Samuel Miklos Stern and Andalusian poetry

ABSTRACT

Samuel Miklos Stern (SMS) was the pioneer of the modern study of both Arabic and Hebrew muwashshaḥāt (a genre of stanzaic lyric poetry). This paper gives an overview of Stern’s ground-breaking contributions to the study of Andalusian poetry, from his entry into the subject while a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, through his field-shaping articles in the journal al-Andalus, to his remarkable paper on “Literary Connections between the Islamic World and Europe in the Early Middle Ages” at the Spoleto conference of 1964. In this as in other fields, it is suggested, Stern’s contribution was irreplaceable, his cautious and meticulous approach serving as a model for how to proceed in this difficult area of scholarship.

KEYWORDS:

• Andalusian
• Arabic
• Hebrew
• Spoleto

Samuel Miklos Stern (SMS) was the pioneer of the modern study of both Arabic and Hebrew muwashshaḥāt, respected as much now as when he published two ground-breaking articles in 1948 and 1949, when he was working on his DPhil here in Oxford.

Three forms of stanzaic lyric poems established themselves in Arab al-Andalus in the tenth century: the musammaṭ, which had come from the east, and the muwashshaḥ and the zajal, which were local inventions. They showed some structural variations from each other, but the major differences were linguistic. The musammaṭ was composed in classical Arabic and the zajal in non-classical Arabic including Romance. (For the muwashshaḥ see the next paragraph.) The musammaṭ and the muwashshaḥ were quickly adapted for use by Hebrew poets in the peninsula, the most famous practitioners being Moshe ibn ‘Ezra (d. after 1135), Yehuda Halevi (d. 1141),¹ Abraham ibn ‘Ezra (d. 1164), and the much later Todros Abulafia (d. c.1295). All early material has been lost, but much survives from the golden age in the eleventh and twelfth centuries – though less than 10% of the Arabic material was available when SMS began his studies.

It was the muwashshaḥ that particularly interested SMS, though he later did some work on the zajal. Muwashshaḥs are complex lyrics: they normally have a lead-in verse followed by five stanzas, the last line in each stanza having the rhyme and pattern of the lead-in verse. The main part of the text was in the normal poetic register, but the last line, the semi-independent kharja, might be in a non-classical register. With Arabic this might be either colloquial Arabic (or, very often, pseudo-colloquial Arabic) or, in about 8% of the poems of which texts now survive, Romance (or pseudo-Romance) or, much more commonly, a mixture of the two. SMS was particularly interested in the kharjas, but was meticulous in seeing them in the context of the whole muwashshaḥ.

For those unfamiliar with the genre, here is a translation by SMS of the only known muwashshaḥ by the famous Andalusian polymath Ibn Bājja (Avempace) (d. 533/1138).² There is also a muwashshaḥ by Yehudah ibn Gayyath which takes the maṭla‘³ of this poem and uses it as the kharja of the Hebrew poem.

Trail proudly your cloak wherever it listeth,         maṭla’ and add drunkenness to your intoxication.

And light your tinder with a flame              stanza 1

from silver surrounded with gold

and crowned with pearls of froth,

with a dark, shining, fresh-lipped youth,

whose cup is full with wine

like frozen water, like melting coal.

There, the dawn's light already appears,            stanza 2

the wind among the flower-beds blows already.

Do not light a lamp in the darkness,

leave it and uncover the wine instead,

where tears of the dew descend

and the flowers of the garden smile.

The hand of the king, who is kingship’s ornament,       stanza 3

gathers the jewels of excellence upon a thread.

God has not created another king like him.

He appears like the full moon, and his fragrance for me is like that of musk.

He is like the rain, like the morning, like the sea

like ʿAlī in battle or like ʿAmr

.

What a lion, what a lionheart,                stanza 4

what a lance, what a sword,

thrusting against the enemy’s chest,

cutting his neck,

giving his sword a red cloak,

pasturing his spear in his foe's neck.

When he appears, his face veiled,              stanza 5

like the new moon covered by clouds,

while above his head his banners flutter,

Arabs and those who are not Arabs sing this burden about him:

May God raise the standard of victory             kharja

for Abū Bakr, the excellent amīr.

It was at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem that SMS first became interested in Andalusian Hebrew stanzaic poetry. He not only had the encouragement of his own teachers – a series of amazing scholars (among them David Baneth in Arabic, Hans Polotsky in Semitic languages, Julius Guttmann in Islamic philosophy, and Hiram Pflaum-Peri (1900–1962) in Romance studies) – but was also spurred on by the material being published by the Research Institute for Hebrew Poetry in Jerusalem, and its leading light, the great medievalist Hayyim Schirmann (1904–1981), who was building on work started in the nineteenth century but not followed up.⁴ It was known, for example, that a number of Hebrew muwashshaḥs had Arabic material in their kharjas, and seemingly some had Romance material as well,⁵ but virtually no serious work had been done on them.

