One Thousand Years of Cultural Harmony between Judaism and Islam r 257word of each of the lines ends with the syllable mah, which in Hebrew
constitutes the word mah (what). This word can open various questions
such as what to do, what to think, how to speak, etc. Thus it creates an
impression of the state of emotional turmoil the worshipper is in, which
grows even stronger as the appearance of mah is so dense; all five verses
of the poem end with this syllable.
With this emotional unrest, it seems, the answer hides in the question,
as mah also constitutes half of the word neshamah (soul), perhaps sug-
gesting that the way to resolve this perplexing situation is through the
neshamah. Indeed, the poem ends with the optimistic hope of a devoted
lover when he finds the way to reach his beloved, God. This huge gap be-
tween the two can be reconciled only through the soul, which will unite
with God on common ground. It is expressed in the last verse through
two variations of the same word gadol (infinite or great): vehigdalta and
tagdil, used for God and the worshipper (lines 5a and 5b), respectively. For
God, vehigdalta hasadim (“... and Infinite Thy ways”); and for the wor-
shipper, lekha tagdil lehodot kol neshamah (“Therefore the soul expands to
sing Thy praise”). This unity between God and the worshipper is realized
through a spiritual process of contemplation and prayer that leads the
worshipper to unification with God.
Scheindlin (1991, 139) asserts that the form and structure of this poem
derived entirely from secular Arabic poems. Furthermore, he says that
its content is saturated with Islamic thinking to the extent that “the spe-
cifically Jewish element of the liturgy is either completely suppressed or
drastically reduced, and the theme of love all but disappears.”
In this poem, as in Dunash’s, there is no indication as to the melody
to which the poem should be sung. Two melodies are prevalent among
the Babylonians. The first is sung in maqām nawā jihārkah by Shlomoh
Reuven Mu ̔alem (1905–89), who was one of the most famous cantors in
Baghdad of the first half of the twentieth century and later on in Israel. The
second version is sung in maqām bayāt by Moshe Havushah, the grand-
son of the Baghdadi cantor Gurgi Yair, a contemporary of Mu ̔alem.^12
The Ottoman Empire and Israel Ben Mosheh Najarah
For both Muslims and Jews, the year 1492 symbolizes the dramatic transi-
tion from the fifteenth century to the sixteenth. For the Muslims, it marks
the fall of their last hold in Spain, in Granada, and the end of classical