Page 267 - גנזי קדם יא

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Spanish school of Hebrew poetry. Indices include a list of epithets, a list of
weekly Torah portions and Haftarot, foreign words, neologisms, rabbinical
sources, locations for manuscripts, and incipits of piyyutim. In this review,
I will focus on lyrical aspects representative of Samuel’s personal creativity
by which he reveals Jewish religious themes. A study of Samuel’s lyrical
potential will demonstrate that he views piyyut as an innovative, prestigious
medium rather than simply a set of conventional synagogue repertoires.

In dealing with lyrical aspects of Samuel’s poetry, I refer to Katsumata’s
PhD dissertation, submitted in 2003, which concerned this paytan’s stylistic
features, published shortly afterwards as volume five in the Hebrew
Language and Literature Series by Styx-Brill. Katsumata’s book serves as
an informative supplement to the edition of Samuel’s works, particularly
Katsumata’s chapter on syntactic ways to enrich a poetic line. When
combined with the online Historical Dictionary of the Hebrew Language–
Ma’agarim, modern research is offered a new means by which to study
the characteristics of Samuel’s figures of speech and rhetorical methods.
Needless to say, Samuel operates with a self-consciousness in relation
to his literary antecedents, particularly to Scripture, which he, like many
other great medieval scholar/poets, knew virtually by heart. Be it prose
or poetry, Scripture provided Samuel with recherché terms that would
confer a special status on an account or an idea, but this, of course, can
easily be said of other hymnists as well. Samuel, however, went the extra
mile, exploiting the scriptural phrase in both rhetorical and grammatical
directions; as Katsumata’s observes, Samuel produced poetic lines more
biblical than the biblical verses themselves. As I will show, this type of over-
biblicisation is achieved by adding an infinitive absolute or adverbial noun
of the same consonantal stem. The newness of his poetry may be helpful
for establishing additional notions of what the literary conditions were in
an elite Mediterranean–Jewish milieu in the second half of the tenth century
and early eleventh century. Which lyrical aspects were at issue in Samuel’s
composition of Hebrew hymns that have such an obvious aesthetic sense and
stylistic mode appropriate for the subjects of Sabbath and festivals? Samuel
seems a type of poet whose writing of verse constitutes a world in a language