In 1946–1947, SMS wrote an article which examined the final stanzas and kharjas from twenty Hebrew poems that had Romance as the sole or main language in the kharja. The scholarship was meticulous, SMS taking great care to give well-grounded readings, particularly for the Romance material, which was often garbled in the manuscripts. Later he was sometimes criticized for being too cautious in his readings, but he was absolutely right in his approach. If a text is seriously corrupt, one has to present that text. Solutions may or may not follow. Though the texts were the key part of the article, there was a useful introductory section in which SMS had to refer to the fact that there were contrary views about the origins of the muwashshaḥ. He mentioned that the German orientalist Martin Hartmann (1851–1918) suggested an Arabic origin and the Spanish scholar Julián Ribera (1858–1934) a Romance one, and for the time being neatly smoothed over the problem by suggesting that they might be reconciled.

SMS submitted his article, written in French, to Emilio García Gómez (1905–1995), the editor of al-Andalus, the Spanish journal devoted to studies on Muslim Spain. García Gómez, clearly impressed, got the leading scholar of Hispanic literary studies of the time, Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1869–1968), to comment on it, and a couple of Menéndez Pidal’s notes are referred to by SMS in the printed version. This appeared in 1948 in vol. 13 of al-Andalus, with the title Les Vers finaux en espagnol dans les muwaššaḥs hispano-hebraïques: une contribution à l'histoire du muwaššaḥ et à l'étude du vieux dialecte espagnol “mozarabe,” shortened in the 1974 translation to The Final Lines of Hebrew Muwashshaḥs from Spain.⁶ It caused an immediate sensation, particularly amongst the Spanish establishment but also among scholars of Romance throughout the western world.

Turning to Arabic, the dearth of material for the classical period of the muwashshaḥ was even worse: largely the all too brief quotations to be found towards the end of the famous Muqaddima of Ibn Khaldūn and some later material.

Only one book in a European language dealt with the muwashshaḥ. This was Hartmann’s Das arabische Strophengedicht – I. Das Muwaššaḥ, published in Weimar in 1897, the main source of which was the introduction to the Leiden manuscript of the Dār al-ṭirāz⁷ of the Egyptian Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk (d. 1212). However, Hartmann did not print the texts of the 34 early Andalusian muwashshaḥs it contained. A further page of early criticism by the Andalusian critic Ibn Bassām (d. 1147) circulated after the volume of his work (al-Dhakhīra) containing it was published in Cairo in 1942.

When SMS arrived in Oxford to write his DPhil thesis on the Old Andalusian Arabic Muwashshaḥ he was expecting to make the texts in the Dār al-ṭirāz the core of the textual part of his thesis. However, he received a bonus when García Gómez sent him a microfilm of a manuscript in the Escorial, never worked on, apart from being misattributed in the library’s manuscript catalogue. Stern established that the work was the Tawshīʿ al-tawshīḥ of al-Ṣafadī (d. 1363), a work similar to, but slighter than, the Dār al-ṭirāz. It contained only 14 muwashshaḥs, but one of them damʿun safūḥun wa-ḍulūʿun ḥirār “shed tears and burning ribs” by the famous poet al-Aʿmā (d. 1126) had a Romance kharja. This poem was the subject of a brief article, again in French, Un muwaššaḥ arabe avec terminaison espagnole published in 1949 in volume 14 of al-Andalus. The final stanza runs:

I cannot do without him in any case,

a master who accuses and is harsh and haughty

He has left me a hostage to grief and affliction,

and then recites, part in love and part flirtatiously—

M-r al-h-*-*-* a-n-f-r-m d-m-w-a-r

k-a-n d-š-t-a-r

*-n-f-s a-m-y-t k-s-a-d m-w-a-t-a-r

As can be seen from the transliteration, the kharja is badly garbled, and SMS said, “I have unfortunately not succeeded in deciphering the Spanish verse; perhaps others will be more fortunate.” He then went on to read the first three words correctly as meu l-ḥabīb enfermo “my beloved is sick.” He made a few other suggestions, but without conviction. Later, two other versions of this kharja were to surface, and we can add di meu amār “through love of me” at the end of the first section. There are arguable readings of the second section, but the third section is hopelessly corrupt.

This article caused further excitement, and SMS had much correspondence as he worked to finish his DPhil. I should stress how arduous the work was. Virtually everything was in manuscript, and often difficult to read.

In 1950 al-Andalus was able to print a further sensation: the acquisition by Georges Colin (1893–1977), a great French specialist on the Maghrib, of an anthology of 354 muwashshaḥāt, the ʿUddat al-jalīs of Ibn Bishrī (d. early 15th century).⁸ Colin found 24 kharjas containing Romance material, and he supplied transcriptions of these and some notes to García Gómez in Madrid, together with some additional notes were supplied to the latter by the Egyptian professor ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Ahwānī (1915–1980).

