SOLOMON IBN GABIROL: AN ANDALUSIAN ALPHABET ✦ HIS METAPHYSICS emerge from desire: his ethics evolve to a science of sense.Whatbeginsthereinwisdomendsinanger:whatwasangergives waytoagrace.Heisapoetofpolesandswellsandreversals,ofsplitsthat proposeacompletion.HeisthemostmodernoftheHebrewmedievals, the mostforeign to a modernist approach. Inhisversewhatlookslike a mirrorismeantinfacttobepassedthrough:transparencymarksadivide. Hebrew is Arabic, MuslimJewish, his resistancea formof embrace. ABU AYYUB SULAIMAN IBN YAHYA IBN JABIRUL The reconstructed facts are few. He is born Shelomoh Ben Yehudah Ibn Gabirol, in either 1021 or 1022, in Malaga, to an undistinguished family that may have fled the collapsing capital of the Umayyad Caliphate, Córdoba, with the same wave of refugees that included Shmuel Ha- Nagid,whowouldgoontobecometheperiod’sfirstgreatHebrewpoet. At some point his father moves the family north to Saragossa, and Ibn Gabirol—or, in Arab circles, Abu Ayyub Sulaiman Ibn Yahya Ibn Jabirul—israisedinthatimportantcenterofIslamicandJewishlearning. IbnGabirol’sfatherdieswhiletheprecocioussonisstillinhisearlyteens, andthe youngmanislookedafterbyaJewishnotableattheSaragossan court, Yequtiel Ibn Hasan al-Mutawakkil Ibn Qabrun. He is writing ac- complished poems by age sixteen, important ones by nineteen, though he is ill, already afflicted with the disease that will leave him embittered and in constant pain, suffering from boils that scholars reason were caused by tuberculosis of the skin (the actual condition has never been precisely identified). We can alsoinferfromhispoemsthathewasshort and ugly. In 1039 Yequtiel gets mixed up in court intrigue and is killed, and Ibn Gabirol loses his patron. He leaves Saragossa sometime after 1045,whenhismotherdies,andmostscholarsassumethathegoessouth, to Granada, in order to try his luck at the court of HaNagid, who is, at that point, governor (nagid) of the region’s Jews, prime minister of that Muslimta‘ifa(partystate)underitsBerberking,andcommander-in-chief 3 AN ANDALUSIAN ALPHABET of the Granadan army. Things appear to work out for a time, but wires get crossed, or the young, upstart poet insults his elder poet-patron, and even this meager trail vanishes, with Ibn Gabirol still in his mid- twenties. He is known, says Moshe Ibn Ezra, author of the age’s most important work of Hebrew literary criticism, The Book of Discussion and Remembrance, for his philosophical temperament, and for his “angry spiritwhichheldswayoverreason,andhisdemonwithinwhichhecould not control.” Hewritessecular verse,often gnarledwithambitionandanger,and it is probable that later in life he is supported by his writing for the syna- gogue, composing radical and, in comparison with his court-centered verse, remarkably self-deprecating piyyutim, or liturgical poems, for the weekday, Sabbath, and festival services. Apart from his diwan and his philosophical masterwork, The Fountain of Life, he produces a short but striking ethical treatise, On the Improvement of the Moral Qualities, and claims in one of his poems to have written some twenty books—now lost—onphilosophical,linguistic,scientific,andreligioustopics.(AChoice ofPearls,avolumeofproverbs,isoftenattributedtohim,butitisabland gathering, hardly in keeping with the rest of his extraordinary oeuvre; and while other medieval authorities quote his biblical commentary, no mentionof a collection survives.) “Arrogant, orphaned, itinerant,” in Allen Mandelbaum’s characteriza- tion,hedies,saysIbnEzra,inValencia,notyetforty.Hisreligiouspoems now form part of the regular prayer service in Jewish communities throughouttheworld,anddowntownTelAvivtrafficjamstakeplaceon a street that bears his name. BEZALEL “Shelter me in your shadow,” he writes, “be with my mouth and its word.” The vocabulary of Jewish poesis, or making, goes back to a crisis of refuge and interiordesign. Ithas always been cultic,just as itsethos has