The Poet and the World

Festschrift for Wout van Bekkum on the Occasion of His Sixty-fifth Birthday

Joachim Yeshaya, Elisabeth Hollender, Naoya Katsumata

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783110600759
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110599237
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: Literature

A collection of seventeen essays on pre-modern Hebrew poetry in honor of Wout van Bekkum. The articles in this volume all seek to examine how the religious, cultural, and social context in which the poet functioned impacted on and is visible, either explicitly or more elliptically, in their poetical oeuvre. For this purposes a broad understanding of "world" has been accepted, including both the natural world and the constructed one (society, culture, language) as well as the spiritual and emotional world. History, a pillar of the man-made constructed world, has been used to determine the boundaries: from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages, and—in instances where the topic connects to older traditions—to Early Modern Judaism, i.e. pre-modern Hebrew (and Aramaic) poetry. The articles in this volume, in the breadth of their temporal and spatial range and their multiplicity of approaches and methodologies, highlight the richness of contemporary scholarship on Hebrew poetry. The volume invites the reader to engage with this astonishing body of poetry, while providing a glimpse into the world of the pay?anim, and the cultures and societies from which they drew their ininspiration and to which they made such important contributions.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction (including Biography of Wout van Bekkum)
• Bibliography of Wout van Bekkum
• Part 1. The Poet and the Poem Moving in the World
• Ibn Abitur between Fusṭāṭ and Córdoba: Two Jewish Cultural Centers at the Turn of the Eleventh Century
• From West to East: The Poems of Samuel ha-Nagid in the Cairo Geniza
• Israel Najara: A Beloved and Popular Poet
• Scenery of the Land of Israel or “Scenes” from the House of Study: Descriptions of the Land of Israel in Early Liturgical Poetry
• Part 2. The Poet and the World of Men
• Elʿazar berabbi Qillir: A Late Antique Poet and his Cultural Legacy
• Poems for Ploni: On the Use and Reuse of Praise
• Poets (Almost) Without An Audience? Ashkenazic Piyyuṭim in Local Manuscripts
• A Karaite Ḥakham Kolel and a Hebrew Poet: Zeraḥ ben Nathan in a New World
• Part 3. The Poet and the World of Words
• No Translation Needed: Hebrew in Two Samaritan Aramaic Hymns
• Hebrew Piyyuṭ and its Byzantine Greek Influences: The Case of the Inverted Construct Form
• Love and the Description of the Beloved in Moses Ibn Ezra’s Girdle Poems
• The Debate Poems of Abraham Ibn Ezra: An Inquiry into the Genre and Definition of the Corpus
• Spanish Elements in Italian Hebrew Poetry
• Part 4. The Poet and the World of Emotions
• Death in Aramaic: The Funeral Poems of Shirat Bene Maʿaraḇa in Context
• Out of Your Senses: The Baroque World of Moses Zacuto’s Tofteh ʿArukh
• The Anger of a Poet: Judah Ibn Shabbetai and the Depiction of Evil in Words of Curse and Excommunication
• Emotional Discourse and Terms for Body and Soul in Hebrew Elegiac and Panegyric Poems by Joseph ben Tanḥum Yerushalmi
• Index