The Compunctious Poet

"Yes, the Koran is considered the most perfect book in Arabic. It’s divine. Which is a good segue to Brann’s book, which is about Muslim Spain in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In Jewish history this is thought of as the golden age. A very prosperous Muslim empire, and the Jews were profoundly involved in this society. There were Jewish ministers of external affairs, Jewish prime ministers and Jewish commanders of the armies and so forth. They were very much involved in this society. What Brann is working on, whether he’s an historian of ideas or a literary historian, are texts in Arabic and in Hebrew that were written in Spain. In that culture, poetry was the social currency of the age. If you were a cultured man then you wrote poetry or at least you were the patron of poets. And of course the Muslim poets wrote in Arabic and imitated the style of the Koran. So as we’ve said, the Jews were part of this culture, and they had the wine gardens and the little boys and little girls and all the rest of it like everybody else, but they were not Muslims. And of course they could not write in the style of this sacred book of somebody else. So they invent Hebrew poetry, in a certain way, imitating the metric patterns of the Arabic poetry, but in Hebrew and based on the style of the Bible , which for them, equally, was divine and perfect. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Brann uses the word ‘compunctious’ to describe their state of mind. On the one hand they’re absolutely comfortable. On the other hand, they’re not. They’re not really the powers in the state. The greatest of the Hebrew poets was this man, Judah Halevi, who lived that life and eventually rejected it and said, ‘You’re fooling yourselves–you’re just being used by these Muslim rulers. Your idea of a kind of Zion in Spain is a pipe dream…. No. It survives for a while in southern France, but eventually it fades away. And you don’t really get any more poetry until modern times. Right, there’s a dialectic. I don’t usually use that word. But there’s a kind of dialectic. Brann wants to look at how Muslims talk about Jews and about how Jews talk about Muslims but he has a terrible time finding Jews talking about Muslims. They were very careful. They produced thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of literature. All kinds of philosophy and poetry and legal writing but they were very very discreet with reference to their neighbours."