SHMU’EL IBN SASSON

(first half of the fourteenth century)

Scholars agree for the most part that the historical value of SHMU’EL IBN SASSON’s poetry far outweighs its literary worth, and they read it for the light it sheds on the cultural situation of mid-fourteenth-century Castile. About the poet himself we know very little, apart from the fact that, unlike nearly all the other Hebrew poets of Spain, he spent most of his adult life in provincial towns (Carrión de los Condes and Fromista, both west of Burgos). Even in those provincial outposts, however, he was able to maintain a literary circle of sorts, albeit a small and inferior one. Two noteworthy poems (below) tell respectively of the plight of “poets who are not rich” and of the hardships that Jewish communities endured after Alfonso XI promoted his anti-Semitic counselor Gonzalo Martinez to a position of higher influence in 1336. “They Will Be Tried” is part of Ibn Sasson’s 164-line maqaama, which begins with the rhymed-prose heading: “And I made this at the time of the debate between R. Yehoshu‘a and R. Avner, for at this time trials increased and the labor was great in the Land, and the enemy would have devoured us had it not been for the Lord, our God, who was with us.” R. Yehoshu‘a has not been identified, but R. Avner is Avner of Burgos (the modern editor of Ibn Sasson’s diwan describes the maqaama as “an imitation of Avner’s vision”), and the trials he mentions refer to the increased tax burden borne by the Jewish community at the time. The local nouveauriche and boorish Jewish tax collectors—whom the poet despised and attacked in a series of poems—worked for the authorities and were often the worst of the oppressors. The maqaama notes that during this period the Jews were also sometimes imprisoned, forbidden from conducting public prayers, paraded naked, or forced to convert. At the beginning of the section presented here, the poet has just been cast into a deep sleep, through which he hears a prophetic voice telling him: “Son of man, why are you sleeping? Do you wonder at the trials that have come . . . heavily upon the Jews?” The voice explains that the trials are God’s means of punishing his people for their evil ways, and the poem—spoken by this voice from the skies—sums up the situation. Ibn Sasson also exchanged poems with Shem Tov Ardutiel and Yitzhaq Polgar.

MAN’S PERIL

WHY MOST POETS ARE POOR

THEY WILL BE TRIED