INTRODUCTION

The originals of the following poems are, with one or two exceptions, to be found in the Sabbath and festival prayer-books in use in the synagogues of English and foreign Jewish communities. By far the larger number come to us from mediseval Spain, where Hebrew poetry reached the highest point of devotional and poetical excellence. There the Jewish hymnologists were alike poets and philosophers, and the stream of learning and cultivation, mingling with that of poetry, flowed through the plains of religious life and enriched them in a thousand ways, while the fruit of the tree of knowledge was used both to enlighten and strengthen religious faith, and to adorn and beautify divine service.

For some centuries after Judea ceased to be a separate state, Hebrew poetry remained as it had been in Bible times, i.e. unrhymed and undivided into lines and stanzas.

But little by little the Spanish Jews became acquainted with the poetry of the Arabs, and the natural result was the adoption of rhyme, and later still of stanzas, often elaborately arranged. The originals of all the following translations are rhymed — some in couplets, some in stanzas; but it has seldom been found possible to reproduce with absolute exactness the verse-arrangement of the Hebrew, as to the number of lines and rhymes in each stanza. It is impossible to say with certainty when rhyme first appeared in Hebrew poetry, still less can it be ascertained when the stanza became part of it; but both are to be found in the writings of Eleazar b. Jacob Kalir, who lived about the middle of the tenth century, probably in the south of Italy. His style is terse, and often obscure, crowded with images, complicated by new forms of words and phrases, and frequently rendered artificial by involved versification, rhymes, and acrostics, but full of poetic fervour and enthusiasm. He composed upwards of two hundred poems for divine service, many of which are still retained in the liturgies of French, German, and Itahan Jews.

Kalir’s compositions became the general type and model of Jewish hymnology, until towards the middle of the following century, when Hebrew poetry, in Spain at least, took a higher and more unfettered flight.

Among a number of more or less well-known poets four shine out with especial lustre: these four are Solomon Ibn Gebirol, Moses Ibn Ezra, Abraham Ibn Ezra, and, greatest of all, Jehuda Halevi. All four were philosophers as well as poets, but their poetical works are all that need be mentioned here.

Solomon Ibn Gebirol (b. 102 1) was a native of Malaga. His parents died early, and appear to have left him without means. It is uncertain when he left Malaga for Saragossa, but we hear of him in the latter place as enjoying the protection of Jekutiel Ibn Hassan, who held a high position in that town under King Jachya Ibn Moudair. But a rebellion, which cast the king from the throne, cost Jekutiel his life, and Gebirol his patron, a loss which he lamented in a touching elegy of more than two hundred verses. This elegy was far from being Gebirol’s first poetic flight: his earliest known poem was composed in his nineteenth year, and consisted of a Hebrew grammar in verse, in which his extraordinary fluency and ease of diction triumphs even over the dry difficulties of his subject. All his poems, both secular and religious, are distinguished by their flowing and harmonious verse. Those that treat of his personal fortune and feelings are of a melancholy and somewhat egotistic tone, but his liturgic poems are full of the purest and loftiest religious thought. Among them are to be found every variety of religious poetry, hymns of praise and penitence, thanksgivings, lamentations and prayers for fasts and feasts. But his best known and most important composition is the series of half religious, half philosophical poems, called ‘Keter Malchut’ (Crown of Sovereignty) in which he pours forth all his thoughts on religion, all his speculations, all his ardent love of and gratitude to God, besides all that he has learned from the theology of his own nation, and the science and wisdom of the age in which he Hved. Few further details are known of Ibn Gebirol’s life. It is said that the first persecution of the Jews in Spain since its conquest by Islam (the attack on Joseph Ibn Nagrela and his Jewish fellow-citizens in Granada, 1066) embittered the last years of the poet, and he died after many wanderings, in the year 1070, in Valencia.

Moses Ibn Ezra was the second and most distinguished of four brothers Ibn Ezra of Granada, who were all learned and wealthy. The dates both of his birth and death are uncertain, but the former is supposed to be about 1070, the latter 1139. An unfortunate attachment appears to have first aroused his muse, and like Ibn Gebirol his secular poems are chiefly occupied with describing his own feelings and bewailing his own fate. As a religious poet he was extraordinarily prolific, and his penitential poems (‘Selichot’) are especially numerous. He had a wonderful command of language, and enriched Hebrew poetry with a variety of metres, but the very interest he took in the form of his verse has sometimes an unfavourable effect on its contents, and his poems have neither the spontaneity of Gebirol nor the majesty of Halevi. His penitential hymns, however, show much earnestness of feeling and poetic enthusiasm. He was held in high honour by his contemporaries, and Jehuda Halevi, with whom he had been on friendly terms, and with whom he corresponded for years, wrote a touching tribute to his memory.^[1] See Graetz, History of the Jews. 

Abraham Ibn Ezra (born about 1088, died 1167) was at once theologian, philosopher, comm.entator, grammarian, mathematician, traveller, and poet. It must, however, be confessed that he was too much of a critical philosopher^[2] Sach, History of the Religious Poetry of the Jews in Spain.  to be a true poet. His religious poems are not so much hymns as a series of reflections on the high destiny of man, whom God has endowed with thought and intellect, and who ought therefore to use these gifts in His service. But the elevated tone and strong religious feeling of Ibn Ezra’s poems give him an honourable place among the poets of his nation, while his extraordinarily varied talents, and the adventures of his wandering life, make him too interesting a figure to be passed over in silence. His early life was spent in Toledo, but want of means compelled him to seek a livelihood elsewhere. He was, however, not destined to be wealthy, and he declared quaintly, that if he ‘took to candle-making as a trade, the sun would never set again until the hour of his death.’ His wanderings led him by turns to Italy, France, Egypt, Palestine, and England. During his sojourn in London in the course of 1158, he wrote a treatise called ‘Yesod Moreh’ (Foundation of Religion), which he dedicated to Jacob Ben Joseph of London, and also his ‘Sabbath Epistle,’ which he says he wrote ‘in one of the cities of the island called the “corner of the earth” (Angleterre), for it is in the last of the seven divisions of the inhabited earth.'^[3] See The Jews of Angevin England, J. Jacobs.  He continued his wandering life for many years, and died at Calahorra on the borders of Navarre and Aragon.

