ABSTRACT
Hebrew poetry in medieval Spain expresses Jewish nationalism as the Bible does, by being in Hebrew, its Golden Age in the 11th and 12th centuries, when most Jews still lived in the Middle East after centuries under Islamic rule. As the Iberian Peninsula was part of the Islamic empire, and had been since the 8th century, the Jews generally felt more at home there than in Christian Europe, where the Crusades brought havoc to many Jewish communities. All Spanish Hebrew poets were native Arabic speakers and writers. Their use of Hebrew was a matter of choice, signifying that however assimilated they were in Arabic society they were Jews in exile from the land of Israel. This lachrymose self-image, universal among Jews until 1789, was in line both with Judaism and with Christian and Islamic perceptions of Jews as tolerated infidels. The high point of Hebrew poetry in medieval Spain came in the late-11th century, when the Crusaders conquered the Holy Land from Islam (1099), briefly raising messianic hopes of a return from exile.1 These hopes were expressed most notably in the poetry of Judah Halevi (c. 1075-1141), which entered the Jewish liturgy and remains so to this day. Halevi’s poems of Zion, written in Spain – ‘the end of the west’ – express yearning not only for the land of Israel as it was in the time of Jewish sovereignty but also as it might become in future.2
