The Book of Delight, and other papersAbrahams, Israel
Religion
The Book of Delight, and other papers
Abrahams, Israel
Ibn Zabara, Joseph ben Meir, 1140?- Sefer sha'ashu'im; Jews -- Intellectual life; Love poetry, Hebrew -- History and criticism
The final quotation comes from the Wisdom of Solomon, ch. vi. v. 12; ch.
viii. vv. 2, 16; and ch. ix. v. 4. The "radiance" of Wisdom is, in ch. vii,
26, explained in the famous words, "For she is an effulgence from
everlasting light, an unspotted mirror of the working of God, and an image
of His goodness."
MEDIEVAL WAYFARING
The evidence for many of the statements in this paper will be found in
various contexts in "Jewish Life in the Middle Ages," in the Hebrew travel
literature, and in such easily accessible works as Graetz's "History of the
Jews."
Achimaaz has been much used by me. His "Book of Genealogies" (_Sefer
Yochasin_) was written in 1055. The Hebrew text was included by Dr. A.
Neubauer in his "Mediaeval Jewish Chronicles," ii, pp. 114 _et seq_. I
might have cited Achimaaz's account of an amusing incident in the synagogue
at Venosa. There had been an uproar in the Jewish quarter, and a wag added
some lines on the subject to the manuscript of the Midrash which the
travelling preacher was to read on the following Sabbath. The effect of the
reading may be imagined.
Another source for many of my statements is a work by Julius Aronius,
_Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland,_ Berlin, 1893. It
presents many new facts on the medieval Jewries of Germany.
The quaint story of the Jewish sailors told by Synesius is taken from T.R.
Glover's "Life and Letters in the Fourth Century" (Cambridge, 1901), p.
330.
A careful statement on communal organization with regard to the status of
travellers and settlers was contributed by Weinberg to vol. xii of the
Breslau _Monatsschrift_. The title of the series of papers is _Die
Organisation der juedischen Gemeinden_.
For evidence of the existence of Communal Codes, or Note-Books, see Dr. A.
Berliner's _Beitraege zur Geschichte der Raschi-Commentare_, Berlin, 1903,
p. 3.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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