Festschrift by Joseph Yahalom
Articles and Reviews by Joseph Yahalom
Yehuda ha-Levi (d. 1141) was one of the most prolific medieval Hebrew poets and composed about on... more Yehuda ha-Levi (d. 1141) was one of the most prolific medieval Hebrew poets and composed about one thousand secular and liturgical poems. His liturgical production was absorbed quite quickly into prayer books, but there remained a need to collect his complete oeuvre, especially his secular poems. These collections generally contained captions for each poem, relating to the different occasions of each composition. A full collec tion of this sort was known as diwan ha-Levi. As part of David's plan to write The History of the Jewish Book, our diwan aroused his interest in order to present it as the example of the diwan of a medieval Jewish poet. The process whereby the diwans of our great medieval poets came to be edited is mostly a mystery. It is not always clear whether a poet edited and collected his own work, or whether this was done by admirers who lived at the same time as the poet and collected and edited years of work, piece by piece. In the unique case of Shmuel ha-Nagid (993-1056), we have the testimony of his son Yehosef, who listed the poems that his father sent to him to copy, collect, and organize in a kind of chronological order, according to the dates they were composed. In this way, the Nagid's diwan was preserved through the Middle Ages and we possess a manuscript of it today.Ŷ^u da ha-Levi is a different case. He worked in three cultural centers that were very far one from another-first in Christian Spain, then Muslim Spain, and, at the end of his life, in Egypt, for almost a full year (Elul 1140-Sivan 1141). We do not know anything about the poems that he took with him when he left on his voyage to the land of Israel. Accordingly, the work
Joshua Blau and Joseph Yahalom, “Judah Halevi on the Hebrew Language,” in Aaron J. Koller, Mordechai Z. Cohen, and Adina Moshavi, eds., Semitic, Biblical, and Jewish Studies in Honor of Richard C. Steiner (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2020), 130-157 (Hebrew)
Joseph Yahalom, “Body and Soul Argumentation in Syriac, Aramaic, and Hebrew,” in Shmuel Glick, Evelyn M. Cohen, Angelo M. Piattelli, et al., eds., Meḥevah le-Menaḥem: Studies in Honor of Menahem Hayyim Schmelzer (Jerusalem: Schocken, 2019), 171-179 (Hebrew)
Joseph Yahalom in Moznaim, vol. 91, no. 4 (2017): 15-17 (Hebrew)
Early Rhyme Structures in Piyyut and Their Rhetorical Background From the earliest period, parall... more Early Rhyme Structures in Piyyut and Their Rhetorical Background From the earliest period, parallelism has served as one of the outstanding structural devices in Hebrew poetry. It is discernible as a characteristic feature already in the Song of the Sea and the song of Ha'azinu, and afterward occurs in the elevated style of the Prophets and the Psalms. In the most basic form, the content of the first stich recurs in the second stich. The distinction between one parallel unit and the other becomes more salient when the idea introduced in the first stich is completed by the second, even as synonyms help to organize the poetic line and mark its borders. Consider for example the opening of Ha'azinu (Deut 32:1): פי אמרי הארץ ותשמע / ואדברה השמים האזינו Give ear, O heavens, let me speak; / Let the earth hear the words I utter!1
Joseph Yahalom, “Palestinian Tradition,” in W. Randall Garr and Steven E. Fassberg, eds., A Handbook of Biblical Hebrew, vol. 1: Periods, Corpora, and Reading Traditions (Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2016), 161-173
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Festschrift by Joseph Yahalom
Articles and Reviews by Joseph Yahalom