Using these materials, García Gómez published in al-Andalus his famous article Veinticuatro jaryas romances en muwaššaḥs arabes.⁹ The texts of the kharjas were printed in a standard modern Arabic font (not in the original Maghribī script); and even García Gómez called for caution as he was not working with the original manuscript, though he implied that he had done a good job. This turned out not to be the case, but none of his readers could judge that, and what they were interested in was the importance of the new material for Romance studies.¹⁰ Kharja studies had been born, much to the detriment of muwashshaḥ studies.

The switch of focus to kharja studies was not to the taste of SMS, as he thought that each muwashshaḥ should be studied as a whole. Nevertheless, he was unstinting in his efforts to help the many who sought his advice. He published articles from time to time, but not on the new debate. Pat Harvey, editor of the posthumous Hispano-Arabic Strophic Poetry, summed up the situation neatly:

If his thesis did not appear in print in his lifetime, we can be quite certain that it was not because of any difficulty in finding a publisher. Rather it was because [of the discovery of] further valuable textual material [in] the Colin manuscript of Ibn Bishrī. [This] did not in any way impugn his thesis, indeed it served to confirm (in a most uncanny way at times) how firmly based were the hypotheses he put forward in it. To a perfectionist scholar like SMS, the publication of his work in the form of the original thesis was no longer acceptable. He formed the plan of compiling a work on the muwashshaḥ as a whole ‘in which I intend to gather those texts from the Andalusian period of the genre which have come down to us’ (see Al-Andalus, xv (1950), 79)^. He at times referred to his pro­jected book under the title Corpus Muwashshaharum. Common sense required that the whole body of material be assembled, and any partial anthologizing was unlikely to satisfy scholars for long. As an interim measure, for the benefit of Romance scholars, Stern produced in 1953 Les Chansons mozarabes (reprinted 1964), and orientalists could evaluate the detailed structure of his work from such partial studies as ‘Muḥammad Ibn ʿUbāda al-Qazzāz’ (Al-Andalus, xv, 1950) and ‘Four famous muwashshaḥs from Ibn Bušrā's anthology’ (Al-Andalus, xxiii, 1958), and gain some idea of the scope of the new material from such descriptive articles as ‘Two antho­logies of muwashshaḥ poetry: Ibn al-Khaṭīb’s Jayš al-tawšīḥ and al-Ṣafadī's Tawšīʿ al-tawšīḥ’ (Arabica, ii, 1955).¹¹

The direction in which kharja studies were being pushed in Spain made things difficult for a scholar for whom evidence was a sine qua non. Let me quote from Federico Corriente (1940–2020), the one major Spanish Arabist of the period who did not share the view of the Spanish establishment.

When Stern published his momentous article on kharajāt of Hebrew muwashshaḥāt in 1948, basing his interpretation on a significant number of texts, it was taken as a signal by Romance scholars—notwithstanding Stern’s expressed reservations—to rally in favour of a Hispanic hypothesis that would explain those texts as remnants of a pre-Islamic native lyrical poetry. They were pushed in that direction by the suggestions of García Gómez, who had privileged access to an important collection of the Arabic counterparts to the Hebrew texts studied by Stern, in a manuscript owned by the late Georges Colin. After García Gómez published the kharjas of those texts in 1952, many scholars rushed in where Stern had wisely feared to tread too heavily. There was an additional impetus in this instance, as revealed by Hilty’s clever remark to the effect that, in the aftermath of the disgraceful Spanish Civil War, and with the emergence of a dictatorial rightist regime which was shunned by most Western democracies, the discovery of supposedly ancient poetry came as a windfall to those who believed and proclaimed that Spain had always been the cultural and moral vanguard of the West.¹²

In the 1960s SMS wrote rather more articles on Hebrew writers than on Arab poets¹³; but two other interesting pieces were an article on the sole surviving muwashshaḥ by a twelfth-century woman poet Nazhūn (1960, Arabic, Aligarh) and Andalusian Muwashshaḥs in the Musical Repertoire of North Africa, given in Cordoba 1962.¹⁴ Again, he let his scholarship do the talking.

