Between Hebrew and Arabic Poetry

The book includes sixteen studies about medieval Hebrew poetry compared with Arabic poetry. It is well known that since the tenth century medieval Hebrew poetry took Arabic poetry as the ultimate paradigm in terms of prosody, language purism and rhetorical devices and even in regard to poetical genres. However, the concept unifying all studies in this book is that a comparative examination must consider not only the identical elements in which Hebrew poetry borrowed from the Arabic one, but also what is much more significant—what Hebrew poetry stubbornly set itself at a distance from Arabic poetry. The conclusive result of this sort of examination is that Hebrew poetry combined selectively borrowed Arabic poetical values with traditional ethical Jewish values to create a distinctive poetical school.