“FROM BAGHDAD TO BIALIK WITH LOVE”:A REAPPROPRIATION OF MODERN HEBREW POETRY, 1933

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES, Vol. 42, No. 3, 2005.Copyright © 2005 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

125

“FROM BAGHDAD TO BIALIK WITH LOVE”:

A REAPPROPRIATION OF MODERN

HEBREW POETRY, 1933

Lital Levy

In 1933, an Iraqi Jew by the name of Dahud ben Sleyman Semah sent asixtieth birthday present to the famous Hebrew poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik(1873-1934), a Russian Jew referred to then and now as “ha-meshorer ha-le’umi” or the “national poet” of what was to become the Hebrew state.1

Appropriately enough, the gift was a poem extolling Bialik as the “father”of modern Hebrew verse. Composed in the style of the tor ha-zahav, theHebrew “Golden Age” of Spain, the poem is a virtuosic tour de force.2 Itsopening words, an elaborate homophonic wordplay, quickly unfurl into anextended metaphor of a beautiful maiden, who represents Hebrew poetry.Yet when asked who her father is, the maiden points to two men, who turnout to be none other than the famous medieval Hebrew poets Solomon ibnGabirol and Moses ibn Ezra—two of the great Jewish luminaries of al-Andalus, the Arabic name for Muslim Spain (known in Hebrew asSepharad).3 By this point, the poem has taken on the performative qualityof a paternity suit, challenging its various contenders: Will the real fatherof modern Hebrew literature please stand up? Why would a poem cel-ebrating Bialik as the rejuvenator of literary Hebrew utilize the centuries-old, Arabic-inspired Andalusian style—and shift the spotlight away fromits panegyric subject back to two medieval poets lurking in the wings? Whatis at stake in answering this question, I shall argue, are the cultural originsof modern Hebrew literature.

Jonathan Simpson

muse

126 C O M P A R A T I V E L I T E R A T U R E S T U D I E S

Figure 1. The birthday poem in Semah’s own hand: letter to Bialik dated 18Tevet 5693 (16 January 1933).

127FROM BAGHDAD TO BIALIK WITH LOVE

I.

Writing from the 1890s until his death in 1934, Bialik is widely creditedwith the creation of a modern Hebrew poetic idiom. His lengthy, Roman-tic, often anguished poems are mandatory reading in the Israeli educa-tional system, and many of them have been adapted for music and absorbedinto Israeli popular culture. For decades he dominated the Hebrew literaryscene, and even now the name “Bialik” elicits unparalleled veneration in theworld of modern Hebrew letters. The story of modern Hebrew literaturehas in fact been told as the story of Bialik and of his immediate precursorsand successors, all of whom had in common one important attribute: theywere Eastern European Jews, working in what Hebrew literary critic andhistorian Binyamin Harshav has called a “time of revolution” sparked bythe Russian pogroms of 1881–1882.4 These figures were preceded by theno less revolutionary maskilim, the first generation of Hebrew writers inEurope to break away from Orthodoxy and to re-fashion liturgical Hebrewinto a neo-classical literary language on the European Enlightenment model.Geographically speaking, then, the history of modern Hebrew literaturehas been written as a tale of Odessa and Plonsk, Vilna and Warsaw, andfinally, Tel Aviv, where it reaches maturity and eventually comes to incor-porate Jewish writers from throughout the world who settled in Palestine,later the newly-created State of Israel.

Some of those later writers included the “Oriental” Jews, those fromArab and Muslim lands, as well as Sephardic Jews descended from theSpanish exiles who had settled throughout the Ottoman provinces andSoutheastern Europe (namely, Greece, Turkey, and the Balkans). In recentyears some of these writers, along with second-generation Israelis of MiddleEastern descent,5 have gained prominence in Israel, where their works havebeen considered under a “minority literature” rubric akin to the multicultural“[Ethnic]-American” literatures of the U.S.—even though Jews from theMiddle East constituted a majority of Israeli Jews until the mid-1990s.The Hebrew writing of non-European Jews has thus been construed as alate and secondary addition to the mainstream narrative of Hebrew litera-ture that originated in nineteenth-century Europe, and whose cultural echochamber was, and remains, strictly European.

What, then, were the rest of the world’s Jews doing while EasternEuropean Jews were “inventing” modern Hebrew? What were they read-ing, writing, and thinking? The general assumption, both popular and aca-demic, has been that they were still laboring in darkness, languishing under


the crumbling Ottoman rule and waiting for the European Jewish enlight-enment and, later, for political Zionism, to usher them into modernity.Ammiel Alcalay’s groundbreaking 1993 work, After Jews and Arabs: Re-making Levantine Culture, challenged these long-standing suppositions bymeans of a mammoth inventory of Middle Eastern cultural production,from Dunash ben Labrat’s famous tenth century wine poem—the first toadapt Arabic meter to Hebrew—to present-day Mizrahi (“Oriental” Jew-ish) writing in Israel.6 Still, no comprehensive study has been made of Jew-ish literary and intellectual activity in the Arab East during the hundredyears extending from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries—themost crucial, transformative period for the fate of modern European andMiddle Eastern Jews alike.

As it turns out, Jews in the Middle East were in fact producing textsreflecting a vast range of influences and interests, from cultural sources thatwere Jewish and Muslim, Middle Eastern and European. In the late nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries, the region underwent accelerated pro-cesses of modernization, secularization, and cultural liberalization thatreconfigured the basis of identity from the communal to the civic/national.The many and varied activities of modernizing Arab writers and intellectu-als, later collectively construed as a movement called al-nahda (the Arabic“renaissance”),7 had been gaining momentum in Beirut and Aleppo throughthe mid-nineteenth century; by the 1870s the nahda found a new epicenterin Cairo, whence it rippled through the entire region, including what isnow Iraq. The spirit of the times swept the Jews along in its path, and innot quite fifty years, Jews in the mashriq (Arab East)8 who availed them-selves of the burgeoning new educational opportunities learned classicalArabic as well as European languages and began producing journalisticwriting, short stories, poetry and plays in Arabic, Hebrew, English, andFrench.

As early as the 1870s, an Egyptian Jew named Yacqub Sanuc (1839-1912) pioneered Egyptian colloquial theater and founded the first popularArabic newspaper, the satiric Abu Naz.z.ara Zarqa’ (“The Man in the BlueGlasses”).9 The maverick Sanuc (who coined the nationalist slogan “Egyptfor the Egyptians”) was exiled to Paris in 1878, where he continued pub-lishing his newspaper until his final years. While credited for his founda-tional role in the Arab press, Sanuc remains a relatively obscure figurehovering at the edge of historic memory: “It is astonishing that a man of somany talents, who had played such a prominent part in the political andcultural movements in Egypt in the latter half of the nineteenth century[…] should have been forgotten by later generations of Arab writers.”10


Nonetheless, Sanuc has fared better than his contemporary Esther Moyal(1873–1948), the remarkable Beirut-born Jewish journalist, feminist, andliterary translator, who has been in fact been forgotten altogether. Amongsther many accomplishments, Moyal founded the first newspaper for Egyp-tian women, translated a dozen novels from French to Arabic, authored abiography of Emile Zola, and traveled to the Chicago World Exposition in1893 to take part in the historic Women’s Pavilion.11

Some decades later, in the 1920s-1940s, Jews in Baghdad, Beirut, andCairo published newspapers in which aspiring authors tried their hand atpoetry and short stories. During the interwar period, Baghdad became thecenter of Middle Eastern Jewish creativity as a newly-educated strata ofyoung professionals, having discovered the riches of world literature andthe Arabic literary heritage, enthusiastically took to publishing poetry, shortstories, essays, and novellas in presses throughout the Arab East.

The exceptional prominence of Jewish intellectuals in Iraq has muchto do with the unique character and contours of Iraq’s Jewish community,often called the oldest Jewish diaspora, which many believe to date back tothe first Babylonian exile some twenty-five hundred years earlier, duringthe reign of Nebuchadnezzar. When the British General Maude marchedinto Baghdad in 1917, the Jews formed the largest single ethnic or religiousgroup in the city. By 1950, anywhere from one in three to one in every five(according to different estimates) Baghdadis was Jewish; the entire Jewishcommunity of Iraq numbered some 140–150,000 souls (about 2.5 per centof the overall population).12 Baghdad’s Jews held an important and visiblerole in the economic, social, and cultural life of the city: commerce in thecity operated largely on a Jewish calendar, with entire business sectors clos-ing on the Sabbath and other Jewish holy days.13 During the liberal years ofthe 1920s-1930s, Baghdadi Jews participated in government; the first IraqiMinister of Finance, Sasson Hisqil, served in parliament for thirteen con-secutive years, from 1920-1932. This period of accelerated integration andacculturation also witnessed the enthusiastic entry of Iraqi Jews into theworld of modern Arabic literature.

Jewish writers were at the vanguard of nascent literary modernism inIraq.14 Others devoted their creative energies to Hebrew, or translated He-brew works into literary Arabic, simultaneously participating in the revivalof both languages. These translation projects resulted in some fascinatingexamples of cultural transfer: in 1945 the Iraqi Jewish writer Ezra Haddadtranslated The Journey of Benjamin of Tudela, a famous medieval Hebrewtravel narrative, and published it in Arabic with an introduction by a promi-


nent Iraqi-Muslim historian; two years later, he translated a number ofOmar al-Khayyam’s Rubaiyyat from Persian to Hebrew. Haddad also wrotesecular Hebrew poetry, instructional Hebrew books, and was the principalof a Jewish secondary school,15 yet declared in 1936 that “Nahnu ‘arab qablaan nakun yahudan”: “We are Arabs before we are Jews.”16 In his writings aswell as his statements, Haddad embodied the intercultural world of theIraqi-Jewish intelligentsia.

