by Simon Schama
This two-way response – reinforcing tradition by registering the strength of the physical world – was strongly imprinted on Arabic poetry and philosophy and it was what Dunash carried with him to Cordoba, determined to turn Hebrew the same way. To accusations that he was an Arabiser, Dunash could reply that on the contrary he was aiming to replace the ideal of arabiyya with something no one, other than Saadia, had yet grasped – yahudiyya, a language fit not just for chanting and liturgy but philosophy, poetry and who knows what else. And he would do this by injecting the breath of new life into true biblical Hebrew that had become aridly mechanical. Arrogant in his sense of the intellectual superiority of Saadian-Babylonian wisdom, Dunash lost no time heaping scorn on Menahem’s arid language studies and in particular on his Hebrew dictionary, the Mahberet, with its obsessional emphasis on the three-letter roots of each and every word in the Bible, which Dunash wrote off as owlish myopia. It didn’t help that Menahem knew nothing of Saadia’s own philological and lexical work that had prepared the way for Dunash’s adventures in the New-Old Hebrew. A little culture war, ugly and vicious, broke out in Cordoba over the fate of Hebrew, its authenticity, traditions, and present and future life, both men mobilising their followers to sling poisoned barbs at each other. Ridiculed by Dunash as a laborious narrow-minded pedant, the humiliation for Menahem was acute, and it only worsened when Dunash wrote and circulated liturgical poetry for inclusion in worship that was swiftly adopted around Jewish Andalusia. Dunash had somehow squared the circle: taking the forms of Arabic metre and rhyme patterns but making them reinforce rather than weaken what he claimed was authentic Hebraic tradition in all its ancient vigour. He studded his poetry and his liturgy with vocabulary taken straight from the Bible. And his wife wrote verses. Thus he was new and old at the same time: an invincible phenomenon.
Hasdai fell headlong for all this, and for its smart young spokesman. It must have seemed to the man who had spent his life within high Arabic and Muslim culture that he could now fully embrace its elegance of thought and expression without in any way compromising his Judaism. Dunash’s way was the way to reinvigorate a Hebrew that had been in danger of calcifying. On the defensive, fighting for his professional life, Menahem publicly retorted that this was precisely what the suddenly fashionable Dunash literature did: betray the ancient tradition for thinly disguised flirtation with Islam. But as Saadia’s prize student – one on whom the teacher, on seeing Dunash’s verses, had proclaimed them to be ‘nothing like anything yet seen in Israel’ though at the same time deeply orthodox – the younger writer was invulnerable to Menahem’s critical flailings.
The culture war escalated and it became fatal. Menahem was not going to hold his tongue, not when he knew his enemy was bent on destruction as surely as if he had attacked him with a dagger. Hasdai looked on, enjoying the gladiatorial contest and ultimately giving a lordly thumbs up to Dunash. When Menahem (and his loyal students) refused to be silenced, Hasdai took it personally. The war over Hebrew was not an academic game. The offending old secretary was violently assaulted in his own house on the Sabbath, his hair torn out by the roots, and marched off to prison. It was a savagely vindictive end to a long, loyal career. Evidently it did not pay to push the great Hasdai ibn Shaprut too far.
Desperation spurs genius, though. Menahem wrote his old patron a letter using exactly the formal rhymes his rival sneered at, but flooding them with memories and a heavy load of guilt directed at Hasdai’s conscience. In trouble? Wheel on the sainted parents, may they rest in peace! ‘Remember the night your noble mother died . . . By God you came to me on foot at midnight / To bid me compose a eulogy, rhyme a dirge / You found me already writing . . . When your father died / I wrote a great eulogy / Which all Israel recited, one each day / All the days of mourning / I made the pages of your panegyrics swift rider / I made the tale of your glory, chariot wheels in every city.’
Hasdai was unmoved. Even if Menahem was released from prison (and it is by no means certain that he was) he was a broken man. It was left to his embittered disciples to take up his cause, and their version of what they took to be a truly sanctified Hebrew would, in fact, have another chapter in its history. Hebrew authenticity will be fiercely debated as long as there is anyone who can read it. But for the moment Dunash and his style – at once emotively biblical and sharply contemporary – triumphed, with a Hebrew that stole the silk of Arabic form and set it about the shoulders of a handsome new Hebrew literature. Yahudiyya had arrived. And because Dunash’s verse forms were free and flowing, they were easily adaptable for song. Some entered the liturgy; others lent themselves to the earliest music of informal observance: the songs of the eve of the Sabbath. Menahem’s ghost hung around in the academies of the devout, but Dunash crossed the threshold into hearth and home, sung before the Sabbath candlelight.
