SA‘ADIA IBN DANAAN

(mid-fifteenth century–1505)

The final poet in our selection brings us full circle, back to the south and Muslim Spain. SA‘ADIA IBN DANAAN was born and raised in the last remaining Muslim territory on the Iberian peninsula, the kingdom of Granada, which at that time would have had a Jewish population of perhaps one thousand souls. After the city fell to the Christian Reconquest and the sentence of Expulsion was pronounced over all of Spain’s Jews in 1492, Ibn Danaan fled to North Africa and settled in Morocco, where he became a leading transmitter of the Andalusian legacy and a religious authority known for his responsa literature and his wide learning. Apart from religious law and poetry, he wrote on history, linguistics, philosophy, biblical commentary, and poetics. He died in 1505.

Living in fifteenth-century Granada, Sa‘adia developed outside the mainstream of Hebrew literature in the Christian north, and his work preserved a natural, though anomalous relation to the Arabic tradition out of which Hebrew poetry in Spain had evolved. In addition to his numerous epigrams, he wrote secular and religious poems, most of which are still in manuscript. But Ibn Danaan is best known for his 1468 composition about the Spanish-Hebrew meters, which has been called the most detailed work of its kind written in the Middle Ages. Here, at the tail end of the period, we find a Jewish poet—writing in Arabic prose and translating himself into Hebrew—for the first time systematically comparing the Hebrew meters to their Arabic models. Like Moshe Ibn Habib, Ibn Danaan demonstrated the meters in both versions with classical (though far more accomplished) Hebrew epigrams of his own. In the Hebrew version of his treatise, Ibn Danaan presents didactic proverbs dealing with faith and morals. As the examples below demonstrate, the didactic poems stand in curious tension with the erotic epigrams that serve as illustrations in the original Arabic version of his work. The latter are distinguished by their extraordinary lightness of touch, and it’s on a grace note, with selections from Sa‘adia’s primer—linking ethics, desire, and meter—that this remarkable period comes to an end.

ENMITY SMOLDERS

HORDES OF READERS

MIXED MESSENGER

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