From the mid-1930s onward, the competing forces of Zionism andArab nationalism would put these writers in a tug-of-war with one inevi-table outcome: following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, therope itself would break, its long-intertwined strands unraveling with un-foreseen rapidity. Caught in the political fallout of the conflict, MiddleEastern Jews were suspected of treacherous loyalties, accused of being fifthcolumns. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the great majority of the Jewsin Arab countries left what, for most, were their ancestral lands, for Israeland the West; some ninety percent of Iraq’s inveterate Jewish communitydeparted in 1950-1951 alone. By the end of the twentieth century, the term“Arab Jew”—Jews like Haddad, who considered themselves part of the Arabcollective—would be no more than a historic anachronism, and these Iraqiand Egyptian Jewish writers became a quickly-fading memory in their landsof origin. As historic subjects who fit neither the master narrative of Zion-ism nor that of Arab nationalism, their contributions to modern Hebrewand Arabic literatures languish unrecognized, indeed virtually unknown.

II.

In 1933, however, the horizon of possibilities was still wide enough and thegeopolitical boundaries loose enough to permit a voluminous correspon-dence between Semah, the Baghdadi-Jewish poet, and David Yellin (1864-1941), the native Jerusalemite and eminent scholar who lived his entire lifein Palestine. Yellin, along with Eliezer ben Yehuda, had played a determi-native role in Hebrew’s linguistic modernization. He also shared Semah’spassion for Andalusian Hebrew poetry, and his Torat ha-shirah ha-sefaradit[Introduction to the Hebrew Poetry of the Spanish Period (1940)] was for manyyears the authoritative work on the subject. Writing to Rabbi Uziel, Yellindescribed Semah as “one of our people’s greatest sages (ehad mi-gdoleyhakhamey ‘ameynu) in the [Hebrew] poetry of Spain and the knowledge ofArabic literature and poetry.”17 In his letters to Yellin, Semah would usually


append a poem, in rhyme and meter, whose thematic content reflected (orperhaps refracted) the letter’s subject matter.

Born in 1902, Semah would have been witness to many seminal events:the 1909 Young Turk revolution, the First World War, the creation of theBritish mandate over Iraq, the monarchy, Iraqi independence, and finally,the first Israeli/Palestinian war and creation of the State of Israel in 1948.Semah was educated at the French-run Alliance Israélite Universelle school(founded in Baghdad in 1864), an institution of historic import that pro-duced the first generation of modern Iraqi Jewish intellectuals and pavedthe way for the emergence of other secular schools. During the last decadeof Ottoman rule, the number of secular educational institutions in Baghdadsoared, giving rise to the generation of acculturated Iraqi Jewish writersclosely associated with the creation of modern Iraqi fiction.

Semah, however, unlike most of his classmates at the Alliance, alsoreceived religious instruction at Baghdad’s modern yeshiva (seminary) BeytZilkha, for which he earned the title of rav (rabbi). From his youth hedemonstrated an affinity for medieval Hebrew poetry, and at the tender ageof twelve he wrote poems both in Hebrew and Arabic about the horrors ofthe First World War, which the Ottoman Empire had entered on the Ger-man side. Semah’s seminary instructor, the rabbi Yehuda Fatiyyah, wantedto publish the collection, but when Semah’s father objected on the grounds

Figure 2. Meeting of David Yellin (third from left) and Dahud Semah (fourthfrom left), Baghdad, Winter 1932–1933 (Courtesy of Babylonian JewryHeritage Center).


that it was likely to invoke wrath of the authorities, Fatiyyah burned thecollection instead. Semah eventually became a bookseller and publishedscholarship on medieval Hebrew poetry; he also collected a large numberof priceless original manuscripts, many of which were to be stolen in theanti-Jewish riots of June 1941 known as the farhud.

During a visit to Palestine in 1932, Semah was Bialik’s guest, and thetwo poets continued to exchange letters afterwards; Semah also sent Bialiknumerous comments on the poems of Solomon ibn Gabirol, whose worksBialik had begun to reissue in the late 1920s. At Yellin’s behest, he returnedto Palestine in 1935 to work at the Institute for the Study of MedievalHebrew Poetry, where he assisted Yellin with the preparation of the col-lected works of Todros Abu al-‘Afiyah (Abulafia) for publication.18 In 1949,following the Palestinian-Arab defeat and creation of Israel, and in themidst of the ensuing deterioration of Jewish life in Iraq, Semah emigratedto Israel permanently. There, he continued to publish scholarly criticism ofAndalusian Hebrew poetry, and also published his own poetry in the pres-tigious Haarets daily as well as in a number of literary and cultural journals(Moznayim, Ha-hed and Mahberet).19

The poem that will be the central concern of this paper was, then,written in 1933: shortly after Semah’s first visit to Palestine and meetingwith Bialik, and one year before Bialik’s death.20 Bialik’s reputation was bythis point more than firmly established. In light of the respect, indeed, ce-lebrity he commanded, one would expect nothing less than a paean to this“prince of poetry,” as the poem calls him. And indeed, Semah’s poem deliv-ers praise of the highest order—but not only of Bialik.

My reading of the poem reveals that it was not the single-mindedcelebration of Bialik’s achievements one would expect. Through a multi-layered, deeply intertextual mesh of references upon references, the poemcreates a nuanced picture of modern Hebrew poetry that is in dialogue bothwith the Andalusian tradition and with the revolutionary poetics spear-headed by Bialik. It seems to celebrate but also decenter Bialik’s persona asthe modern-day prophet of poetry by locating the cultural origins of mod-ern Hebrew poetry in ‘arav, a term used in post-Biblical Hebrew to con-note Arabo-Islamic civilization. Between the lines, Semah may have beenquietly establishing his own role, as a successor to the Andalusi Hebrewpoets, in the revival of Hebrew letters. His fluent engagement with thesemultiple sources—let alone the sense of self-assertion that emerges fromthe cultural contestation waged in the poem—considerably complicates theone-dimensional view of Hebrew poetry from this period as the exclusivecultural property of European Jews.


III.

The two-hundred year “Golden Age” of Hebrew poetry in Muslim Spain(950-1150) opens with the arrival in Cordoba of another Baghdadi Jewishpoet, Dunash ben Labrat, who is credited with the adaptation of Arabicmetrics for use in Hebrew verse; it comes to a close with the dislocation ofJewish life under Almohad rule.21 Remembered primarily for its intermin-gling of religions and cultures (Arabic, Hebrew, Romance/ Mozarabic,Berber, and others), al-Andalus has been much idealized in modern timesas a model of co-existence and of creative synthesis between the three mono-theistic faiths. Nostalgia notwithstanding, the Andalusi amalgamation en-gendered remarkable texts by a class of Jewish elites who wrote in bothHebrew and Arabic—and whose Hebrew poetry constitutes a unique so-ciocultural phenomenon in the history of Hebrew literature.

Ross Brann attributes the adoption of Arabic poetic norms by the eliteof Spanish Jewry to the interrelated processes of urbanization andArabization that followed the spread of Islamic civilization.22 Followingthe conquest of Iberia in the early eighth century, Visigoth Spain cameunder Muslim rule; with the development of court culture over the nextthree centuries, Jewish nobility “began to adopt the values and imitate theforms of cultural expression cultivated by the elites within Hispano-Arabsociety.”23 A class of courtier-rabbis emerged, who, in writing poetry, re-tained Hebrew as their linguistic medium, but assimilated into it Arabicpoetic conventions of style, prosody, and content. The innovative (and, atthe time, controversial) aspect of their writing was its use of biblical lan-guage and allusion for the secular ends of entertainment and persuasion,such that “a startling fusion of the sacred and the profane became the touch-stone of Andalusian Jewish culture.”24 Their choice of Hebrew (as opposedto Arabic) has been explained by various scholars as a panoply of ethnocen-tric motivations: as a “vehicle for the self-expression of a newly self-confi-dent and cohesive community […] a new prestige literature”; as an expressionof “cultural nationalism,” or even as a “subversive appropriation of Arabicculture for Jewish ideological purposes”; yet the literary and linguistic ide-ology informing this ethnocentric poetry was itself derived entirely fromthe host culture.25 The result of this somewhat paradoxical situation is, in Brann’scollocation, a “literary discourse designed to mediate cultural ambiguity.”26

For centuries following the Jewish expulsion from Spain, Hebrew po-etry remained an important model of creative expression for Middle East-ern Jews (many of whom were themselves descendants of the Sephardic


exiles). It should be noted, however, that by the time of Semah’s poem (1933),very few writers even among the Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jews werestill utilizing this form. For Semah, composing an Andalusian-style poemwas most likely a reflection of his deep scholarly and personal identificationwith this culture and its heritage. But what is perhaps more intriguing isthat in adopting the form and style of Andalusian Hebrew poetry, he alsoseems to transfer some of its legacy of ambivalence. Here, however, thesense of “cultural ambiguity” obtains not from the complex interaction with,and mediation of, a non-Jewish host culture, but rather, from the interac-tion with another Jewish cultural discourse: one founded upon the assump-tion that the torch of Hebrew literature, and in fact, of Jewish modernity,had passed to exclusive European Jewish dominion.

I will begin my reading of the poem with a transliteration, followed bya very literal translation that takes minimal poetic license for the sole pur-pose of rendering into comprehensible English what is a highly mannered,stylized and archaic Hebrew. In the interests of English syntax my transla-tion dispenses with the break between hemstitches.

