XIV. A Poem attributed to Al-Samau'al

Extract

In the Jewish Quarterly Review for April, 1905, Dr. Hirschfeld published a poem discovered by him in the Cambridge Genizah Collection, attributed to Samau’al, and in Hebrew characters. This Samau’al is naturally identified by him with the Jewish hero of Taimā, whose name is commemorated in an Arabic proverb, and to whom certain poems preserved in the Aṣma‘iyyāt and the Ḥamāsah are ascribed. An account of him was given by Nöldeke in his Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Poesie der alten Araber, 1864, pp. 57–64. Verses would naturally be ascribed to such a person, as it is the habit of the Arabs to attribute at least a few to almost every famous man; thus they can recite to us the ode in which Adam bewailed Abel. Samau’al being a person on the confines of myth and history, the supposition that any verses ascribed to him were really by him is extremely hazardous.