Hebrew-language poetry and the predominantly religious piyyut (liturgical hymn) are one of the most fertile modes of expression and constitute one of the most important aspects of the literary production of Moroccan and Maghrebi men of letters.
Hebrew-language poetry. The Spanish school and the Jewish “poetic chain.”
The Hispano-Arabic model
The methodical examination of this mode of expression and the systematic study of the fundamental works that represent it make it possible to discern the bonds that attach Maghrebi poetry to traditional Jewish poetry — to that “poetic chain” constituted by ancient biblical poetry, by the Palestinian piyyut of the first seven centuries of our era, and by the medieval works of the great masters of the Sephardic and Eastern world up to the sixteenth century: a whole succession of messages and traditions transmitted from school to school, “a collective memory” from which the Maghrebi man of letters, like his counterpart in the other diasporas, draws the essential materials and ingredients of his poetic creation — a reservoir of thoughts already formulated from which he takes his inspiration, of models and paradigms that he imitates, that he interprets, that he deepens, and that he constantly brings up to date. The Spanish school, more particularly, is the privileged reference of Moroccan and Maghrebi authors who, for most of them at least, are the descendants of the Castilian “expelled ones.” Spiritually, all lay claim to that glorious Andalusian Golden Age and assert their inheritance of it. The literary and poetic heritage it represents is regarded here as exemplary, and it is held a point of honor to imitate its models and to equal its works. The solidarity sealed, over long centuries, between Spain and the far Maghreb, through constant and fertile cultural exchanges, and the memory that is stubbornly kept of that period of intellectual splendor and material prosperity, are the fundamental reason for this Maghrebi men of letters’ predilection for this “link” in the chain of Jewish poetic tradition. It is to the Andalusian inheritance, to the cultural patrimony elaborated during the Hispano-Maghrebi Golden Age, that this poetry owes the essence of its prosodic techniques. It is, indeed, in the school of adab (Arabic belles-lettres and refined learning), of the linguistic sciences and of Arabic humanities, that the Hispano-Maghrebi Jewish poets served their apprenticeship in the poetic art. They remained faithfully attached to it. In contact with Arabic poetry, Hebrew poetry is transformed. As early as the tenth century, Dunash ben Labrat succeeded in acclimatizing to it the technique of quantitative meter, laying the bases of a new Hebrew metrics, a replica of Arabic metrics whose rules were adopted in spite of certain constraints imposed on the rhythm of the Hebrew line and on the linguistic structures proper to Hebrew. To do this, it was necessary to overcome the resistances of routine and the hostility of the zealous defenders of the integrity of the Hebrew language and of traditional poetics. The muwashshah (Andalusian strophic poem) likewise became a familiar mode of expression of Hebrew poetry, associated with other devices (old and new) such as the alphabetical acrostic or the signature acrostic, the tautogram, the chronogram, the anagram, the cryptographic techniques of gematria and notarikon, modes of composition such as the kiklor (Greek kuklos, “cycle”), the mustajib (Arabic term meaning “response,” “echo”), the taqli’a (Arabic term designating the technique of so-called “chained” poems, corresponding to the Hebrew piyyutim meshulshalim), chiasmic structures, the bilingualism of the so-called matruz poetry in which Hebrew and Arabic stanzas alternate, and so on.
After the exile from Spain, one witnesses, in the East and elsewhere, an evolution of prosodic techniques. Only the influence of the kabbalistic school of Safed, in all likelihood, penetrated into the Maghreb, where they imitated — more readily than others did — the models that the poetry of Israel Najara seems to have favored. The rules of metrics, elaborated by Dunash ben Labrat and codified by his school, were regularly followed by the Andalusian authors throughout the whole period of the Golden Age; they survived the Spanish exile, in the countries where the Jews found refuge, in the Maghreb notably, where the poets, immigrants and natives alike, remained faithfully attached to the traditions of their Andalusian masters.
