Abstract
‘Intertextuality’ has undoubtedly become a prominent key word in recent literary studies. Standing for a suggestive, many-sided concept, this term has acquired a considerable variety of senses, implications, and modes of usage. However, its essential denotation, or orientation, is rather evident nonetheless. It has to do with linkages between texts, or — as two glossaries of critical terms put it — with ‘the condition of interconnectedness among textsj’2 and ‘[a] relation between two or more texts which has an effect upon the way in which the intertext (that is, the text within which other texts reside or echo their presence) is read’.3 Piyyut, Hebrew medieval liturgical poetry, can be seen as a locus classicus of intertextuality. It is a corpus which by its very nature is interconnected with other, far flung, corpora that echo their presence within it. The present paper aims to consider certain aspects of a highly significant intertextual affiliation of piyyut: its relation to the Bible.4
An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the first European Association of Jewish Studies summer Colloqium on Medieval Hebrew Poetry, Yarnton Mano; Oxford, 24–27 July 2000. I am grateful to the participants at this presentation for their comments, and particularly to Prof. Shulamit Elitsur, Prof. Ezra Fleischer, Dr. Ruth ha-Kohen, Dr. Yehiel Kara, Prof. Shlomit Rimmon-Kenan and Prof. Wout van Bekkum for their scholarly and kind advice.
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References
R. Moffin, S.M. Ray, The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, Boston/New York 1997, 176.
J. Hawthorn, A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory, London etc. 1982, 126.
The two main corpora (besides the biblical), the ‘presences’ of which are most significant in Piyyut (though in essentialy different ways), are the fixed prose prayers (mini y]pri), the textual Sitz im Leben of Piyyut and consequently a crucial factor in its shaping (cf. E. Fleischer, ‘Studies in problems relating to the liturgical functions of the types of early Piyyut’, Tarbiz 40 [1971], 41–63 [in Hebrew]), and Rabbinical (Talmudic and Midrashic) literature, which has been — often as a ‘mediator’ of scriptural text and themes — a major source of Piyyut’s subject matte; mainly in its classical period. In later schools one has to take into account other kinds of discourse as well, e.g. mystical and philosphical writings and secular poetry. ‘Internal’ intertextuality within Piyyut, i.e recourse of piyyutim to earlier piyyutim, is a widespread and varied phenomenon as well; cf. S. Elizur, ‘Adaptions of Piyyutim in the Cairo Geniza’, Peamim 78 (1999) 100–12.7 (in Hebrew), and the literature mentioned there.
S. Elizur, ‘The use of biblical verses in Hebrew liturgical Poetry’ (forthcoming). I am grateful to Prof. Elizur for providing me with this paper.
The standard formulae of this kind are 211127 (‘as it is written:’) or ’,Milt (‘and it is said:’); cf. e.g. W. van Bekkum, The Qedushta’ot of Yehudah according to Genizah Manuscripts, Groningen 1988, 33f.
These verse chains tend to have a significant linkage to the subject matter of the poetic composition, and are usually formally connected to it by means of anadiplosis; Van Bekkum, The Qedushta’ot of Yehudah, 34•
Elizur, ‘The use of biblical verses’, 3 (Elizur is using there the term ‘ornamental verses’).
I am using the terms ‘hypotext(ual)’ (cf. Allen, Intertextuality, 254), and ‘pretext(ual)’ as practical synonyms, both referring to an ancient text on which a work is founded, to the ancient text incorporated in the work. The first term stresses its ‘synchronic’ presence within the work, whereas the latter stresses its precedence in time.
R.J. Loewe, ‘The Bible in Medieval Hebrew Poetry’, in J.A Emerton, S.0 Reif, eds, Interpreting the Hebrew Bible, Cambridge 1990, 137. The italics are mine. Loewe’s own contrary conception of the reliance on scripture in medieval Hebrew poetry is phrased in a suggestive and insightful metaphor: ‘when the medieval or the traditionally minded modern Hebrew poet uses a biblical quotation, he is not indulging in a piece of mere literary virtuosity. Rather, he is setting out to achieve the effect that the composer aims at when, instead of using a simple note, he draws on the full depth and subtlety of a chord’ (ibid., 138).
Cf, e.g, the famous statement of Julia Kristeva (who has coined the term ‘intertextualité’ in the mid sixties), ‘Any text is constructed as a mosaic of texts; any text is the absorption and transformation of another’. T. Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader, New York 1986, 37.
E. Fleischer, ‘Medieval Hebrew Poems in biblical style’, Teudah 7, 201–215 (in Hebrew). On the language of Piyyut as distinct from both biblical and rabbinical Hebrew cf. I. Yeivin, ‘Charachteristic linguistic features of Piyyut’, in M. Bar-Asher, ed., Studies in Hebrew and Jewish Languages Presented to Shelomo Morag, Jerusalem 1996, 105–118 (in Hebrew); see also Van Bekkum, The Qedushta’ot of Yehudah, 74.
D. Dimant, ‘Use and Interpretation of Mikra in the Apocrypha and Pseudoepigrapha’, in M.J Mulder, ed., Mikra, Philadelphia 1988, 383.
This proposition seems to be illustrated by the fact that the practice of scriptural verse endings was not spread before the standartization of rhyme (Fleischer, The Yozer, zi; Elizur, ‘The use of biblical verses’, 6). It seems that this finding can be accounted for by the self distinction from the Bible as a defining element of Piyyut. Before it was rhymed, the massive insertion of continuous biblical passages into the Piyyutic text would have blurred the identity of its poetic idiom as distinguished from the biblical; only when systematic rhyming has created an absolutely clear cut, unmistakable distinction between the Piyyutic and the biblical poetic landscapes, could such a technique become prevalent. Cf., in this context, Ruth Kartun-Blum’s description of Hebrew as ‘an ongoing palimpsest (…) in which subliminal layers show through and are sounded rather than subsumed’; R. Kartun-Blum, Profane Scriptures, Reflections on the Dialogue with the Bible in Modern Hebrew Poetry, Cincinnati 1999, ix.
L. Jenny, ‘The strategy of form’, in T. Todorov, ed., French Literary Theory Today, Cambridge 198z, 45.
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Granat, Y. (2002). Intertextual Polyphony: Scriptural Presence(s) in a Piyyutim Cycle by Yoseph Ibn Abitur. In: Berger, S., Brocke, M., Zwiep, I. (eds) Zutot 2001. Zutot: Perspectives on Jewish Culture, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3730-2_9
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