The Golden Way: The Hebrew Sonnet during the Renaissance and the Baroque by DvoraBregman; Ann BrenerReview by: Michela AndreattaJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 127, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 2007), pp. 205-206Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20297255 .

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Reviews of Books 205

will draw heavily on this insightful monograph, and anyone who is concerned with the structure and

meaning of the priestly HXOn offerings is fortunate to have such a systematic, detailed study to refer to.

Naphtali S. Meshel

Jerusalem

The Golden Way: The Hebrew Sonnet during the Renaissance and the Baroque. By Dvora Bregman.

Translated by Ann Brener. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 304. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006. Pp. i + 298. $45.

It is hitherto little known that Hebrew was the earliest language to adopt the sonnet after Italian, in which this poetic form had made its first appearance in the thirteenth century. This peculiar cir

cumstance was rooted in the long-lasting presence of Jews in Italy and the constant cultural inter

change which marked their relationship with the surrounding non-Jewish environment. Immanuel of

Rome (c. 1265-1335), who knew and was inspired by the works of Dante, composed the earliest sur

viving Hebrew sonnets and gave this verse form the shape it was to maintain for the centuries to come,

largely identical with the classical Petrarchan pattern. After his work the Hebrew sonnet apparently fell into decline until the sixteenth century, when first in Italy and then also in the Ottoman Empire and Holland, it was resumed and flourished anew. The fascinating history of the Hebrew sonnet from its

first appearance in medieval Italy through its subsequent development during the Renaissance and the

Baroque is the subject of Dvora Bregman's study, first published in Hebrew (Shevil ha-Zahav: Ha

Sonet ha- (Ivri bi-Tequfat ha-Renasans ve-ha-Baroq [Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, Ben-Gurion Univ.

of the Negev Press, 1995]), and now masterfully translated into English by Ann Brener.

Bregman, a senior professor at Ben-Gurion University and one of the most important scholars in

the field of Hebrew poetry written in Italy, undertook her ground-breaking research in the eighties, as

a doctoral student at the Hebrew University, under the guidance of the late Dan Pagis. Using manu

scripts and hard-to-find printed books, she gathered a corpus of more than four hundred Hebrew sonnets

from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (later to be published as an anthology under the title Tzror

Zehuvim: Sonetim 'Ivri'im bi-Tequfat ha-Renasans ve-ha-Baroq [Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, Ben

Gurion Univ. of the Negev Press, 1997]). This remarkable corpus, of which very little was known

before this time, along with the early sonnets by Immanuel of Rome, provided the author with the material for the reconstruction of the history and general traits of the Hebrew sonnet from its emergence until the eighteenth century as presented in this book.

Almost two centuries separated Immanuel of Rome from Joseph Tzarfati and Moses ben Joab, the

first Hebrew authors to compose sonnets in sixteenth-century Florence. As a result of the apparently discontinuous history of the Hebrew sonnet, Bregman has divided her book into two main sections.

The first is devoted to the early Hebrew sonnet as preserved in the work of Immanuel and examines

at length its content and formal features. While a disciple of the Spanish school, Immanuel was largely influenced by contemporary Italian literature at every level, thus standing out among all the Hebrew

poets of his day. His main work, entitled Mahbarot, is a collection of rhymed narratives interwoven

with poems, written after the model of Judah Al-Harizi's Tahkemoni. In this work, Immanuel also in

cluded thirty-eight sonnets, most of them praising women and love?a favorite subject of the con

temporary Italian sonnet?in a few cases in a highly erotic and realistic style. But it was mainly in adapting the prosody of the Italian sonnet to Hebrew, successfully conveying its

unique musicality, that Immanuel showed his deepest poetic insight and refinement. All of his sonnets

display fourteen lines in a single meter, and the great majority are rhymed according to the scheme

ABBA ABBA CDE CDE, the pattern that was to establish itself as classical with Petrarch's Canzoniere.