Let us note that one must not lose sight of the musical requirement and of the aptitude of the line to bend to the constraints of song. What matters is the musical realization conforming to the model (lahan and no’am, melody and tune) on which the poem rests. From this standpoint, the metrical formula is modified, and there often subsists of it only a variety whose degree of kinship with the primitive classical meter is rather remote.
Poetry and music
The study of prosodic techniques and of their essential functions leads us quite naturally to that of the relations between poetry and music and, more particularly for what concerns us here, to a brief overview of the practice of the Andalusian musical tradition in Maghrebi Jewish society.
“The roads of Music and of Poetry cross,” says Paul Valéry. A hymn is, one may say, the exceptional moment when the genius of poetry enters into symbiosis with that of music. Song and music, indeed, give the poetic message a dimension and a meaning that exceed its content, conferring on it resonances that are added to those formulated, inscribed within it. Let us note in passing that primordial form of synagogal music which is cantillation, and let us underscore its role in the various readings of the biblical texts in their Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Berber, and Castilian versions. Like liturgical music and song, cantillation is an ornament of discourse, a solemnization of the word.
The Andalusian musical traditions in Maghrebi Jewish societies
In our research on the contribution of Maghrebi Judaism to the radiance and the conservation of the Andalusian musical traditions, we have relied in the first place on the analysis of the Maghrebi poetic anthologies themselves, printed or in manuscript — those used especially by the associations and confraternities of the “guardians of the dawn,” during the Sabbath vigils known as baqqashot (supplicatory hymns), and many others not exclusively destined for that use; all bear musical and prosodic indications of no’am and lahn, of maqam, tab’, and nawba mode. These indications are expressed, save for rare exceptions, in the language and with the terminology of Arabic music and of Andalusian song, which testifies to a perfect knowledge — acquired most often by oral transmission — of the theory and the practice of the ‘ala, the “Andalusian musical art,” and of the content of collections such as the one entitled Al-hayk, which still constitutes the Bible and the bedside book of the accomplished Maghrebi musician, of the amateur (mulu’) as of the professional (’ali). But the knowledge of the Jewish cantor exceeds the framework of the hayk; it borrows from genres and modes inherited from an older tradition designated as tariq qdim, “ancient way,” and which refers either to Andalusian melodies forgotten elsewhere and which are said to have been perpetuated in the mellah-s (Jewish quarters) and the synagogues, or to musical themes of old Palestinian origin or more recently imported from the East, carried about by the Rabbi Emissary-Collectors.
In the Maghreb, and especially in Morocco, the Muslim and Jewish populations have piously preserved the memory of Hispano-Arabic music, emigrated with them from the Iberian metropolises. They appreciate it and they love it, the ones and the others, with a passion that sometimes resembles veneration. In Spain as in Morocco, the Jews were the ardent maintainers of Andalusian music and the zealous guardians of its old traditions. Many a time it found among them a sure refuge, when a prince took it into his head to apply to the letter the rigors of Muslim law and the censure of the codes that place it under interdict. So much so that after a period of eclipse, when a sultan wished to renew the tradition and reconstitute the Palace orchestra (sitara), it was often in the mellah that he recruited new musicians.