mostoftenbeenabstract,atacertainremovefromthefigure.Wherethe much more talked-about and vatic abstraction derives from the am- biguoussecondcommandment,itself anextensionofthefirst,“Iamthe Lordthy God:Donot makeidolsorlikenesses,”themoremodestifnot maligned ornamental idiom comes from the scriptural role played by BezalelBenUri,ofthetribeofJudah,whoseGod-giventaskwastobuild 4 AN ANDALUSIAN ALPHABET andoutfitthedesertSanctuary,“toadornHim.”Hewastoconstructthe Arkand theTabernacle, tofashionthecurtainsandcastthecandlesticks thatthemidrashtellsusbaffledthemorepedanticMoses.Bezalelsawto theloopsandtheveilsandthesockets—thealtar,thecourt,andthelaver. Eventhepriestlyvestments.Hisnamemeans“intheshadowofGod,the son of my light (or ‘fire’),” and Exodus 31:2 says that he was “filled ... with the spirit of God, in wisdom, in understanding, and in knowledge, in all manner of workmanship ... of the craftsman, and of the skilful workman, and of the weaverin colors.” Like the Bezalel of Scripture and midrash, and like King Solomon his successorandthepoet’snamesake,whobuilttheTempleandcomposed themostbeautifulandwisestofbiblicalbooks,IbnGabirolwouldcharge hisornamentwithcomplexvalue,bringingsublimevisiontoaspacethat artifice defined. Lacing his poems with allusions to the work of these forbears, he would devote his skill to the pursuit of wisdom and the evocation of magnitude. CORRIDORS: CLUES Scriptural figures apart,key precursorsand contemporariesinclude: the blind and reclusive Syrian ascetic poet Abu ’l-‘Ala al-Ma‘arri (974– 1058), known for the dense patterning of his caustic poems, like Ibn Ga- birol’s,at once“boundlessand self-contained.”Afterbeginningasacon- ventionalpoetworkinginthecourtmodes,“milkingtheuddersoftime,” inhisLuzumumalaYalzam(TheNecessityofWhatIsn’tNecessary)Abu ’l-‘Ala sets out against the grain of the poetry of his day and its neo- Aristotelian motto—the most pleasing poetry is the most feigning—and seeks “to speak the truth”: “You stand there as the driven/wheels of heavenspin/and choose,/while the fatesare laughing”; Abu al-Hakim al-Karmaani, a prominent scholar (born in Córdoba, d. 1066) who, after his travels in the East, introduced to Saragossa the doctrine of the tenth-century Ikhwaan As-Safa’, The Brethren of Purity. Their ecumenical, encyclopedic Epistles were read throughout the Mus- limworldandplayedanimportantroleintheriseofSufism.Intheworld of the Epistles, the pattern of the whole is always represented in the pat- ternoftheparts:manisamicrocosm,andcorrespondencesexistbetween astronomical, ethical, and social planes. The sciences there are treated not as ends in themselves, so much as vehicles by which mankind gains awareness of the harmonies and beauty of the universe. When a new 5 AN ANDALUSIAN ALPHABET edition of the Epistles appears in the first half of the eleventh century, it makesitswaytoAndalusiawhere,withinmonths,itiscirculatingamong the Islamic scholars,and also reaches Ibn Gabirol; Abu Muhammad ‘Ali Ibn Hazm (994–1064), the harem-raised Cór- doban theologian-poet, perhaps the most vigorous and representative Muslimthinkeroftheperiod.IbnHazm isbestknownforhisRingofthe Dove, a psychologically astute treatise detailing the signs and stages of love,butheisalsotheauthorofavastworkoncomparativereligionand at least one qasida that recalls Ibn Gabirol’s greatest poem, Kingdom’s Crown. Also reminiscent of Ibn Gabirol is Ibn Hazm’s moral essay, A Philosophy of Character and Conduct: “I am a man who has always been uneasy about the impermanency and constant instability of fortune.... Inmy investigationsIhave constantly triedtodiscoveranendin human actionswhichallmenunanimouslyholdasgoodandwhichtheyallseek. Ihavefoundonly this:the oneaimofescapinganxiety....