Wout van Bekkum – författare

This volume contains fifteen essays in honor of Professor Joseph Yahalom who served as a lecturer at the Hebrew University from 1974 until he became full professor in 1985. The completion of his Warburg price awarded thesis in 1973 marked the start of a long and successful academic career in both Hebrew and Jewish studies, with much emphasis on poetry and poetics. Yahalom’s continuing interest in and research on ancient Piyyut led to a number of editions of Hebrew and Aramaic texts as well as to studies on the early Palestinian vocalization system and the language of Piyyut based on the Genizah findings. In 1983, Yahalom was elected a member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. In 2003, he received the Yizhak Ben-Zvi award for his lifetime study of Jewish history and Hebrew literature. Yahalom’s research on Hebrew medieval liturgical poetry focused on a period of roughly one thousand years, from the days of early Byzantium until the final days of Jewish presence on the Iberian Peninsula and the Sephardic diaspora. His bibliography testifies to his expertise of understanding Hebrew verse, laying much emphasis on the interaction between the Jewish and surrounding cultures, which concur with Yahalom’s overall convictions and views about Jewish literature in context.

The discovery of the Genizah manuscipt collection is nothing less than a revolution for the knowledge of Hebrew literature and Jewish culture in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. One of the main results of one hundred years of Genizah research is the rediscovery of Hebrew liturgical poetry which shed much light on various aspects of Jewish studies. For the last half century it has been almost comonplace to discover new poems, unknown poets, novel uses of poetry and unfamiliar poetic versions of familiar prose texts within liturgical settings being revealed among the manuscripts and manuscript fragments. The products of the composers and reciters of synagogue poetry convincingly demonstrate the importance of poetry in Jewish worship and communal life. The major corpora of Palestinian liturgical poetry bear evidence to the prolific literary activity of a number of famous poets who laid the foundations for the development of Hebrew poetry in later periods: Yossi ben Yossi, Yannai, Simon bar Megas, Elazar birabbi Kilir and Yohanan ha-Kohen. One of these mostly Byzantine-Jewish 'melodists' was Yehudah who composed a cycle of poems in accordance with the reading tradition of the Pentateuch and Prophets on the sabbath. This study presents Yehudah's oeuvre with commentaries and deals with its historical and literary context in four introductory chapters. The edition is complemented by indices and a bibliography.