Raymond P. Scheindlin - Böcker

The Jewish poets of medieval Spain combined elements of the dominant Arabic-Islamic culture with Jewish religious and literary traditions to create a rich new Hebrew literature that is as richly entertaining today as it was in the twelfth century. Scheindlin presents the original Hebrew poetry with his own melodic English translations, each followed by commentary that explains its cultural context.

From the tenth century to the thirteenth, the Jews of Spain belonged to a vibrant and relatively tolerant Arabic-speaking society, a sophisticated culture that had a marked effect on Jewish life, thought, artistic tastes, and literary expression. In this companion volume to Wine, Women, and Death, we see how the surrounding Arabic culture influenced the new poetry that was being written for the synagogue service. The Hebrew poems here, accompanied by elegant English translations and explanatory essays, are short lyrics of the highest literary quality.

Judah Halevi (ca 1085-1141), the best-known and most beloved of premodern Hebrew poets, abandoned his home and family in Spain and spent the last year of his life traveling to the Land of Israel, where he hoped to die amid its sacred ruins. The events of his journey and its meaning to him are preserved in recently discovered letters of the age and in his ever-popular poetry. The Song of the Distant Dove tells the story of Halevis journey through selections from the documents, some never before available in English, and explores its meaning through discussions of his stirring poetry, presented in new verse translations with full commentary.In the course of the discussion, we meet Halevis circle of Jewish businessmen and intellectuals in Islamic Spain and Egypt, examine their way of life, and learn about their place in Arabic and Islamic culture, then at its height. We learn that Halevi was partially motivated by a desire to repudiate his contemporaries hybrid Judeo-Arabic culture and return to a purely Jewish way of life; yet the echoes of the Islamic religious sensibility in his poetry show that he could not escape it completely. And while the precarious situation of the Jews as a tolerated minority in the Islamic world weighed heavily on him, the poetry shows that he was motivated not so much by national sentiment as by his own distinctive inner life.Touching on literature, religion, and history, this book provides a thorough introduction to Judeo-Arabic culture as well as a close look at a commanding personality of the agea doctor, theologian, communal leader, and, above all, a poet and at one of the best-documented episodes in medieval Jewish religious history.

The Literature of Al-Andalus is an exploration of the culture of Iberia, present-day Spain and Portugal, during the period when it was an Islamic, mostly Arabic-speaking territory, from the eighth to the thirteenth century, and in the centuries following the Christian conquest when Arabic continued to be widely used. The volume embraces many other related spheres of Arabic culture including philosophy, art, architecture and music. It also extends the subject to other literatures - especially Hebrew and Romance literatures - that burgeoned alongside Arabic and created the distinctive hybrid culture of medieval Iberia. Edited by an Arabist, an Hebraist and a Romance scholar, with individual chapters compiled by a team of the world's leading experts of Islamic Iberia, Sicily and related cultures, this is a truly interdisciplinary and comparative work which offers a interesting approach to the field.