The anecdote retold above by Moses ibn Ezra (c. 1055–c. 1135) helps to describe the social, cultural and intellectual position of Jews in medieval al-Andalus . The protagonists of the story – one a young Jewish scholar and poet , the other a Muslim legal expert – are clearly members of the educated class: they move effortlessly between Arabic, Hebrew and Latin and quote freely from Hebrew Scriptures and the Qur’ān . Their rapport is easy: Ibn Ezra emphasizes how he is esteemed and liked by the Muslim scholar, and when he turns the tables on his companion, he suffers no adverse consequences.

On the surface, this story seems to affirm a “golden age” in medieval Spain, a time characterized by religious diversity and cultural exchange between Jews, Muslims and Christians. Two intellectuals, one Jewish, the other Muslim, engage in a game of linguistic and religious competition. The Jew is acculturated enough to represent his Scripture in Arabic and to challenge his interlocutor to translate the Qur’ān into Latin . He is clearly schooled in adab , the cultivated knowledge of grammar, poetry, history and ethics, among other intellectual subjects. The familiarity of both parties with each other’s language and scripture hints at linguistic borrowings and cultural hybridity, with Ibn Ezra as an example of an “Arabized Jew”¹ who has internalized Arabic theology and culture.

The notion of Jews well-versed in high culture at this time plays into the convention that Jews and Muslims indeed coexisted peacefully and respectfully in medieval al-Andalus . While Jews in Muslim Spain did have freedom of religion, autonomy in legal and religious affairs within their community and the freedom to engage in trade without restriction, they were tolerated rather than embraced. In the ṭā’ifa kingdoms of the eleventh century, Jews were useful to the rulers: those who had commercial connections and proficiency in languages became intermediaries between Muslim and Christian Spain . Jews could be “tolerated” as long as they maintained their inferior, “humiliated” status.² Linguistic and theological rivalries between Muslims and Jews mirrored the polemical ‘arabiyya/shu‘ubiyya debate wherein Muslims who traced their genealogy from pre-Islamic Arabia viewed themselves as superior to later converts to Islam, with Arabic deemed the superior language for literary expression.³

While this anecdote confirms shared cultural values between Andalusī Jews and Muslims, it complicates the assumption of a “golden age” of co-existence between the two faiths. The young Jewish scholar is challenged by the Muslim scholar to recite the Ten Commandments in Arabic and has no choice but to answer his charge. The Muslim scholar wants to prove to him the inferiority of the Hebrew Bible and the paucity of biblical language, to the extent that even when Jewish Scripture is recited in Arabic – the language of divine revelation for Muslims – it will not sound good. However, Ibn Ezra parries the Muslim scholar by asking him to recite a sūra in Latin , knowing full well that even when translated, the poetry of Qur’ānic verse cannot be adequately transferred to another language; in attempting to do so, its beauty would be sullied and its holiness debased.

In medieval al-Andalus , two highly valued elements of Muslim court culture were recitation of verse and theological discourse based on analogical reasoning . Poetry was defined in Arabic poetics in two distinct ways. The first trend defined poetry formally as metre and rhyme. The second determined that poetry was “related…to creativity, to the power of emotional and intellectual apprehension , to intuition and imaginative creation.”⁴ Metre and rhyme alone could not capture these conceptual facets of poetry. Arabic Aristotelian philosophers took note of the critical inquiry into poetry and poetics; they looked to Greek commentaries for terminology and linked poetry to imitation or mimesis (muḥākāh ), imagination (takhyīl ), and metaphor (ist‘iāra).⁵ They recognized that language could carry both literal and non-literal messages, and similarly, figurative language could signify multiple meanings.

In the ṭā’ifa courts of eleventh-century Muslim Spain, scribes were elevated to positions of power and the palace became a place where written and oral eloquence were esteemed. This eloquence was manifest in court poetry that praised the ṭā’ifa sovereign in elaborate elegies, among other styles of poetry that contained “hidden significations.”⁶ These encoded messages were carefully and artfully woven into poetry, philosophy and architecture, with the intent of puzzling the listener, reader or viewer, who would then decipher their meaning. As a result, artists and thinkers composed with multivalence in mind. In poetry, meanings were encoded through metaphor, or isti‘āra , a means of figurative expression that allowed difficult or abstract concepts to be understood through “likeness or similarity articulated through analogy.”⁷ Using metaphors, similes and other rhetorical devices , poets encoded multiple meanings into their poetry, in the same way that palace architects built rooms within rooms, gardens within courtyards, and layer upon layer of pattern into Andalusī palaces.⁸

Medieval Jewish thinkers, following their Arabic Aristotelian precursors, understood metaphor to be a function of human imagination. Metaphor was viewed as one of the most beautiful aspects of literature; an analogy between two disparate concepts was a puzzle to be solved and to be delighted by when deciphered. However, metaphor also pointed to the limits of human intelligence, because without figurative language the mind could not fathom the immaterial, such as God or his actions. Comparing God’s actions with something analogous in the sensible world allowed people to comprehend figurative biblical language. Medieval Jewish thinkers sought to define a role for the proper usage of metaphor in poetry and scripture. These guidelines were expressed in both poetic and theological treatises.

This book examines the role of metaphor as a form of cognitive expression in three treatises ...