The Compunctious Poet

The Compunctious Poet PDF Author: Ross Brann
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description

The Compunctious Poet

The Compunctious Poet PDF Author: Ross Brann
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Get Book Here

Book Description


Jews of Spain

Jews of Spain PDF Author: Jane S. Gerber
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0029115744
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
The history of the Jews of Spain is a remarkable story that begins in the remote past and continues today. For more than a thousand years, Sepharad (the Hebrew word for Spain) was home to a large Jewish community noted for its richness and virtuosity. Summarily expelled in 1492 and forced into exile, their tragedy of expulsion marked the end of one critical phase of their history and the beginning of another. Indeed, in defiance of all logic and expectation, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain became an occasion for renewed creativity. Nor have five hundred years of wandering extinguished the identity of the Sephardic Jews, or diminished the proud memory of the dazzling civilization, which they created on Spanish soil. This book is intended to serve as an introduction and scholarly guide to that history.

Shards of Love

Shards of Love PDF Author: María Rosa Menocal
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822314196
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
With the Spanish conquest of Islamic Granada and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the year 1492 marks the exile from Europe of crucial strands of medieval culture. It also becomes a symbolic marker for the expulsion of a diversity in language and grammar that was disturbing to the Renaissance sensibility of purity and stability. In rewriting Columbus's narrative of his voyage of that year, Renaissance historians rewrote history, as was often their practice, to purge it of an offending vulgarity. The cultural fragments left behind following this exile form the core of Shards of Love, as María Rosa Menocal confronts the difficulty of writing their history. It is in exile that Menocal locates the founding conditions for philology--as a discipline that loves origins--and for the genre of love songs that philology reveres. She crosses the boundaries, both temporal and geographical, of 1492 to recover the "original" medieval culture, with its Mediterranean mix of European, Arabic, and Hebrew poetics. The result is a form of literary history more lyrical than narrative and, Menocal persuasively demonstrates, more appropriate to the Middle Ages than to the revisionary legacy of the Renaissance. In discussions ranging from Eric Clapton's adaption of Nizami's Layla and Majnun, to the uncanny ties between Jim Morrison and Petrarch, Shards of Love deepens our sense of how the Middle Ages is tied to our own age as it expands the history and meaning of what we call Romance philology.

The Dream of the Poem

The Dream of the Poem PDF Author:
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400827558
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 575

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Book Description
Hebrew culture experienced a renewal in medieval Spain that produced what is arguably the most powerful body of Jewish poetry written since the Bible. Fusing elements of East and West, Arabic and Hebrew, and the particular and the universal, this verse embodies an extraordinary sensuality and intense faith that transcend the limits of language, place, and time. Peter Cole's translations reveal this remarkable poetic world to English readers in all of its richness, humor, grace, gravity, and wisdom. The Dream of the Poem traces the arc of the entire period, presenting some four hundred poems by fifty-four poets, and including a panoramic historical introduction, short biographies of each poet, and extensive notes. (The original Hebrew texts are available on the Princeton University Press Web site.) By far the most potent and comprehensive gathering of medieval Hebrew poems ever assembled in English, Cole's anthology builds on what poet and translator Richard Howard has described as "the finest labor of poetic translation that I have seen in many years" and "an entire revelation: a body of lyric and didactic verse so intense, so intelligent, and so vivid that it appears to identify a whole dimension of historical consciousness previously unavailable to us." The Dream of the Poem is, Howard says, "a crowning achievement."

A Matter of Geography: A New Perspective on Medieval Hebrew Poetry

A Matter of Geography: A New Perspective on Medieval Hebrew Poetry PDF Author: Uriah Kfir
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004363599
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
A Matter of Geography: A New Perspective on Medieval Hebrew Poetry takes a ground-breaking approach to the relationships between centers of medieval Hebrew poetry and their implications regarding matters of poetics. It shows on the one hand how literary efforts by members of the Spanish school of secular poetry, from its zenith in the eleventh century to the thirteenth century, helped gradually shape its predominance. On the other hand, it presents thirteenth century Hebrew poets from Iraq, Egypt, Italy and Provence, and charts the different strategies of these “peripheral” authors, who had to cope with Iberian fame. The analysis, which draws on concepts from literary and cultural theories, provides close readings of many works in both the original Hebrew and, in most cases for the first time, an English translation. "Kfir’s book makes a strong case for the craft, vibrancy, and richness of Medieval Hebrew poetry as rooted in place. Highly recommended for scholars of medieval Hebrew poetry, poetry aficionados, and historians." - David B. Levy, Touro College, in: Association of Jewish LIbraries 8.4 (2018)

