A History of Spanish LiteratureFitzmaurice-Kelly, James
History
A History of Spanish Literature
Fitzmaurice-Kelly, James
Spanish literature -- History and criticism
In official charters, as early as 804, Arabic words find place. A local
disuse of Latin is proved by the fact that in this ninth century the
Bishop of Seville found it needful to render the Bible into Arabic for
the use of Muzárabes; and still stronger evidence of the low estate of
Latin is afforded by an Arabic version of canonical decrees. It follows
that some among the very clergy read Arabic more easily than they read
Latin. Jewish poets, like Avicebron and Judah ben Samuel the Levite,
sometimes composed in Arabic rather than in their native Hebrew; and it
is almost certain that the lays of the Arab _rāwis_ radically modified
the structure of Hebrew verse. Apart from the evidence of Paulus
Alvarus Cordubiensis, St. Eulogius deposes that certain Christians—he
mentions Isaac the Martyr by name—spoke Arabic to perfection. Nor can
it be pleaded that this zeal was invariably due to official pressure:
on the contrary, a caliph went the length of forbidding Spanish Jews
and Christians to learn Arabic. Neither did the fashion die soon:
long after the Arab predominance was shaken, Arabic was the modish
tongue. Álvar Fáñez, the Cid's right hand, is detected signing his
name in Arabic characters. The Christian _dīnār_, Arabic in form and
superscription, was invented to combat the Almoravide _dīnār_, which
rivalled the popularity of the Constantinople besant; and as late as
the thirteenth century Spanish coins were struck with Arabic symbols on
the reverse side.
Yet, even so, the rude Latin of the unconquered north remained
well-nigh intact. Save in isolated centres, it was spoken by countless
Christians and by the Spaniards who had escaped to the African province
of Tingitana. Vast deduction must be made from the jeremiads of Paulus
Alvarus Cordubiensis. As he bewails the time wasted on Hebrew and
Arabic by Spaniards, so does Avicebron lament the use of Arabic and
Romance by Jews. "One party speaks Idumean (Romance), the other the
tongue of Kedar (Arabic)." If the Arab flood ran high, the ebb was no
less strong. Arabs tended more and more to ape the dress, the arms,
the customs of the Spaniards; and the Castilian-speaking Arab—the
_moro latinado_—multiplied prodigiously. No small proportion of Arab
writers—Ibn Hazm, for example—was made up of sons or grandsons
of Spaniards, not unacquainted with their fathers' speech. When
Archbishop Raimundo founded his College of Translators at Toledo, where
Dominicus Gundisalvi collaborated with the convert Abraham ben David
(Johannes Hispalensis), it might have seemed that the preservation
of Arabic and Hebrew was secure. There and then, there could not
have occurred such a blunder as that immortal one of the Capuchin,
Henricus Seynensis, who lives eternal by mistaking the _Talmud_—"Rabbi
Talmud"—for a man. But no Arab work endures. And as with Arab
philosophy in Spain, so with the Arabic language: its soul was required
of it. Hebrew, indeed, was not forgotten; and for Arabic, a revival
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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