[A]sIinvesti- gated, I observed that all things tended to elude me, and I reached the conclusion that the only permanent reality possible consists in good worksusefulfor another, immortallife” (trans.Kritzeck); theunnamedpoetsmentionedbyMosheIbnEzrainTheBookofDiscus- sionandRemembrance:IbnGabirol’s“wayintheartofpoetrywassubtle,” says Ibn Ezra, “like that of the later Muslim poets,” referring perhaps to the major “modern” Arabic writers—poets of the “new,” ornamental (badii‘a)style,suchastheninth-centuryinnovatorMuslimIbnWalidand the master mannerist Abu Tamaam, and perhaps to the metaphysical Saragossa circle as well. ON the Hebrew side of the ledger, one counts among Ibn Gabirol’s predecessors and peers the aforementioned Shmuel Ben Yosef Halevi HaNagid, the major Jewish cultural and political figure of his day. Ibn Gabirol contacts HaNagid when the former is sixteen years old and the latter at the height of his several powers. The young poet writes him at length, in verse,initially from Saragossa, singingthe vizier’spraises,and settingthestagefortheirsomewhatmysteriousconfrontationandfalling out severalyears later in Granada; hovering in the background is the ongoing influence of several key figures: Sa‘adiah Gaon, the great Eastern rabbi, leader of Babylonian Jewry in the first half of the tenth century, translator of the Bible into Arabic, redactor of the first standard prayer book, liturgical poet, com- piler of the first rhyming dictionary in Hebrew and the first Hebrew– 6 AN ANDALUSIAN ALPHABET Arabic lexicon, and author of The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, which in- cludesmodern-sounding,“scientific” chaptersonmoney,children,eroti- cism,eatinganddrinking,andthesatisfactionofthethirstforrevenge.It was Sa‘adiah’s student Dunash Ben Labrat who introduced Arabic po- etry’s secular genres and quantitative meters into Hebrew in the middle of the tenth century and set offa debate thatsplitthe Jewishintellectual community:Dunashwasaccusedofdesecratingtheholytonguewithhis importationofanalienpoetic,andhisworkwasattacked.Thingsturned nasty,andDunash’sprimaryrival,anolderandmoreexperiencedcourt- poet named Menahem Ibn Saruq, fell out of favor with the principal Jewish patron of the day, Hasdai Ibn Shaprut, and was thrown into prison. The new spirit of rationalism and innovation took hold in Hasdai’s court, which, in turn, was modeled on the Córdoban court of the Caliph ‘Abd ar-Rahman III, where Hasdai served as a senior physi- cian, customsdirector, and personalenvoy for the caliph. In the small body of his work that has come down to us, however, whereheseemstohavehandledthenewformsawkwardly,Dunashwas more innovator than master, and it turns out that credit for the qualita- tivelyricbreakthroughrightfullybelongstohiswife,whosenamewedo not know. In a marvelous 1984 discovery, scholar Ezra Fleischer identi- fieda singleextant work of hersinthepapersoftheCairoGenizah; this short poem to her husband (who also appears to have quarreled with Hasdai) is, says Fleischer, the first realized personal poem in the post- biblical Hebrew canon: Willherloverememberhisgracefuldoe, heronlysoninherarmsasheparted? Onherlefthandheplacedaringfromhisright, onhiswristsheplacedherbracelet. Asakeepsakeshetookhismantlefromhim, andheinturntookhersfromher. Hewon’tsettleinthelandofSpain, thoughitsprincegivehimhalfhiskingdom. Otherechoingvoicesinclude thepopulartenth-centuryliturgicalpoet and teacher Yitzhak Ibn Mar Sha‘ul, of Lucena, who took up Dunash’s prosodic innovations and reportedly was the first Hebrew poet to write of the “gazelle,” the young, male love interest in so many of the erotic poems of the period; his central claim to fame lay in his penitential 7 AN ANDALUSIAN ALPHABET poetry, particularly his petition, “Lord, Do Not Judge Me for What I Have Done,” which entered the liturgy in many communities and finds direct echoes in Kingdom’s Crown; the powerful, prolific, and somewhat reactionary liturgical poet Yosef IbnAbitur(c.950–after1024),legendaryforhaving“interpreted”theTal- mud for the Andalusian Caliph al-Hakim II (whose Córdoban library of some 400,000 volumes was the largest