Many layers of meaning in texts

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

Earlier this month, Iona Pacific Inter-religious Centre hosted a one-day conference entitled Scriptures in Medieval Iberia: Language, Literature and Sacred Text in a Multi-religious Society.

“The study of scriptures in medieval Spain’s multi-religious cultural context was an intellectual and cultural achievement that had a tremendous impact on the development of languages, literatures and cultures far beyond the Iberian Peninsula,” began the promotional materials. “The conference wishes to take the medieval Spanish study of the Bible as a springboard to discuss other Spanish scriptural traditions, such as the Jewish and Islamic.”

The speakers at the June 6 event, which took place at Vancouver School of Theology, were scholars from the conference’s co-sponsors: Iona Pacific; the faculty of creative and critical studies at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan campus); Centro Internacional de Investigación de la Lengua Española; Universidad de La Rioja; Green College, at UBC; and the Centre for the Comparative Study of Muslim Societies and Cultures, at Simon Fraser University. The daylong conference also included the launch of The Calling of the Nations: Exegesis, Ethnography and Empire in a Biblical-Historic Present, one of the co-editors of which is Rabbi Dr. Robert A. Daum, and about which the Independent will write more in a future issue.

With regard to the lectures, of specific interest to the Jewish community was Hebrew Bible: Intertextuality in Spanish-Hebrew Literature, presented by Prof. David A. Wacks of the department of romance languages at the University of Oregon. Wacks’ speech can be found on his website (davidwacks.uoregon.edu), along with the handout, which includes the texts referenced and their translations.

“The idea of intertextuality is very useful for understanding the importance of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, in Spain’s medieval Hebrew literature,” began Wacks. “Intertextuality is the site of a good deal of theorizing and, while time constraints do not allow a full accounting of this discussion, I would like to borrow from Michael Worton and Judith Still’s understanding of the term in its most basic sense, as it has been used by various literary critics and theorists. They write that, ‘The writer is a reader of texts ... before s/he is a creator of texts and, therefore, the work of art is inevitably shot through with references, quotations and influences of every kind.’ This means that each work of art is a sort of group discussion, a collaborative process in which various texts, authors, experiences and readings participate. The text is a fabric, a weave of a number of threads, which in turn are pulled from other texts. Today, I would like to talk about the processes by which this pulling and weaving happen in medieval Spanish-Hebrew texts, paying specific attention to the role of biblical language and source texts.”

He further clarified, “By ‘scriptural textuality,’ I mean the ways in which scripture is practised and experienced by the community. This includes the visual reading of the text but also extends to the physicality of the text, its support and packaging, the physical and social contexts of its practice, and the aural-visual memory of its practice.”

After touching upon the ways in which Muslim communities experience the Qur’an, Wacks explained, “Reading is not merely scanning a text but participating in a community, whether political or religious.

“By way of demonstration, I would like to try to illustrate, or at least suggest, the various forms of intertextuality that [one] might obtain in any given reading of a biblical text. I’ll take the example of the Hebrew Shir HaShirim or Song of Songs.... For the poet and his audience that understands the meaning of the Hebrew text, the allusion would also rely on the literal meaning of the text, in addition to the sound image of its recitation.... In addition to the sound image of the recitation and the accompanying sensory memories of the gathering in the synagogue where it takes place, the allusion would also carry with it associations with the traditional exegetical interpretations of the passage. In this case, I bring examples from the commentary of Abraham Ibn Ezra, a Sephardic rabbi who lived from the end of the 11th century to the beginning of the 12th. The traditional rabbinic interpretation of the Song of Songs is that, far more than a mere love poem, the text is an allegory of the love between God and the community of Israel.

“To the sound image, literal meaning and exegetical meaning,” he continued, “we might also add the liturgical context of the text’s recitation as part of the Passover liturgy, with all the affective cathexis [focus of emotional energy on an object or idea] that attends the celebration of a major religious holiday: the specialness of the occasion, the hope for a good growing season, the spring fever that inevitably strikes the youth any community at this time of year.... In the same vein, the Song of Songs might well recall for poet and audience the social and familial context of the celebration: the foods, songs and customs related to the celebration of Passover, the gathering of relatives and friends, the seder or traditional ritual meal, the new clothes.”

About Shir HaShirim, Wacks concluded, “All of these associations come bundled with poetic allusions to a biblical text: the textual image, the sound image, the literal and exegetical meanings, the lived experience of liturgical and social events related to the text. All of these may be indexed, consciously or otherwise, when a writer deploys biblical text in an original poetic composition, as well as by readers and listeners of that composition.”