As for the meter, in order to reproduce the Italian endecasillabo, Immanuel created a new Hebrew line

combining the traditional quantitative system of Spanish Hebrew poetry with the syllabic one char

acteristic of Italian verse. This innovation established itself as one of the hallmarks of Hebrew poetry written in Italy until modern times.

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206 Journal of the American Oriental Society 127.2 (2007)

Although Immanuel's M?hbarot saw wide circulation both in manuscript and print, Hebrew poets of the following two centuries were apparently reluctant to follow in his footsteps. The quantitative

syllabic meter which Immanuel introduced in his sonnets was questioned, partly because it required

linguistic and poetic skills which most of the Hebrew poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

apparently did not possess. But the main reason for the decline of the genre in this period probably lies

in the open eroticism of Immanuel's sonnets and the unconventional and mocking tone that pervades

many of them.

The sonnet and prosodie legacy of Immanuel could be reappraised and finally revived only in the sixteenth century. During this time, despite harsh measures adopted against the Jews inside the ghettos, cultural life was flourishing and much was being produced in almost every artistic field. Yet moral

censure of Immanuel's work was still strong?at just this moment the M?hbar ot were being condemned

and forbidden for their licentious contents in Yosef Caro's Sulhan (arukh, first printed in Venice in 1564-1565. This could explain why not a single love sonnet from the sixteenth century has come

down to us. In fact, the authors who renewed the sonnet in this period, the above-mentioned Joseph Tzarfati and Moses ben Joab along with the Paduan grammarian Samuel Archivolti (c. 1530-1611), used it to compliment friends, praise newly-published books, and for moral or religious subjects.

Nevertheless, in doing so they paved the way for its definitive social and literary acceptance. As a matter of fact, by the seventeenth century the revived Hebrew sonnet, to the illustration of

which the second part of Bregman's book is devoted, had turned into a common and favored verse

form, celebrating the many public events which enlivened social life inside the ghettos. It was described

in the main prosodie treatises of the period and received Hebrew nicknames referring to its refined

and strict prosody, like shir zahav, "the golden poem," zahav, "gold" in Hebrew, having the numerical

value of fourteen. Under the influence of the Baroque, thematic and prosodie variations were intro

duced by contemporary poets, although without prejudicing the distinctive and clearly-defined nature of the sonnet. The love sonnet itself knew a revival, although mostly in the form of the wedding poem,

while even the tones of mockery and laughter were resumed by a few authors from Italy, thus bring

ing the sonnet closer once more to its beginnings as in the poetics of Immanuel of Rome.

The history of the Hebrew sonnet did not end with the age of segregation but has continued through the modern period and up to the present day. To the later Hebrew sonnet Bregman has devoted a

subsequent study (Sharsheret ha-Zahav: ha-Sonet ha-Tvri le-Dorotaw [Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz

Hameuchad, 2000]), completing the diachronic perspective on this peculiar verse form and its many

appearances, further helping to show its place of importance in Hebrew literature.

Michela Andreatta

Ca' Foscari University, Venice

The Stains of Culture: An Ethno-Reading of Karaite Jewish Women. By Ruth Tsoffar. Detroit:

Wayne State University Press, 2005. Pp. xv + 245, illus. $27.95 (paper).

Stains of Culture focuses upon menstruation in the contemporary Karaite community, a group that

has defined its own boundaries outside of Rabbinic Judaism. The book is a rewritten dissertation that

has not entirely shed its previous objectives. For example, Tsoffar refers to numerous methods in

cultural studies and presents allusions to established theories of ethnography. Most of the methods seem

to be highly appropriate to the investigation of blood and stains, i.e., the visible signs of a bodily fluid within a limited cultural context. In order to ground the non-specialist reader, Tsoffar presents a brief

background of Karaite history. In particular, the author refers to the narrative history of this group, which is intricately related to the definition of their identity. The Karaites' claim to authenticity and to

legitimacy is based upon their perceived record of origins. Similar to other groups that seek to establish

a religious-cultural identity, some Karaites consider themselves as a distinct group that has existed

since the time of Biblical Creation, although other Karaites maintain their origins date to the time of

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