poem with its restored heading was, in other words, described as being
“By the wife of Dunash ben Labrat to him”
—making it almost certain that
she,
not her husband, was the author of this lyric. Cambridge’s University Library then supplied Fleischer with an enhanced reproduction of the Taylor-Schechter manuscript containing the lines in question, and he was able to decipher the caption to the complete copy of the poem. It read: “A letter from the wife of Dunash,” confirming the identity both of the poem’s author and its protagonists. Furthermore, the Taylor-Schechter manuscript contained
another
poem halfway down the page—this one with a heading that read:
“His
[
her husband’s
]
reply to her,”
indicating plainly that an exchange of his-and-her (or even he said, she said) poems was involved.
With this find, scholars suddenly had in hand not just a poem by the wife of Dunash ben Labrat—the sole example of her work that has come down to us—but the only poem by a woman in the entire five-hundred-year-old medieval Hebrew canon. Composed, it seems, on the occasion of her husband’s forced departure from Spain (the reasons for his leaving remain obscure, but the last line of the poem suggests that he had fallen out of favor with the leader of Spanish Jewry at the time, the aforementioned Hasdai ibn Shaprut), the poem is simple but highly refined. Its restraint and quiet dignity, along with its pulsing tenderness and subtle complication of tone—melding affection, resentment, and above all a sense of acceptance of what seems to be a tragic fate—speak for this poet who has no name, but who, thanks to the Geniza and Ezra Fleischer, now has a place of pride at the very start of the canon alongside her husband and his wine poem. And not just as a curiosity. The poem by Dunash’s wife, observed Fleischer, is no less than “the first fully realized personal poem in the new Andalusian style,” and it far surpasses the work of her husband in quality. That it emerged at such an early stage of the poetry’s
evolution, he says, and from the pen of a woman, makes the find all the more remarkable.
As it turns out, there were more Dunash-related surprises still to come. In 1985, five years after the discovery of the poetic exchange between the Ben Labrats, the notion of their forced separation was corroborated by yet another Geniza find. In the upper left corner of a previously examined letter from Hasdai ibn Shaprut to the Empress Helena of Byzantium—Hasdai was corresponding with her about the plight of the Jews in her kingdom, and the letter was, scholars believe, part of his archive, which somehow landed in Cairo—Fleischer identified what appears to be a somewhat slack poem of complaint by Dunash addressed to Hasdai and composed in the local and unmetered style of Menahem. (It seems that Dunash had taken up this mode as well, though he showed little affinity for it.) Broadly translated, the new fragment picks up in medias res (the opening two lines were illegible): “ … I served you in sorrow, for all your wares are loathsome. / I will glean no grapes, nor will I gather corn. / I betrayed a young wife and sent her a writ of divorce. / I left my home, and abandoned the son that she bore.” Dunash is, in other words, bemoaning the conditions of his service under Hasdai, the pressures he faced on that job, and the heavy price he had to pay for it in the end—the destruction of his family.
T
he Geniza’s contribution to the field of Spanish Hebrew poetry was, however, by no means restricted to the recovery of precursor, minor, or merely piquant poems of the day, meaningful as those discoveries have been. As the work of scholars from the early thirties and on has repeatedly demonstrated, and sometimes in breathtaking fashion, understanding the connections between the less heralded or seemingly tangential writers of the period has helped us see the shapes made by the lives and lines of the major poets as well.
Yehuda HaLevi is a case in point. In 1938, Schirmann prepared the
first-ever biographical study of HaLevi based on a relatively complete and reliable edition of his poems. Some four decades later, in the wake of his friend S. D. Goitein’s pioneering explorations of previously ignored Judeo-Arabic documents relating to Mediterranean commerce, Schirmann had to thoroughly revise his earlier work in order to take into account information contained in the fifty-five letters pertaining to HaLevi that Goitein found in the Geniza. Among this correspondence were several stylistically impressive pages in the poet’s own feathery hand, several of which were scrawled while the doctor-poet was surrounded by people—probably his patients—and as a courier was waiting to get on his way.
Goitein had published only a handful of these letters, and nearly a quarter century would pass before younger scholars would look into this material again. But look they did, and once more the baton was passed—as the Giblews’ motto had it,
lampada tradam
(let me hand on the torch)—from field to field (between literary scholarship in Hebrew and documentary research in Judeo-Arabic), and then vertically, from one generation to another, as Schirmann’s student Ezra Fleischer teamed up in the late 1990s with one of Goitein’s prominent disciples, historian Moshe Gil, to bring out a collection of all the Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew documentary material relating to
HaLevi’s biography.
Dedicated to their two teachers—who worked, as Fleischer put it, in a period “when Nephilim [the legendary semidivine biblical giants] were still in the land”
—Yehuda HaLevi and His Circle
presents something akin to a wide-angle view of HaLevi’s world and takes us, as few medieval Jewish documents of this or any other era have, into the tangible scene of a major writer’s day. In signed and dated formal letters sent by official post between Egypt and other parts of the Jewish world, and in more casual “notes” passed between colleagues and friends, we find the poet and his peers—businessmen and scholars, physicians and cantors, writers and hangers-on—going about their lives. They buy, sell, love, annoy, hate, and suffer illness (often elaborately described); they announce births, mourn deaths, report on travels, request books of poems, and tell of family friction, communal tension, and the pathetic competition that literary celebrity sometimes breeds.
At the same time the documents lead us back to the circumstances surrounding the composition of HaLevi’s poems, multiple copies of which also emerge from the Geniza. A letter Fleischer believes to be from the summer of 1129 by the poet to his wealthy Egyptian merchant friend Halfon ben Netanel mentions HaLevi’s desire to go east, thus giving us the first documentary evidence of a principal theme in his best-known work: his longing to turn his back on Spain and all it had come to stand for—poetically, intellectually, and spiritually—and journey to the Land of Israel, where he could spend his remaining days. And in fact the beating heart of this cache lies in the letters that allow us to travel with the elder HaLevi when he eventually embarks on that trip. Other letters seem to solve, or come close to solving, the centuries-old mystery of whether or not—and how—HaLevi realized his dream to set foot in Jerusalem and see, as he put it in perhaps his most famous poem, “the dust of the desolate shrine.”
But the value of these letters goes well beyond the stuff of a single man’s biography. Rather, they demonstrate, as Fleischer provocatively states, that the trip was not simply a personal pilgrimage so much as a full-fledged emigration, and that the rejection of the syncretic culture of Andalusia by the most prominent Jewish personality of the day was intended to serve as an educational and political model for others. (After
all, HaLevi was, as one Granadan writer put it in an 1130 letter that wound up in the Geniza, “the quintessence and embodiment of our country.”) The irony of this most intimate portrait of the poet, then, is that—in combination with his poems and prose writings—it reveals the embrace of HaLevi by subsequent generations to be, by and large, a celebration not of Andalusian-Jewish literary accomplishment, but of the
abandonment
of that accomplishment. In numerous places the poet characterizes the Hebrew poetry of his time as “froth on the waves of wisdom’s sea” and describes the entire complex of secular Greco-Arabic learning as “all flowers and no fruit.”