La-yovel ha-shishim shel Hayyim Nahman Bialik27

1 yeshirun ‘et yeshurun bo yeshuron ‘adinat ha-yofi bimey ‘alumim2 menagenet we-kinorah be-heykah we-zimratah tesamah lev ‘agumim3 we-ya‘lat hen be-lo khahol we-saroq me‘uteret be-khol miney besamim4 we-tupha be-tokh ‘arav u-me-hem mequshetet ve-‘al apah nezamim5 we-arba‘t tsemidim ‘al yadeyha we-haruz dar meyapeh ha-gelamim6 we-al shuley me‘ilah pa‘amonim metsaltselim ‘aley shem ha-hakhamim7 yetomah hi we-aviha hakhi hay we-noldah lo bli tsirim we-damim?8 ani me’az shema‘tiha teranen we-avinah neginat ha-yetomim9 she’altiha: le-mi at ha-‘adinah u-vat mi mi-qedoshim at we-ramim10 heshivatni: ani ha-bat asher yad avotay tahafokh ha-tsur agamim11 avi qorban ba-hagi hag navi shir le-havi li-krat hodo shelamim12 asher hu gidlani mi-ne‘uray ‘afrot ‘ash ve-tola‘a, ha-ze‘umim13 ani ha-bat avoteyha nevi’im le-hodam nirtsa‘u laylot we-yamim14 we-ramzah li b-‘ayin yamin ‘aleyhem we-toreh ‘al shney ishim ‘arumim15 ra’itimo be-siftot dovevot el zamir bitam asher bi-sefat yequmim16 u-vahzotam yada‘timo ve-heymah gevirol ‘im bno ‘ezra re’emim17 we-sefer ‘al yadey vitam lefanay memula dar u-miney yahalumim18 we-abit bo we-ha-katuv la-ha’im me’od yafeh we-im lo ba be-yamim19 we-hotsev lahavot esh ba-zmirim yehashmel ‘orqey shom‘av zeramim20 yahid ha-dor ve-abir shir ha-lo hu ba-doreynu u-mahmadav ‘atsumim21 we-hatot ha-zman rabu be-abdo sefat ‘ami we-nitmala ashemim


22 ‘adey ba hu we-hehya et sefatam we-eyn ‘od ba-zman hatat u-mumim23 l-khakh ha’im qarauhu avotav we-hiyah et sefat torat temimim24 we-lif‘amim yehu qashim hakhamim we-hu no’ah we-ish tsadiq we-tamim25 ahuv ha-kol we-ha-kol ne’ehavav u-mahmadav be-lev yamim reshumim26 avarkhenu be-hag shishim ve-yim‘at be-‘eynay lo malo ‘olam shelomim.

For the Sixtieth Jubilee of the Poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik

1: They will sing when they see in Israel the delicate beauty inthe bloom of her youth 2: playing the lyre in her bosom’s embrace,her song gladdening the sorrowful heart 3: a charming doe [even]without kohl or rouge, perfumed with all kinds of fragrances, 4: shewas cultivated amongst the Arabs, and from them she is adornedwith nose-rings 5: and [with] four bracelets on her arms and amother-of-pearl bead that embellishes the body. 6: On the fringesof her cloak bells tinkle the names of the sages [i.e. great rabbis]. 7:She is an orphan, yet be her father alive, and she born to him with-out labor pains or blood? 8: Since I heard her singing, and under-stood this to be the song of orphans, 9: I asked her: “Whose are you,delicate one, whose daughter from amongst the holy and exalted?”10: She answered me: “I am the daughter whose forefathers’ handturned the rock into water. 11: I will bring a sacrifice to my festival,the festival of the prophet of poetry [puns with: the festival on whichwe bring poetry], to bring to his glory [i.e. to honor him with] ablameless offering, 12: he who raised me from my youth of meagerdust, moth and worm. 13: I am the daughter whose forefathers werepoets, and for whose glory people toiled like slaves by day and night.”14: And with her right eye she winked to show me two wise men 15:I saw them with their lips moving to the song of their daughter,which was in a human language. 16: And in seeing them I recog-nized them, and they were Gabirol with Ibn Ezra, the giants [liter-ally, rams] 17: and before me was a book in the hands of theirdaughter, filled with all kinds of precious pearls and diamonds 18:and I looked at it and the book written by Hayyim [puns with: dedi-cated to life] and it was very beautiful, even if not ancient, 19: strik-ing sparks of fire in the poems and electrifying the flow of blood inits listeners’ veins. 20: Verily, he is unique in his generation, a princeof poetry, and his virtues are great! 21: The sins of time multiplied inthe loss of my people’s language and it [the language] grew full of


blame 22: until he came and revived their language, and no longerare there sin and defects in [our] time28 23: And therefore his fatherscalled him Hayyim [life]: because he completely rejuvenated the lan-guage of Torah. 24: While the sages were harsh at times, he is apleasant, righteous, and blameless man, 25: loved by everyone, andeveryone loved by him, and his virtues are inscribed in the heart ofthe days [i.e. time].29 26: I’ll bless him on the festival of his sixtieth[birthday], and in my eyes a world full of congratulations would betoo small for him.

As nearly every line of the poem incorporates at least one pun or word-play, my analysis will focus on the points most relevant for our discussion,beginning with the extended metaphor of the maiden, introduced as the“delicate beauty in the bloom [literally, days] of her youth” (line 1). Thephrase we-ya‘lat hen be-lo khahol we-saroq [“a charming doe [literally, ibex]without kohl or rouge,” line 3] originates in the Babylonian Talmud,30 whereit is mentioned in the context of wedding ritual, as a song sung in Palestineof antiquity to celebrate the beauty of the bride; its modern Hebrew deriva-tive, le-lo kehal u-sraq, has come idiomatically to mean “the real thing,” or“the thing as it is.” Here in the poem, the phrase works on both levels:literally, to personify the maiden, and figuratively, to represent Hebrew po-etry as an art whose beauty is innate, genuine, as opposed to cosmetic.31 Butthe poem then further informs us that this beautiful maiden was “cultivatedamongst the Arabs, and from them she is adorned with nose-rings,” with“four bracelets on her arms and a mother-of-pearl bead that embellishesthe body” (4, 5). The Hebrew word haruz (bead) puns with “rhyme”; here, itrefers to the haruz al-mavriah, the rhyme that “locks” the end of the secondhemstitch in each line and, as such, endows it with its aesthetic form (muchas jewelry embellishes the body).32 But while the Hebrew writers of medi-eval Spain frequently compared Hebrew language or poetry to a beautifulwoman, this modern poet leaves no doubt as to the maiden’s cultural iden-tity: she is the embodiment of Hebrew verse whose meter, structure, andintercultural references are Arabic; who was nurtured, developed, and culti-vated by the Arab cultural milieu. Thus, while the essence of her beauty isHebrew, and as the language of God and Torah, innately beautiful (be-lokahol we-saroq), her style, her appearance, her character—that is, all theexternal adornments that enhance her innate loveliness and give it a dis-tinct aesthetic form—are Arab.


Figure 3. The poem in print (Ben Ya’akov, 420).


As to her exact identity, though, the poet still has a few tricks up hissleeve: there will be a riddle, and it will have multiple answers. With lines 7through 11, we arrive at the heart of this poem’s intertextual realm, and thekey to its interpretation. Line seven introduces the riddle “Yetomah hi we-aviha hakhi hay/ we-noldah lo bli tsirim we-damim?” which could be para-phrased: “She is an orphan whose father perhaps lives, and who was born tohim without labor pains or blood?”

In presenting us with the paradox of the orphan whose father lives, thepoet invokes the well-known medieval genre of riddle poems—but with adeliciously subversive twist. To begin with, the poem intimates but simul-taneously questions the maiden’s paternity through the words hakhi hay(“does [he] live” or “is [he] alive”), the word hay punning with Bialik’s firstname, Hayyim (life)—a hint more fully materialized in line 23 (“and there-fore his fathers called him Hayyim”). The phrase that follows, “withoutlabor pains or blood,” recalls Bialik’s seminal essay, “Hevley Lashon” (Lan-guage Pangs, 1905), in which he argues that to put an end to modernHebrew’s “labor pains,” Hebrew must acquire a truly “living,” spoken regis-ter.33 The phrase is also a nod to the classical Arabic tradition that greatpoetry is produced effortlessly, either by demonic inspiration or by naturaltalent—an idea that dovetails with the Romantic trope of poet as prophet,which Bialik borrowed from Russian literature and retrofitted to the He-brew tradition, and which is made explicit in line eleven.34 Through thesedelicate clues, the line prompts us to consider that this maiden may be thesingular daughter of Bialik, whose poetic greatness is such as to have pro-duced her in an immaculate birth of sorts (a concept that will be explainedin more detail shortly).