Moroccan Jews continued the Andalusian musical tradition in two ways. At weddings and other family ceremonies, the musammi’in (Andalusian-music performers) played and sang its most popular “suites” and programs, without changing anything of the poetic texts proper to it, the original muwashshahat and azjal, in classical Arabic and in Andalusian dialect. Moreover, Moroccan Judaism, like its counterparts in the other Maghrebi and Eastern communities, adapted Andalusian music to the piyyutim, to the poetry in the Hebrew language, liturgical or destined for the celebration of the great moments of family life, achieving in the synagogue the equivalent of sama’ — an essentially religious song that, in the mosque and the zaouia (Sufi lodge), glorifies the Prophet Muhammad in laudatory poems and exalts Islam in edifying cantilenas, and which, like the synagogal piyyut, admits no accompanying instruments. The fidelity of the Moroccan Jew to Andalusian song appears in the mechanisms of substitution of the Hebrew text for the primitive Arabic text, the former conforming to the prosodic laws of the latter, bending to the requirements of its metrics, and respecting even the placement of the connecting vocalizations (yala-lan…) and of nonsense-syllabling (na-na-na). The two musical versions accord perfectly, the melodic lines overlap exactly. But at the level of theme, the texts do not superimpose in any way; the Jewish poet has preoccupations bearing on faith, on liturgy, and on the practice of the legal prescriptions, whereas the compositions he adapts are of a profane character, conveying the commonplaces of laudatory, erotic, or bacchic poetry. Bilingual poetry, called matruz (“embroidered piece”), illustrates well this kind of adaptation, of marriage carried to its conclusion, in which one sees the Hebrew and Arabic lines or stanzas intertwine, of the same meter, the same musical mode, the same melody.
The bilingual poem whose first stanza we present below illustrates well this kind of adaptation. One sees the Hebrew and Arabic stichs (verse-lines) of the same isosyllabic meter intertwine. In the former, the poet exalts the grandeur of his God, deplores the wanderings of his soul; the latter evoke allusively, in this first stanza, and more openly in those that follow, distracted love and separation from the beloved.
The religious dominant
In the whole of traditional Hebrew literature, a certain number of values predominate, supremacy belonging at all times to religion. Poetic creation does not escape this rule as to its substance. But at the level of form, it has obeyed variable imperatives, according to the periods and the schools. In the Jewish poetry of the Spanish Golden Age, for example, and in the works of the Maghrebi authors who proclaim themselves its heirs, the dominant — and this is the very summit of aesthetic criteria — is represented by the quantitative (or pseudo-quantitative) meter of the Arabic poetic model and by the aptitude of the line to adapt to the measure and the rhythm of Andalusian music and song. The poets and the cantors have, in a way, constantly justified poetic creation and the use of music — essentially the practice of song — by religious and national motivations, indeed by mystical considerations. Musical creation, associated with poetic creation, is concerned, for the greater part, with safeguarding the integrity of faith and thought, with sheltering from danger the identity of the group, with keeping out of reach the ancestral traditions constantly threatened by the foreign influences exerted notably by means of song and music. In the minds of the authors, the motivations of poetic creation and of the practice of song come together to turn the Jew away from profane musical production expressed in a foreign language, by offering him compositions in the Hebrew language, performed to melodic themes that are ancient or widespread in the surrounding milieu. This centrality of the religious and mystical dominant, tinged with messianic nationalism, we perceive it in the prefaces of the poetic anthologies, those composed by the Moroccan authors themselves. Popular song, whether in the Hebrew language or in Judeo-Arabic like the qasida (lyric ode), is dominated, as to its content, by the great currents of ethics and religion. There are expressed, in addition, the nostalgia for Zion, the misfortunes and the hopes of the Jewish people, and all those themes whose recurrence we perceive in the mass of poetic production. Let us note, in passing, the songs welcoming the Shabbat, those that celebrate its privileged moments (liturgical moments and meals), or that mark its close with the ceremony of the habdalah (havdalah) which “distinguishes the sacred from the profane and the ordinary,” dedicated to Elijah the prophet, the Tishbite, the Gileadite, the son of David and the herald of the messianic advent; the songs of the great pilgrimage festivals, of Hanukah and of Purim, and so forth. As for form, Jewish music and song, like poetry, identify themselves with the sociocultural environment; they are predominantly Arab and Andalusian in an Arabic-speaking milieu, of old Castilian tradition in a Spanish-speaking milieu. And so this form of expression of thought and of art reflects too, in sum, to a certain extent, the image of diasporic Judaism of the Muslim East and West.
Let us note further that, under the influence of zoharic Kabbalah, one witnesses the restoration of Aramaic as a means of expression of mystical poetry and song.
Mysticism and popular and dialectal poetry. The hagiographic compositions.
