The vast body of premodern Hebrew literature is usually termed “medieval“—a somewhat misleading term, partly based on the assumption that in most countries the Jewish Middle Ages lasted until the Emancipation in the eighteenth century. However, as is well known, this literature was by no means monolithic. It comprised such disparate schools and styles as portions of the liturgy dating back to late Roman times, the Palestinian and Eastern piyyut (liturgical poetry) of the Byzantine and Moslem periods, the famed Hebrew-Spanish school and its ramifications or parallel schools in Provence, North Africa, Turkey, and the Yemen, other important centers like Germany and France, and an entire millennium of Hebrew poetry in Italy whose later stages coincided with, and were influenced by, the Renaissance and the Baroque. Israel Davidson's monumental bibliography, entitled in English Thesaurus of Hebrew Mediaeval Poetry, actually spans more than a millennium and a half, or, as its Hebrew title states, “from the canonization of the Bible to the beginning of the period of Enlightenment” (in the late eighteenth century). Alternative terms to “medieval” seem scarcely clearer; “postbiblical” tacitly and misleadingly excludes the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while “premodern” includes the Bible.
David as Warrior, Leader, and Poet in Medieval Hebrew Poetry of al-Andalus