IV. Poetry in Power
There are certain things poetry can’t do: prolong the life of doomed states, for example. What Dunash had begun would have a long and thrilling future among the Sephardic Jews of the Iberian peninsula, but it would not unfold in Umayyad Cordoba. In the spring of 1013, twenty-three years after Dunash ben Labrat died, Abdalrahman III’s grandiose city was put to the sack by the disgruntled Berber warriors who had originally been brought there to defend it. Nearly everything of Cordoba except the vast, glowing mosque at its centre was destroyed. Next time, pay the Berbers.
One of those leaving Cordoba in a hurry, just before it was reduced to ruin, was a young Jew called Shmuel ibn Naghrela.29 It was said that his father, Yehosef, had been learned and pious enough to send his son to study with the fabled sage Hanoch ben Moshe who, if you can believe the story (and you really shouldn’t), was said to have waited on the caliph with seven hundred students, each in their own grand coach. Naghrela would not be remembered for the depth of his piety, but for something else entirely: the startling union, in his person, of poetry and power. He was as politically astute as Hasdai ibn Shaprut and at least as learned in the usual array of disciplines – medicine, philosophy, literature – but unlike Hasdai, he was his own poet. A fourteenth-century Muslim chronicler of Granada describes Naghrela as a paragon of both the arts and sciences who ‘went deeply into the principles of the Arabic language, and was familiar with subtlest works of the grammarians’ as well as ‘excellent in . . . mathematics and astronomy’.30 He would become the nagid of the Jews of Granada, their guardian-protector, and the wazir, the chief minister to two of its Zirid dynasty kings. Even more astonishingly Naghrela was, if not the general-in-chief (and he may have been), certainly a high officer in the armies of the Berber amirs of Granada, the strategist of victory.
Yet all this pales beside what he accomplished in his verses. Naghrela would take the Arabised verse forms inaugurated by Dunash and use them for a radically new kind of Hebrew poetry: sensual and earthy; witty and passionate; steeped in the blood and bragging of battle; drowsy with the all-night wine parties held beside blossom-freckled pools, and even in the visceral slop and stench of the chattering souk. In a shattering poem whose climax is a denunciation of all those who imagine themselves above dumb animals awaiting the butcher’s knife, Naghrela takes the reader – or the listener, since the poetry was meant for recital, often with musical accompaniment of flute (halil), the stringed oud and the drum – through ‘a market where sheep and oxen stood side by side . . . cattle too many to count . . . and flocks of fowl were all awaiting death / Blood was congealing over clotted blood / While slaughterers were opening veins’.31 When you are inside a Naghrela poem all your senses are on high alert. ‘What I would not do for the youth / Who awoke in the night to the sound of the skilled flutes and lutes / And seeing me there, cup in hand, said to me “Here drink the grape’s blood from my lips.” Oh, the moon was a yod [the Hebrew letter that resembles an apostrophe] writ small / On the cloak of the dawn in watery gold.’32
Though busy with matters of state and community Naghrela seldom seems to have put his pen down. When he quartered his regiment
overnight in ‘an old fort, razed long ago by war’ he has the reader see the sleeping soldiers bunked down amid the ruins: ‘And I wondered . . . what had become of the people who dwelled here before us / Where were the builders and soldiers, the wealthy / and poor, the slaves and their lords? . . . They settled across the back of the earth / but rest in the heart of the ground – their magnificent palaces turned into tombs, / their pleasant courts to dust.’ But the poet-general is no elegiac sentimentalist. He might be swooning with love, craving the girl or boy dribbling wine into his goblet one moment, but the next he wants you to know he has seen it all. ‘First war resembles a beautiful girl we all want to flirt with and believe / Later it’s more a repulsive old whore / whose callers are bitter and grieve.’ So, inside the fort, the snoring horsemen stretched out on the grass, in his mind’s eye he parades the caravan of its earlier occupants only to flinch from the prospect: ‘if they could lift their heads and emerge / they’d take our lives and pleasure. In truth my soul, in truth and soon / I’ll be like them and these sleepers.’33 There had been nothing like him before, and though other great poets would follow, there is still nothing quite like him to this day. His is not a parochial literature. You can read him (even without the elastic sense of rhyme and rhythm in the Hebrew) with no special dispensation for his time or religion; read him as you would Donne, Baudelaire or Brodsky.