But—and here is the twist—even as it hints that the father may beBialik, line seven undercuts this reading by invoking at least two importantmedieval intertexts, whose readings suggest an entirely different solution tothe riddle. Ben Ya’akov (the editor) glosses this line with a reference to thefamous “Shirah yetomah” of Yosef ibn Hisdai, “Arusah at ve-hi la-‘ad betulahve-em lah av ve-hineyha yetomah”: “She is betrothed yet forever a virgin,and she has a father but is an orphan.”35 The “Shirah yetomah” (literally,“Orphaned Poem”; idiomatically “Singular Song”)36 was composed by Jo-seph Ibn Hisdai for his friend, the great Hebrew poet and prime ministerof Granada, Samuel ha-Nagid (993-1056), and in it Ibn Hisdai also boastsof his own role in reviving Hebrew through his poetic labor. Although IbnHisdai is indeed the chronological antecedent, I believe we find a closertextual match to those particular lines in the introductory maqamah37 of


Yehudah al-Harizi’s fourteenth-century Tahkemoni. The Tahkemoni beginswith the speaker’s long lament about the deplorable condition of Hebrew,and the faithlessness of all those Jewish poets who have been seduced byHagar (Arabic), leaving Sarai (Hebrew) barren. The speaker will thus takeit upon himself to find the Hebrew language (in the guise of a beautifulwoman, of course) and to have intercourse with her; their offspring will bethe maqamat that follow in the collection. In a poeticized replay of Abraham’sservant finding Rebecca at the well,38 the speaker decides that he will go toa spring and will ask the first maiden he encounters if he can drink of her“poetry”:39 “We-amarti eleyha hashkini na mi-nozley melitsotayikh. Ha-notfim mi-beyn siftotayikh. We-amrah: shteh. We-esh lehavim mi-beynsfatay hateh. Otah l-‘avdekha hokhahta, u-vah eda‘ ki hesed ‘alay gamalta.”[“I will say to her, ‘Give me to drink of the poetry flowing from betweenyour lips.’ And [if ] she will say: ‘Drink. And snatch the flames of fire frombetween my lips’ [then I will know that] You have given her as proof toYour servant that You have bestowed kindness on me.”] No sooner does hefinish thinking this than a woman appears with a pitcher on her shoulder todraw water. She says to him: “Drink, my lord, from the flow of my [ratio-nal] thought. For milk and honey are beneath my tongue.” The narratorthen resumes: “We-eshal otah we-omer: bat mi at? U-mi-eyzeh mahtsavhutsvat? Amrah: ani yetomah we-avi hay. We-niharu bi bney imi we-ehay.Ani hayiti keter melukhah. Ani lashon ha-qodesh gvirtekha. We-im eytavb-‘eynekha ehyeh havertekha.” [“I asked her: ‘Whose daughter are you? Andfrom what quarry were you hewn?’ She said: ‘I am an orphan yet my fatherlives. My mother’s sons, my brothers, have forsaken me. I was a crown ofroyalty. I am the Holy Tongue, your mistress. And if I be pleasing in youreyes, I will be your companion.’”]40 The speaker also describes the maidenas adorned with the “jewelry” of his own poetic talents: “nizmey tehilotaybe-ozneyha. We-‘anak melitsotay ba-tsavaroneha”: [“the earrings of mypraises are in her ears and the necklace of my verses around her neck”]—ornaments with distinct echoes in lines 4 and 5 of the Semah poem.

Indeed, the poem’s invocation of the orphan, the necklace, and thebead achieve a perfect integration with a network of Andalusian poeticassociations dating to the tenth through the eleventh centuries. The wordyetomah (orphan girl) first mentioned in line 7 immediately evokes its Ara-bic cognate and counterpart, yatimah. While it, too, literally means orphangirl, in the Arabic tradition it connotes a unique line of poetry, whose unique-ness is such that it is incapable of being reworked by other poets in theirverse. We see, for example, in the title of an eleventh-century anthology ofpoetry called “Yatimat al-dahr” [“The unique one of the age, by al-Tha’alibi”]


how the word yatimah comes to signify poetic uniqueness. In terms of theIbn Hisdai—ha-Nagid correspondence, although ha-Nagid is the morefamous of the two poets, Ibn Hisdai’s “Shirah yetomah” is considered thefinest poem of that period—hence the title, most certainly bestowed uponit long after its composition, as was often the case with medieval works.41

In this literary tradition, moreover, the poem is the “daughter” of the poet;the better the quality of this daughter, the more she becomes “barren,” be-cause truly great poetry can neither reproduce nor be reproduced. We findthis concept underscoring the line from “Shirah yetomah,” inasmuch as themaiden (here, self-referentially representing the poem at hand) will remain“forever a virgin.”42

One of the classical Arabic terms for poetry is nazm or manzum, mean-ing “strung” (as in the sense of beads or pearls arranged and strung on athread). In the opening of Tahkemoni’s introductory maqamah, for instance,the speaker says: “ve-haya ka-‘anak la-shir” [“he was as a necklace for po-etry”].43 In such a necklace of pearls or beads, the centerpiece, which has nocounterpart on left or right and is hence unique, is often called the yatimah—the orphan girl. The Andalusian scholar Ibn ‘Abd Rabbihi even modeledhis anthology of poetry “Al-‘iqd al-farid” (The unique necklace) on thispattern, such that each chapter is named after a stone and hence doubled,except for the “centerpiece” chapter, which is called the faridah (the femi-nine form of “unique one,” similar to yatimah).

All these interrelated elements are present in both Semah’s poem andthe al-Harizi intertext: the unique, beautiful “daughter” who is Hebrewpoetry, and who is also an orphan; the bead that is also a rhyme; and thenecklace that, in its aesthetic enjoinment of these individual “beads,” is thepoem. But what is more telling is that in Ibn Hisdai’s “Shirah yetomah” aswell as in al-Harizi’s Tahkemoni, the speaker (who, in both cases, identifieshimself as the author), credits himself with the role of savior and rejuvenatorof Hebrew from its much-lamented decrepitude. In Ibn Hisdai’s “Shirahyetomah,” as in Semah’s poem, the beautiful maiden is identified directlywith Hebrew poetry; in al-Harizi’s Tahkemoni, she is the Hebrew languageitself. To be sure, in lines 21 through 24, Semah focuses overtly on Bialik’scolossal role in revitalizing the Hebrew language. Yet at the same time, byinvoking al-Harizi and Ibn Hisdai, Semah locates the initial revival ofHebrew and creation of secular poetry in the Arabo-Hebrew tradition ofal-Andalus, long associated with the Arabized Jews—and with which hewas so closely associated himself.


This genealogy is made more explicit later on in the poem, when thebeautiful maiden indicates to the speaker that she is in fact the “daughter”of the two wise men—“Gabirol ‘im bno ‘ezra” (“[Ibn] Gabirol with IbnEzra,” line 16), whose works Bialik had recently edited and published withRavinitsky.44 Throughout the poem, then, lines of lineage and paternity areblurred; the poem does not seem to refer either to Bialik or to the AndalusiHebrew poets without somehow conjuring up the other. In so doing, itimplies a line of succession between these poets and Bialik, potentially natu-ralizing Bialik into a tradition of secular Hebrew literature that began inSefarad. Bialik would by no means have opposed such a linkage, whichaffirmed his own master narrative of Hebrew creativity as a semi-continu-ous lineage stretching from antiquity to modernity, whose common threadof “Hebrew genius” connected discrete historical moments, and to whichhe considered himself heir.45 But Bialik’s romantic (and ahistorical) visionof the cultural sources of modern Hebrew would hardly have emphasizedtheir Arabic roots. Nor, moreover, would he have seen the Andalusi Hebrewpoets as Arabized Jews; in Bialik’s manner of thought, the Hebrew poets of“Sepharad” were more of an autonomous cultural entity that happened toembody the “Hebrew genius”—that quasi-mythological spark—for thatparticular period of history.46

It seems important to Semah to connect Bialik with the AndalusianHebrew tradition, a connection he effects through the slippery identity ofthe “book” in lines 17 through 19. Lines 17 through 19 can conceivably beread as saying either that the book was written by the daughter for Bialik or,more probably, that the book, written by Bialik, is now placed in thedaughter’s hands.47 While the latter reading is, in context, the more plau-sible, the phrasing al-yadey vitam (either “by the daughter” or “in the handsof the daughter”) remains intriguingly ambiguous. If we were to read seferal-yadey vitam as “a book [written] by their daughter,” it would follow thatauthorial agency is now shifted from Bialik—and even from Ibn Gabiroland Ibn Ezra—to their “daughter,” the (female) embodiment of Hebrewpoetry. In this (the alternative) reading, the sefer (book) might be under-stood as a moment of ars poetica, a self-referential allusion to the poem athand, which the speaker has “found” before him, in another “immaculate”birth of sorts; and which, while written in Andalusian style, is indeed “notancient.” But what is certain is that either way, the maiden is a figure who isplaced in the poem to mediate between Bialik and the two Sephardi poets.

The poem also leaves no doubt as to the book’s properties. It is notonly beautiful, but powerful, striking sparks of fire in the poems and elec-


trifying the bloodflow in its listeners’ veins (“we-hotsev lahavot esh ba-zeramim/ yehashmel ‘orkey shom‘av zramim,” line 19). The Biblical de-scriptive phrase hotsev lahavot esh—literally, “quarrying flames”—has comeidiomatically to connote a rousing speech, one that generates enormousenthusiasm amongst its listeners; we saw an allusion to this same phrase inal-Harizi’s Tahkemoni when the speaker asks the maiden of “fiery” speechfrom “which rock” she was “quarried.” It also subtly re-invokes the poet/prophet trope.48 Linguistically, the line sweeps from antiquity to moder-nity: it begins with the language of a very old Biblical metaphor—that ofthe rock and fire—and culminates in a distinctly modern metaphor usingthe mystical Hebrew word hashmal of the Book of Ezekiel, newly refur-bished to mean “electricity” in modern Hebrew, and which Semah useshere in a very contemporary way (le-hashmel, “to electrify,” in the sense of“enthrall”). Semah’s use of this neologism indicates that he was abreast ofcontemporary developments in the language.

That Semah’s poem, through these intertextual hints and syntacticambiguities, explicitly praises Bialik while subtly asserting its own author’simportance is not in and of itself unorthodox or unprecented. Here we mayrecall the “Shirah yetomah,” in which Ibn Hisdai uses his poem for ha-Nagid as an opportunity for self-promotion. This, too, was one of the con-ventions of al-Andalus: poets would trade praise poems amongst themselves,each working to outdo the other in their poetic virtuosity and thereforeimplicitly flattering not the subject of the poem so much as themselves, thecomposers. Given that their relationship was mediated through a mutualinterest in and correspondence about Andalusian poetry, it is a conventionthat Semah would have expected Bialik to recognize and to understand. Increating such a panegyric circle and inscribing himself within it, Semahmay thus have sought to forge a relationship akin to that of Ibn Hisdai andShmuel ha-Nagid; a relationship of peers, and as follows, as equals.

