DUNASH BEN LABRAT

(mid-tenth century)

By all accounts the founder of the new Andalusian Hebrew poetry, DUNASH BEN LABRAT reimagined the very nature of Hebrew verse and, with that conceptual and tactile shift, brought about a revolution in Jewish letters and the world onto which they open. Just how and why he did that remains something of a mystery, as we have little more than an outline of his life. Born in the first third of the tenth century in Fez, Morocco (the name Dunash is Berber in origin), he traveled to Baghdad in his youth in order to study with the greatest scholar of his day, Sa‘adia Gaon (d. 940). While still in Babylonia, Dunash adapted Arabic poetry’s quantitative meters to Hebrew and showed the results to his teacher, who offered up the distinctly ambiguous judgment: “Nothing like it has ever been seen in Israel.” He was in Spain, it seems, by age thirty, having brought with him the new poetics and all they implied. Dunash’s Arabizing method caught on, despite his arrogant manner and his scorn for what he considered the provincial ways of the backward Spanish-Jewish literati he encountered in Andalusia. And though he was accused, among other things, of “destroying the holy tongue . . . by casting it into foreign meters,” and “bringing calamity upon his people,” sometime around 960, he displaced Menahem Ben Saruq as the reigning poet at Hasdai Ibn Shaprut’s Jewish Cordovan court. Dunash’s liturgical poems were soon sung “in every town and city, / in every village and county”—according to a polemical poem by one of his students; his secular verse also gained many admirers and marked the beginning of a tradition that would last for five centuries in Spain, and continue on after that in North Africa, Palestine, Yemen, Turkey, Italy, and elsewhere. With regard to poetics, compunction, and theme, his short motto and longer, conflicted wine poem (both below) in many ways anticipate the concerns of the entire period. In a controversy about which we know almost nothing, Dunash eventually abandoned Spain, leaving behind a young wife and at least one small child. A quarrel with Ibn Shaprut appears to have been behind his departure.

Most of Dunash’s output is presumed to be lost, and critical opinion of his thirteen extant poems and assorted fragments is mixed. While he was ambitious and daring, Dunash was hardly a master craftsman, and much of his work shows the strain of his labor. By and large, his figurative gifts were limited and his style awkward and stiff. Still, his innovations were major and lasting, and he goes down in the annals of Hebrew literature as one of its greatest pioneers.

FRAGMENT

BLESSING FOR A WEDDING

DRINK, HE SAID