Exegesis and Poetry in Medieval Karaite and Rabbanite Texts

Exegesis and Poetry in Medieval Karaite and Rabbanite Texts PDF Author: Joachim Yeshaya
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004334785
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
This collection of essays offers an inquiry into the complex interaction between exegesis and poetry that characterized medieval and early modern Karaite and Rabbanite treatment of the Bible in the Islamic world, the Byzantine Empire, and Christian Europe. Discussing a variety of topics that are usually associated with either exegesis or poetry in conjunction with the two fields, the authors analyze a wide array of interactions between biblical sources and their interpretive layers, whether in prose exegesis or in multiple forms of poetry and rhymed prose. Of particular relevance are mechanisms for the production and transmission of exegetical traditions, including the participation of Jewish poets in these processes, an issue that serves as a leitmotif throughout this collection.

Mother of Reason and Revelation

Mother of Reason and Revelation PDF Author: Irene Zwiep
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900445389X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
This book presents a first inventory of Medieval Jewish linguistic thinking, covering the period from Sa'adya Gaon to Profiat Duran. The author claims that the Hebrew grammatical tradition itself contains but vague reminiscences of actual linguistic thinking. However, contemporary philosophical treatises, exegetical works, and scientific encyclopedias of Rabbanite and Karaite provenance provide these reminiscences with a general theoretical background.

Between Hebrew and Arabic Poetry

Between Hebrew and Arabic Poetry PDF Author: Yosef Tobi
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004189459
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
The book includes sixteen studies about medieval Hebrew poetry compared with Arabic poetry. It is well known that since the tenth century medieval Hebrew poets took Arabic poetry as the ultimate paradigm in terms of prosody, language purism and rhetorical devices and even in regard to poetical genres. However, the concept unifying all studies in this book is that a comparative examination must consider not only the identical elements in which Hebrew poetry borrowed from the Arabic one, but alos what is much more significant – what Hebrew poetry stubbornly set itself at a distance from Arabic poetry. The conclusive result of this sort of examination is that Hebrew poetry combined selectively borrowed Arabic poetical values with traditional ethical Jewish values to create a distinctive poetical school.

Booking Passage

Booking Passage PDF Author: Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520918215
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 569

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Book Description
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi's sweeping study of modern Jewish writing is in many ways a long meditation on the thematics of geography in Jewish culture, what she calls the "poetics of exile and return." Until the late nineteenth century, Jews were identified in their own religious and poetic imagination as wanderers and exiles, their sacred center–Jerusalem, Zion–fatefully out of reach. Opening the book with "Jewish Journeys," Ezrahi begins by examining the work of medieval Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi to chart a journey whose end was envisioned as the sublime realignment of the people with their original center. When the Holy Land became the site of a political drama of return in the nineteenth century, Jewish writing reflected the shift, traced here in the travel fictions of S.Y. Abramovitsh, S.Y. Agnon, and Sholem Aleichem. In "Jewish Geographies" Ezrahi explores aspects of reterritorialization through memory in the post-Holocaust writing of Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Aharon Appelfeld, I.B. Singer and Philip Roth. Europe, where Jews had dreamed of return, has become the new ruined shrine: The literary pilgrimages of these writers recall familiar patterns of grieving and representation and a tentative reinvention of the diasporic imagination–in America, of course, but, paradoxically, even in Zion.

Power in the Portrayal

Power in the Portrayal PDF Author: Ross Brann
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069114673X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Power in the Portrayal unveils a fresh and vital perspective on power relations in eleventh- and twelfth-century Muslim Spain as reflected in historical and literary texts of the period. Employing the methods of the new historical literary study in looking at a range of texts, Ross Brann reveals the paradoxical relations between the Andalusi Muslim and Jewish elites in an era when long periods of tolerance and respect were punctuated by outbreaks of tension and hostility. The examined Arabic texts reveal a fragmented perception of the Jew in eleventh-century al-Andalus. They depict seemingly contradictory figures at whose poles are an intelligent, skilled, and noble Jew deserving of homage and a vile, stupid, and fiendish enemy of God and Islam. For their part, the Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic texts display a deep-seated reluctance to portray Muslims in any light at all. Brann cogently demonstrates that these representations of Jews and Muslims--each of which is concerned with issues of sovereignty and the exercise of power--reflect the shifting, fluctuating, and ambivalent relations between elite members of two of the ethno-religious communities of al-Andalus. Brann's accessible prose is enriched by his splendid translations; the original texts are also included. This book is the first to study the construction of social meaning in Andalusi Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, and Hebrew literary texts and historical chronicles. The novel approach illuminates nuances of respect, disinterest, contempt, and hatred reflected in the relationship between Muslims and Jews in medieval Spain.