Jehuda Halevi, the greatest Hebrew poet of Spain, or indeed of any other country since the Psalmists, was born in Old Castile in 1086. His life presents no very striking incidents. After studying at the college of Lucena, he decided on adopting the medical profession, and became a physician on returning to Toledo, his native place. Here he practised many years, and appears to have been highly esteemed as a doctor, for he writes to a friend that ‘the city is large, and that he is busily engaged curing the illness of the inhabitants.’ But he longed, he says in the same letter, for the time when he may depart and ‘seek some place of living knowledge, the fountain of wisdom.'^[4] See Graetz, History of the Jews.  All his life he had been filled with a passionate desire to visit the Holy Land, and at last (about 11 40) he bade farewell to his only daughter, his grandson, and a large circle of friends and pupils, and started on his pilgrimage. His poems, describing the perils of the journey, and especially of the sea voyage, are overflowing with the finest poetic imagery, but most beautiful of all is his ‘Ode to Zion,’ which, according to tradition, he composed at the very gates of Jerusalem. The legend tells how, while he was reciting it, an Arab soldier rode over him and killed him, just as he was about to set foot in the holy city. It is, however, more than probable that he never came even thus near the goal of his desires, but that he died on the journey from Egypt to Palestine.

Jehuda Halevi has enriched the Jewish liturgy with at least three hundred poems, for the celebration of the various fasts and feasts of the Jewish calendar. Their flowing and harmonious verse, and the mastery displayed in them over the pure Hebrew of the Bible is only a small part of their attractions; the wonderful mingling of religious fervour with the true spirit of poetry is what constitutes their inner charm, of which, it is to be hoped, traces may still be found even in a translation. A strong national spirit pervades his poetry, and when, in his ‘Songs of Zion,’ he sings of the past and future glories of Jerusalem, and mourns over her present sorrows, his muse rises to a height which may not unfitly be compared even to the Psalms. Heine, in his delightful, but utterly untranslatable, fragment ‘Jehuda Ben Halevy,’ dwells especially on this tendency, and tells how the poet, like all other minstrels of his time, loved a fair lady, whom he celebrated in his verse.

‘But a wan and woeful maiden
Was his love: a mournful image
Of despair and desolation,
Who was named Jerusalem.

Even in his early boyhood
Did he love her, deeply, truly.
And a thrill of passion shook him
At the word Jerusalem.’

And the ‘Ode to Zion’ is thus described : —

‘Tears of pearl, that on the golden
Thread of rhyme are strung together.
From the shining forge of poetry
Have come forth in song celestial.

And this is the song of Zion,
That Jehuda ben Halevy
Sang when dying on the holy
Ruins of Jerusalem.’

No star of similar magnitude has risen on the Jewish horizon since Jehuda Halevi’s ‘pillar of fire’ vanished from the scene, but many lesser lights pierced the darkness of the Middle Ages, and brightened the pages of the old Machsors (prayerbooks) in tim’^s of anxiety and persecution, when the synagogue service gave the only touch of light and colour, of peace and gladness. But with the end of the twelfth century the golden age of Hebrew poetry ended likewise. Moses ben Nachman (born about 1195, died about 1270) maybe cited as the author of a truly magnificent poem for the New Year festival, and here and there in the course of the three following centuries, an otherwise unknown name appears as the writer of some well-known hymn, as for instance the familiar ‘Sabbath Hymn’ by R. Shelomo Halevi, who is said to have lived at Safet in the sixteenth century. But the days of Solomon Gebirol and Jehuda Halevi were past and gone, and Hebrew poetry, after three centuries of song, has again sunk to silence, from which it seems little likely to be aroused.

CONTENTS

1. Ode to Zion, Jehuda Halevi
2. ‘God! whom shall I compare to Thee?,’ Jehuda Halevi
3. Servant of God (Hymn for the Day of Atonement), Jehuda Halevi
4. My King (Hymn for New Year), Moses b. Nachman
5, To the Soul, Jehuda Halevi
6. Sabbath Hymn, Shelomo Halevi
7. O Sleeper! wake, arise!, Jehuda Halevi
8. The Land of Peace, Solomon ibn Gebirol
9. The Heart’s Desire (Hymn for the Day of Atonement), Jehuda Halevi
10. O Soul, with Storms Beset!, Solomon ibn Gebirol
11. Sanctification, Joseph ibn Abitur
12. Hymn of Praise, Abraham ibn Ezra
13. Passover Hymn, Jehuda Halevi
14. Morning Prayer, Jehuda Halevi
15. Judgment and Mercy (Hymn for New Year)
16. Grace after Meals^[5] Here, this is referring to the piyyut “Tsur Mishelo” rather than the Birkat ha-Mazon. 
17. ‘Lord of the Universe‘^[6] a/k/a “Adon Olam” 
18. Hymn for the Conclusion of the Sabbath
19. God and Man, Jehuda Halevi
20. Hymn for Tabernacles, Eleazar b. Jacob Kalir
21. Hymn for Pentecost, Jehuda Halevi
22. Hymn of Glory
23. Hymn of Unity for the Seven Days of the Week
24. Penitential Prayer, Moses ibn Ezra
25. The Living God We Praise^[7] a/k/a “Yigdal”