In 1090 the Almoravid invasion broke the sociopoliti-
cal stability of Granada, whose Jewish community was
devastated for the second time in twenty-fi ve years. For
reasons that are unclear, Moses did not join his brothers’
exodus to Córdoba and Toledo. He remained alone in
Granada, “a resident alien” in his desolate native land.
Subsequently, sometime between 1090 and 1095, Ibn
Ezra was mysteriously compelled to abandon his wife
and children, and leave Granada for exile in Christian
Spain. So began the poet’s forty-year odyssey though the
towns of Castile, Navarre, and, it appears, Aragón. This
tragic event proved to be the turning point in Ibn Ezra’s
personal, intellectual, and artistic life because he was
never able to reconcile himself to an environment that
he believed was socially, culturally, and intellectually
inferior to that of his native Muslim Spain.
Ibn Ezra was, arguably, the most conservative of the
Andalusian school of Hebrew poets. He initiated no
major genres; his classicizing language and style are
manifest in both his secular and his liturgical verse; he
revived, in Hebrew form, the traditional structure of the
neoclassical Arabic ode (qas.ida); and he was the fi rst
Hebrew poet to compose an Arabic-style book of man-
neristic homonym poems. Even Ibn Ezra’s most identifi -
ably personal occasional poems, the lyrical complaints
in which the poet laments his exile from Granada, are
stylized in form and conventional in content. It would
be incorrect to conclude, however, that his poetry is
lacking in either originality or self-expression. On the
contrary, he achieved distinction as a poet through his
creative reworking of poetic tradition and his artistic
mastery of rhetorical style.
Apart from his literary conservatism, what imme-
diately distinguishes Ibn Ezra from other poets of the
school are his Judeo-Arabic prose writings on Hebrew
poetry and Andalusian Jewish culture. The Book of
Discussion and Conversation, the most complete and
comprehensive work on Hebrew poetics to come down
from the Middle Ages, is a prescriptive and probing
treatment of the legitimacy of Arabic-style Hebrew
poetry. The Treatise of the Garden on Metaphorical and
Literal Language is a theoretical study of the nature of
poetic diction as manifested in the Hebrew Bible. Along
with his substantial corpus of secular and devotional He-
brew poetry, these works serve to identify Ibn Ezra as the
embodiment of the traditions and ideals of Andalusian
Jewish literary intellectuals of the period.
Further Reading
Pagis, D. Secular Poetry and Poetic Theory: Moses Ibn Ezra and
His Contemporaries. Jerusalem, 1970. (In Hebrew.)
Scheindlin, R. P. “Rabbi Moshe ibn Ezra on the Legitimacy of
Poetry.” In Medievalia et Humanistica, new series, Vol. 7. Ed.
by Paul M. Clogan. Cambridge, 1976. 101–15.
Ross Brann
IBN H.AZM (994 – 1063)
Ab ̄u Muhammad ‘Al ̄ı ibn H.azm was born in 994 at
Munyat al-Mugh ̄ıra, a suburb of Córdoba, and died
on Mont Lishan, near Huelva, in 1063. He enjoyed the
luxury and the education of the wealthy during the last
years of the last Córdoban caliph, ‘Abd al-Rah.m ̄an IV,
at whose court his father was a high-ranking offi cial. His
fi rst attempts to follow in his father’s steps in political
life proved unsuccessful. After the fall of Córdoba, and
some years of residence in various places, in 1016 he
sought refuge in Játiva, near Valencia. Between 1016
and 1023 he was minister during the short reign of the
Ummayyad caliph, and after the latter’s assasination Ibn
H.azm was thrown into prison. Between 1027 and 1031
he seems to have been active again in political life, from
which he withdrew to turn to scholarship.
Ibn H.azm’s education, with the best-known teach-
ers of his time, encompassed the Qur’ ̄an and religious
sciences, theology, literature, medicine, history, and
logic. He was a prolifi c author, with some four hundred
titles attributed to him, of which only fourteen(?) are
extant.
Ibn H.azm is especially well known in the West for his
book Tawq al-ham ̄ama (The Dove’s Necklace), written
during his exile in Játiva and thus a work of his youth.
It is in the strictest sense a literary epistle (ris ̄ala), a
mixture of prose and his own poetry. It offers, in thirty
chapters, a rather nostalgic contemplation of the na-
ture and experience of love, which he treats with some
autobiographical references, a considerable amount of
sensuality, and a great deal of sensitivity. A book on love
of enduring appeal, it has been incongruently compared
to Ovid’s and Andreas Capellanus’s somewhat similar
works.
Of greater importance, yet lesser known, are his
other books, works in which the image of the playful
and sensitive youth dissipates, replaced by that of the
pious, often rigid Muslim scholar that he was. In his
Maratib al-’ulum (Categories of Sciences) he encour-
ages the study of all sciences, but with an objective that
is clearly religious, for in his opinion religion should
be the aim of all learning. Less important in his view
is the study of poetry, especially the lyrical (ghazal),
which may lead to temptation, and the panegyrical
(madh.), which tends toward deceitful exaggerations.
His moral concerns are the topic of another book, the
Kit ̄ab al-akhl ̄aq wa’ln ̄ -siyar (Book of Conduct) consist-
ing of twelve chapters in the form of admonishments
and refl ections on virtuous life.
The most important of all Ibn H.azm’s extant works
is his voluminous Kit ̄ab al-fi sal f ̄ı’^ l-milal (Decision
Among Religions). Aiming at demonstrating the truth
of Islam in comparison with all other religions, Ibn
H.azm writes what has been considered a treatise on
comparative religion. Beginning with the religious andIBN H.AZM