collection of books in Europe at thetime).Hispoemsforthesynagogueoftendealtvividlywithreligious- nationalist themes, especially that of exile, and he was also famous for his mystical poems of angelology, which were to have a marked influ- enceonIbnGabirol.IbnAbitur’sloneinnovationwasmajor:hewasthe firstpoettodevelopthelyricalpreludes,orreshuyot,tohithertoneglected parts of the Sabbath and festival morning liturgy. The genre would go on to figure prominently in the work of the great poets of the period, withIbnGabirolcountedasthefirstmasterofthisquintessentiallyAnda- lusianform; IbnAbitur’scontemporary,the firstexclusively“professional”andsec- ular Hebrew poet of the period, Yitzhak Ibn Khalfon, who was born in North Africa and raised in Córdoba in the latter third of the tenth cen- tury.IbnKhalfoneventuallysetoutasanitinerantpoet,writingeulogies and other poems for Jewish patrons in Spain, North Africa, and even far-off Damascus. The outstanding member of the second generation of thenewHebrewpoetry,hegreatlywidenedthetonalandprosodicrange of that verse, above all adding a personal, graceful and often comic di- mensionto itsrhetoric; and,finally, IbnGabirolwassurroundedandnodoubtinfluencedbya contemporary Saragossan Who’s Who of Jewish intellectuals that in- cludedthepoet-linguistYosefIbnHasdai,authorofasingleextantpoem, known as the “Orphaned [unique] Qasida,” an erotically charged, peti- tionaryencomiumdedicatedtohislifelongfriend,ShmuelHaNagid,and looked upon as a model of its kind by many of the Andalusian Hebrew poets; the sharp-tongued, learned, and promising satirical poet, Moshe Ibn al-Taqaana, killed in his twenties when a wall fell on him along the Toledo Road; and one of the leading linguists of the age, Yonah Ibn Janaah, author of the important Book of Roots and, along with Ibn al- Taqaana, an outspoken detractor of HaNagid. “NEXT to Ibn Gabirol,” however, proclaimed the thirteenth-century au- thorYehudahal-Harizi,withcharacteristichyperboleand,itwouldseem, 8 AN ANDALUSIAN ALPHABET without full knowledge of HaNagid’s output, the previous poets were “only wind and emptiness.” DEATHS, DIWANS, DETECTIVES The better part of his social life seems to have been spent making ene- mies,and thepayback wasn’t longincoming.IbnEzratellsusthatafter Ibn Gabirol’s death—scholars have established the correct date as 1054, 1058, or 1070, with the middle figure being most probable—after his death, or deaths, his reputation came under assault and his work was criticized “by pedants” for assorted flaws, much as happened with the work of HaNagid after he died in 1056. “The poet sings,” wrote Jacob Glatstein in a Yiddish poem some nine hundred years later, “the Jewish coffin-birds snap.” Themedievalsnip,itwouldseem,wasequaltoitssnap,forthesecular poemsofbothAndalusianpoetscametosimilarfates:seldomcopiedand, onthewhole,forgottenforreasonspersonalandpolitical(fundamentalist Musliminvasionfromthesouth,Christianreconquestinthenorth,with subsequent expulsion of the Jews), they were relegated to that under- ground nexus throughwhich strong marginal poetryisoftenpassed on. In HaNagid’s case only fragments circulated, and a sixteenth-century copy of hiscollected poems, or diwan, surfaced ina crate inearly twen- tieth-century Syria, though it wasn’t published in an edition the general reader might absorb for another thirty years. The case of Ibn Gabirol is morecomplex,andinsomewaysevenmorefabulous.Whilemanyofhis liturgical poems were taken up by communities throughout the Jewish world and preserved in prayer books, the nonliturgical poems were harder to come by and clearly not in great demand. Nor, prior to the discovery of the Cairo Genizah and its scrap heap of Scripture, scrolls, shopping lists, recipes, letters, and assorted literary gems, was there any mention of a complete diwan of Ibn Gabirol’s poems. When German scholarsinthemid-nineteenthcentury soughttoassembleaselectionof