The Jewish hagiographic literature of Morocco knows a considerable number of legends in prose or in verse in which the qissa (tale, narrative) holds pride of place. Particularly in favor, in the milieu of the men of letters as among the popular masses, are the great hymns that glorify the Palestinian saints, those of Meron and of Tiberias (Rabbi Shim’on Bar Yohay, Rabbi Me’ir Ba’al Hanes, etc.), or the more modest compositions dedicated to the illustrious Maghrebi masters, to the local wonder-workers and holy men of every stripe (‘Amram ben Diwan, David Ad-Dra’, David Al-Ashqar also called Mulay Iggi, etc.), who are celebrated by hillula-s (saint’s-day festivals) and seasonal pilgrimages whose theatrical and spectacular dimension is worth noting. It is a kind of fairground festival at once religious and profane, comparable to the Islamic usage of the moussem. On the site of the presumed sepulcher of the Rabbi and the Saint, a rite unfolds that the pilgrims generally accomplish following a vow pronounced on the occasion of an extraordinary event or a free promise made to the Rabbi to visit his tomb occasionally or on a fixed date. The ritual of the hillula and of the pilgrimage comprises special liturgies associated with great brotherhoods. The prayer and the cantillation of the psalms are accompanied by copious meals, by abundant libations of brandy and wine, by dances and songs, by folkloric and popular manifestations that border on heresy and that, very often, the orthodoxy of the rabbinate condemns but cannot prevent. It is also the occasion for a fertile literary creation, in Hebrew and in the local dialects. We find here again, with regard to hagiographic poetry, the two hierarchized levels of Jewish learning: scriptural Hebrew knowledge with occasional piyyutic compositions, on the one hand; strophic poems in Judeo-Arabic, or more rarely in Judeo-Berber, on the other. The long sung qasa’id (odes) or qisas (tales) recount the extraordinary life of the saint, a life filled with fabulous events, with miraculous interventions, with prophetic signs and visions. The briefer pieces, of one stanza or two, laudatory, bacchic, or individual thanksgivings, are generally improvised; they are sung while accomplishing one or the other of the two ritual gestures acquired at a special auction: the right to light an oil lamp (a taper, a candle) dedicated to the Saint and Rabbi, or that of raising and drinking the glass of brandy in his honor and in thanksgiving. In the course of our various surveys, we have gathered a considerable quantity of these qisas and these piyyutim, a written and recorded documentation a part of which has already seen the light of day. Whether of Hebrew or dialectal expression, this whole poetic production testifies to a remarkable knowledge of rabbinic teaching and of the most ancient Jewish legends, whose biblical, talmudic, midrashic, and more especially mystical and zoharic sources are here paraphrased, amplified, sometimes travestied so as to be adapted to the circumstances and conditions of the surrounding milieu. It informs us, moreover, about a great number of local customs and usages, about Maghrebi popular and folkloric traditions that are the common lot of Jewish and Muslim societies. It also happens, and more frequently than one believes, that the Jewish literary production of dialectal expression leaves the domain of the sacred to give itself over to other genres and other themes, less polarized on religion and liturgy, belonging to a popular literature common to Jewish and Muslim societies, in which one perceives nothing that recalls its confessional or ethnic origin. Such is the case of the poetic genres represented hereafter by the qasida of “the Lover,” and the ballad dedicated to the “Caftan.” Jews and Muslims meet there, as well as in the vast domain of the tale and the legend, of the popular song and the classical music inherited from the Andalusian patrimony, to take their pleasure, to exalt love, wine, and good cheer, to sing the adornments of woman, to weep the pain of separation and the sorrow of unhappy lovers, and so forth — using the same language and the same discourse, the same symbols and mythic representations, the same techniques of the poetic art of malhun (sung dialectal poetry), the same aesthetic, the same motifs, and the same themes. This literature is, in a way, the privileged meeting place of the two collectivities, which achieve, in this precise domain of culture, a veritable symbiosis.