Outsider/Insider: Shlomo Ibn Gabirol and Moshe Ibn Ezra

🌅 Today we explore the lives of two poet-philosophers, one the ultimate well-heeled Andalusi insider and the other an idiosyncratic, semi-tragic genius—both of whom wrote soul-stirring poetry.

You’re reading Stories from Jewish History, a weekly newsletter exploring Jewish thinkers, events, and artifacts, from the famous to the obscure. Last week, we focused on three great halachists of the Muslim period in Spain, including their continuities in later Christian Sefarad. Today, we follow the path of one scholar’s student, R. Moshe Ibn Ezra, alongside a poet-philosopher who influenced him, his one-of-a-kind senior colleague, R. Shlomo Ibn Gabirol.

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In this issue:

• The Insider: Moshe Ibn Ezra

• The Outsider: Shlomo Ibn Gabirol

• Reads and Resources

The Outsider: Shlomo Ibn Gabirol

An evocative modern statue of Shlomo Ibn Gabirol in Málaga, Spain.

R. Shlomo Ibn Gabirol (c. 1021–c. 1057) is a true original; you won’t find another medieval person of his particular flavor anywhere in Jewish history. There are others, of course, of whom this is true, but the singular voice available to us through Ibn Gabirol’s poetry allows us a particularly intimate glimpse into his personality, while his philosophy surprises us with its detachment from Jewish tradition (which also caused it to become detached from him for centuries). His surname appears to originate in the Arabic jabir (جابر), “comforter”, with the Romance ending -ol or perhaps -uel; Arabic ج /j/ is the equivalent of Hebrew ג /g/ (in the contemporary Egyptian dialect it’s pronounced as a hard /g/ like in Hebrew). Like other educated Andalusi Jews, he was known socially by his Arabic name, Abu Ayyub Sulayman (= Shlomo) ibn Yahya (= ben Yehuda).

Though born to a one-time privileged family, his parents were impelled to flee Córdoba in the wake of the political instability there in the early years of the eleventh century (which I wrote about here as a part of R. Shmuel ha-Nagid’s story). They ended up in the nearby port city of Málaga, on the southern Spanish coast, as attested by Ibn Gabirol’s self-designation of “ha-Malaki” (of Málaga) appended to his acrostic in several poems. Elsewhere, he referred to himself as “Shlomo ha-Katan,” the younger, or, the weak, or, the lesser. Sometime in his childhood, the family seems to have relocated again to Zaragoza (Saragossa) in northern Spain, where young Shlomo acquired a thorough Andalusi education.

Orphaned at a relatively early age, evident from elegies he wrote to his parents, Shlomo also suffered from a skin ailment, described in some detail in the unusual poem Ha-lo Etzdak (הלא אצדק, “Am I not correct?”). In general, he not infrequently refers to himself in self-abnegating terms as a result of his small stature and the effects of various illnesses on his physical appearance. This is balanced poignantly in his short, dark, but self-confident masterpiece, written at the age of sixteen, in which he declares, “I am the ruler”:

אֲנִי הַשַּׂר – וְהַשִּׁיר לִי לְעֶבֶד,
אֲנִי כִנוֹר לְכָל שָׁרִים וְנוֹגְנִים
וְשִׁירִי כַּעֲטָרָה לַמְּלָכִים
וּמִגְבָּעוֹת בְּרָאשֵׁי הַסְּגָנִים.
וְהִנֵּנִי בְשֵׁשׁ עֶשְׂרֵה שְׁנוֹתַי –
וְלִבִּי בָן כְּלֵב בֶּן-הַשְּׁמֹנִים!

I am the ruler—and the poem is my servant.
I am a lute to all who sing and play,
And my poems are like the adornment of kings
And hats upon the heads of the viceroys—
Here I am, at sixteen years of age,
My heart like the heart of an eighty-year-old!