thepoet’swork,thematerialhadtobepiecedtogetherfrommanuscripts heldinlibrariesinOxford,Parma,Vienna,St.Petersburg,andelsewhere. Thetextsweresometimesinpoorcondition,andtheoverallpicturewas hard to construct. Enter an Iraqi Jewish writer by the name of David Tzemah, who tells his story in a 1931 letter to David Yellin, a Jerusalem scholar who was preparinganeditionofanotheroftheHebrewSpanishpoets.Tzemah,it 9 AN ANDALUSIAN ALPHABET appears,wasawareofafamilylegendaboutanimportantmanuscriptof medieval poetry that had once beenbelonged toa certaineminent fore- bear but had been lost during that relative’s lifetime, toward the middle ofthenineteenth century. Hiscuriositypiqued,Tzemah-the-youngerset out in search of the lost manuscript. He wrote to all his Iraqi relatives, traveled to remote villages, but came up empty-handed. Ten years passed, he says, with neither rest nor repose. Finally he decided to be- comeanantiquarianbookseller,ontheoutsidechancethatinthiswayhe mightsomedaycomeacrosshistreasure!Heannouncedhimselfinsyna- gogues and to other booksellers, stating his readiness to buy old manu- scriptsanytimeandanyplace,butnothingturnedup,andTzemahcame to despair of ever finding the legendary manuscript. Either it had been destroyed, lay tattered in a genizah, or else, he reasoned, it was not in Iraq. One day, he continues, he was walking on his way, headed for the celebrationofabritmilah,acircumcision,wherehehimselfwastodothe honors—a group of children were singing behind him, as was done in thatpartoftheworld,henotesforYellin—whenawomanbegancalling out to him. She had heard that the good scholar bought old books, and shehadsome;perhapsthehonorablegentlemanwouldliketoseethem. Tzemahexplained thathe couldn’tcomenow,ashewasexpectedatthe brit,buthisservantwouldgowithherandseewhereshelived,andthen bring him by later on. And so, after the ceremony and the meal that followed, his servant brought him to the woman’s house. Tzemah climbed up to the attic where the “old books” were stacked, but found onlydustyPentateuchs,Psalters,andprayerbooks.Nothingofinterestto anantiquarian. “I camedownfrom theattic,”hewrote,inhisprecise,if somewhat odd and old-fashioned Hebrew, “I and my servant, to return tomyhouse,whenIsawthekitchenopenbeforeme.Abigpotofwater was set out for the laundry and beside it was a basket of papers, all of them what looked to be old scraps, to feed the fire and heat the pot. I asked her: What is that? And she said: Tomorrow is our day for the laundryandwe’llgetupearlytopreparethefire.Isaidtoher:Whenwill you people be done with this awful practice? Perhaps there are sacred writings among them. She said: We have already checked them. They don’t contain any print. Anyway, what can I do? I want to rent the attic and I need the space. The booksare for sale; the papers—forthe fire.” “I approached the basket to see what it held, and there among the paperswasthemanuscriptI’dbeensearchingforalltheseyears!Howcan 10 AN ANDALUSIAN ALPHABET Idescribeforyou,goodsir,thatinstantuponwhichIbeheldbothlifeand death at once, that moment which resembled the revelation at Mount Sinai! And here I was, the final redeemer among the sons of the sons of thatrighteousman!Icouldhavetakenthemanuscriptfornothing,butin my delight I gaveher a proper reward.” InhishandsTzemahnowheldaseventeenth-centurymanuscriptcon- taining more than four thousand poems, nearly complete diwans of Ibn Gabirol,MosheIbnEzra,YehudaHalevi,TodrosAbulafia,andselections from other minor but important poets from Spain, Provence, and the Near East—which is to say, a sizable share of medieval Hebrew poetry’s greatest works, all of it literally snatched from the fire. Its lineage was spelledoutwithinitaswell:ithadbeencopiedinEgypt,thenbroughtto Iraq, Bombay, and then back to Iraq. Tzemah’s letter goes on in similar fashion, telling of his attempts to find a buyer for the manuscript who would issue the books in accessible editions, and of the eventual