Notes on Hebrew Baroque Poetry

Dvora Bregman Notes on Hebrew Baroque Poetry

https://www.academia.edu/19140208/Notes_on_Hebrew_Baroque_Poetry

The present discussion offers some observations concerning the treatment of several Baroque qualities in Hebrew Baroques poetry. It will focus on the work of three poets that brought that poetry to its peak in Italy, namely, Moses Zacuto (c. 1610 – 1697), Jacob Frances (1615 – 1667) and his brother Immanuel (1617– c. 1710).

Hebrew Baroque poetry was popular in Italy in the seventeenth century. she says the poetry of Moses Zacuto, Jacob Frances, and Immanuel Frances had a distinctive quality of "sharpness" in their poetry. she argues that the poets were influenced by Italian, Spanish and Portuguese styles. Rather, they seem to regard the new cosmos as a reflection of the infinite greatness of the Lord.. Zacuto mirrors it in a grand style: Like a painter who applies bold brush- strokes of paint to a canvas he lets his muse fill a greatly expanded text by drawing one picture after another and leap with great speed from one pole of the earth to the next, from the lowest heaven to the highest..When a group of scholars concluded their study of a Talmudic tractate he commemorated the event with a long poem, where the starry system, the sun, the moon, the Zodiac, angles, the beasts of the holy chariot, the seven skies, the elements of nature, biblical rivers, living creatures on earth, in the air and in the seas - all take part in the celebration ..* * *The three poets into whose treatment of Baroque manners I have tried to provide some insight may all be regarded as poets of wit wonderfully conveyed in Hebrew, and as innovators that combined Baroque manners with Hebrew literary traditional convention.. But Zacuto stands alone, as I tried to demonstrate, as a poet of the Kabbalah who used Baroque manners to express his own worldview, by means of the magical power of the Hebrew word.