YOSEF IBN ZABARA

(c. 1140–late twelfth century)

YOSEF IBN ZABARA was the first Hebrew poet who was raised in the Christian north and then lived there for most of his life; some scholars, therefore, mark the beginning of the Christian period of Hebrew Poetry in Spain with his—and not Avraham Ibn Ezra’s—work. Born in Barcelona, where he was educated by his physician-father, Yosef too became a doctor, possibly having gone to study at the Hebrew school of medicine in Narbonne in his mid-twenties. Sometime after that he returned to Barcelona and practiced medicine there for several years. In the early eighties he began traveling but soon returned to the city of his birth.

In addition to medicine, Ibn Zabara was well-versed, it seems, in several fields, including Talmud, translation from Arabic, religious thought, philosophy, and more. Little of his writing survives, apart from a long anatomical poem, Batei HaNefesh (Homes/Stanzas of the Soul), employing a non-Andalusian rhyme scheme; one accomplished liturgical poem; several medical prose volumes of uncertain attribution (including On the Analysis of Urine); and Sefer Sha‘shu‘im (The Book of Delight), the volume on which Ibn Zabara’s fame rests. The latter was dedicated in Barcelona no later than 1209 and comprises a book-length, rhymed-prose narrative of the author’s wanderings with another physician whom he comes to despise, one ‘Einan HaNatash ben Arnan HaDash—essentially an acronym for Einan the Devil, son of the Demon. While the specific setting of the body of the narrative is never mentioned, at least not by names that we can identify, the book begins and ends in Barcelona, and its fictional landscape appears to be based on Muslim Spain and Provence. A series of moral tales set within a frame story, it is the first structurally complex Hebrew narrative in the tradition and among the most entertaining. Although the book makes use of the usual scriptural and rabbinic elements, its emphases are worldly and—in keeping with Ibn Zabara’s training and profession—corporeal (and often moral).

Israel Davidson, who edited the critical edition of the work, describes it as a “veritable storehouse of medieval lore . . . built in the Arabian style, decorated with fables and riddles of India, inlaid with the choicest products of Greek science, and illumined with the wisdom and maxims of the Orient. The whole,” he says, “is a magnificent monument to the zeal for secular learning among the Jews of the Middle Ages.” With its lean, pragmatic, and often nonbiblical language, its generally subversive treatment of misogynistic tales, and its reluctance to make use of interspersed poems, Zabara’s work departs from the “classical” standard of the Andalusian poems and even from that of the later maqaamas. Schirmann calls it one of the earliest efforts in the direction of a Hebrew novel—at a time when similar work was being done in European languages—though in the proper sense of the word, it isn’t a maqaama at all. Its high quality notwithstanding, Sefer Sha‘ashu‘im was for one reason or another very slow to gain a readership, and for hundreds of years there was little mention of it or its author. The book was printed for the first time in Constantinople in 1577, and interest in Zabara’s work was not renewed until the nineteenth century, when Sefer Sha‘ashu‘im appeared in a Hebrew journal. Davidson’s critical edition was published in 1914. The poems translated here are drawn from the twenty-two contained in the body of the book. Just three or four of them are believed to be by Ibn Zabara; the others remain unattributed, but may well be his.

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