216 r Libby Garshowitz
they spend their days and nights eating, drinking, and making love, bat-
ting their eyelashes and winking at each other,^37 kissing, hugging, fondling
each other, consumed by the fires of love, unquenchable by their tears, as
they sing of their mutual hunger (ll. 140–43). Yefefia becomes desire per-
sonified, a woman not afraid to express her wants and her passion, which
have come to pervade her total being (ll. 124–27). Their growing love is
shared, and Jacob ben Elazar minces no words in his erotic descriptions
of their passionate lovemaking.
Meanwhile, a visit to the slave market yields up yet another breathtak-
ing maiden, Yemima, “white and pure like the day” (ll. 143–46).^38 Con -
sumed with jealousy at being passed over by Yoshefe, she sells one of her
neck beads and commissions the overseer to buy her a horse, fine clothes,
a royal crown, and weapons, no matter the cost. She pays him the munifi-
cent sum of two thousand gold coins—money most likely stolen from her
previous master’s house (a common theme in Arabic literature), lies in
wait to ambush Yoshefe at his house, and finally enters in male disguise.
There, while he lies in a drunken stupor, entwined with Yefefia, Yemima
kidnaps Yoshefe and leads him away, still asleep, into real captivity (shevi),
as she says, no doubt in the hope that he in turn will now become capti-
vated by her (ll. 144–64). An angry and jealous Yemima has turned the
tables on Yoshefe: Yefefia, a dutiful slave girl, had followed a few steps
behind Yoshefe, all the while preparing to ensnare him, but now he is
Yemima’s captive and he trails her. He is the captive in this game of love, its
victim, not knowing whether he will live or die, metaphorically of course.
Yoshefe appears again to be led, this time by a woman, not by the ne’er-do-
wells he has encountered in his bizarre travels. Intoxication, which oppo-
nents of wine soirées derided, was Yoshefe’s undoing, as Yoshefe himself
pointed out (ll. 15–19). His servitude to Yefefia as a metaphorical captive of
love, a common theme in love poetry, has turned into actual physical cap-
tivity. In a fit of pique, he expresses his innermost feelings at the situation
in which he now finds himself. Angry and completely subdued, Yoshefe
voices his discomfort at Yemima’s physical abuse, not knowing that his
captor is a woman in male disguise:
Woe is me, my lover, woe is me.
From your bosom have I been stolen away.