IV.

Here, however, we must ask whether, in the context of twentieth-centuryEast-West dynamics, such a relationship of equals was really possible. Weknow very little about the relationship between these two figures, otherthan the fact that they had corresponded and that Bialik had hosted Semahduring his 1932 visit to Palestine. Like other Europeans, Ashkenazi (Euro-pean) Jews immigrating to Palestine in the early- to mid-twentieth century


generally saw themselves as culturally and intellectually superior to non-European peoples, including their Middle Eastern co-religionists—whommany contemptuously dismissed as “Asiatics,” “Levantines,” and so forth.In this context, it is important to note the popular perception that Bialikhimself held a strong aversion to Middle Eastern Jews. This belief stemsfrom an undocumented—and perhaps apocryphal—statement made byBialik to the effect that he hated frenkim (a derogatory term for Sephardicand Middle Eastern Jews) because they reminded him of Arabs.49 A recentarticle in the literary supplement of the highbrow Israeli daily Haarets tookup this controversy in an effort to rid the public of the idea that the “na-tional poet” ever made this disparaging remark. In the author’s view, it isimplausible that Bialik could devote a large part of his career to editing andrecovering the works of Sephardic poets such as Ibn Gabirol and Ibn Ezra,indeed calling Sephardic poetry the greatest creation since the Bible andTalmud50—and yet still hold such a negative attitude toward the Jews whomost closely resembled his poetic forbears in language and culture.

The author, Shmuel Avineri, endeavors to clear Bialik’s name of rac-ism toward the Sephardic community first by showing how much Bialikadmired the Andalusi (Sephardi) poets and their intellectual legacy, thenby relating anecdotal, third-party reminiscences of Bialik vehemently de-nying any connection to the infamous statement, and finally, by attributingthe statement to someone else (one unknown “Arieh Leib Smiatitsky”).Unfortunately, the article, written to exonerate Bialik, serves mainly to re-inforce the statement’s racist assumption that being likened to an Arab issimply an unequivocal affront. Threading through Avineri’s sedulous de-fense is the implicit declaration that since Bialik really liked Sephardim, hecouldn’t possibly have put them in the same category as Arabs!51 Nowheredoes Avineri ask what that category is, or unpack its set of equivalencies(Sephardi = Arab = Eastern = inferior, backwards, etc.). The article thusleaves one with more questions than answers: as one reader wrote to theeditor in response, does the author means us to understand that Bialik hatedArabs? To convey Bialik’s depth of admiration for the Sephardic commu-nity, furthermore, Avineri employs blatantly patronizing language (“Bialik’swords about the weakness that had visited itself upon the Sephardic com-munity in the present [were] said in a loving spirit and as an impetus forreform”) as well as Orientalist assertions (“Bialik didn’t deprive himself fromenjoying the beauty of the daughters of the Oriental Jewish communities”)—delivering, in short, the proverbial apology that may be even worse than theinsult.52


I include this digression into the twenty-first century to point out howvery much resonance the name “Bialik” still possesses as a cultural icon, andwhat is at stake in the fact of Bialik’s relationship with a thoroughly ArabizedJew such as Semah. In the event, Bialik may have been a victim of his ownsuccess; for, regardless of his own individual views, he became the veritablepersonification of the European-Jewish cultural elite. His name thus stillhas the symbolic power to evoke an entire milieu that, collectively, was lessthan welcoming of Middle Eastern Jews and their cultures. As the afore-mentioned reader’s letter put it: “Bialik symbolizes much more than oneunimportant utterance—rather, he symbolizes the repressive Israeli culturalcenter, which occluded the Arab culture of the Mizrahi Jews.” Thus whetheror not Bialik was the source of the utterance, over the years it has become apermanent fixture of the discourse about him, reified in the collective con-sciousness of Israeli public culture—whence the young poet Eytan NahmiasGlass’s modern day (1995) “ode”:

The national poet of the Ashkenazis,Hayyim Nahman Bialik hated usthe Blacks, the Sephardis, the Mizrahisand with pomp and circumstance was this sensitive man lowered into the grave.But what can I do, still I love his poems—my heart blazes for his words, yet does not forgive.“Take me under your wing,” you son of a bitch!54

Bialik had in fact, as Avineri himself noted, written and spoke aboutwhat he viewed as the sorry state of contemporary Middle Eastern Jewry.55

For instance, in 1927 Bialik had delivered a lengthy lecture in Jerusalem atthe invitation of a Sephardic association (Histadrut Halutsey ha-Mizrah) onthe desired revival of Sephardi Jewry (“Tehiyyat ha-Sephardim”) in whichhe called for Sephardic Jewry to awake from its torpor and paralysis andreclaim its historic legacy of cultural greatness. In this lecture he also ex-pounded own views on the origins of modern Hebrew literature, informinghis Sephardi audience that “The Hebrew scholarship of the haskalah periodwas centered around these [medieval Sephardic literary] personalities, fromwhom they [the Ashkenazi Jews] learned how to revive the Hebrew lan-guage, thought, and spirit. This was done by Ashkenazi Jews. Unfortu-nately, the Sephardim were the last to know their own roots, their culturalroots and their heritage.”56 Moreover, in Bialik’s introduction to the works


of Solomon Ibn Gabirol, published in the same year (1927), he not onlyreiterates this judgment but also draws a totalizing dichotomy whereby schol-arship and intellectual inquiry are a purely Western endeavor, whose specialcharge it is to study its aesthetic object: the Hebrew writing of the East,portrayed here as the unheimlich place that is self and yet other, at once aliveand dead:

Even if we make an exception for the invaluable undertakings ofShmuel David Lutatsu and Hayyim Brody (mentioned above), whowere alone in their time, still before us will stretch the field of re-search on Sephardic [Hebrew] poetry, by all appearances a desolatevalley full of dry bones, sowed with the stones of ruination from allthe parts of the Temple, a sad testimony to the weakness of spirit and tothe impotency of the current generation [of Sephardim], a generation dis-tinguished by its [legacy of] wisdom and national spirit, but that has notfound amongst its own a redeemer of the splendor of its fathers’ spirit,which cries out to this generation from the grave. Who is to blame forthis matter? There is no doubt that the source of this evil needsagain to be sought in that same iron wall that stands these manyyears as a barrier separating our scholarly work in the Western coun-tries from the Hebrew creative works, alive and continuous, in thecountries of the East. Research and inquiry into the poems of ourancestors, as one of the branches of the wisdom of Israel born in theWest, experienced its birth and growth primarily outside of the bor-ders of the revival of Hebrew and its governance [i.e. Palestine].57

Read against this context, the correspondence between Semah andBialik becomes all the more intriguing. What was Semah doing, if not “re-search and inquiry” on Sephardi poetry? Even if Bialik had, at the time ofwriting, been unaware of Semah’s contribution, he might have made men-tion of any of Semah’s antecedents. As but one example, another Baghdadi-born Jew, Shaul Abdallah Yosef of Hong Kong (1849-1906)—also a poetin his own right—had been a pre-eminent scholar of Sephardi poetry. Yosefdiscovered and elucidated the manuscript of the aforementioned TodrosHalevi Abulafia’s Gan ha-mashalam ve-ha-hidot and also wrote commen-tary on Yehuda Halevi and Moshe Ibn Ezra.58 He had corresponded onthese matters with Haim Brody (whom Bialik mentions above), and it ishighly unlikely that Bialik would not have known of his work. Yet, despitecertain knowledge of the contributions of Yosef and Middle Eastern Jew-


ish scholars to the field of Sephardic poetry, Bialik could allow himself toact as though he had never heard of them.

Semah, the Iraqi Jew writing in 1933, at the twilight of Bialik’s life,must been privy to Bialik’s disparaging views of contemporary Sephardim.But was he aware of the alleged statement? Was the emphasis in his poemon the specifically Arab (as opposed to “Spanish” or “Sephardi”) roots ofmodern Hebrew poetry an oblique rejoinder, an attempt to remind Bialikof the role Arabic civilization had played in Hebrew culture? Or did Semahsimply feel that he was expounding, in his verse, a genealogy of Hebrewpoetry that Bialik would have embraced? What if, on the other hand, Semahtook Bialik’s expressed admiration of the Andalusi Hebrew poets to heartand wrote the poem to defend Bialik? Or maybe he himself had internal-ized the Orientalist gaze, and saw Bialik as the long-awaited “redeemer”?Possibly, the answer comprises some or all of these possibilities—whencethe ambivalence I find in the poem. For now, we can only speculate aboutSemah’s intentions. We can, however, affirm that the same “invisibility”that plagued Sephardic and Arab-Jewish intellectuals such as Semah dur-ing those formative years of modern Hebrew letters persists to the presentday. Just as Bialik elided Shaul ‘Abdallah Yosef from his purview of Sephardicscholarship, contemporary histories of Hebrew letters continue to effaceSemah and his Middle Eastern Jewish peers, such as the aforementionedEzra Haddad. Neither Semah nor Yellin merited mention in Bialik and hisContemporaries—an extensive, “authorized” 1974 collection of papers ex-changed between Bialik and the Hebrew writers and scholars of his time.This was despite the fact that Moshe Ungerfeld, the volume’s editor andthe caretaker of Bialik’s archives, certainly knew of their tripartite corre-spondence, as he himself had included Semah’s poem in an earlier (1959)collection of poems dedicated to Bialik by writers throughout the world.59

The implication is that while an Iraqi-Jewish writer such as Semah couldbe one of Bialik’s exotic worldwide devotees, whose ode served to enhanceBialik’s internationalist stature, he could not be considered one of his “con-temporaries”: that is, a modern Hebrew writer, scholar, or interlocutor inhis own right.