Ani ha-Sar

Here Ibn Gabirol emerges as a both triumphant and tragic: prematurely aged, he also bears skill and wisdom beyond his years. He is the master, and yet is relegated to the background, serving to adorn and embellish others. This certainly reflects his enormous, self-evident talent as well as his precarious situation of seeking out patronage and eking out a living. Ibn Gabirol’s personality was such that he chafed under the requirement of obsequiousness in writing for patrons, even as he depended on them, and did not hesitate to criticize the pedestrian interests of society figures, as he saw it. He nonetheless produced panegyrics and other poems for his patron Yekutiel ben Yitzchak Ibn Hasan, as well as an elegy for R. Hai Gaon, and worked under the patronage of R. Nissim Gaon (of Qayrawan), demonstrating the continued ties of Sefarad with the old Geonic center as well as with the newer communities of northern Africa. He also seems to have worked under the tutelage of R. Shmuel ha-Nagid, though this is disputed by some scholars.

Ibn Gabirol produced both liturgical and “secular” poetry, including two longer verse works: Keter Malkhut, a piyut for Yom Kippur replete with Neoplatonic motifs, and Ha-Anak, a didactic poem of ethical instruction.¹ (Neoplatonism refers to the philosophy arising from the works of Plotinus, who lived in Roman Egypt during the third century, and saw himself as continuing to work in the ancient tradition of Plato. A core idea of Neoplatonism is that an ultimate Unity emanates from Itself into the world, causing its multiplicity while remaining essentially One.) Ibn Gabirol also wrote an ethical work known in Hebrew as Tikkun Middot ha-Nefesh (The Improvement of Moral Qualities), which became popular in its Hebrew translation (from the Judeo-Arabic).

It seems that many of Ibn Gabirol’s works have been lost, and in fact his philosophical magnus opus, Mekor Chaim (The Fountain of Life) was “lost” to him for years, circulating only in a Latin version, Fons vitae, attributed to one “Avicebron.” The total lack of any references to Tanach or rabbinic literature in Mekor Chaim made its attribution to a Jew unlikely, but in the nineteenth century the scholar Salomon Munk proved that it was the work of Ibn Gabirol based on a discovered fragment of an attributed medieval Hebrew translation of it by R. Shem Tov Ibn Falaquera (a fascinating figure who we’ll have occasion to meet later on).

The earliest sources about Ibn Gabirol’s death are in rough agreement that he died in his mid-thirties, tragically as he had lived, if the legends are to be believed. In the sixteenth century, R. Gedalia Ibn Yahya wrote in his chronicle Shalshelet ha-Kabbala that Ibn Gabirol had been murdered by an Arab, a doubtful story which continues to circulate. The late scholar Angel Sáenz-Badillos (whom I had the privilege of learning with) notes that one version of the Commentary on Sefer Yetzira attributed to R. Saadia Gaon (Mantua, 1562) contains a separate story about Ibn Gabirol creating a wooden female golem. Such legends point to Ibn Gabirol’s singular personality and persona.

A number of years ago, Ibn Gabirol’s poems were set anew to modern, haunting melodies. The classic Shafel Ruach is embedded below, and here’s the full album as a playlist. You can also hear it performed as a piyut here.

The Insider: Moshe Ibn Ezra

A Cairo Geniza fragment of Moshe Ibn Ezra’s Judeo-Arabic Kitāb al-Muḥāḍarah wa’l-Mudhākarah (the treatise on poetics), Library of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, Paris Ms. V A 63.

R. Moshe ben Yaakov Ibn Ezra (also called Abu Harun) (c. 1055–after 1135), a younger near-contemporary of Ibn Gabirol, ended his life with a hefty dose of the tragedy that infected the elder poet’s. However, Moshe Ibn Ezra was, temperamentally speaking, much more in tune with the cultural power brokers of al-Andalus. Born into the esteemed Ibn Ezra family, of which his younger relative R. Avraham Ibn Ezra was almost certainly a part, his prime years, up until 1090, were largely charmed. Born in Granada, Moshe Ibn Ezra studied in Lucena under the famed Talmudist R. Yitzchak Ibn Ghiyat, who we met last week. Back in Granada, he was granted an Arabic honorific title, probably indicating his status at court. He used his éclat to catapult a young R. Yehuda ha-Levi, the subject of next week’s newsletter, to well-deserved fame.