Wacks gave another example, that of a strophic (verse-repeating/chorus) poem, a muwashshah, also by Ibn Ezra, “in which a number of intertexts are juxtaposed with the language of the Song of Songs,” but in which “Ibn Ezra drew not only on biblical language but was also consciously participating in a well-established Arabic poetic tradition of using the apple as a locus of amorous discourse. Arabic and, later, Hebrew poets frequently employed descriptions of apples in their poetry. The 11th-century poet and vizier of Granada, Samuel Hanagid, wrote a series of 15 descriptions of apples, and Solomon Ibn Gabirol likewise tried his hand at the genre.

“Like the Shir HaShirim itself, this poem is a text written to be performed, and not just to be recited, as would have been the Arabic poem by Abu Nuwas [in the handout]. The muwashshah in particular was a poetic genre written for musical performance, and even for dancing, and so Ibn Ezra’s text would have also been set to music.... These corporeal readings of the text brought new intertexts to the biblical sources he employed.”

Wacks explained that Ibn Ezra “lived during the waning of Andalusi political hegemony on the Iberian Peninsula and, by his death, Christian monarchs had conquered large sections of what had been al-Andalus.

“The generations of Hebrew poets who were raised in Christian Iberia, despite being educated in Arabic, had a very different linguistic experience than their grandparents, who were raised in a country where Arabic was the official language of the court, the mosque and the majlis, or literary salon,” he continued. “They were native speakers of romance vernaculars such as Catalan, Galician, Aragonés and Castilian. They sang ballads and songs, and told stories that were common to all of their countrymen regardless of religious tradition. In some cases, they were familiar with vernacular versions of biblical texts, either from paraliturgical contexts, such as the vernacular versions of the Book of Esther that were performed as part of the celebration of Purim, or from popular ballads and other vernacular reworkings of familiar biblical stories.”

As an example, Wacks used texts from Vidal Benvenist’s tale of Efer and Dina, which was written in Spain in around 1400, but wasn’t published until 1521, in Italy.

“In the story, Dina’s impoverished father seeks to better his position by marrying Dina off to the elderly, wealthy widower Efer,” explained Wacks. “Despite Dina’s protests, the two are married, but Efer is unable to fulfil his conjugal obligations to his young wife. He sends one of his servants to procure for him an aphrodisiac, but misjudges the effective dose and dies of a fatal overdose.

“Benvenist explains in a lengthy excursus that the tale is a moral allegory, in which one should read Efer as the weakness of the human soul and Dina as the temptations of the material world that ultimately bring one no lasting benefit and in fact may lead to one’s moral demise.

“At the time when Benvenist wrote,” noted Wacks, “the Jewish communities of Aragon and Castile were under tremendous pressure to convert to Christianity and those who did often enjoyed far higher standards of living than those who chose to remain Jewish, so Benvenist’s message is timely.

“Like the poem of Ibn Ezra, the biblical language and allusions in Efer v’Dina coexist with and interact with a number of intertexts, including the Dina story in Genesis, the Spanish ballad version of that story, the traditional Spanish malmaridada songs, in which a young girl laments her marriage to an older man who does not love her, and, lastly, a kind of situational affiliation with the biblical Esther story and celebration of Purim.... Like the story of Dina, that of Esther is like a European novella or comedia, in that a woman’s honor or romantic fate determine both the dramatic outcome and, in a larger sense, the fate of the community. Dina’s marriage imperils the moral health of both her father and, according to Benvenist’s allegory, the entire community. Esther’s marriage to King Ahashverosh, as we all know, turns out to be the saving grace of the Jewish community of Shushan.”

Wacks added that, when Efer v’Dina was published by Gershom Soncino in 1521, Soncino marketed it as entertainment “in the tradition of Purim literature that parodies the Talmud, the Prophets and other traditional Jewish texts. He maintains in his introduction that he means for audiences to ‘delight in the tales of love and in words of silliness during the days of Purim.’ Whatever Benvenist’s intentions may have been, at least some of his readers saw the Esterismo in Efer v’Dina and sought to capitalize on it.”

Wacks concluded, “Biblical intertextuality is more than a simple matter of the recycling of words from the Hebrew Bible. I see it as much more ... as the metaphor suggested by the Latin etymon textus, a cloth woven from a number of threads, each one a metaphor for a different allusion, reference, sensory experience or memory. Together, these intertexts form a new text that in turn acquires its own life, much as the life of a garment, as it is worn and passed from one owner to the next, comes to mean much more than a simple combination of threads woven together.

“Finally, it is important to recognize that Spanish Hebrew authors, even when drawing on biblical texts for inspiration or for raw materials, were also placing these texts into discussion with the secular vernacular texts and traditions of their particular time and place. The resulting poetic exegesis was one that was filtered through vernacular artistic sensibilities, much as the rabbis drew on vernacular culture and reality in their formal exegesis and jurisprudence.”

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