For in Shmuel ibn Naghrela the reader encounters, for the first time in Jewish literature, an unapologetically outsized ego, a hand-pumping, back-slapping, rib-whacking, hairily muscular personality, capable nonetheless of inward self-examination and erotic pathos. Even when at his most ruminative, brooding on the inexorable wasting of the years, Naghrela is the earthiest of all the great poetic presences in medieval Hebrew. If it is at all conceivable that a Hebrew poet could also be a field warrior and a politician, then it had to happen with Naghrela whose every motion of mind and muscle suggested the battles of power not least inside his own tight-strung frame.
His bravura was on parade from the beginning. When the young Naghrela left behind broken Cordoba, it was not with a sighing glance backwards at a lost home. He’s off, much provoked by presumptuous friends who assume he’s leaving to find ‘ease or gain’. That wasn’t it at all, he wrote, just the opposite in fact. ‘By God and God’s faithful – and I keep my oaths / I’ll climb cliffs / and descend to the innermost pit / and sew the edge of desert to desert, / and split these and every gorge / and sail in mountainous ascent / Until the word “forever” makes sense to me / and my enemies fear me / and my friends in that fear / find solace.’34
It is shamelessly boastful, affecting the tone of Muslim warrior poetry. But he enjoyed fighting words. A tradition had the young Naghrela debating the respective merits of Judaism and Islam, no holds barred, with the Arabic writer Ibn Hazm. Later, Ibn Hazm would be provoked to outbursts of hatred against Naghrela and the Jews for daring to question the Quran and the Prophet. Yet much of the strongest Hebrew poetry owed its force to a sense of combat. It’s sometimes assumed, misleadingly, that a ‘golden age’ of Hebrew poetry unfolded in a serene atmosphere of mutual sympathy under stable Muslim governments in Spain. In fact it flourished amid the chaos and violence that followed the collapse of the Umayyads. For as long as Muslim factions and mini-states were busy plotting to destroy each other, the Jews, disqualified from rulership, were presumed innocent of political ambition.
They were not, however, immune from battles, sieges, random affrays on the highways. Carrying weapons of self-defence was denied them on pain of dramatic penalties. The saddlebags of their mules were a prime target. Notwithstanding his adolescent bluster, Shmuel ibn Naghrela was for a while reduced to keeping a spice shop in the port city of Malaga. Later biographies, especially the Jewish twelfth-century history of Ibrahim Da’ud, had him discovered there by servants of the wazir of Granada who realised he was a master of the elaborate Arabic needed for matters of state. The writing opened doors. Naghrela was bidden to come to the fortress hill city, became secretary to the wazir, and proved to be so dependable in war and diplomacy that, on the wazir’s death, he became his successor.
Once in high office, Naghrela knew how to keep it. On the death of his patron, Habbus, in 1038, the amir’s two sons both claimed the succession and were prepared to fight over it. Going against the majority of his own community, who were both proud and nervous of the high place their most famous son had achieved, Naghrela sided with the younger Prince Baddus who, despite the odds, prevailed. Thereafter, the Jewish scholar-warrior-poet – to an extent not even dreamed of by Hasdai ibn Shaprut – became the unchallenged governor of Granada, the manager of its revenues, the high officer of its armies. And all this in a state that was, for a while, the dominant power in east Al-Andalus. Later commentators made it clear that some were shocked by the Zirid amirs entrusting the fate of their realm to an Unbeliever, but politically Naghrela was the beneficiary of his own ineligibility for the amirate itself. He was, as one of the chroniclers put it, ‘free from the lust for power’, or at least from the suspicion of it.