sale to aVienneseantiquarianwhosepartnercametoBaghdadtoseehim.The partnerlithiscigarette, Tzemahexplainedthathepreferredthenarghila (“Hadnotthegentlemenreadhis‘SongoftheNarghila’?”),theyhititoff, and the promise of publication was confirmed, though nothing had yet come of the pledge, Tzemah observes, as he closes: “But I mustcut this lettershort,forthepostmanisabouttodepart....Hereistheaddressof BenjaminthebuyerandhispartnerinVienna.AndDavidsendsblessings to David, [signed] DavidBen Salmaan Tzemah.” EMBRACING EVASION: THE EXOTIC Perhapstheprimaryobstaclefacingthecontemporaryreaderofmedieval Hebrewpoetryistheoverstuffedcriticalbaggageofitsornament,which thetextbookswouldhaveusdragaboutonourwayfromlinetolineand poemto poem. Again and again the poetryisdescribed asdecorativeor ornamental,withoutoureverstoppingtoaskwhatthatmeans.Thetacit assumptionofmodernart-talkisthatornamentisunnecessaryorquaint (domesticating). Baroque theories of the fold notwithstanding, we think ofitoftenasfluff,oralie.“Arabesque,”forEzraPound,wastheultimate put down, the representative figure of evasion and flight from the real. “The world is still deceived with ornament,” we hear in the Merchant of Venice,at the heart of another age of embellishment.“Thus ornament is butthegildedshoretoamostdangeroussea...theseemingtruthwhich cunning times put on to entrap the wisest.” Also prominent in the anti- 11 AN ANDALUSIAN ALPHABET ornament camp is Adolf Loos’s equation of “Ornament and Crime,” as the title of his 1908 essay on the subject has it, and his saying elsewhere that“thelesscivilizedapeopleis,themoreprodigalitwillbewithorna- mentanddecoration.... TheRed Indianwithinus,”heurges,“mustbe overcome.” There are, however, less mechanical or reductive ways to think about ornament. The apocryphal book of Ben Sira says: “To a sensible man educationislikeagoldenornament,andlikeabraceletwornontheright arm,” a reasonably familiar sentiment. But then it says: “A mind settled on an intelligent thought is like the stucco decoration on the wall of a colonnade” (22:17), already a much more interestingnotion. Forthe phenomenon is cosmetic, though in saying so we unwittingly arriveattherootandtruthofthematter,thecomplexofdefinitionsthat accrue around the Greek word for theverbalform ofthe term,kosmein, that is, to order, and, secondarily, to ornament. It is from this cluster of meaningsthat we get our“ordered world,” “acosmos,” asinthepseud- epigraphic Prayer of Manasseh: “He who made the heaven and the earth with all their embellishment [kosmo]....” Which returns us to Bezalel and the sanctuarydesigned to “adorn Him.” Several modern writers who look at ornament in the visual arts and withoutcondescensionbringuscloserstilltotheheartofthematter.The art historian A. K. Coomaraswamy traces the development of the word inSanskrit, Greek, and English, fromculttocourtand ontotheswamp of pretension and the dismissal of “arts and crafts.” At the outset, he notes, ornament was “that which makes a thing itself”; and ornamentum in Ecclesiastical law didn’t convey superfluousdecoration, but theequip- ment of the sacred service. Discussing the various words used in tradi- tional art-theory to express the phenomenon he says: “Most of these words, which imply for us the notion of something adventitious and luxurious,...originallyimpliedacompletionorfulfillmentoftheartifact orotherobjectinquestion[...withaviewtoproperoperation]...until ...theartbywhichthethingitselfhadbeenmadewholebegantomean only a sort of millinery or upholstery that covered over a body that had not been made by ‘art’but ratherby ‘labor’.” AndOlegGrabarstatesinTheMediationofOrnament:“Ornamentis,to coin a word ... calliphoric: it carries beauty with it.” Echoing Cooma- raswamy he observes that the words used to express the act involved in ornamentation imply “the successful completion of anact, of an object, orevenofastateofmindorsoul.”Henotesthedaemonic,intermediary 12