In 1090, however, a group of Berbers known as the al-Murabitun (“men of the forts”), Romanized as Almoravids, took control of Granada. The ideological stance of the Almoravids was conservative and intolerant, creating problems for minority groups; the Jewish community of Granada was effectively destroyed. After some time, Moshe Ibn Ezra made his way out of Granada and fled to the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain. The remainder of his life was spent longing to return to his home city and its glittering past. He also seems to have endured familial troubles and poverty.

Moshe Ibn Ezra exhibits heights of technical proficiency in his poetic creations along with an evident love of classical Hebrew, but perhaps most of all, joyfulness in language and unmitigated beauty in expression. A prolific poet, he wrote piyutim, especially Selichot (repentant poems for the month of Elul and the Yamim ha-Noraim), along with poems on the “good life” and stirring meditations on life’s disappointments, difficulties, and end. The spare and plaintive but linguistically brilliant poem Hekitzoni Seipai readily demonstrates:

הֱקִיצוּנִי שְׂעִפַּי לַעֲבֹר עַל / מְלוֹן הוֹרַי וְכָל־אַנְשֵׁי שְׁלוֹמִי
שְׁאַלְתִּימוֹ וְאֵין מַקְשִׁיב וּמֵשִׁיב / הֲבָגְדוּ בִי עֲדֵי אָבִי וְאִמִּי
בְּלִי לָשׁוֹן קְרָאוּנִי אֲלֵיהֶם / וְהֶרְאוּנִי לְצִדֵּיהֶם מְקוֹמִי.

I had the thought to pass the lodging where /
My parents and all my dearest friends abide.
I greeted them, but no one spoke. “Have Father /
And Mother both forgotten me?” I cried.
They heard. Without a word they summoned me, /
And pointed out my own place by their side.²

Hekitzoni Seipai

Moshe Ibn Ezra did one unusual thing—unusual, that is, among his medieval poetic peers, but well-suited to his abilities and cultural milieu: he wrote a treatise on poetics, titled in Arabic Kitāb al-Muḥāḍara wa al-Mudhākara. It is the only one of its kind, although not translated into Hebrew until modernity. The entire treatise is invaluable, but of particular interest is the section about the poets of Sefarad, from which we know much of the details we have about the “Golden Age” poets, including Ibn Gabirol; and also, its massive final chapter on prosody, the formal rules governing classical Hebrew poetry.

Reads and Resources

• Peter Cole, a poet himself and an extraordinary translator of medieval Hebrew poetry, has a whole book devoted to the poems of Shlomo Ibn Gabirol. He also has a book of Shmuel ha-Nagid’s poems and a wonderful anthology of Andalusi Hebrew poetry. (A downside of the books is that they do not feature the Hebrew texts, if that’s of interest to you, nor tell you the incipits by which the poems are known in Hebrew, if you want to reference them elsewhere. This might be buried in the back matter somewhere—I don’t have copies before me—but it’s not included in the main body of the book.) You can read two of his translations of Ibn Gabirol at the Poetry Foundation, here and here.

• An extract of Fons vitae on an aughts-era website is available in English here.

• A great edition of Moshe Ibn Ezra’s work on poetics, including the Arabic original along with Hebrew translation, has been published by A. S. Halkin as Sefer ha-Iyyunim ve-ha-Diyyunim (1975). Unfortunately, it is rare and expensive, so you’ll need access to a Judaically well-stocked academic library to get to it.

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1. Not to be confused with Yehuda al-Harizi’s later Sefer ha-Anak.

2. Translated by Raymond P. Scheindlin in Wine, Women, and Death, p. 162.