266 r Merav Rosenfeld-Hadad
The PLS and Its Poets in the Perspective of a Millennium
The brief yet extensive survey of the PLS leaves no doubt as to the role
of Arabo-Islamic culture in its creation. All the poetic characteristics of
the PLS, its form and content as well as its music, present this artistic
product as one that comprises four main combinations of elements that
might be understood as dichotomous. In its content, the PLS amalgam-
ates elements taken from the religious worlds of both Islam and Judaism,
as illustrated in Ibn Gabirol’s poem. Furthermore, this genre is united in
another layer of what seem to be contradictory elements, the religious and
the secular. That is to say, these religious ideas and thoughts are expressed
many times through secular and mundane images borrowed from Arabic
love songs and are sung to their melodies, as shown in Najarah’s work. The
melodies themselves, typical of Arabic culture in general, create another
layer of dichotomy, as each of them combines elements such as measured
and unmeasured melodic sections and composed and improvised parts.
A further dichotomous layer of the PLS is created through the jux-
taposition of oral and written traditions. The music of the PLS was not
documented in notation, but was transmitted orally, and thus can be
ephemeral and changeable. The text, on the other hand, is documented
and fixed. All of these three layers of seemingly polar elements are united
again in a poetic form and style created by the Arabic ̔arude (prosody)
and ̔ilm al-balagha (rhetoric), and written and expressed in Hebrew, with
its own grammatical rules, rhetoric, associations, and allusions.
This chain of extraordinary combinations is not exclusively confined
to the genre alone. It is also typical of both its poets and its carriers. The
biography of many of the poets attests very clearly to their strong and
immaculate Jewish piousness, combined with equally strong involvement
in the surrounding Arabo-Islamic culture, without any split or feeling of
contradiction between the two.^24
The same mixture of elements also characterizes the identity of the
Babylonian Jews. This conclusion is based on interviews held by the au-
thor, between the years 2003 and 2008, with members of the Babylonian
community in Israel, all born in Baghdad during the 1930s and 1940s,
and all of whom immigrated to Israel between 1949 and 1951. They all
described their identity as having two components: Jewish religion and
Arabic culture. The harmonious coexistence between these two compo-
nents was described almost unconsciously and in the same breath. Their