V.

Semah’s poem is an ingenious performance of literary erudition and stylis-tic virtuosity in a Hebrew poetic tradition long identified with Middle-


Eastern Jewry. But it is also much more than a neo-classical display of lexi-cal razzle-dazzle. Like the jack-in-the-box masquerading as an innocentbirthday gift, this praise poem is inordinately complex, quite literally “riddled”with ambiguities and double entendres. While overtly acknowledging thescope of Bialik’s contribution, it subtly reclaims the source of modern He-brew poetry, locating it in the Arabic-influenced legacy of al-Andalus, asopposed to the European-Jewish trajectory that originated with the haskalah.This panegyric to Bialik should thus be read also as an artifact of the corre-spondence between two contemporary Hebrew poets, and finally, as a so-cial text about an Iraqi Jew facing the burgeoning European-Jewishhegemony over Hebrew culture. In this light, what is most significant forour conception of Jewish intellectual history is the very fact that an IraqiJew writing Hebrew in Baghdad in the 1930s felt confident enough toinsinuate this claim to poetic origins (not to mention the assertion of hisown place in that story) within his paean to the Hebrew “national poet.”

In so doing, he was certainly writing against the grain, as the Andalusiantradition, with its rigid prosody and stylistic conventions and its formulaicmetaphors and allusions, was by that point not seen as a possible source forthe renewal of Hebrew poetry. New Hebrew poets were even then rebellingagainst Bialik’s chokehold on Hebrew letters and experimenting with mod-ernism, developing ever newer and freer styles, but from within a distinctlyEuro-American stylistic frame of reference.60 To write in Andalusian stylein 1933, and moreover, to use that style to make a distinctly contemporarypoint, were deliberate choices, ones that must be understood in the contextof Semah’s correspondence with Bialik and their mutual interest in restor-ing the literary treasures of the Hebrew Golden Age for the new, quicklyexpanding Hebrew-reading audience.

The poem, then, acts as a kind of theater in which the speaker, Bialik,Ibn Ezra and Ibn Gabirol and, finally, the female “spirit” of Hebrew Poetryall appear as characters, interacting with one another in the ongoing dramaof Hebrew literature: one imagines, in center stage, the figure of HebrewPoetry—the beautiful, bejeweled and bell-tinkling belle—holding in herhands the book by Bialik and looking pointedly at the venerable figures ofIbn Ezra and Ibn Gabirol, resurrected from their Andalusian pasts, per-haps still in grave-dusty robes. In collapsing historical time and culturaldistance to bring these figures together, the poem becomes a nexus of thedifferent historical moments and places they occupied. Written at a criticalpoint in the development of modern literary Hebrew, Semah’s poem thusrepresents a different kind of Hebrew modernity—one whose trajectory


passes from al-Andalus to Baghdad to Jerusalem—and a reclamation ofmodern Hebrew letters for the Middle Jews who, for centuries, had keptthe spirit of al-Andalus alive.

University of California, Berkeley

Notes

1. The poem is dated with the Hebrew month Tevet of the year 5693 (tartsag), which, inthe Gregorian calendar, began on Dec. 30, 1932. Since most of that Hebrew month fell inJanuary 1933, and as the poem was written to mark Bialik’s sixtieth birthday, which was in1933, I date the poem 1933. The text of the poem was printed along with a number of usefuleditor’s notes in Avraham Ben Ya’akov’s compendious anthology Shirah u-fiyut shel yehudeybavel ba-dorot ha-aharonim [Hebrew Poetry of Baghdadi Jewry: Collected and Selected Po-ems] ( Jerusalem: Ben Tsvi Institute, 1970) 420. This is the edition from which I worked inpreparing this article. The poem also appeared more recently along with a summary inter-pretation in Lev Hakak’s book Nitsaney ha-yetsirah ha-ivirt ha-hadashah be-bavel [The Bud-ding of Modern Hebrew Creativity in Babylon] (Or Yehuda: The Babylonian Jewry Heri-tage Center, 2004) 184-186.

2. These, in Hebrew, are referred to as delet and soger, literally the “door,” which opens,and that which “closes,” such as a latch or clasp).

3. A note on terminology and usage: Muslim Spain has as many different names as it haslegacies, including that of the Hebrew poets who lived and wrote there. The place may bereferred to as Spain or Iberia, or in older usage, as “Moorish” Spain; in Arabic, it is al-Andalus, and in Hebrew tradition, it is Sepharad—which is also modern Hebrew’s name forthe modern nation of Spain. I generally refer to the Hebrew poets of al-Andalus as “Andalusi”(or “Andalusian”) Hebrew poets, but where appropriate, may call them “Sephardi” (or“Sephardic”) poets, as they are traditionally known in Hebrew, and in Jewish scholarship.The descendants of the Jewish exiles from Spain are also known as “Sephardim” (plural of“Sephardi”). Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the term has been somewhatgeneralized in common usage to refer (inaccurately) to all Middle Eastern Jews, most ofwhom do not trace roots to Spain or speak Ladino (the language of the Sephardi exiles, alsoknown as Judeo-Spanish). In recent years, the term “Mizrahi” (plural of “Mizrahim”) hasentered Hebrew usage to refer to this latter group of indigenous Middle Eastern Jews, asdistinguished from the Sephardim. It is to both of these two groups that “Sephardi” or“Sephardim” pertains in the discussion of the controversial statement attributed to Bialik(later in this paper).

4. Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993)vii-x, 3-9. A few notable exceptions were Western European (German) Jews, but for themost part, the pantheon of Hebrew literary figures from this period were born in Russia,Ukriane, Poland, and Lithuania.

5. Israeli writers born in the Arab world include Sami Mikhael, Eli Amir, Shimon Ballas,Yitzhak Gormezano-Goren, Haim Sabato. Some notable second-generation Mizrahi writ-ers are Albert Swissa, Dorit Rabinyan, and Ronit Matalon. (Rabinyan’s family hails fromfrom Iran).

6. Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (Minneapolis: U ofMinnesota P, 1993).

7. In referring to the (loosely defined) Arabic social and cultural reform movements ofthe nineteenth through early twentieth centuries, the term “nahdah” [usually spelled as nahda]is most often translated in scholarly literature as “renaissance,” occasionally as “awakening”


or “revival”; but each of these translations implies (and reinforces) an ideological metanarrativeof this history, and thus I have a certain amount of discomfort with them. Literally, the termmeans “rising,” “getting up” (from a sitting or lying position).

8. The Arab world is understood as consisting of two regions: the maghrib, or West,which includes the countries often referred to as “North Africa” (Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria,and Libya) and the mashriq, or East, which extends from Egypt to Iraq and comprises theentire Levant. The cultural ties within each section are stronger than those across them,such that each is considered not just a geographical, but to some degree also as a cultural,entity. Jewish writers of the maghrib would have belonged, then, to a different cultural sphere,one that had come under particularly strong French influence during that the French colo-nization of North Africa. For this reason, I limit my study to the Jews of the mashriq.

9. See Irene Gendzier, The Practical Visions of Yaqub Sanu (Cambridge: Center for MiddleEastern Studies, Harvard University, 1966). The title of his newspaper is variously translit-erated as Abu Naddara or Abu Nazzara.

10. Matti Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction, 2nd ed. (Boulder: Lynne RiennerPublishers, 1997) 52.

11. There is very little information in print about Moyal. Biographic information appearsin Bath Baron’s The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (Yale UP,1994) 20-21, and she is also mentioned briefly in Marilyn Booth’s May Her Likes Be Multi-plied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt (U of California P, 2001). No scholarly mono-graph (or even article or chapter) has been devoted to Moyal as of yet.

12. Nancy Berg, Exile from Exile: Israeli writers from Iraq (New York: SUNY Press, 1995)19; Nissim Rejwan, The Jews of Iraq: 3000 Years of History and Culture (London: Weidenfieldand Nicolson, 1985) 195, 210; and Moshe Gat, The Jewish Exodus from Iraq, 1948–1951(London: Frank Cass, 1997) 7.

13. See for example, Naim Kattan, Farewell, Babylon, trans. Sheila Fischmann (New York:Taplinger Publishing Co. 1980) 39-40.

14. See Shmuel Moreh, ed., al-Qissah al-qasirah ‘inda yahud al-‘iraq [Short Stories by Jew-ish Writers from Iraq] ( Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, the Hebrew University, 1981), espe-cially the Introduction; Reuven Snir, “‘We Were Like Those Who Dream’: Iraqi-JewishWriters in Israel in the 1950s,” Prooftexts 11 (1991): 153-173 and “Tmurah tarbutit ba-ra’iha-sifrut: rashit ha-sipur ha-‘ivri ha-‘aravi ha-katsar me-et yehudim ba-’iraq” [“Culturalchange as seen through literature: the origins of the Arabic short story by Jewish writers inIraq”] Pe‘amim 36 (1988): 108-129; and Sasson Somekh, “Lost Voices: Jewish Authors inModern Arabic Literature,” Jews Among Arabs: Contacts and Boundaries, eds. Mark Cohenand Abraham Udovitch (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1989) 9-19; also “Lost Voices: JewishAuthors in Modern Arabic Literature” (not an identical essay), What is Jewish Literature? ed.Hanna Wirth-Nesher (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994) 188-198.

15. Haddad was the headmaster of the Al-Wataniyyah (National) School from its found-ing in the 1920s (or, according to Ben Ya’akov, in 1933) and until his emigration to Israel in1951.