At a conference in Spoleto in April 1964 he gave a remarkable paper Literary Connections between the Islamic World and Europe in the Early Middle Ages, in which he dealt with the question of historical contact between Muslim and European lyric poetry during the late Middle Ages. As Wansbrough was to say, “his expertise and sound judgement provided a refreshing corrective to the wide-ranging and often simplistic generalizations so long current in that field of study.”¹⁵ He set out his views both on the origins of the muwashshaḥ and on the possible transfer of Arabic stanzaic material to later Romance poetry. It was originally published in Italian, but can now be found in English, together with the ensuing discussion, in Hispano-Arabic Strophic Poetry.¹⁶ It was during the discussion that he summed up an axiom that shaped his work: “If I am not mistaken there is a maxim of the schoolmen which runs De possibili ad esse nulla illatio ‘One should not infer that something exists from the mere possibility of its existence.’”¹⁷

The Spoleto paper was to be his last major publication on the field. He made no written comments on the notorious work¹⁸ of García Gómez, Las Jarchas romances de la serie árabe en su marco, published in 1965, though he must have been pressed to do so. I regret that I never asked him about, but it would have been tactless to do so.

It was the summer of 1969 when SMS told several friends interested in the muwashshaḥāt, including Derek Latham (1927–2005), Pat Harvey and myself, that he was about to start his edition of the ‘Uddat al-jalīs. Our hopes were dashed by his sudden death.¹⁹ The past fifty years have shown how irreplaceable SMS was in this and other fields of scholarship.

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Notes on contributors

Alan Jones

Alan Jones was Emeritus Professor of Classical Arabic at the University of Oxford, where he was a Founding Fellow of St. Cross College (1965–1980) and Reader in Classical Arabic and Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Pembroke (1980–2001). A specialist in early Arabic literature, he was the author of the two-volume Early Arabic Poetry (1992–1996) and an English translation of the Qur’an (2007), and editor of The ‘Uddat al-Jalīs of Ibn Bishrī: An Anthology of Andalusian Arabic Muwashshaḥāt (2012) and The Jaysh al-tawshīḥ of Lisān al-Dīn ibn al-Khaṭīb (2015).

Notes

1 At the time of his death SMS was supervising a D.Phil. thesis by Tova Rosen on the muwashshaḥāt of Yehuda Halevi.

2 From Stern, “Four famous muwaššaḥs from Ibn Bušrā’s anthology.”

3 [The maṭla‘ is the common-rhyme couplet with which the muwashshaḥ often begins.]

4 [Hayyim Schirmann was editor, inter alia, of Mivḥar ha-Shirah ha-‘Ivrit bi-Italia (An Anthology of Hebrew Poetry in Italy) (1934), Ha-Shirah ha-‘Ivrit bi-Sefarad u-veProvans (Hebrew Poetry in Spain and Provence) volumes (1954–1956), and Shirim ḥadashim min ha-Genizah (New Poetry from the Geniza) (1965), and author of many essays on medieval Hebrew poetry.]

5 See Corriente, “The ‘Kharjas’,” 115: ‘The tinge of elation and national pride is clearly detectable in Menendez y Pelayo (1894), upon disclosing his discovery of what he took for Castilian words in a kharjah of a Hebrew poem by Yehudah Halevi.’

6 Harvey, Hispano-Strophic Poetry, 123–160.

7 An excellent edition of Ibn Sanā’ al-Mulk’s Dār al-ṭirāz was published in Paris in 1949 by the Syrian scholar Jawdat al-Rikābī. It has since been reprinted several times in Damascus.

8 García Gómez, “Nuevas observaciones,” 157–158.

9 García Gómez, “Veinticuatro jaryas romances.”

10 The zeal is understandable, but the lack of perspective, the ignorance, and the hubris that all too often accompanied it are inexcusable.

11 Harvey, Hispano-Arabic Strophic Poetry, vi.

12 Corriente, “The ‘Kharjas’,” 115.

13 See Latham and Mitchell, “Bibliography,” nos. 158, 169, 181, 188, 200, 203, 206, 217, 226, 239, 255. [For Stern’s work on Hebrew literature, see Raymond Scheindlin’s contribution to the present volume.]

14 See ibid., nos. 156 and 199.

15 Wansbrough, “Samuel Miklos Stern,” 600.

16 Harvey, Hispano-Arabic Strophic Poetry, 204–230.

17 As Pat Harvey put it (Hispano-Arabic Strophic Poetry, ix), “SMS was made to appear far less papist than the Pope by those who insisted (and still insist) on seeing in his discoveries evidence of influences which he himself was inclined to deny.”

18 When the manuscripts became available many years later, it became clear that García Gómez had tacitly tampered with the texts of the poems to make them appear to support his metrical theories. Corriente (“The ‘Kharjas’,” 115) describes him as “defending the Romance scansion of not only kharajāt, but also the remaining parts of muwashshaḥāt and azjāl, propounding stress-based rhythms that simply do not match the true phonetic features of either language, Romance or Arabic.”

19 I was eventually enabled by the Gibb Memorial Trust to publish an edition of the ʿUddat al-jalīs in 1992 and one of the Jayš al-tawšīḥ in 1997.