Chapter 29 - Belles Lettres

Summary

The prominence of poetry and other kinds of literary work in which the skill displayed in the writing contends for attention with the work’s contents was an outstanding feature of Judeo-Arabic society in our period and one that distinguishes this society from all earlier and most succeeding Jewish societies until the nineteenth century. Arabic-speaking Jewish writers, in the period covered by this volume, produced literary works of lasting appeal not only because some were profound thinkers, sensitive souls, or linguistically gifted individuals, but because Arabo-Islamic society created institutions in which artistic writing played an important public role, thereby encouraging the cultivation of elegant language and literary craftsmanship among its subject peoples as well. Poetry and fine writing were first and foremost instruments of public life and secondarily of upper-class social life and entertainment. The literary forms cultivated for these purposes were vehicles for the expression of communal attitudes as well as individual writers’ personal views and even inner experience. The age of Judeo-Arabic ascendancy produced, for the first time in Jewish history, something we can recognize as literature, in the artistic sense of the word.