Wout van Bekkum, Groningen

In 2007 I published an edition of the Dīwān of the Baghdadi poet and paytan, El‘azar ha-Bavli, on the basis of two larger manuscripts. The first of these, containing 67 folios, is in New York and catalogued as EN Adler No. 881 and was edited by Hayyim Brody in 1935. The second, with 51 leaves, is in St. Petersburg and is catalogued as Firkovicz Heb, IIA, 210.1, This manuscript was used by Jacob Mann in his renowned Texts and Studies, Volume One, in 1931. The latter is the better example of the two, but the two of them supplement each other, offering us a fair idea of El‘azar’s productivity. Their study is important for our reconstruction of Jewish poetry in the East, especially in Baghdad during the first half of the thirteenth century, shortly before the invasion of the Mongols in 1258.

Now, 16 years later, an edition of El‘azar ha-Bavli’s religious compositions (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2023) is available. These piyyutim are widely distributed in several Genizah collections and in disparate maḥzorim from Persia, Syria (minhag Aleppo), Egypt, Yemen, India (printed in Calcutta and Bombay), Greece (Corfu), Italy (Rome), and other European countries. An obvious means of identification for these piyyutim is a title with his full name (a rare occurrence) or his name in acrostics (an obligatory device).  However, one could easily be mistaken by the wealth of “El‘azarim” in the Genizah, including the eminent hymnist El‘azar birabbi Qilir or Kalir.

Sometimes one has better luck in the quest for El‘azar’s religious verse. A manuscript from Warsaw, containing a Sēfer Šīrīm ‘Attīqīm, a Book of Ancient Songs, was brought to my attention. The title page of this bundle informs us in both Russian and Hebrew that the well-known bibliographer and scholar Ephraim Deinard (1846-1930) was the collector and compiler of this anthology of Hebrew poems. In this manuscript, ten compositions are ascribed to El‘azar ha-Bavli: six of them are unknown and uncatalogued. They are of fine quality  – without a doubt characteristic of El‘azar ha-Bavli’s language and vocabulary – expressing his personal and spiritual devotionality. Sometimes he is awarded the epithet ha-mēvīn or al-mēvīn (‘the insightful’ or ‘the inspired’) as an indication of his Judeo-Sufi (and Muslim related) pietism.

My book discusses, among many other subjects, Jewish liturgy in the East and the criteria which determined how El‘azar’s poetry was transmitted or omitted in prayer books and maḥzorim. These forgotten compositions may not have been conceived as suitable for liturgical purposes, whereas other hymns were widely distributed and survived in distinct branches of Jewish liturgy. Do we have here a type of subversive poetry that could not be included in standard liturgy because of its controversial contents? Did El‘azar cross the line of normative hymnology, which was principally intended to praise the God of Israel in the fashion of psalmody and mainstream piyyut, by depicting a God of philosophers or mystics? It is very likely that El‘azar himself did not see his composition of these eloquent hymns in which deep pietist impulses of contemporary Eastern Judaism are expressed as problematic.

El‘azar’s piyyutim, meticulously edited and translated into English, are a valuable contribution to the study of his religious oeuvre alongside his secular poetry. All in all, El‘azar ha-Bavli can be considered a prolific composer of devotional and social Hebrew verse, a Sufi-oriented mystic, a Hebrew grammarian, and probably a zealous student of Neoplatonic astrology and philosophy.

Wout van Bekkum is a professor emeritus of Middle East Studies at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. His expertise lies in the field of Semitic languages and cultures, especially the different varieties of the Hebrew language and Hebrew poetry from Late Antiquity until pre-modern times. He is also translating Maimonides’ Guide from Judeo-Arabic into Dutch. 

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