16. Rejwan, 219.17. Avraham Ben Ya‘akov, ed. Shirah u-fiyut shel yehudey bavel ba-dorot ha-aharonim. [He-

brew Poetry of Baghdadi Jewry: Collected and Selected Poems] ( Jerusalem: Ben Tsvi Institute,1970) 420.

18. Another Hebrew poet from Toledo, c. 1247-1306. Toledo was part of Islamic Iberiauntil 1805; by Todros Abulafia’s lifetime it was part of Castile. Todros Abulafia was, how-ever, still strongly influenced by Arabic literature and by the Andalusi school of Hebrewpoetry. ( Jonathan Decter, personal communication, March 25 2005).

19. All the biographical information on the life and work of Semah presented here is fromBen Ya‘akov, 420.

20. It was, apparently, published in Moznayim some time afterwards, presumably in com-memoration of the departed “national poet.” The poem was later reprinted in an anthologyof poems dedicated to Bialik, “Shir ha-sharim le-h.n. bialik: mivhar shirim be-khamah safot ‘al


H. N. Bialik vi-yetsirato she-nilketu mi-tokh sefarim u-khitvey ‘et, bi-melot ‘esrim ve-hameshshanah li-fetirato” [“Poems Written for H.N. Bialik: A Multilingual Collection of Poemsabout H.N. Bialik and His Works Compiled From Books and Journals to Mark Twenty-Five Years Since His Passing”], ed. Moshe Ungerfeld (Tel Aviv: Hotsa‘at Ma‘ritsey Bialik,1959). According to this volume’s table of contents, the poem was published in Moznayim,vol. 39, 1934. My search of Moznayim, however, reveals that vol. 39 actually appeared in1937, and at the time of writing, I have not found the poem in Moznayim issues from 1934or 1937. In the anthology (and so presumably in Moznayim), it appears under the title “Batshirat sefarad tahog hag yovel ha-shishim” [“The Daughter of The Poetry of Sepharad Cel-ebrates the Sixtieth Jubilee”]. It appears without title in Shira u-fiyyut.

21. See Ross Brann, “The Arabized Jews,” in The Literature of Al-Andalus, eds. MariaRosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin and Michael Sells. (Cambridge/ New York : Cam-bridge UP, 2000) 435-454; 440; Schirmann, Jefim, Toldot ha-shirah ha-‘ivrit be-sefarad ha-muslemit [The History of Hebrew Literature in Muslim Spain], ed. Ezra Fleischer. ( Jerusalem:Magnes Press, 1995) 526-527 and Schirmann, Hayyim. Ha-shirah ha-‘ivrit be-sefarad u-be-provans, kerekh sheni [Hebrew Poetry in Spain and Provence, vol. 2] (Tel aviv: Dvir/ Jerusalem:Hotsa’at mosad bialik, 1956) intro, 24 and 55.

22. See Ross Brann, The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in MuslimSpain (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1991). The summation in this section is deeplyindebted to the introduction and first two chapters of this book.

23. Brann, 6.24. Brann, 11.25. Conseulo Lopez-Morillas, “Language,” in The Literature of Al-Andalus 33-59; 43.

Lopez-Morillas also suggests that the choice of biblical Hebrew in particular reflects the“classicizing nature of the whole enterprise of poetry in the Arabic milieu,” wherein Jewslooked upon biblical Hebrew as their own classical literary language, their own equivalent ofclassical Arabic (the language of poetry and of the Qur’an). (44); Brann, Compunctious 14;Brann, “The Arabized Jews” 451.

26. Brann, Compunctious 24.27. Ben Ya‘akov 422; A note on my transliteration: In the Middle Eastern Jewish tradi-

tions, “vav” is rendered “waw,” “kuf ” is “quf ” (as in the Arabic “qaf ” ), “ ‘ayin” is pronouncedas a gutteral, and “tsadiq” is pronounced as an emphatic “s,” as in the Arabic letter “saad.”Because this journal does not employ diacriticals, however, I have transliterated “tsadiq” as“ts” (rather than“s” with an underlying dot). Likewise, I have rendered both “het” and “hey”as “h.”

28. I.e., Time has ruined Hebrew, but Bialik has rebuilt what time ruined.29. This use of yamim [days] is a personification of time (used invoked in the sense of

fate); in medieval Hebrew and Arabic, saying someone’s virtues were inscribed on your heartwas the idiom for expressing liking or affection. Here, the speaker’s affection for Bialik isinscribed not on his own heart, but on the heart of the days (of time, fate), as if to say thattime itself has recognized his virtues and embraced him (Tova Rosen, personal communica-tion, Dec. 10, 2003).

30. In Aramaic: “la-kahal ve-la saraq ve-la pirkus – ve-ya‘lat hen.” Tractate Ketubot 17a.The Talmudic reference can be found under the entry for “kahal” in Even Shushan, Ha-Milon Ha-Hadash ( Jerusalem: Kiriat Sefer, 1999) 730.

31. This in turn recalls the classical Arabic polemic over kadhib and sidq (untruth andtruth) in poetry. According to Mansour ‘Ajami, most medieval critics conceived of truthfullanguage as that which conforms to “reality and to the poet’s intent,” according to which“the best poetry obtains by the logical ordering of words and meanings” (‘Ajami, 2). Untruepoetry, on the other hand, is that which employs excessive metaphor, exaggeration, or hyper-bole (ibid., 1-2). See The Alchemy of Glory: The Dialectic of Truthfulness and Untruthfulness inMedieval Arabic Literary Criticism (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1988).

32. Editor’s note, Ben-Ya‘akov, 422; I believe the four bracelets on the maiden’s arms mayalso refer to a particular metric scheme or other structural feature of Andalusian Hebrew


poetry, although I have not been able to substantiate this idea. Jonathan Decter suggests thatthe word tsemidim (bracelets) is similar to the word tsimudim, “tsimud” being a Hebrew tech-nical term created by David Yellin to designate the Arabic tajnis or jinas (“paronomasia”:wordplay, often alliterative or assonant, based on shared roots), a rhetorical figure applied bythe Sephardi poets to their Hebrew verse. (Decter, personal communication, March 25 2005).

33. “Hevley lashon,” Kol kitvey Bialik (Tel Aviv: Hotsa’at Dvir, 1964) 197-198. As for theessay’s date of publication, according to Chana Kronfeld, while it is usually attributed toHa-Shiloah 18 (1907), it first appeared two years earlier in a special edition of Ivriya. (Kronfeld,On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics [Berkeley: UC Press, 1993]248.) I also borrow the translation for the essay’s title from Kronfeld.

34. In the introduction to Poetry and Prophecy: The Image of the Poet as a “Prophet,” a Heroand an Artist in Modern Hebrew Poetry (Leiden:Brill, 2003), Reuven Shoham argues thatwhile both the haskalah and the Hebrew poetry of al-Andalus utilized biblical rhetorical/thematic models such as that of prophecy, Andalusian poetry did not use this trope (or theBible in general) to try to “reform the normative cultural system of the Jews,” as did thehaskalah;’ “nor did it adopt the image of the prophet-poet as the key personality in its world,despite the dialogue it held with the biblical literature and the magic that the image of theprophet and prophecy itself worked on the leading figures in medieval Jewish poetry. Bycontrast, the Haskala embraced the Bible and the image of the prophet as part of its overtand covert struggle to change values in the Jewish world” (1). As concerns Bialik, he writes:“The prevailing view […] is that Bialik also designed his ‘prophetic’ ‘I’ from models of Ro-mantic poetry in general, Russian in particular. Benjamin Hrushovski (Harshav) maintainsthat Bialik’s figure of the prophet is a new feature in Hebrew literature whose roots lie inPushkin’s poem “The Prophet,” whereas Miron finds the seeds of the prophetic mode in theHaskala literature of the nineteenth century. These seeds flourished later in Bialik’s poetrythrough the influence of the Romantic and symbolist movements in Europe” (3).

35. Reference in Schirmann, Ha-Shirah ha-‘ivrit bi-sefarad u-be-provans (Hebrew Poetryin Spain and Provence), vol.1 ( Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Bialik Institute and Hotsa’at Dvir,1956): 175; my translation.

36. “The Singular Song” is a translation of the title suggested by Brann, Compunctious 49.37. A maqamah is an Arabic genre of narrative in rhymed prose, often recounting the

adventures of a narrator and his trickster counterpart. The genre was invented by Badi‘ al-Zaman al-Hamadhani in the tenth century in the Muslim East and became popular in al-Andalus, where it was also adapted into Hebrew by such writers as al-Harizi. See also RinaDrory, “The Maqama,” in The Literature of Al-Andalus (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000)190-210.

38. Genesis 24:10-14 reads: “Then the servant took ten of his master’s camels and set out,taking with him all the bounty of his master; and he made his way to Aram-naharaim, to thecity of Nahor. He made the camels kneel down by the well outside the city, at evening time,the time when women come out to draw water. And he said, “O Lord, God of my masterAbraham, grant me good fortune this day, and deal graciously with my master Abraham:Here I stand by the spring as the daughters of the townsmen come out to draw water; let themaiden to whom I say, ‘Please, lower your jar that I may drink,’ and who replies, ‘Drink, andI will also water your camels’—let her be the one whom You have decreed for Your servantIsaac. Thereby I shall know that you have dealt graciously with my master.” (“Genesis,”Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures. [Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1985] 34)

39. Yehuda al-Harizi, Tahkemoni, ed. Y. Toporovsky (Tel Aviv: Hotsa’at mahberot la-sifrut,1952) 10; my translation.

40. Al-Harizi, 10; Yehuda al-Harizi, Tahkemoni, vol. 1. trans. Victor Emmanuel Reichert( Jerusalem: Raphael Haim Cohen’s Press, 1965) 33-34. Translation based loosely on Reichert.

