SHELOMO DEPIERA

(1340s–after 1417)

The first seventy years of the fourteenth century, according to Haim Schirmann, marked a low point in the history of Hebrew poetry in Spain. Things began to stir again only with the appearance on the scene of a group of Saragossan poets who called themselves, among other names, ‘Adat Nognim (The Minstrels’ Circle). The senior and perhaps most important member of the group was Shelomo DePiera. Born sometime between 1340 and 1350, in Catalonia, Shelomo seems to have been a distant relative of Meshullam DePiera, possibly his great-grandson or great-great-grandson. For much of his life he worked for one of the community’s most distinguished families, the Ben Lavis. In sharp contrast to members of the materialistic Jewish upper class at the time, Don Shelomo Ben Lavi turned his attention to cultural matters, and in many ways he was the driving force behind this late Saragossan renaissance. In addition to writing work of their own, Don Shelomo, his son Benveniste, and some of his grandsons supported Hebrew scholars, funded translations of scholarly works into Hebrew, and employed the period’s most prominent poet—Shelomo DePiera—as a Hebrew secretary and tutor in the Ben Lavi household. DePiera’s curriculum naturally included verse, and it seems that gifted friends of the Ben Lavi children also studied the art with his group. At least two of DePiera’s students (Vidal Benveniste and Yosef Ben Lavi—Don Shelomo’s grandson) went on to write serious poetry. In time, as DePiera became known as an important cultural figure, various aspiring poets began sending him work and soliciting his opinion.

The year 1391 brought cataclysmic changes to the Jewish community. After more than a decade of anti-Jewish preaching by Archdeacon Ferrant Martinez, violent disturbances broke out in Seville and soon spread throughout the peninsula. Incidents of murder, plunder, and forced conversion (as well as mar-tyrdom) were widespread, and in their wake, the Jewish population—especially of Catalonia—was decimated. Barcelona’s days as an important Jewish center came to an end, and the violence threatened the Jews of Saragossa as well. The Ben Lavi family seems to have secured a refuge for themselves and DePiera outside the city, which, it turned out, was spared. The poet’s own children, though, were taken by “the angels of death,” as he wrote in one poem, and either slaughtered or sold. DePiera spent the rest of his life under the cloud of that loss, and he sought revenge or at least an outlet for his anger in his poetry. Eventually DePiera returned to Saragossa, where he resumed his work in the service of the community’s leaders. “The spine of Spanish Jewry,” however, notes Schirmann, “had been snapped.”

The last period of DePiera’s life—after the death of his patron Benveniste Ben Lavi in 1411—was particularly grim, and it’s from this period that the vast majority of his poems come down to us. His diwan contains some three hundred poems. Neglected by his former students, DePiera lived out his remaining days in bitterness and poverty, plagued by the infirmities of old age, including illness, blindness, and arthritis (about which he writes in verse—below; he also writes about a sore throat, a toothache, and the inadequately heated living quarters in which he was holed up through the winter). Further suffering was brought on by a wave of proselytizing by Vincente Ferrer and the subsequent Disputation at Tortosa (1413–14), where circumstances worked against the Jewish delegation and brought about a massive wave of conversion that—as with the events of 1391—in many cases wiped out entire Jewish communities. Among the new converts were members of the Ben Lavi family (including Yosef, who had been part of the delegation to Tortosa), and with them the desperate septuagenarian poet. Even after his conversion, Shelomo, like many other Conversos, maintained relations with his Jewish friends and colleagues, often exchanging Hebrew letters and poems with them. The last we hear of him is in a short poem complaining about the bad wine produced in 1417 in his adopted hometown of Monzón (in northeast Aragon).

The monotony of much of DePiera’s poetic output has been described by one leading scholar as “frightening”; the poet also had little sense of proportion and could write endlessly in mannered and often ridiculous prose and verse alike: “Your song’s soul dozes, and the dust/of my poems is tossed in your noses, and you sneeze!!” His long-windedness and fustian notwithstanding, the poet was devoted to the Hebrew language, something that could by no means be taken for granted in his day, when cultural assimilation and conversion were the norm. (DePiera also wrote prose in Spanish.) He clearly saw himself as an important link in the transmission of Hebrew Andalusian culture, though his poetic models were postclassical rather than classical: he singles out Meshullam, Alharizi, HaBedershi, and others for mention, rather than the major poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. From poets like HaBedershi (in his longer poems) came DePiera’s fondness for mannerist contortions and perhaps also his prolixity. That said, there are numerous places where the poetry comes to life and impresses. His poems of complaint about old age are among his strongest, along with his satirical epigrams—though the latter are less representative of his work and sensibility on the whole. In addition to his secular work, DePiera left behind some forty-one technically accomplished liturgical poems, which in the estimation of their twentieth-century editor speak with a dignified simplicity and quiet, noble feeling.

THINKERS WITH THINKING

THE BEE AND THE GRUMBLER

MEDIEVAL ARTHRITIS

WINTER IN MONZÓN

AFTER CONVERSION

(to Vidal Benveniste)

TABERNACLES: A PRAYER

A PRAYER FOR RAIN AND SUSTENANCE

THIS YEAR’S WINE: 1417