In so many ways (except the one that ultimately counted) Naghrela was indistinguishable from the Muslims he served so efficiently, and this very accomplishment would be fateful for his son and successor. His Arabic was polished, his manners refined, his courtesies exquisite, his capacity for ruthlessness, when called on, proven. If anyone personified and naturalised a union of Islamic culture and power with unapologetic Judaism, it was Naghrela. This is why Arab commentators like Ibn al Khatib, wary as they were of Unbelievers, and slightly shocked by the possibility that a Jew could effectively be charged with the government of a Muslim state, admitted that ‘although God did not inform him of the right religion’ Naghrela had to be regarded as ‘an extraordinary man’, ‘combining . . . a solid and wise character with a lucid spirit and polite and friendly manners’.35 A later Arab source reported, more resentfully, that when Naghrela was seen in public with his master the amir, beautifully attired, it was impossible to tell who was the leader and who the led. His poetry, too, followed Arabic forms: the rhyming muwashshah ‘sash’ poems with their colloquial two-line ‘karja’ pay-off at the end. Their favourite subjects – those all-night parties, when half-stupefied drinkers lost somewhere between slumbrous collapse and erotic awakening reach for a goblet or the boy or girl serving them – were equally violations of Islam and Judaism and equally sensually indulged. ‘I in bravely bibbing company / upon a bed of almond blossoms sit / And watch the fair young cupbearer pour out / the drink, and to and from the wine cask flit / while a swain with inkless pen writes music on the lute and crosses it. / Life is but a dance / the earth a maiden laughing with her castanet / The sky a tramping army camped by night / In front of each man’s tent a lantern lit.’36
Many of the poems of Naghrela (and those who came after him, like Moshe ibn Ezra, also a Granada rabbi poet) are unambiguously homoerotic. ‘Emet!’ begins one poem which might be translated confessionally as ‘OK, it’s true, I am in love with’ that boy who has been picking roses in your garden. Or again (after a row), ‘Le’at!’ – ‘Give me a break, will you? My heart isn’t made of iron and your anger, my love, right now, is more than I can take.’ The tzevi, the deer who ‘ravished the heart’, is unquestionably male (a doe would be tzeviyah). And because the same erotic poets write lines of the deepest spirituality, embarrassed or incredulous commentators have insisted, against all the evidence, that the amorousness is metaphorical rather than actually carnal, an inheritance from the biblical Song of Songs in which the body of the beloved is described in lingering close-up detail but thought to be an expression of longing for union with God. However, since Arab sexual culture at that time is known to have countenanced bisexuality, there is absolutely no reason to suppose the same could not have been true of Jewish courtier-writers who lived in the same world. The same saqi cup-bearers, trained in flirtation, the girls with their hair cropped like boys, were on hand in Arab and Jewish gatherings, and the same te
mptations were available, to be resisted or enjoyed. Naghrela had a famous biblical antecedent in his simultaneous absorption in the sexual and the spiritual: King David the adulterous voyeur, David the brutal warrior politician, David the anguished penitent, with whom Naghrela self-consciously, if a little presumptuously, identified. Like his exemplar, Naghrela was so equally steeped in Judaism and sensuality that his most daring lines could verge on the blasphemous. When he commanded a lover to take ‘breast and thigh’ he was outrageously invoking the choice body parts of the ram of consecration reserved for the Temple priests who made the sacrificial offering to God.
Naghrela, the wazir, was a big fish in a small pond. But neither was Granada a power to be trifled with. It fought battle after battle – against Almeria, Seville and other Berber states – and almost always prevailed. We will never know whether or not the Jew was also the commander-in-chief of a Berber army, but no scholar thinks he imagined his war poetry from some cushion in a walled garden. The lines are soiled with dirt and blood. Many of them, as you would expect, follow the conventions of Arab battle epics, the dastardly foe crushed before the victors. There is much animal and bird imagery; lions with their claws tearing the flanks of fleeing deer. And true to form Naghrela imports from his own tradition some of the more high-pitched archaic poetry of the Bible, although some of the lines are graphic, almost documentary:
During the day the heavens were noisy with the tumult of horses while from their motions the earth shook and trembled . . .
I saw a crowd break through, hurling stones and then I heard jubilant shouts and trumpets.
We climbed to the top on a ladder made of bows and flying arrows . . . we made a path to their gates for all who would plunder and we entered their courts as one penetrates a broken city . . .
we made mounds of earth dyed with their blood, a highway from the dried corpses of their lords