41. Shamma Boyarin, personal communication (Nov. 11 2003, UC Berkeley).42. See Abdelfattah Kilito, The Author and His Doubles: Essays on Classical Arabic Culture,

trans. Michael Cooperson. (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2001); especially 19-20, 28-31.43. Al-Harizi 3.


44. Editor’s note, Ben-Ya‘akov 422.45. In Bialik’s lecture on “Tehiyyat ha-Sephardim” (“The Revival of the Sephardim”), a

long speech delivered in Jerusalem in March 1927 at the behest of Histadrut Halutsey ha-Mizrah and the Sephardi community, Bialik in fact uses this term in his lecture in describingthe Sephardim of the Golden Age (and what befell their descendants in modernity):

And this tribe, that concentrated within itself nearly all the Hebrew genius in theDiaspora for hundreds of years (Ve-ha-shevet ha-zeh, she-rakaz be-tokho ki-m‘at etkol ha-genyus ha-‘ivri ba-galut be-meshekh me’ot shana) and which created [litera-ture] on behalf of the entire nation, in its own time and for generations to come(ve-she-hu yatsar bishvil kol ha-umah kulah, la-sha‘ato ve-le-dorot), – how is it pos-sible that after [this] glory, a time of spiritual and creative decline came to it, until itbecame entirely estranged from Hebrew creativity and was left, if I may dare to sayit, a dry branch, indeed in any case not a branch that bears fruit?

(H.N. Bialik, “Tehiyyat ha-Sephardim,” Devarim she-be-‘al-peh, Sefer rishon (Collected Lec-tures, Volume One) (Dvir: Tel Aviv, 1935) 111. Bialik wrote, for instance, of Ibn Ezra: “Andas for modernism […] I found in the poems of Moses Ibn ‘Ezra, that are just now beingprinted, much more modernism than in the poems of many of the recent [Hebrew] poets[…] but do not understand from this that I, God forbid, belittle our fledgling poetry!” IgarotBialik, vol. dalet (4) (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1938) 25, quoted in “Eyn ani mevin keytsad melamdimha-sfaradim mi-tokh sifrey limud shel ashenazim” [“I don’t understand how they teachSephardim from Ashkenazi schoolbooks”], Haarets, “Tarbut ve-Sifrut,” (Literary Supple-ment), 2 January 2004, H-1. It is also interesting to note in reference to Moses Ibn Ezra thatRaymond Scheindlin sees him as the quintessential Andalusian Jewish intellectual preciselybecause of his simultaneous Arabness and Jewishness:

Of all the Arabized poets of the Hebrew Golden Age in al-Andalus, Moses (AbuHarun) Ibn Ezra is the one whose poetry most resembles that of an Arab poet. Yethis literary career was more varied than that of most Arabic poets, reflecting theinterests of the Jewish aristocrats of his age. The interplay of Arabo-Islamic andJewish elements, a fascinating feature of the lives and careers of all the leadingHebrew poets of al-Andalus, is so fully developed in him as to render him a modelcase of an Andalusian Jewish intellectual.

(Raymond P. Scheindlin, “Moses Ibn Ezra,” in The Literature of Al-Andalus 252-264, 252.)46. In his 1927 speech before the Sephardi community of Jerusalem, Bialik enumerates

the socio-cultural and historic factors leading to the European Jewish haskalah and tehiyyah—namely, the European Enlightenment and the radical transformation of spiritual and mentallife in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which, in his view, lead in-eluctably to the era of nationalism; but any such historic, socio-cultural, or contextual back-ground is entirely absent from his presentation of the Golden Age of Hebrew creativity inIberia, which he discusses solely in (Hebrew and Jewish) literary terms, often presenting itas if it emerged from nowhere, in total disregard of the Arabic culture and civilization ofwhich it was part.

47. I am reading the phrase katuv le-ha’im as “written by Hayyim” as in the sense of theBiblical Hebrew, “Shir le-Shlomo” (“Song of Solomon,” meaning by Solomon, not toSolomon). Some linguistic indeterminacy stems from the multivalent nature of prepositionsin this register of Hebrew; how we interpret the line depends on how we read the preposi-tion le- (in the phrase katuv le-ha’im) which can be used variably mean “to,” “for,” or “by.”However, in the context of the following lines, the reading I propose seems the most logical one.

48. The phrase itself originates in Psalm 29 (rendered in one translation as “the voice ofthe Lord kindles flames of fire” (Tanakh, JPS 1138). See also Even Shoshan, Ha-Milon ha-


Hadash 574. It bears noting that the association of rock and fire also recall some the Biblicalprophets, beginning with Moses, who had burned his tongue on the ember, and continuingwith the later prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah, where the idea of prophecy is presentedas something written on a stone that is swallowed and then burns inside the prophet, strug-gling to get out (independent of the prophet’s will). These tropes then lead us back to themodern associations of prophet with poet mentioned earlier in this paper. Pushkin’s famouspoem “The Prophet,” inspired in part by the Book of Isaiah and translated into Hebrew byDavid Frischmann, ends with the final injunction of the poet-prophet: “ve-daber—u-l’vavotdevareykha yav‘iru!” [“and speak—and your words will set hearts aflame!”] which looselyrecalls “hotsev lahavot esh”; Bialik then recapitulated the theme in his “Davar” (“Word” or“Oracle”) with a rather more cynical view of the readers/listeners’ ability to receive the proph-ecy—that is, to recognize and appreciate great poetry.

49. The alleged statement appears in two formulations. The first, “I hate Arabs becausethey’re like the Sephardim” or “I hate Arabs because they’re like the frenkim” is the versionreferred to in Shmuel Avineri,“Bialik ve-‘edot ha-mizrah: anatomiah shel ‘alilah ve-shel ‘elbonshav” [“Bialik and the Mizrahi Communities: The Anatomy of a Plot and of Baseless In-sult”] Haarets, Tarbut ve-Sifrut [Literary Supplement] (25 Jan. 2004) H-1. Elsewhere thestatement is inverted as “I hate Frenkim [Sephardim] because they remind me of Arabs” orvariations thereof; Ammiel Alcalay, for instance, writes that Bialik “couldn’t abide SephardicJews because they reminded him of Arabs” (Alcalay 154; in p. 307 of Alcalay’s endnotes, thestatement is “Cited by Nahum Menahem in Ethnic Tension and Discrimination in Israel, p.83; p. 86 in the French edition”).

50. Bialik’s introduction to his edition of the poetry of Ibn Gabirol states:“Aharey kitveyha-kodesh ve-agadat ha-talmudim ve-ha-midrashim, ayn safek, ki ayn lekha miktso‘a gadolbe-yetsirat ha-dorot kulam min ha-shirah ha-sefaradit, zu she-‘amalu bi-shikhlula ha-gedolim,adirey ha-ruah ve-anshey m‘alah kulam…” [“After the Holy Scriptures and the agadah ofthe Talmud and Midrash, without a doubt there is no greater creative endeavor throughoutthe generations than that of the Sephardic poetry, that for whose composition the toiled the“greats,” of great and lofty spirit all…”] Shirey Shelomo Ben Yehuda Ibn Gabirol VII.

51. For instance, Avineri quotes a letter from an offended author writing to the Israelidaily Yediot Ahronot in 1969: “By putting us and the Arabs in the same category, Bialik hasturned in the eyes of Sephardim and Mizrahim into a symbol of schism and fraternal ha-tred.” Here again Avineri defends Bialik against the charges of anti-Sephardi racism ratherthan addressing the overt anti-Arab racism of this writer’s complaint. Yuval ‘Ivri, Letter in“Responses” section of Haarets, Tarbut ve-Sifrut [Literary Supplement] (9 Jan. 2004) H-3.‘Ivri writes: “Avineri didn’t see fit to contemplate the meaning of what he termed a ‘racist’statement. It was not clear to me as a reader whether he sees in the fact that Sephardim aresimilar to Arabs a racist statement, or whether [the racist statement was that] Bialik wassupposedly considered an Arab-hater. Avineri returns again to the racist formula as throughthe Mizrahim [Oriental Jews] are emotional people who are easily insulted, and thereforedisassociating Bialik from the statement will undo their feelings of ill-treatment.”

52. Avineri, H-4, my translations.53. ‘Ivri, H-3.54. From Eytan Glass, “Ani Simon Nahmias” (I Am Simon Nahmias), (Tel Aviv: Ha-Kib-

butz Ha-me’uhad, 1995) 21, my translation. “Take me under your wing” is an allusion to thetitle of Bialik’s famous poem “Hakhnisini tahat knafekh,” which has entered into Israelipopular culture in a number of guises (in, for instance, at least two musical renditions) and isthe poem Israeli society associates most closely with Bialik.

55. See also the quote from Bialik’s 1927 lecture to the Sephardic community in footnote46.

56. Bialik, Tehiyyat ha-sefaradim 114-115.57. The italicized portion of the quote is as follows in the original Hebrew: “dor she-mitgader

be-hokhmato u-ve-le’umiyuto, ve-lo matsa be-tokho go’el le-tif’eret ruah avotav, ha-tso‘eket elavmin ha-qevarim.” Shirey Shelomo Ben Yehuda Ibn Gabirol (The Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol),vol. 1, eds. H.N. Bialik and Y.H. Ravinitsky (Tel Aviv: Hotsa’at Dvir, 1927) viii; my transla-tion and emphasis.

58. See also Lev Hakak, Nitsaney ha-yetsirah ha-ivirt ha-hadashah be-bavel [The Buddingof Modern Hebrew Creativity in Babylon] (Or Yehuda: The Babylonian Jewry Heritage Cen-ter, 2004) 235.

Documents

“FROM BAGHDAD TO BIALIK WITH LOVE”:A REAPPROPRIATION OF MODERN HEBREW POETRY, 1933